Posted by Randy on 10th February 2010
I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow. But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem. If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck. The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live. I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by. But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms. Anyone got an answer? Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?
Quality, a User Problem | Arc90 Blog
Facebook understands the noise problem, and that it has only been exacerbated with the prevalence of third-party application notifications. They’ve tried to solve it, but haven’t really nailed a way to determine the quality of a post.
10 Reasons Why Twitter Sucks | The Virtual Circle
After about 20 days Twitter deletes every tweet you’ve made unless you marked it as memorable. This is so sad. There are many interesting people on twitter saying, on occasion, quite memorable things. It is all being gradually lost unless there’s someone deliberately collecting it.
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Posted by Randy on 10th February 2010
How is the information technology department viewed in your organization? Too expensive, too slow, always say no, better to outsource? If any of these sound familiar then it might be time to take some lessons from The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value. Overall the book is excellent — clearly presented with plenty of real examples to illustrate the various points. I found it tough to keep my attention focused on the book, not because is was boring, but because the ideas rang so true I found myself thinking through how I might employ them in my own workplace.
I’ll only touch on a couple of ideas from the book. The first section touches on value traps — commonly held ideas that are not only wrong, but hold the It organization back from real effectiveness. For instance the notion that IT’s purpose is to deliver quality technology. Technology is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a more effective organization. IT needs to deliver solutions, not just a service. Another value trap goes along the lines of “follow our rules or we can’t guarantee it will work.” Engineers like certainty, but business leaders are often happy to settle for close enough if it gets the job done. And they will find ways to end-run IT regulations that are seen as obstructing progress and see IT as a barrier rather than enabler of progress. What IT does need to do is measure and benchmark its projects in terms of business effectiveness, and communicate that information throughout the business. The big trick is to stop thinking like a service unit and become integral the process of creating new value for the organization. Improving IT is not so much about making the IT department better, but utilizing IT to make the entire organization better. As the authors conclude:
” A small but growing group of CIOs has figured out how to show value and deliver increasing value in terms that are utterly convincing to their enterprises.”
And the lessons described in the book look to be a pretty effective place to start.
The Real Business of IT: a real value to IT executives book review
The Real Business of IT is a clear and focused look at the issue of IT value and the approaches to capture, communicate and increase that value. This book is unique in several respects. It is a book written for CIOs largely based on the experience of CIOs.
The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value – Harvard Business Review
In The Real Business of IT, Richard Hunter and George Westerman reveal that the cost mind-set stems from IT leaders’ inability to communicate about the business value they create-so CIOs get stuck discussing budgets rather than their contributions to the organization.
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Posted by Randy on 8th February 2010
Confused by what Google Wave might be useful for? Here is a nicely demonstrated scenario going through a business process modeling project. I like the example of new members re-playing the Wave to catch up on the team’s progress — very efficient. It seems to me that a workplace effort to encourage this type of Google Wave use would need some type of kick-off/introduction workshop. Get a big group together, have some scripted collaborative tasks, and have them use wave to accomplish those tasks. You’d teach the tool and also work on the general topic of effective collaboration/team work.
Using Gravity to collaborate on processes
Google Wave has been around for a few months now and though the hype is fading away we are seeing more and more practical use-cases in the enterprise. One excellent example is SAP’s Business Process Modelling tool gone collaborative; Gravity. We have been fortunate to work with a prototype version of Gravity with access to the minds behind the concept. Gravity is a Business Process Modeling tool which can be accessed as a gadget in the Google Wave client. This integration in Google Wave allows for collaboration over time and / or near real time, on business processes. This model is exportable to Netweaver BPM via BPMN 2.0 XML, thus making it a fully integrable modelling tool for use in an SAP landscape. Still puzzled? check this video with an explanatory example:
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Posted by Randy on 8th February 2010
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy. And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs. I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want. These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point. When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here. And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.
The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys. The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.
WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins
The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.
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Posted by Randy on 3rd February 2010
A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers. From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%. And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement. The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination. There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.
PHP Magazine, PHP Training, PHP Conferences, PHP Books, PHP Apparel — php|architect
“We think that HipHop has the potential to bring significant changes to the way we use and interact with PHP; … said Marco Tabini, CEO of Blue Parabola.
Facebook Developers | HipHop for PHP: Move Fast
One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.
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Posted by Randy on 3rd February 2010
As much as I love Apple and freely admit they make great products, I also have concerns with Apple’s closed-system approach. While there are some valid points to Apple’s ‘let us do the driving’ philosophy, I think users are better served when technology platforms are open. So how cool would a Google tablet be? After all, if they want to beat Windows at its own game, what better strategy than ripping off an Apple idea?
Google’s Tablet versus Apple’s iPad: Open versus Closed?
More importantly, though, Google’s tablet will have one major advantage over Apple’s iPad: it will have an open application platform.
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Posted by Randy on 3rd February 2010
I have held my tongue as far as comments on Apple’s iPad — there is more than enough other chatter from other quarters. But a recent article in the New York Times, The Media Equation – To Deliver, iPad Needs Content Providers on Board – NYTimes.com caught my eye in a comment on book publisher’s response to the platform:
…the book industry seems ill-prepared to take advantage of many of the new worlds the iPad opens up…Readers on the iPad should certainly expect that when they buy a cookbook, building in cooking demos would be a no-brainer, but it may be a long while before the industry has the ability to produce books that incorporate multimedia.
Why is it even a question of who will produce these videos? Haven’t they been watching for the last 5 years? You know the answer, don’t you? The readers will do it! Take a page from the reader book reviews on Amazon — look at what this cookbook fan has to say:
I have to admit I’m a great fan of Michele Scicolone. I got one of her cookbooks long ago, baked the best cookie I’ve ever had, and have been addicted to her wonderful recipes, stories and style ever since. This book continues her tradition of crafting perfect cookbooks. Why do I say perfect? Well, I’m not a professional cook, yet I can follow her recipes and create fantastic meals…
Any doubt that a fan like this wouldn’t be happy to create a short how-to video as they cook one of the recipes? All they need is an easy way to submit them. The technology piece is easy, and there are certainly partners around who would be happy to help — in fact Amazon seems a little panicky over the threat of the iPad introduction. Call them — they understand how this whole internet-user-contributed-content thing works. E-books augmented with integrated reader content — I’d buy that.
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Posted by Randy on 27th January 2010
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash in this month’s Website Magazine suggests that elements such as wild background colors, garish text, visual embellishments (eye candy) and animation/video distract website visitors from important content. In a case study of a redesign of the CREDO website they found an 84% improvement with a simplified design. The case study used a new service called AttentionWizard.com which uses computer algorithms to approximate eye tracking studies of a web site. The idea is these will reveal what point on the page the visitor’s eye should land on. If it is what you want them to see — like a buy now button — bingo, you are doing well. If their eyes don’t land anywhere, or on the wrong things it is time to make some adjustments. I thought it would be fun to compare the Yale and Harvard main websites using the service.
First up Yale. According to the article Yale’s website does earn extra points for its simple, white background, plain text and simple graphics. But don’t start celebrating so fast. The eye tracking study also doesn’t find anything that does grab attention. There is some focus on the graphic, but the links on the left side don’t register too high, except for the about Yale:
Yale's landing page
Yale Attention Heat Map
Now for Harvard – strong black background, white text — low marks. On the attention scale they do a little worse — again the image gets the most attention, but otherwise the eye wanders around the screen not really landing on any other focal point.
Harvard landing page
Harvard Attention HeatMap
It is not clear to me on either site what the key objective is. And in fairness these sites have multiple objectives, mostly trying to give people a lot of options. It might have been fairer to compare sites with clearer objectives, like a sales-orientated site. But then I wouldn’t have been able to tweak the classic Yale/Harvard rivalry. And I may be biased, but while neither site did great, I do think Yale finished with a slight lead. Go Bulldogs!
Two notes on the article: 1) it is written by the CEO of SiteTuners.com, creators of AttentionWizard. 2) in my experience it is the client who wants the flashy, distracting eye candy. Most graphic designers I’ve worked with have better taste than that (good article, bad title). You can use AttentionWizard in a trial version — 1 upload/analysis per day. Give it a spin on your favorite site!
AttentionWizard FAQ’s
The eye gazing path is represented by the numbered path shown on the AttentionWizard heatmap. The eye gazing path starts with the number 1 and follows in chronological order. The eye gazing path depicts the path that your users eyes will take when they first get to your page. Depending on the image submitted (full page or above-the-fold) the eye gazing path can differ significantly.
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash – Website Magazine – Website Magazine
You were led down this path by your internal creative team or outside interactive agency. Because of the limitations of their unique perspective you have been forced to sacrifice conversions in the name of “coolness.” So, you have actually come to think that your baby is quite beautiful and have, in fact, grown very fond of it.
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Posted by Randy on 21st January 2010
Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat. Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive. Teambox organizes communication around projects. Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files. The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar. And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data. And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails). Now I just need a project to test it with…
Community: Teambox is a public open-source project.
Installing:If you want to run your own server with Teambox, some knowledge of Ruby on Rails and UNIX is very recommended.
Blog Archive » The quiet majority in collaborative communities
Message traffic on our company Yammer network is following the classic 80-20 principle, although in our case it is closer to 85-15.
Twitter for Teams: Teambox Launches Web-Based Collaboration Tool
The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration – including distributed teams – we can see this application going over very well.
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Posted by Randy on 19th January 2010
I recently read Jaron Lanier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
. It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising. Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments. And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting. A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy. Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions. I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead. But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book:
- The hive mind/crowdsourcing vs. the individual: Does aggregation of content occur to the detriment of individual effort? Are we starting to fall victim to group think passed on through the Twitters and YouTubes? That’s one way of looking at it. However my experience is that the Internet today offers more opportunities for individual content to find an audience than ever before — you’re reading this, right?
- Is the free economy hurting indvidual artists, killing the profession of content creation, and lowering our culture to its lowest common denominator? If you’re in the newspaper, colllege textbook, sheet music or music distribution businesses you’re sure feeling a big pinch. Yes there is a shift going on, there have been casualties, and it is not clear where this is going. But there is no returning to the pre-internet golden days. And new business models will evolve — people are still willing to pay money for content and services that they value — the trick is to figure out what those are.
Perhaps the bigger question is whether there is anything to really worry about. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, How America Can Rise Again raises the point the our country through its history regularly sees doom and gloom just around the next corner in the midst of abundance. Thomas Jefferson was as sure the country was headed to hell as today’s Fox news pundits. With the abundant flows of information, outlets for individual expression and rising opportunities for social interaction is there any fundamental problem with the Internet? Sure there is room for improvement and contrarian views are useful in exploring how these further.
Book Review: The Computer That Ate the World – Newsweek.com
Today, the futurist Jaron Lanier warns in his persuasive new manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, the danger is less that our network of machine intelligence will fail than that it will endure—that Web culture, and its chiliastic faith in the superior wisdom of computers, will triumph.
Findings – Jaron Lanier Is Rethinking the Open Nature of the Internet – NYTimes.com
He argues that old — and bad — digital systems tend to get locked in place because it’s too difficult and expensive for everyone to switch to a new one. ..It can sound plausible enough in theory — particularly if your Windows computer has just crashed. In practice, though, better products win out, according to the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis.
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