The Full Kernick

Some good reminders

2008-06-25T22:49:00.004+01:00

Andrew McAfee has posted some interesting articles on the adoption of E2.0 applications. His most recent post, Is Management the Problem?, seems, inadvertently, to be a pretty good summary of these posts.

Is this just because he's been right all along ;-)?

I'm convinced that our success with news feeds (RSS et al) is due, in no small part, to getting senior management to experience it and use it. I can see the same pattern emerging (oops, no pun intended) with some E2.0 apps, although I'm not prepared to say which here.

Nokia that Symbian

2008-06-24T16:10:00.001+01:00

Wow, this is interesting.

Nokia Corp. Resources | ZDNet

Nokia is to buy out Symbian and set up a new open-source platform with Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoMo, forming a major rival to Google's Android The mobile open-source world suddenly has a very major new player, after it emerged on Tuesday that the Symbian, Series...

587 days

2008-06-20T08:31:00.003+01:00

Got this in my inbox today.

Hello from Weebly!

It looks like it's been 587 days, 21 hours, 57 minutes and 37 seconds since you last logged in...

Of course I'd completely forgotten what Weebly was all about and what my password was. The Weebly folk did something clever that I've not seen before, they included in the email a link to log in if I have forgotten my password. With the barrier to entry so lowered I clicked the link.

I remember this site, which 587.92 days ago was unusable. It's a simple web site editor and was usable enough for me to have a quick play and publish. You can create two types of content - pages and blogs (although you'll probably only have one of the latter). It reminds me a bit of jotspot, which is based on a wiki model.

Unless you fear the evil of Google I'd use Google Sites.

Social Network Fatigue

2008-04-29T15:24:00.003+01:00

Not for the first time I received yet another invite to Naymz. I just don't want to get into yet-another-social-networking-tool (just crying out for an acronym - YASNT).

Anyway, all the people who have invited me so far are people I'm connected to with Linked-In. Where's the added value?

So far I've just declined. Nothing personal, you understand.

Youtube Warp

2008-04-28T15:06:00.003+01:00

I've only just noticed that when you view a youtube video in full screen you can click on the Warp icon and explore related videos in a way reminiscent of Digg's visualisations. Nice.

Google generation

2008-03-31T08:34:00.002+01:00

This interesting report on the British Library web site was pointed out to me recently. It does a good job of debunking some of the myths that I have heard perpetuated about Gen Y.

Dark clouds approaching

2008-03-16T22:18:00.004Z

Do we have a problem looming? With the popularisation of folksonomies as a means of categorisation will we see tag clouds being built into several applications and how will we (and will we want to) join these clouds?

I fear the worst. Is there a standard XML expression for a tag cloud? I haven't found one.

Consumers ahead to stay

2008-03-13T22:53:00.005Z

In the '90s and into the early part of this decade it was fair to assume that the enterprise (well the big ones anyway) had the better technology. You would expect to find the IT department bringing out the new gizmo's that really enabled you to do something more, better, faster, easier. Largely due to cost, but also because of the low penetration of fast, pervasive networks, the consumer market was some way behind.

The tables have turned. Mobile technology is giving people access to their personal emails and 'the cloud', but connectivity into the enterprise is lagging. People stream media around their house, have terabytes of storage at sub-£500 prices and are used to anywhere, any-device access to their data stored with online services such as Google Docs or Zimbra.

The expectation is that the enterprise should still be leading the charge, and I don't think that is possible anymore. The constraints for the enterprise are just so different. It doesn't matter if you stream a video into your home and your backup doesn't run, or it takes a bit longer for an email to arrive. In the enterprise that matter a huge amount, and we're serving the needs of thousands, not a handful. Although protecting personal data is important to everyone, your phone holds your data. The phone the company gives you holds data about clients, the company or its personnel, and management and security of these devices becomes a constraining factor.

We (the IT department) need to help bring the realisation to our customers in the business that you won't see it here first anymore; you'll buy it on the high street. We also need to help the leaders (who see the consumer technology as unnecessary toys) to see the value, when it's there, and to be courageous in bringing the right technologies and services into the enterprise.

Microsoft super standards mode

2008-03-04T08:02:00.000Z

What a name - "Super Standards", should be something like "Finally Compliant". Of course this doesn't remove Windows Only features like ActiveX from the web.

Well, it makes me happy anyway.

Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

In the end — regardless of why Microsoft really is making this change — the decision to make standards mode the default in IE 8 should make many happy.

Feeds and Traffic

2008-02-26T23:27:00.003Z

A part of the adoption of RSS/Feeds inside EY involved discussions about what effect this would have on peoples browsing habits and what are the possible knock on effects. Would a desktop reader create, for example, capacity issues on our firewall or internal web servers?

The end result is that it's almost impossible to predict. However, the question came up again recently and, as we now have several feeds, I did a quick check. The xml file of the main feed on our Intranet site was 7k. The home page was 341k.

The most basic computation based on 7k returned every time the reader refreshes the feed on an hourly schedule shows that about 5 days worth of feed updates is equivalent to one visit to the home page.

The feed is only updated two or three times a day. When the xml file hasn't changed the web server returns a 304 (Not Modified) http status code - a tiny fraction of the 7k. Therefore the real value equates to 19 days or 26 if you add weekends in for free.

It's got to look like feeds will reduce traffic.

The counter argument to this is that people will be more aware of updates and therefore it will drive up visits to sites. This may be true, but I have no way to measure it. If it is then, assuming the content is work related, this can only be a Good Thing. It is, after all, one of the fundamental benefits of the technology.

It's a wired world

2008-02-26T23:21:00.001Z

As I look over the different technology elements involved in the creation of my combined feed I can't help but be amazed.

There are three sources: My blog (the simple Atom feed), NewsGator clippings (stuff I tag in my reader, FeedDemon, in RSS) and Del.icio.us (stuff I tag with tfkfeed in delicious, also in RSS)

These three feeds are merged, de-duplicated and sorted by publish date by a Yahoo Pipe and spat out as a single RSS stream.

This RSS stream flows through FeedBurner, which truncates the posts, and creates a combined-format feed that is more broadly compatible than standard RSS or Atom.

We've been pretty successful in Ernst & Young at utilising feeds. We've got many internal sources producing feeds, not just blogs. Some of our knowledge repositories and portals will display content in a mini-reader. All desktops have a feed reader (other than the rather incapable embedded ones).

I'm working now to raise awareness of what comes after this, and although it will take some time before we see anything like the picture I've painted above, I'm looking forward to challenge.

Copyright conscience

2008-02-26T22:52:00.004Z

For obvious reasons I don't subscribe to the feed on my own blog, but did so the other day just to check that the feed-reader-clippings-yahoo-pipes thing is working. It is, but there's no distinction between content that is my own and that from other sites, although the links are clearly to the source. Nevertheless, I feel this potentially misrepresents other peoples content as my own have set the combined feed to summarise. This final step is done by FeedBurner, which I've been using all along in order to track subscription.

I realise this may reduce the value of the feed, but I don't feel comfortable doing otherwise.

Delicious Yahoo Pipes

2008-02-21T14:41:00.002Z

So now I added del.icio.us into my Yahoo Pipe. I haven't used del.icio.us for a Long Time now, despite having the toolbars, I just don't think to tag things there. Well, in an effort to see if it's just habit on my part or really No Longer Useful I've joined it into my feed pipe.

Now if I tag something in del.icio.us with the tag tfkfeed it will flow through the same Yahoo Pipe that is currently joining my Google Reader (now no longer used) and my four FeedDemon clip folders. The nice thing about del.icio.us is that I can add a description that becomes the body of the RSS feed, so it's like a mini post that only goes into the feed.

Whilst in pipes I created a new pipe that joins my posts feed and this combined clip/del.icio.us feed into one. So now through one feed it's possible to track everything all my tech related streams.

All of this is making me want to try out Flock. Never done that.

Neighbourhoods

2008-02-12T08:54:00.003Z

This looks interesting, but can we spell it right?

Andrew McAfee

Awareness Networks builds, hosts, and deploys integrated E2.0 suites for an impressive roster of customers ... When they described how neighborhoods work within Awareness, I think I said "Great idea!" out loud.

Each Awareness installation is called a ‘community,’ and each community can contain multiple neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are simply ways to categorize the content that gets contributed over time, and are defined in advance by the people who commissioned the site. Since these people are usually the bosses of the company (or are at least acting on their behalf) neighborhoods tend to reflect the formal organizational structure or goals of the company, or some combination of the two.

Linking back

2008-02-12T08:51:00.001Z

Moving to FeedDemon as my feed reader has introduced an annoying side effect. The corporate browser is IE, so although I have FF installed on my machine it is not the default browser. I use ScribeFire for quick blog posts like this one and I haven't found a suitable equivalent in IE (not that I've searched very hard given that I do most of my browsing in FF). Whilst using Google Reader I was reading posts in FF too, so quick blogs were a simple matter. Now FeedDemon has taken my blog reading back into the world of IE and broken the link to quick and easy posting.

This extra copy URL-switch to FF-paste routine was certainly becoming a barrier to me making some posts. However, I found the entry below on the Channel9 forum that shows how to create a right-click menu entry for 'Open in FF'. Now I can easily bounce links from FeedDemon (and from IE) into FF from where I can use ScribeFire to post.

Barrier lowered, posting continues.

IE add-on: Open In Default Browser

In Firefox an extension exists - IE View - to open a link target in IE. I asked if a similar extension could be created for IE - Sven pointed out that it could. This IE add-on will allow you to click on a link in IE, and open its target in your default browser. Sven's version allows you to open the target in Firefox.

Has anyone a recommendation for posting direct from IE?

Blog beginnings

2008-02-11T16:00:00.003Z

I first came across Ricardo on Linked-In, where he had answered a question. He caught my attention because he works for PWC, a competitor to Ernst & Young (where I work). So I pinged Ricardo and we've been tracking each other's blogs. It was interesting reading Ricardo's post on the origins of his blog as it matches so closely to my own.

I started a blog internally about two years ago and recently decided to 'go public' for similar reasons to those given by Ricardo. However, I still actively maintain my internal blog and probably post equally frequently to both.

This motivated me to write a post about identities that has been stewing since I Roo Reynolds made a remark at the Online Information Exhibition I attended in December 07. Roo said that he has only one identity and it keeps him honest. Personally, I have lots of identities and I don't have any desire to mix them.

This blog is my professional identity, although I might post a bit of personal stuff in here. I do more personal stuff internally, partially out of fear of identity theft. I have several social networking persona's, the two main ones being Linked-In (professional) and Facebook (social). FB is the closest I get to publishing anything about my life on the web. If FB gave me the ability to have circles of friends I might do this more.

I have considered (but with four children never spared the time) setting up a private blog with logins in order to share my life with my closest family and friends who are scattered across the globe.

As bit of an aside: on identity theft the stories don't get much funnier that this.

What do other's think? Do you keep your worlds apart or throw everything into one bucket?

UPDATE: Someone sent me this link. It's an interesting read, but I think it's overdone. Sure there are people who exhibit extreme behaviours between different identities, most of us just reflect who we are in an appropriate way. In this post, however, I was thinking more about who I want to hear me. I'll tell my wife my deepest secrets, I won't blog them here. I'll tell my friends I'm looking for a new job, I won't post it here or on my internal blog, or on FB. I'll discuss some technical interest here, but internally will post about how EY could respond or use it.

Right now I have to have a separate application for each group and no tool yet enables me to break down my contacts into smaller groups and direct, at the level of a message, communications to these small groups. I'm guessing the future is not far off when I'll be able to do this in something like FB.

FeedDemon - 14 days

2008-02-08T15:02:00.000Z

I've been using FeedDemon for two weeks now. Here are my thoughts:

+ I have two machines so the way sync'ing just happens is great.
+ Gives me access to both internal and external feeds in one place. When I was using Google Reader I started ignoring Bandit and missed internal updates for extended periods.
+ Reports to help me manage dead feeds. Probably comparable, although quite different, to Google Reader.
+ Clip folders have given a bit more structure and context to posts that are of interest. I never really used the tagging in Google Reader.
- The toolbar for each feed (to flag, share, mark read etc) is at the top of the feed, so I keep scrolling up and down.
+- I initially missed the auto-mark-read-as-I-scroll feature of Google Reader, but now I'm not so sure. I quite like being in control of when feeds are marked read.
- I would to have the option for links to open in new tabs by default, instead I have to remember to click on the little icon next to the feed title. I guess once in the habit I won't mind this so much.
+ Prefetch seems an excellent feature, although I haven't needed to use it yet.
- The keyboard shortcuts seems a bit odd. Ctrl-Shft-A to mark a feed as read, Ctrl-R to mark the whole folder of feeds as read. On the plus side you can configure all the keyboard shortcuts.
- FeedStation doesn't auto clean up on a per feed basis. Some podcasts are daily, some weekly or less frequent. I use Juice and will continue to do so.

So the big question. Google Reader or FeedDemon? Nyah, it's an easy one. FeedDemon, and for this one reasons (or is it really two) above all else:

Combined internal/external with the sync'ing between machines (at least for the external feeds)

Carrots and what

2008-02-08T13:49:00.001Z

So what is the perfect accompaniment to a carrot? If this happens, what else will sell out? I say hummus.

Facebook users plot global carrot rampage

More than 60,000 people from an online group have pledged to swarm supermarkets and buy out their supply of carrots in one day in a bizarre mission labeled "impossible" by vegetable growers.

Laying traps

2008-02-08T09:38:00.001Z

Terry Doerscher posts a very interesting and eloquent entry on balancing the need for directive control and to give freedom to flourish in the work of Knowledge Workers. Quite rightly he concludes with no prescriptive answer, as there isn't one. I'm no expert on this matter and haven't the time to read even the two books Terry mentions let alone the library of thought that no doubt exists around this topic. Coming at this from a technical view we need to widen roads and lay traps.

People will use the tool that enables them to do what they need to do in the most efficient way. Efficiency means that not having to ask anyone for permission or assistance to get this done. People will sacrifice their contribution to the Greater Good if necessary. In other words, the tools we provide need to be obvious to use and unhindered by bureaucracy. (This reminds me of Andrew McAfee's post on The 9X Email Problem; if you need to make people change from what they are doing now the hill is so much steeper.)

Then there are the traps; not preventative measures but ones that capture what people are doing without requiring them to do anything different. This is the emergent attribute of technology that is at the heart of Enterprise 2.0 software. If we can harness every day activities and link them into the collective organisation in a way that contributes to the Greater Good then we gain something for nothing.

I'll conclude then to say that emergence will be a key technology contribution to the solution.

Planview - Blogs - Enterprise Navigator: Dancing on the Edge of a Razor Blade

Drawing upon the works mentioned and your basic daily observation, we know that knowledge workers, in particular, professionals, tend to be a highly independent sort and very cat-like. When you get right down to it, we like to do what we want and do it the way we want to, not necessarily how someone else wants us to. In fact, we are generally loath to take direction. Nor are we inclined to clue anyone else in on what it is that we are doing or our methods or progress, if we can avoid it. We want to establish our own list of tasks, set our own priorities for them, and figure out how to pull it all off without any help or oversight.

Not so native after all

2008-02-05T08:17:00.000Z

From an article in this weeks Information World Review, "The idea that the Google generation is the most web-literate is a myth." This from research commissioned by the British Library and JISC.

I have become increasingly sceptical about the hype created over Generation Y, and pointed to it in my Online Information 2007 reportback. I do not doubt that there are differences between the generations. I do not claim that there is nothing to consider. However, the new generation will bring as many challenges as it will address issues.

It may be that GenY'ers adapt to and adopt more easily new technology. It may be that they are more able to work in an environment that pulls attention in several different directions at once - they may be better jugglers. However, they will need to learn how to plan, to analyse and draw their own conclusion, and they will need to learn how to fail.

To tie, as some do, Enterprise 2.0 technology to this generation is nonsensical. For me it cheapens the value argument for Enterprise 2.0. The fact than GenY'ers will be more comfortable working with these tools does not mean they will add that much more value. However, it does suggest that they will participate, which many of my generation and beyond are not prone to do.

The natural conclusion is that Enterprise 2.0 is only valuable if it has the participation of the older generations; otherwise these will be spaces that perpetuate the faults of GenY'ers rather than integrates and matures them.

Lotusphere to go

2008-02-04T10:15:00.001Z

If, like me, you didn't get to Lotusphere but have an interest in the software stack you might be able to catch one of these. I'm going to make an effort to get to the London one, although there's no details on it at the time of posting.

IBM Lotusphere Comes to You 2008

Lotusphere Comes to You is a premier event series featuring new and timely presentations designed to bring anyone who couldn't get to Orlando the critical messages and the excitement they missed.

Eclipsed Amazon+Audible

2008-02-03T16:09:00.000Z

I have blogged a couple of times about ebooks. This is a technology that recently caught my imagination - sparked by the release of the Kindle. On Thursday I spotted that Amazon has bought Audible - probably the best known and perhaps largest seller of audible books (I have no facts to back that up) - but the news of MS and Yahoo has eclipsed this news. I do know that Audible make heavy use of DRM to protect their content, although I think their purchase model makes things little better than the Amazon experience, where an audible book costs about the same as a paper copy but comes with a more restrictive licence.

I'm waiting for the confluence of the right device (I like the look of the iRiver one) and library, that sells books at the right price and with a fair licence. I don't mind DRM, but get the price down to reflect the restrictions, and don't impose it on authors/publishers that don't want their work restricted in this way.

Will this Amazon+Audible tie-up create this magical world. I'm not seeing the writing on the wall just yet.

FeedDemon - first impressions

2008-01-24T12:34:00.000Z

Having used RSS Bandit for over 2 years I recently became a Google Reader convert, largely because of the ability to read it from any machine. What I missed was the offline stuff and I still needed to keep Bandit for internal feeds. So with the announcement from Newsgator that FeedDemon is now free I thought I'd give that a go.

I like the interface, it's clean. I kind of miss the three pane view of Bandit (UPDATE: I discovered you can have a three pane view in FeedDemon too), but then there's more space for the posts. What I really miss is the posts being marked read as I browse down the newspaper view (both Google Reader and Bandit have this feature), I have to keep remembering to mark the items read.

The alert message is attractively implemented and I think the fade is better than the toaster animation of Bandit that jerks my screen when my machine is busy. I like the ability to get alerts syndicated every 30 mins rather than when they arrive.

One of the killer features that kept me on Google Reader is sharing feeds I find interesting. These pipe straight into the RSS Reader widget on my blog. I can do the same with Newsgator online, and now I can do it through FeedDemon. I created a few categories for clippings - architecture, social software and notable; but what do I pipe into my blog. I can use Yahoo Pipes to join the feeds. I like that I can clip web URLs and not just feed items.

I don't like the fact that the toolbar for each feed (mark read, flag, delete, clip etc) is at the top of the feed. I only know what I want to do once I've read it! Doh!

In all other respects there doesn't seem to be much to choose between the three. I'll shun Google Reader for two weeks and see how I get on.

Is IBM snubbing Second Life

2008-01-19T17:24:00.001Z

I didn't pay much attention to the use of Second Life at Lotusphere 2007, so I don't really know what sort of reception it had. However, I thought this year might be good time to give it a go, as much to have the SL experience as to learn something about the Lotus products.

However, as far as I can see there is no SL Lotusphere 2008, which means that IBM didn't get enough from 2007 to make it worth their while this year. What's more interesting is the complete silence on the matter. I've done a little digging to see if anyone is talking about it and nothing!

What does this say about using Second Life for business? Something to avoid?

Update: Someone pointed out this post, so it appears that IBM was doing stuff in SL after all, but with no fuss. Odd!

iriver's ebook reader

2008-01-15T23:40:00.001Z

The device looks sweet. What service will they have to back it up? Where's the iTunes to this? What's the deal with publishers going to allow them to do?

iriver's E-BOOk reader - Engadget

iriver's E-BOOk reader