Folks are getting up early this morning to join us in Boston for our first user group meeting. Some of the Coradiant product team had sushi with early arrivals from a couple of companies; I was struck by how weird it is to have a conversation with someone about TrueSight or the future of Real User Monitoring and to speak the same language.

By this I mean that for most of my life, I’m explaining why people need to measure the quality of their site by watching end-user experience. I don’t spend as much of it with folks who are already convinced. So to find someone who knows more about Watchpoints than me, or who can discuss the relative merits of PCLs and SLTs (which probably sounds cryptic unless you’re on the inside) is positively astonishing.

Anyway, maybe it was the Sapporo talking, but the next couple of days promise to be very interesting. Presentations are ready (last-minute tweaks aside) and I’m off for a few hours’ precious sleep before the attendees start to show up.

In the meantime, here’s some artwork from the slide deck. I call them:

Service Level Management

and

Incident Management

One of the hot topics for many of our customers is using Real User Monitoring to measure the impact of a change. There are plenty of changes that sites experience every day, from new content or new code to modifications to routing or end-user browsers. (Hey look! All your customers just switched to Firefox beta 2 and IE 7!) And the consequences of those changes can be far-reaching, from slower pages or more downtime to harder-to-identify problems like reduced capacity or dissatisfied users.

At our customer event this week I’ll be presenting a more detailed look at how to use our flagship product, TrueSight, to perform change impact analysis. It’s really a collaboration between the agents of change (engineering) and those who have to deal with the change (operations.) And it usually involves a change planning board of some kind.

Here’s a high-level workflow of these three groups, working (hopefully) in concert.

I’m psyched. We’re launching the Coradiant User Group this week, with our 2006 East Coast summit in Boston.

When we set out to organize the event, we expected less than 20 people. After all, it’s near the holidays, and everyone’s busy with the end of the fiscal year. So when we blew past 40 respondents, we were overjoyed. Sure, we’ve blown our budget; and sure, we’ve had to change venue.

As I was putting together the opening slides on the plane back from Web 2.0, I used the title “Watch What Matters.” I’m all about Real User Monitoring. And we tell companies they should watch their users on their applications in order to run their businesses well. So it’s only fair that we take our real users seriously. Ultimately, whether you’re a vendor or a web operations professional, what matters is your customers.

We’re putting our money where our mouth is, investing pretty substantially to create what we believe is a much-needed venue for dialogue in the field of Web Operations. With the last year’s incredible growth and adoption by all kinds of industries, it’s events like this that will keep us in touch with our customers’ needs and direction.

We’re also kicking off the user group mailing list, which will hopefully keep the discussion going long after the event is over. Any Coradiant customers can join; and we’ll be setting up our West Coast event early in the new year.The group’s hosted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coradiant_users/

Viacom’s Comedy Central stars, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, should be downloadable for free. And there’s a good, convincing reason for this that all the people involved should agree with.

After Google’s acquisition of YouTube, Viacom’s lawyers started asking for the ever-popular clips of their shows to be taken off the site. And much to the chagrin of YouTube faithful, Google complied.

Several things make this silly. First, both shows are topical. Lost might be good a year from now, but old episodes of John Stewart’s antics are really only fascinating to computer scientists. And second, the Internet postings of their shows are one of the main drivers of their popularity — as evidenced by Stephen Colbert’s collective hacking of Wikipedia and rigging a vote for a bridge in Eastern Europe.

So why should it be free?

Well, not free exactly. There’d be an ad (or ads) you can’t skip. But here’s the kicker for advertisers:

• You’d be able to specify a target audience (in other words, viewers would be asked to disclose basic stuff like their gender and age)
• You’d find out who watched the ads
• You could tailor content to the time it was downloaded and geographic region with great precision
• You could have a call to action (a clickthrough) to the product or service

To an advertiser, this is gold. An old adage goes, “I know half of my advertising budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” One of the reasons that online advertising is enjoying such a bull market is that it’s far more measurable than traditional broadcast media because of traceability and targeting. This “free” download of content would fare far better than the traditional advertising model.

Who loses? Well, you could argue that viewers lose a minute or two; but they get the clear conscience and uninfected desktops that come from not using illegal means to get their shows. The networks get a better advertising product. And the advertisers get targeted messages whose effectiveness they measure.

It seems that the only losers are regional telcos and cable providers. The same guys who want to have tiered bandwidth on the Internet (I’m listening to Vint Cerf debate net neutrality as I type.) As the alternatives — VOIP, downloadable TV shows, and the like — become more and more compelling, the traditional models for telcos and regional cable companies are starting to crumble.

Watching some of the industry’s technorati/glitterati/congnoscenti speak in broad swathes about the future of the Internet.  This show is always entertaining and thought-provoking in equal measure.  Not sure if it’s Jumped The Shark yet; apparently, with over 2,000 attendees they still had to turn away another 5,000.

The show is jointly authored by CMP, the same people that run Interop. They have a Web 2.0 Expo coming up at the Moscone Center in April; the organizer just used the term “Webops” to describe the content, so maybe it’s finally catching on.

It feels like there’s a dichotomy here.  Half of the attendees are revenue-side: Eyeballs, marketing, number of users, VC financing, and so on. The other half are cost-side: platforms, development, and so on. Of course, the money (read: Well-dressed) and the cost (read: Scruffy, with sticker-laden Macbooks) don’t always get along.  It’s a battle between who can spend more to look more casual, and who can get away with the most counter-cultural T-shirts.

But on to the technology.  I get a lot out of the show because I studied advertising in university; and whether they like it or not, many of these companies rely on AdWords. It’s certainly behind the bootstrapped revenue plans of B2E sites. But I don’t hear the same furore around clickfraud and wasted ad revenues.

Some great soundbites from the last few days:

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but [Skype] is sort of last year’s YouTube” - John Battelle to one of the co-founders of Skype.

“Being too early is the same as being wrong” - Tim O’Reilly

“The biggest cost of a web business is idle infrastructure. It’s like buying a 747 and having it sit on the runway 83% of the time.” - Jeff Bezos, talking about Elastic Computing and S3.

“Everyone thinks their entrails are interesting to everybody. I’m sorry but I just don’t think that’s so.” - Barry Diller on user-generated content

“I’m glad that Google’s there.  They’re kind of the heat shield for us.” - Adobe’s CEO on Microsoft’s increasing view that Adobe/Macromedia is a direct competitor.