Archive for August 2004
In amongst the musings on underwear, Gert comes up with some sartorial advice for ladies of a larger size. Which is advice that would have been good to share with the pride of heffalumps descending from a coach in the centre of York about 20 minutes ago. Not a natural fibre on any of them, their static charge alone would have powered a medium-sized city through a harsh winter. If a single one of them was less than a metre wide, I’d be amazed, which made the popular choice of tartan and checkerboard-patterned slacks even more alarming for those of a nervous sartorial disposition. I can only assume that there are special coaches laid on with extra-wide seats, and barrels of grease onboard in case any of the passengers get stuck between the armrests.
I have to keep reminding myself that although the – ahem – large, polyester-and-baseball-cap clad American pensioners do have a tendency to clog the streets while they stop dead in the middle of the pavement (sorry, sidewalk) to exclaim “Gee, Hank, look at the purty church!”, they are these days the cosmopolitan, adventurous ones who have dared to venture this far from the safety guaranteed by the Department for Homeland Security.
I just wish there was a lunchtime curfew for tourists in York, so that we residents were able to sprint to the sandwich shop before the bacon, brie and cranberry ran out without trampling visitors….
If I had a pound for every time I’d been told “But isn’t that just like a message board” when explaining weblogs to non-webloggers, this post would have come to you from a sandy beach somewhere hot. It’s a common misconception that blog = messageboard = blog – and not altogether suprising, because there is a significant degree of overlap between the two.
Now Lee LeFever of Common Craft has put together a comparison of the two:
Worlds are colliding, people. Your friendly neighborhood message board is not alone in the online community world any longer……The appearance of weblogs have left many observers, including me, wondering about the differences between the two technologies and how they will be used inside online communities.
The highlight of the article is a direct comparison of some of the key features and choice criteria (it’s graphical so I won’t reproduce it here) – and it’s written in language suitable for pointy-haired bosses…
It’s a well-thought-out summary of the principle differences – each has benefits and drawbacks, so this would make a good starting point for deciding which is the appropriate technology for you.
… help yourself to a free download of Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto.
Now in corporate-friendly PDF format!
The building society have processed the mortgage and issued the offer (they say – excuse my rampant scepticism, but we have heard that before), so now the only delay are the solicitors. We’ll be in by Christmas, I know we will…
OK, so I wasn’t nearly trendy/geeky (delete as applicable) to go to EuroFOO, but it sounds like I missed a good one.
They’re planning to build a 3D chocolate printer…
I don’t know if this is something that Martin Sutherland has come up with himself or recycled, but it’s advice to remember for the future:
- A job interview is not a test of my worth as a human being
- Getting through to the next round of an interview series, or being offered a job, is not a validation of my existence
- If offered a job, I am not under any kind of obligation to accept it
- Accepting a good offer for a bad job leads to stress, misery, self-doubt, and despair
- A job interview is the prime (and possibly only) opportunity to find out if the job is bad for me. Use this opportunity wisely.
It seems that the meme-of-the-day is predicting the demise of email as a communications medium – those that know lots about this kind of thing, such as Stowe Boyd and Chris Pirillo, are clear and vocal in their belief that email is the tool of the devil and should be consigned to history forthwith.
I certainly won’t deny that email has its problems – from spam to overload and more – but I can’t help but feel that to misquote Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the downsides, there doesn’t appear to be anything waiting in the wings that can deal with what I would consider to be some of the major advantages of email as a communications tool.
Email is a de-facto lowest common denominator
With few exceptions, when I send an email I know that the recipient will be able to open and read the contents. There are a few plain-text extremists around who will refuse to accept HTML-formatted messages, but these are the online equivalent of non-smokers who would put out your cigarette with a fire extinguisher if you lit up in their presence. Individuals without email addresses are few and far between – we seem to have progressed past the point where access to email required the justification of a business case – so it’s become an assumption that it’s a valid way to communicate. That’s taken a long time to develop – so to expect that we’re all going to switch any time soon to RSS, or instant messaging, or whatever alternative technologies exist – is optimistic to say the least.
Email is asynchronous
Something that instant messaging advocates often ignore, I think, is that email is an asynchronous medium – it doesn’t matter if I’m not logged in at the time when the message arrives, because it will be stored for me to deal with later. While this might not be a problem for those who spend their days wholly online, most of us spend more time away from a screen than not – and if I’m not there, an instant message will go unanswered.
To be sure, email has an unfortunate latency for quick queries that would be better resolved through a swift face-to-face interaction, but this ignores the fact that a lot of the time, people don’t actually want to be interrupted. Closing an email client and ignoring the ‘new message’ flag is a valid way of scheduling your interactions in way that makes best use of your time, rather than being forced to respond at the behest of your interrogator.
Email is cross-cultural
As a straight-laced Brit, I’m not all that comfortable with pinging an IM to a complete stranger, or someone that I don’t have a particularly strong relationship with already (and I’m probably more laid-back than most of my fellow Brits, given that I’m a hair-trigger geek with a different messaging account for every day of the week.) And if we Brits are straight-laced about this, Asian cultures are even more averse to this kind of interaction – it would be considered actively rude to engage in an interactive, unsolicited communication in many Asian cultures, for example. Despite the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication, email provides an acceptable sense of distance to allow for a relationship to develop – the language of messages can casualise over the course of the interaction, whereas it’s far more difficult to be as formal in an instant message.
This isn’t a problem if you’re working within an coherent organisation that can override these kind of cultural imperatives, but if you’re interacting with individuals from different cultures and backgrounds, it’s a mistake to assume that what works in Armpit, Nebraska, will work in South-East Asia – or even Europe.
Email is auditable
This point came to me in a conversation with a senior manager in a project management role, who related a horror story of specifications evolving over the course of numerous IM interactions – only for the changes to become the source of a “my word against yours situation” when problems started to occur. In an ideal world, these situations wouldn’t arise in the first place – but we live in imperfect times, so there’s sometimes a valid place for a communication tool with a built-in audit trail.
I don’t deny that email has its fair share of problems – and I don’t seem to suffer unduly from spam, so I have to be careful about drawing conclusions from my experiences alone. There are technologies around, such as RSS, which would appear to solve some (if not all) of the more serious flaws of email. But I do wonder if in their eagerness to move to the Next Big Thing, the earliest of early adopters aren’t in danger of leaving the rest of us behind?
This post:
just about sums it up for me at the moment. Substitute “a small building society based somewhere in deepest darkest Lancashire” for “Lloyds Bank”, and it’s my sentiments exactly.
Today’s excuse went somewhere along the lines of “we’re sorry we’ve fucked up your mortgage, but our mortgage person broke her wrist at the weekend”. Fuckwits.
Here’s an interesting take from Greg Hughes on the effect that webfeeds can have on a daily routine:
My webfeed reader saves me about 300 hours a week
I read an incredible amount of information these days. So much more than I ever did, and a lot of it on the Internet. Not only that, but I get the information I need (or want) so fast now that I can practically always act faster than most people when news breaks. Research that used to take hours and hours of searching and browsing now takes just minutes. I’m consuming much, much more information and doing so in much, much less time. What I can accomplish today in the information gathering department would have taken two of me just a year or so ago, before I found the real beauty of RSS.
It’s an opinion that I can definitely back up – I’m currently subscribed to about 180 webfeeds, and although not all of those have articles at any one time, there would have been simply no way that I would have been able to keep up with 180 separate websites. But because it’s possible to quickly scan each feed, it’s possible to rattle through this lot in about 25 – 30 minutes. End result: I’m better informed, and (hopefully) as a result, more productive.
And where did I see this article? On a webfeed, naturally…
