Graham Chastney

Here’s another way to see what’s popular. aideRSS is a new service which generates a rank for each of your posts – PostRank. It then uses this information to provide filtered RSS feeds for good, great, best and top posts. These filtered feeds then allow you to filter out the drivel from someone’s site.

My posts all rank exactly the same at the moment which isn’t very helpful. I suspect that is because I’ve not written anything interesting recently; it only shows my last 10 posts. If you want to have a look it’s all here: http://www.aiderss.com/all/oak-grove.typepad.com

I’m a bit puzzled by the whole concept really, because it feels a bit like a self fulfilling prophecy. The PostRank seems to be using things like the number of comments on a particular post. If lots of people only subscribe to the “best” posts then those posts are going to stay the “best” posts because they are the only ones being commented on and the other non-”best” posts aren’t going to get a look in. They must be reckoning on enough people subscribing to the full feed that the numbers aren’t completely skewed.

The other interesting thing is that they are running it on Amazon’s EC2. So you could says that it’s a virtual start-up because they don’t even have their own infrastructure to look after.

Josh Bernoff writes:

The more I write and read about social media, the more frustrated I get with the term “users.”

When I started in the business twenty-mumble years ago, writing software manuals, people who used software were unusual (and had to be masochists). We spent a lot of time talking about users. The word user was helpful — it helped us to keep in mind that there was a poor slob on the other end of what we were building.

Those times are long gone. We know users are important now. Disappoint them and you lose. So why do we still have to call them “users,” which puts the emphasis on the technology they are using?

Josh’s point is that it makes us see the customers of the things that we do differently. If someone is a “user” they are somehow out of the ordinary. Ordinary people aren’t users, they are just people. Describing them as “users” dehumanizes them.

I’ve tried for a long time not to describe people as “users” not because of the reasons Josh is outlining (to change the way we see these people) but because I think it’s a demeaning term. The only other business with “users” is the illegal drugs industry and I don’t want to see any of my customers in that way.

Having said that, I find that it’s great shorthand that people understand. Not using it can make the documents that I write sound a bit politically correct. There is a real danger that using a different word just shifts the problem on to that word we already have this problem with words that describe people who are older or people with some form of disability/special need/etc. (you see my problem).

It’s becoming a popular trend of reporting “BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance“.

Is that really true?

Is the device itself actually bad for work/life balance?

Does the very presence of a Blackberry or a PDA have a negative effect on your ability to balance your time?

It’s another case of us humans abdicating our responsibility over to the machines and letting them take the blame.

It’s not the machine that is the problem – it’s our attitude to the machine!

Do I have the ability to turn my Blackberry off? Of course I do!

Do I have the ability to leave my BlackBerry at home when I go out for the day? Of course I do!

It’s a tool that I use, it’s not my master and I’m not a slave to it.

If my boss sends me an email at midnight, that’s his problem! I don’t see why I should carry my BlackBerry around just in case he does.

If I choose to go through my emails on the night before returning from holiday so that I can have an easier run in on Monday morning that’s my choice. It’s not the machine making me do it. If I blame the machine then I’m just ducking the real issue.

When I was a child I kicked a ball through a window. When I was caught I blamed the ball, but I was still the one that was punished. N-one would expect otherwise.

I know that, for many people, the need to respond to something is very strong, but we need to learn to ignore it, or to turn it off. I would be a very rich man if I had a £1 for every time someone interrupted a face-to-face meeting we were having so that they could answer the phone. But it’s still not the phones fault for ringing, it’s our fault for answering it.

This weeks is a timely reminder that stuff happens.

For the second time this year whole areas of the UK are deep in water. Thousands of homes are without running water. Thousands have been without power,  thousands more would have been if it hadn’t been for some remarkable work by the Emergency Services.

Yesterday a power problem in San Francisco affected a number of popular web sites.

People in IT talk a lot about contingency and resilience but sometimes you just have to acknowledge that you can’t allow for every eventuality.

One of the interesting things about working from home is having to provide your own power and connectivity.

It’s gone very dark outside because of a thunderstorm. The power has already dipped a number of times and I’m using CTRL+S (Save) rather more than normal just in case.

Thankfully the domestic supply in the UK is quite reliable, but it’s not guaranteed. As more people work from home, I wonder whether we’ll start to see the utility companies offering a premium service for home workers.

Oh dear, what possessed me! Why on earth have I done this thing?

Perhaps I thought it was time to get down with the kids.

Perhaps I thought there was something I was missing out on.

Perhaps I thought that there was some sort of experiment in social engineering that it might be interesting to understand.

I don’t know, but I’ve done it now, and once I’ve done something it’s done.

I have no idea where I am going to find the time to do anything with it though.

I’m not going to give you a link or anything, because I think that should be part of the experiment .

This weeks Bug Bash reminds me of so many situations I’ve seen:

How about you?

My current top 20 post by visits:

1. Vista RTM on TC1100
2. Gadgets Impact on the Family
3. Windows Live Writer Dictionary Hack
4. Vodafone 1605 (HTC TyTN) Pocket PC Phone
5. Windows 2003 R2 Single Instance Storage
6. Microsoft use Single Instance Storage on All of Their File Servers
7. Form Factor Psychology
8. Right Brain v Left Brain
9. Multi-tasking the Theory and the Example
10. Ricky Gervais – Microsoft 1
11. Is the Shared File Server Dead? (Part 2)
12. The Shared File Server is Dead?
13. Graham Chastney 2.0
14. Brain type? Brain strength? Brain training?
15. Microsoft ‘Motion’
16. Is change difficult?
17. Windows Live Search for mobile beta
18. Internet Fishing Metaphor
19. Amazing HD Videos to Download (BBC)
20. Concept of the Day: Visual Illiteracy

And search keywords by visits:

1. try live search
2. tc1100 vista
3. graham chastney
4. internet fishing
5. car psychology
6. microsoft motion
7. vodafone 1605
8. why is change difficult
9. single instance storage
10. vista tc1100

I’m not sure I can draw any conclusions from any of this. Perhaps there is one; people don’t come to my blog for one particular thing they read all sorts of stuff.

I was expecting that the pages which refer to a particular product would be way out in front because they are easy to find in a search. Looking at the search keywords though, it looks like people type all sorts of things into a search engine. I was very surprised how high the My Brain posts were, for instance.

The other thing that this has made me realise is that it’s really difficult to tell what people are reading. There are more than 90 people who aren’t likely to appear on these statistics very often, because they use an RSS reader. Knowing the things that these people found interesting would be more helpful than any of these numbers.

Charles Stross has written an interesting article on a potential future where all human experience is recorded for future reference:

“In the long term, almost all human experiences will be recorded. And in the very long term, they’ll be a gold mine for historians.”

Is that a good idea, or a terrible idea? I suppose it depends on your point of view.

There are times in my life, for instance, where I embarrass myself. I will relive those situations, in my mind, a few times until I eventually forget it. It would be awful for that situation to be recorded and available as a last reminder.

There are also times in my life when I wish I could go over a situation and see whether there is anything I could learn from it. It would be great to see if from other people’s perspective too.

There are other issues too.

The more we use a machine to remember for us, the less we will remember, it’s inevitable. I’ve written about this before. Would there come a point where we could no longer do anything useful because we didn’t have enough memory available to do it?

I also wonder whether our brain doesn’t retain everything for a good reason. Not because it is limited, but because it’s good for us not to remember everything.

It’s a question posed by Stu to which I was going to write a comment, but the comment got too big, so I turned it into a post.

Some thoughts.

Working together is a good thing

In most situations working together is a good thing. There are all sorts of sayings down through time that would support this:

• Many hands make light work.
• Two minds are better than one.
• Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble. (Proverbs 1000-600 b.c.)

So it’s long been recognised that working together produces more.

There are constraints to working together

Although we know that working together is a good thing we work within a set of constraints. Some of these constraints are physical, some of them are more to do with our individuality as humans.

The time and space barrier

Two of the major physical barriers to working together are time and space, we cannot all be in the same place at the same time.

One of the ways we overcome these barriers is to arrange a time and a place where we can work together – we call this a meeting. Meetings are as old as mankind, we’ve always done it. Overcoming the time and space barriers by having a meeting is an expensive thing to do, but it’s also a very rich experience where we use all of our senses and all of our intelligence if it’s done well (considering how long we have been doing meetings it’s a mystery to me why there are so many bad ones).

One of the reasons we write, draw, paint, sculpt, model is to overcome the time and space barriers. Art creates an expression of our thoughts or feelings that transcends the time in which it was created, it can also transcend the space in which it was created. Expressions in art may not, however, provide the richest experience. When I visit art galleries I love to read the labels next to the art because it gives me a richer experience. At one gallery I went to they had a recorded commentary from the artist, this gave an even richer experience, I suspect that had the artist been there in person the experience would have been even richer.

The human barriers

We are all individuals, as such we work with other people in different ways. There are some things we love to do together, there are some things we prefer to do on our own. Each of us has individual preferences. If we are to work together in an effective way we need to build a whole set of things between each of the individuals: trust, respect, experience, understanding, etc.. These things do not necessarily come easily and normally do not come quickly.

My best experience of working together has been on teams where we had worked together long enough, on a common goal, where the human barriers no longer existed and we were able to work in freedom from them. I’ve recently been on FranklinCovey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People course. They call this type of working “synergistic working”. As a British person there is something about the word “synergistic” that sticks in my throat, but I know what they mean. Synergy is about working in such a way that the result is greater than the sum of the parts. Another way of thinking about it could be the principle of resonance.

What does collaboration mean to me?

So, back the Stu’s question.

Collaboration is working together in a way that tends towards synergy.

What does collaboration technology mean to me?

Collaboration technology is a set of technology that is aiming to enable collaboration outside the time and space barriers while still providing an appropriate richness of experience. It’s the richness of the experience that helps us to overcome the human barriers.

I’ve talked before about the different ways that we talk on a telephone conference call. I am sure that I have a completely incorrect impression of some people because I have only interacted with them on conference calls. Conference calls are definitely not a synergistic experience, there isn’t enough richness for that.

There have been many occasions when I have built up an impression of someone from their emails, only to have it smashed to bits by meeting them in person.

I regularly find myself in the situation where the technology has enabled me to overcome the time and space barriers without providing the appropriate richness of experience. In that sense then, for me, collaboration technology is still a yet to be fulfilled promise.