June 2005 Archives

The French lesson du jour is: "Laver son linge sale", to clean one's dirty laundry.

The aptly named 24 hour laundry, a Palo Alto startup co-founded by Mark Andreesen, is already causing a few people to air their (dirty) laundry even before it opens for business. Russ complains about CNet, Om and Mark, then Diego spills the beans (sort of).

It looks like a new consumer-oriented video-blogging social-networking web service is around the corner. From their minimalist site (they're a "stealth startup"), one can infer the backend will be in Java, the front-end in PHP/Javascript/DHTML (and all the latest goodies I guess, though they didn't list Ajax ;-)) with may be some desktop clients for Windows, Max OS and Linux, and surely mobile phones. But what I particularly like is this about page. Not a breakthrough but still a nice recipe for a startup.

Reading this review of GoLive CS2 reinforces me in not buying anything from both Adobe and Macromedia in their overlapping product lines, until Adobe clarifies what it intends to do next. And I hope their next web editing software will finally sport a decent support of both CSS design and Mac OS X interface.

Marketers please take note: watch your language.

In We The Media, Dan Gillmor writes:

Perhaps no document of its time was more prescient about the Web's potential than the Cluetrain Manifesto, which first appeared on the Web in April 1999. It was alternately pretentious and profound, with considerably more of the latter quality. Extending the ideas of McLuhan and many others, the four authors—-Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger—-struck home with me and a host of other readers who knew innately that the Net was powerful but weren't sure how to define precisely why.

As I dig further into corporate uses of blogs and wikis, I point more and more people to The Cluetrain Manifesto as a necessary reference to understand the phenomenon. Whoever writes professionally for the web should read it. And whoever finds it more pretentious than profound should, may be, write for another medium or simply avoid writing about their company.

There's something going on on the web today that marks a shift in corporate communications and marketing. It goes to this direction: markets are conversations.

What Sun Microsystems is doing with its employees' blogs should be on the radar of all IT marketers, especially knowing that at least half a million IT professionals are encouraged to blog by their employer in this industry. There aren't half a million marketers in this field, and there will never be. When Jonathan Schwartz goes on writing that (emphasis mine):

One of the big upsides of my job is hobnobbing. I clearly didn't check with our corporate communications team before saying that, but let's be honest - it's cool to sit with a head of state, or a head of a corporation, or a CIO with an IT department bigger than Sun's entire employee base. The perspective is always fascinating.

Corporate communications should be paying attention as well. Now watch where this is going.

Tim Bray encourages Sun Microsystems bloggers to read Dervala's post on Strong Language to gain more confidence in their language skills:

Engineers, scientists, and military officers often turn out good prose. Their sentences may not always be limpid, lyrical or arresting, but as writers they are capable of a clarity and precision that academics and marketers often can't or won't match. Their work demands it. When a software engineer writes vague instructions, her program breaks. When a scientist notes observations imprecisely, her experiment suffers. When a Green Beret commander gives a rambling order, his guys are put at risk.

But Dervala goes on a comparison which, I'm sure, will strike a chord with a lot of people and make some other uncomfortable:

Literary hacks, consultants, and marketers, on the other hand, are slower to recognize their limitations and fix them. It may not even pay off to do so. Now that machines do the work of scanning abstracts for relevance, an article full of jargon will score more highly in a form of buzzword bingo. In the business of business mystique, all but the very best fear clarity. When you're not convinced about what you're selling, it takes courage to describe it in a way that can be understood. Even when you believe wholeheartedly, simplicity and grace takes much more effort—and more brains—than the cheap embrace of buzzwords and cliché. Jack Welch talks straight, but to a bog-standard middle manager, a description like "leveraging expertise in innovative, mission-critical enterprise solutions" provides more letters for covering ass.

Before Dervala, Erin Kissane started a series of posts to put marketers favorite buzzwords on a hit list. Welcome, or rather unwelcome are solution and leverage. I, for one, who can't stand content-free content, am looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

One can say I'm biased, and I am. Or that this is just a hype. Or that it's limited to IT. Surely, my focus is on the IT industry right now, a technological one that is filed with engineers who are used to communicate and are less afraid than others to try new tools. But IBM, Sun and Microsoft are no small startups and what's happening is spreading outside IT. Look at GM Fastlane, or Randy Baseler's journal at Boeing (though the VP marketing hasn't got rid of all his marketing habits overnight, he's making progress at the expense of Airbus which is still focusing on traditional brand awareness, PR and marketing methods). As a corporate webmaster, I'm living a funny time and my gut feeling is that it's all but a hype. It won't be an overnight revolution but it will spread on the web regardless of the company size and activity.

The pressure is rising for the marketing and communications communities to think about their added value. If they don't have one, then they will be made redundant. I think they do have value (everybody can publish on the web today, but not everybody writes well). The web is a very unfriendly place for useless intermediaries. Losing the "Command and Control" habits is frightening, and isn't necessarily easy to overcome. But difficult doesn't equate complex. It's difficult but simple. Start by adapting to each of your audiences. Stop copying someone else's jargon and serving Wall Street Calibrated Soup™ to your clients, they know better. Even analysts read blogs, if they aren't blogging themselves. Trust your employees to interact with your clients, they already are. Content is key but your voice is what makes it authentic or not. You want your web site to be eye-catchy? I'd like it to be link-catchy. And it starts by simply watching your language.

What Jeremy Zawodny wrote in Job Specialization and Why it's hard to explain what I do resonates a lot with me. For a lot of people at work, I'm the "Internet guy". And internet equals techie. And techie equals specialist. And for some, internet equals IT, and they stop there (especially those who see me logged in via a terminal to one of our servers). Then they discover that I write rather decently (surprise), that I can advise them on a whole lot more than just "the web" (big surprise), that the internet is a lot bigger than what they thought (panic! ;-)). When come questions about what my job is, I've been joking for years saying that my officious titles are "webmonkey, chaos manager and corporate emergency hologram", which is my way of not answering the question.

The reality is that I'm a generalist in my specialty, and I've always been digging into high-tech fields with a nasty habit of trying to look at the bigger picture. I feel like a lion in a cage when being labeled, and corporations tend to have a lot of standard labels. Like Jeremy I tend to get bored if I stagnate for a long time because I'm a change agent who keeps looking at which status quo to attack next. Corporations are filled with people who dislike change agents, because they're threatening the status quo that they are mistaking for their job. I've been a startup guy, and I might still be. Despite all of this, I've been working for the past seven years for a big corporation. But one that still allows someone like me to go against status quo and change things, profoundly. And one that allows me to change myself.

I'm now looking forward to attacking my own status quo.

I just received a newsletter from Sun marketing advertising the release of Open Solaris and I noticed the following bit at the end (emphasis is mine):

You can find out more at http://sun.com/opensolaris, or if you're interested in participating in the OpenSolaris community, http://opensolaris.org. And, for the week of June 14th, we'll be talking about OpenSolaris at http://blogs.sun.com. Please check it out and let us know what you think. And, if you're as excited about this as we are, please help to spread the word!

And indeed, if you check what used to be the laundry list of Sun blogs, they've revamped it to put the focus on their main marketing event for one week (click to zoom):

This is very clever. If you encourage your employees to blog, then you'd be silly not to draw the spotlight on their thoughts during big events like this. I can hear some folks there saying "Now guys, quit complaining that marketing is deserving your work, because you're doing the marketing now!"

Another interesting addition is a Technorati ranking of the top Sun bloggers:

See how Tim Bray and Jonathan Schwartz are far ahead, and how quickly it drops below ten links. They fall at zero links starting from the 38th blog. You may wonder why they did replace their previous ranking based on the received traffic per blog, which didn't expose that most of those blogs are not receiving much inbound links. I think it's actually good because it put an incentive on their bloggers to get links (including links between Sun blogs). All of this is subjective, but I value inbound links over traffic and their ranking allows you to browse those links. As with the previous version, blogs.sun.com gather stats for Sun-hosted blogs only, so they're missing a lot of their prominent early bloggers who are hosted on their own.

Sun blogs are ramping up in an interesting way, and this is a very interesting example of how blogs can be used for marketing purposes at very little cost. If you think of it, they probably just had to revamp a few pages, make a smart search over blogs.sun.com to extract the posts about Open Solaris (tags, keywords, categories, I don't know but it's surely not a big problem), use the Technorati API to produce the rankings and encourage their people to blog. Getting marketing agree on a web banner would probably take more time ;-).

Update: don't miss Tim Bray's OpenSolaris Blogs Oh My post, with a lot more insight (obviously, he's their top blogger) on the communications and culture shift, comparison with the mailing-lists culture of Linux kernel developers, personalization, and my favorite: "hey, my boss blogs better than your boss, nyah nyah"!

Ever dreamed of reading Darth Vador's blog? Now you can: The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster. Hilarious!

In Iran, one can be imprisonned and risks the death penalty for blogging.

Free Mojtaba Saminejad:

Mojtaba SamieNejad, 25 year old blogger and student, was first arrested on November 1, 2004 for reporting the arrests of three other bloggers. He was held in custody for almost three months. Following his temporary release on January 27, 2005, he started a new blog to reflect his thoughts and beliefs. This resulted in a second unlawful arrest which has lasted to this day.

Mojtaba is kept in Ghezel Hesar prison amongst inmates convicted of murder and other serious offences. Mojtaba was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment on June 2, 2005. This sentence was issued by Judge Saadat of Revolutionary Court 13.

It is ours' and all human rights activists' duty to take a stand against the injustice of imprisonment for voicing one’s opinion. We ask all bloggers, human rights organizations and free people of the world to help Mojtaba by voicing their objection to his sentencing and demand his immediate and unconditional release.

Please sign the petition, it will take you one minute and can help set him free.

Mojtaba Saminejad (in Persian).

Update: a few links for more insight on the subjects...

• Iranian Journalist Credits Blogs for Playing Key Role in His Release From Prison


• Going home, finally


• The Association of Iranian Blogwriters (Penlog)


• Committee to Protect Bloggers


• Blogger Mojtaba Saminejad gets two-year prison sentence


• BBC: The price paid for blogging Iran

I'm still enjoying a long awaited (by French standards ;-)) vacation break, hence my light blogging. As an appetizer to the promised story about the redesign of capgemini.com, here is a little look back at eight years of home page design of capgemini.com, starting with the oldest one I could find in our archives, code-named "Birdy" and published in 1997:

The home page is the orange one, with an inner page on the left with a green background. (The screenshot on a black background was taken on our intranet "Galaxy" at the time.) It was made by a British agency and full of metaphors. Apparently too metaphoric, it was deployed only on our corporate site and no other units adopted it.

A year later, the Group Directoire decided that it was time to impose a single look & feel to all our sites and stopped the hot potato from bouncing between IT and communications. Corporate Communications was charged to produce a standard look & feel and hire a "corporate webmaster" to "stop the chaos". I was hired with those exact title and mission in June 1998, my first task being to impose this upon our 20 or so web sites:

(See an inner page.)

Three frames and a rotating markee at the bottom, can you tell it's been designed by IT people? ;-) Nevertheless, this was our very first standard "look & feel" and I got it rolled-out on our international sites. A first in the Group traditional history of "one site equals one brand new look & feel"! (Because, you know, the Internet is all about change and evolution and being sexy, plus it's fun, every unit should have its own site!) I learned only a year later that two or three previous attempts had failed, and that I had been the first to herd cats and succeed. I made it because nobody told me it was impossible ;-). Anyway, I couldn't stand this design, neither many of my peers, so we quickly got together to produce a second version. Which brings us to...

(Click to zoom.) Those are working drafts (I'm terrible at keeping images of the past) and the end result was in between (closer to the second image but without the printing bug of the top banner). I was already trying to sell the idea that space, using white space and cutout images, was better than stuffing the home page with tons of heavy graphics on flashy backgrounds. 2D 1/2 rollover buttons were "in" at the time, as were tiny and unreadable (on screen) signatures below our logo :-). Surprisingly, convincing people (especially IT developers) that Frames Suck (Most of the Time) was a bit difficult. It was also not obvious, although easier, to convince people that having the navigation and peripheral elements on the right was actually helping people to read the content on the left.

This design didn't last long. At the end of 1999 we started discussions with Ernst & Young to acquire their consulting practice, and the new company was renamed Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in May 2000. In the midst of the merger, a quite worrying possibility emerged with the consulting practice attempt to create their own sites with their own look & feel. But let's just say that the competition wasn't fair: PowerPoint and Lotus Notes experts in front of an already organized web team with a consistent and agreed model of one global site plus one site per country. Within three months we agreed on a new design, which was rolled-out early 2001 (click to zoom):

Again, this is a working draft, but quite close to the final result. It maintained the principle of a main navigation with a top banner, with drop-down menus, and a denser layout for the home page (a main lead graphic plus three small teasers). This design lasted a loooong time, until we changed our name to Capgemini in April 2004 with a quite simple solution (swapping the logo with the new one, click to zoom):

This design lasted until last month. Then I did something I've always dreamed of doing before launching a new site (click to zoom):

I wanted to tease a little bit our audiences before the launch, while explaining our new site structure. I did the handwriting, showed it to a couple of people (hi boss!) and silently replaced our home page with it five days before the launch. A few people thought our site had been hacked! It was quite fun and very well received.

To see how the site looks today, check www.capgemini.com. Quite different, isn't it?

I'm updating some figures on the number of blogs out there, and stumbled on a few intesting trends. Here is a raw report, and don't count on me to make an analysis right now!

In January 2005, LiveJournal claimed 5.7 million users with 2.5 million "active in some way". Right now on June 1 they claim 7.3 million of accounts which represents a gain of 28%, but with 2.6 active in some way which is a gain of only 4%. I have no numbers for TypePad (may be I should just bug Loic or get him drunk to figure them out).

In France, in the same period, Skyblog moved from 1,4M to 2,1M of accounts (+50%). Unfortunately they don't provide any number to estimate active vs. inactive blogs.

Netcraft saw 63.5M web sites in May and reckons that 27.7M are active, while Perseus counted 32M blogs in April on only 20 blog services (top North American services only, excluding others and self-hosted blogs). And today, Technorati claims an index of 10.7M blogs (a third of what Perseus sees and 17% of what Netcraft sees) and 1.173 billion links while Google claims to index 8 billion web pages (so the links in the 10.7M blogs in Technorati would represent 15% of the Google index, though it doesn't include images).

Perseus saw a growth of 10M blogs in the first quarter alone. Netcraft saw the number of sites grow by 1.2M per month (and 580,000 active sites per month) between January and May 2005. David Sifry reckons that the number of blogs doubles every five months.

Clearly, the blogosphere is the most active part of the web.