cazh1 » LinkedIn

Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

Jim MacLennan — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:06:47 +0000

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 to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what and how, status reports for projects or trips.

I’ve recently begin experimenting with a new (for me) type of blogging – I’ll call it short-format, and it hearkens back to the old-school, diarist model. This is a place to put short notes, observations, maybe sketches / photos for an Artist / Designer, code snips for a Engineer / Developer, or experimental prose for an Author / Poet. The format is exemplified by tumblr, a fast-growing platform that hosts some amazing content and is giving the old stalwarts some competition.

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Content Sharing

But what about the Usual Suspects – Facebook and Google+? I don’t see these platforms as content creation engines as much as they are content sharing engines; ubiquitous Share This! links, the +1’s and Like buttons that give “social media” their differentiating characteristic; networks of contacts that are of a like mind, in your Circles or Smart Lists, add value and context to the original content.

I see Flickr and YouTube as hybrids. Flickr is driven by people adding pictures; you can see / browse / search, and it has a personal, sharing-my-photo-album quality. YouTube, in the other hand, is more like a new video broadcast network; lately, it seems like the number of personal videos is dwarfed by ad campaigns, political messages, and music / entertainment videos.

Antics with Semantics

Yes, I understand that you can Follow other tumblrs. Facebook pages and Google+ circles are creating content as profound and banal as the bloggers. And I’m glossing over professional networks like LinkedIn, which can be oversimplified as an electronic form of career networking. All of this has great value, is very relevant to the conversation – but all have subtle nuances, different use cases where they drive value.

Where does Twitter fit in? The best description to date seems to be micro-blogging; the 140-character limit forces a style and controls depth of meaning – Twitter is more of a broadcast medium, a virtual bulletin board or cocktail party, best understood by watching trending topics when events are breaking. Content is created, and RT’s and hash tags give weight to an ideas current mindshare.

An Excuse for Experimentation

Clearly, there is no one best answer when trying to figure out how social networks can drive a business. There are many platforms and technologies, all of which are evolving to deliver different messages and produce different results. There is no one best solution – and the only way to be able to glibly comment on how this might impact your business is by diving in, learning what these things can and cannot deliver. Or find someone who had done it, who is still doing it.

Just don’t go by what you read in airline magazines or see on TV – sound bites won’t cut it.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Blog, Blogger, business value, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Tumblr, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

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Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:22:21 +0000

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 need yet another social networking platform? Not really, I’ve got my personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) networks somewhat segregated, and I am falling a bit behind in regular tweets and blog entries – the value waxes and wanes over time. Still, I’ve been impressed with Google’s overall track record on innovative tools for the “personal cloud” (i.e. how can I run my own life / my start-up / my virtual business sans infrastructure?)

Ahem … Google Wave notwithstanding … but everyone gets a mulligan every once in a while, yes?
In the various reviews / blogs, many call out that Google+ will replace / obviate the need for Google Buzz. Funny, I barely registered that one … a finnegan?

First impression: the basic interface / layout seems unimpressive, just another “skin” over the basic LinkedIn / Facebook layout. The UI tricks in Circles (drag and drop into groups) is cute, and it’s the little “usability” things that get a fair chunk of the universe to salivate … but I’m looking for something insightful …

Sparks just looks like Yet Another take on aggregated, automated search. I can follow news topics in Google News or companies on LinkedIn, subscribe to Google Alerts in eMail or RSS feeds in my feed reader; Sparks is just the Google+ version of an in situ enabler for watching the world go by

Hangouts actually looks promising – a video chat room that allows groups to speak and see each other. The first-time install process was a typical, classy example of well designed, tech savvy, user-empathetic instructions that eludes corporate IT.

Ahem … looking for examples of why folks don’t like corporate IT? Or, suggestions for skill sets and training required in modern IT?

However – to be a real enterprise tool, it desperately needs the ability to screen-share. The majority of my collaborative, video-enabled meetings-at-a-distance typically revolve around a presentation or spreadsheet that we are reviewing.

Active vs Passive: I found that I was looking for ways to incorporate feeds from Twitter and this blog … but I noted what MC Siegler called out in his writeup. Content doesn’t make it into Google+ unless I specifically put it in there; if/when I build up an active, complex nesting of Circles, that editorial tweak has the potential to jack up the overall relevance score, and make Google+ an impactful tool for workgroups in a professional setting. Combine that with the readily-available face-to-face Hangout interaction – it’s a social networking platform that leans a bit more to Active, not Passive, connections. Marshall Kirkpatrick has some very insightful notes on this idea, expanding on the notion that communication needs contextual integrity (a reasonable expectation of the proper level of privacy in this context – or, freedom from worrying about who’s listening in).

At this point, however, it’s very tough to get real interactions going – I need to get folks that I know – and would actively participate – to join Google+. I got my invite through a Lifehacker forum last week, and the person that kindly sent me an invite hasn’t even completed their profile yet.

Social Networking for the Enterprise: The really interesting notes come from folks like Dennis Howlett and R. “Ray” Wang, longtime commenters on the enterprise IT scene. Howlett’s writeup on Google+ in the Enterprise is a bit breathless, but I suspect this comes from years of wading through the so-called Enterprise 2.0 offerings from other quarters; he also notes the contextual power of Circles (when done right). Wang writes about the Google+ and the consumerization of IT – where I (above) call out the usability, he is stressing his five pillars of Consumer Tech and how Google’s approach lines up so nicely with what the consumer market has been trained to expect.

But don’t take my word for it – check out these writeups, my link list for the topic (hey, I even tagged and shared ‘em via Google Reader … and the

Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker gives a quick tour here – best place to go for the mildly curious
MC Siegler at TechCrunch captures his thoughts, including the seed of the Active vs. Passive idea
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb on the intricacies of Circles – and an XKCD comic
A threat to Facebook? David Cohen at All Facebook weighs in with his alternaview
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb writes on her “stress test” of Circles – and shares the findings of Florian Rohrweck on possible future offerings for Google+

At this time, Google+ is still invite only – last weekend, there was quite a rush of wannabe early adopters, so I am not in a position to give out invites – but if you are interested, let me know, and I will send out invites as soon as I am enabled!

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Post tags: collaboration environments, Dennis Howlett, effective design, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, Lifehacker, LinkedIn, personal cloud, R. "Ray" Wang, social networking, Wave, Web 2.0, YouTube

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Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 03:42:50 +0000

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 …

Click to enlarge ...

Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. Design (Inspiration) started strong, had a bit of a lull, but is enjoying a bit of a renaissance (as it were). And unfortunately, “management” is spiking in recent year – not sure if that’s good or bad.

Sense of Self

Code jockeys generally don’t like the term coder, that’s for sure – but it looks like after a peak in the mid-80′s, Programmers are losing their mojo to the Developers.

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Although I was a little surprised at the results of this one – who knew Pascal was apparently still going strong? Nothing on this page made me think I am suffering from some ambient data noise …

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Buzzword Bingo

Here’s an interesting one; LinkedIn recently published a list of over-used profile buzzwords; I wondered how recent these buzzwords truly were. Dynamic appears to be the outlier …

Click to enlarge ...

… so we toss that one out to see that innovation is a child of the 60′s, and entrepreneurs are apparently less common than we might think.

Click to enlarge ...

More Examples

A number of other folks have been publishing insightful comparisons over the last few days …

Information is Beautiful shows The spirit of inquiry over the ages (what, when, why, how), The Battle of the Brains (Plato vs. Aristotle), and others.

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media gets into some interesting insights into the nature of language.

Scott Berkun investigates Innovation vs. Usability, and then descends into the inevitable blue humor.

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Post tags: ambient data, books database, data, data mining, design inspiration, Google, Google Labs, LinkedIn, Science, Scott Berkun, text mining, visualization

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The Magic In the Middle

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:58:49 +0000

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 who “get it”, and have the brains, the interest, and the desire to fully understand the system / tool / report / whatever, and get the most benefit out of it. In Pareto terms, the 20% that get 80% of the value.
Bottom 20% – The “hopeless”; those that just don’t get the concept (and need constant handholding), have no interest in using the app (at best, they will have someone do it for them), and no desire to expand their horizons and learn something new. In Pareto terms, the 20% that cause 80% of the problems.
Middle 60% – aka “everybody else”. This is the group of users that could get value out of the project, process / program, but need more handholding, guided learning, and/or managerial promises (/threats) to commit to learning how to use and apply this new tool.

Click for the original ...

I call this last group “the magic in the middle”; this is the user group you need to win over to ensure success for the project. In corporate IT, most projects would be considered a failure if they only got 20% of their target audience to realize the promised value – then again, no one expects 100% success, especially with the bottom 20% of folks that will Just Never Get It. So, the make or break “target market” for training and retention is the “magic in the middle” – the folks who need a reasonable level of documentation and training to get things to work.

Note that “magic” refers to the fact that what really differentiates success – that core region of 60% – is the make-or-break group that takes the extra effort. It’s not good enough that your top finance folks understand the new reporting and analytics system – the middling folks that need more handholding and examples are the ones you need to focus on. It’s not good enough that your top project managers understand the new methodology – the journeyman PMs that have more tech background than change management and communication skills need guidance and templates and checklists to make sure the minimal I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed.

Interesting Observation …

This is one of the core reasons why analogies between corporate IT and consumer IT often fail. How many times have people in the business asked IT for projects as flexible, ubiquitous, user friendly, and high quality as Flickr, Basecamp, and gMail? Or tried to address internal communication and collaboration challenges with tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Groups? Why do folks look at highly target-marketed sites / communities of practice, and cynically wonder why internal IT can’t turn over project requests with the same level of speed and quality?

One key reason – those sites only need to go after the Top 5% group of focused, engaged, and technically able potential consumers – because the internet is so big, there is plenty of money to be made from such a small percentage of the total user population. Unfortunately for corporate IT, it is not OK to implement systems that are effective only for 20% of the target user community – expectations are more like 50-80% of the user population needs to be reasonably glib in the system to be judged effective.

… but What Does It Mean?

Corporate IT is forced to go after the “middle” group – the 60 percent of the user base who needs a lot more TLC to understand and be effective in the tools and systems we provide.

However, I call it “magic” for a reason. You can leverage a lot of value once you realize that “the magic is in the middle”:

Training: When you understand the low-end expectations for end-user competence, you can target your training material at that level – and no lower.
Testing for 100% of all cases is exhausting and time consuming, a real drain on resources. However, only testing the basics (the Top 20%) won’t require a lot of rigor, for the error checks are simplistic and the level of scrutiny is much higher. If you want to do an acceptable amount of decent quality testing, your test cases should involve “the magic in the middle”.
Vendors: Bringing them in for a demo? Salesmen typically target business scenarios that are the “low hanging fruit” (in the Top 20%), and it’s easy to understand when the software can’t handle the “worst case scenario” (the Bottom 20%); get the sales team to demo something from “a typical Day In the Life” (the Middle 60%)

The Top 20% group is the easiest to service, the Bottom 20% is the easiest to ignore. The magic is in the middle, and success here separates the excellent from the also-rans in corporate IT.

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Post tags: cognition, education, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Social Networks, Twitter

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More Amazing Social Media Statistics

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 05 May 2010 04:36:16 +0000

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 Twitter usage is on mobile devices
25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

Pretty amazing stuff … check out this video for more …

I was referred to this video short by a friend, and I dug into the source a bit – check out the Socialnomics blog for more stats and videos. For example, this one on Social Media ROI …

… although, I am currently still of the opinion that social media is applicable to consumer markets; I’m not sure how it applies yet to B2B industry.

However, I’m not going to wait around to find out … but I guess I can’t talk about that right now …

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Post tags: Facebook, Google, information, interesting stuff, LinkedIn, millennials, networking, possibilities, Presentations, Social Media, Social Networks, Socialnomics, trends, Twitter, video, Web 2.0, YouTube

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Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:22:00 +0000

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 – but some obviously missing features. And, I am not all that impressed with the basic idea – it’s just a mashup of Google Docs, instant messenger, and eMail.

Problems

All of my experimentation has been from a Windows machine – I am experiencing horrible performance issues with Firefox 3.5.3 on Ubuntu 9.04. I freely admit that this might not be a Wave issue – for the last two weeks, all of my Google sites (Mail, Docs, iGoogle, Reader …) run brutally slow, timing out by graying the browser window. I know it’s a weird issue because I can’t Google for an answer (a disturbingly tight loop). Wave refused to even show me the stills from the introductory videos until I disabled Greasemonkey. Yes, I’m sure it has something to do with my setup, my installed plugins – I’m just surprised that the problems have been this stubborn.

So, to get anything done, it’s back to Windows – still using Firefox, but no hint of platform troubles. Just an underwhelming experience with the fancy new toy.

I Am Legend

Interconnections on the internet are a wonderful thing; I put out a Tweet (sic) regarding my Wave invites, and a note in LinkedIn as well. Twitter generated the most responses, with folks I’d never met – great fun to connect like that. The following day, I got a note from someone looking to connect via Wave – I’m guessing from the information that I can see, this person saw one of my original notes via Friendfeed. Amazing how those copnnections were practically spontaneous …

… while Wave feels like I’m in a walled garden. I still feel very cut off in the Wave world – a different domain from gmail.com means a new address to track, a new contact list to build. And it’s difficult to find connections with folks you already know; I received another Wave invite from a friend, but since I didn’t need it, I tried to figure out how to connect to him via Wave (I thought it a reasonable assumption that he, like me, has dived in). Unfortunately, I had to resort to an email message and some detective work to find out his Google ID – not something I could explain to most business users.

Yet Another Email Client

Yes, I am still at that opinion. Most of the opinions and articles I’ve scanned make it sound like we are working with a next-gen email client that does some of the basics right. I do note that the amplifiers tend to gush a bit, while the attenuators work hard to impress with wit.

Generally Pro

Generally Con

Maybe It’s Just Me

One of my random invites went to this guy, who’s review was a bit more positive than mind. Ok, maybe I’ll jump into the with:public pool and wade around a while – it’s probably the only way I’ll really get it. However, I am very willing to be patient and continue the experiment – took me about 3 months to get Twitter.

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Post tags: Collaboration, Google, innovation, Knowledge Management, LinkedIn, mashup, Twitter, Wave, Web 2.0

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Introducing … Google Wave

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:30:00 +0000

Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We’re happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product. To accept your invitation, sign into Google Wave at the following link …

Well, maybe not the most exciting email I’ve received over the past few years, but it was nice to get the [sorta] early notice. I’m definitely in the second wave, but I’ll not look a gift URL in the mouth.

Of course, no early impressions just yet – the interface upon start up is spare, looks like Yet Another Email Client. I will check out the introductory video(s) – I typically do my best learning by playing around a bit (without reading any manuals), then watch a demo or get an expert to give me a quick tour – and then I’ll get serious. Something to do this weekend, or while waiting around during the Next Big Go-Live (project at work).

Like previous Google apps, this one came with invites – but this is 2009, man, and I’ve got Tweetdeck at the ready! Soon after receiving the invite, I put the word out (via LinkedIn, too), and got a number of responses from fellow adventurers looking for their own golden ticket.

I have no idea how long it will take to close the loop – my Wave page/inbox/site/thingie makes it look like I’ve added these folks to a List of Indeterminate Length, with no ETA on delivery. Still, I think it might be interesting to gather their feedback into a mini review of this newest communication technology. More to follow …

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Post tags: collaboration environments, LinkedIn, Wave

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Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but …

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:10:00 +0000

When I see / read articles like this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors, pundits, and True Believers, I’ll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff – social networking, collaboration, and innovation – are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998.

Do these sound like presentations from your recent Enterprise 2.0 conference?

Managing Cultural Change to Create a Knowledge Sharing Environment
Effectively Managing Information Overload in the Information Age
Information Content and Security in Document Management Systems
Using Technology and the Project Management Workbench to Accelerate Product Development Efforts
Shifting the Burden of Knowledge Sharing to All Employees

I dug up an old copy of the proceedings from a 1998 KM conference; if I did a global text replace of “Innovation” for “Knowledge”, I could probably get a bunch of folks to sign up today!

Ok, a little sarcasm is fun, but once you realize the similarities, there are other parallels with 1990′s KM efforts – not the least of which is the identification of business benefits. Anyone involved with projects back then can testify to the difficulty in predicting hard benefits – clearly quantifiable impact on top line or bottom line, derived in a predictable, measurable manner. Sorry, it just didn’t work out that way for KM – and it won’t for Social Networks, either! The hype cycle will prevail …

Hard Benefits of Social Networks Do Not Exist, but …

Why do people insist on expecting a hard business benefit from social networks, or a payback from a project to implement a funny-sounding technology (wiki/blog/tweet) inside the enterprise? Has anyone ever gotten a quantifiable business benefit from participating on Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace?

Well, yes, actually – plenty of folks have connected with friends / colleagues, collaborated on business ideas, come up with innovative new approaches – actually monetized all the goofy sounding tools. I myself have written about successes, and have made connections I could never have anticipated. Heck, the old KM conference guide has a couple of case studies as well.

Ah, but do you see the pattern? Business benefits are not predictable, they are always opportunistic and anecdotal. Success is characterized by stories of the home runs (rarely accompanied by comparable stats on strikeouts, by the way). You can’t implement a social network within a company or a group, and predict how much and when the profits / savings / growth with start rolling in. You are setting up an environment of opportunity – nothing more.

When I hear people talk about business value or business return of social networks as if they could predict it, I cringe. They’re trying to apply financial controls on something that’s governed by chance – you can’t do it. The incorrect assumption is that you can control good luck – but you can tweak your chances.

Active networkers know – I’m talking about people that have been networking for years, when connections were made face to face. Career coaches would exhort us to get out there and build our professional network – make the office visits, get on their calendar, develop some connections. You have no idea what could happen from any one connection or conversation – nothing might happen or something might happen – you trying to make your own luck.

What is it they say, luck is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration? Social networking is just automation for some of that 90%. And benefits will happen – just don’t ask me when.

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Post tags: Blog, business benefits, business value, collaboration systems, conference, Facebook, innovation, Inspiration, Knowledge Management, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Wiki

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Field Notes: Lean Times for IT Services

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:31:00 +0000

I know it’s lean times in IT, and product / services vendors are all beating the bushes. Some interesting patterns have emerged over the last few months …

My Boss Is In Town: This is far and away the #1 meme / structure of incoming cold calls; I get a (very) brief synopsis of services/value add, the caller and pushes for some face time with “their manager”. Did some newsletter or web site suggest this novel approach last summer? I pinged a consultant friend for an opinion, and they said it might have to do with my title, but I don’t think so – this seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon.

LinkedIn Surfers: Using the Who’s Viewed My Profile feature, I typically only see names of companies. For the unfamiliar names, one or two clicks will tell me if they are software or services firms; at this point, I’ll lay 1:2 odds that they will be calling or eMailing within a week. Not that this is bad – just predictable.

Never be Rude: In all of these conversations, I do try to be polite and listen to the conversation / “pitch” for just a few minutes. I think it’s all about karma – the folks on the phone are just doing their job, and I’ll give them as polite a response as I can muster, in complete sentences, etc. I’m not turning down face-time requests because I don’t like these folks; the reality for most buy-side firms (I would think) is that [we] have limited time and attention span for new professional relationships, and limited resources for additional projects. If the product or service you are pitching is not on my close-in radar screen, I probably won’t be interested – so let’s just jump to the end game …

Never say Never: However, I do like to exchange contact information, and I’ll always ask for a short electronic synopsis of a firm and their skills / product offerings. Electronic – because I hate moving paper. Plus, I keep my conversations in a contact database, and index my hard drive for stuff like text-searchable PDFs, office documents, etc. When I do have a need, I will typically search my electronic resources to find out who (among those I have connected with) might have a certain set of competencies.

A Perfect World: Here’s a thought: some really innovative firm could publish contact information and competencies in some structured text, or maybe make it electronically discoverable on their corporate web site – can you say semantic web?. Then I search & find by competencies when I have a true need. Of course, guys like me would love a spec and a how-to document to do the same for our departmental IT profile (key technologies, typical use of third party firms, IT procurement processes for Preferred / Approved Vendors, etc.). You know, if some firm out there defined, implemented, and popularized such a spec / standard, they’d really be showing me that they knew what they were talking about …

Real World Chicago: Of course, my professional career has been centered in Chicago, and have built excellent networks and rapport with the folks I know, have spent face time with – so I do appreciate the value of that whole relationship thing. Still, please don’t be offended when I keep the conversation terse.

Of course, all the best sales people get two orders every day, right? Get out and stay out!

(apologies to TQ, he always hated that joke)

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Post tags: Chicago, Execution, LinkedIn, vendor, Vendor Management

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On the Road: Business Travel, Fall 2008

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:59:00 +0000

I don’t travel a significant amount in my current position, but when I do, it seems to come in chunks. I’m about half way through a round of travel this fall – mostly business, but with some personal travel mixed in. Six cities, three countries in less than four months. Some observations at the halfway point …

@ the Data Center: The Surreal Life

I’m finishing this entry around 4am – just off my second night in a row on the “late shift” for our Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise [Note: final edits and post mid-day, after I got home]. I’ve been deep in the “bunker” – a highly secured building with acres of processors, busily working away for any number of companies. No matter what city you are in (even New York!), the traffic is very light between 1 and 3am! And I’m definitely on a different cycle than the majority; yesterday morning, I got off the elevator heading out, and some late-night revelers were stumbling to their rooms after their own “late shift” at the local night spots. No fun like that for the IT folks – gotta keep the brain waves clear, working the checklists.

I’ve got an easy role; I’m a Shift Manager, just the “manager-in-charge” for the time I’m on. The techs are doing all the heavy lifting, although I get to join in the chorus should we need to escalate anything with our DR hosts. That, and making sure the folks trying to tough it out and go 20+ hours straight are not falling asleep at their consoles. The general preference is to work in the windowless rooms – time goes faster when you can’t see the beautiful weather outside. Added bonus – excellent bandwidth to the Internet, which makes it a much better place to work than the hotel room. There are also less distractions (junk daytime TV), and plenty of free food. Alas, that’s the other difficult thing to manage when on the road – gotta watch the calories!

Staying Healthy

I’m getting too old to party much on these business trips. Typically, I’ve got some emails, presentations, or other such stuff to work on during my off time. I can’t always count on a decent health club / fitness room – I don’t typically stay at the high price joints, but every once in a while I’ll luck out and find an elliptical. However, I do like to walk around in the cities that I visit – big or small, always good to get a sense of the place.

Healthy eating is the other big challenge – typically, I’m eating in restaurants, and most American eateries serve up oversize portions that don’t help the cause. In general, I find I don’t gain much during most trips – never out long enough to develop any seriously bad habits. Unfortunately for this trip, the data center kitchen is always well stocked – has to be, the DR team is working a 24×7 task plan with a ton of stuff to get done in the allotted time. Gotta feed folks well to keep them awake and happy – lots of water, too.

The Crash of 2008, as seen from the Night Shift

It’s a strange sensation, working on a weekend project that really destroys your regular schedule – makes following the news of the week a bit disjointed. And what a week – the Dow lost more value than any other week in history. As we wait in the airport, rest in the hotel, or stare at the consoles as tapes load, conversation can wander towards events in the financial and business world – and this adds to the feeling of disconnectedness. It’s almost too big to comprehend – but the blogosphere is nicely provides a nuanced, multi-faceted view of the situation, stuff that really makes you think.

Staying Connected

I must say, traveling over the last 2 years has been a joy, now that I’m armed with my Blackberry Pearl and the Internet. I’ve downloaded the Google Maps application, and while my Pearl doesn’t have GPS, it can swag my location by triangulating against cell phone towers. I never get lost, and it’s easy to find the right spot to eat, shop, or visit. I was surprised to find out my current location has no pancake houses near the downtown area. Disappointing …

When you can get a decent connection, the Internet lessens that disconnected feeling. These days, I get the majority of my news from websites and blogs, and those stay comfortably constant, no matter where I’m at. Interesting sensation: the environment has changed considerably, but you are just as connected as when you are sitting at home.

Soon, it’s time to load up the van and head for the airport – and another round of experimentation with Ping.fm. I’ve been experimenting off and on with Twitter again, and since I’ve recently made the leap and started a page on Facebook, I thought I’d also try this multiple status updater. Note that I don’t send travelogue updates to LinkedIn – as I’ve noted before, the “what am I doing” feature doesn’t seem to be used much by my network, so I’m sure that the group doesn’t care to know when I take off and land. I assume Facebook will become my semi-professional, friends-and-family social network, while LinkedIn stays all business. Twitter? Well, I’m still not sure how relevant that is to me, but I’ll ping stuff every once in a while. I do like Ping.fm’s ability to quickly toggle parts of your notification list – I will Ping all (including LinkedIn) when I post to this blog, but the “social” stuff doesn’t go to the business network.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2008. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: BlackBerry, BlackBerry Pearl, disaster recovery, DR, Facebook, Google Maps, IT Operations, LinkedIn, pancakes, Ping.fm, systems tests, Twitter, Waffle House

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