adoption curve dot net

Two (independent) articles that point to a cause-and-effect:

WebWatch – RSS: 98 per cent of surfers shun it

A report from Forrester Research has found that just two per cent of US internet users are making use of RSS feeds.

7Nights: Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription
There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it’s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don’t really work.

I don’t find either conclusion particularly suprising – you have to consider that for most people, the cutting edge of IT usage is what they experience in the workplace, and the majority of workplaces have yet to progress much beyond basic email and file storage in the way they (fail to) exploit the potential of the systems they are using. And home computing is still dominated by a virus-and-spyware ridden AOL paradigm.

So perhaps the surprise is that RSS usage is as high as 2%?

[UPDATE: here's the original source from Forrester, and an interesting comment from The RSS Weblog - far from lack of knowledge being a problem, it could actually be a symptom of a successful shielding of the technology from those who don't know (or care) about it...]

You hear the phrase “free as in beer” bandied around the open source world a lot – sadly “beer as in free” doesn’t crop up that often, but this is a new take on the idea:

Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen is trying to help by releasing what they are calling the world’s first open source beer recipe.

If you’re in the midst of trying to roll out any kind of collaborative or knowledge-sharing system, this article might be well worth a read – destinationKM.com has an article by Carol Kinsey Goman on “Five Reasons People Don’t Tell What They Know”

It’s worth reading the full article, but here are the headlines:

People believe that knowledge is power
People are insecure about the value of their knowledge
People don’t trust each other
Employees are afraid of negative consequences
People work for other people who don’t tell what they know

A quick way of forcing Project to handle non-standard resource availability:

Task calendars can be used to good effect if, for example, a specialist person or a piece of equipment is only available on certain dates and times. It is also useful when you need to force Project to schedule a task to start on a specific day of the week, say Fridays.

It’s a neat idea, but I’m not entirely convinced by the idea of the Personal MBA. At it’s lowest level it’s a reading list – with some interesting and useful titles, but also some of the biggest wastes of trees this side of the Da Vinci Code. Now there’s also the start of an online community, which could be the beginnings of something really useful – 43 Folders, anyone?

My reservation stems from the same problem that afflicts the distance-learning route. A significant part of the value of undertaking an MBA isn’t in the qualification itself, or the reading list, or even the academic content – it’s in the interactions that you have with the other members of the cohort that you’re studying with. A decent course at a reputable school will pull together a group of people from a wider variety of backgrounds, nationalities and experience than you will ever experience in a business environment; so the value of the qualification comes as much from learning from your colleagues as it does from learning from the faculty or reading list.

So if the proposition of the Personal MBA is that you can learn everything you need to know from reading 40 books, it’s being disingenuous. If the reading list is the start of a broader interaction through the site and the discussions, then there’s the possibility of really reading something. And if it’s the source of inspiration to go off and do some real networking with real people, then it’ll be adding some real value.

Courtesy of Escapable Logic comes the sanest piece of advice I’ve read since last Thursday (it’s actually referring to the sniper that had Washington DC running scared three years ago, but it’s just as applicable to London):

Do the Maths

The D.C. sniper has an entire region hunkered down.

What are the odds any individual person in the area will be shot?

Next to zero.

What are the odds that anyone you know will be affected?

Next to zero.

What are the odds that the Nightly News will tell you anything of real use?

Next to zero.

What are the odds that, if you quiet your mind and attend to the work in front of you – or maybe blog a little – you’ll come up with something of surprising value, or do something nice for someone you care about?

Huge.

It’s now rather overshadowed by what’s going on in London currently, but the other big news of yesterday (apart from the Olympics) was that the European Parliament has thrown out the bill which would have harmonised patent legislation across Europe to enable software to be patented.

The thumping majority by which it was rejected is being seen as a win by the anti-patent lobby, while the pro-patent side is trying not to appear too upset. But I can’t help but feel that a black-and-white win/lose view is somewhat simplistic.

What the European Parliament decision does is maintain the status quo – with national patent offices taking a variety of approaches. And while a centralised approach might not have succeeded, what we’re likely to see now is a change of tactics from the pro-patent lobby. They’re likely to concentrate on changing the system to their ends country-by-country.

This is actually a retrograde step as far as the anti-patent side is concerned. Whereas before there was the opportunity to bring together protest Europe-wide, now the arguments are likely to take place at a national level. The lobbying efforts of the pro-patent side aren’t diluted by this – after all, most of them are multinational corporations – but for the anti-patents lobby, it’s much more of a divide-and-conquor situation.

The other factor coming into play is that there will continue to be widely differing national standards and definitions of what’s patentable and what’s not. Given a few more years of Europe-wide confusion, it’s entirely conceivable that the issue will come back to the European Parliament, only this time with a far more plausible argument for harmonisation. And needless to say, the level of harmonisation is likely to take the policy of the most pro-patent country as its starting point.

So I’m not sure that this decision can be regarded as a victory for either side. What’s certain is that the argument is going to go away any time soon – it’s just been shifted to a different time and place.

Courtesy of Darwinmag.com, here’s seven ways to deal with email overload:

1. If any subject or issue involves more than two e-mails, one party should call the other to resolve the issue by phone.
2. No junk e-mail, no jokes.
3. Only send relevant information, which is defined as just what the person needs to know.
4. Limit CCs (which might be more appropriately named CYA).
5. Don’t ping-pong with e-mail for a conversation; use the phone.
6. Deal with it and delete it.
7. Don’t read every e-mail as it comes in; handle them in batches.

I’m not sure I necessarily agree with the first – sometimes email can actually be a more focussed and productive way of dealing with a tricky issue, although that does depend a lot on the verbosity and writing ability of the correspondents.

And in finest Blue Peter fashion, here’s some other ideas we prepared earlier…

Following on from a previous post of mine, Frank Patrick points out another reason why simple formulas have hidden dangers when it comes to calculating potential task durations:

When considering task estimates, we should simply face reality and recognize that estimates are best communicated in terms of ranges and best agreed to as such, and not as single point commitments. The idea of “accurate estimates,” over which too much time, effort, and angst is too often spent in project planning, needs to be set aside.

I’ve often thought that life would be easier (for project managers, at least) if we could get away with using the type of predictions that the Bank of England uses for monetary inflation (PDF link). The graphic is embedded in the PDF, unfortunately, but imagine a line graph where the end fans out into a range of possible values – the expanding ranges shaded by their probability, the darker the more likely (and closer to previous values).

This neatly illustrates both the potential range, and the potential likelihood, of the values. It eliminates the danger of focussing on a single value, but manages to convey the full range of possibilities. It’s an effective graphical way of saying, “there’s a 10% probability of X, but a 50% proability of Y”.

The problem with this approach is that Gantt charts don’t deal with probabilities – they deal with arbitaryly-selected values. And however much you caveat a Gantt chart with ranges and disclaimers, once you’ve produced a hard number, that’s the number that’s going to be quoted.

Here’s a long (and continually expanding) list of things you can do with RSS.

It’s a wiki page, so it can be expanded as more and more people have more and more idea – and naturally there’s an RSS feed.