Category: Weblogs

Feed working – being fixed properly

Relaxing at the end of a long morningMy feed is now working – it’s apparently not fixed, just working. It wasn’t my problem after all.

To those of you who got a post via a feed that said that the feed was broken – it isn’t anymore. If it was still broken then you wouldn’t have got the update, but because I wrote a post when it was broken you did get an update. I didn’t want to delete the post about the feed now being fixed because that kind of goes against blogging where you write something and it stays there.

Sometimes this technology stuff makes my head spin. Actually I’ve had one of those days that would make your head spin, but I’ll write more about that when my head is no longer spinning.

facebook offline too

Is it time for some conspiracy theories?

Not only are my feeds broke, my facebook is offline too.

At least it’s only temporary.

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Feed Broken – Pointless Post

Visiting Vernon StumpyThe feeds on this site are broken at the moment. I feel the need to write this information down, but it seems like a completely pointless thing to do. If you use a feed then you won’t get to read this post and if you don’t use a feed then you don’t care whether it is broken or not.

It’s a strange fault so I’m not sure where the problem lies, but I am endeavouring to find out.

eBay "Addiction"

Storm TroopersFollowing on from my post about Infomania and Facebook the BBC is today reporting on a set of workers who have lost their jobs because of ebay addiction.

Unison welfare officer Mark Fisher said people got “addicted” to certain web sites.

“People get very involved in eBay, Sky Sports and their favourite soccer teams. It happens in many, many offices,” he said.

“Obviously we cannot justify people spending a couple of hours of working time looking at these sites – but temptation was put in their way,” he added.

“We plan to push for the authority to make changes to its IT system, to help prevent workers landing themselves in hot water.”

He called for Internet access be limited to lunch break and that web access should be filtered at other times.

“We want them to take temptation out of people’s hands,” Mr Fisher said.

I suppose that’s one way of doing it, but is that really realistic. Is it actually practical to filter out every site that would potentially land people in hot water if they used it too much?

To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable with the word “addiction” in this context either. If someone really is an Internet addict they shouldn’t be using the Internet at all. Alcoholics don’t go from over drinking to moderate drinking, they go to no drinking. It may be that for some people that is the case and they should stay away from the Internet all together, but I’m not sure that it’s really like that for everyone who overuses the Internet. I’d like to be able to suggest another word, but I’m not sure what that would be, perhaps “mania” is a better word.

What’s not told in this story is what level of training these people were given and whether they have been offered some form of rehabilitation. Traditional training has always focussed on the practical side of IT systems – click here, type there – but very little training has been undertaken on the social elements. As I’ve said before, I think we are moving into an age where we need to start training people to be safe Internet users in the same way as we train them to be safe drivers. Safe for themselves and safe for others. We need to start doing this as early as possible, from children through to adults, if we are going to avoid an epidemic in the future.

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Infomania and Facebook

Sparkling Water at the Science MuseumThere are days when thoughts come together. I’ve been wondering about the impact of Facebook on infomania. This follows on from some of the reports in recent days about the productivity impact of Facebook and a newish report on Informania.

To recap, infomania is the condition that your boss (probably) has when they feel the need to checking emails on their Blackberry while they are talking to you. it’s the need that they have to make sure that they aren’t missing out on something.

As we increase access to information and information sources then we increase the infomania that these people all feel. Facebook is just the latest source of information.

This need to access information costs business lots of productivity, but is it really Facebook that is to blame. I’ve written before about the Blackberry effect on the work/life balance as another example.

My starting point is that infomania not the tool’s problem, it’s a human problem. We are still in control of the machines, we still have access to the off button (although I was in a meeting earlier this week where a senior manager didn’t know how to turn his Blackberry off). It’s our choice not to use it.

The numbers in the report are startling:

Intel employees spend an average of some three hours per day processing email. About 30 percent of messages (one million per day) are unnecessary.

On average, knowledge workers can expect three minutes of uninterrupted work on any task before being interrupted.

On average, a major interruption occurs every 11 minutes, the time to return to an interrupted task is 25 minutes …

The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge-intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.

If those numbers are true, then we need to do something to protect people from themselves. If we were talking about a drug we would probably ban it. If not an outright ban we would at least have a huge education programme making sure that people understood the dangers they were entering into. Anyone can buy a computer and connect it to the Internet without any understanding of the potential dangers. A car is a dangerous thing, so we train people how to use it properly.

I wonder, though, whether we need to go further.

  • Perhaps we need global information rest days when we turn everything off.
  • Perhaps we need to run infomanics anonymous courses to help people.
  • Perhaps we need to remove network connections and ban blackberry’s from meeting rooms.
  • Perhaps we need to give children IT Education alongside Sex Education.
  • Perhaps…
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"Facebook will increase your network, but not your friends"

Anthony Gormley ExibitionDid this report really need writing?

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.
Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.

Apparently all of those people who are in my list of friend on Facebook might not actually be real friends. Is anyone in IT naive enough to believe that anything that is displayed on a two dimensional screen can come anywhere close to replacing a real person to person interaction.

Previous research has suggested that a person’s conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. Larger numbers just require too much brain effort to keep track of.

But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked over 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face.

Five close friends that’s it – it’s not going to be changed by IT any time soon. As a task oriented person I’m not sure how people maintain a network of 150 let alone 200. As I have a people oriented wife I know it can be done, actually 200 seems a bit light .

via Wikinomics

Live Writer Update – Dictionary Hack Still Working

Jimmy and Grandad at Blackpool LightsFor those of you who have implemented my dictionary hack for Windows Live Writer – you’ll need to do  it all over again with the updated beta released yesterday (12.0.1277.816).

The only difference is that the default path for Writer Dictionaries has changed to Program FilesWindows LiveWriterDictionaries

I was hoping that one of the 28 languages which Writer has been released in would be British English. I can’t find a list of the available dictionaries anywhere so I’m not 100% confident that they haven’t resolved this problem and that I’ve just been given the US version rather than the British version.

The new Windows Live unified installer seems to work really well updating both my Writer and Messenger applications. Not sure that I’m too keen on the new look of Messenger though.

aideRSS: PageRank for your blog

Scorton here we comeHere’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.

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Stuff Happens

IMG_5179This 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.

Where is this blog popular?

Ashton MemorialMy 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.

What does collaboration and collaboration technologies mean to you?

Picnic by DerwentwaterIt’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.

Past 500 posts

Jimmy wonders what's through the doorJust noticed that I have posted more than 500 times on this blog. I know some people pass that in a month, but some of us burn a little slower . I’d like to be able to make the quality v quantity comparison, but I’m not sure that would be a fair one.

The sad thing is – the 500th post wasn’t about something profound.