This article about ’managing werewolves’ (you need to read the article to understand the reference, I won’t bother trying to explain it) was sent to me by a friend recently. It’s a very interesting take on managing relationships (both in the workplace as well as outside the office). Just thought I’d quickly post a link in case anyone’s interested in checking it out — it’s worth a read.
Since I’ve talking about social networking so much lately, I thought I’d point you to an interesting post that Luis Suarez wrote about the business value of social networking (which includes a presentation by David Tebbutt about the same subject).
David’s presentation mentions as caveats that hierarchies get flattened and silos get breached — yet I’m not entirely sure that this is always the case (this seems to be a common claim about social networking tools, which, as Luis mentioned, was something knowledge management often claimed it would do).
It’s very true that the introduction of social networking tools (and I think it’s safe to say that we’re talking about online social networking tools most of the time) can be a catalyst for change, but it can’t really change the culture of an organization. I agree with David’s claim that social networking (often) does have value within the business, it’s just that like anything else, it can fall flat on its face if the organizational culture is not conducive to the approach taken. And thanks to both David and Luis for continuing the discussion on this topic.
This from The Tech Herald: “Lady Susan Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, claims that social networking could lead to users characterised by ’short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise, and a shaky sense of identity.’. There’s also a longer article in the Daily Mail that allows for discussion.
While I don’t know much about the study beyond these two articles, it does seem to be a bit of stretch to me to link online social networking to the rise of specific disorders — but the discussion about social networking changing the way in which people think is an interesting one.
I also wonder about the ‘immediacy’ factor of online social interaction that Professor Greenfield brings up — is it actually possible to interact online any more ‘immediately’ than offline? While you can multitask online (having several conversations at once), you really can only focus on one conversation at a time.
To me, this seems like an increase in the fragmentation of interaction, not the immediacy of interaction (since the person you want to talk to is not responding immediately, you move on and talk to someone else). I talked about this fragmentation (and Richard Senett, who’s an expert on the subject) before. I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this subject — do you think Facebook is actually making you stupid?
I signed up for Plaxo a short while ago, and I have to say, I’ve been less than impressed so far. While the Plaxo platform is not necessarily bad in itself, I kind of feel like it’s just a somewhere between Facebook and LinkedIn — both of which I already use.
I’ve tried to give Plaxo a chance, but ultimately I haven’t really found anything I’m too excited about, not to mention I’m not overly eager about having yet another social networking site to fill in endless minutiae about myself.
I posted before about the questionable importance of LInkedIn, wondering whether most people actually have that much of a use it (besides being a way of keeping in touch with people you normally might drift apart from).
So is there something obvious I’m missing with Plaxo? Some kind of bell or whistle that has escaped me? I’d be interested to hear opinions from either side of the question — does Plaxo actually offer anything we haven’t seen before?
Well, I’m back to Toronto after my holiday. I had mentioned in my last post that I had visited Quebec’s museum of civilization — where they had an exhibit on the future of cities around the world.
The exhibit is called Urbanopolis, and is a especially apropos since it’s the 400th anniversary of Quebec City. Within Urbanopolis, there are several models of potential future cities, including New York, Chicago and Quebec City — all of which are projected out 100 years to the beginning of the 22nd century.
Looking back at some of the projections people have made about where we would be at the beginning of the 21st century, it would seem that while such projections are an interesting exercise, they don’t necessarily always pan out to be true.
It seems like everybody under the sun is putting together a wiki for something. There’s even a wiki for the board game Go. But with all these wikis around, is a wiki always the best tool for the job?
Back in September of last year, I talked about some general questions people should ask before setting up a wiki. The very first question I asked was: “is a wiki the best technology for what I am seeking to accomplish?”. That may not always be an easy question to answer.
So if you’re thinking of setting up a collaborative space — when should you use a forum and when should you use a wiki?
Stephanie at Healthy Simplicity has written an insightful post about why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to ban allergens in schools. In my reply to her post, I talked about how banning something often gives people a false sense of security — and is, in reality, a security that doesn’t usually exist.
This post made me think about something else that often gets banned. Organizations are often fond of banning technologies — giving various reasons such as exposure to risk (whether that risk is leaked information, inappropriate comments by employees, or viruses or other malware).
The usual targets for technology bans are things like peer-to-peer downloading software and instant messaging applications, as well as web sites, which can be banned through an organization’s site filtering software.
There are several arguments as to why software or sites should be banned within an organization, and they basically go like this. Employees don’t really understand copyright, often misjudge what’s in good taste, and waste quite a bit of time — and if we ban certain software and sites, we’ll curtail some copyright infringement, distasteful content and time-wasting.
Michael Clark has written up some fascinating ideas about the need for more open social networks. While I agree that this an extremely important area, I’m a little more concerned by the fact that social networking sites don’t have much incentive to share.
I’m reminded of the fact that it took (in the web world equivalent anyway) a long, long time for Microsoft and Yahoo! to allow users to start sharing contacts on their instant messaging platforms. I certainly applaud both companies for making the move — but there are still many other instant messaging platforms that aren’t part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! interoperability framework.
There are lots of very legitimate reasons for this — privacy being the number one concern as Michael points out. I don’t necessarily want some shady upstart instant messaging program having all my vital data. Yet privacy shouldn’t be something we have to sacrifice in order for interoperability to work.
The ‘just another social network’ phenomenon, however, has another twist to it. Those that run these social networks are only secondarily concerned about openness, and in fact, more concerned about competition. While a site like Facebook doesn’t really have much in the way of major competitors, this only encourages more niche sites to form.
For example, sites like LinkedIn offer the professional social networking take on things, and it seems that lately, there’s a social network for almost everything. Yet like most things web, standards are usually set after the fact. Let’s just hope that principle of openness doesn’t get lost along the way.
Doug Cornelius has put together some interesting thoughts about corporate wikis. Doug points to CNN Money’s Why commerical Wikis don’t work as evidence of the failed commercial wiki — with Penguin Books failed attempt to write a novel through a wiki being the article’s shining example.
Despite the assistance of a British university’s creative writing team, the collaborative book has become a hodgepodge of writing styles and plots. Let’s face it, there are some people who shouldn’t write a book.
CNN also tells the tale of the L.A. Times’ failed attempt at opening up their editorial page to user editing. Unfortunately, a few people started trashing the pages, and were generally just being destructive (I talked about the destructive potential of anonymity on wikis at the beginning of the year).
Chris Taylor from CNN makes some great points about the need for wikis to be focused — which keeps them from just recruiting anyone to contribute. It’s a bit of a fine line between being open to participation and being a closed community.
All discussions around wikis, however, seem to overlook one crucial and obvious fact. Wikis are often not the best technology to accomplish a goal. Creating a wiki to write a book is about the equivalent of picking several thousand volunteers off the street, putting them in conference centre for a few months, and asking them to design a car. Similarly, we’re not all talented novelists.
While wading through my daily dose of spam (which originally never plagued my Gmail account, but now has risen to approximately 50 spam a day), I started thinking about the quality of information. How do we gauge the value of something that there is so much of out there?
How can we filter out the good from the bad — and prevent users from missing that one important message that went into the junk mail folder? First though, I decided to look at some statistics about spam.
The famous Akismet spam filter (which filters Wordpress spam) has caught a total of 2,171,905,896 spam comments so far. According to Akismet, this accounts for 94% of all comments left on blogs. Taking a look at the the diagram below (which is borrowed from the good folks at Akismet), we can see that legitimate messages make up a tiny portion of all comments.
