DISQUS

Jake, ignore the criticism. With you all the way..

The only stuff that's been clogging up my reader and getting up my nose of late has been all the petulant whinging complaining about this 8-things meme, and now all the post-analysis of who was right and wrong.

And the only thing close to spam has been Howard's multiple posts and emails on the subject.

Despite evidence that the 8-things idea never did get out of hand, and is well over now anyway (more's the pity), his site remains off the net. That is so funny!

I think somewhere along the way, some forgot that this is the internet we are dealing with, not a database.

There is no "SELECT * FROM internet WHERE topic='oracle' and category='only oracle' and stuff='only what I like';"

Don't like what you get through an aggregator? Ignore it or roll your own, like using Yahoo Pipes...

Hi Jake.

clearly if you want to keep the network execs sweet, you need a blog about "nothing"

Thanks for asking, listening and then acting Jake!
Great trifecta. Wish more people would do all three if they are going to do any at all.

Politicians especially;-)

Likewise, I use a feed reader and hate having to click-thru to get full content (and rarely do...)..

Jeremiah's suggestion sounds perfect; it recognises that using a feed reader and coming to the home page are two very different experiences, and it is articifically restrictive to try and do "one size fits all".

It would also be good if you can clean up the "archives" concept at the same time. Love the tag cloud, top posts etc ... but I rarely use them. Most of the time when I come to your home page I want to just see your chronological list of posts. What month is irrelevant. Just current, old, older, oldest... its a continuum.

Hey, it was Deathstar-1.0 that was destroyed (thanks to that son-of-a-no good, heavy-breathing mattel pin-up doll. If he'd just open sourced it, that backdoor into the power core would never have made it into production).

But we're talking Deathstar-2.0 dude!

"... talk of the Gartner shindig last week was all about *2.0 ..."

Deathstar-2.0? Like it ... better that "enterturd-2.0" which always stuck on my tongue;-)

Hi Paul. I think there are thousands of failed products and companies that would contend with your contention that ".. pain not felt nearly as acutely in the consumer world".

In fact I'd say you have it the wrong way around. What's the worst that can happen if an internal innovation doesn't take off? Get re-assigned to a "boring" job? Quit in disgust?

However, launch a new product or business into the consumer space? You may be putting everything on the line, and everyone associated will feel some very real pain if you fail.

But that's a digression. I think the real point is to make a disctinction between simply "idea people" and (usually) groups that are recognised "innovators". Innovators by definition have the special skills/influence/connections to "get things done". If they didn't, it wouldn't be "innovation".

When I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point I was immediately drawn to contextualise the message in terms of driving change in at work. Definitely worth a read from that perspective, particularly some of the ideas on how major change usually rests on three distinct roles: the maven (person with the ideas/expertise); a connector (with the relationships/networks); and the salesman (the influencer/closer/dealmaker).

Hi Dan, Thanks for the hat tip on the reCAPTCHA with Oracle SSO solution. I found out about your post when I saw Patrick Wolf's taken the next step and added reCAPTCHA to APEX!
Whether its a good thing or not I don't know, but looks like we have Oracle covered for reCAPTCHA;-)

hmm. Seems to me you are just making a case for agile methodologies, albeit with shortcuts!

But I don't see anything exclusive to Web 2.0. Even the idea of "perpetual beta" is not exactly groundbreaking (could make a few jokes at this point).

So what is the real message and meaning of Connect?

I'd suggest its not really about web/enterprise 2.0 at all, not even about methodologies. It's about being the intentionally disruptive force that provokes innovation elsewhere. In other words, driving for an indirect but exponential payoff.

So from that point of view, where Connect itself is not necessarily a "product" with longevity but a means of stimulating the applications dev and aria teams to adopt and extend "connect" innovations, then how you build it and whether you wrote any doc is pretty irrelevant;)

What's more important is how you can best isolate, evaluate and evangelise the "innovations that worked".

Yes, definitely vote for some global participation Jake!

Hi Jake, I actually had this quote in mind regarding "innovation in the DNA" ...

'A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action. Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is only in their implementation.' (Theodore Levitt)
http://topten.org/public/CY/CY146.html

i.e. its all about execution!

Hi Jake, congratulations on getting the idea factory off to a great start.

Lots of ideas and comments is a good indicator of creative flow. However now comes the true test of innovation - turning ideas into reality - before we can claim "Innovation is in our DNA".

I've worked in research before, and I think its fair to say that generating ideas was never really a very hard problem to crack. We found however that we needed to most of the effort into the subsequent phases of the innovation process. How do you ensure that the best ideas get to float to the top? How do you counter the impact of conventionalism and personality to ensure that even the most unlikely ideas are given a chance to prove themselves?

I'd suggest that this aspect of the IdeasFactory is worth a few ideas itself!

Paul

Its interesting how people get used to modalities, and can't imagine anything better ... until some guy comes along with something new and says "look at my gooflogimr ... it's not email, IM or a blog, wiki or facebook ... its better ..."

Email as a mode of communication is a relatively young thing, but it has been incredibly successful because is is/was so much better than the alternatives and so simple. But the email mode was invented at a time before all of the content uploading/publishing came to be. Bringing us to a stage now where we are starting to feel cramped by the artificial walls between these different facilities, and forced to do really stupid things by convention (like mail MB files to 20 collegues, who then change and mail back to the group).

Which makes me feel that this we're not seeing a "battle of modes", because that assumes the modes are somehow fixed. I think what we'll be surprised by in the years to come is how some smart cookies bend and morph the modes into something new and better.

In other words, I'm sure I'll still be using gmail in 5 years time .... but it won't be a "mail client" in the sense we understand it today.

Perhaps another interesting question is whether I'll still have a _corporate_ "mail" facility in 5-10 years time..