Ever wonder why some open source projects are insanely popular and others struggle to get mind-share?  I do, all the time, especially since the “insanely popular” part is what I’m striving for as a Community Manager at Novell.  I recently read a great book entitled “Designing for the Social Web” by Joshua Porter.  In his book Joshua describes the life-cycle of a user interacting with a website and points out the various hurdles that must be overcome in order to create an active user.  This got me to thinking (dangerous) about the similarities shared between the life-cycle Joshua outlined and what open source projects go through.  I thought I’d write down my thoughts on this topic before I forgot them (more…)

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With collaboration and community tools like blogs, wikis, forums, tagging, and rating systems, the enterprise has become filled with collaboration tools that bring people together online and enable productivity. However, the lack of integration in these platforms creates not only Data Silos but Collaboration Silos. Information from one system has to be moved to another system if you want to collaborate and then finding the most relevant copy of the information becomes a nightmare. Where is the latest version? Was it an email attachment? Did I put it in the shared directory? Where are Bob’s comments? These questions and many similar ones are asked every day. What we need is a smart collaboration platform that combines simple actions with relevant information artifacts to produce collaboration spaces that work for you and not the other way around. (more…)

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I fully appreciate the need that the “Save” button fulfilled thirty years ago when disk and cpu resources where hard to come by, but today ….. please.  My documents should be saved as I type them and not require me to manually press Ctrl -S or “Save”.  I don’t understand why an application can crash and I lose my work or why when I shutdown and forget to save something its gone.  Why does the “Save” button still exist?

Tomboy Notes does a fantastic job with “Save”.  Why can’t other applications?  In fact, I’ll say it… I Love Tomboy Notes:-)  Of course it has its warts, the outline tool is not very sophisticated and sharing notes is not as easy as it should be but overall I’d say it is one of my favorite (more…)

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