threads on a loom

How do you read all that stuff?

I’m often asked by friends, family and colleagues how I keep track of all the different sorts of things I’m interested in online.

In the past, good bookmarks, aided by social bookmarking like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia were useful to find places… but how to get through all of the content.

Drinking from the firehose

There’s so much good content on the internet that trying to consume all of it is impossible. You can take a sip or two as the river passes by, but how do you get the good bits? There are all sorts of ways to identify them – which will be meat for *another* post – but the key issue is how to get them in front of you.

The best way I have found is using RSS – an initialism which stands for a range of thing – let’s go with Really Simple Syndication.

At its simplest, it’s a way of a site pushing its latest content out in a format that can be captured by an RSS Reader; there are loads of them about.

Lee LeFever has a wonderful explanation of RSS shown here…

What other sort of feeds are there?

I use RSS to track the results of searches – I use summize.com to search twitter – where I am @steveellwood – and the feed (http://summize.com/search.atom?q=%40steveellwood) will produce any mention of me – so I can see if I’ve missed any replies…

I use RSS to track news, blogs, and twitter – you can see some of the things that interest me below… in Sharing Your Reading

RSS Readers

One client I use at work is FeedReader which lets me pick up information about corporate news and activity within my Professional Community. It’s straightforward to use, and if there are private feeds – that can’t be seen outside your corporate network – it’s ideal.

Usually though as I move between a variety of PCs – my home desktop, my work laptop, and my lovely eee PC, I prefer an online reader.

There’s a variety of these, too including NewsGator products, Google Reader and my favourite, NetVibes.

Sharing your reading…

These online readers have the additional benefit that you can share what you think other people might be interested in – for example my public NetVibes universe, or my Google Reader shared items.

Those are my somewhat idiosyncratic choices, but the irrepressible Guy Kawasaki produced the wonderful alltop.com which claims to have “all the top stories covered, all of the time”. You can get updated feeds about just about anything you want there. Sadly, I’m *not* one of the Twitterati – but I do follow some of them!

There’s even RSSmeme which allows you to search shared RSS feeds…

Will you sell RSS?

If you know people that don’t use RSS, do you tell them about it?
Are you an RSS user – and if you are, what do you read with?

Picture Credit janettowbin

piles of books

You mean like – books?

Yes, I do mean books. Since I’ve started playing with the what social networking/social media might mean to me, I’ve bought more non-fiction books in the last 3 months than fiction.

Some of this has been catch-up – I’d heard of the long tail, I’d hear mavens mentioned…

Some have been as the result of my own research – looking for social capital I’d hear about Bowling Alone…

Shirky’s book was as a result of seeing Bill Barnett (@bb42) tweeting about some of Clay Shirky’s writings and me saying, “Wow, what should I start with?”

I love playing with the toys, but I think it’s even more important to try and get an understanding of how this area is formed and where it’s moving…

… and for me, that’s largely by reading what others have written.

Recent reading

This is my current list, most recent first – the first two still being read.

  • Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
  • Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams
  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few by James Surowiecki
  • The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
  • The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand by Chris Anderson
  • Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam

What are you reading?

I’d really like to know your reading suggestions – mainly printed word, as I think RSS feeds are a matter for another post…

… which might be next week.

Picture Credit gadl

jigsaw imageHow to deal with multiplicity?
I’m deeply puzzled – not that this is at all unusual.
There are lots of social media tools, and many of them link to each other. Like quite a lot of dabblers, I’ve ended up with a mish-mash of updates appearing in varied places. How best to use the wide variety of social media tools at my disposal? I’m coming to the conclusion I need to list and separate what I use – and how.

What do I use?
I’m trying a fair range of things. A fairly full list is below, sorted more or less in frequency of update.

Do I set my location?
Well, yes. Sort of. When I remember.
Largely I use microformats in twitter, as I indicated in Twitter – what it is, and how I use it.
I’ve also used Plazes.
I’m registered with FireEagle but no-one seems to be using that.

How do I update these?
On the web interfaces, often.
For twitter I’ve used and like both snitter and twhirl
For pownce, I’ve used a similar air client.
I’ve updated via voice on phone using Spinvox and by SMS to twitter. I’ve also used ping.fm both on the web and as a WAP client on my mobile.

Where are they aggregated/streamed?
Often, bits are currently fed one to another – meaning that twitter feeds to jaiku, which feeds to Facebook, which feeds to friendfeed – which is echoed back to Facebook. Which is cluttered, untidy, and very likely the sign of a grasshopper mind.

I currently have some life streaming services I’m playing with at the moment, friendfeed which though I like the interface doesn’t seem to pick up all that’s going on – and onaswarm which gives a nice feel for what’s happening in my area. I’ve also given soup.io a shot but I haven’t made my mind up about that yet.

Which way am I heading?
I think I’m going to bite the bullet and take out all the inter-tool updates, with the probable exception of twitterfeed which lets people know when I’ve blogged.

Then it’ll be twitter for quick “What I’m doing/thinking”; del.icio.us for those important bookmarks; tumblr for future blogging ideas or GTD Someday/Maybe, Facebook for contacts, flickr for photos.
I’ll – eventually – choose an aggregator, probably friendfeed as it seems to be gaining traction…

Maybe, then, people won’t see the same wibble in 4 places from me – and won’t that be an improvement?

What are you doing?
I’d like to find out what others are doing.
Are you more choosy than me?
Am I a grasshopper bouncing from one thing to another?

Please, let me know your solutions.

Partial Inspiration
This is also the first blog post I’ve tried following Chris Brogan’s guidelines to Writing Effective Blog Posts. How was it for you?

Picture Credit place light – on a a project –

having seen Robert Scoble’s latest post on Facebook’s rant about dataportability problems I thought it might be necessary for me to try and hone my understanding a bit.

I have data on A Social Network (ASN); this might include my name, email address, and a photo of me.

I also show other data on there; the identities of some of my friends, possibly including their contact details. A few RSS streams, some photos of some buddies when we went climbing…

ASN also shows some data about me; my subscriber status, my feedback rate and so on.

Which is mine? Well, my address and email; my assertion about my friends.

Which is my friends? Their email addresses; their photographs possibly .

What belongs to ASN? At a guess, my subscriber status, and possibly the feedback rating that members of the site have co-operated to give me with ASN’s system.

What can I take with me? This is where it gets tricky…

I can/should be able to take my name/identity/email address.

What about my friend’s email address? They might not want me to take it to another site.

What if I can identify them another way? How about their ID? My current OpenID is this blog… If someone wants to assert they are a friend of http://shaidorsai.wordpress.com should that bother me? I freely make my blog available; if I can link to you(your OpenID) – I’m not linking to anything you don’t want used.

Just like with content, if I pass it off as mine, that’s wrong. Linking to things is what holds the internet together – so, I can link to the information that you do make publicly available. That may, or may not, include your email address.

What about those photos my friends took? Well, to be honest, it depends what they want to do with them. Howsabout if I say that I can point a link to them, if publicly available? If the link is on a commercial website, and they don’t want their pictures used there, they can either tell a linker to take them down on a case-by-case basis (unless we believe that most people will ask for permission) – or licence them with Creative Commons.

How will that work with my FOAF? I don’t know – yet – but am starting to play with this.

Would you object to me asserting a relationship to your OpenID? If you did, what do you think I should do, or you could do? Unless you explicitly assert the relationship back, how believable is my claim?

Should a FOAF be CreativeCommons Licenced?

Should I be able to take the ASN data? It depends, is the traditional answer; if they built it, they paid for it, they use it… perhaps I should pay if I want to take it – or maybe I can just point to it, while I reatain a relationship with ASN

It’s no secret that I work for a big corporate, and the PTB are aware that I blog about a range of things that interest me and affect both within and outside work.

My colleague Richard Dennison wrote an interesting post about the risks of blogger/social media interaction from disgruntled employees.

“On the one hand, you invited them to join the conversation in the first place and they’re just expressing their views … on the other, they’re damaging your brand. Leaving them to continue making negative comments feels uncomfortable … leaning on them through their line managers feels like censorship. “

It might show I’m old style, but I reckon that you shouldn’t sledge your employer in public – OK, I’ll make an exception for whistleblowing – when there are avenues for dealing with issues internally. I’m certainly happy to draw attention internally to people who damage the brand of the company that feeds me.

Now, if you feel those avenues aren’t delivering an open, honest and credible response to your people… there’s a nice improvement project to work on.

So, what to do?

First, make it clear what you expect people to do. The BBC have a nice blogging policy

“Personal blogs and websites should not reveal confidential information about the BBC. This might include aspects of BBC policy or details of internal BBC discussions. If in doubt about what might be confidential, staff members should consult their line manager.

Personal blogs and websites should not be used to attack or abuse colleagues.”

Seems pretty fair to me – and incidentally, the BBC explicitly allow staff to blog from work, as do my employers.

Who else has a sane policy? In a reaction to the Civil Serf furore, Tom Watson has come up with some suggested points for Civil Service blogging. Something I’d like see enacted.

Then, accept you are going to get some posts you don’t like … so, you do have hate groups – including employees or not – what to do? Engage where they are? – as Richard says

“Accepted social media ‘wisdom’ says you should engage ‘in the channel in which the comments were made’ to try to turn things around … but do you really want to get into a ‘dialogue’ with a mixture of disgruntled customers and employees?? “

I’d have said “No.” Well, maybe a qualified “No, but…”

…but there has to be an easy way for people to get human interaction. Don’t insist they go through callgate hell. Let’s bite the bullet, and take all the feedback we can get. Let’s really be customer connected.

Sandy Blair in an engaging and typically erudite comment says

“Much better to join the conversation with positive comments (and fix the issues people are raising).”

I know Apple, Verizon, Oracle and Microsoft all have some presence at GetSatisfaction.com. Do you want to do that? A *big* corporate would bring loads of traffic to someone else’s site. Publicity for them and impact on their infrastructure. You’d need loads of folk handling enquiries, and you’d still get posts elsewhere – so perhaps not.So, just do it. Get a group of people on “20% time” to start digging at the issues raised in these individual sites. “My appointment failed…” Why? Sort that and we’ll sort issues for lots more than that individual. So, engage individually, sort root cause, and fix globally – meaning you’ll get more Right First Time.

How do you choose the people who’ll get the 20% time… well, they just volunteered, didn’t they? They saw and raised the problem… let them help to fix it.

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This post is in response to a request following a light hearted tweet about unlikely papers.

In common with many people in larger corporates, I work in what could loosely be called Professional Services(PS). My knowledge, skills, and experience can be used in internal projects or more enjoyably with opportunities within external companies.

Like many companies, mine organises into groups of professional communities. We arrange people into these by areas of expertise. In our implementation of these, we have two key areas of focus which are skill development and the adoption of appropriate professional methodologies.

The leadership team of each community define the development paths that individuals need to follow within their profession.

This means that, even when moving from assignment to assignment, everyone will have:

  • a clearly visible way of progressing his or her career (while the business gets clear visibility of what skills gaps it has for the future and can take action to address them).
  • a solid base where they can share knowledge, learning and take ownership for their own development.
  • an infrastructure with knowledge sharing, support structure and development pathways that create a true community of expertise.

So far, so good. I’m active in, and have enjoyed my time in Professional Communities. I wonder if it is the same everywhere?

Now, to produce these cohesive communities I’d suggest a key requirement is a willingness to share at least explicit knowledge, if not tacit. The community can then assess the level and experience of its members.

Performance Management
This is key to succesful growth of a community. How do we do this?

Forced ranking/Vitality Curve?
This is a very competitive model, which works against the idea of knowledge sharing – why should I, a B-ranked individual, help you a C-ranked individual. I *need* to look better than you. Rather than spending time sharing my knowledge, or increasing my skills, it might pay me better to game the system. Plenty of office politics, and subtle sledging of my peers.

In a knowledge based organisation, perhaps a System of Profound Knowledge might work better. That, of course is a reference to W.Edwards Deming who highlighted “Seven Deadly Diseases”.

Number 3 was “Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance“.

If you’re in a professional services organisation set up in communities with forced ranking – ask how does this help the community work together?

HR
Difficult to know what to say about this group as they don’t know what to call themselves – but since they are managing the takeon and servicing of the key asset of a PS organisation – the people themselves – they must be key.

To enable a successful Professional Community, there must be really close links with the HR function, with an intimate understanding of the requirements of the community. The procedures followed must be transparent to avoid accusations of favouritism.

HR should provide clear guidance to Professional Communities on strategic issues like knowledge management, retention, professional development.

Does your HR service give clear advice on how to develop your community members – perhaps sticking them in a development bench area? If that’s what they are suggesting, an interesting article by a performance management company suggests that might not be such a good idea, saying keeping people on a bench can *lose* you people.

Do they give clear unequivocal guidance as to how much time should be spent on developing the skills within a community? If not, why not? Google give their engineers “20% time” to work on other projects…

…would 10% time be better for you?

5%?

No? So, how do you think this community is going to work.

I was chatting IRL with a valued colleague whose catholic spread of knowledge I enjoy greatly, and he told me he was finding his way round twitter. I said something dismissive like “Well, I only know bits and pieces…” and I thought that as I have to write a presentation on aspects of social networking I might start things about twitter

Twitter is :

  • a way of telling the world (and/or your friends)what you are doing now
  • a way of building links to colleagues and strangers
  • a microblogging phenomenon
  • Twitter says “Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing.”

Basically, you can share 140 character snippets from your mobile, your messaging client, the web… with anyone who is interested. They can see these snippets on their mobile, their messaging client, the web or any one of them if they choose.

What will twitter do for you?

@pistachio asked the question “Twitter make you …what” folk answered

  • more socially aware
  • less alone
  • more knowledgeable
  • more informed
  • more inspired

amongst many other things.

I’ve learnt a great deal from it – including how to make Sicilian Spaghetti – and built links with a range of people in a wide range of countries, with a vast range of jobs and hobbies and interests.

How do you use it?
Fitting what you need to say in 140 characters can be quite challenging. Most folk use some of a range of Microformats

@ replies
Beginning a tweet with, say, @steveellwood alerts folk that this is in reply to something I’ve said or tweeted. This lets them choose whether to follow me or to track back what I’ve said. More than two or three of these in a row makes me feel it should have been done by a direct message (which is done by beginning a tweet with “d steveellwood “, and would only be visible to me, not the world and their spouse)

l: location details where you are – so folk can find you. This can be down to country, town, road, or house. Look at Twittermap and search for steveellwood, and it should show whereabouts I am.

++ or using plusplusbot you can show your pleasure or displeasure with a service, a product or an individual – for example, http://plusplusbot.com/targets/steveellwood shows what I have done that is noteworthy or notorious… you do need to “follow” plusplusbot on twitter for this to work.

#hashtag by adding a #(hash) to the front of a word, you can tag the word to make it easy to search for mentions of the word by other folk. e.g. Discussions at BlogTalk 2008 – again you have to “follow” hashtags for this to see you.

What do you use with Twitter?

Terraminds for free search of the Twitter information stream: you can search for topics or individuals – and the search can be saved as RSS.

RSS (Really simple syndication) – is a web format used to publish frequently updated content. You can take RSS feeds from all over the place – including this blog – but it is very useful for twitter.

Some people publish large volumes of “tweets”; they can drown out the less frequent posters in the webclient. One example is Hugh Macleod (@GapingVoid). For his posts, I take an RSS Feed (http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/50193.atom) and look at it in my RSS Reader.

You won’t always see every tweet that mentions you; some you’ll miss, some will be folk you don’t follow… so using Terraminds referred to earlier you can do a search for yourself (n my case, http://terraminds.com/twitter/update-rss?query=steveellwood&) and then get an RSS feed of the search.

Twittermap to see where folk are

Twitterkarma to see who follows me and I follow back

YouTwit a mashup to watch those who *I* follow

Gridjit – a grid view of who people twitter with – see mine

Tweeterboard – conversation analytics for some twitter users….

Snitter, twhirl, twitbin – all clients for twitter. You can also use most standard messaging clients.

Are there rules on how to use it?

Yes; No; Maybe.

Twitter works by consent; people will only see what you publish … if they choose to. Be boring, rude, irrelevant… and people won’t follow you. Be offensive, and they’ll block you from following them.

My colleague Phil Whitehouse(@Casablanca) wrote the 10 Commandments of Twitter

Robert Scoble, a very well known blogger (@scobleizer) writes how he breaks the 10 rules of Twitter

Paul Downey, another colleague, (@psd) divides folk into twits and twerps (Twits good, twerps bad).

Follow your own rules, and enjoy it.

Caroline Middlebrook wrote a fairly nice guide.

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I’ve played with a variety of clients before, and never found myself hugely committed to any of them. Having noticed a tweet by @dahowlett where he suggested it was the best blog editor on the planet, I’ve decided to give this a try.

If you’re interested, it can be found at the Live services site.

From home, I’m never offline, so it’ll be a while before I try that out.

Following a couple of interesting tweets on Twitter, I started following Brian Kelly and, as usual had a look to see if his blog was interesting. It is, and I’ve joined in with his Pownce experimenting – you can find me here.

One of his latest posts touched on ownership of social networks asking:

  • Who should own the social networks?
  • Should ownership of social networks be any different from other software services we use in our institutions (including VLEs such as Blackboard, Web 2.0 services such as Flickr or blogging services such as Edublogs Campus)
  • How should a transition to a change of ownership take place?
  • How realistic is the transition strategy?
  • How do you know what this is what the users actually want?
  • How will social networking services be funded under alternative ownership resources? And if the answer is increased taxes, how will you get that past the Daily Mail readership which seem to be influential in informing policy discussions for both the Labour and Conservative parties?

This followed concerns being raised by Frances Bell and Josie Fraser about the ownership of the social networks – particularly Facebook.

As an employee of a *huge* telecom/ICT firm, the idea of any state ownership of social networks seems faintly odd. If we trust private firms to provide the infrastructure that these social networks run over – because, of course, we can always switch to another supplier – why *wouldn’t* you trust private firms to run the social networks?

The social networks – be they Facebook, Orkut, bebo, MySpace or something from ning – are the pipes that we deploy our social graphs across. Pete Johnson gives a good explanation of graph vs. network.

Now, if I can take my graph off that network… [hey, isn’t that beginnning to look like Data Portability – and aren’t Facebook saying they’lll play?] … can I use it somewhere else? Which bits of the data are mine is a different issue.

Well, not yet. But maybe soon. And when that happens, won’t these concerns about who runs the “pipes” be less significant?
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Wikis 
I’ve written before about wikis and the intranet, and how I saw advantages in their use.

My colleague Sandy – who has the patience of a saint – sighs, and explains that scalability and control are a bit more of an issue when you have 100k users rather than 30.

I counter with Knowledge Management working better when you have involved Communities of Practice, pointing out that wikis are ideal for those and we go round again.

I was interested to see Abigail Lewis-Bowen’s view at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum which suggests that

“it’s important to provide Wikis and Blogs only after processes for publishing “formal” information channels to the Intranet are well established.  If the right people are publishing to the right place on the Intranet, and there is good editorial workflow and governance, then the Intranet is sturdy enough to add an open, less-structured layer of content.”

Basically, if your intranet functions OK, go for it; require authenticated log-in, provide good how-tos and link the formal stuff to the “under-Web” [lovely coining by Paul Miller in his Trends for 2008]

Social Networking

Still lots of interest at work in:

  •  what this is (yes, I know you know, dear reader, but I’m still working it out; so have patience).
  • what can we get from this – and an interesting term I hadn’t heard before – Social Capital. I mean, I now know it’s been around for years, with the first cite being around 110 *years* ago.
  • how we can facilitate it – what tools, what processes?

I think it’s partly culture, partly tools,  and partly process.

As part of my Personal Development Plan(PDP), I’d decided this was a key area to understand and try and utilise. My company’s culture encourages us to drive robust PDPs. I’d found a range of tools – each new one pointed to by posting on previous tool, and learned from them. The process is the bit that is currently blocking wider acceptance of this; how do you measure the value. As long as nobody starts talking about a business model  I’ll be happy.

Facebook

I’ve had Facebook for a while, but following the irritation I – and a number of other friends – had been feeling with Vampires, “funny” videos, LOLcatz I removed FunWall and SuperWall. I update my status via Twitter  – and so do many others, and am currently using Twitter more – but I still use Facebook.

It’s still a nice application for seeing what your friends/colleagues are doing and provides a way of managing the various contacts – true, I want to be able to escape from the walled garden – but that looks like it’s coming.

I’ve been able to build

  • online relationships with the people I’ve “friended”
  • knowledge of Web2.0
  • understanding of some of the tools
  • links with people I’d never have heard of…

 JP Rangaswami says

“The information that flows through a social network exists in three dimensions. One dimension is time, past, present and future. A second dimension is number, one to many. A third is movement, static to dynamic. When I share my contact details with another person, I am providing static, present, one-to-one information.  When I share what I am intending to do with a whole community, I am providing dynamic, future, one-to-many information.

The motivation to provide information is, at least in part, driven by an expected value of the information coming out of Facebook. And one other thing: the comfort level of providing, to a community, what is essentially private information.

Generation M and their successors are comfortable with sharing their past actions, current state and their future intentions with the community they belong to; they’re comfortable with sharing changes to states and intentions as well. They do this because they believe new value will emerge from that sharing. Collaborative, communal value, shared value.”

I think that’s fair – and I look forward to how we’re going to use “Facebook for the Enterprise” to leverage the social capital we’re looking for.