Dodgy characters

Many moons ago I wrote a blog post asking:

"Is it unfair to characterise the IT industry as dodgy characters in cheap suits selling wish fulfilment to out of their depth executives?"

Sadly those guys have now moved on to package and sell social into the business world. People are being fleeced for over engineered, over priced and over sold bloatware. This is not in anyone's long term best interests.

Happiness is ...

Happiness is a newly mown lawn. And yet how hard it is to get started. I will do anything but get that mower out and have even been known to hope for rain on a day I have agreed to cut the grass.

But the quiet satisfaction of getting it done is so sweet. The slightly aching muscles, the smell of petrol and newly mown grass, the neat, alternating, light and dark lines drawing your eye down the centre of the garden. It feels good for a short while. I resolve to try harder next time.

But I know I won't ...

Paperless Field Guide

Paperless Field Guide was my first experience of reading an interactive book created with iBook Author and what a great experience it was. Written by David Sparks, author of iPad At Work and presenter of Mac Power Users, it is packed with really useful information on how to go paperless using the various Apple devices. David has done a terrific job of deploying the multimedia capabilities of this format to the maximum effect without going mad with them. The book is really easy to read, clear, and very, very useful. Highly recommended. (Requires an iPad)

Orange and the over systematisation of life.

As some of you who have seen my grumpy tweets will know I have been having significant problems with my broadband access from Orange over the last few weeks. It would run fine for a while then go for days only managing to stay connected for a few minutes at a time - apparently more than 500 disconnections! Given how much I work online and with a family all wanting to use the web for all sorts of things, this is a not insignificant irritation.

Things started going badly from from the beginning. When I moved to them in November  Orange got my login details mixed up with another customer. When I pointed this out I was told that they couldn't correct this simple bit of information and that I would have to start again with the ten day registration process. I said this was nonsense and to get around it I now have to log in under this other customer's login name.

They then failed to cancel my previous ISP causing double payments on my account for a couple of months which led me to two sets of call centre hell to sort out.

This more recent technical problem involved approximately 30 phone calls to Orange technical support who insisted on conducting about 8 line tests because that was part of their rigid system. They also replaced my modem, triggered a visit by a BT engineer and lost my landline as well for half a day. On top of this they closed the fault twice because we had triggered some time delay or particular response from some part of their check list. I would then have them announce that the fault had been resolved while I still had no broadband access!

The reason I am writing this post though is to comment about the over systematisation of everything. Each time I called the Orange operatives in the call centre in India they wanted to start from scratch with their script. Literally. If I am ever asked again if I am using a wired or wireless connection I will scream. Not only that but no one seemed to know anything about what had happened previously. There was no one apart from me seeing the whole picture. It was like being in my own Groundhog Day nightmare. It was all very frustrating.

No one really owned my problem. Not even the databases that stored my info owned the problem. And when the system didn't work no one was willing, or able, to step out of it and take responsibility for solving my problem. As I said in a pointless email exchange with a gatekeeper in the chief execs office their company was in a race to the bottom with other ISP's reducing costs to such an extent that their product was becoming unusable. I had little confidence that moving to another ISP would make a lot of difference as their whole industry is afflicted with the same corner cutting mentality. Feeling stuck in this disembodied, call centre hell is an unfortunately common experience these days with all sorts of services.

I got to the stage where I didn't care how much my service cost so long as it worked or at the very least I got looked after well when it didn't. In response to some advice from friends I have switched to Zen who cost more but who I understand still employ grown ups who can take responsibility for solving my problem and aren't hamstrung by a broken system. Here's hoping!

Today

“What day is it,?" asked Pooh.

"It's today," squeaked Piglet.

"My favorite day," said Pooh.

ht Dina Mehta

iTunes for journalism (reprise)

Some time ago I suggested iTunes for journalism and compared newspapers to albums - having to buy two crap tracks along with the six you really want. Why not build an RSS playlist of journalists you rate rather than having to pay for all the stuff you don't?

This tweet from Mark W. Smith suggests taking the next step and giving journalists their own platform - at least for longer form pieces. I know all the arguments about the need to fund good investigative or foreign journalism but this might in the long term prove an interesting alternative.

The web ain't what it used to be

It was interesting to read The Guardian's interview with Sergei Brin today in which he expresses concern about commercial interests and governments damaging some of the principles that have made the web so successful, and Google so successful at searching it.

I was lucky enough to meet Sergei years ago at the first Super Nova conference in Palo Alto just before their IPO. We were each allowed to ask him one question. My question was what he was going to do, being an American company with, at the time, most of its servers on American soil, when the US Government asked them to index some bits of the web better than others or in some other way tried to control their activities.

He didn't really have an answer but from his comments in The Guardian interview it would seem he has been trying harder to come up with some recently.

Wordsworth on blogging

O reader! Had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O, gentle reader! You would find

A tale in everything.

- William Wordsworth

Destructive criticism

"Destructive criticism is the biggest single enemy of human potential. It is worse than cancer or heart disease. While those diseases can ultimately lead to the deterioration and death of an individual, destructive criticism kills the soul of the person but leaves the body walking around." - Brian Tracy

Flexing our muscles

It is really interesting to watch first the Internet population's ability to turn back SOPA through the strength of a collective response, and now to watch both the phenomenon of KONY2012 and, more interestingly, it's backlash.

Part of me loves the way ideas can spread so effectively and so quickly on the Internet, and part of me is worried by it. In "real life" we have all sorts of social and practical constraints on our righteous indignation. On the web we don't have such constraints.

We need to individually take responsibility for our power to amplify, or to ignore, each wave of ideas as they pass through the internet. We need to apply our own filters and make our own judgements as to the truth or otherwise of what we are passing on. As I wrote in my book we all have a volume control on mob rule and we need to learn to use it.

The "thingification" of social media

Last week I took part in several events at Social Media Week London. It is an amazing event and kudos to Sam Michel and his team at Chinwag for helping make it happen.

I met loads of interesting people and had lots of interesting conversations but came away bemused by the amount of business there is doing something for people that I believe they should be doing for themselves. We have turned social media into a thing that can be bought and sold and are attempting to industrialise something that I believe is organic. Just turning it into a thing is problematic (thanks to Mark Foden for the word "thingification") and I had a few rants about this throughout the week.

You can watch one below!

Sky News, The BBC, and Twitter

Image by wstera on Flickr

Interesting watching the fuss about Sky News and now The BBC putting limits on how their journalists use Twitter to break stories. I have been talking about the growing tension between individual journalists' brands and those of their employers for a long time. In fact three years ago I toyed with the idea of iTunes for journalism and used the above graphic on the story!

As Matthew Ingram, writing on Giga Om, says:

if a single tweet from someone on your staff gives away enough of the value of your story that you have to forbid it, you have a lot bigger problems than just breaking news on Twitter.

Increasingly, institutions hold smart people back.

It's all about pointing

Robert Scoble has a bit of a rant today about the open web being dead and does a bit of trolling against Dave Winer and others who fight for open standards. He may be right. "Most people" may experience the web through closed systems like Facebook and Google+ rather than directly through blogs and RSS. Part of me feels that this is like AOL in the old days and that however attractive walled gardens may be in the short term the open web wins out in the long term. The other part of me wonders if it matters.

What is powerful about the web is our ability to find things and then indicate our feelings about them by linking to them. As David Weinberger says every link is an act of generosity. This may be a direct link from or blog or it may be a "like" in Facebook or a "plus" in Google+ - does it matter?

It matters when people start telling us what we can and can't link to and that is the risk of proprietary systems. Much of the web is now "owned" by corporate interests and these, while they may provide most people with most of their experience of the web, will ultimately be eroded and replaced by the evolution of the web itself. I am reminded - yet again - of Bob Khan's point that the hacker mentality will always stay ahead of those attracted to corporate or institutional thinking. Whatever the mass may do most of the time there will always be edglings and to claim that Facebook or Google have killed off the open web is naive.

Just for the record ...

Banning social sites at work is for wimps - real managers have conversations with their time wasters about wasting time.

Organizations Don't Tweet now out in hardback

Looks like Amazon now have my book Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do on their "shelves"!

Something I hadn't realised previously was that my publisher John Wiley & Sons is able to do special runs of the book with individualised company inserts such as a frontispiece or introduction. They are also able to publish individual chapters, or selections of chapters bound in special editions. A number of clients are also buying in bulk which is great as the book was primarily written as an influencing tool for those trying to get traction with the social web in big organisations. Do get in touch if you would like to find out more about this by emailing me at euan [at] euansemple [dot] com

Solitude

Andrew McAfee has an interesting post about The Surprising Benefits Of Solitude in HBR. In it he questions some of the assumptions of collaborative working in "the real" world that tend to be taken for granted. He also suggests that people working together online can avoid some of the dysfunction and group think that sharing the same space can lead to. I recently wrote an article for a corporate real estate newsletter about the changing needs for space that we can expect to see over the next few years. In it I suggest that people will become increasingly aware of where they work better and for which activities. Some will be better at working in the same space and some will be better done online. It will be the transitions that will be interesting.

Spookily, shortly before I read Andrew's article, I ordered Solitude from Amazon. Its description includes: "In a series of biographical sketches it demonstrates how many of the creative geniuses of our civilization have been solitary, by temperament or circumstance, and how the capacity to be alone is, even for those who are not creative, a sign of maturity."

What do you reckon. Is our need to work together in the same space over rated?

Accountability

There is something testing about putting your thoughts in writing, especially in public. The discipline of being forced to consider “Is this really what I think?. What will people’s response be when they see what I think? What will the consequences be when they see what I think? Will I be OK with that?” This self scrutiny is a good thing.

I was asked recently to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) and as usual responded that, to me, being asked to sign such a piece of paper indicates a lack of trust. It is hardly worth the paper it is written on in terms of regulating my behaviour. However the social web does. Particularly for those of us who live much of our lives online. We are very accountable. If we mess up, or do something reprehensible, any criticism of us will be immediately visible online and will therefore have an immediate effect on our reputation. I believe that, over time, this accountability brings with it an increased integrity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

This is true not just of individuals but of groups, organizations and society itself. This is the end game for me, seeing an increase in people’s visible and public engagement with life and a consequent improvement in our collective accountability. If we all have our thoughts out there, in writing for all to see, then we will have to think harder about what we are doing and why. This has to be a good thing.

The olympic spirit

The olympic games communications team have rightly been being criticised for imposing constraints on the use of social media by volunteers for the duration of the games. This is naïve on so many levels.

It is a missed opportunity. Allowing volunteers to be part of communication about the event could have generated so much genuine involvement and enthusiasm. Any official use of the tools is likely to be stilted and ineffective in comparison. Trying to control use of the social web in this way in this day and age is impractical. It makes the organisers look stupid.

They are not alone. Most people running our institutions don’t understand what is happening and don’t know what to do about it. They pay agencies to do it for them and the agencies themselves don’t understand what is going on, or find it challenging and try to retain their own form of control.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This is not rocket science.

In an orderly fashion

From our earliest days at school we are trained to think that if we don’t have order of a particular sort then we have chaos - and chaos is a bad thing. If we don’t have the grown ups in the centre of our society, maintaining order, then it falls apart. Those in power in companies, institutions or nations all have a vested interest in perpetrating powerful myths that keep the rest of us in check. In fact the degree to which they have power is determined by their success in convincing us that without them looking after us we would get in a mess. As a result We have a consistent and pretty fixed sense of what organised means, what organisations look like, and how unattractive the alternatives are. We cling to this sense of order like a lifeboat in the stormy seas of life.

Being part of this myth generating group has a strange effect on its members. It makes the grown ups start to think and act funny. They react differently because they are in charge, because they are responsible. They stop reacting to things in spontaneous and natural ways. Instead they start to filter and calculate their responses based on their roles. This screws things. They realise this is happening and feel uneasy about it. They know it is wrong and start to hide these feelings from themselves. They hide them from others. They see people in the same situation as themselves and start to gravitate towards them because it feels more comfortable to be with people who understand. Next thing you know they are starting to see the world in terms of us and them, black and white. They need to defend something they are part of from people who are not.

Look at the way that in the second world war  the Germans managed to maintain administrative control over such vast numbers of people and at such a speed when they invaded most of Europe in a couple of years. A friend of mine put his finger on how this could happen. People like order. Those in charge of maintaining order particularly like it. Up to a point they don’t care what kind of order it is so long as it is order. So if you invade a country you only need to take out a few of the top people and most of the rest will meekly line up in an orderly fashion and those charged with maintaining order, the police force, the judiciary, educators etc., will continue to do what they do.

Does it have to be this way? If not how do we stop this pull to an artificially created centre? Is it an inevitable part of human nature? Might we avoid it if we have such decentralised systems that there is no longer a centre to aspire to and defend?

May my pebbles ripple in your pond

I just tweeted about the odd feeling of cramming ideas into my head as fast as I can when eventually my head will no longer exist. This wasn't necessarily as gloomy a thought as some may have assumed.

I have often thought that writing a blog post is like lobbing a pebble into a pond. You are not sure where the ripples will end up but you aspire to getting better at lobbing them and making bigger ripples.

A while back I was chatting with a friend about recent discoveries in neuroscience and got on to the way significant or repeated thoughts have a physical and persistent effect on our synapses. We reckoned that one way to achieve physical immortality would be to make sufficiently significant and replicable dents in enough people's heads - literally!

As we parted he said that my pebbles were rippling in his pond. I reckon this is as much as we can hope for ...