beatnic - just wondering

Ever since I saw them and started using them I could see that if we had Delicious, Technorati and Bloglines on our intranet it would change the way we work and our perception of what an intranet is.

It’s something I’ve been presenting on at events recently to fellow intranet professionals.

There are so many reasons why this is important and exciting. Here are three:

• it takes the intranet to the next level and beyond the “firewall” - covering the web, the stuff you can see through your browser (whether it’s hosted internally or externally)
• teams, projects, communities of interest, communities of practice have new ways to share information, including bookmarks
• potentially fascinating (and useful) insight available from the tag-clouds that start to appear, an organic topology of interests and a real-time overview of what an organisation is thinking and maybe even which way it’s going

Thanks to Chris Tubb for sending me a link to this article by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr of IBM about the excellent sounding stuff they’ve been up to in this field.

After a flying visit to Copenhagen, I was piecing together a lego helicopter with my three-year-old and telling him about Legoland coming from Denmark.

After a moment he looked at me and asked: “If I go there will I stick to it?”

• Content management solutions: Gerry McGovern
  (tags: intranet intranets gerrymcgovern contentmanagement cms content mcgovern)

Interesting article by Bill Thompson on what happened when he blogged about a meeting he was invited to. Here’s an excerpt:

Those who would like to control the free flow of information, whether they are organising invitation-only events or running the government in a closed society, need to realise the significance of this change.

The blogosphere has shifted the boundary between private and public, and made it much, much easier for anyone who desires it to engage in the public sphere.

If I had been acting maliciously then I could, of course, have set up a new Gmail account, created a Blogger identity using it and then posted my report anonymously.

I suspect that this would not have worked since I was the only person with a laptop in the room, but normally it would have been effective.

Our normal assumptions about what is and is not public, or about the proper limits on how widely we should share the things we see or hear or learn, no longer apply, but we have yet to figure out a new set of norms.

We need to do something about this, and fast, because otherwise we’ll see more slips of the keyboard like the one I made.

Read the full article on BBC News.

Greetings and welcome to the safe and nice city of Mediocrity where challenge and honesty are illegal, and we celebrate the power of safe niceness. There are no threats here, no troubles born of confrontation or challenge.

Please conduct yourself in a pleasant, non-threatening manner during your visit to our city. Please do not display any positive or negative extremes of emotion. If you must criticise anything please do so in a calm, diluted way and deliver your views in a non-challenging manner.

Have a “nice” time in our city!

Remember our motto: Equality is ultimately based on mediocrity

And whatever you do, don’t say what you really think!

• Web Site Metadata Strategies and Guidelines
  (tags: metadata)

• Flickr: Photos tagged with socialsoftware
  (tags: socialsoftware flickr photos clusters)
• Flickr: Photos tagged with socialcomputing
  (tags: socialcomputing flickr interesting)
• kintya: technology | entrepreneurship | design: Why Web 2.0 in the enterprise makes sense?
  (tags: yadda)

• Charlene Li’s Blog: Forrester’s corporate blogging solutions evaluation, Part 1
  (tags: blogging corporateblogging socialcomputing)

The term “social” is derived from the Latin word “socius”, which as a noun means “an associate, ally, business partner or comrade” and in the adjectival form socialis refers to “a bond between people” (such as marriage) or to their collective or connected existence.

Source: Wikipedia

Why Do Taggers Tag?
Recognition
Low self-esteem
Peer recognition
For recognition; a distorted view of “fame”
See it in the community and want to try it too

Via Vandal Watch: Stopping Vandalism in Your Neighborhood via Boing Boing!

They were in a primary school classroom our team painted today.

Newt Arrester was where my journey started.

After a minor delay at Hawthorn-Hero-Ill, I wound up down Bowel Mind way.

For a while Queer Spank was where I got off, though some call it Ink Blur and others (estate agents mainly) Lava Media. That was after Blather Month.

I work between Trek Beakers and Otter Bends, but you could also use Strange Perk.

[All thanks to the London Underground anagram map, via Synesthesia].

You just have to see these amazing photos.

Brilliant!

[Via The Obvious?]

Google’s new Desktop 3 will let Google store files from your hard disk

I already use gmail, so Google has my email and search history, but I think this would feel like too many of my eggs in someone else’s basket.

Ant sums it up nicely

With new and astute technical leadership, the company has begun the steady march to rebuild the infrastructure - readying it for faster development. But, culture is slower to change than code. We still tend to operate with the same deliberate, beaurocratic attitude. Change is hard for any company and it never comes quickly or without a few shocks to the system. We are receiving those shocks by way of a few ‘initiative projects’ by senior managment setting an example. With these I’m observing an interesting dynamic, something not totally dissimilar to post 9/11 USA where those who dared question the wisdom of the government were painted as ‘unpatriotic’. When culture needs to change and the agents of that change encounter resistance to it, they’ll toughen their stance to see their will enacted. Subordinates who wish to avoid lambasting (and gain political capital) make ‘yes’ their favorite word… and those that challenge the new “wisdom” are deemed ‘old guard’ and bypassed.

For those taking the leap, and anyone else considering it, from designer Jon Hicks, some words of inspiration and a helpful note on photocopying VAT returns!

Its been wonderful, and I don’t think I could go back to work for someone else, but why didn’t anyone tell me:

1. You would be working A LOT. More than you thought.
2. That dealing with emails, quotes and enquiries would be more time-consuming than doing the accounts
3. That you have to keep a photocopy of each VAT return – not just a printout from your accounting software, but of the actual return. Whoops.
4. That strange distant mumbling is the sound of you talking to yourself.
5. That in the first couple of months I would be so nervous and lacking in confidence that I would be sick.

Never mind, I soon found out.

This public information film via Kathy Sierra’s superb Creating Passionate Users

• Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web :: UXmatters
  (tags: ux userexperience web design applicationdesign informationdesign)

It may be old school, but I prefer to hold the door open for someone and follow rather than going first and letting it close in their face.

So when it comes to revolving doors that you have to push to get through…

Should I go first (against my old school ways) and push or let the other person go first and therefore have to do the pushing?

According to the official site of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club:

It is the day that the Groundhog comes out of his hole after a long winter sleep to look for his shadow.

If he sees it, he regards it as an omen of six more weeks of bad weather and returns to his hole.

If the day is cloudy and, hence, shadowless, he takes it as a sign of spring and stays above ground.

They even made a film about it in 1993 starring Bill Murray.