beatnic - just wondering

• BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Twins reunited, after 35 years apart
  To separate at birth… right or wrong? Interesting ethical dilemma to kick off the new year.

  “They share an easy intimacy that belies the fact that identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein spent their first 35 years in total ignorance of the o

  (tags: twins nurture nature ethics biology twinstudies)

A week offline (well just about anyway) and google reader is telling me I have over 3000 unread items…

So I have just hit the “Mark all as read” button.

For a brief moment, my google reader is empty. I can’t remember the last time it was empty.

I wonder what I’ve missed.

Using a combination of different techniques I’ve been managing to keep my email inbox empty for several months now. But that “space” soon became filled with unread items in my RSS subscriptions.

It’ll be interesting to see which bits start filling up first. My “news” (whatever that means these days) tag is the most obvious candidate.

Apparently I have 189 subscriptions. And that’s after a bit of tidying up. Of those, there are only a few that I really hope will have new items each time I check - and they’re virtually all written by people I’ve met.

I’m back online after a week of photosynthesis and I find Twitter is down for quite a while for maintenance.

I wonder if this means people are actually having to talk to each other.

In very short sentences.

If you have five minutes to spare, Elliott Masie wants to know.

Philippe Starck does his turn at TED.

Don’t look up, it’s a trap.

[Via Richard Sambrook]

Bill Ives at FastForward blog writes about how the software company Serena has adopted Facebook as its corporate intranet.

They’re using it to take their 800 global employees through a big change programme. They’ve created a few custom apps that staff can use in their private network on Facebook. Apparently it’s boosted staff morale.

This is good news. Not because Facebook is the answer, but because it’s getting people thinking about the possibilities of intranets and moving the conversation on.

Much research has been done and the number one thing people want their intranet to help them with is finding other people.

What better way to help people find each other and the answers to their questions than by focusing the intranet - or rather the digital workspace - around people.

This very much fits in with my model which I call the DNA of the digital workspace - more on this soon - which places people at the centre of getting our work done.

Before the internet, dying was a simple business.

What you said, wrote, created in your lifetime lived on in people’s memories, passed down the generations and turned to myth. And sometimes these had more tangible manifestations, in letters, books, works of art, buildings and of course children.

Nowadays more and more of us have digital identities, and in many cases multiple digital identities. Every time we create a new profile on a website we’re creating another instance of ourselves, sometimes who we are, sometimes who we want to be.

What happens to all those accounts we’ve set up, frozen in virtual time?

What will your virtual legacy be? What will your last blog post say? Your final tweet on Twitter? Was it your turn in Scrabulous? Will your Flickr photographs gradually fade and curl at the edges?

Should we, as a friend of mine wondered, put all our login and password information in our will? And what then?

Someone once asked “If you died, how many of your Facebook friends would come to your funeral?”

Rather morbid, but they had a point.

I said “How would they know I’d died? I wouldn’t be able to update my status.

Talking about this - on Facebook - with a friend recently. They added:

Yes, I’ve often wondered whether I should include my logins and passwords in my will. Same goes for blogs. Then my heirs could put a message on my status saying something like, “XXXX is still dead” or suchlike and create a facebook event for my funeral — also announcing the fact that I would be attending. Although, would I really?

Yesterday about thirty Intranetters (thanks to Andrew for pointing me towards the yahoo group) got together in central London.

It was a really good event - a kind of intranets anonymous. Big thanks to Simon Hill and Rod McLean for their warts’n'all stand-up routines. It certainly seemed quite a cathartic experience for all involved. Intranutters.

This morning a text message arrived from Twitter. I’m tracking the word “intranet” - more on subject-tracking in twitter here. It was none other than Richard Hare, yesterday’s whistle-blower and one of our hosts.

We touched on Sharepoint and accessibility, or rather the lack of it. Maybe we should set up the SHarepoint Accessibility Group - a self-help sub-group of Intranetters.

Some questions from the event…

1. If you could build an intranet from scratch, what would you start with? And what would you tell people it was for?
2. What are the best prizes to offer if you’re running a competition on your global intranet?
3. Management won’t allow blogging because it might encourage cyberbullying. Where do you start?
4. Is there a precedent in UK law (or any other country for that matter) where a company has been taken to court for an intranet not meeting DDA accessibility requirements?

Just wondering…

• BBC NEWS | Technology | Factfile: XO laptop
  (tags: olpc laptop xo)