Tomorrow's Intranet Is Already Here!

I was in a workshop the other day with my colleague Richard Dennison and we were thinking about the future of Intranet content. Richard summarises our findings nicely on his blog. The key consideration for me, was that we’ve now created a world inside the organisation where all content can now be classified as collaborative. Previously, we’d used words such as definitive, official and so on which implied it was owned and published by and individual, or very few. Official content is probably already a minority of the content we have available to us, and as a proportion of the total it will continue to shrink. What’s interesting about this new world is that this democratisation of publishing and crowd-sourcing of content is just the beginning of some fundamental changes we’ll see in the very fabric of organisations over the next decade. Businesses can no longer hold on to the top down structural models and processes constructed centuries ago during the age of empires. Big changes are foot!!

Augmented Reality

I was listening to a presentation the other day by a Futurologist. He talked about lots of things – the future of gadgets, smart badges, connecting artificial limbs to the nervous system and so on, but the thing that caught my imagination the most was the notion of ‘augmented reality’. We now have computer displays on spectacles, and displays on contact lenses are not that far away. And everything will have ‘presence’, so it seems it’s not going to be long before we are able to walk down the street and everything we see could be virtually tagged with information in our in vision display. The opening time of shops, special offers targeted especially at you – because the machine will know who you are, what’s playing in the theatre you’re passing and what seats are available, what number that bus in the distance is, where it’s going and if there is room. In fact, anything you could possibly want to know about anything you in your line of vision or around the corner could become available. But how will we manage it? We already suffer from information overload which has driven us to consume content in smaller bites, so do we really need this extra information? Of course, there are many specific applications for this technology – guided surgery, architecture, military and so on – and these will be very welcome, however, I think we’ll end up being very selective about how and when we switch these things on.

Sweeney Todd

An 18 certificate musical! Not unique, but pretty unusual. Clearly Tim Burton knows what people expect from him and delivered this one quite well. I liked the music, although sometimes the lyrics were a little hard to understand, but the counterpoint melodies were interesting and reminded me in some ways of the clever weaving of songs in Moulin Rouge. Johnny Depp plays to his strengths – perhaps now becoming typecast as number one weirdo actor – but it was Helena Bonham Carter who stole the show. As Mrs Lovett she was playing a part she was ideally suited to. On the whole the film moves along quite well, but there were a few minutes towards the middle where it slows down quite noticeably. The cinema audience seemed to get quite restless for a time. A quick mention for Sacha Baron Cohen. A good part for him, but he was too much like Borat and I found that a distraction.

Head tracking

I picked this great video up on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

I don't have a Wii yet, but will certainly be getting one. And I can't wait for games to be available that use this technique.

My son got the Xbox 360 he so desperately wanted for Christmas and he doesn't understand what all the fuss is about. He can't seem to see that, for most people, it's the game play that's important, not the ultra-realism of the graphics. Just another example of the old axiom 'Keep it Simple Stupid'.

Come on Virgin - you can do better than that!

Last year we had a lovely family holiday in Florida. We flew with Virgin Atlantic. We mixed time in the parks, with time relaxing by the pool. Took in a couple of baseball games and did a bit of shopping. Then we arrived at Orlando International airport for our flight home and came face to face with a 12 hour delay. Okay, these things happen and although it was uncomfortable and tempers started to fray we were reasonably well looked after both at the airport and on the flight home.

The time duly passed and as we boarded the flight, we were each handed a letter explaining the delay, apologising and offering us 10,000 Flying Club points as compensation. Great.

Shortly after arriving home, I duly sent off all four letters for the points to be credited to my account. I got a reply a week or so later telling me that my account would only be credited with the points in my name. My wife and two children would have to open their own accounts - even though I had been credited with the points for the original booking. Those of you with Virgin Flying Club accounts will know that 10,000 points are pretty worthless, so at a stroke the compensation for a very long and uncomfortable delay was taken away. The grand gesture was just that, an empty gesture.

I sent a letter to Virgin. No reply.

Another letter. No reply.

So today I emailed them. And got an email failure due to ‘insufficient disk space’ on their email servers. So much for customer service.

I shall certainly think twice before booking another flight with Virgin!!

Facebook - it's not real!

I came across this post from The Eychild today whilst I was thinking again about why I'm uncomfortable with Facebook. Facebook is superficial. And it serves only to re-kindle relationships with people I hadn't seen or heard from for years. Of course, there's likely a good reason why those relationships fizzled out in the first place. So, even though I've now re-newed contact with all these 'friends' it hasn't resulted in any real relationship with any of them, let alone facilitated a real friend interaction - like a drink down the pub!

Also, MySpace is not dead - it seems to still have traction with the kids.

This illustrates a real risk for those trying to get social networking going inside an organisation. How do we avoid it descending into superficiality and failing to deliver real value? Perhaps one thing we should do is stop talking about "Facebook Inside" but start talking about creating a place where people can share experiences, insight and information on their projects. If we create Facebook inside we'll have failed.

Feature on Simply Communicate

I mentioned in a post the other day that I'd been interviewed by Marc Wright at Simply-Communicate for a 'How Did I Get here Feature'. Well it's now on the website. Enjoy!