I find this statistic really interesting, apparently:
One in four UK adults do it 23 times a month. And Britons do it more often than anyone else in world, except for Canadians.
Social networking – that is (We are British, we don’t do anything else 23 times a month).
Why Britons? Why Canadians?
According to a new report from an organisation called Global Action Plan the ICT sector is about to overtake the aviation industry when it comes to CO2 emissions (I hadn’t heard of them before now so I’m not vouching for their pedigree, but they look genuine).
There are more than one billion computers on the
planet, and the worldwide ICT sector is responsible
for around 2% of man made CO2 each year – a similar
figure to the global airline industry. In the UK, there are
an estimated 10 million office PCs; and ICT equipment
accounts for roughly 10% of the UK’s total electricity
consumption.The ICT sector is growing at a faster rate than the
aviation industry. In 2006, 48% more data storage
capacity was sold than in the previous year, compared
to a 3% increase in UK air travel passengers in the same
period. The impact of the sector is starkly illustrated
through the following statistics.
- A medium-sized server has a similar carbon footprint
to an SUV achieving 15 miles to the gallon.
Servers also require as much energy to cool them
as they directly consume.- 1,000 PCs left on 24/7 without any power save
settings activated will consume up to £70,000 of
electricity per year and for every unit of electricity
consumed, around another half unit is required to
dissipate the heat generated.- If 20% of European business travel was replaced by
teleconferencing, around 25 million tonnes of CO2
could be saved each year.- In 1980 before the introduction of the PC, world office
paper consumption averaged 70 million tonnes a year
– by 1997 it had more than doubled to almost 150
million tonnes.- In the UK, 120 billion pieces of paper are printed
every year, the manufacture of which emits 1.5
million tonnes of CO2 before taking into account the
impact of the manufacture of printing equipment and
ink and the energy consumed by printers.- Each year 125 million computers are taken out of
circulation worldwide and most of these end up in
landfill sites (a problem addressed by the introduction
of the European WEEE directive in 2007).- Manufacturing one PC requires 1.7 tonnes of raw
materials and water and consumes over 10 times its
own weight in fossil fuels.
Some interesting headline numbers there. headline numbers tend to make me skeptical though, I’m not entirely convinced by the growth parallel in the above extract – 48% more disk storage doesn’t need 48% more power. I’ve not had chance to read the whole report though, so it may be that the headlines mask the real detail.
I’m not saying that the problem isn’t real though. Today I am looking at a solution for a customer which will have huge amounts of redundancy because the service levels are very high. All of this redundancy will be consuming power all of the time, but delivering no value other than to be ready to take the load of the active servers. It could all be in some kind of “stand-by” mode, but the technology isn’t there to allow us to do it. It’s this kind of thing that we need to start resolving. There are a lot of things we could do, but there seems to be little urgency to get it done, even though initiatives like Energy Star have been running for a very long time.
What with this, the Child Benefit CD fiasco, and other major IT project problems we need to start getting our act together before we become completely demonised in the eyes of the British public. I also think that there is a growing problem with people of my age experiencing work related health issues from 20+ years sat in front of a screen and keyboard. It reminds me a bit of the problems we have experienced with asbestos workers and could be just as expensive to fix.
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:
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
I use a whole set of services these days: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, blog, email, instant messaging. I have multiple blogs, I also have multiple email accounts and multiple instant messaging accounts and I make extensive use of an RSS reader to gather information together. I really enjoy them all, that’s my personality.
There are multiple integration points between some of them, there are multiple ways that I express myself (Flickr, Facebook, blog, Twitter). There are also multiple ways that I can make and receive comment (Facebook, blog, Twitter) without including direct communications on email and IM. There are multiple ways of me being notified about these communications (email, IM, RSS).
As a technologist this is all very exciting, but as a usable system of tools for anyone else, it’s a bit of a messy user experience.
Let me give you some examples:
I regularly want to say “don’t comment there, comment here instead”.
I have developed a way of working that allows me to push out a whole set of information and to receive a whole load more back in return. Others have developed a their own way of working, differently. Many people only see a small subset of my working, others see a more holistic view. People react in the way that is massively influenced by their viewpoint and context. If they see a picture in my blog, why shouldn’t they comment in my blog, it seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do from that viewpoint. They have no idea that I would rather they comment on my pictures in Flickr. They may well have no idea that the picture is hosted in Flickr anyway.
Having these different systems gives me lots of flexibility. This flexibility means that I will put up with the niggles. But I do think that I am getting to the point where I can’t actually add anything else in, unless I take something out.
I can’t imagine proposing this working practice to a corporate customer. I think that over time we will start to consolidate some of these different capabilities into more generic services.
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.
Along with a load of other Live announcements Microsoft announced that Windows Live Writer was now out of beta and has three English dictionaries. This makes my kludge of a dictionary hack wonderfully obsolete, it’s better that way. The installation even picked up the correct dictionary for me. So I can now be English (United Kingdom) without any issue.
I’m sure that the debate about the use of “ize” will continue for some time to come though, but I’m adamant that “colour” needs it’s “u”.
Everything seems to work great, although for some reason I find it strange to be writing about Windows Live Writer while using it.
If you are struggling to get the correct dictionary you can change it in Tools-Option-Spelling.
Today in the British press a lot was being made of an announcement that promised the addition of 100,000 extra seats on the rail network. While I was listening to this announcement on my car radio I was sat in a queue at a set of traffic lights.
Hearing this news a set of parallels between the railways and the corporate WAN v the roads and the Internet occurred to me.
In the UK we manage the rail network as a single entity with a single owner. They provide the tracks and the stations, they also do all of the scheduling. The railways are highly managed with intricate timetables, specific safety measures and centralised capacity planning. There are specific routes; if you want to go somewhere where there isn’t a direct route you have to go via another location. Extending to a new location is a very costly undertaking. In the UK most railway lines lead to London, there are many journey that require you to go into London to come out of the other side. The trains that travel on the network are operated by a small number of organisations who need to follow a strict set of standards the result in an almost uniform set of designs.
Corporate WAN’s are highly managed with centralised capacity planning. Lots of money is spent on safety measures ensuring that the only thing on the network is what is allowed by the corporation. The WAN connects certain locations to other locations. Extending to a new site is an expensive thing to do. The network is generally centred around a small number of dominant data centres. The number of device types that connect to the network is limited so that each of them can be ensured to work.
In the UK the roads are managed by all sorts of organisations, town planners, county planners, central government even private organisations. There is no central scheduling or capacity management. If you want to join a road, you join the road. If you travel from one place to another you choose the route that you take and when you travel. If someone builds something new they always build a road to it. You can use all sorts of different vehicles on the roads, you get to express yourself in the type of vehicle that you choose.
You can probably guess where I am going here.
The Internet is not centrally managed, it is managed by a number of different organisations and service providers. What you connect to the Internet is up to you, as long as it works with IP then it can be connected. You can get to any source across the network. You don’t create specific routes, you join and your data flows. If people build something new, someone is likely to extend the Internet to it. You get to express yourself through the device that you choose to connect with.
So if these parallels exist do some of the things we see on the the rail and the road also ring true for the Internet or the corporate WAN?
Whenever there is an accident on the roads it receives little coverage because it’s a regular occurrence and few people are impacted. Whenever there is an accident on the railways it generates all sorts of coverage. I wonder if this has a parallel?
Even when there are compelling reasons to travel by train, people still prefer to travel on the roads. I think I know what the parallel is here.
People are far more upset when a train is late compared to their annoyance at waiting in a traffic jam on the roads.
People would rather drive to Tesco’s than take a train into a town.
One parallel is definitely straightforward – the roads grow at a huge rate compared to the rails.
Anyway this post is already getting too long. I just have a feeling that there are things that those of us in IT could learn from the transport industry here. Perhaps this is going to require a second post.
I’ve talked a few times about 64-bit and it’s slow adoption (here, here).
If you want more information Channel 9 are running a set of videos from their Route 64 training event.
Check out the first one: Route 64 – Kang Su Gatlin talks about 64-bit
I would expect most people to be really happy with a proposition of getting something for nothing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with 64-bit Windows. I wrote about this a little while ago. IDC have recently published an White Paper on it:
One of the biggest missed opportunities among today’s customer base may be the lack of use of 64-bit x86 Windows Server solutions to boost performance, scale, and utilization rates. Overlooked by many customers potentially for the wrong reasons, 64-bit Windows Server solutions offer a compatibility story that can be misunderstood, leaving customers to make deployment decisions that prevent them from enjoying the technology already installed in their shops.
Let me reiterate one of the main points here because many people still do not understand this point – you already have it available.
I’ve tried to think of an analogy for this for some time and I’m struggling, I think because it is so unusual for people to ignore what they already have.
I think you are probably getting the point now.
The graphs of adoption that are shown are striking:
That’s a huge amount of potential.
I tend to have two worlds that I keep reasonably separate – personal and professional. There is, of course, some overlap, but for the most part, my professional relationships are different to my personal ones.
I keep this principle in my online society too. My Facebook contacts are a different set to my LinkedIn contacts. It would appear, though, that Facebook are wanting to change that. Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook is making changes that could enable it to know about both sets, but treat them differently:
But that’s changing, fast. First, we noted that Facebook is creating friend grouping last month. By specifying certain friends as professional contacts, a whole different set of content can be shown to them (sans the dating status and pictures of you getting drunk). Or as Nick O’Neil puts it
, Facebook may be growing up.
And now Facebook is quietly making changes to their data structure to allow for the concept of “networking.”
…
Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.
I’m not sure how I would feel about having one tool and two different sets of relationships. The relationships are different. I might set my status to “Graham Chastney is feeling tired” in Facebook, but that’s not something I would necessarily want to tell all of my professional contacts. I’d also want to be able to mark all of the applications as professional or personal. Take the bookshelf type applications, I might want to tell my friends a different thing to my colleagues. Would I really want to poke a professional contact?
Graham Chastney 