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About 3 months ago, I pre-announced the kick-off of the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) 2.0 effort, and fairly quickly, over 20 volunteers signed up to help. After just 2 months of work (mostly on nights and weekends), the CKS team has accomplished quite a bit and has decided to release a couple of editions and components to the community for evaluation and feedback. The CKS along with over 50 other active SharePoint oriented projects on CodePlex provide a very positive indicator of the power and extensibility of the SharePoint platform. I expect many more developers in the community to join SharePoint oriented shared source initiatives such as the CKS over the next 12 months. If you are interested, the CKS team can always use more help.

This CKS 2.0 Pre-Release contains the following:

• Enhanced Blog Edition Beta 1
• Enhanced Wiki Edition Alpha
• ChatterBox AJAX Beta
• Tag Cloud

Enhanced Blog Edition Beta 1

The CKS:EBE was designed to enhance and extend the functionality of the built-in blog feature in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. By leveraging its innovative Modular Theme Framework (MTF), your blog can look nothing like a typical SharePoint blog while retaining the ease of use of the SharePoint blogs built-in functionality. You can modify an existing theme or install a new one even if your blog is provided by an external SharePoint hoster or an internal IT department, and you only have Contributor level permissions. The EBE teams motto is that your blog should look as smart or creative as you think you are. :-)

The MTF is the brainchild of Vincent Rothwell, who was the Lead Developer for CKS:EBE Beta 1. Heres the default out of the four included themes in the EBE:

Not impressed? Well, with just 2 clicks of the mouse, your blog can instantly look like the screenshot below, complements of the excellent design work done by Isha Hartono of Provoke Solutions in New Zealand. Urged on by CKS:EBE team member, Ari Bakker, the Creative Design team at Provoke has created several other themes, which are available separately.

If youre still not impressed by this or the remaining two included themes (Summer and Bird), you can easily create and deploy your own by following the CKS:EBE MTF User and Designer Guide (written by Ari) included in this release. If you create a theme and would like it to be considered for inclusion in the next release of the EBE, please contact Brent Bolleman, EBE's Program Manager.

Heres what the Wildlife theme looks like after youve signed in. Notice that the Blog Admin list of links is now visible.

And heres the EBE Blog Settings page, which is accessible from the standard Site Settings page or directly via the /_layouts/ebe/settings.aspx URL. Notice the settings for enhanced features such as post trimming, integration with Akismet for comment spam detection, and custom RSS feed URL.

Theres one other EBE feature to highlight: friendly URLs or FURLs! For example, the URL for the blog post in the screenshot earlier is http://cks.wssblogs.com/archive/2007/06/16/welcome-to-the-community-kit-for-sharepoint-enhanced-blog-edition.aspx rather than http://cks.wssblogs.com/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=2, the latter of which isnt as conducive for search engine optimization. Moreover, the default RSS feed URL is now http://cks.wssblogs.com/rss.xml rather than something like http://cks.wssblogs.com/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=%7BB58689A3%2D5343%2D43AE%2DB342%2DAF4DBC6249F1%7D.

While these are indeed exciting and useful enhancements for the SharePoint blog, be warned that the Beta 1 release of the CKS:EBE is not recommended for production environments. The EBE team wants to further refine these features and has several more key features, including the often requested support for trackbacks/pingbacks and import from other blog services, planned for a feature complete Beta 2 release that is tentatively scheduled for the October. Please download and evaluate CKS:EBE Beta 1 and provide feedback to the team.

Aside from the contributions by Vince, Ari, Isha, Shane Perran (Summer theme), and Bob Medcalf (Bird theme), this Beta 1 release simply could not have happened without program management by Brent Bolleman, testing by Ki Tsang (who also wrote the Installation Guide), and more testing by a handful of other CKS:EBE team members: Nadeem Mitha, Ben Robb, Pedro Pablo Diaz Arguello, Jagadesh Sri Raja Kakarlapudi, and Bas van Atteveldt.

Enhanced Wiki Edition Alpha

Wiki Discussion Feature

Since theres currently not much documentation available anywhere about how to enhance and extend the SharePoint wiki, the CKS:EWE team felt that it would be worthwhile to release even in alpha form some of the work that theyve been doing. In this release, the key feature is integration between the SharePoint wiki and the SharePoint discussion board that enables a piece of functionality thats similar to that of MediaWiki, which powers the popular Wikipedia.org website.

Upon installing the EWE, every SharePoint wiki page will have a new Discuss button, which opens an associated discussion board page.

On the discussion board page, two new buttons are added. The Topic button brings the user back to the associated wiki page, and the Alert Me button sets up an e-mail alert for just the specific discussion topic whereas the standard SharePoint Alert Me feature would setup an alert for the entire discussion board.

Lastly, deleting or renaming a wiki page would be automatically reflected on the discussion board.

Please carefully read the CKS:EWE Alpha Installation Guide for important instructions and caveats about this release. Separately, take a look at the Technical Referece document and the source code if youd like to know how the functionality was developed. The EWE team is looking for 2-3 more developers, so ping David Mann, the Program Manager, if youre interested.

A big thank you to Mark Arend, who was the Lead Developer of this Alpha release! Additional features that are planned for the EWE Beta release include support for the CKS: Tag Cloud, a couple of templates, custom tokens such as an in-page Table of Content and associated bookmarks, and duplicate detection for the FAQ wiki scenario.

Wiki Import/Export Tool

The EWE team is at a very early stage of designing an import/export tool for the SharePoint wiki. The goal is for this tool to be able to import from other wiki products such as FlexWiki, MediaWiki, and TWiki, and Confluence and also from Word and OneNote as well as to export to Word via HTML (per page) and MHTML (entire wiki) formats.

For this CKS 2.0 pre-release, the EWE team is making available a fairly stable build of the FlexWiki Import Tool, for which the source code was graciously donated by Michael Cheng, a developer in the SharePoint product group. This is a one-off tool that will ultimately be converted to a plug-in for the Wiki Import/Export Tool, so if youre currently using FlexWiki, please test the tool and provide feedback.

ChatterBox AJAX Beta

This is an updated ASP.NET AJAX-based version of the ChatterBox web part that was released about a month ago. In addition to the quick and easy persistent chat functionality of the previous version, ChatterBox AJAX provides enhancements such as color coded chat entries and presence detection. The final version, which may include (no promises though) support for multiple chat channels, will be released shortly after Service Pack 1 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 becomes available, which is when ASP.NET AJAX will be officially supported in the SharePoint platform.

Thanks again to Matt Swann (another developer in the SharePoint product group) for continuing to enhance the ChatterBox web part during his spare time! If youre interested in helping him make the ChatterBox even more useful and cool, please let him know.

Tag Cloud

This is a production quality release of the CKS: Tag Cloud, so Id encourage you to try this out in a pilot environment and eventually deploy it into production. Thanks to Ki Tsang (yet another developer in the SharePoint product group) for all the hard work. The CKS team plans to fully support and leverage the Tag Cloud in various CKS editions.

The CKS Tag Cloud solution consists of four web parts:

1. Tag Cloud web part displays tags in weighted format. The more popular (based on the number of uses or associations with SharePoint list items) a tag is, the bigger it is shown.
2. Tag Browser web part displays items associated with a tag. The order of items can be customized.
3. Related Tag Cloud web part displays related tags co-existed with a tag.
4. URL Browser web part displays link items sorted on number of saves. This web part is designed to be used for the social bookmarking scenario.

Heres a snapshot of the Tag Cloud web part:

Much More to Come

As the founding member of the Community Kit for SharePoint team, I am gratified beyond measure by the great progress that has been made by such a wonderful group of passionate, creative, and skillful individuals. The ultimate goal of the CKS is to enable community oriented features and solutions by leveraging, enhancing, and extending SharePoint as a social computing platform. This is cool and fun stuff that I would be doing even if I wasnt the Community Lead for SharePoint, so Im doubly happy that I can do it as part of my day job! Of course, given how busy my day job has become, I end up doing much of my work as the overall Product Manager for the CKS at night and on weekends just like most of the other CKS volunteers. :-)

You can expect much more to come from the CKS team as it continues to work diligently towards feature complete beta releases scheduled for October and final releases prior to the SharePoint Conference 2008 event where the CKS team will have one hell of a party to celebrate its accomplishments, so join the team and be part of the action! Even ISVs like Bamboo Solutions and KWizCom have committed to contribute to the CKS.

I hope that this pre-release of CKS 2.0 will be useful to you even though much of it is not recommended for production implementation. I encourage you to try out the editions and components that are most relevant to your interests and needs. Please provide feedback via the Discussions or Issues list on the CKS project site on CodePlex rather than leaving a comment here. Thanks!

<Lawrence />

Here's a little information overload for you. Links to blogs associated with social media analysis companies. Some are more work-oriented than others, but there are some good sources in here.

Read the list here.

Six Apart is announcing today the beta release of Movable Type 4, a much anticipated upgrade to a blog platform that has two distinct user bases nowadays - consumer base (like R/WW, which uses MT) and Enterprise. Of equal interest is that Six Apart is also announcing the Movable Type Open Source Project, a move that will see the release of an open source version of Movable Type in Q3 of this year.

MT4 boasts over 50 new features and "a completely redesigned user interface", which includes a more advanced WYSIWYG editor and a system dashboard with dynamic graphic display. MT4 is also pushing itself as "a social media platform", which allows users to turn their audiences into communities. In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors - including sharing photos, videos, and audio. There is also a new ratings framework and later in the beta period more community features are promised.

MT4 also promises more down-to-earth functionality, like improvements in fighting blog spam. There will be a number of technical improvements, such as database caching through Memcached and authenticating of users with OpenID. MT4 also brings a new component-based architecture, which unifies its commercial and enterprise product lines "while enabling advanced capabilities with optional functionality packs". All in all, there is a lot of new and improved functionality in MT4 (more on how this will effect bloggers like me, below).

To understand why Six Apart is releasing an open source version of Movable Type, we need to briefly revisit its past. Movable Type was once the darling of the blogosphere, especially from its original launch in 2001 to about 2004 (when licensing issues upset many bloggers). Since 2004/05, many bloggers have migrated to the open source Wordpress - and perhaps of more concern, a lot of third party developers transferred their efforts from MT to Wordpress. However to make up for the loss of momentum in the consumer market, Movable Type began to sow some seeds in the Enterprise market. Back in October 2006 Read/WriteWeb reported on the release of Movable Type Enterprise 1.5. Movable Type at that point was being positioned as an advanced tool, suitable for enterprises and power bloggers alike. What's changed since then is that it now wants to be a social media platform, and the open sourcing will address some market concerns over licensing.

What MT4 will bring to current Movable Type users

Read/WriteWeb is powered by Movable Type. It's held up well over the years, particularly as the site has scaled a lot over the past 1-2 years. I do however have some minor issues with MT (and note we are using MT 3.2 currently, so we're not using the most recent version). The first is that I have looked on rather enviously at some of the plug-ins available to Wordpress users. For example, outputting tags for posts, integrating comments and trackbacks, and listing "related entries" - these things are a lot harder with MT than it is with Wordpress. In chatting with Anil Dash from Six Apart tonight, he assured me that almost all of the top 10 or 15 MT plugins have been integrated into MT4. This would certainly make things easier for me, as I am not a fan of fiddling around with Perl (when I could be writing blog posts with that time).

Another of my current peeves is that comments are far too slow on R/WW currently. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause of this, but I am almost certain it's an MT issue (as my research has indicated other MT blogs have suffered similar problems with slow comments). Anil told me that there are a lot of scaling pieces that are new in 4.0, that come from Vox and LiveJournal and Typepad - and from that they've learned to handle commenting from tens of milions of users. It sounds like relief may be on the way for R/WW's commenters then!

Conclusion

It remains to be seen how the open source effort will be received by the blogging public, but certainly MT4 sounds like a big functionality and performance improvement over MT3. For purely selfish reasons I hope it can fix all the minor technical issues R/WW has had with scaling, but also of course it will be a huge boost for Six Apart if MT4 has indeed ramped up technically and can meet the needs of small businesses (like mine) and enterprises alike. The social media platform is exciting too, and I can certainly see ways R/WW can leverage that!

Here are some early screenshots. Let us know in the comments what you think of MT4.

Written by Sean Ammirati of mSpoke. Sean is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA) and will be reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

The SXSW conference has multiple panels going on at the same time. I started my SXSW experience by attending the "World Domination Via Collaboration" panel. The presenters were: Jory Des Jardins Co-Founder, BlogHer LLC; Betsy Aoki Program Mgr, Microsoft; Jessica Hardwick Founder and CEO, SwapThing; Lisa Stone Co-Founder and Pres of Operations and Evangelism, BlogHer LLC; and Jenna Woodul Co-founder, LiveWorld

Overview

Jory Des Jardins opened the panel by stating that in 'web 1.0', community was a "nice to have". In 'web 2.0' the new reality is that community is "the business". The panel then jumped in, focusing back and forth between two topics:

(1) Tactics and policies to build a community organically, and 

(2) How to convince other individuals in your organization to actually spend time and resources developing a community.

Build a Community Organically

The panel discussed two keys to build a community organically. First of all, you need to understand the members and ask them what they want. Second, you need to make sure you protect the community from spammers and trolls.

When discussing how you would understand a community, there were a number of tactics discussed. First of all, the panel pointed out the obvious - that you should greet your members and simply ask them. While obvious, it is amazing how many web services overlook doing this. As an example, the panel pointed to the greetings that early Flickr users received (interesting explanation here).

In addition to these tactics, Jenna strongly recommended that sites consider forming advisory boards. She pointed to the 'eBay voices' as a good example of this advisory board structure. However, she also emphasized the importance of rotating membership of this group. You don't want it to stay stuck with the 'old-timers'.

In terms of protecting a community from spammers and trolls, there was an interesting question posed by a member of the audience: "Is anonymous commenting the cryptonite of an online community?" While everyone agreed that at a minimum, you needed to allow people to create online personas that might appear annonymous to the community (i.e. not their real name), there was some disagreement around whether you should allow completely anonymous commenting. BlogHer does not allow people to comment with out first creating an account. This is so they can block individuals who repeatedly add comments that end up later needing to be moderated; or as Lisa said, they "are building BlogHer not BlogPorn".

Interestingly, Betsy talked about how she allows anonymous commenting, because if people want to take the time to write a comment on her blog (even if it is rude or errant), she wants to react to it. (She does block spam). Betsy also pointed to the Slashdot 'Anonymous Coward' as an interesting example. It shows that the community respects people who comment publicly more, but they are open to taking feedback even from anonymous individuals. She explained that while it has added some work monitoring flame wars in her role at MSFT, she did feel it added value to the Slashdot community. Unfortunately, as this topic was heating up the panel ended - but it was an interesting thing for community builders to consider regarding their own sites.

Convincing an Organization to Build a Community

Previous to starting BlogHer, Lisa was a consultant who helped a number of organizations embrace community. She consistently followed a 2 step process on these projects. First, she would monitor and circulate conversations occurring online, in real time, about the organization. Then she would transition to getting her internal champions (regardless of level) to start blogging in order to champion the concept.

Betsy pointed out that the employee blogging program at Microsoft skipped the first step, but was entirely 'grass roots'. A number of 'feisty people' felt it was important to blog and made it happen. She runs the internal email distribution list and said that they're even more feisty on that list! As senior managers became aware of the blogging, it was discovered that Microsoft had no formal policy around their employees blogging. Note: Microsoft has decided to continue operating without a blogging policy.

Jenna talked about her experience helping large corporations (like BMW and Dove) create community. She explained that at the end of the day her argument comes down to the ROI of customers who are engaged in community versus those who are not. She pointed to an eBay Case Study by Harvard Business Review (link here) that showed participants in an eBay community purchase 56% more and listed 4 times as many items.

Conclusions

This was an excellent first panel of the show. While I wasn't necessarily surprised by what was said, the examples like eBay, Flickr and stories from the front lines at Microsoft were fascinating. I'm sure the community at Read/Write Web has a number of other good examples of community building. Please consider leaving these in the comments below.

She left an hour later just as frustrated as the day she and her boyfriend spent 101/2hours aboard a plane on a New York airport tarmac with "nothing but chips and soda for sustenance."

"You can't know the future, but what I can say right now is that I don't ever, ever, ever want to put another dollar in their pocket," said McCaw, who grew up in Hercules and Pinole. She called from New York City the afternoon of March 2.

McCaw, 33, said she was angry and insulted after her marathon Valentine's Day that began and ended at Kennedy airport when severe storms forced JetBlue to cancel more than 1,000 flights affecting 100,000-plus passengers.

So she started an Internet blog. It was noticed, by her fellow passengers, the national media and, perhaps most importantly, read more...

Just got here - a lot of well known people here but I decided not to speak to anyone yet.  After getting breakfast I listed to Rob Crumpler of Buzzlogic. 

As readers might recall, I asked for a Demo of Buzzlogic about 3 months ago - and was sopposed to get into the Beta Program.  Since then - nothing much happened.   I did not care for the way Rob Crumpler spoke - it seemed too artifical - like Buzzlogic is going to solve all your PR and Buzz issues - but I know it's not like that.  

In fact, I think Buzzlogic has the potential to give BrandPulse a run for the money (and there's probably a couple of other platforms similar to it)- and anything that gives Nielson a headache is a good thing in my book (since they're suing every analytics company that uses any of it's patents - at least, that's the way it seems to me).

In fact, I'd say that something about BuzzLogic reminds me, in a tangential way, of Eric T. Peterson's engagement score - just follow me here.   What Buzzlogic is trying to do is find the authorities - the people who really matter that are blogging or just talking about your company.  I believe, perhaps, that engagement might be a quality that goes with "authority".  If that's the case, Eric might have, without realizing it, defined an algorithm for determining authority - or a part of it.  Read  Eric T. Peterson's  post in detail to find out more.

I guess having BuzzLogic as part of the AO 100 makes sense - since the technology is disruptive.  More likely, if they become really all that disruptive, Nielson will just buy them out.

9:30 am – 10:15 am: CEO Showcase: Web & Blog Analytics & Research
        Rob Crumpler, CEO, BuzzLogic
        David Soskin, CEO, Cheapflights
        Amar Anand, CEO, eTIMEisMONEY
        Brian Magierski, CEO, Kalivo
        Benno Wasserstein, CEO, Box UK
        Demo Review by Industry Experts:
        Chris Fralic, Partner, First Round Capital
        Julia Hood, Editor-in-Chief, PRweek
        Brian Kelly, Partner, Manatt, Phelp & Phillips

Ok, I did not pay much attention to David Soskin, CEO, Cheapflights which seems like it used some analytics (but I did not catch what he said).

I spoke to Amar Anand, CEO, eTIMEisMONEY on Monday night at AlwaysON NYC, he's in NYC so I may interview him later.  I like Amar's way of speaking and his platform of making time into money and has a module for Bloggers to legitimately monetize their blogs.  eTimeisMONEY sells time and there's a commission on the time sold on the site.   It looks like a pretty good platform and he's launching today.

Brian Magierski, CEO, Kalivo is a platform for marketers that has a "listener" which crawls the internet and picks up relevant content and allow the marketer to respond to it.   It sounds to me like Kalivo has a nice way of categorizing what's happening in context to the what the marketer cares about - which might give it an edge; I like the analytics, based on what I can see.

You an even focus in of the type of Blogger platform (ie: WordPress bloggers talking about iPhones - and also categorizes conversations based on importance - and you can then interact with those sources - a very nice feature!)

ClickDensity ( I think it was Benno Wasserstein, CEO, Box UK  presented) is really presenting a standalone heatmap program that, while is fancy to look at, is not really much different than what most upper tier web analytics platforms provide in some form or another.  I like that each click on a page also includes the time spent on the link (page).  However, there are segmentation capabilities in ClickDensity - more how people react on the page (how quickly a visitor, on average, click on a link of the page).  It's not a replacement for your regular Web Analytics - it supplements it.

There were also 3 panelists that just came on the stage - Chris Fralic, Partner, First Round Capital, Julia Hood, Editor-in-Chief, PRweek and Brian Kelly, Partner, Manatt, Phelp & Phillips.

I think what the panelists/analysts above liked was the ability to know what the blogosphere is saying and interacting with it (as well as the attractive pricing).  The analytics seemed more intuitive - drawing a box around all this unstructured data in a visual way.   But the panelists want to know how the analytics here really work - and which one is better and why.   ETimeisMoney is also liked by the Panelists - they think it's a good direction to go. 

Anticipating issues rather than just being reactive.  But the Panelists think it's all about Google - Google dominates the conversation even though they are not, in away way I'm aware of, present at this conference.

Well, that's it for this session.