Saturday 4 April 2009

Week in review

New weeks sees the SharePoint best practices conference in London.
http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/

I am not going to be there but some great partners like K2, Code and Content, Quest, and Microsoft press will be there.

This week so the world learning that science had established that going on Facebook made for not only more productive workers, but significantly higher productive workers. It seems that short breaks help produce better concentration. I would also add that most traditional employees simply escape all day in to fantasy whereas facebook keeps them focused.

Will bosses start to change policies on these sites. It is my impression that generally in the short run business is not about money but power. The thing about a market is in time it becomes about money, and we will see major changes in coming years.

Also this week we learned that Jimmy Wales was giving up on a Wiki Search.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7976275.stm

After failing to touch search Wales, the man who gave away one of the biggest ideas in computer history will now try, and fail, to create a wiki social network.

Its hard to feel sorry for a guy since in my opinion his determination to pursue an open source alternative to Google (which he would be able to profit from unlike Wikipedia) was pursued at the cost of making Wikipedias search better, or lets say less bad. The end result is that Google is bring Wikipedias free content in its searches where it can make money off it.

The thing I think about web 2.0 is this. Someone is going to make the money, if you make a massive site with millions of hours of human labour someone is going to make money. If you selflessly refuse to make profit, like the Soviet Politburo that "runs" Wikipedia, someone else like Google will just make it for you.