Happy Birthday Blog

It is now nine years since I started blogging at The Obvious? A server crash in the early days means my posts here only go back to December 2001 but I started in February 2001. Seems like just yesterday!

The Journey by Mary Oliver

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Reboot 2009

The video of my keynote at last year's Reboot has gone up. To explain the start I decided that when Thomas announced me I wouldn't be on stage but sitting in the audience in an attempt to convey the discomfort people feel when things don't happen as they expect.

Should everyone get involved in social media?

You can see the full series of Q&A's here

"Working In The Wired World" Workshops

Over the next two months I am going to be delivering a series of workshops in London covering various aspects of the business use of social media. I have been running similar events for some time within organisations but this is the first opportunity, in conjunction with Online Information, to make them available to a wider audience. 

There are three workshops offering a comprehensive understanding of the impact the web on the workplace and the information needed to do something about it. 

24th February GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE WIRED WORLD

10th March HOW TO MANAGE THE NETWORKED WORKFORCE

24th March STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE IN THE POST INDUSTRIAL AGE

If you are unable to make it yourself, or know of someone else who would benefit from any or all of these workshops, do please forward this link.

Geoprivacy

Stowe Boyd writes this morning of the issues of geolocation tools and privacy. I have been an early adopter of Brightkite, Foursquare, Twitter geotagging, Fire eagle and Google Latitude. The only ones I use now are Foursquare and Twitter and even then not all of the time. Like Stowe I often zoom out to city level rather than being specific about my location. I don't automatically post locations to Twitter to try avoid annoying people with too much noise and only do so when I think there might be a chance of meeting up with someone.

My experience so far has been 100% positive with many serendipitous meetings that I wouldn't have had without letting people know where I am.

I am always surprised when people write as if they were victims of technology rather than in control of it - I guess it is a bit like email!

All you need is love

I attended a funeral today. A very moving and nice tribute to a man who had a real zest for life and was very much loved by everyone who knew him. One of the readings was from 1 Corinthians 13 which I quote below.

As I listened I heard it in terms of some of the things that can seem to really matter in this brave new 2.0 world but which in fact maybe don't.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

I'll show you my scars if you show me yours

I often forget that I am one of the few folks out there promoting the use of social tools in business who has actually spent most of their working life in a corporate environment doing a line management job. I tend to underplay just how much I learned by doing annual appraisals for fifty staff (yes 50), or writing endless strategy papers for John Birt, or ploughing my way through the annual budgeting process. It is no place for the feint hearted and understandably resistant to the idea that "getting real" or "finding your voice" will make much of a difference.

But I also remember donning my collar and tie for the first time, starting to talk management bollocks, teetering on the brink and then pulling back. There are a lot of brave souls in organisations who know it can be different and to whom the lifeline of the word "social" is worth reaching out for.

Understanding where people are rather than getting frustrated at them for not being where you think they should be is something I should remember to do more often.

Changing Innovation

The guys from Lift have just posted up videos of last year's conference in Marseille

Euan Semple "Changing Innovation" (lift09 France EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

A magic moment with AKMA

I know I go on about how wonderful the web is but having just had a really, really nice evening with AKMA, having known him for nearly nine years but never having "met" I am yet again blown away by its power to connect people. The way we immediately felt at ease and the warmth in our friendship makes a mockery of those who say online is somehow secondary to face to face as a way of establishing relationships.

We covered everything from politics, to religion to, yes, sex and in a way that I just didn't want to stop. As I said to the two young ladies sitting at the table next to us who we asked to take this photo - they had been witness to what, certainly for me, was a magic moment.

Interview with Abi Signorelli

I was interviewed by Abi yesterday in advance of speaking at Melcrum's Social Media Conference next month. You can hear the results below:

I'm going to meet AKMA!!

AKMA and I have known each other for nearly nine years online having "met" during the early days of blogging. Swapping emails, iChat conversations and comment threads I feel like I know AKMA better than people I know locally but yet we have never met face to face. Until tomorrow that is! I am flying up to Glasgow to do an executive workshop and am going to spend tomorrow evening with AKMA. Can't wait!

What gatekeepers just don't "get"

I have just started reading The Laws Of Disruption by Larry Downes, which already has the feeling of being a cracker, and in the opening chapter he discusses, amongst others, Metcalfe's Law. For those of you unfamiliar with this law it can be paraphrased as "the usefulness of a network is the square of the number of users connected to it"

This as why from the word go numbers matter. You can't afford to be choosy about who joins your networks or why - you just need bodies. In corporate settings don't get arsey about who should or shouldn't be using your social media tools or what they should or shouldn't use them for. You can't afford to care. You need numbers and you need them fast. Do ANYTHING it takes to get them or you will end up with a dead system on your hands.

Why blogging will (still) change the world

I remember ages ago talking about blogging to an older friend who said "Oh yes blogging - isn't that just people expressing their opinions?"

But opinions are ideas and ideas change the world. Whether it is the ideas contained in The Bible or in Mein Kampf, ideas are what shapes and defines the world as we experience it. Every idea has to start somewhere. Every idea has to first be thought and then be expressed.

With a blog you have more reason to think. Having an outlet for your ideas makes you take them more seriously. Even if you never publish the posts, taking your ideas seriously and thinking harder about them is a good thing.

If you write a half decent blog post you will make someone else think. You may make them think you are wrong or you may make them think you are right but you will make them think.

My previous post about hard men seems to have made people think judging by the comments. Imagine if that blog post had been on a blog on an organisations intranet? Imagine if it had been written by someone with status and influence inside the organisation - or even by someone no one had heard of. It would have made someone else think and maybe, even in a very small way, change their behaviour.

The world only ends up the way it does because people have ideas and express them. What's so wrong with us all having a go?

Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e, share it with others?

Brenda Ueland If You Want To Write 1938

Parallel Universes

Watching my kids as they get older I am reminded of my own childhood and how different your experience of the passage of time is when you are young from what it is as an adult.

Noodling away Saturdays, doing nothing in particular on the frequently grey, wet days of my home town they seemed to last forever. Lying in front of a coal fire watching Scottish football, or if I was really lucky Rallycross, on our black and white television felt as if it would never end.

I imagine this is how my kids experience their time now. What a shame mine is flashing past in the blink of an eye.

Standing up and being counted

I have just been watching a diet programme on Channel 4 and was stunned at the misleading pseudo health information put on really unhealthy foodstuffs by household name companies. The people who do this have to know it is wrong and deceptive. They must sit in meetings discussing doing this. Not all of them can feel comfortable.

Following on from my last post about bullying attitudes in the workplace one of my aspirations for social media in business is that one day, when people get confident enough to say what they think, enough of them might just get the gumption together to stand up and say "guys this is wrong". Maybe then we could put a stop to this sort of crap.

Hard men are wankers

Forgive the forthrightness of this post’s title but I was nudged into writing it by the coming together of a number of things:

A Skype IM chat about antler-clashing amongst social media mavens and how much “blokishness” there is.

A recollection of just how intimidated I used to get being around BBC executives and how deliberate this was on their part.

Reading the following in the wonderful If You Want To Write, by Brenda Ueland:

I hate [criticism] because of the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages,that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.

Social media relies on people having the temerity to say what they think and others having the decency to listen.

Forget Enterprise 2.0. The promise of social media will not become reality until you do something to reduce the power of the bullies.

Terrorism and "ooh that's interesting"

Reading the various commentary pieces about Christmas Day's attempted terrorist attack it seems blindingly obvious that tightening existing systems and reinforcing existing approaches is unlikely to help us become safer. David Brooks in an interesting piece in The New York Times does a good job of exposing why current thinking doesn’t work but he fails to go the next step and imagine new ways that might work better. I reckon the social web holds potential to at least partly help.

I have written elsewhere about the collective “ooh that’s interesting” principle that I think is the most fascinating aspect of our new web technologies. Our ability to notice things is individually enhanced because, even if it is only Twitter, we have somewhere to write, somewhere to express ourselves, somewhere to “be interesting”. If we have done a good job then other people will go “ooh that’s interesting” and amplify or comment on our signal making it less weak. If enough people notice more, write more and comment more then our collective ability to know what is going on and do something about it increases.

This is true in so many situations but seems particularly so when dealing with the unpredictability of terrorism. Imagine if people who knew the terrorist, like is Dad, had expressed their concerns online, imagine if someone who read that picked up on the fact that the guy was flying on this particular flight. If it turns out to be true that the terrorist had managed to circumvent security in Amsterdam when boarding the plane, imagine those who saw this had tweeted it. Imagine passengers on the plane had been reading Twitter just before take off and noticed a reference to their flight number and became suspicious.

Yes all of this could be misapplied and one could easily imagine scenarios where it led to panic and possibly injustice. But even if we don’t want to rely on citizens being brave enough to finally take the action required to prevent the next atrocity don’t we have it within our grasp to weed the weak signals from the strong ones? To work out well enough who we trust and what is real quickly enough to at least help the authorities do the right thing?

Happy New Year

I hope that all readers of this blog have a successful and peaceful 2010

Important article on terrorism and our response to it

I have posted this elsewhere but wanted to amplify more of Bruce Schneier's CNN  article from which:

Since 9/11, we've embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life -- all of this plays into the hands of terrorists.

We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable.

The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise.