Recently in rich internet applications Category

I received a number of emails after my blog on Iron Mountain's Friendly Advice Machine, including some from non-John Cleese fans who still thought it was a fun experience. I even know of some colleagues who have visited the site multiple times ;-)

Still, I thought it would be interesting to get the real statistics on visits and impact from the company themselves. Iron Mountain's Karen McPhillips, VP Marketing, answered my call for an interview. Here are some interesting excerpts:

• Aimed at IT managers, a marketing research team developed the campaign by creating a literal "buyer persona" resulting from over 100 interviews with existing and target prospects. This was not a "closed door brainstorming" session. The team identified and aggregated a long list of common process and technology IT-based pain points to drive targeted messaging with a healthy dose of humor.
• By end-October, the first month of release, the site received 19,000 hits and exceeded viewing expectations by 20%. Audience segmentation revealed 60% U.S.-based views and 16% Eastern Europe-based views.
• The previous Cleese-based campaign featured the comedian as Dr. Harold Twain Weck, Director of the Institute for Backup Trauma. By the end of its run, the site had received more than one million hits from IT professionals alone.
• The company markets the campaign globally, but it is available only in English. Given the difficulties of true context-driven translations, especially for "Cleese humor," this seems prudent. McPhillips reports no complaints on the decision from the company's major global markets, including France and Germany.

In a word, "expectations". There is nothing wrong with the moniker itself, but when used as if it were a thing-in-itself, as something concrete, it inevitably becomes misleading. This is not something to solely blame on marketing hype - people crave simple labels, marketers are just accommodating us. We need to take a little responsibility for asking what such labels really mean. When forced to reduce Web 2.0 to something real, you end up with AJAX. There is also nothing wrong with AJAX or its components. The problem is overestimating what it can do for us.

Bill Thompson's post "Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito" yesterday on The Register's Developer site, is perhaps a little overstated, but is useful reading for VCs and IT strategists. Here's a sample:

"Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable. ... Ajax is touted as the answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application, but if the long term goal is to turn the network from a series of tubes connecting clients and servers into a distributed computing environment then we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need."

Onfolio, a company and tool I have used and liked, is being acquired by Microsoft. Onfolio is led by J. J. Allaire, one of the incredibly bright and hands-on entrepeneurial Allaire brothers who developed Cold Fusion. According to the Boston Globe, the entire six-person Onfolio team is moving from Massachusetts to Redmond. This is much like the case of Ray Ozzie's Groove, where Microsoft is acquiring Allaire as much as they are acquiring Onfolio.

Also according to the Boston Globe, the Onfolio tool, which came in three retail versions ranging in price from $30 to $149, will be available for free, starting today, as part of the Windows Live Toolbar. However, I checked the Windows Live Ideas site quickly and couldn't find it.

UPDATE: The Toolbar Beta is there now.

Hopefully some of you tuned in to our webinar yesterday and have had a chance to read the companion whitepaper. My radio theme - or podcast if you are so inclined - for the title of this blog is intentional. In fact, I also toyed with "Mixing Content and Web 2.0" to illustrate "the remix factor" -- an intrinsic part of the Web 2.0 "engaging the user" vision and one of the reasons why professors call O'Reilly Media's SafariU "revolutionary."

Remixing. Familiar to your teenagers and made famous by iTunes, but not a word well known in corporate circles. Using Web services and MarkLogic Server, O'Reilly delivers a user interface that allows higher education professors to reassemble - or remix - sections and chapters from a vast library of O'Reilly and partner books to, in CJ's words, suit their needs. Suit their needs. Since when do software applications suit the user needs without the word "customization" being part of the equation?

In terms of content applications and Web 2.0, since now. Is this analogous to the radio industry's evolution? Absolutely. Can it provide new revenue for publishers through a compelling product? Definitely. Ian Krantz over at the Really Strategies blog continues the conversation. And CJ Rayhill , O'Reilly's Chief Information Officer and General Manager of O'Reilly's Education Division, is obviously the source.

Yesterday, the webinar audience asked me what parts of the SafariU story are universally applicable. Read on to see what I said. Also, feel free to submit questions and comments here about what you read and hopefully listened to about the SafariU case study. (I will let you know when the archive is available). Let's continue the conversation!

Microsoft's InfoPath was announced with great fanfare in October 2003 as part of the Office 2003 release. Microsoft then included some enhancements to InfoPath in a Service Pack release (SP1) of Office, which was distributed in June 2004. Since then, there has been little news about InfoPath. The InfoPath team blog at the Microsoft Developer Network went quiet in early 2005, with its last post in November of 2005, which was an announcement of an InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005. There is a newish InfoPath tips-and-tricks blog by Microsoft blogger Tim Pash, but other than that, Microsoft has been very quiet about InfoPath. Does this suggest a reduced commitment by Microsoft?

UPDATE: As you can see from the comments, Microsoft appears to be plenty busy with InfoPath. See also this post from Eric Richards, who is a development lead on Microsoft Office.

We hope to see you at our upcoming Boston conference. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the keynote discussion by including questions in a comment on this blog entry. Below is the session description with links to the participant's bios and their blogs. Let us know what technologies you think we should be discussing. Comments and trackbacks are on.

Keynote Panel: New Technologies You Need to Consider for Content Management Strategies
The pace of information technology development continues to increase as organizations develop experience in implementing content applications, and as software vendors vie to incorporate their customer's feedback into product technologies ahead of the competition. As most enterprise applications become more content-oriented, content technology developments are coming from a broader base of suppliers and developers. This session will look at a couple of technologies relevant to content-oriented applications you may not be aware of, or may not think of in the context of content management strategies. Complementing this session are the analyst panel, and the keynote debate on Enterprise use of Blog and Wiki technology.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, Editor & Publisher, The Gilbane Report --- Blog

Jon Udell, Lead Analyst, InfoWorld --- Blog
Coach K. Wei, Founder and CTO, Nexaweb --- Blog
Jean-Philippe Gauthier, General Manager, Sympatico / MSN
Bob Wyman, CTO and Co-founder, PubSub --- Blog

If you have been hearing about Ajax technology and are curious, you might want to check out this pretty cool dictionary site. The developer offers a helpful explanation of how it works, including some potential risks and tradeoffs. Up until now, Google Suggest has been kind of the canonical example of Ajax for this kind of application, but I think I like this one better. Some of the bloggers over at ZDNet have been doing a nice job of explaining Ajax and other such technologies and how they will impact traditional applications such as Microsoft Office. I think there are all kinds of implications for content management, with authoring and search interfaces only the beginning.

Writing for Power Builder Developer's Journal, Coach Wei has an excellent article on how XML can play a key role in beefing up client applications in J2EE environments.

This question of client functionality continues to be key. Content applications, especially, often demand rich feature sets for client interfaces. The question is how to bring enough functionality out to the client without significant investment in cost and resources. As organizations bring more business process out to the browser--for larger and larger audiences--this question continues to pose practical challenges.