The Obvious?

talktalk woes

I know I shouldn't use this blog to rant but ....

When I transferred my line and calls to TalkTalk I opted for online billing when I filled in the original online form.

When I try to log in the system says it doesn't recognize my e-mail address.

They then keep sending me e-mails, to that very address, nagging me to do online billing.

When I call for the fourth time to try to get it sorted the automated system askes me to input my phone number.

When I eventually get through to a person the first thing he asks for is my phone number.

When I ask, politely, what the point was of keying it in when I now have to repeat it all to him he hangs up on me!

Grrrr

Collective Joy

Thanks to a nudge from Alan Moore I am currently listening to Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich and thoroughly enjoying it. The book traces the history of street festivals, carnivals and other group activities that have been repressed and disapproved of by various regimes through the centuries but which continue to surface in new forms with each generation.

It occurred to me that Facebook, Twitter and all the other tools that people like to disparage as being silly are probably the latest attempt to express collective joy in the face of "grown up" resistance!

The power of the well asked question

I remember with fondness the power of Marko Tusar's questions on our intranet forum at the BBC and it is nice to see from this post on the BBC Internet Blog that he hasn't lost the knack.

Twhirl is raising funds at a $4.2 million valuation ...

... and in his post announcing the news Loic used the memorable phrase

"Given the market price of a tweet" ....

And people worry about the word social!

;-)

Girlie phones

Many moons a geek at the BBC used to try to wind me up by calling Macs Fisher Price computing. I used to wind him up by saying that I took that as a compliment as it meant well designed, easy to use and fun.

Several times now women who I barely know have seen me using my iPhone and come up to me saying they have one and how much they love it. Not just like it - LOVE it.

In the same inversion of it's possible sexist use I reckon the normally disparaging epithet "girlie" is high praise indeed for a bit of kit.

Geek & Poke thanks to Dave Snowden

Oh my gawd ...

The nightmare that called itself knowledge management would appear to be attempting to morph into wisdom management. Abandon faith all ye who enter ....

Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013

Forester are predicting this huge spend on bringing web 2.0 to the enterprise. I find myself telling people more and more that if they are spending loads of money on this stuff they are almost certainly doing the wrong things.

If any businesses want help making Forester's prediction look silly they know where to find me .....

The hidden benefits of social computing in the enterprise

Rex Lee has a great post listing the not so obvious, but in my view greatest benefits of social computing in a business environment.

More on the word social

Shortly after I responded to Dave's comment on my previous post my aggregator pointed me to this very interesting and different take on use of the word social.

Having just come back from The Czech Republic, where I spent a lot of time thinking about its past under communism, and having just finished the section in Modern Times which deals with the various forms of totalitarianism shaping the world at the start of the second world war, I have been thinking a lot more about the risks of revolutionary and utopian thinking.

The ideologies of the thirties filled the vacuum left by the loss of faith in religions triggered by the thinking of Einstein and Freud and the destabilization of the old order speeded up by the impact of the first world war. I am constantly thinking about the similarily major changes happening now in how we see societies and relate to each other, partly brought about by the impact of the web on our ability to connect with and understand each other, and the risk of slipping into utopianism and our own dogmas. It is so important to me to try to learn the lessons of history as I play my own small part in avoiding some of John Gray's ever decreasing circles.

For me the bottom line is that without the web and blogging, sitting here in rural Buckinghamshire I would not have been able to re-publish Hugh's cartoon which would not have been read by two people in totally different parts of the world who also think hard about things that matter and we would not have been able to engage each other in trying to understand our world and make it a better place each in our own ways.

This is soooo why I love blogging.

Spot on

I get frustrated when people in business turn their noses up at the word social and Hugh, as usual, nails it.

Homosexual Geneticists Isolate Cause of Christianity

via Tom Coates

Reboot

Now 26th and 27th of June not 5th and 6th as previously planned.

Diddy little camper

We walked past this little beauty last night in Tenby.

Vanity publishing

My appearance on BBC Breakfast this morning was at a different time from predicted and one or two people asked if there was an online copy so here you go.

And no I am not an "Internet Security Advisor" as the caption says. So much for editorial standards!

Brace yourselves

I am going to be on the BBC's Breakfast show at 0820 talking about the government's proposals to make social computing safer.

Wish me luck!

A matter of perspective

Overheard from our living room as we were all rushing to get out the house this morning:

Mother: "Stop mucking about in there"

Daughter: (sounding irritated) "I am not mucking about I am doing a handstand!"

Radio Play Of 'Blood, Sweat And Tea'.

I bet when Tom Reynolds started blogging he never imagined ending up being the inspiration for a radio play!

Congratulations Tom - when is the film deal going to happen then?

Tagging Images

I got really excited when I saw TagCow, a site which uses Mechanical Turk to tag images in the thousands, but was then disappointed when I realised that the tagging only applied to images on their site. What I really want is a similar service where I could upload thumbnails of my images to get tagged but then have the tags incorporated into those images' meta data on my own hard drive. I am pretty good at tagging but with 8,000 images and growing it is a daunting task!

Wish I were there ....

... but going to be in Vegas instead.

Different rhythms

Stow Boyd has an interesting post today about the movement from blogs towards more "flow" tools like Twitter and how blogging tools, as currently conceived, don't make this transition easy. I agree with everything Stowe says but would also suggest that there are different rhythms to the different tools and that blogging will continue to have an important place. A place to stop and ponder in the midst of the flurry of flow.

Says it all really ....

Via wikinomics

Post filtered friendship

In the old days our ability to make friends was pre-filtered - you only met so many people. Nowadays it is post-filtered. You can meet hundreds online then filter down after the fact.

Pervasive Penguins

Walking to school with my daughter this morning I found myself whistling one of the great tunes from Club Penguin. I then envisaged a Life Of Brian moment when all the other parents in the playground might join in on the chorus.

Maybe one day.

Constance Evans

Since we moved into our house sixteen years ago we have enjoyed the company of the wonderful old lady, Connie, who lived next door. She was a happy, optimistic, cheerful widow who had lived in her house since the 1940's.

Despite failing health over recent years Connie remained a model of how to maintain a cheerful disposition and proved daily that happiness is something you do rather than something you get. Many's the time we have found ourselves complaining about something or other and been pulled up short when we thought of how little Connie had in comparison and yet how rarely, if ever, she felt sorry for herself.

Sadly Connie passed away in hospital this morning. For such a small and understated person she will leave a remarkably large hole in our lives.

Come the revolution

I had a bit of a ding dong with Conrad Bird, Deputy Director, Government Communication, during a panel at The British Library recently over my use of the title "The Quiet Revolution" for my workshops. Conrad took exception to the word revolution and preferred the use of the more moderate word evolution. The reason I preface the word revolution with "quiet" is that while this thing we are at the start will be revolutionary in terms of how we see ourselves and the world around us I would agree that images of the storming of the Bastille are not really appropriate!

However .....

While this is not a revolution in the sense of being bottom up - those in the middle and the top are in some ways as constrained by the system as those at the bottom - and it is also not revolutionary in the sense of a concerted activities driven by one small group with a particular ideology. It is a gradual, revoltuionary sophistication of how we see ourselves, each other and the world we create.

Reading the section in Here Comes Everybody about the power of self organisation in political contexts, along with watching this video about monetary reform, combined with my previous post on the dangers of right answers all lead me to believe, yet again, that while there may be flaws in the wisdom of the crowds the madness, and misdeeds, of the few are currently a far bigger problem. For every perceived risk of anarchy or chaos I see a benefit in dispersal of the power to misuse or abuse.

Diffuse means collective. We need to see things as shared responsibility and take that responsibility. I am convinced that we will re-invent politics, and hopefully even religion, in ways that enable us to take account of our new found ways of understanding our world and working together to improve it. Capitalism, socialism and the belief in a patriarchal deity all feel like incredibly tired ways of making sense of things. Surely we can do better ....?

Fame and the danger of "right" answers

Reading the section on fame in Here Comes Everybody made me uneasy. Clay talks of the inevitability of fame being one way. Once someone becomes famous even social tools can't get away from the fact that one person, whether a pop star or famous blogger, can't relate to the number of people who want to relate to them.

It nagged me that something felt wrong with this until it dawned on me that it is the fame that is wrong rather than the ability to deal with it.

I get nervous when people are given or assume the status of being more right than others, which is partly what is behind fame. People tend to become famous for being thought to be better, or more right, at something; living their lives, making money, singing pop songs, being a politician. Even notoriety is in a way being seen as being better at being bad than others!

Whether it is individuals or groups, religions or utopian totalitarian regimes, thinking that you have the right answer, and are more right than everyone else, causes all sorts of problems.

Yet people want right answers. We are taught to expect there to be a right answer and that we will be all right if we just make enough effort to find it. Business assumes this and that if you just pay enough consultants and do enough spreadsheets you will get to the right answer and be OK.

But I believe the web is teaching us another way.

In our forums at the BBC people used to ask how they could search to see if the right answer to a question had been offered previously. Eventually we learned that it was more productive to ask the question again as someone else might answer of the perceived right answer may have changed over time due to differing circumstances.

Surely even science is just a current working hypothesis that changes sometimes fundamentally when someone like Einstein comes along with enough insight to shift the paradigm. We need to make decisions because we need to do things and we need to do so on the best information available to us at the time we need to make those decisions. However getting wedded to those answers or becoming famous for having come up with them is a slippery slope.

For me a moving scrum of people thinking about, debating and building on, recursive "right answers" feels like the best way to deal with the complexity of modern life.

Maybe these conversations don't work with someone famous but then maybe fame is an outmoded idea? If the ability to be more right than anyone else and more famous for having done so gets fragmented by a more distributed series of conversations is that such a bad thing?

The cost of managing

Spookily as I read the section in Here Comes Everybody about how the cost of running organisations increases rapidly with their size to the point where running the organisation is its own biggest cost I have encountered yet again the inability of accounts departments in large organisations to actually pay people!

Hurrah!

Love in the workplace

And no I am not talking about bonking your secretary!

In the afore-mentioned Future interview with Steve Jobs he mentions love a lot. Loving the iPhone, loving working for Apple.

I wrote about love and its place in the workplace some time ago when I still worked at the BBC. It felt OK to talk about it then even though I knew some people would find it a bit odd. Having now gone freelance and met people from all sorts of organisations I am aware that for lot of people talking in terms of love at work would not only get them laughed at but in some places would have serious repercussions.

Isn't that sad.

[If you feel the need of confirmation that this is an issue read Cheryl's comment]