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Genius. Pure Genius.

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Definitely in the ‘fun stuff’ category lately for me is the ‘Girl Genius’ webcomic.  There are lots of free webcomics out there, most of which have about zero art, less humour, and zip plot.  Girl Genius, though, I can appreciate (although I’m not a huge fan of the ‘paper dolls’).  Especially since I’m married to a Girl Genius, although perhaps not in a SteamPunk kind of way.

Let’s just say that if a girl with green hair & funny-looking swords wants to buy you coffee, run.  Just – run.

And showing how the new world can work – creative tweeps can follow Othar’s Twitter.  I’m sure none of these jobs existed when I was in High School…

Tag Clouds for fun and profit

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We had our ITM CoE meeting on this immediate past Tuesday, where in a case of life imitating social media I got to meet Mick Leyden in-the-flesh, as it were, after meeting on Twitter. 

In the course of discussions around the table, one topic that came up – quite apart from the topic of, somehow, Viagra – was using tag clouds as a way of communicating the big issues to clients from interviews.  One of our members, Shauna, had thought of tag clouds for blogs, but not in the context of using it to show a client and reflect back what they have said.  I recently used the tag cloud, www.wordle.net, to demonstrate to a client what I’d gleaned from my one-on-one interviews with them. 

It was really helpful to just demonstrate what had been said.  Interestingly, the conclusions of priorities after three hours of analysis were just about the same as just running the text through the tag cloud generator.  But of course, less valid.

Anyhoo – if you want a way to brighten up the results of interviews, I would heartily recommend this as a new way to communicate the message.

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Evernote’s watchful eye

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I note that over the weekend I twittered about my examination of Evernote 3.  I’ve been a user of Evernote 2.2, and I believe my tweet was something to the effect of:

“Struggling with Evernote 3 – wondering if I could use gmail with imap instead. Answer looks like ‘no'”

That was on Saturday.

Yesterday, www.twitter.com/evernote started following me.  That’s three days.  Interesting, particularly in the context of my recent article on online reputation management.  People do do it.  It will be interesting to see what they say when I post my review :)…

Social security

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About this article

In about April I got a phone call asking me if I could write an article very quickly for the CFO Software guide of 2008.  This guide is produced in association with CPA Australia every year, and every so often the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence writes an editorial piece related to the topic of the moment (usually).  This time, though, because it was very short notice (I believe the phrase ’10am tomorrow?’ was used), I got to draw a fairly loose association with the topic.  I wanted to write something a little different to the normal business article – although a good and serious article is excellent, it doesn’t achieve much if it is never read, in my view. 

So as a result, I wrote an article on the topic of social networking, and called it ‘business socialism’ – it was subsequently retitled to ‘Social security’.  In an edition where the companion articles are fairly business-focused, my article probably has, as was described in unsolicited feedback, as a ‘tone’.  The Editor’s Letter for this edition notes that the theme of social software and tapping into the wisdom of crowds ‘is picked up enthusiastically by Micheal Axelsen, the chairman of the Information Technology and Management Centre of Excellence for CPA Australia, in his opinion piece’. 

I’m going to take that feedback as positive feedback.  I reproduce the article below as I submitted it, together with an attached scanned copy of the magazine.  If you think you may be the person who has their photograph in FaceBook giving a Nazi salute, perhaps drop me a line on my email. 

Oh, and thanks to Jenny for being very sporting about the fame of her cat, Stitch.

Social security

Once, ‘friends’ were people that you met regularly. Friends went to the movies together. Friends may occasionally have had one beer too many and woke up together on a park bench. Sometimes friends were workmates. Sometimes they were actually your significant other’s friends. You and your friends drifted apart when you changed jobs (or your significant other).

Today, the world is very, very different. The circle of friends expands and grows. Friends that move away can be ‘followed’ with social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. Because of Facebook, I know that a former colleague has just received a kitten called Stitch. A cute cat, but I have not met that colleague in eight years.

Today, people are Facebooked, MySpaced, and LinkedIn. They Flickr and Twitter and Qik. People blog and they YouTube.

Today’s workforce talks over the internet in myriad ways, at all times and at all opportunities. The line between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ has become very blurred. Social networking sites can have a real business impact.

Social networking is positive in several ways. For example, searching on a candidate’s name will provide more background than a resume ever will. A footprint on the internet will exist somewhere. Potential employers can be better informed about the candidate. The same approach can be used for prospective suppliers of products or services to the business.

Candidates or suppliers with personal photographs in the Facebook group ‘embarrassing party photos’ may not like this. However, it is not only the young that can have unsavoury photos appear online. At least one Facebook user has shown poor professional judgment by posting a photo of their employer’s grey-haired managing director giving a Nazi salute. The poor fellow probably doesn’t know it exists.

A scan of blogs and other online tools for qualified candidates expressing frustration about their current job may be helpful when recruiting. Head hunting to fill specialist roles can be much easier in this digital world.

On the other hand though, customers with bad experiences services will likely retell their story on the internet. Today’s mobile technologies allow this to occur before the customer has even left the store. Many prospective customers today will perform a search on the business. These customers tend to believe an anonymous internet posting in preference to any information contained in a marketing brochure.

Employees’ activities ‘out of hours’ can also have an impact. The legal liability is at best murky when an employee stalks another employee using social networking tools. When businesses request employees to put their details on MySpace or Facebook as part of a staff recruitment drive, a legal problem may arise very quickly if an employee is stalked, attacked or has their identity stolen using this information.

Likewise, LinkedIn is a popular social networking site for professionals. This website provides a ‘newsfeed’ of the events occurring in your network of contacts. Secrets can be inadvertently given away by staff members setting their LinkedIn status to (for example): ‘Micheal Axelsen is developing a proposal for Can-Do Technologies’. LinkedIn also allows a contact to see their contact’s contacts, which can give an interesting insight into that contact’s marketing activities.

Business should respond in some way. In 2008, the CPA Australia Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence is writing a guide for business with appropriate policies to adopt for social networking. At the least, we encourage businesses to understand their ‘internet footprint’. A regular search upon the business name, the names of key products, and the senior management team is essential, with Google Alerts a good tool that can alert you to such new content.

Staff should also be aware of the risks and issues for the business and their career when posting information online. At least one Facebook user has been astonished to see photographs of her in an inebriated state. She is desperately trying to get these ‘friends of friends’ to delete the photographs.

The social networking phenomenon is here to stay and will continue to grow. Businesses should review the impact of social networking on their business. There is a need to communicate to all staff the types of appropriate behaviour and content when living out their digital life. Businesses should monitor their ‘internet footprint’ and plan a response when the business is mentioned online. ‘Banning’ social networking is unlikely to be helpful for a company. A sensible and informed approach is important, with an awareness of the potential risks and problems.

Social networking: sometimes, it’s about business. And we mean business.

 

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Ubuntu, Ubuntu, we want you!

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I think I have expressed an overriding concern regarding Windows Vista on both my blog and through my Twitter feed.  In essence, I feel gypped.  Vista is a great way to slow down an astronomically fast machine.  Sometimes I’ll be typing away on it and it will decide to do something on its merry own, slowing down my typing speed. 

The underlying ethos seems to be that Vista will go off and do things that it thinks needs to be done, with no intervention from you.  There is probably a frustrated scriptwriter somewhere with a proposal for a new show called ‘Vista knows best’.  Generally, it gets it right.  Generally.  Unfortunately, after six months of ‘sticking with this turkey’ because Microsoft knows its best, I’d really like to be able to dump it in a nearby bin. 

Recently, I reformatted my home PC with Windows XP.  That alone was enough grief – have you ever tried finding the WinXP DVD that came with your machine when you bought it?  Oh that’s right – no software supplied, it was all on that hard drive.  The hard drive that went bung exactly twelve months and two weeks after I bought the machine from Dell.  So that caused grief, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome.

During the course of that reformatting I came to the realisation that there was a new version of AVG anti-virus.  Beaut, I thought – I’ll update the copy on my laptop.  This I proceeded to do, but unfortunately the install complained that a particular Windows Update patch was not present.  ‘No problem’, I thought (which of course would be exactly when the problems started).  I’ll go into trusty Windows Update and download the patches there.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there were several updates waiting (I have been, naively, simply trusting that Windows updates will be reliable and have the critical ones automatically installed only).  Instead of looking for and installing the specific update AVG was complaining about, I simply downloaded all of the patches that were waiting there (cue Family Feud sound effect). 

Vista decided as a result that I needed a new driver for my wireless card (check), and a new driver for the Nvidia graphics card (check).  Got a coffee, rebooted & installed.  Bang – no network, no graphics display.  It took a while to work out, though, that that was the problem – a bit difficult to troubleshoot without a screen.  Twelve hours later, after searching forums ad infinitum, I finally reconnected and downloaded the proper nvidia drivers and network card driver, but even then Vista kept switching me back to the drivers it felt I needed to have.  Eventually I was able to turn that off.

After filling my heart with soft thoughts of fairy floss and candy for Microsoft, I thought – OK, I’ll try Ubuntu, I’ve got a spare external hard drive, let’s boot off that and see how we go.  That experience was actually very positive.  Quite positive.  This is a six-month old laptop, so the hardware is fairly new, and Ubuntu 8.04’s install got most of it right.  And it is lovely to look at, and on this fast machine it’s beautiful to operate.  I even managed to install new software through the lovely package manager. 

Overall – Ubuntu 8.04 = lovely.

Still, for a complete newbie, getting Ubuntu right was a steep learning curve.  It probably took about two days to come to grips with it (finicky downloads played a part in that).  I did have difficulties with the wireless driver and the nvidia graphics – I finally got the nvidia graphics sorted, but the wireless card continued to elude me as I kept needing to manually start the network.   I’m sure there are solutions there but I had already lost two days that I couldn’t afford to lose.

At this stage, out of the box, Ubuntu seems to do most of the things most people would want from a PC.  Unfortunately, that last ten percent is still a roadblock.  I have a Blackberry hosted through Managed Exchange, so I needed to have Evolution as my mail client – Web Central doesn’t seem too keen on that, and I couldn’t get that configured, so a killer application of email is still an issue.  Also, all of my accounting software needs are met by MYOB.  Cue one for Vista. 

I also looked for blogging software, which I thought would be an easy find but it wasn’t that simple to get software as good as Windows Live Writer for my WordPress blog.  Finally, as a person who does a lot of presentations and report-writing (I’m a management consultant – it comes with the territory), I need Visio or an equivalent.  There still doesn’t seem to be a Visio equivalent.

Overall, Ubuntu 8.04, you won’t let me avoid the Microsoft hegemony just yet, but you’ve come a long way baby.  If I really, really tried hard, I think I could get it work for me.  A few niggly things (graphics, wireless card), as well as some problematic (and possibly fairly specific to me) software (Outlook, MYOB, Visio, MS Project) are stopping me making the jump.  Dual boot does not meet my needs.  Open Office 2 is great for my needs (I am very cold on Office 2007), and generally the bells and whistles Ubuntu implements automatically are pretty much the equivalent of Vista, if not better. 

I am thinking of a mini-notebook so that the lump of iron I currently cart around can be the desktop replacement it really is, and if I get that I’ll run Ubuntu on it.  For now I have to stick with Vista, but I’m not a fan of it (really, really not a fan) and neither am I a fan of Office 2007, although it generally works fine.  I’ve made an investment in Microsoft Software – I have the whole suite, dabnabbit!  Legal and everything.  I have Visio, Office 2007, and MS Project – that’s about $3000 in software.  Even so, I’m keeping an eye on Ubuntu 8.04; perhaps I need a class in it.  If Ubuntu is better, I’ll walk away from that investment.  If any OS is going to replace Vista, what I saw shows that Ubuntu is the one.  Roll on the next version of Ubuntu, perhaps?

You’ve come a long way baby – just not quite there yet.