disruptive technology,cluetrain manifesto,technorati,web 2.0

I know that quite a few of you haven’t heard of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Summing up, it’s the Jerry Maguire approach to Marketing. Check out some of the 65 theses, and you’ll get the picture that it asks for companies to participate in conversations with their markets.

Now Peter Hirschberg, chairman of Technorati is participating in delivering a paper pushing those core concepts into business. Quoted from Finding conversational marketing’s heartbeat | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Eight years ago, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger presented the The Cluetrain Manifesto, which came up with the phrase that in the Internet age “markets are conversations.”

Now Peter Hirshberg, chairman of Technorati, and Steve Hayden, vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, along with Doc Searls are extending Cluetrain concepts to the office, with a paper, “The Manifesto on Monday Morning: How to put the wisdom of Cluetrain into action when you get to your office.” The paper will be presented at the Conversational Marketing Summit today in San Francisco.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was ahead of its time–before the “Live Web” of blogs, wikis, RSS and the high-velocity, real-time information flow–and business practices are just beginning to catch up.

The authors also include a “Conversational Advertising Code of Conduct,” and are solicitating comments in true conversational marketing fashion. Among the “codes” are the four areas where transparency is required: Use of a publisher’s content, the editorial process, attributing advertising and influencing content creators.

Conversational Marketing is hot. Hence the web viewer’s much higher use of text based links over banner ads for eCommerce related traffic. It was Disruptive Technology eight years ago and still remains cutting edge. Now it’s becoming mainstream. I’m a big proponent of Disruptive Technology, and concentrate on reading between the hype in order to get my clients the best while minimizing their risk.

Raw Data and Transparency

Transparency is key. People need to trust the authors of the content they read to form opinions. I find it’s critical to let people know what my raw data is that I base my decisions on, particularly with the Adobe RoboHelp thread that’s been on fire this month.

So… I’m evaluating different software that I’ve been talking about evaluating for over six months. There should be no surprises there. The transparency should be that, first, I know a lot of the insiders in the industry and second, I need to adopt some sort of server technology (or recommend adoption of same) for my clients and my own business.

roboengine,robohelp server,cluetrain manifesto,cluetrain,adobe robohelp,madcap flare,madcap feedback server,adobe robohelp server,technical communication,web 2.0,online collaboration,workflow collaboration

What I’ve heard from my clients interested in search technology is that while Natural Language Search (NLS) is desirable, Web 2.0 capabilities trump the NLS requirement, behind the firewall particularly. This also fits well into my Workflow Collaboration research.

MadCap Feedback Server Review Coming Soon

I’ll review MadCap’s Feedback Server this month. As I mentioned earlier this year I’ve got a couple large clients this Web 2.0 concept may work for so we’ll see what we can discover.

For those of you who in the HATT list who are asking why I don’t look at other HAT tools, this should satisfy that request. Alternatively, I am sure it will bring cries of ‘See, I told you so - he’s one of those MADCAP supporters’.

Read more about my focus and hopefully it will put those issues to rest. I hope it answers the skepticism. In any case, please feel free to comment.

Feedback Server Contender: RoboHelp Server

I may not get around to reviewing this anytime soon since there has not been much new capacity added to this tool, merely bugs fixed and necessary browser and Vista related updates.

Besides, I already know the main beef with RE was the installation and maintenance and killing the Natural Language Search capability fixes this. But… without the NLS, RoboEngine / RoboHelp Server becomes just about as useful as ZoomSearch, a $300 tool.

From MonkeyPi’s RoboHelp Server 6 and NLS issues?:

Many have upgraded only to find that the legacy Natural Language Search functionality has not been included. Synonym search is gone, too. Apparently, Adobe has simply not included the NLS DLL file with the software.

What’s odd is that the functionality apparently hasn’t been disabled in the UI or the help. From the developer’s perspective, the feature just isn’t working. In other words, the features “appear” to be there, but aren’t. Users aren’t aware of the disabled functionality until they try to use it. Even the software’s help topics on NLS are apparently still present.

By the way, when RoboHelp Server / RoboEngine (RE) came out in 2001 it was ridiculously underpriced. A $20k server for $2k. That was innovative.

Without the NLS, RoboHelp Server is beaten by Peter Grainge’s recommendation for a free / sub-$500 solution called ZoomSearch.

Beer and Wings Segment

When Macromedia laid off everyone RoboHelp in 2005, I investigated the feasibility of becoming the third party support resource. David Black was the primary engineer tasked with supporting the RoboEngine, and depending on the circumstance he might be a great person to contact with existing configuration.

For those who are not willing to lose the NLS resources in your version of RoboEngine by upgrading, contact me or David and we can see what might be done.

Fair and Balanced RoboHelp Server Resource

For further raw data from Adobe, check out Vivek’s post on his blog last week.

I would review Adobe RoboHelp’s Server, however since they detuned the Natural Language Search (NLS) capability out of it earlier this year and spun the facts on it, I’m not interested. I used to support RoboHelp Server while at eHelp five years ago, and if it’s not been changed and had new functionality added since then, it’s outlived it’s innovation as a market leader.

Ironically, that improvement within RoboEngine was due to the NLS which was axed in this version. Too bad they didn’t initially tell people that. As evidenced by MonkeyPi’s post and my comments.

Cluetrain Segment

To be fair at the time that MonkeyPi’s post came out I did email the then-PM of RoboHelp and attempted to post a comment on his blog. No reply to either. Well, an initial out of office email, but that was all. I’ll post the raw data on that if anyone cares to ask for it.

Vivek, thanks for finally answering the content of my questions from earlier this year last week in your blog post.

My response:

Cluetrain. Markets are conversations. Straight up Vivek, as far as RoboHelp is concerned you don’t know your market and, by the single post on HATT appear to only be able to speak in PR or Marketing blurbs, and not engage in true dialogue.

That dialogue might have actually ended up teaching you about your market if you had taken advantage of it.

Vivek and all Adobe PMs: I care about you learning about your market, because if you learn about your market, you become stronger as a competitor to MadCap’s Flare. That makes things better for everyone who buys HAT technology.

ZoomSearch: Recommended on the HATT

When I posted up earlier this year, I got a great response from Peter Grainge for a sub $300 search engine. Unfortunately my clients were looking for something more web 2.0, hence my evaluation of the MadCap Feedback Server.

The link will take you to Peter’s writeup about ZoomSearch.

— In HATT@yahoogroups.com, “Peter Grainge” wrote:
>
> I wonder whether ZoomSearch would fit the bill for you. There’s a
> topic on my site about it and the search there uses it. It’s very
> configurable, easy to use, inexpensive and the support is excellent.
>
> http://www.grainge.org