Friday Oct 16, 2009
Where is the online market?
Every time someone views my actual blog page (as opposed to reading it in a feed reader), it records some statistics about the visitor. I'm using a widget located at the bottom right hand side of my blog from 
As an Australian, what intrigues me is how little traffic actually appears to come from Australia in comparison to North America and Europe. Its the barrier of distance that we need to overcome!
The internet allows us to talk to, to reach, to communicate and to influence people and businesses across the globe. Yet us Australians, spend the fair
majority of our time selling in the offline world, to the people that we can see and touch and not to those larger potential online markets.
Tags communication influence online market | Comments 0
Sunday Oct 11, 2009
The worth content
'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says.
These are some interesting words, which I found from a Slashdot article, titled "Rupert Murdoch Says Google is Stealing His Content".
Two and a half years ago I wrote a blog entry, "What is Content?" and in that I said "Who controls our content, controls the knowledge that is represented to us. The channels of delivery holds worth that is higher then the cost of the content itself; but the channel itself has no worth without content.".
I believe what we are seeing now is the channel of delivery that controls more formal content exerting it's influence. The worth of the content, when it is
not used directly to generate advertising revenue, will be interesting to see and to discover, as these current, being instigated by Murdoch, events unfold.
Tags murdoch communication content control | Comments 1
Sunday Aug 09, 2009
Communication and Control
"The present time is the age of communication and control."
(from Cybernetics, 1948)
Norbert Wiener wrote Cybernetics in 1948. Cybernetics, Second Edition 1965 is still available from Amazon.
But what amazes me is the quote is still true now. Some sixty odd years later.
How has the internet changed communication? What barriers still control your communication?
I certainly am, enjoying using various new communications capabilities on the net. This blog is a case in point.
Yet, I find many are hesitant to write their own. Is it fear, or a societal or generational expectation that controls others from not utilising this communication mechanism or others available on the internet?
I'm interested in your thoughts.
Monday Apr 14, 2008
Getting out of Email Jail - Email Jail Bail
We've been cutting back on email for a while. Today, Alex has written an excellent wiki entry on Email Jail. So if you have an overcrowded inbox, and who doesn't now a days that is sitting in a large organisation, check out Alex's solution overview being Email Jail Bail. In it Alex is proposing to use a Wiki as the means of getting out.
Now if you think there are other solutions for Email Jail, you can register and update the wiki yourself. For those not inclined to register there is an open discussion page (well open at this time).
Using a Wiki in this way enables many to many communication, removing potentially a lot of duplicated email communication in an organisation.
Tags communication email wiki discussion email+jail+bail email+jail | Comments 0
Sunday Mar 09, 2008
Cutting back on email
There are a lot of people I know that are bombarded with email and for many of them it has become one of those dreaded daily chores. It is even worse when left unchecked for a period of time. I've heard a new term that aptly describes this phenomenon as "Email Jail".
Luis Suarez, a Social Software Evangelist from IBM, has been actively experimenting on "Giving up on Work e-mail". His status report for Week 4 makes for a very interesting read. I've been communicating with him through twitter on this subject and he still receives email but then actively encourages conversation through other means and tools.
About a year ago, I wrote about email, in a blog entry titled "Email that's what I use to talk to my Grandfather" inferring that the newer generations entering the workforce, or indeed currently working in it, expect more modern tools for communicating then just emails. Invariable, they use other tools to communicate to their friends and associates but revert to email to communicate to their older relatives. A year on I've seen a steady rise in the usage of sites like facebook from within the confines of the corporate work environment. Some organisations have embraced these off-premise communication means and some have blocked them. But for both, email is an issue. The availability of which now has a critical impact on daily operations.
We actively use Lotus Sametime for our daily work, Alex has written up a blog entry on his experiences with it. This enables us to minimise our email usage, to really offline communication (Offline Sametime would be good IBM) or to information that we need to send external to other organisations. Everybody I show Sametime to, is impressed with it as we can also share screens (take control of other screens), use white boards and quickly capture screen shots and snippets in a conversation to expand meaning.
Now we are also experimenting with a wiki server for public and offline "walled garden" communication and it is open to others, who register, to collaborate on content with us. More on this later in another blog entry, as I see this as being an ongoing exercise.
For us, we lose productivity if our Lotus Sametime services is not available, thus it would be more critical for us to have that facility operational than email.
So if you are stuck in "Email Jail" the first step is to acknowledge it and the second step is to find other means to communicate. Even picking the phone up can be an escape (we'd prefer to use a VOIP service like Skype over traditional landlines).
Tags sametime communication email productivity community wiki email+jail skype | Comments 2
