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Introducing Collaboration Tools? Three Required Personas for Success

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 17, 2011 ⋅ One comment

When introducing collaboration tools to an organization – creating the corporate intranet, defining project sites in Sharepoint, etc. – there are multiple skills you must master – well, at least get better at. You need to capture the ideas and communicate the data such that your target reader understands what you are trying to convey [...]

Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 22, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Progress requires innovation, success spawns imitation, competition requires differentiation – and after 7+ years of “Web 2.0”, there are multiple sharing environments vying for our attention (and participation). Content Creation Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, WordPress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue [...]

Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 4, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

This past week saw the introduction of Google+, the search behemoth’s entry into the social networking fray. A slew of posts, articles, opinion pieces, etc. were sure to flow – and as I settled down with some time and a backlog of links to review, here are my initial thoughts on the service. Do I [...]

Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 19, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

A recent gift from Google Labs – the NGram viewer, a fascinating tool that searches the Google Books database for words and phrases, and charts their relative frequency. For example – let’s take some of the themes of this blog … Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. [...]

Art and Science of Data Visualization

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 7, 2010 ⋅ One comment

“Data Visualization” has been an extremely active and popular topic for a few years – we can use Google’s Timeline search feature to see the growth in interest since 1980: That local high in July of this year was due in no small part to David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful talk at TED this past [...]

The Magic In the Middle

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 25, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, or what it originally meant, but I have been using it a lot in the last few weeks … Consider the entire user population for any web site or application. You can generalize all user populations into three Pareto-inspired groups … Top 20% – The folks [...]

More Amazing Social Media Statistics

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 4, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics … would you believe … If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen 80% of [...]

Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 24, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered – embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical [...]

Hands-On Project: Offsite Strategy

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 22, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

When I talk about having an “offsite strategy” meeting, I’m looking to get out of the office and have some good, “strategic” conversation over a cup of coffee or a beer. Back when I worked for a software development company, we did our best design work at a hot dog stand in Des Plaines, IL; [...]

Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Took some time today to work with the new communication meme – Google Wave. I wouldn’t call it a fundamentally new way to communicate – well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a “preview” label – clearly not even “beta” yet. No horrible bugs – at least on the Windows platform [...]

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