The Obvious?

More on finding the good stuff

2008-09-03T06:58:53+01:00

Following on from my previous post about the power of the social web being partly the collective process of finding and pointing to good stuff David Smith has linked to this wonderful collection from The Observer of The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube pulled together by Ajesh Patalay.

YouTube is best known for its offbeat videos that become viral sensations. But among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans. Ajesh Patalay selects 50 of the best - Joy Division's TV debut, readings by Jack Kerouac, a Marlene Dietrich screen test, Madonna's first performance... and much more

There is a huge potential for individual curatorship like this where people earn reputations for being able to find and pull together quality content. One of my favourite blogs from way back is Mark Wood's Wood S Lot which has very little original content but is a wonderful collage of material from all sorts of sources assembled skillfully in interesting and often powerful combinations.

Google Launches Video For Businesses

2008-09-02T06:50:57+01:00

I have no idea how good this is but I do know people who will be very interested in it:

This morning Google is launching Google Video for business, a customized video platform aimed at businesses for internal use. Think training vides, HR videos, etc. (anything that isn’t outside facing). The product is included in Google Apps Premier Edition for free, with 3 GB of storage per user account.

This is a “Zero billion dollar market today” Director of Product Management Matthew Glotzbach said in a briefing about the product. The reason there’s no market, though, is that it’s a huge pain to build a video infrastructure for internal use. Google Video for business aims to make that trivially easy.

http://www.techcrunch.com

Finding the good stuff

2008-08-30T21:00:48+01:00

I was listening to Twit the other day when the contributors were talking about their concern that too many blogs "just" pointed to stuff. I am not so sure that this is a problem and sort of rests on the, mistaken in my view, assumption that blogging has to be like journalism.

One of the original uses of blogs was to point to stuff and to add comment about why it was interesting enough to point to. A lot of the benefit I get from the bloggers in my aggregator is their ability to find and point to good stuff related to my interests and concerns. Yes there is also great original content in there but even if all they did was point to stuff I would still get value from subscribing to them.

This relates to a conversation I am having with someone in a news agency where I am arguing that part of the work of agencies has always been "finding the good stuff" from the mix of paid journalists, stringers and freelancers and is this so different from building a brand on finding the good stuff on the web?

The "collaboration" word

2008-08-30T19:30:02+01:00

It bugs me the way people seem to set out to make things harder than they need to be - no doubt in an attempt to make themselves seem clever and their software indispensable. One of the words that press my buttons currently is "collaboration". How have we managed to turn talking to each other into such a fad? An e-mail exchange I have just had reminded me of my attempt to come up with one of those one liners to describe my BBC job that I was called on to do with depressing regularity. I suggested ""Increasing the frequency and quality of the conversations that get your job done". I still rather like it.

Hang in there

2008-08-16T06:38:58+01:00

I suggested to a potential client yesterday that one of my main functions is to be a shoulder to cry on for those in organisational life willing to step up to the mark and initiate change. The following quote from Machiavelli picked out by Dave Snowden sums it up nicely:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it

Career advice

2008-08-14T06:42:05+01:00

Thanks to David Smith for pointing to and summarizing this wonderful post from George Monbiot
be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you.

... What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution.

... my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty.

... my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be.

... You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"

My biggest regret is that it took me so long to learn these lessons - hopefully if you read Monbiot's post you will learn them quicker

A bit of an adventure

2008-08-03T18:02:08+01:00

Last night I was woken from deep sleep at around 4.00 am by the sound of screeching tires and a loud crash. As I woke I wasn't sure whether I had dreamt the noise or not but as we live on a fast road near a dangerous junction I thought I had better check.

Having put some clothes on I took a look outside and there in the dark, mist and rain was the back end of a sports car with the front buried in a tree and the driver moaning and calling "Someone help" "Get me out of here". I made a quick 999 call then grabbed an old jacket and a torch and ran over to get a better look. There was this young lad, barely conscious with a fair bit of blood on him, both air bags having gone off and the whole of the front end of his Porsche crumpled.

My first thought was that there was a hell of a strong smell of petrol and I needed to get him out of the car as fast as possible. I was wary of moving him in case he was badly injured but reckoned if the car went up he was going to get a lot worse. I had to haul the damaged door open and then tried to lift him. Initially he seemed in too much pain and I was worried that his legs may have been damaged so i stopped. By this time my wife had joined us with a fire extinguisher and my first thought was to get her to keep back in case the car exploded and the kids lost both their parents right outside their front door!

The driver was becoming a bit more active by this time and his legs were obviously OK so with his help I was able to pull him from the car and sit him on the edge of the road. He was talking about his daughter and appeared worried that she had been with him so I did a quick scan around with my torch but there was no sign of any other passengers. The driver soon got on his feet and was agitated and wanting to walk away. A neighbour had now joined us by this time and we both kept persuading him to stay where he was until the ambulance arrived. He started walking along the road and we were following him, keeping him safe when at last the police arrived and moments later an ambulance.

I won't go into detail about the subsequent conversations with the police but we soon headed back to the house and tried to get some more sleep. By the time we got up again the car had gone and the only sign of what had happened was the damage to the tree.

Looking back it all seems a bit dream like and has left me feeling tired and unsettled. I may never get to know how he is or the full story as to what happened but at least he walked away in one piece.

Women

2008-07-30T09:22:12+01:00

Contrast this with this and consider where the future lies.

News?

2008-07-30T06:27:41+01:00

I haven't bought a newspaper for ages, don't listen to The Today Programme, but I do look forward to David Smith's del.icio.us bookmarks dropping into my aggregator every morning with baited breath.

[And before you start going on about echo chambers I am with Loic when he says that if news is important enough it will find him.]

Suffering for her art

2008-07-29T18:32:38+01:00

Me: Could you tidy that mess up please?

Seven year old daughter: You can't help making a mess when you are an artistic person

Me: .........

Editorial standards matter ...

2008-07-28T07:46:41+01:00

.... even in Twitter

Nice to see Stephen Fry back and on form

2008-07-26T06:53:25+01:00

... businesses that aren’t so pompous and deluded as to think dullness and bad design are a sign of probity and business acumen.

http://stephenfry.com/blog

Who are you calling a horse?

2008-07-23T08:01:28+01:00

Dave Snowden has an interesting blog post today about management in which he, rightly, questions those who claim that organisations don't need management any more. He also re-asserts Tom Davenport's point that:

...the two extremes of anarchistic or chaotic self-organisation and micro-management of command and control are just that, extremes that rarely exist in reality for any length of time. In effect all management is complex, a system of constraints in which behaviour modifies the nature of the system itself over time. OK it would be good if managers stopped failing to manage outcomes and recognised that success is better achieved by managing constraints and connectivity with a view to coherence.

Sadly though, for me anyway, Dave falls at the last hurdle by re-asserting the origin of management as meneggiare, the ability to ride and train horses. I have never felt the need of a horseman and never needed any of my managers to actually tell me what to do. I needed them to give me reasons to do what i did, context within which to know how to do it well, and a willingness to take on some of the administrative activity and negotiation with the rest of the organisation that I needed but that would distract me from my work if I did it myself.

I have always said that networked ways of working are not bottom up in nature and are of as much interest to those in the middle and the top of current hierarchical structures. Everyone is a node in the network who has network power depending on the number of their connections and the perceived value of their input. In many ways this gives managers more ability to influence than they have ever had and may get them to give up some of the pretense of control.

What is interesting is considering different ways of "managing" businesses - almost certainly with different structures. certainly with different underlying assumptions of the role of managers and possibly even with sufficient re-definition of the role that current language becomes unproductive. Someone once described my role in the BBC as being that of an "intrapreneur" and someone else as an "animateur".

I am not suggesting that we move over wholesale to French management speak but that there is huge potential for a radical re-think of how stuff gets done in organisations, who is "responsible for it and how.

Setting Postcodes Free

2008-07-22T16:40:13+01:00

Thanks to Tom for flagging this small but big thing

Rock Star?

2008-07-21T19:59:54+01:00

I have tried several times today to write about this but have failed.

I just want to register discomfort.

Telegraph CIO on swapping Google in for Microsoft

2008-07-19T07:41:18+01:00

Paul Cheesbrough, a former colleague from the BC, has taken the leap with the comment that:

"The CEO’s challenge to IT was to stop being a beat-up group."

Lets hope he proves an inspiring example!

CIO

Tickles goes walkies .....

2008-07-17T18:00:49+01:00

Euan

Best practice?

2008-07-15T22:55:42+01:00

Michael Walsh just sent me the following list gleaned from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual Section 11 General Interference with Organisations and Production"

(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Job going at Going Solo

2008-07-14T16:14:27+01:00

My friend Stephanie Booth is hiring:

Going Solo is looking for an enthusiastic salesperson to negotiate and finalise sponsorship deals. After a very successful first event in Lausanne, Switzerland, the conference is taking place again in Leeds, UK, on September 12th. There are plans to produce the event elsewhere in Europe and in the US.

I reckon she'd be great to work for!

Faith in human nature ... and iPhones

2008-07-12T08:56:00+01:00

I have been making such a fuss about the loss of my iPhone and my inability to pick up one of the new ones yesterday that my very good friend Geoff Jones took pity and sent me his 2G iPhone in the post. It arrived this morning, recorded delivery, wrapped in foam in a small wooden box.

I have to confess to having had a lump in my throat as I unwrapped it.

iPhone 3G Launch

2008-07-11T07:58:02+01:00

I am watching leo Laporte do 24 hours of coverage as the 3G iPhone launches in various timezones around the world. Not even half way yet and he is looking fresh as a daisy!

I'm also looking forward to the reports from my mates at Sleepydog who have launched a life blogging app for the iPhone called LifeCast. They are going to be sharing video and images from various UK iPhone outlets and aggregating content on rezpondr.

National Secular Society

2008-07-10T19:24:34+01:00

I just joined because their vision seemed worth standing up for:

We want a society:

In which those who have no religious beliefs do not suffer discrimination or disadvantage as a result. We want to ensure that religion is not allowed to dominate those areas of society that we all have to share – education, health care, social services and the political arena. We think religious views should be accorded only the respect they earn, not what they simply demand.

Where free expression is recognised and valued as the very bedrock of a democracy, and where it is vigorously protected.

Where people are allowed to make up their own minds and allowed to freely change their beliefs or abandon them if they want to.

In which education is objective and free from ideological manipulation. We want our education system to be secular, so that children can make up their own minds about what they believe. ‘Faith schools’ have no part in such a system.

In which human rights are paramount and can never be sidelined by religious demands.

With a clear separation of church and state so that no religion or denomination receives special privileges.

On the death on an iPhone

2008-07-08T07:07:58+01:00

My iPhone is dead. It is official. Even an Apple Genius couldn't revive it after the water damage it suffered during a downpour on my walk the other night.

The reason I am posting about it is that it is more than annoying - it is also sad. This thing has been a constant companion and almost like an umbilical with its ubiquitous connection to my family, business, and social networks online. It has entertained me in endless airport queues and told me where I was when I hadn't a clue. I have played with it constantly enjoying the smooth, pebble like sensation as I rolled it in my hands almost as if it were worry beads.

It has been an efficient, aesthetic and emotional delight since I first turned it on and now it lies there without a pulse.

Audible

2008-07-04T21:23:48+01:00

I am a big fan of Audible and have been for years since I got to meet their founder, Donald R. Katz, many moons ago at MIT. I listen to audio books all the time on my iPhone and find it a great way to squeeze new books into otherwise "dead" time.

I have wanted to publish my current listening on my blog for some time and so have just become an Audbile Associate and now include a link in my sidebar, below the Amazon Associates one, where you can see, and buy, my current listening.

Scrobbling again

2008-07-04T15:59:59+01:00

Euan

One of the many reasons I love my iPhone

2008-07-04T07:49:32+01:00

the iPhone wins because it both keeps us in the flow and keeps us loosely connected. Perhaps a little like adding a “lurking” factor…. iPhone in hand I have a better sense of what my friends and colleagues are doing.. I am more connected without actually thinking about it or working at it.

Stuart Henshall

And why this matters:

‘We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing. Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.’

Douglas Adams via a humungous post from David Smith

Congratulations to School of Everything

2008-07-04T07:45:51+01:00

School of Everything, on whose advisory board I sit, have won a New Statesman New Media Award.

Well done to a great team with a great idea.

Niall Cook's given birth ...

2008-07-03T11:13:58+01:00

.... to a book!

Congrats Niall.

2gether08

2008-07-01T21:15:01+01:00

I am really looking forward to tomorrow's first ever 2gether, "A festival of ideas, popular technologies and progress", in London. Steve Moore has pulled together a really interesting bunch of people and I am going to have the fun of hosting a couple of the sessions - JP Rangaswami on Cluetrain + 10 and Julian Baggini on "a journey into the English mind".

Books, books, books

2008-06-29T12:53:28+01:00

Picking up on my earlier post about the web increasing the amount and quality of my book reading I thought I would point to some of the tools I use to bring this about.

Firstly I use Delicious Library for the Mac to keep track of the books i actually have on my shelves at any time to help find them quickly and also to facilitate selling those I don't want to keep second hand at Amazon.

Secondly I use Librarything to keep a record of all books I have read, both good and bad, since starting to use the system. I also rate my books on Librarything and will some time use it to generate recommended reading lists etc. I can also see what friends are reading, read their reviews, connect with other people I don't know yet who are reading the book I am and all sorts of other wonderful web 2.0 goodness.

Lastly I have just started playing with bkkeepr, thanks to a comment from Adrian, which lets me keep track of where I am in my current book and add online notes through Twitter.

As a last note the "Current Reading" link on my RH sidebar links through to an Amazon associates link which means that if any of you click that link and buy the book I get a small percentage of the sale. This earns me enough to get a free book once a quarter or so.

I have reproduced my recent favourites below so feel free to click through, expand your reading, and fund mine at the same time!