Graham Chastney

This post isn’t going to say anything of any real value other than to say that I’m trying out the Wordpress Client Beta for BlackBerry.

It looks like it will be a really tidy little application for blogging those ideas that are on my mind and need to be written there and then.

The problem with those ideas is that they aren’t, on consideration, normally that good.

There has been a bit of discussion around recently about the value of blogging, with some people giving in because they can’t make a decent living from it.

I don’t do it for a living, but I was intrigued as to what my blog would be worth.

I don’t think I’ll be giving up the day job any time soon.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are really making progress.

Wii Breakfast

Today I have finished work with a reoccurring question on my mind – “how do I communicate better?”

I’m not sure whether it’s just me, or whether this is something that we all struggle with. I have some information that I need to move from my mind into someone else’s mind.

For thousands of years we have spoken; for thousands of years we’ve drawn pictures; for hundreds of years ordinary people have been able to read and write; businesses spend billions every year on technology in the hope that it is improving the way that its staff communicate – and yet we still can’t make the distance from one brain to another brain any shorter.

So I’ve decided that I need to do something.

I’ve decided to try and have a meaningful conversation with someone every day. I’m not talking about information sharing I’m talking about communicating. Hopefully this will lead to better communication all around.

“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.” – George Bernard Shaw

If I’m successful I’ll let you know, if I’m not I’ll simply forget that I ever write this post and so should you.

I have a bit of a usability problem with Lotus Notes tabs.

It’s a simple thing but it catches me out every day and has become an annoyance that I feel like I need to write about.

When I start Notes the first thing I do is to take a quick look in my inbox and then open my calendar. The two tabs that I have open look like this:

As I open items to read the tab bar starts to fill up and the size of the tabs starts to reduce.

The number of tabs that I need to open depends on the size of the screen that I am using. On my laptops it’s only four items before I get to this:

I’m now stuck, which is my calendar, which is my inbox. Opening more items just makes the situation worse. If I had a shorter name it would be less of an annoyance, but I don’t have a short name.

I’m not sure why Lotus couldn’t do something with the icons to show me which view of my mail file I am looking at, perhaps it’s configuration issue I can work my way around, or even the way that Notes has been deployed to me, but I haven’t done anything to create this situation.

I’m currently stuck in a kind of ironic loop – which is frustrating.

I subscribe to a technorati feed for links to my blog, it’s a really good way of finding out that people have linked to me.

A little while back Sam wrote a post call “How Frustrating?” I can’t link to it, because it’s not there anymore. On a daily basis my technorati feed us updated with this particular post:

So every day I get reminded of a post titled “How Frustrating?” that I can’t even look at because it’s not there – how frustrating.

According to Verizon there is a saving of between 5 and 35 times to be made when a meeting is run virtually:

Telecommunications company Verizon has wielded the power of senior-level buy-in to further increase its remote conferencing use in an effort to reduce meetings spending and unnecessary travel and support green initiatives.

“Let’s face it, we have to be cost-conscious and environmentally smart, so that needs to be mirrored in the way we travel,” said Debra Goldmann, senior specialist for Verizon Travel Services. “We took a look at how much people actually spend for a certain type of meeting versus how much they would spend for a virtual meeting. We found that a face-to-face meeting is between five and 35 times more expensive than a virtual meeting.”

When it comes to virtual meetings I have to admit to being something of a cynic. My issue isn’t with the cost savings of moving meetings virtual – my issue is with the diminished value of these meetings.

I don’t think that anyone would argue with me that any virtual platform – video or audio – detracts from the value of the meeting. This results in meetings that are protracted in length and tend to communicate at a very high level. Any discussion that has required a deep understanding or close collaboration has been, in my experience, a failure.

With all of these limitations I wonder whether the value of many virtual meetings is so low as to make them more expensive than face-to-face meetings. I have participated in many teleconference meetings which have been massively protracted by the limitations of the medium. These meetings have then used far more time than a physical meeting would have, but they have also added massively to the lead-time for resolution. In one particular occasion we were working on a technical problem for over three weeks before a face-to-face meeting resolved the problem in under 2 hours.

Having said that, I spend hours of my working week on teleconference calls – and they work very well when they are about transmitting information and not about collaboration.

I also have to admit here that my experience on HD telepresence systems is very limited and it may be the game-changing technology that some people tell me it is.

Perhaps I’m just a Luddite.

I’ve spent two days this week in an off-site management meeting. One of the purposes for this meeting was for us to consider how we progressed some areas of our business.

We did this using a classical brainstorming technique – groups of people with a question to consider where all things were allowed and discussion was discouraged. The recording technique was a little different though, each team had a copy of MindManager into which they hammered the thoughts in without any structure. This didn’t really help the brainstorming activity, it was just normal brainstorming, but it wasn’t intended to make any difference.

Later sessions in the day were aimed at putting some structure to the thoughts, and that is where mind mapping and the power of MindManager came in. Structuring the disparate thoughts into themes using a mind map was really easy, and very powerful.

Presenting these themes back was also very powerful with people able to see how their thoughts had contributed straight into a structure.

It’s something I’ll definitely do again.

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.

Earlier this week I decided that my life wasn’t complicated enough and that I needed something else to take me out of my simple lifestyle – so I’ve started twittering.

If you don’t know what twitter is you are best reading their faq rather than the lame and inaccurate definition I could put together.

I’ve not really got my head around what it is I am going to twitter, but I think that it’s primarily going to be about what I am doing through my working day. Because it’s effectively open access I’m not going to be saying anything too specific. This makes me worry that my twittering may be so neutered as to be useless, but we’ll see.

Being a desktop kind of a person, I’m using a desktop application, rather than using the web interface. Currently I am using twitteroo, seems fine so far, but it’s early days.

I’ve also exposed my twittering via my blog and via facebook, but I’ve not integrated my facebook status with my twitter because I think I want them to say different things.