In keeping with our commitment to connecting scholars across the world with as few boundaries as possible, we have released the source code for the Pronetos social networking software.

We’re using the Google Code platform to house the code, and you can access it here.

Currently Pronetos is running on Debian, with a PostgreSQL database. The code base in in Ruby, so if you are a massive Ruby hacker or just trying to hone your chops, you are hereby invited to the community!

If you are interested in making code commits, please let us know at info@pronetos.com, or contact one of the projects leads at the Google site.,

Greetings all! We noticed that there were a number of new user accounts created, but never activated. We have gone in and done that for many of you so you can begin using your Pronetos profile. After creating a test user account to make sure everything was working properly the one tip I can give you is this: if you registered for the site and did not get your verification e-mail, check your SPAM. If the message is there (it probably is) make sure to move it to your inbox or otherwise tell your e-mail client that it is ok to accept incoming messages from Pronetos.

Greetings all. We’ve finished migrating the Pronetos site over to new servers and it appears that all is well. We’ve had several people sign up apparently with no snags, so I am encouraged.

Speaking of signing up - the suspense is killing me - can we just get to 500 already! If we each brought a few more folks along, we’d get over that mark REALLY quickly.

Thanks for using the site!

By now, anyone following this space has developed an opinion about Amazon’s play to squeeze the other POD publshers out of the market, but I haven’t seen anyone simply say this: it won’t work. If Amazon were smart they’d admit they made a mistake and drop the policy and they should do it for the basest of all reasons: it will lead to lower revenues.

In attempting this squeeze play Amazon is violating many cardinal business rules but let me focus on two specifically. First, as a distributor, Amazon needs to fill its pipeline with the products that sell best, or offer the highest margins. If those products are created by manufacturers other than itself, then so be it. This is how they earn a living. So cutting successful products out of the distribution pipeline is utterly foolish.

The second reason this squeeze will fail is because Bezos and Co. are totally misinterpreting Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. The Amazon play appears to be their attempt to flip the long tail. Right now, CreateSpace and BookSurge are dwarfed by other POD manufacturers such as Lightning Source. If Amazon succeeds in squashing Lightning Source and the other large POD players, they will have succeeded in flipping the long tail. Amazon will then have the big selling POD titles, and the other manufacturers, finding that their distribution options have been pinched, will ostensibly fall off in sales and come to make up the tail portion of the long tail. But that’s no victory for Bezos - and he seems to not understand that.

If both sides of the tail are roughly equal, isn’t the goal to control both portions of the tail? Of course it is. Apple always understood this and that is why it is now the largest music retailer in the world, having just recently surpassed Wal-Mart - a company which previously controlled the top side of the long tail music market. If the long tail premise is correct then Amazon and Bezos should immediately end this policy which will only hurt revenues, not enahnce them. This is just a bad business decision on the part of Amazon, plain and simple.

As an observer of the POD space for some time, I’ll predict that you’ll see Amazon reverse course in short order.

Greetings all - we are in process of migrating the Pronetos site to new servers. We don’t expect any issues or downtime, but if you get any error messages this afternoon or evening, it could be because of the DNS propagating, etc.

If you have any questions, please let us know at support [at] pronetos [dot] com.

Thanks for being part of the community!

Chris Blanchard
CEO
Pronetos, Inc.

Just want to say thanks to scholars all across the globe who are still writing about Pronetos, and signing up in droves. We appreciate all the interest.

Thanks to our friends too at the University of Melbourne, and the University of Melbourne Library Intelligencer Blog, who posted about Pronetos yesterday!

We look forward to the discussions you’ll create, the research you’ll share, and the communities you all will build on Pronetos!

Well we woke up to find that we had appeared on a number of blogs over the weekend, and lots of new people have come to the site. Thanks to all of you for your interest. Apparently, the 2007 Horizon Report, which said that social networking was one of the tools that would most impact academe this year, was correct!

I hope we don’t forget anyone in the list below, but here are the posting that I am familiar with that have appeared recently, on Pronetos:

Thanks for all the support, bloggers!

Also, let me take a minute to thank the good folks (Dr. Susan Shadle) at Boise State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. We had a great time presenting to the faculty about Pronetos, and social networking faculty style. We look forward to doing more of that. In fact, if you’d like us to come out to your university, we can do that too. Just leave a comment here, or get us through the ‘about us’ link.

We got the word yesterday that we will be participating in a BarCamp style “unconference” called THAT Camp, hosted by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. Very exciting! We’re looking forward to meeting the folks out at at GMU and the other participants to see what else is cooking in the world of digtial humanities, and higher ed technology.

Besides having an awesome basketball team, GMU has what is probably the leading center for the study and integration of new media tools in the humanities. The CHNM faculty and staff have created some excellent tools - the one most of you are probably familiar with is Zotero - the Firefox plug-in for grabbing and organizing citations online.

So, thanks for the invite, CHNM, we’ll see you in D.C. in May!

There was a big vote yesterday - and I’m not talking abut the Potomac Primaries, either. No, a real paradigm shifting vote occured yesterday in the meeting of Harvard’s Arts and Sciences Faculty, who adopted a policy that “requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.”

This is a tremendous step forward in the dissemination of knowledge, and Pronetos of course hopes that other universities worldwide will follow Harvard, who yet again blazes a new trail in academe.

Good job, FAS Faculty!

Our developers recently experimented with a text editor to make it easier to upload images and links, and we will get that built in - we just want to make sure your pages render in the best possible fashion. In the meantime, you CAN use the “a href” and “img src” tags to liven up your pages. Take a look at my profile page to get some ideas. If you want some help prior to the text editor install, shoot us an e-mail and we’ll give you a hand.

Also, I’ve been using Pronetos’ document versioning feature while finishing my thesis. Why e-mail the thing back and forth between campus and home, or carry it back and forth on a flash drive? You can store documents on Pronetos, and Pronetos keeps track of the different versions.

You can also get comments and reviews on the document while it is out there. Very cool.

So give some of the features a try, and if you like something (or if you don’t) or find a new way to use the site, leave a comment so others can share in your knowledge. That’s the point of this whole thing, right?