Mar 26, 2009 | blog
Several years ago (okay, more than a decade) there was a great keynote speech by James Burke at ACM 97 where he talked about ‘The Next 50 Years of Computing’. Now, if you’ve seen James Burke’s Connections series, you know what he’s good at. Describing the intertwining relationships of time, technology, and happenstance.
Here, a decade or so later, I’ve been thinking how true those words are. At the time, Windows 95 was still new, Microsoft Outlook was in it’s initial ‘1.0’ release, and the browser wars of Netscape vs. Internet Explorer were on, and Google was still a dream to be developed. Back then, I was waist deep in technology as a Novell NetWare and then Windows NT “expertâ€, and loving it. It was all about connecting computers together, and getting businesses connected to the Internet. Email and ICQ were HOT.
Fast forward a decade, and so much has changed. Where cell phones were a luxury that businesses could barely afford to sponsor, they’re now the de facto communication device of nearly all of us (who needs a land line). Why have browser wars when you can have 5 to choose from that all have a spot on your Start Menu? Where we used to pay upwards of $30/month for 56k dialup access, today most folks pay about that much for about 100 times that speed. Heck, we have faster connections on our cell phones than we did at home back then. GPS was a nifty gadget where you could plot waypoints to your favorite fishing hole; today, we have full-on navigation packages built into our vehicles to guide us anywhere. The list is endless.
The point I’m getting at is the change all these things have made to our culture. We’ve brought the concepts of democratization to technologies and industries that we used to think impenetrable. Through citizen journalism and social media, we’ve toppled once powerful institutions. We’ve squeezed huge entertainment companies to the point that they lash out at their own customers because they can’t find a new business model. The people of the United States felt they had a real voice that was listened to in the selection of their latest President.
All this is through the incredible advancements in technology that changes our culture.
A decade ago in that keynote by James Burke, he talked about how developed countries were 50 years ahead of underdeveloped countries, and how this pattern would repeat into the future. I believe we’ve sped up the process and are much farther down that path than we believe. We are living in a future that our parents could never have dreamt of. We have the opportunities available to us at the touch of an iPhone that a decade ago weren’t thought possible.
My question then, is what will you do with the advantage of living in the future?
Photo credit: Hometown Invasion Tour
As a note, if you follow the link to the ACM97 slide deck and videos, I just want to point out that it was compiled a long time ago and is not as polished as we see today on YouTube. Just remember that as you go through it. It’s still a great presentation, by a master at telling stories of history and technology. Oh, and I did try to find it elsewhere without luck.
Mar 21, 2009 | blog
It’s been there for awhile, quite awhile really. I’ve been able to ignore it for the most part, though it is getting a bit old.
I’m talking about those MLM types, thinking they can gain some advantage through sheer following numbers on Twitter. Fancy schemes to gain thousands of new followers in 48 hours or less.
What purpose does this serve? If your tweets/following percentage can’t even break 1%, why are you there? Why would I even care? Why are you gaming my account and others? We can see through what you’re trying to do.
Do you want to know why?
Like a bad 70’s disco LP, stuck in the past. Singing the same tune like so many previous polyester leisure suit wearing, used-car salesman before you. Am I stereotyping? Gee, sorry – there’s a reason for it. Your last-century marketing efforts are lost in the reality of the 21st century. You might as well try selling toothbrushes door to door for all the good your Twitter account does.
Take your glossy commercials with pop stars, your shiny hummer, that damn inflatable Gorilla, delete your spam account and start over. We’re not buying it.
Photo credit: Sunfrog1
Mar 20, 2009 | blog
I’ve been an IT guy for a darn long time, and as I’ve said before, it was a great career. I’m sure I’ll revisit it from time to time – I’m too much a tech-geek to abandon it completely. One thing I know from experience is that IT is many times a bigger bottleneck than we tend to admit. So as I move into new areas as an advocate for and a professional in social media I understand the issues from both sides of the fence.
Some folks scoff at how IT always seems to pull the security card on attempts to do new, inventive, creative things. It’s but one of many things that corporate IT departments have to consider when someone brings up something new. Other things can range from support costs (obviously) to recovering from disasters. New systems really do consist of much more than just buying and installing software.
Interestingly, it’s not always management in IT that causes the roadblock. In fact, IT leadership is often well equipped to be advocates of change in the organization. Even with tight budgets, IT is almost always looking to help position the company for growth. However, remember they’re biggest responsibility is to maintain existing systems and provide a secure, reliable environment.
So the question is then, how can you get IT to be interested and prioritize your project?
The answer is to get them involved early. Very early. In fact, they should be among your first stops when you’re looking for supporters and stakeholders. What usually happens with many a project is that the technology aspect get’s pulled in way too late for the project’s original timeline. All this does is turn it into another firedrill project with folks working long hours and weekends to make it happen.
However, if you get IT involved at the beginning, they’ll help with estimating real costs. They’ll help figure out realistic timelines. They will be a key part of making your project succeed.
Contrary to what you may think, Information Technology isn’t just about databases, operating systems and all the computers in the office, they too get excited about learning new things. The realization that social media, and new ways of doing business is important to them too.
Photo credit: Great Beyond
Mar 17, 2009 | blog
It’s been an interesting week or so. I’ve again learned that my perception of social media is just one of many interpretations.
What is this socialization of media anyway but a simpler means of collaborating upon work with peers from differing backgrounds. Social media, really, is a movement and not technology. The technology and tools are simply enablers.
While we explorers of social media out on the Internet talk about transparency, and openness, businesses are struggling to figure out how to get involved but be able to balance all the parts that are important to them. Some will say this is the problem, that there are too many layers in your average corporation that get in the way.
That may be true, but we also have to remember all the parties involved in that corporation we like to lump in with so many others. The needs of the shareholders, the responsibilities to the consumer, proprietary technology or processes, responsibilities to it’s work force, legal liabilities, risk of damage to a valuable brand, and the need to be a good corporate citizen.
These are all things that an established organization needs to take into account, and it doesn’t even begin to touch on internal power struggles and political plays, or the resistance to change that the majority of corporate workers embrace. One look a the newspaper industry in the United States can give you a glimpse of the worst-case possibilities of all this. They recognized the need for change too late, but your average corporation isn’t quite as blind as that, they just have a lot to juggle to be able to come to the table to play the game.
So as we compare decades-old companies to a couple year old startup when it comes to participation in social media, it really comes down to perceptions of what’s right and what’s wrong.
What’s your perception as you work with older organizations under the theme of social media?
Photo credit: Ezu
Mar 1, 2009 | blog
Spending a week with a different operating system on my laptop is like learning a new religion. It’s intensely interesting, insightful, a true learning experience! Ultimately it teaches one what they took for granted about the things they already knew and cherished.
So I spent a refreshing week on the linux side of the operating system fence last week. In the end, I had to come back to Windows. It wasn’t the operating system, it wasn’t the software, it wasn’t the stability, nor was it any of the big things that people run into when trying to run any flavor of linux.
Instead, it was the little things – very little things. Like not having the play/pause, and volume buttons on my laptop not work with the media player. Or the media player not playing WMA files by default without a trip to the command line to make it work – yeah it matters, I have 15GB of tunes in WMA that I’m not re-encoding.
I ran into a number of things that simply needed a little tweak or manual intervention. Any one of them nothing at all a real problem. All the really important things just simply worked. For example, I didn’t have to find one single driver for my laptop hardware for Ubuntu 8.10 – it all worked out of the box. My favorite Firefox plug-ins, and therefore my main work environment, were all set up in the same amount of time that it takes on Windows – and worked just as expected. Email was set up in Evolution quickly and, again, just worked.
No, it was all the little things that added up made me decide I still needed to be running Windows. I’m less a “techy†person than I have been in the past, and while it’s fun to try new things, and experiment, I need a system that I don’t have to think about or fight with. I need something that simply works on every level at any point, and for me, Windows is that system.
So I’ll test Windows 7 a bit and then go back to Windows Vista until Win7 is released later this year.
Feb 27, 2009 | blog
Since Twitter is the current social media darling, I thought I’d record a few thoughts I’ve had about one of my favorite online tools. I’ve had the privilege of using Twitter for two years, and each and every person I’ve followed or had follow me along the way has taught me something new. So here we go.
Twitter is…
- a place for friends
- a news outlet
- a place to share your greatest failures & your most stunning achievements
- an attention getter
- a publishing platform
- a customer service tool
- a researcher’s dream
- vulgar
- the ace up your sleeve
- brilliant
- a new entertainment channel
- a social network
- a micro-blogging platform
- a marketing tool
- your community
- overwhelming
- 24x7x365 (always on)
- a level playing field for your ideas
- a sounding board for your thoughts
- a comment reel for your new book
- your starting place for your online excursions
- the place for your organization to learn about it’s customers
- a multicasting instant messenger
- a game changer
- a PR tool
- a messaging infrastructure
- a simple way to share & trade information
- can be inane
- is faster to publish to than anything else
- is where you go to learn
- your online “water coolerâ€
- a conduit into the lives of others
- a conduit into the idea stream of smart people
I’ve got a lot more input on what Twitter is than I could fit in this post, so I’ll work on fitting that into another format of some type. What is Twitter to you? I mean, what has Twitter brought to your life that you can’t believe you lived without before you discovered it?
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rickmahn
