WOWNDADI

Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done

Benjamin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:01:29 +0000

This may be random. For once, I am speechless. Or at least wordless. You know me. That doesn’t happen. Ever. I might go quiet, but that is different from not having something to say. Perhaps it is all the different threads in my head? There are big Redcatco projects in the wings, new blogs to feed, articles to write and a fair collection of other things to be done. But is it all making sense, or is it random, like stones on the forest floor.

Do you ever get too many things in your head at once? Perhaps it’s just me, although given the popularity of How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work, I’m not sure. When we get overloaded things start to look random. Things fill in all the gaps and the patterns that gave a sense of order disappear.

Randomness is a curious thing. I’m not thinking of the mathematical science of it, but rather its effect on the brain. There’s a nice review of Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” here, which is a good read on the subject. Essentially we try and predict randomness. Its in our nature. Our brains see patterns everywhere, that’s how they work. The only way we can know if a pattern is valid is from its success in predicting future events. However, we rarely wait that long.

On the other hand, some things that look random are actually patterns. I was trying to get a close up photograph of a bee (in relation to “Do your employees dance“), when I realised that often life is only random until you study it carefully.

Getting the picture was going to involve either waiting at a flower and hoping to luck-out, or knowing where the bee was going to go next and being there first. After a quick trial, it was clear the former method was going to involve significantly more time than I was planning to spend. I needed to predict a bee’s movements, and get to the flower first, that or hope for a matrix-like moment of speed.

After watching them for a bit, I came to the conclusion that they were pretty random critters. So much for my pattern-making brain. I got a little closer in, and followed one of the more industrious looking fellows for a bit. I was just starting get a feel for what he was up to, then ‘whoosh’, he was gone. Ok, on to the next. As I got closer and started to see the world from more of a bee’s-eye view (minus ultraviolet capabilities), I suddenly spotted the pattern. Click.

This bee progressed around in a very orderly spiral, until the lavender flower was cleaned out, then hopped on to the next. The randomness? Well, the bee could see which flowers had accessible pollen and simply ignored those that didn’t.

Have you ever watched someone and thought ‘why on earth did they do that?’ - it may well have been for a very logical reason, or part of a well ordered pattern. Until you understand the motives and assumptions that the person is working with, their actions will seem random.

Patterns make us productive. At least, productive people seem to follow patterns (as a tangential piece in The Economist seems to indicate: “Every move you make“). It might be cause and effect, or it might simply be a correlation, but patterns bring a sense of order, and a sense of order helps to get more done.

So, how to get some order and efficiency from business overload? Take a leaf out of the computing book. I was writing up a webcast for BusinessTechFeed on Data Center Efficiency, which included a section on virtualization. A very useful technology for making more efficient use of computing resource. Virtualization lets you move from lots of under-utilized machines to one efficient and highly utilized one. This machine runs separate instances that each behave like a fully fledged machine.

Taking the virtualization concept across to productivity, rather than looking at your life as a whole (which is a good thing to do by the way, so don’t stop!), try dividing it down into chunks. What are your different roles and responsibilities? Are there distinct areas to your life? Try writing down a set of objectives for each area, if that is something you haven’t done before. Now try slicing your time into segments for each of these areas. When you are working in one segment, don’t let the others invade unless it is really an emergency.

After just a few days, the technique should result in a fresh level of clarity and efficiency. When everything is thrown together, it feels random. Things are hard to make sense of. Separating out the different things helps you to see patterns and order more clearly. Remember those stones on the forrest floor. Let me put a few of them off in a different pile. Does the picture make more sense now?

The 9th Habit of Highly Effective People - Look after your data!

Benjamin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:00:45 +0000

Stephen Covey has already published the The 8th Habit, so I’ll have to put this down as the 9th habit of highly effective people.

These days we have more knowledge than we can comfortably fit in our heads, so we depend on our trusty computers to keep all of that overflowing information safe. From important e-mails, to irreplaceable family photos, or even the music collection to keeps us going through the day. It’s all there in those tiny magnetic particles.

Needless to say, it’s no laughing matter when it goes wrong. Hard disk failures, flat batteries and lost laptops are becoming everyday events. It isn’t that the technology is getting less reliable, it just that we are increasingly reliant on it. That should make the limitations of storing data on a PC or laptop obvious:

When the machine is destroyed, stolen or fails, all of that data is lost (or at least compromised).
Data is inaccessable to others (unless you are doing some form of funky personal file sharing).
Data isn’t available when you are away from the machine or it is off with a flat battery.

These were some of the reasons that IT departments installed LAN servers in the 90s. Data was kept somewhere safe and backed up regularly. You won’t know how valuable your data is until it is lost, and by then it is too late to do anything about it.

A laptop is stolen from the car.

A hard drive fails for no apparent reason.

Data is corrupted by poor software.

A flat laptop battery and a lost power supply.

The list goes on. In the last week I have come across nearly a dozen people who have lost days, if not weeks, of productive time. You might have the most well organised to do lists in the world, but if you loose your data, your productivity goes down the drain.

Data storage continues to plummet in price (see ”the exploding digital universe“), which means we consume more and more, but also that a backup system needn’t be expensive. Consider one of these ways to protect your data:

Back up data onto an external drive.
- External firewire drives are fast, although a little more pricy. A USB drive is fine.
- Store it somewhere safe, but different (a friend down the road?).
- It is no good if you loose the drive at the same time at the computer.
- Consider using encryption to keep the data safe.
Set up a file server or NAS.
- If you have enough machines to make it worth while.
- Ethernet and wireless connected storage systems are affordable.
Back up data with an on-line back up service.
- They are surprisingly affordable.
- Some services double as a way to share files with others.
- You’ll need a decent amount of bandwidth, and the first back up will take a while.

It is all basic stuff, but human nature means that we say “it won’t happen to me.” Trust me when I say that it will. A few hours choosing and setting up a system for backing up all of your data will save you hours if not days in the future. A few more things to think about:

Ensure that you back up often, to minimize what you might loose.
Test that you are actually able restore from the back up.
A backup system is only useful if it is workable, usable and used.

I’ve been pointed to Tom Olzak’s post on TechRepublic: Four reasons to validate your backup processes which has a good rational for checking that your backups work.

WordCampUK, Communities and Goops

Benjamin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:44:09 +0000

This has happened before, but this ‘goops‘ is rather timely. What’s a ‘goops’? It’s my favourite term for semantic/contextual errors: Searching without sufficient attention to context.

Let’s say I’m looking for information on Birmingham. I might head over to Google and do a search on ‘Birmingham’. If I’m after a picture, I could click on image search and find myself one. So far so good. Hold that thought for a minute.

I met up with the London-based WordCamp UK crew last night (upcoming meet details). We talked about next year’s WordCamp event, forming a legal entity and how to best build the WordPress community in the UK. Tony Scott, Jeff Van Campen, Hugh Fraser and others were there - as you can just about see from my slightly over ambitious, dark venue, self-timer-taken photo.

Events are a key component of building communities (as in the OU’s community model), but it is a good social software platform that creates the bridge between those physical events and the on-line world. That bridging is key in order to keep the community going. That was a big part of last night’s discussion and a topic for a later post.

Back to looking for pictures of Birmingham. Attendees of the WordCamp event might remember that there are two Birmingham’s. The Birmingham where we had WordCamp UK, unsurprisingly in the UK. Then there is Birmingham Alabama, where folks had “WordCamp Birmingham” in the US. A little confusing in the run up to both events! That is a little detail that seems to have slipped by someone in Birmingham city council.

In choosing a picture for a recent promotional leaflet, over half a million copies printed, they managed to use a picture of the Birmingham Alabahama, US skyline, rather than their own Birmingham. A classic “goops” - a search based error. Just to add to this little PR stumble, they initially denied the error and claimed they had used an image of a ‘generic skyline’ (which just happened to be of the US Birmingham, of course).

That’s also a proof point for a good PR tip: “go ugly early” - if you’ve made a mistake, best to come clean about it quickly. In today’s high speed, search engine driven world, it’s all too easy to make a goops. A good job we have communities to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Open Learning - Determined People with Tenacious Goals

Benjamin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:29:04 +0000

The Open University learning environment is a technology-mediated communication role model. Even so, the OU still brings learners together for ‘real-world’ events. That has been the reason for a no blog posts this last week - I have been working my little socks off at Bath University, conducting research projects with a few hundred other people.

I was bowled over by the tenacity of my fellow learners. People who had been studying towards their degree for years, on top of their day jobs. People who were still 5-7 years away from getting their professional qualifications (which involve a PhD and chartering for some). This was a group of people who are committed to learning. There again, tenacity is at the very heart of the Open University.

The roots of the OU go back to the 1920’s, when educationalist J C Stobart envisaged a ‘wireless university’. Those words mean something different today - it sounds more like someone using a wifi enabled laptop in the back garden to do literature searches. However, back then it meant using the cutting edge technology of the day to create an open learning platform.

It look a few more decades for the OU to be born, predominantly driven by the tenacity of Jennie Lee (you can read the full story on the OU site). It’s that tenacity again. Today the OU continues a tradition of technology-mediated learning, using social software tools to connect students and tutors to form a gigantic learning organisation. It is the largest Moodle deployment in the world (Moodle is an on-line social-learning platform - think of a blogging, forum and content management system on steroids).

Non-technology industries work on different timescales. A couple of decades working in the technology industry has twisted me into believing that 2 years as a long-time, and 3-5 years is a time window beyond which predicting change is futile. Technology means that software and hardware develop rapidly, driving quick changes. Building institutions and companies takes longer. Much longer. When was the last time you took on a 10 year project? It takes tenacious long-term goals.

The long-term path of the start ups, now grown ups, I have worked with has been relatively predictable. Likewise, the major technology trends of the last few years have been too. Yes, 20-20 hindsight does make predictions simpler, but technology has strong homeostatic tendencies. After all, it is driven by people and people change slowly, if at all. Today, people drive (or hold back) technology, rather than the other way around.

The emerging web-browser and cloud computing model isn’t that different from my early experiences of computing with dumb terminals and mainframe computers. What is new this time around is a greater emphasis on people-centric design. The nature of application and systems design is being changed by rafts of new technologists with user experience qualifications (many of whom studied the same Psychological theories I was wrapped up in last week).

The area of science that I am most interested in doesn’t really exist yet, but it will, because it must. How does all of this technology change the way that we work? How can we build companies that make better use of technology, and technology that makes better use of people? We can’t do all of our learning at school or university anymore. Successful businesses and people will have to make continuous learning part of their very being, just to keep up.

There is still a long way to go in all of these things. It involves big goals. But tenacious long-term goals have always been how big things get done.

July Top 10 and Wrap Up

Benjamin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:26:40 +0000

There is one consistent item on the editorial calendar of the WOWNDADI Blog: The end of month round up. Reviewing is a great productivity habit and sometimes it can be fun too. This month’s certainly has been! Some highlights:

MediaCamp London and lunches with the Social Media Mafia.
TechCrunch Pitch! My signature low-light photography turned up on TechCrunch and TechCrunch UK - thank you to Mr Butcher for an excellent event - it also inspired the post: “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Pitchers“.
WordCamp UK - There is a competition for the best write up, please do VOTE.
CloudCamp London - more on cloud computing and hosted applications to follow.

As well as IoD activities, getting businesses up and blogging and psychology assignments. I also just heard that I have been quoted in Director magazine in a piece on social media in business. I haven’t even mentioned building a Wi-Fi enabled field or recent interviews yet…

There are some big things in the month ahead, which I will be blogging about, of course. As an aside, effective use of powerpoint in business is one of my passions, even if it does seem a little Business 1.0 relative some other activities. There is a new course I’m building on that topic, I will be looking for beta customers, so do drop me a line if you are interested.

Back to the point, this months Top 10 was as follows:

I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. Your comments are always appreciated. A word or two, a link or a simple thought can spark a journey of discovery.

Do Your Employees Dance?

Benjamin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:46:30 +0000

Have you studied bees? Our family has fantastic friend, Dave. Dave keeps bees and supplies us with honey from his local hive. The pollen rich honey does wonders for the hay-fever sufferers in the household.

Like most people, I’ve not had much reason to study bees. At least, not until I started studying the psychology of language. Dave’s bees do fascinating things, like building the honeycomb pictured here. Bees are viewed as hyper productive, industrious creatures, working away industriously. The hive is the very model of business, full of busy bees.

But did you know that bees spend a fair bit of their time wandering about aimlessly, and a fair bit dancing too? Bees major product is honey. Producing honey requires nectar, which the bees stumble upon by foraging. This is where the dancing comes in. The dancing gets work done efficiently.

When a bee finds a source of nectar it comes back to the hive and does a ‘waggle dance’ for its co-workers. The dance communicates the location of the nectar, indicating the direction and distance. The dance also communicates the type of nectar, by including a sample of the newly found treasure as part of the communication process. The co-workers then mobilize to bring back the rest of the new find.

It is a process of innovation and discovery. A single bee, with the time to wonder, makes a discovery. It then shares the discovery with the hive. The process maximizes the return on the new discovery, while minimizing unfruitful searching by other bees.

Do your employees dance? Do they have the time and tools to communicate where the nectar for your business is to other employees? Do they celebrate and communicate success? It is as important to the modern business as it is to the bee hive.

It always makes me sad when I hear a business shutting down communication channels that employees use - be it instant messaging, video conferencing or a community forum. In the wake of that decision is a hive of workers with less information to make them successful, and a less productive community.

Internal blogs and wikis and open communication channels (rather than closed point to point e-mail systems) are an essential tool for showcasing the steps to success. Did you just make a big business win? Then make sure everyone in the business knows. Let them know why it was a big win, and what enabled it to happen. Do a waggle dance!

It isn’t just for the benefit of current employees. Hopping back to the bees for a minute, the nature of the waggle dance is unique (if you want to know more, check out Karl von Frisch who pioneered the study of bee communication). If you take a different sort of bee and introduce it to the hive, it will not be understood. Although eventually, after some mis steps, the bees will learn to communicate again.

How are new bees in your hive able to learn the language to communicate with the existing bees? Wikis and blogs provide a place for new staff to come and absorb the culture and language of a business. That gets them productive more quickly. They are called business wikis for a reason.

New employee hire orientation isn’t a one off event. It is about binding people into a community and enabling them to be part of it. That is a two way process, requiring good communication tools.

Bees have a specific place where they can come to dance. For some species it might be at the entrance to the hive, for others it is vertically on the comb, but there is a place.

Does your business have somewhere for employees to dance?

Living in the Cloud - Computing

Benjamin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:53:36 +0000

This is a long overdue post, following on from CloudCamp London, which was the second ever CloudCamp, and the first in the UK. It’s been a couple of weeks of firsts, what with WordCamp too. And yes, before you ask, I have been a busy camper - so much so that I am taking time out to go camping tomorrow, but that is another post.

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.

My favourite technology of the evening was really James Governor’s Segway (founder of RedMonk - his write up of the event here: CloudCamp London: the inauguration). However, I didn’t manage to persuade James to part with it, although he did get me thinking more generally about Cloud Computing and the surrounding issues.

Cloud-based services are going to be a increasing part of business life, and understanding them will be essential. There are a number of benefits and a number of challenges, which I’ll touch on in the next few posts…

WordCamp UK 2008 - A Qik Look Back…

Benjamin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:39:35 +0000

One of the great things about blogging is you can still do it when you are unable to talk! I had an unscheduled visit to the dentist today, having woken up in intense pain. Now the anesthetic is wearing off, I am remembering what happens when you get over 60 WordPress bloggers and developers in a room:

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!

Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis

Benjamin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:58:17 +0000

Hey, that’s your business! Or it could be. Vandals pulled a large number of BT cables out of the ground in our local town (Camberley), leaving thousands of people and hundreds of businesses without their phones. It will take weeks to repair all of the damage. Sadly, with the increasing value of the copper in phone lines, this sort of incident is becoming increasingly common.

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.

Future of The Web - Part II - The Future

Benjamin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:07:11 +0000

A minutely belated followup to “Future of The Web - Part I - A History“, these are the rest of my thoughts on the NESTA “Future of the Web“ session. The videos of the event are here - you’ll need to be able to play Windows Media files.

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…

WordCampUK 2008

Benjamin — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:58:07 +0000

I use both commercial and open source software. Choosing the best tool for the job is the priority. However, one thing that I do really appreciate with open source is the communities that operate around each platform.

For the first time in the UK, the WordPress community is gathering. WordCamp UK will be held from Saturday July 19 to Sunday July 20, 2008 in Birmingham (Birmingham, UK that is). Tickets are on sale here.

There will be presentations, workshops and the opportunity to socialize with other WordPress enthusiasts and developers. A great opportunity to learn and share knowledge and skills.

I’ll be there with my camera, capturing the moment (here are the pictures from MediaCamp and TechCrunch Pitch! in case you missed them). I’ll also be on the Q&A panel, as well as speaking from my experiences of the past few years.

Redcatco are supporting the event with sponsorship - it is great to be able to give something back to the community. You can find out much more on the WordCamp UK blog. Oh, and the event even has its own WordPress plugin: Linklove.

If you are a WordPress user in the UK (or know one, or can travel to the UK), come along and spread the word. I use WordPress everyday, and really appreciate its ease of use, flexibility and developer community.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Pitchers

Benjamin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:11:25 +0000

Last night saw me at the TechCrunch Pitch! event and in a camera happy mood (see Techcrunch pitch photos on Flickr), you’ll find some videos on techcrunch moblog (I Qik’ed Mike Butcher’s intro here). The pitches were of a high standard, and I’ll be checking out a some of the companies.

Mike gave the companies a specific list of questions to work to. That isn’t completely unusual for a pitching situation, although I think it vexed a few of the speakers. Doug Richard, from BBC’s Dragon’s Den, did an excellent job of playing bad-cop.

On the way home, my thoughts turned to “what makes a good pitch?” Over the years I’ve been on both sides of the table, prepping the pitches and pitching businesses for funding, but also listening to company pitches with a view to investment or acquisition. As I was describing these to my ever astute COO, she said “That sounds like the seven habits of highly effective pitchers”, so here they are:

1. Know the audience, but don’t take them for granted.

What are their motives for being at the pitch? Who are they? These days there is little excuse for not having good background. Linkedin, Xing, Google and Blogs (if they blog) are useful tools. Obviously, don’t end up being a social media stalker, but be aware of the background. One last obvious point, don’t take everything you read as gospel, or make the mistake of believing you actually understand the audience.

2. Know the ideal outcome and shoot for it.

What is it that you want to happen as a result of the pitch? Have a very clear and specific idea of what it is, and make sure the pitch actually works towards it. If you are pitching to investors for cash, they are going to be more interested in how much you want, how good you’ll be with it and why. Not in how hot your Ruby-on-rails coding skillz are.

3. Know the weakness(es) and head them off.

You suck. You genuinely do. There are things that you are not great at. There are areas where your company is exposed. Know what they are. What are the most common objections you get in the context of this pitch? You don’t want to sow seeds of doubt, but you do want to concrete over any ground where they might spring up.

4. Describe the value from a customer perspective.

What is it that you enable? In specific, quantifiable terms, how does it make things faster or cheaper for customers. For any business product it must do one, if not both, of these or there isn’t a proposition. If you are a consumer offering, then you have the luxury of grasping at being outrageously, additively fun. Don’t miss it.

5. Woo and wow, rather than beat and demand.

Don’t sell to me, woo me - win me over. People (I include myself there) dislike being sold too. Get me on your side. Don’t tell me you rock, tell me about someone else who says that you rock. Appeal to my judgment, experience and objectives (see 1).

6. Know your time limit; stick to it.

Not over or under. When I first started running a Toastmasters club, I found one of the rules very harsh: If you run over time, you are out of the competition. It is a good discipline. The only way you can know if you are going to be in the time limit is to do a full talk-through. Do it and time it. Rinse and repeat. The audience, and you, will appreciate it. Failing to stick to time and being pulled off stage dents the impression you leave behind.

7. Tell stories.

Stories have narrative. They flow. Their linked structure (this, then this, then this…) make them memorable and easy to follow. Stories have colour and detail, which makes them engaging. People love stories, and if they are good they retell them - that is a marketing secret weapon.

And remember, good stories have a beginning, middle and end. Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. That’s the seven habits of highly effective pitchers.

Future of The Web - Part I - A History

Benjamin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:45:51 +0000

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…

Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web

Benjamin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:03:56 +0000

Two things in one here: A heads up on an event tomorrow (don’t worry, you can still catch it), and an interesting way to look at things.

Tomorrow sees a talk from Sir Tim Berners-Lee (recently voted the most important technology innovator of the last century), focussing in on web science. It is an area I am fascinated by, so I’m chuffed to be going along. Web science looks at the impact of the web on our society and economy and combines a number of disciplines dear to my heart.

He will be joined by Andy Duncan (Chief Executive of Channel 4) and Charlie Leadbeater (author of “We-think“: The Power of Mass Creativity’) for discussion on the role of governments, business and academia in safeguarding the future of the web as an open platform. The session is fully booked, but panic not, there will be a live webcast, tomorrow from around 4pm GMT (or a bit earlier to be sure!). Here is the URL:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-future-of-the-web-with-sir-tim-berners-lee-8-july

The NESTA Innovation Edge team polled a number of people about their hopes and fears for the future of the web, and used these to produce a Wordle cloud. I’ve seen a few Wordle clouds recently, and they can be quite thought provoking. It is essentially a word cloud (just like a tag cloud, if you are familiar with those), but more graphically rich.

Take a look and you’ll get the idea. Here are people’s hopes for the future of the web:

And here are people’s fears about the future of the web:

Word clouds are a useful stimulus for conversations. The words, freed from their semantic context, stimulate all sorts of thinking. How about building your own word clouds about your hopes and fears and then see what they tell you? Just go to Wordle - Create and paste in your text.

Here’s the wordle for this blog:

Thoughts Post MediaCampLondon

Benjamin — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:06:24 +0000

MediaCampLondon was a very organised unconference (and I mean that in a good way), kudos to Chris Hambly, Social Media Mafia, and the rest of the team that enabled it to happen. A big thank you to SAE for providing a great venue. It was a little disconcerting for me, as over twenty years ago I planned to study at SAE to be an audio engineer. Then I discovered the Internet and the on-line world and the rest, as they say, is history (mine at least).

There were familiar faces (see the photostream: mediacamplondon), but also some that I previously only knew as twitter icons and profile pictures on blogs. It is good to get to connect face to face - apologies to those I didn’t get to talk to in-depth. Jenny B, Whatleydude, Steve Lamb/actionlamb, deCabbit and a number of others ran some great web sessions.

My main interest in social media are as a means of connecting businesses with their customers, and connecting people within businesses, and there were some great sessions that pushed thinking there further.

I remain convinced that social media is the perfect tool to preserve company culture and communications in businesses that are increasingly dominated by remote or mobile employees, dispersed across large geographies. There is still much to learn, but it is clear that blogs, even internal ones, improve communication, efficiency and business in general.

‘Traditional’ office workplace designs include ‘huddle’ areas and social spaces. The virtual workspace and information infrastructure should as well. However, there are good and bad ways of rolling out social media. To quote one of my rare moments of lucidity “social media is something that you do with people, rather than too people” (thank you loudmouthman for capturing that). It needs to me a means to an end, because it is a very empty end in itself.

Jenny Bee’s thoughts on large organizations using video content spawned lots of discussion and set me thinking about the challenge of video again. Some of the discussion was along the lines of can brands be broadcasters (see “is broadcasting something to shout about?”), and also in some very different directions. Video format social media as a marketing tool still presents a number of challenges:

You need quality content. That doesn’t necessarily just mean quality in terms of the filming (although that is important), but in terms of the information contained in the video. That means covering visual as well as audio aspects.
Video production is time consuming. Unless you are an ace Qik’er and able to get everything done in the first take (as Documentally has a knack for), filming and editing is a 1:5 to 1:30 ratio (a few hours to produce a 6 minute video).
A lot of what looks good but “quick and cheap” is actually expensive, agency produced footage. Don’t be fooled.

Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis shared her experiences with online reputation management, and those that follow her blog will be unsuprised to hear that chocolate came in to it as well. Businesses need to keep their eyes open these days. What are people writing about them. What are their competitors up to? What is going on in their industry. The good news is that it is easier to do than ever before. The bad news is that it takes time, and very few businesses are doing it.

June Top 10 Links and the Month Ahead

Benjamin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:19:51 +0000

For this month, I’m putting a slight twist on the usual top 10 post: I am going to split it between the Top 5 posts here on WOWNDADI and my favorite 5 posts from blogs that mentioned the blog.

Five Quid and a Crate of Beer - Starting the New New Business

Benjamin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:45:08 +0000

I’ve been ‘doing’ startup technology businesses for over 20 years now. During that time lots of things have changed, and lots of things have stayed the same. It can get confusing as to which is which, so l took myself along to the SocialMedia Business School to catch up with current consensus thinking in the social media space.

SocialMedia Networks produced the event, which included panels with some familiar faces, including Joshua March. One of the highlights for me was Stefan Glaenzer, with his Fidelity Ventures hat on. Whilst he gave solid advice, in his usual straight talking style, it got me thinking about the place of VCs in the new open-source-social-media-powered technology world.

For the greatest part of my career, startups have depended on venture capitalists for a number of reasons, mostly contacts and cash for:

Marketing, to get the company and product known.
Development, to get the product or service developed.
Funding the build out of a sales force ahead of revenues.

For a hardware business, there were high set up costs. Even for a software business, there was the cost of machines and development software, and funding a few years of development. But that has all changed. Hardware development has commoditized and can be outsourced. Computers are no longer expensive. Development environments are free and founder/developers are working for equity. For marketing, social media is enabling businesses to reach prospects (and customers) at a fraction of the tradition costs, and even close business too.

These days you can build a start up for five pounds and a crate of beer. Why five pounds and a crate of beer? Blame a conversation with Jof Arnold of Brain Bakery for that one. We were talking about self-funded start ups, and developers working for equity, and surviving on minimal cash at the most recent MiniBar meetup (see also: MiniBar Meetup).

I think it was Jof who talked about someone surviving on 12 pounds. Well, I figured that you must be able to optimize that, given all the great lifehacking blogs, and survive on a fiver - especially if you had a crate of beer as an incentive for success.

Slightly more seriously, technology businesses are no longer anywhere near as capital intensive as they used to be -social media businesses even less so. Google, Amazon and others are providing hosted services (free for low volume) and development environments that allow applications to be developed and launched at low-to-no cost (in a Software as a service model). The same applies to knowledge-based businesses as well.

The key to getting a company up and going now is your core intellect and ability to motivate and organise yourself. You still need a clear, and suitably big, vision of what you want to achieve. Sweat equity is a good test of how good that sense of vision and that motivation is. 37 Signals pioneered the concept of developing new products in spare hours.

This is a really exciting time for innovation and entrepreneurs. Whilst barriers still remain, many of the traditional barriers have come down. In the coming years there will be great change in company structures and across whole industries. That creates huge opportunity for those that can take advantage of it.

Brain Food

Benjamin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:44:29 +0000

Long-time readers will know that I am a bit of a TED fanatic. I’d love to get the best of the UK’s brains together for an affordable, UK version of TED. I’ve met so many talented, world-changing people over the last year. I’d love to get them up on a stage. One day, one day. It will happen. In the mean-time…

Enjoy the on-line TED videos. The trouble is, with so many now on-line, where do you start? Well, at the 50 million views mark, TED have announced their Top 10 TEDTalks of all time, and even put together a highlights video. They are good brain food - although don’t take that too literally with the top video in the list:

1. Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight
2. Jeff Han’s touchscreen foreshadows the iPhone and more
3. David Gallo shows underwater astonishments
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth
5. Arthur Benjamin does “mathemagic”
6. Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
7. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
8. Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do
9. Al Gore on averting a climate crisis
10. Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks

All I can say is, enjoy! Btw, you can retrieve the TED talks via iTunes - which is just about providing a reason to live for my poor frequently-rebooting AppleTV. My Top 10 would have been slightly different. For lots of reasons Sir Ken Robinson would be top of my list:

And, speaking of brain food, Steve Lawson has a novel way of dealing with the pressures of being a one-man band (literally, in Steve’s case), in this post on Creative Choices “…Employ Yourself“. There again, I may just be a little biased, given one of his sources…

Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?

Benjamin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:14:40 +0000

What is happening to traditional broadcasters? Who are the new broadcasters? How should we use broadcast media? What is broadcast media becoming? How do companies communicate in the emerging broadcast world order? These were just some of the topics from the Rebecca Caroe/Creative Agency Secrets ”Should Brands be Broadcasters?” event.

It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
Andrew Howells of Zype.
Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik’s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …).

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers - good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members - as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media - filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

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