I woke up Chris very early in the morning for recording this interview about the future of online collaboration. As we were more than 9 hours apart, there was no easy way to talk live without one of the two being stuck at some strange hours. But so we did, and Chris was quite kind in offering to wake up a bit earlier to accomodate enough time for this online interview.

If you don't know yet who Chris Pirillo is, you should picture in your head a compressed high-energy supergeek which knows no stop to his abilities to renew, reinvent and improve his abilities to study, analyze and report about popular computer technologies. Chris is an online independent publisher maintaining a multi-channel news portal at Lockergnome.com, a book author, a television host (Tech TV), a highly popular blogger as well as an increasingly successful entrepreneur and event organizer bringing Gnomedex, his uniquely designed technology conference to its sixth successfull edition.

Here is my one on one conversation with Chris Pirillo, recorded over a year ago, where we discuss everything from Gonomedex to web conferencing, open standards, contextual collaboration, instant messaging and more.

Together with the fully downloadable podcast .mp3, as well as an immediately playable audio file which you can just start by pressing the play button here below.

Photo credit: JD Lasica

Robin Good: Hello, everyone. Here is Robin Good, and I'm here today again for "The Future of Online Collaboration," a series of good conversations with people who have a gist about technologies, new media and what is happening in the world of computers and the Internet. I have the honor of having on the other side of the ocean today a very interesting person. Why don't you introduce yourself, my friend?

Chris Pirillo: Well, my name is Chris Pirillo. I'm known in several circles for many things, I spin many plates. I've been running Lockergnome.com for many years, since 1996, and then I launched Gnomedex, my annual conference that's now operated by myself and my business partner/fiancee, Ponzi. That happens every year, and currently we hold it in Seattle, WA. I'm also a host of an online show called "The Chris Pirillo Show", of all things, and it's nothing more than talking about technology. We take live calls, we take voice mails and answer questions, mostly about technology in general, nothing too specific or about anything specific. I also do interviews on the show as well. Years ago I used to host a show on a cable television network. I did that. I also have a blog, and it's what has risen me to the number one "Chris" on Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, etc. I've written a couple of books, done some real radio, yada yada yada, enough about me.

Robin Good: Great! That's Chris Pirillo indeed. I've had the pleasure to meet Chris two times in Seattle when we participated to the Microsoft Search Champs, and he's indeed the type of super energetic, brilliant, creative person that always has an opinion about most anything you ask him. So I'm getting involved with some interviews for the weblog movie project that I'm also doing, but today the topic and focus of our conversation is about something called "online collaboration" and its future. Chris, what is for you, how do you define online collaboration?

Chris Pirillo: That's a good question. I think it goes back to my definition of the Internet, and not an interconnected series of wires, though it is. The Internet is largely driven by people, and without people the Internet would be absolutely nothing. And so the idea of collaboration, and the tools and ideas surrounding it, are all based on people. And when you integrate people with technology, which isn't always the case -- usually, people are an afterthought when it comes to technology -- when I think collaboration, I think of easy, simple, intuitive ways of getting ideas across, sharing ideas and thoughts, whether they be in audio format, text format, video format.

At this point, we can't smell the Internet, but maybe that's coming at some point in the future, which would be wonderful to be able to log in to a restaurant's website and smell what they're cooking for dinner. I have to apologize, as it's early in the morning for me over on this side of the ocean, Robin, so I am a little more subdued than I normally would be.

Collaboration is really key and it's increasingly important not just for businesses but individuals. I'm not talking just of collaboration on a family project or just working together on something, but really for business to continue to flourish, save money, become a lot more organized. The tools that are there today probably aren't as good as they should be, and I say that because there's really no leader in this space -- and I'm not going to name any names. But there's no one solution that stands out among the rest.

There usually is when it comes to these types of tools, whether they be web-based or locally-based like a binary you can download for OS X, Linux or Windows. It's a confluence of all these ideas that surround communication. Unfortunately, for collaboration to happen, the tool has to be there and be smart enough and good enough that anybody could use it, not just those who are technically proficient. For instance, if you wouldn't know how to flip between the audio of you and me, then you wouldn't be able to join this conversation.

Some people don't know how to do that. Even if you told them what to press, they wouldn't know that to do; they'd be overwhelmed. And unfortunately, computers are still very much that way. We're in the Stone Ages as far as technology is concerned -- well, as far as I'm concerned.

Robin Good: Chris, do you think that web conferencing is a synonym of online collaboration?

Chris Pirillo: I think it's one aspect of it. I wouldn't say they are one and the same. When we think "web", we tend to think "in front of an computer" at this point. Let me further qualify that. When Americans think "web", we think "sitting in front of a computer, " and we think "going to a web page." We don't see ourselves as being immersed in the Internet in general, and I think putting the word "web" on something automatically limits the way people perceive it. For instance, you've got email, and when I say "email" you probably think of your email client.

When I say "web browser", you probably think of the web client that you happen to use. And so when I think of something based on the web, I think of something that's not very immersive, and collaboration should be much more immersive. It shouldn't be limited to one aspect of the Internet. There are several aspects to the Internet that make it work and make it run. And yes, the web is a fantastic transport for all these ideas, but certainly I don't think you would want to limit the scope of collaboration to just what is normally found on the web or what the web is good at transporting.

Robin Good: Good. Thank you. What are for you, Chris, the type of tools that you use the most to collaborate, meet, and do work together with other people online?

Chris Pirillo: I've been lucky or unlucky to have not had a lot of experience with the tools out there. At least, I haven't found one that just has drawn me in as some people have. I don't use any tool in particular. I guess the most commonly used tool for me in terms of communication is email; it always has been. Unfortunately, the reliability of email has decreased over the years. But that being said, I really hope that one day it's going to get to the point where I can just have something on in the background in working with other people, making it easier to organize the things that happen within a conference. Unfortunately, it's kind of a kludge right now. It's a pain to try to capture things and make them work.

We have to, if you will, "hack" things to make them work the way we want them to work, because either the developers aren't working fast enough or they aren't smart enough to do or to write or to create something that content creators need, or that collaboration efforts need in general. So I'm hoping that at some point I will have more opportunities to collaborate on projects and be involved in such a way that I don't feel it's a -- I'm struggling for a word right now, maybe because of my early morning rising over here -- I'm hoping that it won't be a pain the next time I have to collaborate on something online.

Robin Good: Where do you find the greatest limitations when you are trying to collaborate with somebody online?

Chris Pirillo: It's all about the tools. For instance, the tool that I'm looking at right now, it's functional but it would not win any design awards. For something to work, it has to work out of the box, and design aesthetics, for me, are very high. The user interface has to be intuitive, it has to be smart, it has to know what I'm going to do next and not offend me with the way that it presents it. It's a broad question, a very broad question, and I don't think there's a right answer or a wrong answer, which is good and bad. Boy, I sound like a real waffle, which is of course an American staple for breakfast.

Robin Good: What other things would you like to do online and you can't do yet at all?

Chris Pirillo: That's another nebulous question that I don't think I can answer. There are so many things that we have discovered that the Internet could do for us over the past year. We wouldn't have imagined that some of these things would have taken hold the way they have, so it's difficult to predict or think about the way that I would want to use the Internet in terms of collaboration or working together with people.

I think if I had to choose a general umbrella term, I think it would be organization, in hoping to work on a project that had many opportunities to organize ideas, thoughts, etc. I've seen a couple piecemeal solutions and some pretty good solutions, but unfortunately most of the stuff that I do is pretty much in-house - with "in-house" being between myself and my business partner - and because of that we really don't use the web to collaborate at this point in time. It's just not something that's intuitive enough for both me and her to use, and that means that since we're in the same room, it's not that big of a deal nine times out of 10.

But if I were to think of something, it would be a project that had definitive goals, that had timelines, that had the ability to capture conversations, video, audio, text, ideas, and outline them, organize them, syndicate them, the ability to take the content we capture and reuse it, open it up for a bigger audience if we wanted to at some point in the future. If a meeting, a collaboration, ended up being really cool, I hope someone recorded it or it should have automatically been recorded, and we would have been able to push it out through an RSS feed, and someone would be able to subscribe to it if they really, really cared about what happened at the meeting.

I think Lockergnome is poised, probably within the next three to six months, we're going to be working on a project that's going to change the face of Lockergnome and the way it works, moving forward, and for that we are going to need to work with an outside firm. Undoubtedly, I will be learning more about web collaboration tools, because they don't live in the same city, although they are nearby.

Robin Good: Chris, have you heard about the term "contextual collaboration"?

Chris Pirillo: No, that's a new one to me.

Robin Good: Well, basically what that means is that ideally we don't want to have a world where we need to fire up a specific application to collaborate with somebody else, but we really want to extend the capabilities of our mainstream applications, the ones we use normally, and make them capable, for example, of sharing the content of that application with our contacts that we have in our instant messenger or in our social network, fire up a voice conversation, and all that. And it may be a question of whether this happens by mainstream conferencing and collaboration tools hiding themselves within applications, or applications like the Microsoft Office enabling these kinds of capabilities within themselves. Does that make any sense?

Chris Pirillo: Yeah, it makes complete sense, and unfortunately I think the latter would be true. It would have to be at the operating system level, not just within a Microsoft Office application, because not everybody has Microsoft Office and I think that's the wrong path to take. I'm sure it would be great business for Microsoft in terms of making that a value-add for Office, but I don't think they are going to do it right.

I think that they have illustrated very craftily, if I can use that as a word, that Office really hasn't evolved over the past few years. It's kind of funny, some of the ads they're running here in America include pictures of people dressed up with dinosaur masks on their heads, so they are dinosaurs is what they're trying to convey, because they are using an older version of Office.

Well, the fact remains that if you haven't upgraded office since maybe Office 2000, you're really not missing out on much, or what you're missing out on kind of sucks. You have got some small tweaks, but nothing that's really revolutionary that you've got to run out and you must get it, you must install. And then even so, you have got other camps that are rising, not only people who don't use Windows, but people who would rather support open source software like Open Office and efforts akin to that.

By putting it in the operating system level, you increase the chances of it just happening, without thinking. So software can't be installed, it's just got to be there. Unfortunately, when it comes to Windows, the operating system - yes, is controlled by Microsoft, but the second layer of it is OEM, and when OEM get in the way then that's when you end up with trouble, because OEMs nine times out of 10 screw up the system before it even ships. They want to throw their own software on there, and they want to throw their own value-adds on there. Of course, that's what makes them different from the competition, but software is a commodity.

Most of the people I know would just as soon have a clean system rather than loaded with all the crap that usually comes with the system. It's not spyware necessarily, but some of it really acts like that. So in order for something like that to happen, the contextual collaboration, it needs to be invisible, it needs to be built-in to the operating system. I would argue that it would have to be inter-compatible or just compatible with Mac OS X. Unfortunately, trying to get them to communicate on that level is going to be a bit of a kludge, to use that word again. So I certainly hope that software would evolve to that point, but certainly I don't think it's going to happen as quickly -- for instance, let me take a sidestep here and use an example.

The web browser. For as much as Microsoft got in trouble for including the web browser in Windows, I would say that the web has gotten more people aboard because of that fact. You remember way back when that you had to buy a web browser -- well, you didn't have to, you could get one for free as most of us did, but you could buy the Netscape browser for, I think, 50 bucks was how much it was selling for, and I wouldn't have paid a dime for the browser, even back then, because it sucked. But many people thought that this was the only way you could get onto the internet, and that wasn't the case.

And as soon as Microsoft included the browser with as many products as they possibly could, they increased the proliferation. So people had the web browser, and what could you do with it? Oh, you can go online. Well, okay, so I've got to go out and I've got to get an account to get online. And so by including the web browser, I think that Microsoft actually helped the Internet grow in terms of adoption. Not necessarily broadband, as we haven't really seen any applications that have drawn people into using broadband at this point.

Maybe it will be audio/video, but I'm not looking to Microsoft to innovate in this particular area. They have a really bad track record of not doing the right thing, and of being about three years too late when it comes to actually grabbing onto a technology or a movement. And by the time they do, mind share has already been split, and they are seen as a ketchup rather than the actual Dijon mustard.

Robin Good: So how do you see open source playing out their cards in this enormous opportunity that is the marketplace for live real-time contextual or non-contextual collaboration and communication tools?

Chris Pirillo: I think open source is cute, and certainly business models can built upon open source, but 98% of the open source projects out there are garbage and there's very few that really stand out among the rest. I think the idea of open source is fantastic, but I certainly wouldn't expect it to be the thing that makes it all work, because again you are counting on other people. I think when there's financial incentive involved, you end up with a lot more competition and smart competition.

Open source certainly has people concerned. I've been using open source projects for a while, and actually I am planning on building a few different projects around open source projects that currently exist. But I don't know. I think open source isn't going to be taken seriously, and I don't know if the developers of open source projects really take themselves seriously enough to make the projects go and to make them work. Other than just a few random examples, there is really no company out there that has really proved that you can really make the world turn -- and I mean "turn" in the sense of -- I don't want to back myself into a corner here because it's always tricky when you talk about open source.

It's not necessarily the open source that makes the money, it's the support of the product that's open source that makes the money. So as long as projects are smart enough that they can derive revenue from the support of the open source projects, then I'm certain that they are going to survive, and possibly even provide competition to larger software companies like Microsoft. Unfortunately, I haven't really seen many of them that I would consider true competition. Even Open Office isn't good enough to replace even the older versions of Office at this point in time.

Robin Good: So if it's not going to be Microsoft and it's not going to be open source, who do we leave it to to create our collaborating system of the future?

Chris Pirillo: That's a good one. It's probably going to be a fancy little upstart or just a couple of people who have a brilliant idea for something and then start doing it. Or I would honestly think that the people who would be smart to grab onto this opportunity would be Apple, OS X, or at least future versions of the Mac operating system or the Apple opportunity system. I think it's increasingly gaining mind share with influencers. Slowly but surely they are moving over to the "alternative operating system" and really changing the way they work.

Windows is functional certainly, but it's not without its share of frustrations, and I've seen great strides in developers and development of Apple's products and Apple's suite, and I think they have a big opportunity. They have done very, very well with iChat and integrating that, making it a simple, elegant experience for everybody. In fact, I've got a conference that I'm going to be speaking at - I think in a couple of weeks, and instead of setting up my firewire cam and streaming to the Windows Media Encoder, I just said, "You know, do you have iChat? Okay, let's just use iChat then. It would be so much easier."

So I'm actually using iChat instead of all these PCs that I have laying around the house, each one of them with a seemingly different purpose. I really think the promise is not to be seen, right now at least, with Microsoft. It took them too long to get Longhorn out the door, and they have really got to do a lot of work to slingshot around OS X at this point, and I'm not sure if they can pull it off.

Robin Good: Great answer. Thank you, Chris, for that. Let me ask you something different. Do you openly state that you have not been, really, collaborating online? You have been pulling together something unbelievable with your physical live conference, Gnomedex. Everybody has been talking about it, very positive response, what you yourself have defined a "people aggregator", and there's a lot of collaboration exchange that goes on there. Maybe we can all learn something if you stop for a second and extract for us, distill, a few of the key components, maybe just two or three, that you think make a difference in facilitating getting people together and having them interact and work positively together with each other in building new things. How do you do that?

Chris Pirillo: I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if we're fighting for control, literally, by pressing the CTRL key here. I think as far as Gnomedex is concerned, it's an effort that started years ago with a different set of ideas of why we were doing it, and then years later has morphed into the conference it is today. I think there are several key components. The secret to my sauce, if you will, is not really a secret. It's me. And I don't mean that in any egotistical way, but it all is contingent on the host. The energy of the host, the vision of the host, the ability of the host to communicate.

And when I put myself out there, it usually is easier for people to put themselves out there because I'm just kind of the extreme in terms of energy level goes. And people know to take me seriously by not really taking me seriously. And because of that, they are warm and they are open; more so than they would be at a conference that costs thousands and thousands of dollars, where they are thinking, "God, how can I recoup those costs?".

No, instead they are at a conference where everybody seems to be on the same playing field, even though one person may have done many more projects or worked on many more visible ideas or concepts: they all still feel like they are sitting in the same room. Because of that, you create an environment that fosters communication. You can't make people communicate. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." -- that's very much true, even for conferences.

Doing a physical conference, there is a tremendous amount of cost involved, more so than any web application or web conferencing that I know of, and I mean that in every sense of the word. I could literally flip a switch and do a web conference, it would be easy. Just because it's so easy, anybody could do it, so it's difficult to differentiate yourself amongst the others. So by doing something physical, not only are you getting people out of their element, but you are not relying on technology to make things happen. For instance, we had Wi-Fi available at our conference. We killed it. We flooded the T-1.

Even though we had warned the conference center that it was going to happen, they didn't listen to us, and consequently they paid the price. And we paid a price too, because we didn't have internet access. But that didn't stop the conference from happening. So because the conference had decent content -- and like I said, it's difficult for me to talk about my own projects like this because sometimes it gets construed as sounding boastful or egotistical, but it's also speaking to the success of Gnomedex. If the content was no good, if the people who were there were no good, then the conference wouldn't have been any good.

That's why you see a lot of people talking about Gnomedex and drawing comparisons between us and other conferences, and it's taken five or six years to get there. It certainly didn't happen overnight. We're looking now at ways that we could jump off of that success and do other things, with either the Gnomedex brand or possibly other projects.

Robin Good: That's great! I wish you really the best for this initiative. I think you are putting your best into it as time goes by. So I would like to now to have a close down in our good conversation with a set of rapid-fire questions. I would like to limit your answers to, at most, 10 to 15 seconds. Are you ready for this?

Chris Pirillo: Yes.

Robin Good: Okay, let's go then. Do you see the cost of online collaboration tools going down, Chris?

Chris Pirillo: Certainly. They have to come down. The more the tools become a commodity, the less value is attached to them, and the increased competition in the marketplace drives prices down.

Robin Good: Yes, indeed. What is presence awareness, Chris?

Chris Pirillo: Big Brother.

Robin Good: Is it really so important that we need to meet and collaborate with people online?

Chris Pirillo: Certainly, and the reason why is that it has to be pervasive, not invasive as it currently is.

Robin Good: What do you think are the factors that discourage people the most in adopting and utilizing in general these type of tools?

Chris Pirillo: Cost, learning curve, extensibility, ease of use.

Robin Good: Are open standards important in building these types of tools?

Chris Pirillo: That's a good question. I think they play a part in it. Certainly, if you want vendors to inter-operate, it needs to be based on open standards.

Robin Good: What do you think of the view of online collaboration tools facilitating the creation of virtual spaces like virtual offices, conference centers, classrooms, file cabinets where you put things? Do you think this is passee or is actually the wave of the future?

Chris Pirillo: As much as I would to, I don't think we're ever going to get rid of paper. I think that, certainly, telecommuting or the idea of the virtual office is long overdue. But the hardware doesn't exist, and the software most certainly does not exist.

Robin Good: Do you think security is a critical item when needing to collaborate with other people online?

Chris Pirillo: Security, above all, is the most important thing to keep in mind and to wrap into the design of any project, certainly.

Robin Good: Finally, what do you think software makers should do to develop some better tools than the ones they have been putting out on the market until now? Can you give them three tips?

Chris Pirillo: Hire a designer, work with the community, and release often.

Robin Good: How about their marketing strategies?

Chris Pirillo: I would refer to my second tip. Engage the community. That's the best marketing in the world.

Robin Good: That's great. Great set of answers, Chris. I really appreciate that, and that was indeed an interesting conversation with Chris Pirillo in Seattle, on the other side of the ocean. Chris, thank you very much for your time and for your insight into all of this, and I look forward to have more interesting conversations with you like this. Thanks again!

Chris Pirillo: Thank you, and thank you for not being awake any earlier. I mean, in a different time zone, because then I would have to be awake even earlier.

About Chris Pirillo

Photo credit: Univerisity of Nothern Iowa

Chris Pirillo is the founder and maintainer of Lockergnome. He spent two years hosting the TechTV (now known as G4) television program Call for Help before parting ways from the company. He also hosted the first annual Call-for-Help-a-Thon on TechTV. He writes a monthly column for CPU Magazine (Sandhills Publishing), and hosts a live Internet broadcast aptly titled The Chris Pirillo Show.