I’ve just sat down for tea (dinner if you are in the south of England or some other countries) with the family.
The topic of discussion this even was a story about a friend of my daughter who had been told off in school by here teacher.
What for I heard you asking?
For putting on here Facebook status: “I hate [the teacher]"
I’m sure that this little story is being played out with different characters and different technology all over the world but the essence is the same.
It’s a changing society in which we are all going to have to learn new skills and take different precautions.
It never would have happened in my day.
Over recent years I’ve noticed a significant shift in my attention span. I’d like it to be getting longer but unfortunately it’s getting shorter. 
There may be a reason for this; we recently discovered that the central heating boiler in our house had been incorrectly fitted and was doing its best to poison us all.
But I’m not sure it’s that simple.
I wonder whether it’s also a problem with the number of distractions that I now have available to me.
This week I decided to do something about the distractions.
One of the main distractions is my phone, it always seems to ring at the most inopportune times. This week I made a decision (please don’t tell anyone), I put my phone onto silent and waited to see what would happen.
I’ve written and read more in the last few days that I have for weeks.
I haven’t missed a single really important phone call – and there have been some.
I have always been intrigued with the Carbon footprint of the IT culture that we are building. I have found that people make the assumption that things that are free, are also free in environmental terms too. This is clearly illogical, but people somehow miss that connection.
McAfee have recently undertaken a study that highlights the massive overhead, in CO2 terms, of SPAM:
The average business email user is responsible for
131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions,
and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related. This
spam energy is equivalent to the emissions that
would result if every business email user burned
an extra 3.3 gallons of gasoline annually.The energy required annually to create, send,
receive, store and view spam adds up to more
than 33 billion kWh, approximately equivalent to
four gigawatts of baseload power generation or
the power provided by four large new coal power
plants. ICF estimates spam-related emissions for all
email users at an annual total of 17 million metric
tons of CO2 or 0.2 percent of the total global CO2
emissions — a number equivalent to emissions
from approximately 1.5 million U.S. homes.
The scary part of this report is the thought that 52% of all of this energy usage is consumed by end users viewing and deleting SPAM.
I’m sure that most people regard SPAM as a nuisance, but I don’t think that many people regard it as a ecological pest also.
According to an article by Maggie Shiels over on the BBC your online connects could be earning you an extra £365/month.
But before anyone goes totally negative on the whole online friends routine, a study by IBM and MIT [460Kb PDF] has discovered that there is money to be made from those buddies.The IBM collaboration with MIT’s Sloan School of Management tracked the electronic communications of over 7,000 volunteers for three years. The aim of the work was to put a dollar amount on the effect of those electronic and virtual relationships.
Researchers found that having strong connections to managers (yes, sucking up to the boss) can boost the bottom line. On average, it adds up to $548 (£365) in extra revenue a month.
She’s referring to this research (the link in the BBC blog post wasn’t quite right when I read it).
It’s quite a long report and I have to admit that I haven’t had chance to read it, but can it really be that simple. The conclusion of the report says this:
By analyzing one of the largest organizational electronic communication networks ever collected and combining it with detailed performance data, we show initial evidence that not only are network topology characteristics associated with productivity, human capital of inside one‘s social network and tie strength to the appropriate human capital are also positively correlated with information worker productivity. We find that having strong links to management is associated with higher revenue generation, but simply knowing many managers and have minimal correlations with performance. This demonstrates the importance of distinguishing one‘s social network not only by its network topologies but also the content of the network such as the cumulative human capital inside the network and the strength of ties connecting to this type of capital.
In my really simplistic words – relationship with your management network can lead to higher earnings. I suspect that for many people that is instinctive. If you get on well with those within your management structure you will go further. If you do a really good job, but are obnoxious then you won’t go as far. Simply adding your manager to your Facebook buddy list doesn’t, for me, constitute a relationship.
Network intelligence (my phrase) is going to be an important skill in coming years, online community adds to the networking capabilities, but also requires a higher level of network intelligence.
Is there a business opportunity here that I’m missing, perhaps “NI” training could be a real earner.
Update: Business Week also covered the same research.
As you may have noticed I really like quotations, I’m not sure why, perhaps it’s because they are nice and short and I don’t really like reading anything too long.
I really like Hugh’s take on a set of quotes that come from the chapter titles of his new book “Ignore Everybody”:
I particularly like the line “Everybody has there own private Mount Everest they were put on earth to climb”.
For those of you who are reading this through a some kind of Reader you might be interested to know that I’ve been tweaking the design on this site. 
For the rest of you, you’ve probably already noticed.
There was a bit of thought behind it:
I’ve still got some tweaking to do.
Let me know what you think.
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