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The subject of email cropped up a number of times at the STES symposium this week – mainly in the context of it being broken, with the signal-to-noise ratio declining under a tidal wave of spam and other email junk. And this was an opinion that some participants felt very strongly about – Stowe Boyd is running a “Just Say No To Email” campaign, for example.

There was a lot of talk about instant messaging being the obvious alternative to email, and to an extent I’d go along with this line of reasoning – it’s inherently more robust to spam-type communications for example. It’s also a great deal more immediate, although depending on what you’re doing at the time, this can also make an IM message even more intrusive.

But I think where IM fails to win out over email is when you consider that email is inherently an asynchronous medium. Because of it’s store-and-forward nature, the communication will still get through (spam filters permitting) whether I’m currently around to deal with it or not. If I’m offline, it’ll wait until I get back – in effect, I have complete control over when (or if) I respond.

In contrast, IM is a synchronous medium. If I’m offline, then messaging me won’t work because I won’t receive it. Which is not a problem if the two parties are online simultaneously, but how often does this happen in real life? And the situation is worsened if the parties are geographically spread – it’s entirely possible that one would be finishing their working day as the other one starts.

All of which got me thinking about whether it would be possible to meld both email and IM into one platform – where I could message someone if they were online and the communication medium would behave in an instant messaging-style; but a platform that would be able to gracefully degrade back to a store-and-forward model if my recipient was offline. What would such a system look like, and would it work? Would it be adopted, or are the two separate technologies too entrenched to change?

During the course of his presentation at STES this week, Stowe Boyd made an excellent point about the uptake of social networking tools in an enterprise environment, which I paraphrase below:

Management would rather use techniques that don’t work than techniques they don’t understand. Social networking often causes unsettling situations where it’s the junior people in the organisation that end up with the most karma / whuffie / swarmth. Social systems are often rejected because they’re perceived to be uncontrolled

It’s an updated version of “not invented here”, but it certainly rings true – social networking systems that operate outside of the normal hierarchical structure can be very revealing of where the true power in an organisation lies. How often have we heard the question “what does that manager do?” SNS can expose the fact that individuals who at first glance appear to do very little are actually incredibly important hubs of communication – but they can also expose the lack of added value provided by many management positions.

On Monday of this week we had a company outing to the London Symposium On Social Tools In The Enterprise (or STES in deference to my carpal tunnels). The broad theme was about how social tools – in their widest sense, not necessarily just the blogs and wikis that we’re familiar with – can be used in an enterprise setting.

There were a number of interesting and thought-provoking presentations from the likes of Stowe Boyd of Corante, Lee Bryant of Headshift and Marc Eisenstadt of the Open University. It was also the first time I’d used a laptop to take notes at this type of event, and it proved to be a great way of keeping up with the flow of the presentation while at the same time being able to pay attention to the subject being discussed. Over the next couple of days, I’ll post up some of the notes that I took.

I’ve noticed over the last few days that the volume from the right earpiece of my Sony MDR-EX71SLBs was slightly – but annoyingly – lower than the left. At first I thought it was something to do with the way that I was screwing them into my ears, but much wiggling didn’t have much effect.

So then it occured to me that they might need a quick clean – and the secret of the volume loss was revealed. There’s a tiny hole in the middle of each earpiece, both of which had got – euuck – gunked up. A quick poke with the filament of a toothbrush (it’s a really small hole) and not only was the volume in the right side restored, but so was most of the treble and a significant amount of the bass that used to be present…