Like many technology trends, cloud computing is a series of waves and threads, not a single happening.  Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS - a la SalesForce.com), generally lots of things as a service - XaaS.

There were some cracking presentations, especially Simon Wardley’s “Gang up now before the *aaS Cloud gets you” which was delivered in a Lessig presentation style than was more Lessig than even Lessig himself.

Hosted services aren’t new, in Internet terms. However, what is new is the brewing perfect storm:

• Affordable, ubiquitous Internet access (Mobile for flexibility, Ethernet services for high bandwidth).
• Scalable, but low entry computing services (Thanks to Google and Amazon’s cloud services).
• A bevy of Internet start ups producing applications and users that are keen to consume them.

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WordCamp UK, of course. It was a great event, with The Studio far exceeding my expectations as a venue. It is a fantastic place to hold events in Birmingham, centrally located and suitably post modern. WordCamp gave me lots to think about:

• The technology side of WordPress.
• The content side of blogging (and moblogging).
• And, of course, putting faces and voices to fellow bloggers I have been reading.

It was well worth the travel up to Birmingham - somewhat confusingly, there will also be a WordCamp in Birmingham, USA. This was the Birmingam UK event (we don’t want people getting confused)! I even got to meet both Chris Garretts in one place at the same time (this one and this one).

Now I have no excuse for getting them confused. The links are in the order of the photo, which I promise isn’t photoshopped - check out the full flickr stream to get a feel for the event: WordCampUK photos.

During a break on my journey home I Qik’d a video journal - By the way, Qik is now in public beta, so if you have the right phone, you can sign up and try it out for yourself. You’ll need a good data plan (a large data limit, and watch out for per MB charges). It was a brain dump that turned into a 20 minute monologue, but at least I have captured it all. The video covers the different pieces of WordCamp UK, you can watch it here if you want to hear a full run through of the weekend.:

Video is a surprisingly nice medium for spontaneously dumping thoughts. When you listen back you have the choice of listening to just the audio, or watching the video too. Capturing the facial expressions and seeing what is physically happening adds to the communication - you’ll find out what I mean it you watch the video.

The downside of video is that you can’t skim read it. That was part of an answer I gave during the panel session - I love Q&A panels - always gets the brain going. Chris Garrett caught some of the discussion when he Qik’d from the event. You can hear me telling the story behind WOWNDADI on the video too (thank you Chris):

There are notes and links for some of the content on the WordCamp Wiki, a name check for the event in The Blog Herald and I now have a few hundred gigabytes of audio, video and photos which I will be editting down and posting. Although, embarrassingly, I can’t remember if I videod my own talk!

Special kudos to Sam Bauers of Automattic for flying all the way from Australia and being camera man 2 with a very nifty HDD video camera, as well as fielding a raft of questions. Check out the speakers’ sites to get a feel for a range of WordPress uses:

• My fellow presenters for the Blogging and Journalism session:
  • Bob Jones http://www.thedailynovel.com/ 
  • David Page http://www.expressandstar.com/
• Chris Garrett
• Gurbir Singh
• Ian Covey
• Jonnya
• Mike Little
• Nick Garner
• Peter Westwood
• Rich Boakes
• Richard Williams
• Sam Bauers
• Simon Dickson
• Simon Wheatley
• Tony Scott

Users of WordPress include eBay, The New York Times and the UK Government. More to follow in the coming weeks… It would be great to hear from more WordPress users and bloggers, especially if you are in the UK. Roll on WordCamp 2009!

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It used to be an issue in developing countries, where a few hundred Kilos of copper were worth a day’s wages. That equation now holds true in Europe as well. Systems do get broken, and good businesses should plan for that - see Seth’s post this week: “What do you do when your systems break?“.

Expect the unexpected isn’t just an aphorism, it is good business productivity advice. Many of these people that lost their phone lists also lost their broadband connection at the same time. That means people and businesses with no phones and no Internet.

Now that copper is so valuable, what’s your communications back up plan? Given that most people have mobile phones, the ability to make calls isn’t lost - it just becomes slight more expensive. Also, with many service providers it is possible to divert a landline number to a mobile one. Watch out for how you activate the divert - if it requires Internet access or the phone line, that’s going to be a problem. For the call centres I used to run, the divert process was automated.

So, what about Internet access? Well, the good news is that mobile data services are becoming more and more affordable, even here in the UK. Another alternative is to know where your local WiFi hotspots are, or have an exchange agreement with another business or friend in a nearby town. That way there is somewhere to go to get those critical e-mails out (or in!), and let people know what is happening, if you need to.

As Seth points out in his post, you also need to give staff (and yourself) flexibility about how to deal with the ‘normal’ day to day business. You may not have access to all of the usual systems and information, but make sure that remains your problem, not the customers.

It’s amazing how dependent us business people are on e-mail and web these days. Services can be vulnerable, so it is worth having a good recovery plan worked out ahead of time. That way you are prepared when things do go wrong, minimizing the impact on productivity.

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Unsurprisingly, there were some parallels with the previous session (see Tim Berners-Lee @ The Innovation Edge). It was a shame that it didn’t touch on many of the things that came up in the Wordle cloud (Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web), as there were some interesting items there. Lloyd Davis’ post “Tim Berners-Lee at NESTA on the Future of the Web” says the unsaid well. Sir Tim’s talk was about 20 minutes. I don’t think anyone there would have complained if it had been 3 hours, especially the topics around the Web Science Research Initiative.

Sir Tim’s current baby is the semantic web, which has been incubating (or should that be gestating?) for a long long while. It seems suitably meta to use the talk as an example of how the semantic web would change the Internet. During the talk I was concentrating hard, so I missed the Twitter conversation. This might have been because I was in the front row, opposite Sir Tim, with two video cameras watching my every move - yes, that is my fat head bobbing up and down in the videos, sorry! I felt like a bunny stuck in the proverbial headlights.

Anyway, I missed the back-channel conversation. I knew a fair number of people there would be tweeting (got to love that term), so I wanted to see what had been said. Summize is a tool that searches the Twitter public-time-line [Note, as I posted this, Twitter announced their intent to acquire Summize]. In tradition web style, I would have used search terms like “Sir Tim”, “Future”, and a number of other things. However, most of these phrases would have missed messages and others would have resulted in the search equivalent of “overspray” - catching messages that were irrelevant.

Enter Hash tags. If hash tags are new to you, don’t panic. It is all above board and quite simple. Hash tags make use of the hash symbol (#) to indicate a tag. This is a little like semantic information, in that it provides some context about the message. People can tag messages (in the same way that blog posts and wiki pages can be tagged). This transforms the discoverability of information.

It does require users to manually tag their messages, which leaves it vulnerable to human fallibility/laziness. Automating this process is a key part of building the semantic web. I can go to summize and search for #futureofweb (the tag for the event) and see the conversation. Here is a little hand-picked selection of highlights:

PaulWalsh: Ah NESTA is using #futureofweb hash tag for the event with TimBL. Personally I hate the tags.

JeremyGould: #futureofweb Reflecting how wonderful that TBL still as passionate about web 20 years on Hope I can maintain that level of interest- in …

Nico_Macdonald: Re NESTA TB-L talk… Hope for Web future: bootstrapping human ingenuity. Fears: fooling ourselves Web can solve all problems. #futureofweb

keibro: Generic Answers #futureofweb = CL: Keep it open. AD: Put stuff back based on what you take out.

timd:  TBL: “In terms of humanity, we should make sure we don’t expect too little” #futureofweb

Nico_Macdonald:  Tim Berners-Lee event: Berners-Lee’s answer: Web is about connections between people. Can we expect this much of _humanity_?! #futureofweb

emmalwallace: When TBL speaks you can see the pictures he draws in his head. Da Vinci brain genius in action. When science and art collide. #futureofweb

deirdre: also heartening 2 knw TBL shares my obsession w/ persistence. internet so often is transient, too many things lost & destroyed #futureofweb

That’s a tiny sample of the comments, but it paints the picture. The most comprehensive write up on Sir Tim’s talk is on Mia Ridge’s blog (Open Objects) and you can download the slides via the w3 site: http://www.w3.org/2008/Talks/0708-ws-30min-tbl/.

Even though we didn’t meet at that event, in a strange act of serendipity, I met Mia this evening, at a completely unrelated event. I recognised her from her twitter avatar and blog picture, and had a really interesting conversation. The power of the web…

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Last night NESTA played host to Tim Berners-Lee, with a talk under the title “Future of the Web“, followed by a Q&A and panel discussion. I’ll come back to the talk, because I want to start somewhere else first: in the past. The history of the web may well provide the best insight into its future. During the Q&A, Bill Thompson, asked a question that reminded me of a meeting I missed a few decades ago.

My brain is great at holding complex, interconnected models, pulling up random associated facts and remembering faces, but my episodic memory is awful. Seriously, ask me what I had for breakfast. I have no idea. May be you have no idea too? Ok, you don’t know what I had for breakfast, but you know what I am driving at. So, when my brain reminds me of things from three decades ago, I pay attention. 

A long, long time ago, I opened a very large package. A very, very large package. In one part was something that looked like a typewriter, except for a sad lack of space to put paper or ink in it. In the other was something that looked like a television, but it was completely unable to receive even BBC1 (in the days when we had less than 4 TV channels in the UK). My dad told me it was going to change the world, and that I should figure out how to use it. My dad was smart like that. He still is.

So, I got to work. I fell in love with that box. Most people that know me will tell you I am still in love with its offspring and distant relatives today. However, there is something in particular that captivated me about it. It wasn’t the ability to type in words and get it to do things - although I did use that capability a lot, and made some very good money in the process, thank you. No, the magic moment for me was when I got another, inauspicious beige box, called a MODEM. A clever box of tricks that allowed the computer to abuse a BT telephone line to talk to other computers.  That might have seemed a little pointless to most around me back then, but connecting computers together was rocket science. And everyone knows that boys love rocket science.

I could dial into something called a PAD, and from there, I could hop to another pad (landing pad, get it?) and so on, until I arrived at a big computer on the other side of the world. This was in the days when international phone calls were inconceivably expensive, and when the only americans I had seen were in movies. In fact, even the local phone calls to those PADs resulted in a £1,000 phone bill.

Now, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t have been on that system. In fact, I’d been a little creative in getting the numbers and codes to access it. That sort of creativity wasn’t illegal back then, and truth be told, the administrators knew that I was there and seemed quite ok about it. What harm was a kid like me going to do? They sent me nice messages, and we got on ok.

Later, they did start to get a little fussy. So I, and many others like me, started to write programs for our little machines to do some of the things that those big machines did. And much more too. Some of us got a couple of phone lines and  MODEMs. We made our systems available for others to dial in to, creating places where they could leave messages for each other and exchange programs. A kind of electronic bulletin board system, or BBS for short. Those phone lines ran at about 1/1000 the speed of the first version of bluetooth - if you think moving pictures off of your phone is slow, you’ll know why there weren’t any pictures at all.

Now, of course, we could have got in our cars and met up, but many of us didn’t have cars. To be frank, many of us weren’t the kind to strike up a conversation with a stranger, or to go out and find people to get to know. We weren’t in the social ‘in crowd’. We didn’t know it yet, but we were geeks. Real geeks.

We exchanged ideas, we explored new ways of using these machines and were generally pretty excited about what we found to do with them. So excited, that we started to meet up face to face, to talk about it all and to swap programs. Then we started to connect our machines together, so that our conversations weren’t isolated in little islands, but flowed like rivers around the world. Mostly, all of this all happened for free, powered by volunteers.

A little while later, I got dragged back to that world of PADs and the systems that belonged to the big people. This time, I was on the inside, as a student and then a lecturer. Those systems were connected together too. A sort of network of networks, or inter-net. Some years later, that was where I first came across hypertext (I’ve written about that before). One of my friends even wrote a program that bypassed the electronic message system and let you send messages directly to another user’s terminal. This was all before the thing that we call the worldwide web.

There’s something about that story. It was all about the people, not about the systems. Together, we steered what happened with the technology, both consciously and unconsciously. A few decades from now, this system I have in front of me, and the Internet it is connected to right now, will seem as alien as that first PC and those early bulletin boards seem now.

Last night Charlie Leadbeater drew some parallels between Internet users and the Levelers, a 17th Century pseudo-political group, who had an agreement to support freedom of the people.  I think those early Internet pioneers, the ones who sweated over the fuzzball routers and the ones who ran the BBSs were levelers at heart - creating something much bigger than themselves. Working with high ideals, connecting people in an attempt to build knowledge. It didn’t always go according to those ideals, and some things failed. Charlie said levelers failure was caused by the lack of an economic model. Well, the Internet has an economic model, all be it a very complex one. However, whatever it becomes, it is all about the people.

To be continued…

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Following on from the post a few days ago that mentioned the iPhone (It’s the User Experience as much as the Technology!) it is pretty clear these days that Apple is after the business user. They have provided integration with Exchange e-mail, so you can get your corporate e-mail on the run, and they are creating a very compelling application development environment, which includes a top notch simulator to test out apps.

There is a huge deal of promise in mobile devices to increase productivity, but not without challenges. Lots of different platforms and handset incompatibilities to overcome (see Mini-bar Meet Up - Some New Technologies). Either Apple or Blackberry, or both of them, are likely to crack this one in the next few years.

As I am in the process of choosing a new phone, this is all of great personal interest right now. Apple has been enabling location aware applications, and demonstrated connecting your position and your address book to enable you to locate nearby contacts. I also expect we’ll see more and more social applications coming to the iPhone (there are already a number of blogging apps). The Apple Appstore will enable easy distribution of applications and be in a huge number of countries. Apple also introduced the secure delivery of enterprise custom applications via their own intranets to authorised phones.

Will the Blackberry keep up? In terms of raw handset sales, the iPhone hasn’t flown off the shelves quite as fast as some expected. That good sized user base is key for good support and an a healthy application ecosystem, and there Blackberry has a lead - so far.

That said, Apple users are used to being in the minority from the desktop world (especially at the hight end, according to this report). There too, Apple has been making in roads into business. The Mac might be in the minority, but it seems to be the tool of choice for productivity addicts both at home and in the office - judging by the readers of this blog at least.

All worrying stuff for Microsoft, although given the Yahoo activity, they probably have bigger fish to fry, of the Google variety. They also have some tricks up their sleeve too, but that is for another day. Microsoft have the tablet PC format, which is proving itself in many business applications. The iPhone now have very good support for document reading, and makes good use of the touch screen, but I like having something in between my MacBook Pro 17 inch and the iPhone - the Samsung Q1 I’ve been using is just right. Bring back the Apple Newton (for those old enough to remember that).

Apple also introduced a cloud-based service - MobileMe - which syncs between different devices and enables synchronised e-mail for those of us that don’t have our own Microsoft Exchange servers. It works with PCs (outlook) as well as Macs. It also gives a slick web interface to all of the functionality, and integrates with iDisk as well. It might make for a nice disaster recovery mechanism for solo-workers or small/medium businesses. The usual cloud-based service caveats apply of course. It is $99 per year and there will be a free trial from release in July. Today I use Plaxo to provide this syncing for me, but I’m watching them carefully, post acquisition.

As a side note, it was also nice to see a UK technology company featured during the event (with their Band app, and yes there is even an actual band that use iPhones for their music). A Spanish company was featured too, so a bit of European flavour! Roll on July 11th, when all this should be in our hands…

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“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

From Computerworld: iPhones trickle in the enterprise (emphasis mine).

It really does explain much of the error in corporate IT these days. Web 2.0 consumer services know this, and the next generation of users coming into business expect this: It is all about the user experience. I have used and deployed some awful tools in the past. I will never do so again. They can near bankrupt productivity, be it an information tool for getting things done or an expenses or payroll system.

Let’s say you have 100 employees. If a tool saves a member of the IT department an hour a week, but costs each member of staff just 60 seconds a week, you have lost productivity - and wasted time and money. What if you have 1,000 employees? Think about it.

If you spend a hour downloading, setting up and learning to use a new task management or GTD tool and it saves you a minute a week, it is going to take over a year to get a payback on it. I’m being kind here and assuming the tool stays the same for a year. How many times have you changed your personal productivity system in the last year, or spent time fiddling with new software?

I’m not saying avoid new technology, quite the opposite. If businesses are going to be productive and effective, then they must innovate with the Information technology they use, but it should be from the perspective of delivering productivity not technology. I see a new generation of workers who will bring change, and an older generation who are demanding it. There will be no mercy for IT departments or businesses that get in the way. Technology is meant to improve productivity, not get in the way of it.

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My first encounter with Sir Tim’s work was back in 1990. I was at Kent University at the time, and got involved in the trial of something called “Hypertext”. Quite frankly, I didn’t get it. A page of text where you could click on a word and another page of text would come up. What was anyone going to do with something like that? I took the pay and went back to circuit boards and DJing at the college radio station. Two years later I was back working on Internet technologies. The experience has made me much more thoughtful when I encounter new technologies!

As Sir Tim recounted the foundations of the web, it was curious how accidental and casual the whole thing sounded. The project was a ‘back-room’ effort, carried out during a lull in the work on the Cern accelerator. As Tim put it, giving staff a long leash, giving them space, is where innovation comes from. It brought to mind Google’s 20% time. You could hear the pens of the managing directors in the audience scribbling furiously.

The point of innovation is that you don’t know the end product before you start, sometimes you don’t even know the problem. It is a big risk, and that makes it tricky for a traditional management mindset. The web (or rather hypertext) was driven by the challenge of dealing with lots of documents and having to get others up to speed on them quickly. Necessity is the mother of Invention, which is a theme that came back later during the conference.

He described blogs as a social machine, which is an interesting metaphor - I guess we are still cogs in a machine, even in the world of social media. I have seen what this social machine can create form the huge diversity that it brings together. For me, two stand out quotes from the talk:

“The people doing the really interesting things tended to fall between two stools”

“The web really has to be thought of not as a system of connections between computers, or even as links between web pages, but really as humanity connected.”

The first made me think of the Medici effect, and is the reason for The Web Science Initiative, which sounds very interesting. The second was the final take away for me: The future of the web, and of innovation, is in individuals working in collaboration. There again, that is how all the greatest achievements have come about.

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The report is based on the recent Information Security Breaches survey (PDF and PDF of executive summary) conducted for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and reports a ten fold increase in hackers inside the firewall

An attention grabbing article, but there are some things of note. Because corporate cyber defences are working well, criminals are targeting home PCs and careless web surfers. Having failed to hack us in the office, they are after us at home. The IT team has always been concerned about the security of remote workers, now they will be even more so.

The launch of the report coincided with the start of the InfoSec security show London this week, which featured all of the major vendors showing their latest wares. Security is increasingly moving from network-based firewalls, to desktop-based software. This approach makes securing remote or home-based machines easier.

In the article, Jim Norton, senior policy adviser at the Institute of Directors, suggested firms use honeypots (servers designed to appear to contain valuable information). I wouldn’t say that was good advice. Using honey pots is a bit like guarding parked cars by putting a very expensive looking one in the middle and hoping the criminals hit that first.

Enterprise security measures are working increasingly well. What we have to watch out for now is social engineering attacks, such as emails that result in unwittingly handing over login information or personal details. Be on your guard, as these methods, including “phishing” e-mails, are becoming more and more sophisticated.

The threat is not just our personal or corporate information ending up in the public domain, it is also the risk of loosing valuable data. Yet another reason to have a good back up policy, be it for your family photos or corporate trade secrets!

Reference: Information Security Breaches survey (executive summary)

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The digital universe was apparently 2.25 x 1021bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) last year, with faster that predicted growth due to digital cameras and digital TVs. That is mind-bogglingly huge. IDC says the amount of information exceeded the amount of storage for the first time last year. This may be one of those landmark moments, like Internet traffic exceeding PSTN (telephone) traffic in the mid-90s, ushering in the on-line age.

If we are creating more than we store, this points to more and more transitory data in the digital universe. IDC predicts almost half of the worlds data will be transitory in 3 years time - created, then lost again. I suspect that increased streaming video services (like Qik) account for some of this, but the fact remains that we are moving from a create-forward-store universe to a create-stream-disgard one, and that is a big shift. It seems that even the digital universe itself is suffering from information overload.

The media, entertainment and communications industry is the digital giant, accounting for a disproportionate amount of data in the world. A single one hour HDTV program dwarfs a lifetime’s knowledge written into a text-based wiki.

Handheld/mobile devices are becoming a larger and larger part of the universe, with cheaper and larger flash memory technology, we are able to carry larger parts of the digital universe around with us. However, more and more ubiquitous Internet access on mobile devices also gives us access to information when we are busy being road-warriors.

External hard disk drive sales grew faster than expected, so either we have more data than will fit on built-in drives (which makes sense with more laptops around, with harder to upgrade disks), or we are backing up our data more. Hard disk crashes seem to account for more and more of the productivity glitches that people recount to me. A good data recovery strategy really is part of a productivity plan, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

A quote from Kurt Vonnegut, via David Terrar, “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”

Many businesses do have data retention requirements, with all of the issues that go with that. What about us as individuals? We do need to retain some data, e.g. for tax and other legal reasons, but might we benefit from a bit more archiving? Digital clutter can be just as bad as physical clutter. How does your desktop look? How long does it take to find the information you really need?

Most information used to evaporate: conversations were forgotten, contacts were lost and memories of events faded - unless it was written of course (one way to never loose another thought again). Technology now enables us to capture that information, potentially forever. The problem used to be information scarcity, now it is informatio overload.

The economics of information have flipped and the rules for managing it must change accordingly. Delete more, worry less?

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My longest experience with business social software has been with wikis. I first used a Wikis in a businesses about ten years ago, and have now seen a number of projects across different companies. Case studies are still hard to come by, partly because introducing wikis touches on some sensitive issues. It is not just about the technology, it is about a cultural shift. In many command-and-control cultures information is (seen as) power, but social software moves people towards sharing it. That is a big change.

Be Careful What You Measure

The major benefits of wiki technology are tangential ones. As such they present challenges for metrics, but I have seen multi-million dollar roll outs of ‘traditional’ applications hit their metrics, but be a productivity disaster. Metrics cut both ways, and there is the risk of MacNamara’s fallacy:

“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

The quote is from Charles Handy, but it came via wikipedia and I’ve already said enough about wikipedia research. The Adam Curtis BBC program ‘The Trap’ explored this topic well, if you have the chance to watch it, it is well worth it.

Measuring human systems, like users with a wiki, is non-trivial. You change what you measure, simply by measuring it. This is not to say that things shouldn’t be measured, but they should be measured with caution. It might sound a little trite, but there is truth in saying that the most valuable things are invaluable (or immeasurable).

Wikis are most successful when they are introduced while the company is still small and growing. That way they become part of the culture. Not to say that big businesses can’t be successful with wikis, but it requires a good training program around them. The only wiki-failures I have found were in very large companies, where the technology was introduced with minimal training and no clear objectives, and predictable results.

What are the major benefits of a wiki to a business?

These apply just as well to any form of social workgroup, not just to businesses. They also apply for groups of two to hundreds, but the scaling of wikis is a topic for another day.

Knowledge Availability

Wikis remove much of the chance factor in finding knowledge in the business. Most intranets contain woefully out of date information, through no fault of the intranet owners. Users are left to chance upon the right person who is ‘in the know’. Wikis also reduce the dependence on key knowledge workers for answers to common questions.

Even if the answer isn’t on the wiki, at least users can glean an idea of who to ask (based on who has been adding what to the wiki). This speeds up the business and offloads the burden on senior staff. This is especially important when you are in a hiring phase. No new hire pack? Search the wiki.

Change Control

Basic, but missing from so many information systems in common use. The ability to rollback and track changes is inherent in most wiki software. This can be a life saver and is why wikis are the enterprise CMS of choice for me.

Knowledge Permanence

Wikis are the most constructive and least disruptive way of documenting projects that I have found to date. If someone leaves, at least some of their knowledge remains within the organisation, on the wiki. The same is true for extended absence due to illness, travel or long holidays.

Knowledge Creation

Sparks come from striking two things together. The same is true with knowledge. I have watched brilliant ideas emerge in real-time on a wiki page, right in front of my eyes. Something new on the wiki combined with something someone already knows leads to new knowledge in the business, across multiple people.

Geographic Freedom

Wikis work across geographic boundaries and across time zones. That supports remote offices and remote workers on a global basis. This is key to keeping a business competitive. Water cooler chat is good, but it doesn’t scale across national boundaries.

Cross Platform Portability

Because wikis are web based, the only client required is a browser. That means wikis work across different operating systems and even for mobile devices like Blackberries and smart phones.

So, hopefully now you can see why I am a wiki fan.

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TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher was there to shepherd the evening’s five minute speaker slots along, and ask the questions that make a web business shuffle on the spot, including the especially awkward: “How are you going to make money?”

Margaret Gold presented Vodaphone’s Betavine developer community. The mobile phone (cell phone, or my favourite: the handy) has taken great leaps forward in functionality since the days of the two and a half tonne grey Motorola brick.

However, it hasn’t contributed much to an increase in productivity since those early days. We are more in touch, through SMS and mobile data connectivity, but widespread productivity applications are few and far between.

I hope we’ll see some new applications through the likes of Betavine, and initiatives like Google’s Android, that ease the burden of developing mobile applications. The mobile phone stands in the special ground between the personal and the business worlds. To date consumer applications have dominated. Enterprises should be developing business applications too, but are hampered by the range of handsets and network functionality.

Vigster.com presented their social network for video games. Despite my games console collection, not an area of interest for me. However it did make me realise how dominant Facebook has become in the social networking space. I found myself wondering how Vigster might compete against a Facebook app, and what the equivalent business social network applications might be.

Xavier Damman gave a demonstration of the upcoming Wordpress plugin Commentag. Essentially this enables the tagging, by authors, of comments. It looked very pretty, although I’m not sure if users will go to the extent of tagging their comments, even though it increases discoverability.

Tagging is a powerful information management technique, and the main reason I use TiddlyWiki as a productivity tool. However, the future of tagging is for tags to be computer generated. We aren’t there yet. Folksonomies, that is group-based collaborative tagging, holds out some hope in the mean-time.

The presentation of graffywall piqued my curiosity. Essentially it is a shared infinite canvas. Antonio Lopes took it through its paces. It needed some ambient music to really set it off, and make the whole thing even more surreal. Imagine an infinite space where the whole world can simultaneously draw. Very experimental.

Shared white board applications have been very underused. A big screen and a pen tablet really brings this technology to life, and it a great way to interact with remote workers. I have been inspired to dig out the pen tablet for my Mac.

Nick Haltsted was there, talking about the development of tweetmeme, which will interest Twitter fans. Nick is better known for aggregator fav.or.it (explained on the about fav.or.it page). More on them, and the world of crowd sourcing later. They are hiring, apparently:

An interesting event, supported by BBC Innovation and O’Reilly, with some food for thought and opportunity to meet and greet for the London crowd.

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I get a handy example if I google for the excellent and insightful Fred Basset - yes, I did just use google as a verb, please don’t stone me. In the results page I am overwhelmed by information on the cartoon character, rather than the new media expert. Fred is hidden in the camouflage of a mass of other data. Security by obscurity - he’s hidden in plain sight. If I Google for Benjamin Ellis, I account for most of the first page of results - your mileage may vary searching with Google from other countries (just for fun, e-mail the first page of results from where you live!). I’m not working as an SEO consultant for myself, there just seem to be less Benjamin Ellis’s out there, so I can’t hide.

Digital information has a rather free-flowing nature. Its natural tendency is to ‘escape’ from where we put it. Unhappy accidents like the recent HMRC fiasco are a reminder that it has a characteristic that physical property does not: it can be replicated, indefinitely.

If I mark something as ‘private’, to share with my ‘closed’ social network, I am reliant on those friends not making it public - either purposefully or accidentally. For example, if they tweet it on twitter, then it is indexed in Google by default. In the same way, companies rely on employees keeping information confidential. The difference is that data spillage now happens more easily, with our increasing connectedness.

There is an interesting characteristic of digital conversations that take place in social media, and that is a form of digital ’spill’. The characteristic springs from the mismatch between peoples’ social graphs - your set of friends/contacts and mine may have some common elements, but they also have differences.

If we ‘chat’ between ourselves via the Facebook (using the wall feature) or Twitter, the differences in our social graphs cause shards of the conversation to propagate our beyond the original circle. That can be bad, or it can be good. One of the most interesting things about Twitter is the accidental conversations. It is the closest thing to creating that business haven of innovation, the water cooler conversation. With more and more remote workers, and reliance on external specialists, business will need these tools.

The reality is that Facebook is just describing the real world of social relationships. There is nothing new here. ‘Social graphs’ have existed since humans first started raising children and gathering food together. Now we have a common place word to describe the phenomenon, and tools, like Facebook and Linkedin, that have digitised the information and enabled us to study it as never before.

Data has the rather nasty habit of being permanent, sometimes inconveniently. I recently stumbled upon an email I sent to a mailing list in 1988, which is now a web forum. There is my email, in all of its glory. Thankfully I wasn’t too embarrassing as a teenager, but none-the-less, it is quite a sobering fact that something I wrote twenty years ago is right there, neatly indexed on Google.

The real world of information security, especially around identity, is messy. Tools like Facebook are gradually drawing attention to old issues and creating new ones. In the first few decades of computing, the challenges were in the technology, in the next, I suspect the challenges reside elsewhere.

Having a universal digital identity has efficiency benefits, but it also has big data privacy challenges too. It takes discoverability to a new level, which means that integrity is going to take on a whole new meaning, however good your security is.

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For those who are new to the blog, you might be interested in the fact that a post from back in February (Ready Aim Focus - What’s the point?) has suddenly gained a popular following, apparently good reading if you are a visual learner who wants to know about mission and goals. It thought I’d point you to it, as the popular post plugin on the blog isn’t working as well as it once once - if you can help out by rating some old posts or suggesting a good WordPress plugin, that would really help! Have a brilliant day!

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There will undoubtedly be stories about people hacking the UK iPhones to work on other networks, but as at least one user has found out, this might not be a good idea unless you want a no-phone.

The iPhone has huge promise as a communication s device. The iPod can be integrated with GTD, the iPhone and iTouch have the potential to take this to another level, making it a great productivity tool. I am sure that Apple will add more features as time goes on, the recently discovered iTouch system mode implies there are extra capabilities. It would be great to have a universal capture device that had a voice recorder, camera and email all in one. After the fuss in the US, lots of people will be waiting to see if there will be a price drop - the current pricing means the first year of owning an iPhone will set you back over one thousand pounds. That makes a pretty tough ROI for me, which will defend against the “but it is soon cool, buy it” urge.

Update: The Guardian has posted an article on the launch. It looks like Internet access will be via The Cloud’s Hot Spots. Will the iPhone make it as a GTD PDA?

Most Commented Posts

• Why Don’t You See What You Can Do in an Hour?
• Watch out for the frogs!
• Gordon Brown at NESTA - The Innovation Edge
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• iPod to Go - The iPod as a GTD capture device