No time?

Another insightful response to the “no time” excuse for not blogging:

http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/answering_the_time_objection/

Shel’s absolutely correct.

A case in point:

When my sister’s husband was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, she complained to me that she couldn’t keep up with all the phone calls and e-mails from concerned people. My advice to her was to start a blog, which she did.

My suggestion was for purely pragmatic reasons – to save time. Instead of repeating herself over and over, she could direct people to the blog, formulate her thoughts once, and everyone was up to date. It was a great solution.

Little did I know, it would become a vehicle of incredibly poignant communications, both from my sister and her family to all concerned, as well as from the concerned parties back again, forming a world-wide network of well-wishers – a true support network.

So not only is there time to be gained by blogging when there are things to communicate (and when aren’t there?), the rewards can be tremendous.

 

So many riffs, so little time…

Just in the last 24 hours-or-so, I read this, this, this, this, this and this, each of which stuck a chord in me, and all in some way connected. Hard to know which to begin with, but given the way my blog has been getting off to such a sputtering start, perhaps it’s Ben Yoskovitz’s post.

Finally, a blogger addressing head-on a question all of us on-the-fence bloggers have been asking ourselves. How to find the time? His answer? And I’m paraphrasing: You don’t. If you’re waiting for some time to free up in your schedule, it won’t. Blogging is not about sitting down and writing. It’s about approaching the world in a different way. Get it, and the posts are just the by-product. Don’t, and you can spend all the time in the world posting, but it won’t be blogging.

The new reality of corporate communications is completely analogous. Why do some companies seem to flourish in the Web 2.0 world, while others, despite efforts, only draw criticism and reproach? This may be a more involved question to answer completely, but surely the answer lies in how the company conducts business on a day-to-day basis. If it engages with its customers and stakeholders, and its official communications are consistent with this, it can even make mistakes and be forgiven. Hide behind a veil of press releases and official communications, but act differently, and you know what will happen.

The pundits

Some essential readings of the Web 2.0 movement:

The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S. Raymond, 1998
The Cluetrain Manifesto Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger, 1999
The Long Tail Chris Anderson. October 2004
What is Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly, September 2005

I’m ba-ack…

After a many month blogging sabbatical, I’m considering giving this thing a try again.

It’s still the same issues that perplex me about the so-called “new economy” 2.0. Of course the first new economy turned out to be a bubble, as most of us expected. But this one has a different feel to it. Investors are not throwing money willy-nilly at every company having “.com” in its title.Observers seem to have a better understanding of the medium; of its benefits, but also its limitations. No, there’s something about this that’s more realistic.

But the more I think of it. the less I think is really new. It’s as if the few good ideas from the first internet wave have managed to survive and thrive. The bad ones – the ones that were making a great deal of noise, but really had no idea of if and how they were ever going to make money, never mind a profit – have disappeared. The few that remain, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Red Hat, etc. are the ones that did have a business model, and are showing that it wasn’t all hubris.

But is that all there is to it? I mean, is it just a question of some novel business models made possible by the internet, that were lost in a sea of frenzy, are only now coming into their own? I do think there’s much food for thought here, and certainly an interesting topic for investigation, but I don’t think it tells the whole story.

To really appreciate the new wave that’s upon us, we really need to understand the broader social phenomena I alluded to in may last post. More on this a little later…

Hello world!

An apt title indeed for my blogging debut.

As Dylan told us all some 40 years ago, “The times they are a-changin” Difficult as it may be to believe, this has never been more true in business and information technology (IT). But like Dylan’s Mr. Jones, I’m not yet sure I have a firm handle on the nature of the changes upon us, so I’ll be using this blog over the next little while to try to figure them out. This way, maybe some others can pipe in and help to clear some of the confusion I will no doubt be espousing.

The change I see has a definite pattern, and it’s appearing on many levels: Political, economic, social, technological. Being a bit of a “technolog” myself, I first caught sight of it when I stumbled on agile methodologies. These approaches to software engineering turn conventional wisdom on its ear, advocating an incremental, progressive approach to design and development, which flies in the face of the admonition that it costs ten times as much to fix a problem discovered during implementation than in up-front analysis.

But this is only the tip of an iceberg. The other obvious, and much more prominent, manifestation of change in technology is open source. The idea of sharing knowledge and ownership of source code as a way of developing reliable, high quality and high performing software is again so radical that it’s taken me years to even begin to understand what motivates this movement. I’m still not sure I get it, but I’m beginning to see some glimmers of light which I’ll try to articulate over the next while.

What’s perhaps most interesting about both these technological movements – agile and open source – is their sociological component. They are not so much about the technology (although there is a definite correlation between the rise of these movements and the technological developments of objects and the internet) as the way in which technology is conceived, implemented and delivered. They are about open, trusting, networks as opposed to closely guarded secrets as the engines to drive the economy. This is the concept I find to be profoundly interesting. It’s also why debates surrounding these topics devolve very quickly into heated ideological arguments where much more is at stake than the technological and procedural choices I make in my next software development project.