Managing the stream of data
How do you read all that stuff?
I’m often asked by friends, family and colleagues how I keep track of all the different sorts of things I’m interested in online.
In the past, good bookmarks, aided by social bookmarking like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia were useful to find places… but how to get through all of the content.
Drinking from the firehose
There’s so much good content on the internet that trying to consume all of it is impossible. You can take a sip or two as the river passes by, but how do you get the good bits? There are all sorts of ways to identify them - which will be meat for *another* post - but the key issue is how to get them in front of you.
The best way I have found is using RSS - an initialism which stands for a range of thing - let’s go with Really Simple Syndication.
At its simplest, it’s a way of a site pushing its latest content out in a format that can be captured by an RSS Reader; there are loads of them about.
Lee LeFever has a wonderful explanation of RSS shown here…
What other sort of feeds are there?
I use RSS to track the results of searches - I use summize.com to search twitter - where I am @steveellwood - and the feed (http://summize.com/search.atom?q=%40steveellwood) will produce any mention of me - so I can see if I’ve missed any replies…
I use RSS to track news, blogs, and twitter - you can see some of the things that interest me below… in Sharing Your Reading
RSS Readers
One client I use at work is FeedReader which lets me pick up information about corporate news and activity within my Professional Community. It’s straightforward to use, and if there are private feeds - that can’t be seen outside your corporate network - it’s ideal.
Usually though as I move between a variety of PCs - my home desktop, my work laptop, and my lovely eee PC, I prefer an online reader.
There’s a variety of these, too including NewsGator products, Google Reader and my favourite, NetVibes.
Sharing your reading…
These online readers have the additional benefit that you can share what you think other people might be interested in - for example my public NetVibes universe, or my Google Reader shared items.
Those are my somewhat idiosyncratic choices, but the irrepressible Guy Kawasaki produced the wonderful alltop.com which claims to have “all the top stories covered, all of the time”. You can get updated feeds about just about anything you want there. Sadly, I’m *not* one of the Twitterati - but I do follow some of them!
There’s even RSSmeme which allows you to search shared RSS feeds…
Will you sell RSS?
If you know people that don’t use RSS, do you tell them about it?
Are you an RSS user - and if you are, what do you read with?
Picture Credit janettowbin
How to use social media?
How to deal with multiplicity?
I’m deeply puzzled - not that this is at all unusual.
There are lots of social media tools, and many of them link to each other. Like quite a lot of dabblers, I’ve ended up with a mish-mash of updates appearing in varied places. How best to use the wide variety of social media tools at my disposal? I’m coming to the conclusion I need to list and separate what I use - and how.
What do I use?
I’m trying a fair range of things. A fairly full list is below, sorted more or less in frequency of update.
Do I set my location?
Well, yes. Sort of. When I remember.
Largely I use microformats in twitter, as I indicated in Twitter - what it is, and how I use it.
I’ve also used Plazes.
I’m registered with FireEagle but no-one seems to be using that.
How do I update these?
On the web interfaces, often.
For twitter I’ve used and like both snitter and twhirl
For pownce, I’ve used a similar air client.
I’ve updated via voice on phone using Spinvox and by SMS to twitter. I’ve also used ping.fm both on the web and as a WAP client on my mobile.
Where are they aggregated/streamed?
Often, bits are currently fed one to another - meaning that twitter feeds to jaiku, which feeds to Facebook, which feeds to friendfeed - which is echoed back to Facebook. Which is cluttered, untidy, and very likely the sign of a grasshopper mind.
I currently have some life streaming services I’m playing with at the moment, friendfeed which though I like the interface doesn’t seem to pick up all that’s going on - and onaswarm which gives a nice feel for what’s happening in my area. I’ve also given soup.io a shot but I haven’t made my mind up about that yet.
Which way am I heading?
I think I’m going to bite the bullet and take out all the inter-tool updates, with the probable exception of twitterfeed which lets people know when I’ve blogged.
Then it’ll be twitter for quick “What I’m doing/thinking”; del.icio.us for those important bookmarks; tumblr for future blogging ideas or GTD Someday/Maybe, Facebook for contacts, flickr for photos.
I’ll - eventually - choose an aggregator, probably friendfeed as it seems to be gaining traction…
Maybe, then, people won’t see the same wibble in 4 places from me - and won’t that be an improvement?
What are you doing?
I’d like to find out what others are doing.
Are you more choosy than me?
Am I a grasshopper bouncing from one thing to another?
Please, let me know your solutions.
Partial Inspiration
This is also the first blog post I’ve tried following Chris Brogan’s guidelines to Writing Effective Blog Posts. How was it for you?
Picture Credit place light - on a a project -
Personal Blogging from within a Corporate?
It’s no secret that I work for a big corporate, and the PTB are aware that I blog about a range of things that interest me and affect both within and outside work.
My colleague Richard Dennison wrote an interesting post about the risks of blogger/social media interaction from disgruntled employees.
“On the one hand, you invited them to join the conversation in the first place and they’re just expressing their views … on the other, they’re damaging your brand. Leaving them to continue making negative comments feels uncomfortable … leaning on them through their line managers feels like censorship. “
It might show I’m old style, but I reckon that you shouldn’t sledge your employer in public - OK, I’ll make an exception for whistleblowing - when there are avenues for dealing with issues internally. I’m certainly happy to draw attention internally to people who damage the brand of the company that feeds me.
Now, if you feel those avenues aren’t delivering an open, honest and credible response to your people… there’s a nice improvement project to work on.
So, what to do?
First, make it clear what you expect people to do. The BBC have a nice blogging policy
“Personal blogs and websites should not reveal confidential information about the BBC. This might include aspects of BBC policy or details of internal BBC discussions. If in doubt about what might be confidential, staff members should consult their line manager.
Personal blogs and websites should not be used to attack or abuse colleagues.”
Seems pretty fair to me - and incidentally, the BBC explicitly allow staff to blog from work, as do my employers.
Who else has a sane policy? In a reaction to the Civil Serf furore, Tom Watson has come up with some suggested points for Civil Service blogging. Something I’d like see enacted.
Then, accept you are going to get some posts you don’t like … so, you do have hate groups - including employees or not - what to do? Engage where they are? - as Richard says
“Accepted social media ‘wisdom’ says you should engage ‘in the channel in which the comments were made’ to try to turn things around … but do you really want to get into a ‘dialogue’ with a mixture of disgruntled customers and employees?? “
I’d have said “No.” Well, maybe a qualified “No, but…”
…but there has to be an easy way for people to get human interaction. Don’t insist they go through callgate hell. Let’s bite the bullet, and take all the feedback we can get. Let’s really be customer connected.
Sandy Blair in an engaging and typically erudite comment says
“Much better to join the conversation with positive comments (and fix the issues people are raising).”
I know Apple, Verizon, Oracle and Microsoft all have some presence at GetSatisfaction.com. Do you want to do that? A *big* corporate would bring loads of traffic to someone else’s site. Publicity for them and impact on their infrastructure. You’d need loads of folk handling enquiries, and you’d still get posts elsewhere - so perhaps not.So, just do it. Get a group of people on “20% time” to start digging at the issues raised in these individual sites. “My appointment failed…” Why? Sort that and we’ll sort issues for lots more than that individual. So, engage individually, sort root cause, and fix globally - meaning you’ll get more Right First Time.
How do you choose the people who’ll get the 20% time… well, they just volunteered, didn’t they? They saw and raised the problem… let them help to fix it.
Windows Live Writer
I’ve played with a variety of clients before, and never found myself hugely committed to any of them. Having noticed a tweet by @dahowlett where he suggested it was the best blog editor on the planet, I’ve decided to give this a try.
If you’re interested, it can be found at the Live services site.
From home, I’m never offline, so it’ll be a while before I try that out.
Lots of Web 2.0 bits
Since I started using Facebook regularly, the most interesting things I’ve found are:
- blog posts written by others, that lead me to find out more about what’s happening in the internet area (OK, I’m failing to avoid saying Web 2.0)
- bits in people status feeds that make me think “I wonder what that is?”
Some of the things I’ve found recently (yes, I know they’re all probably old hat)
Twitter - letting folk know your presence/activity
Jaiku - another presence/group/blogging monitoring thing, with the ability to add “channels”
Spinvox - does voice to text stuff, but lets you update Facebook/twitter/Jaiku by phone, which is fun
Tumblr - which allows you to rapidly add links, quotes, text, photos to a stream - and you can add channels, too. I use it for grabbing links, which I RSS to my blog
Tabblo - a photo/text/story/printing site - lets you *easily* bring photos in from Flickr and fairly easily from Picasa; let’s you produce interesting photo displays that you can print as PDF; locally; for free …
Picknik - which lets you edit *online* phots on your PC, Picasa, Facebook, Flickr. Very nice.
Pandora - recommends - and plays - music for you based on characteristics of music that you’ve indicated you like. Lots of fun, and works differently to last.fm which I also use
I think I’ll probably edit this as I recall/use more bits ‘n bobs.
Wikis and intranets
In an ongong bid for speed and agility, my company are changing the way we manage resources on the intranet.
I’m a proselytiser for social networking and wikis (I love my TiddlyWiki, FWIW) so I’m hoping we’ll see significant changes.
Lars Plougmann has written in a couple of places about what you could do if you have no intranet. In If your organisation has no intranet: An opportunity
He suggests some of the disadvantages of an intranet
- Information changes quicker than the intranet team can update it. No content is static.
- When the perception is that the information on the intranet is not up to date it stops being the first source for vital business matters
- The intranet structure typically reflects the shape of the business as of yesteryear
- The process for updating information on the intranet involves finding out who is responsible for a particular page, then describing a proposed change in an email which gets added to a work queue. Most people only involve themselves once in that process if they don’t see the page updated within a short time
- Ownership is often skewed: When only a few people can edit stuff on the intranet, an “us” and “them” culture arises. In the worst cases, the intranet becomes the object of blame and ridicule.
and he suggests that a wiki can address many of these shortcomings, with use of tagging, links and *search* - surely a key component of any Knowledge management system.
If you tie authoring in a wiki to ID, then control is easy and if someone screws up… revert the change.
In How to avoid mysterious golfing cart accidents he develops this further and suggests he has a client who wants to replace their intranet with a wiki. Why?
- To cut the publishing cycle from days or weeks to minutes or seconds thus ensuring that the content is more relevant
- To move from content nobody wants to read written in corporate speak to information about what is really going on written in a human voice
He point back to the Cluetrain Manifesto for a lovely quote
“The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There’s no going back. If a company doesn’t recognize this, the top-down intranet it puts in can breed the type of cynicism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents.”
More wikis; more involvement; more openeness; more benefit - like the Cluetrain says
- “What’s happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.
- Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman. “
Go and re-read (or read if you haven’t) the 95 theses.
The death of Internal Comms?
In another interesting post, Richard at Inside Out asks some interesting questions about how the future will change for Internal Comms professionals.
He highlights change into operational networks rather than managed communication hierarchies - in truth these changes are taking effect already, as harassed professionals use a variety of methods to prune their email overload - some here - some more ruthless.
I use filtering in Outlook to move corporate briefings to another folder which I’ll read when I get chance to, in an airport/station, when I’m grabbing a coffee.Some colleagues filter out *anything* that is cc’d to them. Basically, they are making a choice to try and tone down the CYA emails.
How do you make me read your message? Well, in truth, you can’t. You have to make me want to know what’s important, and good internal communicators know this. Make it easy for me to get the message when I want it; make it snappy to read; keep the format consistent. Then I might read it.
Sending a weekly dirge of “What’s happening in MegaCorp, Blue Widgets Division”, will just get your message canned. Sending a series of links *may* be better, as at least you won’t be quite so hated, but probably won’t get your message across better.
As Richard points out, communication is being done through a variety of means: blogs, recommendations, social networking, like Facebook (where this blog is publicised and my other ShaiDorsai blog is imported to)
“A world in which the information consumer controls what they consume from a menu of feeds – basing that choice on the reputation of the source, recommendations from colleagues and serendipitous discovery through social networks. Interactions are almost exclusively real-time and informal in nature.”
I reckon he’s right; some communicators are naturally gifted and can manage their messages intuitively, and have the focus and time management to do this themselves.
Many who need to communicate won’t have the ability or the time to manage the new media… and Richard and his ilk can continue to earn their money.
Now, how he communicates this message to the senior executives is crucial… I wait with interest to find his next steps…
Another time, another place?
Another time, another place - not just a saying, it’s also a film made near my home.
Well, another place to blog anyway.
Why? because it links into Facebook, and this might make it easier than my current way of importing my existing external WP blog into Facebook as notes.
I’m beginning to build connections and understanding through Facebook and getting a glimmer of how it can be useful, as I see connections building between friends and colleagues.
