digitalquery

RSS isn't dead.

2009-01-14T16:14:51Z

Marshal Kirkpatrick over at RWW proclaims that Enterprise RSS has died. Taking a closer look at the post reveals some basic misunderstandings of RSS and how it's being used by organisations.

First up, what he is really talking about is that RSS reader uptake within the enterprise is very low. If we narrowly define RSS reader as a separate single function application (whether desktop or browser based), then I'd probably accept that - installing new software is hard within a lot of orgs (for various reasons), and who really, apart from hard core information fetishists, needs yet another hosepipe of information ?

However, it's a long leap to equate the lack of uptake of RSS readers (as narrowly defined above) with the death of Enterprise RSS, because the two are *not* necessarily correlated.

When I had my all too brief stint at Headshift, we (and I'm going to say we, because I think I was in the room when this was being discussed - and was definitely in the building somewhere), worked out that within an organsation, RSS was the transport layer for information, upon which all sorts of amazing social, collaborative, filtered applications could be envisaged.

And that still remains the case - from what I see, increasingly, RSS is being offered as a data transfer protocol, or a wire protocol, allowing information to be taken from one source, mashed up, munged or left alone, and reused and redisplayed somwhere else - a dashboard, a custom built application that has information display as one of its features. In many cases, no one using the system is even aware that RSS is being used , or what it is. And that's fine - they don't need to.

And there's more. I'm doing some work for a PCT - a part of the NHS responsible for delivering services to local people In conversations with partner organisations, the following phrases occur often and naturally:

"We'll supply an RSS feed of news items, you can take that and use it if you want"

"Can you give us an RSS feed of your events so we can add it to our health section"

So, RSS is being used as a transport layer between organisations, allowing simple pubish and subscribe mechanisms to move information around with little additional effort. I'd call that a very significant use of RSS in the enterprise.

So - is RSS dead ? Hell no - it just stopped being an overt feature and became part of the plumbing instead.

Social Networks as a retention mechanism

2008-09-18T13:04:33Z

Thought this was very interesting. Shel Holtz being interviewed by Ron Shewchuk

Question #2: Which company do you think does internal communications best, and why?
Shel: I'm reluctant to pick "the best," because there are a lot of companies whose internal communication programs I haven't seen. That said, I've always been impressed with the communications at Best Buy. It's open and candid. It promotes business literacy. It uses multiple channels. And they're always open to new ideas. Not too long ago, for instance, they introduced the Blue Shirt Nation, a social network for retail workers accessible over the World Wide Web. It has become a force of nature. Twenty percent of retail workers have created profiles. Turnover in the retail workforce is about 75%, but among those with BSN profiles, it has dropped to 8%. These are engaged employees with a solid network of colleagues they would have to abandon if they left.#

via For your Approval

That sounds pretty conclusive, but it's possible that it's only the employees that are engaged and motivated anyway who are joining Blue Shirt Nation. It would be great to identify a control group that share similar engaged characteristics to see what the difference in turnover is.

Thinking about this some more (what - you expect me to think *before* I post ??), maybe it doesn't matter. We *know* that engaged employees are less likely to leave, and if we can provide more places for them to communicate and network, thus deepening and broadening their engagement with the organisation, and, more importantly, their peers, then we're doing a good thing - regardless of whether the place is virtual or real.

iMT

2008-09-01T13:11:47Z

Time to dust the cobwebs off my blog and get it going again.

The iPhone plugin for MT is pretty sweet - using it now for this post.

Your intranet app...

2008-03-25T08:47:00Z

Having spent a fair amount of time consulting on intranets and internal applications, as well as being on the receiving end as a user, one thing that's *almost* invariably true is the following...

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/

14 (now 18) alternatives and additions to basecamp.

2008-03-20T13:34:15Z

I was looking around for some alternatives to Basecamp, and was pretty surprised to see that there are a ton of alternatives out there. So naturally a list is the way forward.

No recommendations yet, and not all of these are Basecamp replacments - Harvest and ClockingIt, for example, could be seen as complimentary.

Goplan
Unfuddle
OnStage
Harvest (time tracking and invoicing)
TeamWorkLive
ActionThis
5pm
DeskAway
Collabtrak
ActiveCollab (self hosted)
ProjectPier (fork of older version of ActiveCollab, selfhosted, opensource)
ClockingIt (timetracking, opensource)
Lighthouse
Copper
Wrike
Intervals
Central Desktop
Huddle

Technorati Tags: basecamp, projectmanagement

IABC Commonwealth Chapter

2008-02-23T12:48:00Z

Despite the waves of jetlag that ocassionally threaten to leave me faceplanted on a table, I'm having fun here in San Antonio.

As is the case in all conferences, the true value is always in the people you meet,rather than the conference itself, and I've been having a blast hanging out with some irreverently like-minded people from down-under - Adrian Copley (Copley Communications), Anna Kominik (Ideas Shop) and Amanda Boland Curran (Acid), - who are a lot of fun, as well as being smart and experienced comms professionals. What's especially pleasing is that they're switched on to the way that social media is changing and cascading through the communications sector - and not in a lemming-like follow the herd way, but with an appreciation of how social tools can benefit an organisation if handled properly.

A few margaritas have been drunk, and lots of interesting conversations have been had. Their english isn't bad, and I've been pleased that we've been able to communicate pretty well, only occasionally needing to resort to sign language to get the message across ;-)

In San Antonio

2008-02-21T15:30:27Z

I'm in San Antonio for the next few days, attending the IABC Leadership Institute Conference, thanks to the IABC UK. As the new IABC UK webmaster I'm mainly here to meet with the IABC web team and discuss some exciting work they've been carrying out to provide some templates to chapter sites to create up to date websites based on Wordpress. Looking forward to seeing what they've done, and also to revamping the existing IABC UK site.

I've also been roped in (obligatory cattle and cowboys reference, seeing that I'm Texas) to a panel this afternoon organised by the San Antonio chapter, talking about International Communications Trends. Needless to say, I'm going to spend my bits talking about social media!

Looking forward to an interesting few days, as well as seeing a bit of San Antonio, a town I visited for the first and only time 20 years ago.

This scares me...

2008-02-11T13:59:50Z

Omar Shahine is a program manager on hotmail, and a pretty clued up person. Which is why his latest blog post scares me silly.

That is what I found this evening. I believe that some one managed to issue a password reset command to my account and then somehow logged in and reset my password essentially owning my data.

and this

update: my account just got hijacked again, minutes ago. Also so did my GMail account.
I have no idea WTF is going on here. I have only used one computer this entire time.

Seriously scary stuff, and this for a guy who is pretty technical and also highly connected with people who can help.

Alarmed by this - I had a quick check of my own situation - my stuff is pretty well backed up - to a NAS point for local backup, and then to Amazon's S3 via JungleDisk. My GMail is regularly downloaded to Thunderbird via IMAP. But the thought of someone getting access to my Google account makes me break out in a cold sweat.

So - what do I do to make sure I'm as secure as I can be ?

Check my Google password is long and strong. (Yes - 20 chars, mix of letters, digits and symbols)

Vow never to connect to anything sensitive 'in the clear', especially over public WiFi.

When sensitive information (especiallly login details) is to be exchanged always connect via https (https:/mail.google.com/mail).Check your desktop and especially your laptop that this is the case. Check your bookmarks.
Set up an account with a VPN provider to use to connect through (and make sure you use it)
Use something like a 3G modem to bypass public wifi competely (but still connect via https). I have one (from Three), and it's great as a ADSL backup and also for travelling - no more £5.95 for 1 hour's unsecure internet access for me !

Make sure you have a personal question that is non-obvious (don't do date of birth, mother's maiden name etc). If your provider doesn't allow you to have a non-obvious question, then change, or don't store anything of value in there.

Make sure you are backed up, and that your backups work. I know this is one of those things that everyone says, but really, do it. You have no idea how much of a comfort it is when you know that all your really important info is backed up in a number of different places. JungleDisk is pretty amazing for letting you just set and forget - I back up all my pictures, and documents there, as well as my partner's docs - and Jungledisk is smart enough to only upload files that are new or changed (and you can pay $1 per month to activate a service to only upload diffs to large files).

Get a good virusscanner, malware protector and firewall. Keyloggers are another source of danger - I hear a lot of reports of kids playing WoW who have had their accounts hacked via keyloggers (from programs they've downloaded). Set your firewall to alert you on any new outbound connections, and don't allow anything you don't recognise through.

These are some of the steps I've taken to protect my data - I hope I've covered most of the obvious attack vectors (ooh knowledgeable do I sound !). So far I haven't had my accounts hacked, but past activity is no guarantee of future performance.

Running MovableType's PublishQueue

2008-02-03T11:03:19Z

Movable Type's PublishQueue has some memory leakage, and running in daemon mode (for quicker response to rebuilds) highlights this problem.

So the solution (where solution = not particularly pretty workaround) is to run PQ under daemontools as per this writeup by Byrne Reese. This sets up a monitor which constantly scans for the PQ job and restarts it if it's not there.

Then create a cronjob that kills PQ every hour or so, using pkill

*/15 * * * * pkill -SIGINT run-periodic

So, in this example, the cronjob runs pkill every 15 minutes and kills any processes that contain 'run-periodic' in their name (run-periodic-tasks is the perl script that runs the PublishQueue workers).

The svscan process (part of the daemontools suite) notices instantly (within milliseconds) that the PQ task isn't running, and starts it up and memory is back to normal.

Now, this obviously isn't ideal, but the 6A guys (and some of the more Perl aware ~~parts~~ members (!) of the community) are well aware of the problem, and are looking at how to fix the leaky bits, as well as make the whole thing run better and faster. In the meantime, this is working well for me.

[Update - 6A have acknowledged the memory leaks issue in the latest MT 4.1 release notes and have advised that PublishQueue not be run in daemon mode, or with FastCGI - both of which are fairly essential. My workaround is even more valid now.

Also note the addition of the SIGINT signal to the pkill command - this is a less forceful shutdown and was recommended to me in the #movabletype IRC channel]

Smarta launches site

2008-01-31T14:39:44Z

Smarta is an interesting new venture aimed at supporting entrepreneurs and helping them access the tools and information they need at various stages of the journey.

The site was launched today - it's a microsite for now, but will be enhanced dramatically over the coming months by the lovely people over at Splendid, and also features a blog built by me at digitalquery .

Lovely people to work with, and I'm sure this will be a really valuable resource, especially for those of us starting up.

Aggregate Me!

2008-01-30T19:52:14Z

I started this post over a year and a half ago, and it's languished as a draft in 3 different pieces of software (LiveWriter, WordPress and Movable Type), but today feels like a very good day to dust off the cobwebs and unleash it onto the world. (Although, actually, I only got one line into it before saving it as a draft...). Anyway, without further ado, the post - such as it was !

JP Ragaswami points to Tara Hunt talking about aggregating her bits and pieces strewn over the web.

So - why post now ? Well - in the last year and a half, many personal aggregation / lifestreaming services have sprung up, but today (and the reason I've finally gotten round to doing something with this post), SixApart released Action Streams - a quite excellent personal aggregation plugin for Movable Type 4. Byrne Reese also blogged about it over on majordojo.

Installing the plugin adds a simple interface for adding your activity from other sites, with prebuilt support for the most popular. It's a relatively straightforward process, although the template changes might put off people with no experience of MT, but 10 minutes of template changes was all it took for me to get my lifestream on this site - check it out here. You do need to be able to run a scheduled task to get it to update - but that shouldn't be an issue for any decent host.

Pretty simple, and plays nicely with the Universal Template Set. There's some good stuff coming out of SixApart right now, and it feels like MT is on a bit of a roll.

Movable Type 4.1

2008-01-25T13:02:11Z

I've just moved this site from Wordpress over to the latest build of Movable Type 4.1, using the new Universal Templates.

I've also decided to retire my old blog - scalefree, and have imported all the content across to here - I'll be redirecting everything from scalefree shortly.

MT4.1 really rocks - and the new template set mechanism will allow for Wordpress-like easy styling - and enabled me to get this complete site up and running in a couple of hours.

Contact me if you want more information, or if you'd like a site like this for yourself !

Mac Air and UK vs US Pricing

2008-01-16T23:14:37Z

The blogosphere and twitterverse have been dominated today by Steve Job's Macworld Keynote. Lots of speculation and anticipation beforehand, including several versions of the leaked speech. The event itself was more notable (to me anyway) for the traffic it generated, causing several well known blogs to creak and splutter under the load, and Twitter essentially went down for a few hours as it failed to cope with the pressure.

Anyhoo - the big news for me was the announcement of the Macbook Air - a lovely and incredibly thin laptop. Unfortunately, with tech hotness comes an associated price - starting at $1799 in the US and £1199 inc VAT here in the UK. Sharp intakes of breath as Macheads struggled to reconcile tech-lust with a price that was several hundred of dollars higher than the pre-keynote rumours. The pricing differential between the US and UK also came up in quite a few conversations - so I decided to work out what the cost difference really was.

Google Spreadsheets came to my aid - so here's a table showing the true cost difference - which for me means stripping out UK VAT - in the US sales tax is never mentioned or shown - it's like the dirty secret of American retail that only bites you when you come to pay at the cash till !

So - as can be seen - there isn't actually that much of a difference - if, and it's a big if, you're VAT registered. Add in the US sales tax, and the chances are that you'd actually pay more in the US than you would in the UK.

5 things you may not know about me

2007-12-29T14:00:08Z

i got tagged by Double Dubs - to my mind the best HR technology and systems blogger around. It's a shame he still has to blog anonymously, but I understand why. Anyway - here goes with 5 things you may not know about be, and certainly won't care ;)

I'm a pretty intense Liverpool FC supporter, and one of the best days of my life was being in Istanbul in May 2005 when we came back against AC Milan to win the Champions League trophy (or European Cup to give it its proper name) for the 5th time. Some pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anu/sets/382000/
10 years ago cooking for me involved pressing buttons - either on a phone or on a microwave. Now, after the support and encouragement of my partner, I like to think (in my head) that I'm ok in the kitchen. Come try my lamb..it's tenderlcious :)
I went back to India for the first time in 2 decades last Christmas and felt at home. I'm hoping to spend more time there over the next few years.
I'm planning to move to Montreal sometime in the next 12 - 18 months. My partner is Quebecois, and she's missing the snow ! Any Canadian social software agencies around ? Get in touch !
A true desert involves chocolate. There can be no argument on this :)

Who should lead Enterprise 2.0 efforts within the Enterprise ?

2007-12-27T17:12:42Z

Marcel de Ruiter asked "What corporate functions should lead in Enterprise 2.0?'.

I left the following reply:

Having HR lead an Enterprise 2.0 initiative is probably the quickest way to consign it to irrelevance and indifference. HR typically has credibility in HR and benefits – and should be focusing on that. Attraction and retention are bonuses from E2.0 – not the core benefits.

An Enterprise 2.0 initiative (which sounds unwieldy, cumbersome and committee driven, and thus doomed to fail) has to be driven from need and controlled by the people it’s trying to serve – normally those at the sharp end of the business

Now this isn't meant to denigrate HR - but most HR led systems I've seen (when I was at Mercer) are shining examples of bad usability, bad design, and ivory tower mentalities - causing employees to swear under their breath as they use click through flexible benefits systems. (This is true of most corporate driven IT systems).

So, not a good starting point to design something that should be people focused, nimble, adaptable and emergent.

[tags]HR, Enterprise 2.0, corporate, Web2.0, internal[/tags]