Blogger

There's a fairly small, tight knit, but vocal community who like to evangelise use of social media tools and who keep telling the rest of us how it is changing the web forever. However, when people start to actually use the tools, they are the first to complain about spam and then they promptly decamp to the next 'big' thing. And we all follow them and it starts all over. Very odd.

More twitterings

I've been thinking some more about Twitter now I’ve started to use it. I’ve been amused to see a few ‘tweets’ suggesting the blogosphere is irrelevant now, and Twitter is the only place to be. I wonder if that’s indicative of an early adopter pattern? I blogged some time ago about a possible social media herd mentality. You know, Friendsreunited, then MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter. Perhaps I was wrong about the human herd. Maybe early adopters are a different species altogether and move to fresh pastures as soon as they see the herd moving in? If that is the case that would be a shame as it implies they are only ever having a conversation amongst themselves. Hmm.

Feeling down...

Where I work we conduct regular research to find out how people are feeling and how ‘engaged’ they are. I recently got the results for my team. They were very disappointing. They’re still well above average for the company, but they have taken a dip compared to last year. The odd thing is there doesn’t seem to be any particular area which has declined. It’s just right across the board. So, I’ve been thinking about what to do.

Most of my team works remotely and flexibly. Sometimes it can be weeks before I see someone in person I work with regularly. Also, over the past year quite a few new people joined the team as part of a re-organisation. They also work remotely. So we’re now quite a big team, but we hardly ever see each other. When we were small, we all knew each other well and there was an intimate atmosphere. That intimacy sustained us when we were remote. I think over the past year we’ve lost that.

One of the things I’m going to do is encourage everyone to join up to Twitter – and have created a closed user group for that purpose. Although most of the team work in the technology space, we’re not all early adopters so it’ll be really interesting to see what happens. The danger is that a few take to the technology and get really well connected – better connected than now, but others don’t get on with it all and become even more remote from the group and end up being almost outsiders. I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The other thing is to make sure that we use these social tools to facilitate face to face interactions, not replace them. I think that’s another key thing that has been missing over the past year.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Lines, lines and more lines (and traffic lights)

Why are there so many lines painted on the roads and pavements in the UK? They’re everywhere, but they make not a jot of difference. What a waste! The money would be much better spent on repairing the roads in the first place. The number of potholes round here is by far the biggest threat I face as a cyclist out on the roads everyday.

And don’t get me going on traffic lights. I even spotted a sign the other day warning me there were traffic lights 11 yards ahead. That’s right ELEVEN yards ahead. The warning sign was so close to the traffic lights themselves that it blocked my view of the lights. Crazy.

Blending again

No sooner had I posted more thoughts about blending than I came across this from Hugh MacLeod. Just about sums it up.

Yet more blending

A while back I blogged about how we're blending and blurring lots of things these days. This is the original post. Another example cropped up today - Twitter. I've signed up to Twitter which is a very easy way of your friends and colleagues keeping up with what you're doing. In fact, you can see my latest 'tweets' on the right hand side of this page. What's interesting though, is that if someone sends me a direct message via Twitter it comes through as a text message on my personal phone. I don't mind this as over time my Twitter network to be a mix of business contacts and private friends. But will everyone be as confortable with this blending as I am?

Now I need to figure out how to 'tweet' to my network that I've posted this blog entry.....

Why does everything bleep?

At work, every time someone steps into the lift it bleeps. At home, the iron beeps, the washing machine beeps, the cooker constantly sounds off, push a button on the tv and it beeps. Why? Why does my DVD player have a remote control with 30 buttons on it? And there are 55 buttons on the remote for my Hi-Fi - that's 55!

Is it a sign of aging that I long for simpler times and simpler things?

Connect me to someone who knows

On his The Obvious blog Euan Semple recalls how at the BBC he found that ways of effectively putting people in touch with people became more important that putting people in touch with information. With social networking technology out there now that facilitates this, I think we should think very carefully about the knowledge management priorities inside any organisation we are involved with. Especially as business (and life generally for that matter) moves so fast and changes so often. Codifying knowledge so that it can be input to a system may just be a waste of time if it loses its context and is obsolete within a very short time period. Maybe.