A gaggle of bloggers consumed Lebanese food, drank beer and played wii last night thanks to Jeremiah Owyang (who had this to say) and Robert Scoblewho invited the Portland blogging community out to meet each other. It was a huge turnout, with about 50 people jammed in our break room. I met some cool peeps like Dan Rasay (Lucy), Justin Kistner (Nemo Design), Benjamin Diggles(DB Clay...hook me up with one of those wallets!) and Kristin "Batgirl" Reilly (Gamer Girls Radio). While Kristin beat all the guys at wii tennis, Dawn Foster shot some cool footage.

<script src="http://blip.tv/scripts/pokkariPlayer.js?ver=2007062101" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://blip.tv/syndication/write_player?skin=js&amp;posts_id=315484&amp;source=3&amp;autoplay=true&amp;file_type=flv&amp;player_width=&amp;player_height=" type="text/javascript"></script>

[Dawn Foster|http://blip.tv/file/get/Samjive-PortlandBloggerDinner732.flv]

Click To Play

Dawn also happened to capture a nice little video of Josh Bancroft on social networks and Facebook.  Jeremiah captured some cool pics of the event he put on Flickr.

I see Dave's point. He's worried we're going to burn bridges. Not that it's a heated debate. It's not. Dave and I just thought it would be good to voice our perspectives and get feedback. Regardless, we strongly believe in how Clearspace stands up to other choices.

My idea is to have a place on our website that compares us to other applications and then allows for public comments. If people have other information or opinions they could just post them right under the matrix. Everyday, we get the "how do you compare" question. I bet your company does, too. If you're like us, there aren't any really good places to go to get that sort of information, short of consumer reports. Is the fact that no one else puts up comparison charts reason enough to not do it? What would you think of a company that did have that information public?

I do realize that it will be hard to capture everything accurately and stay on top of it, I know we'd make mistakes. But I think it's worth the risk to give it a shot. Perhaps the other idea is to just buy all those applications and host them so that people can test drive them all in one place.  I mean, Saturn is doing it. You can go to their lot and test drive their competitor's cars, too.

I'd rather focus on providing customers with the information they want then to worry about potential relationship conflicts. No doubt, as much as the matrix wouldn't be intended as a commentary on other people's products it would be perceived that way. Not to mention how objective could we be, right?

My opinion is that we shouldn't worry about upsetting potential partners or other friendly companies. These are risks worth taking. We will make some people upset and some people happy.

What do you think?

Occasionally at Jive Software, our developers take a day off from their regular jobs to spend the day writing plugins for our products. After taking Friday off to write plugins for our new Clearspace product, we gathered at 4PM to do a quick review of our creations. This is what happens when a room full of Jive Software employees geek out over cool collaboration technology.

In a previous post about Jive Software and Open Source, I mentioned that we "do what we can to support collaboration within open source and other software developer teams (i.e. software user groups) by providing them with <span class="jive-link-external">complimentary licenses of Clearspace X or Jive Forums."

I wanted to let everyone know that we have streamlined the application process for getting a free license of Jive Forums or Clearspace X.  If you are interested in a free license, you can apply here:

• Open Source Application

• Developer User Groups Application

We hope to see many people take us up on this offer!

The scariest button on your computer is "reply all."

We've all got the scar tissue to prove it. Tell me you don't hesitate before you click that button. The repercussions for you on either end of "reply all" are not pretty.

Problem is, we've outgrown email and now use it for way more the  simple 1x1 messaging system it was meant for. We desperately need space to collaborate, not just message each other. Because there's no space, we end up ccing a bajillion people and then having endless threaded conversations. Most of these conversations consist of responses like, "no problem" or "thanks."

Email is convenient for recaps, updates or communicating with people outside of work, but it's horrible for quick and effective collaborating. There are a lot of reasons email isn't good for collaborating but let's pick one (you can add the others).

The one that I always think about is a story my college psychology teacher told. She said that when someone is laying on the ground in a small town and someone walks by they immediately stop to help them. In New York, however, everyone walks right over someone on the ground because they think that someone else will help.

The same thing happens with email. Someone else who received the email will help, won't they? Anyway, the last thing you want to do is to reply all.

In an open space, like Clearspace, no one is addressed as the recipient of a question or document. So, while even more people can access the information than anyone you would have added to an email,  people don't feel as scared and are more likely to participate. They could be the only person walking by, right?

I had a really interesting conversation today with Dennis McDonald about Social Networking. His observation was that most of what he's seen so far with social networking is that it's been focused on people connecting to people that they already know. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I love to find the people I know online but for me it's usually a quick, "I found you, cool now we're connected." I'm sure that there are stories out there -- particularly with job searches -- where social networking has been instrumental. Outside that, it seems that more often it's card collecting. I can see that Jill knows Steve but I'm no closer to knowing Steve, I just know that Jill knows him. I do like knowing there's a bag of potential contacts, even if I never use them.

Social Bookmarks have a great purpose, too. I can see what other people mark as interesting content. I have no connection to them personally, but social bookmarking allows me to snoop "good readers" and track their information consumption. I follow the tags and feeds of a number of people but I have never said one word to them. Love reading over their shoulder, though. It saves me a lot of time.

Social Productivity is different than social networking or social bookmarking: it's about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you've never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now. This isn't just true "behind the firewall" within companies. Look at Wikipedia, the content has been built, written and organized more relevantly than any single or traditional team of authors could have done.

We're happy to announce the release of the 1.1 version of Clearspace. Notable in this release is the first public release of Clearspace X, the external community edition of Clearspace. We've updated the Clearspace page to include new 1.1 features and there's a page dedicated to Clearspace X.

There are a few other notable new features and improvements:

• UI Improvements - we spent some time tweaking the front page, search form and results, and the profile pages

• Save as PDF - you can export any document as a nice looking PDF

• More Reports - we added many new reports and a better admin console UI

• Better Presence - when you enable presence sharing with an IM server like Openfire then you can see a user's presence from Clearspace

Finally, we fixed a slew of bugs. Upgrades will be a breeze thanks to the upgrade framework we've developed. For the most part, you'll just need to install the new version and the rest will be taken care of. Be sure to read the upgrade documentation included with the release for more details.

Stop by our booth at Web 2.0 Expo (April 15-18 at Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco) for a preview of Clearspace X, a special community edition of Clearspace launching just after the conference. We're looking forward to showing off a few other cool additions to Clearspace 1.1 as well. If you plan to be there and would be interesting in chatting, please stop by our booth or send me an email at: sam(at)jivesoftware.com