Graham Chastney

If you ever wondered what happiness at work looked like then watch this video:

It’s not about pay – it’s about passion.

See more here.

Flickr announced today the availability of places. It’s a new way of looking at the photos in Flickr – not surprisingly, by place.

I’ve done the usual searches:

• Where I live
• Places I like
• More places I like
• Even more places I like

Hours of fun, I could spend hours on a site like this, and probably will, but not today.

I’m only slightly disappointed that I’m not a featured photographer for my own town, perhaps it’s time I took more pictures here and got that changed. At least I am featured here though.

Anyone who has used email or any other form of electronic communication has seen (and probably sent) written content that shocked you. You were amazed that the person, that you know, could say such a thing in such an aggressive way. The New Scientist has an interesting article that suggests that some of the reason for this is deindividuation:

Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting” – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.

The most recent place where I have seen this personally has been in the occasional reply-to-all storms that we have in our email system. Someone will send out an email to whole set of people. Someone else will reply-to-all that they don’t know why they received the first email, or similar. This will then set of a storm of activity from people replying to the reply-to-all. Each of these replies will get more and more aggressive in their language.

If only these people sat back and analysed what they were doing they would stop doing it. It’s unlikely any of them have read though the recipient list to see who is on it, in their minds they are just replying to some random person. What they are actually doing is replying to all sorts of senior people who could have a great influence on their career, what’s more they are abusing a fellow colleague. If they only thought about how they would feel to receive such an email they wouldn’t do it.

A wise person once said: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

via TechCrunch

The other day I blogged about the fragmentation in the experience of using Facebook + LinkedIn + Flickr + Twitter + Blog + etc.

Francis Shanahan has gone a bit further and tried to map it all of the entities that know something of his identity.

His result was this picture:

The interesting thing is  that he’s only gone as far as the entity that holds the information not what the information is that each one holds. I suspect that a diagram with all of the information types on it would be a huge diagram.

Is there any wonder people can’t remember where they left themselves, or is that just me.

via Kim Cameron

One of the things that bothers me about working from home is my visibility, am I visible to those people who matter. This and an occasional feeling of isolation made me come into the office today. I didn’t have any meetings planned, I just wanted to be visible.

There is a lesson here for every home worker out there.

I came in to be visible, but no one saw me, because no one else is here .

They aren’t all in the same meeting, that I wasn’t invite to, they are in different meetings all over the place. I’m the only one (of my team) in the office .