Seven Degrees Of iTunes

Never mind FOAF and Plink and Seven Degrees Of Separation and all that, when is someone going to write some automagic code to link people via their purchases at the iTunes store? I’m not sure if this is something that I should announce in public to my 3 loyal readers, but I bought Mark Owen’s ‘In Your Own Time‘ album - and then looked at the ‘what other people have bought’ listings. ‘Let’s Get Together With Hayley Mills‘, which in turns link to ‘Pearls In The Snow - The Songs Of Kinky Friedman‘, which leads to ‘Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus‘ (can’t imagine who that one’s by…), and then to Bob Dylan.

So does this mean we can start playing Seven Degrees Of Kevin Bacon with iTunes?

Syndication as an alternative to email

An intruiging idea from Jason DeFillippo - using syndication as an alternative to email. All the best ideas are microwaved…

The only thing you’ll ever need to read about the US elections

I don’t know who Hal Crowther is, but this is possibly the best and only piece on the US election that you’ll ever need to read.

Could IM take over from email?

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?

Management would rather use techniques that don’t work

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.

London Symposium On Social Tools In The Enterprise

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.

The auditory effects of ear wax

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…

Odeon gets Slashdotted

The Odious Cinemas versus Common Sense affair hots up. I predict that Luke “Don’t know a good thing when it points out where my website has gone wrong” Vetere’s mailbox will have melted by the morning - Slashdot: Odeon Orders Takedown Of Copycat Site

STES

We had a company outing to the London Symposium On Social Tools In The Enterprise (hereinafter referred to STES in deference to my carpal tunnels) yesterday - a long day, starting with a train at 0700 and ending in the car at 2230, but worth it.

I’ve been to (and spoken at, for that matter) a fair few conferences in my time, but this was my first experience of a conference where the majority of attendees were social software geeks - mucho chunky glasses and Powerbooks. The actual conference itself was pretty good from a professional point of view - A-listers like Stowe Boyd, Phil Wolff, Marc Eisenstadt and Euan Semple, with some interesting stuff on how you get these kind of tools into the enterprise.

It was also the first time I’ve seen back channels and group-blogging with SubEthaEdit in action (albeit on a fairly small scale), and pretty impressive it was too. All of which makes me think that a trip to London’s in order for the next NotCon-style event, or further afield if I could justify a trip to Supernova…

Emailing Odeon (and others)

Today’s been a bit of a green-ink sort of day. This morning I fired off a broadside at the MD of Powergen (or useless cretins as I prefer to know them.) Nothing particularly earth-shattering, just a complete inability (after 12 months) to comprehend the fact that I no longer live at the address I used to live at, which means I’m no longer using any electricity there. I got fed up with talking to the munchkins that populate their call centre, so a quick trawl through the Companies House database led to the name of their MD and a registered office address, and after venting my spleen I feel Much Better Now. Maybe I should have done a Cheney…

Then for an encore I decided to bang off a rant to Luke “Don’t know a good thing when it points out where my website has gone wrong” Vetere, the Marketing Director of Odious Cinemas, who’s currently firing off nastygrams to bona-fide web hero Matthew Somerville:

To: LVetere@odeonuk.com

Dear Mr Vetere,

I’m an ex-customer of Odeon. One of the main reasons I’m an ex-customer is that I got fed up with the ridiculous struggle that was involved in trying to give you my money in order that I could book a ticket. One of the reasons that I’m likely to stay an ex-customer is that your organisation doesn’t seem to know a good thing when it’s presented with one.

In case you haven’t realised, I’m referring to your email conversation with Matthew Somerville, who has gone to the time and trouble to do what you should have done in the first place, and produced an accessible, standards-compliant website which enables customers to do what the website should enable them to do - namely access your listings and make bookings for your films. But rather than take his advice (and believe me, you need to) you’ve dismissed his efforts out of hand, and threatened him with legal action on the basis of what seems to be some rather confused ideas about data protection. Which is somewhat ironic when you consider that as your website stands, you are running the risk of being one of the first organisations to fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act as it applies to services such as yours.

All of which is making you look both ungrateful and arrogant, is garnering considerable amounts of negative publicity for your organisation, and is likely to make me and others who care about this kind of thing remain ex-Odeon customers. Considering your role as the marketing director is to persuade people like me to forsake your competitors and come through your doors, might I suggest that you should treat your customers (and Matthew Somerville in particular) with a little more respect?

Yours hopefully,

Tim Duckett