Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 10:28PM If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
John Updike
Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 9:01AM Zero integration with iTunes - I want to share or favourite tracks as I am listening to them.
The pre-selected favourite tracks don't represent my tastes.
Hard to see what the favourites are as they use album art rather than track titles.
When I choose to add favourites manually I can't browse my library and have to abort the profile update to look at my lists!
The recommended artists bear even less relationship to my tastes.
No way to import contacts.
Talk about connecting to Facebook but no way to do it.
No way to create or share lists
No integration with Twitter
Photo upload still not working!
[I originally called this post Ten things I don't like about iTunes 10 but realised it was Ping I was ranting about. That then made me question the version number change for iTunes as bugger all else has changed except Ping!]
Monday, August 30, 2010 at 9:22AM At risk of invoking memories of playground rejection by wading in to the sensitive topic of whose a friend of who, I thought this was an interesting story worth telling.
I saw from Facebook that two people I know, Robert Scoble and Jeff Jarvis, had friended Leo Laporte and went to try to add him as a friend as well. I got the following error message:
If you have been prevented you from adding friends on Facebook, it is likely because many recent friend requests sent from your account have gone unanswered. This may be because you’ve asked strangers to be friends or because you’ve engaged in other behavior that Facebook users have reported as unwelcome. When you are allowed to use this feature again, only send friend requests to people that you already know to avoid having additional limits placed on your account.
Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 8:26AM I am more and more convinced that far from damaging business efficiency, as is often claimed by naysayers, becoming more social at work heals so much of what goes wrong.
How often are people de-motivated by a manager treating them as a number or a statistic on their spreadsheets rather than relating to them as a person? How many costly misunderstandings occur because those burdened by responsibility are more comfortable with broadcast than respectful listening? How many projects fail because of the dominance of a powerful individual at the expense of the social bonds of a group?
We have disparaged the "soft" social skills of relationship building as being un-businesslike in favour of a dispassionate coldness. Maybe we should think again.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 5:08AM In the process of pulling together previous blog posts for a project I came across my first post about Twitter in November 2006:
I have been playing with Twitter over the weekend and have to confess that when I saw it I thought it would be a complete wast of time. However ... You know that feeling when you wonder what your mates are up to - well Twitter lets you know. Users can update the system with what they are doing from their mobiles or from the web and then all of their friends can opt to be pinged with this information. Now I can imagine you all thinking what a nerdy, obsessive, male thing to do but trust me - it gets interesting. I have already had several occasions in a couple of days where people have doing things that I either found useful to find out about or was able to offer help in some way and I started thinking how useful this could be in a business context. I can think of loads of times when it would have been useful to find out that someone was working on a particular thing, or about to go into a meeting that affected me or visiting my building when meeting up would be useful. If you get enough "ooh that's interesting" moments then Twitter could quickly become a useful business tool.Twitter
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2006 AT 8:40PM
Sunday, July 18, 2010 at 7:06PM So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation's managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.
Banking epitomises this. When I eventually give up with online systems - that treat me as an undifferentiated unit of a mass market, barely segmented into simplistic demographics - and trek down to my local branch where I have to sit and watch a bank teller - who is treated as an undifferentiated unit of a staff who isn''t trusted to make any decisions and are subject to the same online systems as me albeit with a different set of assumptions this time about grade and accountability.
We both face the same impersonal closed box and we have both had enough. We are starting to talk to each other.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 11:30PM Tonight I attended a music competition at my daughter's school. We were truly blown away by the standard of all of the acts which had been organised, choreographed and written by the pupils themselves. Genuinely talented, nice kids lifting the spirit with their energy and commitment.
Then came the adjudication. One of the most inappropriate responses I have seen in years. Every comment on every item had to have the obligatory "could try harder" element which of course ended up being delivered with more relish than the rest of the feedback.
Goodness knows what motivated the woman but her behaviour struck me as a classic case of being given authority and assuming that that means keeping things in check and being in a position of knowing better - even if you don't. You can stack it up alongside the price of pomposity as one of those so, so damaging, and unnecessary, aspects of authority that we could well do without.
Saturday, July 3, 2010 at 6:09PM
In Toronto recently, and now Sydney and Melbourne, I am having plenty of opportunity to contemplate the energy and determination it took for the original settlers to survive and thrive in what must have been hugely challenging circumstances. I find myself comparing their circumstances with those of the people I am here helping, people trying to bring the social web into the world of business. The same attributes of vision, courage and determination are needed. As are immense amounts of sheer bloody hard work. Building infrastructure, establishing laws, growing culture - the parallels are many.
However I then began to think about the downsides of modern cities. They all dominate the natural environment and, with a few local nuances, the architecture, populations, and culture are pretty much the same. They have also dominated, and to a large extent exclude, the indigenous populations.
I then found myself re-considering the parallels with the web. Maybe the geeks and early adopters are like the indigenous populations who worked with the land and lived in harmony with it. Maybe the settlers are the people who now follow on and “civilise” things turning online conversations into “social media” and BBS’s into Facebook. The hunting and gathering of the hyperlink will be turned into the factory farming of “social search”.
Maybe the geeks and idealists will end up being contained in reserves while the onward creep of northern European, middle class, industriousness continues to dominate the planet and the people on it ……
Monday, June 28, 2010 at 4:02AM I often think that I am not teaching people in business anything new about social media so much as helping them unlearn some bad habits about communication. Helping them to unlearn the use of management speak, the use of dispassionate third person language, the tone of aloofness that has seemed in the past to afford them protection.
I so well remember when I got my first real management job being petrified at the sense of responsibility. Like so many do I started trying to protect myself by wearing a tie and talking funny. Spouting stuff about “process” and “strategy” and “empowerment”. Thankfully I grabbed hold of myself, pulled myself back from that slippery slope and ditched the tie. Many don’t. They keep going and become so immersed in the nonsense that they forget how to be any other way.
Reminding them can be challenging. The trouble is it leaves them exposed - like the papier mache Mephistopheles of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness:
“I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe…”
Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 7:17AM I am often asked by clients how to deal with people who block their attempts to bring the social web into organisations. I still have the emotional scars from dealing with the same sort of people myself, so I remember the feelings of frustration well.
I didn't understand it fast enough but the most important lesson I learned about dealing with these people was that they suck energy. By even dealing with them you give them power. Instead of focussing on moving things forward you get dragged into dealing with their resistance.
But remember you are not going to "convert" everyone and nor should you try!
The way to deal with this is to find ways to route around them. Isn't this the way the internet was meant to deal with obstacles? Instead of clashing antlers find a way, or more often than not many little ways, to allow them to keep thinking what they think but do what you have to do anyway. I always have the image in mind of nature re-populating concrete industrial landscapes. Roots and shoots emerging through cracks and weaknesses in the apparently solid structures and gradually weakening them until they crumble.
Monday, June 21, 2010 at 8:27AM Many moons ago, in the early days of blogging David Weinberger described it as “writing ourselves into existence”. I was reminded recently of just how transformative blogging has been in my life. How much more aware I am of my thoughts and feelings - and of the world around me.
Once you have a blog you notice more, you start to think “I might write about this on my blog” "What do I want to say?” “What will people’s reaction be?”. Over time you get better at noticing and the better at noticing you get the more noticed you get! You end up in the wonderful collective web of “Oooh that’s interesting” which I now wouldn’t ever want to be without.
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:33PM It occurred to me that the ROI question so often asked about social computing is back to front. It is asked because people have been conditioned to think that social computing is something that we have to make happen in organisations. They are trained by vendors to expect to pay obscene amounts of money for over priced, over engineered, process driven, time-wasting, life sapping tools! You can do most of what you have to do with social computing for practically nothing.
The social web is something that is going to happen anyway over time. People will start using these tools for business purposes whether we like it or not. They already are. All we have to do is not get in their way.
So next time someone asks you the ROI of social computing ask them to work out the ROI of stopping it!
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 6:33AM Interesting to read Sean Trainor's post this morning about the Civil Service People Survey; the largest employee engagement study ever conducted in the UK, covering over half a million civil servants across 95 departments and agencies.
The bit that caught my eye was
However only
· half of staff are involved in decision making
· one third believe their opinions count
· one quarter believe change is managed well and is for the better
This would be such an opportunity to have a serious attempt to introduce social tools and reverse some of those stats but the scary thing is we are much more likely to see the blunt instrument of hacking staff numbers and more rather than less management initiatives.
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 6:09AM Curverider is launching a hosted version of the social networking solution Elgg and is making much of the ease with which Elgg will import and export data.
This is something I always consider when buying my own software but it brought back to me just how important it is for enterprise tools, and how I ought to mention it to clients more!
When we we were introducing tools at the BBC this was one of our most essential criteria. We knew that the churn rate of social tools was high - even then nine years ago and it is somuch higher now. If we didn't want to be stuck with all of our users data left in a legacy tool we had to get it out of the old one easily and then into the new one with as little pain as possible.
Worth keeping this in mind.
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 7:46PM Our much loved pet rabbit Tickles died yesterday. We suspect she had developed pneumonia and she died on the way to the vets. She had been very much part of the family, living in the house with us for six years, so needless to say my two daughters were very close to her and are very upset.
We felt that it was important that the kids had the chance to understand her passing because death tends to be such a remote and taboo topic these days. We brought her body home and lay her on her blanket in her hutch. Her body was still relaxed and warm and it was striking what a short step it is from life to death. The sense of the life force having recently departed, the departure of that character that she was.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 1:14PM I often wonder when the social media bubble will burst. I have no doubt it will burst - just a matter of when. However the impact of the web on business will continue to grow and will do so for many years to come. We are only at the start of seeing its full consequences and lots of people will need lots of help in coming to terms with its profound effect on their working lives.
Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 11:15PM Joshua-Michele Ross has just published an, as usual, insightful post about the oil disaster in the gulf, BP and social media.
Josh says that BP "as a corporation is structured to be profitable at all costs.” While I might agree with him on this I have also worked with BP and spent time with some if its most senior engineers who were responsible for standards and safety (this was a few years ago ago and they are not the guys dealing with the current situation). They were smart, concerned, experienced people with a high degree of integrity who were talking to me about the possibility of using social media to improve their ways of dealing with the unpredictable better. They were trying to balance the needs of regulation, documentation and the slow wheels of organisational life, with the real and unpredictable world that they had to work in.
This seems to me be to be exactly where the media in social media is so misleading. Josh is right that much of the buzz around this disaster from social media folks is about the story and who wins or loses the PR war. Even the things that Dachis are saying sounds like spin and management bollocks rather than any radical way of changing the way big orgs work.
For me what is much more interesting is how the social web can enable complex and effective ways of working to be better able to avoid things like this happening in the first place and fixing them better when they do. It is yet another situation where the Cluetrain was spot on with “globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations”. Josh says of the relationship between corporations and the society they operate in: I reckon the same sort of contract with staff will help avoid situations like this in the future. However there is no way corporations can shrug off decades of crap and disfunction and become organic networks of autonomous individuals. This is why I reckon it is going to take decades for the full potential of this to become apparent.I believe that social technologies put selection pressures on businesses over the long run – and will make it harder and harder for corporate profiteers to thrive. This to me is the promise of social business — over time, businesses that abide by a social contract (respect, authenticity, reciprocity, earned trust etc.) will outperform those that abide by a strictly corporate (or legal) contract.
Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 7:15AM I have just finished listening to Michael Lewis's excellent book The Big Short on Audible. It is a fascinating narrative based around the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market told through the stories of those who saw it coming and laid bets involving huge amounts of money. Lewis does a great job of making the complexity of the story understandable and while none of the characters are what you'd call likeable you do end up getting carried away with the roller coaster ride they were on.
The book reminded me of the time a few years ago when we went to our bank to ask for an extended mortgage to extend the our house. I would have said that I visited "our bank manager" but he wasn't our bank manager he was some guy in a suit driving a computer terminal. He still had the air of pomposity and making me feel small for asking for money but I realised as we watched him struggling to input the data into his terminal that he wasn't deciding if we could have the money, the algorithms behind the software he was using were. I was tempted to say "You go off and have a coffee while I input the data because I could do it much faster myself". But then I realised that I actually wanted him to be like an old fashioned bank manager. I wanted him to know my circumstances, have known my father, have a basis on which to make a judgement on both of our behalfs as to whether or not to lend me the money.
Reading Paul Volcker's article in The New York Review Of Books this morning on the financial crisis I was struck by the following paragraph:
One basic flaw running through much of the recent financial innovation is that thinking embedded in mathematics and physics could be directly adapted to markets. A search for repetitive patterns of behavior and computations of normal distribution curves are a big part of the physical sciences. However, financial markets are not driven by changes in natural forces but by human phenomena, with all their implications for herd behavior, for wide swings in emotion, and for political intervention and uncertainties.
This is yet another time when I want experts, I want intelligent meatware, and I'm not so sure I can trust disembodied, disconnected systems run by morons!
[I would have linked to the Audible file of the book rather than Amazon but Audible's affiliates scheme is such a pitiful mess I couldn't be bothered]
Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 8:30PM I spent a very pleasant hour this morning with Alan Wilson who is the Bishop Of Buckingham and an enthusiastic, and very good, blogger. During our conversation we rambled widely round the subjects of the web, blogging, religion and the church and with a good deal of shared beliefs and ideals.
One of the things I found most interesting in our discussion was Alan's description of the Anglican church as being loosely organised, relatively dogma free and encompassing a really wide range of religious beliefs. We talked about the nature of churches and the degree of structure and institution needed to hold them together. Alan's position is very similar to my own - that dogma and rules are vehicles for power rather than entirely necessary for collective understanding, and that "small pieces loosely joined" can be a more robust and long lasting alternative. However we also talked about the high degrees of autonomy and individual capabilities that are required for such loose structures to work and we talked about the need for some sort of framework that people can use as a support to making sense of things.
I mentioned a conversation I had with Thomas Koch in Hamburg about the transition from the days when the church provided the principal sense making framework, through the totalitarian period of fascism and communism to the materialism and faith in the market that is beginning to run out of steam today. Thomas and I both felt this need for some sort of new framework, religion is amost certainly the wrong word, but some set of principles and underlying beliefs about the web and the world it is enabling, that helps make sense and provide an inspiring overarching story for life in the 21st Century.
I love the fact that shared belief in the web brought Alan and I together and helped us to bridge some fairly significant differences in our world views in such a way that we both, I hope, moved forward. This is why I get so excited still about the web and remain optimistic about its impact on society. It makes these connections so much more likely and the ensuing consequence feels like evolution on steroids.
