Thanks to everyone who has commented on this blog (whether it’s on a new post or an older post), and I hope to keep getting some of the great comments that people have left. I hope closing comments on old posts will not hamper any discussion or dialogue that this site has enjoyed for the past few years.

The addition of one-click upgrades to both the WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins was a brilliant feature addition, but I’m hoping things will go one step further and just update my stuff automatically. While I could see the questions raised already (what if something broke? what if you didn’t want to upgrade? what if your database imploded?), why not just make it a feature that you could turn on?

For me anyway, having to log into all of my sites and upgrade WordPress and all its plugins is something that I do irregularly because it’s time-consuming. Would there not be some way to just have WordPress go through the upgrade and just let me know if there’s a problem? I guess we’re still a long ways away from software that can diagnose its own illnesses. Oh well, I can hope, can’t I?

Having seen a few content management implementations myself (not to mention having talked to many people who have been involved in CM implementations), one of the biggest mistakes that organizations seem to make is not actually talking to anyone who is going to be using the system.

Knowledge management and IT folks sometimes think they understand a system better than the users possibly could; and in most cases, they’re right. But understanding the way a system works and understanding how the content should be organized are two different things.

While letting users (or even admins in most cases) loose on organizing content is usually a recipe for disaster, there needs to be some input from the people who actually have to use the content that’s held within a system.

There also needs to be some kind of planning around how you’re going to make your information architecture exenstible when the content outlives the usefulness of the IA — you don’t want to have to rebuild your architecture from scratch every time you have a huge influx of new content (in this case, I think it’s never useful to plan just for your existing content — you need to plan for the estimated amount of content that will come up within the lifecycle of your content management system).

And finally, whatever your estimate is for how much content you’ll likely end up with, make sure to double it.

According to Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s CTO, “I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house.” Yahoo’s also not doing so hot financially. According to the article:

Yahoo’s profits are down, as are most search companies in the current economy. Yahoo earned $118 million in the first quarter of 2009, a drop of 13% year over year with sales totaling $1.58 billion.

While the article points out that Google has overtaken Yahoo as the destination of choice for people conducting web searches, one and a half billion dollars of sales still gives Yahoo quite a bit of weight in the search arena, right?

I’m not sure how a presence in the social networking sphere is going to help Yahoo at this point. While it may lend Yahoo some credibility in terms of social networking, there doesn’t seem to really be a real plan as to how that social networking presence is going to translate into increased profitability.

According to DailyTech, “Yahoo feels that its high number of users gives it an edge in social networking and that it can swiftly launch and build out a social networking backbone with ‘tuck-ins’ of interesting products that are being developed by other firms.”

Admittedly, building a user base is a tough thing to do — but is Yahoo’s user base really going to be interested in social networking (I’m not saying they’re not, it just seems to be a fairly tenuous assumption)? Usually, when companies act with the intention of monetizing their user base instead of acting with the desire to provide a useful service (and as we all know, social networking sites are a dime a dozen), spectacular failures result.

Balogh goes further to say that “for how many incredible applications we could have and should have, for all the experience on Yahoo, we are terribly under-represented.”

That’s a pretty bold statement, when you’re essentially talking about vaporware — couldn’t any company say they are under-represented in terms of what they could have? Yahoo’s starting to come off as a bit desperate here — and looking to cash in on your user base with applications you could have starts to sound like a company that’s already reached its high water mark, rather than one who’s trying to build a social networking presence.

The site is divided into predictions and bets about how the world will turn out, everything from whether machine intelligence will pass the Turing test to whether the universe will eventually stop expanding.

Anyone can predict anything, and any prediction can become a bet when it is challenged. There are a clear set of rules for each bet, and each side of the bet must clearly describe their logic and reasoning for believing that things will turn out a particular way.

Take a look around the site — there are some really interesting bets. One of my favourites is a bet on whether the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the Earth.

As I was reading the latest post I’ve linked to above, it made me think about why I send email and how I feel about email. I’m sort of ambivalent about the actual act of sending an email — I often get the sense that there are certain things I’d be better off sending through instant messaging, posting somewhere fixed (especially in terms of files) or simply picking up the phone.

I won’t run through an exhaustive list of the disadvantages of email (a quick Google search brings up a ton of results on email’s cons), but its main disadvantages are pretty obvious. Email is impersonal, error-prone (ever forget to cc someone crucial?), fractured, and is often misinterpreted.

So if email is so imperfect, why do we all send so many of them every day? Because most of the time, email is the path of least resistance. Conversations (even instant messaging ones) require commitment from you and the other party, and sadly, using collaborative tools often consists of logins, attachment uploading time and some planning. It’s simply easier to just fire off emails without really thinking about it.

And I think this also sums up at least part of Luis’ point about email. The purpose is not to eliminate email completely from the work world, but just to get people to think more closely and when and why they use email. For example, even the possibility of being misunderstood is a good reason to simply pick up the phone.

And from the collaboration perspective, more collaboration tools that integrate seamlessly into people’s work are needed (yes, I know, a tall order). There are too many collaboration tools that are built with great intentions and end up becoming distant silos, hidden behind login screens, forgotten passwords and connecitivty issues.

From my perspective, this means bridging the concepts of the ’network’ and the ‘desktop’, so that collaborative spaces are no longer a case of ‘oh yeah, I should’ve use the workspace’, but instead just the de facto standard when it comes to sharing and collaborating.

Now back to my email.

Worry about your content first, delivery mechanisms later. Your first job, no matter what type of content you’re creating, is to consistently deliver quality content. The delivery mechanisms for content are not too hard to figure out, and should largely depend on your audience and the type of content you are creating.

I like to write blog posts because I write infrequently, and when I do write, I like to put down a series of thoughts (it’s not always something long, but it’s too much to fit on Twitter). In my opinion, too much focus is put on the immediacy of microblogging — when instead you should be thinking about whether Twitter is the appropriate forum for your message.

And you can’t really get around the content quality issue. If you’re not creating stuff that people care about, there’s really not much point in creating it, no matter what mechanism you use to deliver that content.

It’s not that FaceBook isn’t useful or doesn’t allow me to keep up with people — it’s actually been quite useful for that. I’ve reconnected with people that I would have never had the chance to meet up with again otherwise, which has been fun. It’s also fun to check out people’s pictures and connections and see who knows who.

My problem with FaceBook is that I can’t really keep up with the messages and notifications. A long time ago I just assigned all FaceBook messages a particular priority in my email (which essentially is ‘I will never actually look at this’). Instead, I occasionally log in to FaceBook to see if I have any messages — which I often do. I then have a ton of non-personal invites to things (like associations’ groups I belong to on FaceBook, don’t ask me why), which I try to ignore.

Mingled in with these are messages from actual people that I’d like to hear from. Unfortunately, there are sometimes actual, real, time-sensitive (think invitations to real things, not ‘association’ auto-invites) things that I’ve missed. I then sit around pondering why I have FaceBook at all if I’m never going to actually log in.

I suppose having a FaceBook account provides people I know with a reasonable expectation that I’ll log in regularly and check my messages. So I’m going to give this FaceBook thing another shot — I’m going to try to respond more regularly to FaceBook messages. And to anyone I’ve ever not responded to on FaceBook — it’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, I’m just terrible at actually logging in.

And if that doesn’t work, I may have to seriously consider just unFaceBooking.

As part of my new responsibilities, I’m in Nashville, Tennessee for the week. I’m pretty blown away by how friendly everyone is in this city — very nice. I’ll be back in Toronto tomorrow after my last day here.