Musings

General thoughts on things

Musings

Architectural Principles for Enterprise Social Software

We are considering implementing some Social Software so have drafted a series of Architectural Principles to help govern the planning for this. I tweeted on this and was followed up by @IdoNotes asking if I was willing to share these, so here they are. I’d really welcome any feedback,

Musings

Value Chain for Information — The Movie!

Two ideas have converged. Elias Bizannes wrote about the Value Chain for Information which I have been thinking about, then I saw Sacha Chua’s Web2.0 @ Work which was done with a Nintendo DS and got really excited about wanting to make something similar. The main difference is I

Musings

Refactor your life step 6 — Interoperate

Oh what a tangled web we weave… — Sir Walter Scott Ok, so perhaps I’m not practicing to decieve (the full quote is “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to decieve”), but still, the web is tangled regardless.I posted on Why Enterprises are Sucker-punched

Musings

Refactor your life step 5 — Evolve

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection — Charles Darwin Survival of the fittest — evolve, weed out and select your on-line services with vigour and rigour. Try them but if they don’t work, ditch them. If you

Musings

Why Enterprises are sucker-punched by Web2.0

Would you like to buy the Brooklyn bridge? I was reflecting on some internal conversations around blogs a couple of days ago, and it really struck home that Enterprises haven’t really “got” blogs as one example only. “What!” you cry. We have a blog, that our (insert marketing / managing

Musings

Is data portability important for the enterprise?

Gia Lyons tweeted “[can someone tell me] the value of the data portability movement for enterprises, i mean. Not consumer sites”.I thought I’d put my thoughts down here, not least because I know that Elias Bizannes and Chris Saad, both players in the Dataportability movement occasionally stumble across

Musings

Refactor your life step 4 — be you

Reputation is character minus what you’ve been caught doing — Michael Iapoce On-line you can be who you want to be, however I think most regular bloggers will agree that reputations are built and enhanced by interacting with people who aren’t afraid to be themselves, rather than hiding behind

Musings

The Enterprise of 2010 (plus)

The debate around Web 2.0 Vs Enterprise 2.0 etc. is an interesting one. Ultimately though, these are tags for concepts. An interesting question is what does an Enterprise 2.0 actually look like. Can we describe explicitly the functions, features, capabilities, staff, management style etc. that all build

Musings

Refactor your life step 3 — blogs

This one is short and sweet.Update your blog software AND template. Do it. Do it now. And if you use a hosted platform like Blogger, laugh out loud at those of us who don’t but need to keep this step in mind.I’ve been using my favourite

Musings

Refactor your life step 2 — mail

Time to deal with that pesky e-mail. Actually this is one that I *mostly* have under control, but I think there are a couple of valuable tips. Depending on how you approach your e-mail, your mileage will vary.Broadly, there are four different types of e-mail you can have: 1.

Musings

Re-factor your life step 1

There are many places one can begin, but for me the first step in the journey is my internet browser. For various reasons (not least because we still use it at work) I’ve stuck with IE6. I played with version 1 of Firefox, but the performance was terrible and

Musings

Is Battlefield Heroes the model of the future?

Regular readers (and apologies to you all for my inconistent posting of late) will know that I have an Enterprise bent for which I make little to no apology. Those that know me personally will also know that I am a regular gamer. So talking about the upcoming Battlefield Heroes

Musings

Is social software selfish software?

I spent a great couple of days this week discussing ideas around Social Software with some people who are researching, developing and thinking about it. A lot has been discussed under a blanket NDA however so unfortunately no names or product mentioned here.A really interesting comment that came up

Musings

Model of Web2.0 for the Enterprise

This is something that’s been consuming my thinking recently. I believe quite strongly that tools like Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks and others clearly represent real value for the enterprise. But I also believe that there is a gap at the moment, the tools haven’t crossed the divide from

Musings

Web 2.0 — Making the Implicit Explicit.

I’ve just returned from LotusSphere 2008 and had a great time. While the presentations and demos are interesting, I found the most insightful part of the time there was spent in the Innovation and Development labs talking with developers about the advances they are making. In the Innovation lab

Musings

Visualising (visualizing) e-mail

After my previous post, I’ve been doing some further research on Visual Mail interfaces. Of course, like all things Internet, spelling matters. Once I started to use US spelling instead of British, my hit rates went up.I’ve found several papers, some more “academic” than the previous post,

Musings

Build a better mail experience

There is something appealing in this visual mail interface anymails from Carolin Horn and Florian Jennet. As someone who gets large amounts of e-mail every day, a new way of processing information is a great idea. I consider myself naturally “visual” so perhaps I just “get this”, but I think

Musings

Steam engine time

I’ve been reading the “Science of the Discworld” series and enjoying the immensely. The science (for me at least) is fairly hard core and stretches my brain cells a fair bit, and I love anything by Terry Pratchett anyway — it makes a great combination.A concept that is referred

Musings

1000 Monkeys Clicking Cameras

A resurgance once again in the local press about the wisdom, or lack of it, in crowds. I’ve posted here about this a little, and that was added to very eloquently by Chris Saad of Particle who pointed out that media is additive. There is place for both wise

Musings

The gatekeeper Vs. the storming hordes

Bernard Lunn commented on my last post  that when it comes to Enterprises and Start-Ups, we are thinking along similar lines.  His second post on his blog B2B media 2.0 and globalization is a well thought out discussion along similar lines, but with some minor differences

Musings

What start-ups should know about Enterprises…

…and why start-ups should want to play with them. Chris commented on my “Are you hearing me? Who needs a new metric post?” regarding my position that an Attention gathering standard (and more specifically an Attention Engine) would be ideal for Enterprises. He made the valid points that

Musings

Are you hearing me? Who needs a new metric?

Chris posted on the need for a new metric which could supplement traditional page-view metrics.I’m going to add to the call-to-arms from the Enterprise point of view. The ability to understand not just what people click on, but the attention they give to elements of the new,

Musings

The Rich — Poor Vs. the Poor — Rich.

I’ve had my Nokia 6233 phone for about 6 months now. Recently I’ve been wanting to buy an iPOD, but couldn’t really justify the extra gadget just for heading to work and back. Anyway, in conversation with someone at work, they mentioned they’d been

Musings

If building architects had to work like IT architects.

I was sent the following by a friend with the above title, I’ve tried to source it, but while many have quoted it (here is one), I can’t find who to attribute it to. Originally it referred to programmers or web designers. Although this is the first time

Musings

Syndication in the Enterprise — it’s not all about you

The pressure is on to find an RSS / News solution for the Enterprise. But it’s not coming from the users (I think this is because users that want RSS just install their own client anyway).Every time it’s been raised internally in the last couple of years