A few posts back, I had Joe Kraus (CEO, JotSpot) as my guest on Episode #2
of the ETech@Work podcast. I realize
that Joe’s featured quite a lot on this blog, but he seems to have a lot of
wisdom (and experience) to share, so why not.

So, I was watching Joe’s
interview on the Scoble Show
last week and, while some of what Joe says is similar to my interview, he also mentioned
quite a few things that were really different and that really struck me (Dang! Why didn’t he
say these on my interview?). So, since Joe and Robert were my last two
podcast interviews, I thought it would only be appropriate and complementary to
feature these wise words from Joe’s interview with Scoble as this week’s QOTW…

Wikipedia has done an
amazing awareness job for what wikis are—even if Wikipedia isn’t a typical
use-case for what most people do with a wiki, I think it’s helped alert people
to what wikis are…

I think the web is on a
trend over the next 5 years, from being a monologue to a dialogue. So, the web
is moving from where writers write and readers read, to where readers and
writers are much more fluid; there’s very much less of a barrier between them.
And I think that habit for the mainstream takes probably 5–10 years to really come
in—all consumer habits take about that long to really become mainstream, but it’s
going to happen. And I think you’ll see that participatory nature be across
every website. It won’t just be limited to wikis, and I think you’ll see that with
anything from Facebook and MySpace, all the way up through what we’re doing at
JotSpot…

I really believe that
email has been the launching pad for several different technologies that really
result out of the fact that, when email breaks down for this particular task,
something new springs up. And a good example of that is instant messaging.
So, 10 years ago we did instant messaging over email…and people realized that was
really inefficient to do over email, so instant messaging clients as a specialty
piece of software sprung out.

Well, there’s a big class
of email that I would call “request for response” that goes on today: “What do
you think of this word document?” “Oh I think it’s great—here are my changes.”
Now I have to retype and then send them out to people. That is very inefficient
done over email. It’s done so much now that it’s reaching the breaking point
[and] people are willing to look outside of the habit of email for something
new. And I think the thing that’s new that they’re looking towards is wikis…

I have a belief that the
biggest revolutions in technology have always been do-it-yourself revolutions. So,
when you give a non-technical person the ability to do what historically only a
technical person could do, pretty amazing things happen.

There’s a lot more insightful and interesting stuff on this
interview (e.g. Joe references a Gartner study that suggests 50% of
businesses will have a wiki by 2009), so I would highly recommend taking the 33
or so minutes to watch the entire thing, though as stated by Brent Schlenker, the message would probably
have been just as effective in an audio-only format.

Overall,
I think this interview offers a really interesting perspective on a few things:

1. The
way the web is moving to a culture of participation
2. Where
wikis are heading (beyond the basic Wikipedia model)
3. How
useful wikis can be as a collaboration tool and as applications
4. What’s
working for Jot (in terms of business strategy, etc.)
5. Joe’s
usual pearls of wisdom for entrepreneurs