Blogging seems to have all grown up, gotten serious, and become a business tool if BRW is this week (27/05/2005) reporting on business blogging and its effect on modern marketing.
Apparently it is the saviour of marketing (according to a marketing person), which will only be the case when marketing understands how it works and what the message really is.
I note (thanks Phillip Smith) a Hewlett Packard research item (reported at cnn.com) that indicates that emails and text messages create a greater loss in a person’s IQ than smoking marijuana. At least, that’s the headline – but the study also provides a comparison showing that being constantly interrupted by emails has the same impact on your IQ as missing a full night’s sleep.
The study doesn’t mention the long-term effects of email use, but one would think that the long-term “e-mail withdrawal” symptoms can’t be good.
I suspect banning email won’t be the answer for productivity increases (can you imagine receiving 120 phone calls a day instead?), but this is probably a reminder note to regularly schedule email-free time. If it is important, they’ll call you. I suspect many people suffer from the symptom that the next email could be really interesting (even if the last five weren’t).
I know I do, and if I find a good therapy group I’ll post it on this website.
Going back through my old papers, I discovered this (rather more accessible, although it’s still research) version of my thesis on Information Request Ambiguity. A riveting read? Probably not, but it’s a good source for anyone wanting to take a look at the theoretical underpinnings of internal communication and its potential commercial effects.
In case you’re wondering, information request ambiguity is when there is ambiguity in a request for a report to be written by a third party. Information Request Ambiguity is a mouthful, but it’s probably more professional-sounding than calling it the “Are you sure that’s what you want?” factor.
This paper was presented at the International Conference in Information Systems in 2001. We are repeating the experiment and hoping to publish in a first-tier journal “real soon now”. The main rationale for the research was to identify the different types of ambiguity, and what their likely effects are (e.g. accuracy, mistaken reporting, etc).
Just saw this article on zdnet which talks about how the US Army kind of mucked up when it released a confidential report but didn’t convert it to PDF properly. So the censor’s pen wasn’t quite black enough – easier to see than holding it up against the light, I guess.
Of relevance to those of us not in the US military though – never (well, almost never) send a document to a client or external party with track changes on or with dodgy metadata in it (you’ll see dodgy metadata under /file/properties in your Microsoft documents – if you do that and it looks like something you don’t want a client to see, then change your templates). Better yet, do what I do and send them as PDF documents (try CutePDF) – just be better at that than the US Army is.