“How to tell the team the bad news“

Alright, that’s made up. But I have seen several rather over-revealing meeting titles on my way down various corridors recently.

Technology for setting up meetings is getting pretty sophisticated these days.

In one or two office buildings I’ve been in recently, there is a small touch-screen on the wall just outside each meeting room showing the subject of the meeting taking place therein.

It’s all linked to the everyone’s Outlook (Exchange) calendars. You invite your colleague/s, give the meeting a subject, then you invite the room as a “resource”. The subject – and the name of the organiser – then appears on the touchscreen as the meeting takes place.

So, as a friendly word of advice, be careful what you call your meetings. More common and less high tech is for people to print out their daily agenda and walk around with it for all to see.

While we’re on the subject (as it were), and for good measure, put as much meaning in to the meeting title as possible, without giving away all your company’s top-secret information.

A popular bug-bear is when a meeting request arrives with the subject “Catch-up and coffee with Bob” or something similar. Of course it makes perfect sense to the organiser, but once Bob’s accepted the meeting requets, it doesn’t provide Bob with many clues at a glance!

In 2002 we built something on the BBC’s intranet called “Learning Online”. I was working with an amazing team of forward-thinking and innovative people.

We designed Learning Online to be the intranet home for BBC employees to manage their personal development, training and career development.

Alongside e-learning, personal development planning and a personalised virtual induction, was a section called MyNetworks.

If you picture MyNetworks as an early prototype for Facebook groups you’ll have a pretty close approximation. But this was 2002, so the concept was still fairly alien to most people.

The idea behind MyNetworks was simple. Create spaces for groups of people who had something in common where they could have conversations, share “knowledge” as documents or images, and plan events.

We had a lot of interest from various people, who set up and “ran” their networks with varying degrees of success.

There was one consistent and recurring theme.

Where a lot of time was spent “designing” a network before involving its members, the network invariably failed.

Often people would put great effort in to the planning of how a network would be run, and how the information in the network would be organised. When the network was finally launched, nobody used it. And those who did found a perplexing empty suite of rooms.

It seems obvious to say it, but the idea of “if we build it they will come” really did not work in most cases.

The less “designed” the network, the greater chance of its success, through participation and involvement of its members using the online tools to support the network, but not to be the network.

One talk that caught my attention was by Robin Good who is MasterNewMedia.

He asked people about what learning really meant to them and played back recorded video of answers from learned learning afficionados in to the conference.

Good finished by listing 12 things we must all learn to do well. I just managed to scribble these down, so here they are:

1. live healthily
2. read and understand what you’re reading
3. learn – the system and the method
4. be creative, anybody can be
5. empathise
6. tell truth from fiction, especially in the “news”
7. predict consequences
8. value yourself
9. live a meaningful life
10. communicate effectively
11. ask good questions
12. have good fun

Wesabe

I’ve been looking for easy ways to track what I’m spending. Mint.com comes highly recommended but wouldn’t let me in without a US zip code (at the time of writing). So I went on the prowl for some alternatives.

After some research, checking reviews and so on, I came across Wesabe. And so far it’s exactly what I need.

It was quite easy to set up an account and start pulling in bank statements. Depending on who you bank with, some are automatic and some you have to update manually.

There’s a slight leap of faith moment when you start entering bank account details. But after reading around I felt reassured. Wesabe is very clear about their appreciation of and approach towards the need for top-notch privacy and security of your financial information.

Once you have all your statement info, you can start labelling or tagging your spending. You can choose to use “bills”, “utilities”, “gifts” and so on, tagging each item in your statement with as few or as many tags as you wish. And for me this is where it really starts to get useful. In fact it’s one of the few genuinely useful applications of a tag cloud I’ve come across (flickr and delicious being two others).

After about two hours I’d tagged all my income and outgoings across 6 accounts for the last 12 months, and now I could view them all together. I can easily separate out my business expenses from my personal spending, and have finally started to get my head round how much we’re spending on household bills!

This in turn is encouraging me to think about how to get better deals. Which means I’ll probably tap in to the community aspect of Wesabe before too long to learn and share tips.

The Wesabe folk seem well tapped in to the various channels available to keep across who’s saying what about them, and seem happy to join in the conversation. This is good news, and I think it’s pretty vital for companies offering services like this to have an authentic human voice, and not to hide behind corporate comms and PR machines.

Oh yes, I almost forgot… it doesn’t cost a penny to use.

Last FM

Last.fm plays you music while you’re online. It can create your own personalised radio station based the music you like, using its audioscrobbler music recommendation system. Connect it to iTunes to learn what you’re in to. Or just go to the site and type in the name of a band you like and start listening.

Click the heart symbol in the music player to “Love this track” and your radio station gets ever more tailored to you.

I’m listening over at http://www.last.fm/user/beatnicity.

Starting life in East London in 2002, Last.fm has really come in to its own with the proliferation of broadband and now mobile broadband. In 2007 Last.fm was bought by CBS.

Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like – and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.

Read more at last.fm/about

I’ve heard good things about the Last.fm iPhone app.

And finally if, like me, you like to sing along from time to time, check out Lyrics Muse – which combines Last.fm with a lyrics wiki to display the lyrics of the song you’re listening to in real time. And as the source is a wiki, if you think the lyrics displayed are wrong, you can always go and correct them.

The first thing I noticed was that I’d lost some features I’d enabled on the standard gmail.

I’d been using:

Settings > General > Browser Connection > Always use https (for tighter security)
Settings > Labs > Signature tweaks

Experimenting with various others, including as announced in the last 24 hours:

Settings > Labs > Tasks (a new To Do list feature)

More than anything I wanted to see what I could see before. It’s frustrating not to have them available as standard in Google Apps.

The good news is that you can activate these “hidden” features in Google Apps if you know where to look. As it’s not in the most intuitive place, I thought I’d explain where to find it.

First go to manage your Manage this domain, select Domain Settings, then scroll down the General tab to the section called New Services and Features

Here you have two checkbox options for:

1. Turn on new features (like group chat or colored labels)
2. Turn on new features in this domain when they are launched to Google consumers (before Google supports them for organizations using Google Apps)

Switching these on should enable Labs in your apps settings.

142 Court Lane, East Dulwich

Anne Shelton 1928-1994

Popular singer and the World War II “Forces’ Favourite” lived here

Voted by the People

This blue plaque was unveiled on 6 October 2008. Further info on the DulwichOnView website.

And according to google reader people are still writing stuff in their weblogs. And not just about the death of blogging either.

Now. If only I could have thought of a way to say this in fewer than 140 characters I could have tweeted it instead. Or drawn it and put it on Flickr. Or created a “blogging doesn’t look 2004 to me” group on facebook. Or…