From semantic Web to being taken over by technology

So I was having a nice geeky conversation with a friend of mine about this series of books where humans could extend their ability to take input through machines, and also dump their personality into a computer and transpose it to somewhere else (like a bird). Humans are now immortals and can do things we can only imagine. We talked about enhancing what you see with information added by the machine, like you can already do with an Phone, augmented reality I believe it is called. Take a video of your location and someone will tell you this is a restaurant, here is the menu. This is a famous historical building, buy the ticket now and so on.

We went on on a lots of crazy stuff and it was a really stimulating conversations. I could not really explain why the vision made me feel a little uncomfortable. After all, God-like life with infinite possibilities is quite interesting. Something very Taoist about it, except you become the Tao. All an illusion of course, if I can be the Tao, I can be pointed to and so I cannot be the Tao. Augmented reality has something I find scary which is someone would tell you what it is you are looking at. And from now on, everyone looking at the same thing will have the same narrow view of what they are looking at.

The I was watching this video about the semantic web, it is all related, bare with me. All about how you cannot really impose one single taxonomy on the world. There is not such a thing as one way to look at something. When machine are involved I cannot help thinking they have to be programmed in a way and thus already have an interpretation of what they are looking at. If we do use them predominantly to be in the world, we risk to view everything the same way.

Another weird thought occurred to be, people are now constantly posting information about themselves (twitter and all) and we are now becoming instruments ourselves. I see more and more people being obsessed with  sharing more and more information while events are currently happening than they actually forget to process the feelings and the implication of the events itself. We are not really very good at reporting an event and understand its ramifications at the same time.

I suppose it is a long way to say the more I think about it, the more I think we need to also unplug and just be. This will lead to better life experience, fuller life experiences and better creativity. Or maybe I am just starting to feel my age :).

Ah Microsoft!

So I am trying to update my contact application. I have really been maintaining the xml directly that is a little sad. So as I am about to try the new Visual Studio (2010) I am thinking what better way to get acquainted than to update the little application and finally out enough in there that I won’t be the only one using it.

Time to discover as usual Microsoft changed everything since last time I cared. I do miss Java sometimes.

For starter, there is still not a very good way for me to store a simple database in an xml format. Entity Framework, Linq to XML, ADO.NET (those I the ones I know of) are of no help. Object serialization seems to be the only way to get it done.After all this time I can’t believe there is still nothing there do encourage the use of simple file format as the database. You can have SQL Server and you are ok but who wants that for a simple list of contacts.

Then I am looking at the application framework. So I played with Smart Client before, it was ok. Just a little too complicated for a simple application. So now I am having another look and ouch. We have PRISM (new version of smart client as far as I can tell), MEF MAF, Unity. What is a man to do? I also now discover that we have new patterns MVVM, which seems to be been created specifically for WPF (and Silverlight). Now as much as I like the separation of concerns for building an application (who has ever heard of a developer with good eye for graphics), I cannot help wonder about a new technology which requires its own new pattern (and the other ones were pretty generic to start with). The caveat of course is that if you are doing ASP.NET then you can stick with the MVC framework they have created for it.

Now one of the benefit of going with Microsoft technologies is a unified environment (as opposed to Java where everyone wants to create their own framework). If you try to apply good practices, you first need to research all the stuff Microsoft has in progress and then check 3rd party vendors one. That is already a 6 months project. You need a team just to check where we are at, what is not quite finished and where you think it is all going. You will have an aversion to use 3rd party products because Microsoft will come up with something which will kill competition and they will not exist next year. Even Java seems to have standardized on SpringFramework (for the most part only of course).
It should be easy to get started, but anything you create with the tools out of the box seems to be rooted in the 1980s. You just cannot write anything that looks good at of the box. Again, you need to look into 3rd party controls because you don’t even get a decent grid (sorting, grouping with icons) with the regular tools. I think Microsoft is slowly eroding their best competitive advantage. A set of unified tools for you to program the Microsoft world. Is Office 2010 using .NET as the macro language yet or is it still stuck with VBA?

Too much information bad for Democracy

Sorry, I have not really had time but I saw this one and could not resist passing it on: Obama: iPod, iPad don't empower.

Not sure I agree with everything there but still interesting. I suppose busy people don’t have as much time as we do cannot process all the information that is available. I still think there is too much, we need to be able to identify what matters and focus on certain areas.

That being said, tools (like iPhone and iPad) do not make more information more available, although they do make it accessible in more places. We just need to make sure we have tools on those devices which allow us to filter that information.

Although I think the point we should make is that just because information is available that we have to look at it at anytime during the day. I have heard of people not being able to sleep anymore because they were reading news in bead on the iPhone. Of course who has not heard of family dinner where no-one is talking because everyone is texting or checking the internet. I think the toys are great but we need to learn how to switch them off.

When your information does not belong to you anymore

Salesforce is now using the information in the cloud and allowing companies to setup searches to monitor contact graph and Twitter.

It seems everyone is trying to get on the cloud wagon. Google now is searching Twitter and Facebook as real time as they can (so is Bing). Facebook is trying to expose as much data as you would let them by making public the default. I suppose in the latter case they are preparing themselves for making money.

It makes complete sense to try to harness so much information into something which will will give a competitive advantage. I cannot help but think about some colossal implications.

• If you had to be careful about what you said about your company before, once they can have such targeted searches which can be narrowed down to only your employees. Seems you’d better stay off any comments positive or negative. Even if you have positive messages but they are not in-line with your company’s marketing message, this is still not very good.
• Once company understand the source of the information, it will not take much for them to manipulate that information. and then the information will not be very reliable anymore. But it will be a bit like Wikipedia, there is mostly good information but you cannot really take it at face value.
• There is a huge opportunity here for some very interesting visualization multi-dimensional with evolution over time. That would be such an interesting project to work on.
• I suppose it also becomes a tool for you to become an ‘expert’ in your field. No need for hosting conferences anymore, just have lots of opinions and you will come up a lot from the searches in your chosen field. Mind you, it is more likely you will be drowned in by the volume of the crowd.
• I suppose this brings the next thought which is: ‘is there any need for experts?’ When you have access to all the information of your industry at your fingertip, do you have any need for an expert any more. Maybe the only expert we will ever need will be data mining experts and data visualization experts.
• I suppose their is no need here to go on discussing the validity of the wisdom of crowds vs expert opinion and quality vs popularity.

The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade

 

It was the best of decades, it was the worst of decades...

by James Turner

I was looking at this article, which I enjoyed, and could not helping having some thoughts :).

The Best

AJAX - It's hard to remember what life was like before Asynchronous JavaScript and XML came along, so I'll prod your memory. It was boring. Web 1.0 consisted of a lot of static web pages,where every mouse click was a round trip to the web server. If you wanted rich content, you had to embed a Java applet in the page, and pray that the client browser supported it.

Without the advent of AJAX, we wouldn't have Web 2.0, GMail, or most of the other cloud-based web applications. Flash is still popular, but especially with HTML 5 on the way, even functionality that formerly required a RIA like Flash or Silverlight can now be accomplished with AJAX.

I love AJAX but to say that there would have be no Web 2.0, I think that is a bit much. Web 2.0 as I understand is a culture of participation and collaboration. Yes the web application are more friendly and usable, but I believe the collaboration was inevitable. Web services, XML (with or without JASON) were more important I think.

Twitter - When they first started, blogs were just what they said, web logs. In other words, a journal of interesting websites that the author had encountered. These days, blogs are more like platforms for rants, opinions, essays, and anything else on the writer's mind. Then along came Twitter. Sure, people like to find out what J-Lo had for dinner, but the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging.The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context. Combine that with the use of Twitter to send out real time notices about everything from breaking news to the current specials at the corner restaurant, and it's easy to see why Twitter has become a dominant player.

I have said enough about Twitter, staying or not it has brought a new dimension to our on-line presence and to the possibility of harnessing the opinions of the crowds. Some can be called wisdom, some no-one cares…

Ubiquitous WiFi: I want you to imagine you're on the road in the mid-90s. You get to your hotel room, and plop your laptop on the table. Then you get out your handy RJ-11 cord, and check to see if the hotel phone has a data jack (most didn't), or if you'll have to unplug the phone entirely. Then you'd look up the local number for your ISP, and have your laptop dial it, so you could suck down your e-mail at an anemic 56K.

Now, of course, WiFi is everywhere. You may end up having to pay for it, but fast Internet connectivity is available everywhere from your local McDonalds to your hotel room to an airport terminal. Of course,this is not without its downsides, since unsecured WiFi access point shave led to all sorts of security headaches, and using an open access point is a risky proposition unless your antivirus software is up to date, but on the whole, ubiquitous WiFi has made the world a much more connected place.

I am not sure we are anywhere close to universal internet access in the USA and definitely not there with WiFi. I only have an IPod Touch and the lack of connectivity is plainly felt on a daily basis. If we did I am not sure Google would be so involved in trying to give access to the white space now that we have only digital TV. We are no-where near the ubiquitous access which has been enjoyed in other countries but I believe we are doing better.

More on Twitter

I have been blogging about twitter for a while now (mainly twitter vs Facebook) and I have to say I am still baffled on how popular it is.

When not helping dealing with emergencies, and then I think the only advantage twitter has is how easy it is to post and search information, it seems to be a referral tool, a way for a user to advertise content posted at another address (which allows a lit bit more information to be posted).

Then I came across this article from someone who actually raves about Twitter and let you know why. Also there is a slight inconsistency there, the author does admit using either media to post information. I especially like the way he described posting questions and asking help from his followers.

Of course you would have to have followers, not sure I would be qualifying there. The only followers I get are the ones which seem to be disappearing from Twitter for disqualifying behavior.
He also admits to not following many people. Too much information is the same as no information. Seems a bit of a one sided relationship, but I have to say I understand the approach there.

I still think the best part of Twitter is the use of tags and its searchability. There might be a use for the individual but where it seems to shine is in using the crowd’s information. The danger of course is when it is not a fad anymore, and I hear some famous people are now disconnecting, if we do not find a way to make it more attractive for the individual, Twitter might very quickly loose its appeal.

Just found another article claiming that Twitter will be there forever. Well generally speaking it is hard to agree with it, if Twitter does not evolve it will surely disappear in favor of something else. But he makes some valid point as to why Twitter is useful now. It is worth the read.

Social media data analysis

As we put more and more data on-line, we will see different ways to analyze the data floating around. What is says about us, I am not so sure. I previously blogged about a tool to show trends in twitter.

Here is something else that was blogged on by O’Reilly (I do love those guys). This shows a different visualization of some of the information flowing in Twitter. This one also show trends but I have to say the visualization seems more effective to show what is being talked about at one point in time and the actual trends

In order to look at the trend, you need to read the text under each picture. I would be curious to see how they define boring and smart though. That might be more of a judgment call rather than a real data categorization. Actually I just read the article again and it defined by the author.

I wonder if there is a way to actually define boring vs smart. People who talk about some topics, would not really call those things boring (or would they). I suppose the x-axis might be used to represent the trends (getting hotter or cooler).

The death of languages

I was reading this BBC article about the Death of Language. The heading reads: “An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?”

The most interesting part for me was:
"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.
"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."

I could not help wondering if it is the same thing with programming languages. They are definitely a product of their time and a specific culture/idea for which they were developed. They have been evolving over time like any other language. I wonder what we would loose if for instance COBOL was to disappear or maybe something like Prolog.

To some extend, a programming language is there to help solving a specific problem. If there is another programming language which helps you do the same thing better and faster, surely you do not loose much. In a sense, a human language is not that different, it tries to address the communication problem.

Which ever way I turn the ideas around, I think it is both a shame and no big deal if we loose such thing. It is something more tangible than a nostalgia for a world/historical passage of our world. Languages try to address the way we see the world at a point in time. When we loose that language, we loose maybe a dimension of the world we look at. Every language is a compromise to express something. It reflects the choices we make and our priorities. When we have a new language, we may or may not carry this dimension with us and maybe we now are looking at the world only in a certain way and completely missing this other dimension which could have made a big difference in our perception of it.

Of course it is highly impractical to keep all of them and to some extend if everyone was speaking the same language it would be a lot easier. Being a foreigner and all, I cannot help thinking wouldn’t it be a lot easier if everyone would speak English? Or technically I don’t really care which one it is. But then I am fearful of a world limited to only English words. Maybe there is something equivalent to poetry for programming languages, that is an interesting idea. I wonder what that would look like. We know programming can produce visual and audio art. I wonder what poetry could look like. Maybe a requirement for any application should also include artistic element to it.

Yahoo not in search anymore?

I was reading this article.

The most sticking comment were from a Yahoo search expert who came from Microsoft:

“Maarek came to Yahoo from Google, where she was instrumental in the development of front-end presentation enhancements such as Google Suggest. In her view, the last decade brought a revolution in the way Web pages are crawled, indexed, and presented to the user: a revolution that saw Google come out a clear winner.”

If Bing is now replacing the Yahoo search engine, Microsoft now owns the data displayed by Yahoo. O’Reilly has been saying for a while I believe that it is all about the data. Does not really matter how much Yahoo claims it is about presentation, I can’t believe this can be correct. Presentation is just so easily copied, that can’t possibly be the only hedge.

With my limited wisdom I believe that what they are really after is another kind of data, the user habits data. If they can collect and harness that data, they can provide the kind of results I have been blogging about targeted to you. If they can achieve that I suppose that might give them the edge.

I can’t help being suspicious, if they do not own the data, they now become dependent on it. Microsoft is not known for his competitors’ friendly tactics. They might require Yahoo to give them a way to gather the same type of data. Or, knowing that Bing powers the search, why would any new user go through Yahoo instead of Bing directly? That can only mean one thing, a slowly decreasing number of users. They are going to have to find the kind of applications that will make users want to stay, some kind of integrated portal to access most of services people would want to access on-line.

If that is the case, Yahoo is becoming the provide of Software as a Service. There is a fierce competition out there with so many areas to be addressed. Who would be able to know which ones to start with and which ones they will focus on first. If I am right, which would be a small miracle, we should see more applications coming at of Yahoo starting with a better email/IM (oh wait, I think they have already done that).

The positive geek

Not everything in the techie world is doom and gloom. Of course there is lots of it:

• With information being so available, attention is fragmented and being are getting less productive.
• There is no privacy left and companies will be able to buy all the information you have been accumulating on-line for the last 5 years
• Google is becoming the new Microsoft, enough said.
• The internet is not really helping in education and students are copying their work on-line. Are we actually becoming less educated?
• There is so much information out there that you just cannot find anything
• Newspapers are dying and we will forever talk about the non-relevant last big mistake from the most famous because that is all we gossip about on-line and that all the information we have time/money for anyway
• The power of social networks may actually bring about the tyranny of crowds to the entire world.

But there are still a few of us who think there is a lot of good being achieved using technology and the best might still be coming. After all, it could be argued the Internet is still in its infancy.

• There is now greater transparency of information. Even though sometimes it might look bad, it is a good thing. Democracy can only move forward with open access to all the information about how the system is run.
• We have creative ways of using the information using mash-ups. Maps of crime, Google earth/sky/stars.
• There is still so much that can be done and yes, there have been really good use of Twitter in natural disaster cases. Sometimes that was the only mode of communication. Same with Facebook during the Iranian elections.
• Information is accessible from so many different places and smartphones are supposed to be replacing PCs sometime in the near future.
• In poor countries, people use cell phones to transfer money, sell and buy new products.
• I am not the only one saying it. This might be the most convincing argument of course.
• My biggest hope is that there is still so much we have not seen and that is yet to come.

Facebook being active

There is a lot of activity around Facebook those days.

• They are trying to position themselves of value for businesses. Probably positioning themselves for making more money.
• They are still bringing new features using the FriendFeed acquisition and bringing voice to your contacts.

I am a bit curious about the voice thing. EBay tried it with Skype but it seems people were happy staying anonymous (kind of). Of course if you are chatting to your friends, it might be a different story.

I suppose it seems to be more and more about all the social sites merging into one set of functionality and when the dust settles, who know will be left standing. I am siding with Facebook still being there but I am not an expert. I tried to explain why in this blog entry but who knows.

At the moment it seems to be all about bringing real time information. or at least as quickly as possible. I am not sure I agree entirely with the trend for individuals, but of course I already talked about the marketing benefits for this. As an individual, the site is great for me to catch up on the things I have been missing while being busy somewhere else. It is not really about trying to talk to them right here and there. I have IM for that.

I am not sure I am part of the average person using the site. A few of my colleagues have an iPhone and you have to fight for their un-interrupted attention. I hate the feeling that the day might have passed by and I was not paying attention to it. The more I know, the more I try to get my attention back and try to look at the present moment. Seems to be more and more difficult. Anyway, one way to achieve that is by having asynchronous communications with my social members. And yes, I still have lots of improvements to make to make sure I have quality communications with them…

First time I read it it just sounded silly

I thought social media was a way to escape your real life and connect on a different level to all your friends. Or also the gloomy version of pretending to be something you are not and being someone else.

Well, you are not as safe there as you ever thought. Well you were never that safe before, but at least you could pretend. A court order was going to be served over Twitter. Is nothing safe?

I suppose it was the kind of guy pretending to be some one else. But how do you know he actually got it? How do you know the username is not shared across multiple people? How do you know when he got the message?

The article said you can server court orders over email and the like. I suppose the technology is not that different. Just the idea of an electronic transaction being used as an official way to contact you feels a little wrong. Either they don’t know you and so, what kind of weight does an injunction have? Either they know you, I am sure they have plenty of ways of finding out, why would they use anything like Twitter to send an injunction?

Anyway, it did not not seem silly anymore, just a little disturbing…

More marketing use of Twitter

Here is another way for us to parse the data in twitter. The more data we enter, the more it will be analyzed, processed, etc.

In a sense it is great. I can’t help wondering about what other data we would need for us to decide whether the data is actually relevant.

There was a study saying at least 40% of information in Twitter is not really useful like I am having a coffee, at the bar, etc. The next question is whether the remaining population is actually a representative sample. Or I suppose what type of population would it be representative of. If possible, it would be nice to dice the data using that information.

I can’t help but be reminded of the time where we had wars and lots of major things happening in the world and all the news were talking about was Britney Spears. It was cheaper and potentially more popular to provide celebrity news rather than world wide news.

I am a little curious though to see how much the top tweets would be influenced by the media. Let’s pick something that is potentially old news, or off the radar. Start using the regular media to talk about that and see how quickly or if this bottles up in Twitter (or any other social media).

Facebook vs Twitter

It is always fascinating to see the difference between the two. I have a preference for Facebook myself, at least you have the option to enter as much content as you see fit, or as little.

Facebook is a programming platform, although I do have some concerns about privacy and about how much each application has access to but let’s put that aside for a moment.

Facebook is making some steps to become more than it already is. This article details as Facebook is buying FriendFeed and will now (hopefully) be able to improve its real time search capability. This is one of Twitter’s strength, being able to view trends based on current activity.

The article seems to indicate that Facebook might be competing with Google but I am not sure that is the point. I suspect the gap is being reduced between the 2. You can upload pictures, videos for both of them.

The open architecture/api provided by Facebook does make me bet on them. You can also provide an open account (company and others) where it is not necessary for you to be confirmed to become a friend. I believe Facebook has a toned down interface which apparently looks more like Twitter for those who think the regular one is a bit daunting (I am one of them I suppose).

In the end, I believe those services will converge into a social platform (as opposed to a social product) where you can pick and choose the functionality you like. There will probably be specific platform for specific environments, business (Linked In), private (Facebook) and others I cannot really think of.

Twitter, the good

I have been posting so much about what I did not understand about Twitter, I suppose it was time to post about the good. As much as I find hard to get most of it, I think there are really good things coming out of it. It is just I think we could improve the current blogging/social solutions so that similar good things could emerge from those solutions. In the end, if people favor twitter more than the other solutions, it will not matter so much. In the end I believe all those solutions will meet in the middle, as it should be, driven by the user’s needs.

I suppose the biggest difference for most people between something like Facebook is the way you can follow someone without their approval. People who are already famous (and companies I suppose) can’t really validate all their followers on by one. Witness Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN for a million followers.
The other cool feature is the open API which has been embraced by so many applications and devices. It makes it so easy to update Twitter any place, any time.

Even though I am still not sure why people would Twitter, not enough space for information and all, this any place, any time has some really cool applications in case of disaster (either political or ecological). I have not played with it but I believe you can directly upload pictures and movies now. That definitely will help with the lack of information that can be attached to it.

The best part is that while twitter represents the pulse of its members, you can get so much out of the chatter. Here is SalesForce.com trying to use the information from multiple social web sites including twitter.

I cannot help wondering if the social sites or blogs allow public/private profiles, with maybe a more granular level of privacy, and a cool public API, I am not sure if twitter will have much to stand one. On the other hand Twitter is looking more and more like a blog or the other web sites. Somehow I suppose they will all meet in the middle.

After I wrote this, a lot of things happened. Facebook acquired FriendFeed. Facebook has a Lite feature which apparently looks like Twitter. I suspect in the end, the one which will stay will be the one who manages to make money without offending its users. MySpace does not seem to be much in the news those days. Could it be that it was based on giving a music/performer’s platform. The music industry has been a bit in shambles with iTunes and the music industry not really knowing what to do. I have not heard of a platform dominating the market which is centered around music distribution aside of MySpace. Then again I am not really looking that much into it.

Web application or Client application

Just wanted to put what I thought down on paper (so to speak). I figure it would help trying to sort it out. The typical answer 5 years ago would have been a web application allows for quick deployment, avoids the dll hell but would have limited interface capability. Not sure any of this still applies.

On the client side, you can use java web start or the .NET equivalent. They can be downloaded and kept updated every time you launch it.

I suppose Applets, Silverlight and Adobe Flash take it to another level but you sill need to have a runtime engine installed. At least it would not change as often, the code gets updated on the fly and cached I believe if you do not need to change it. The size of the runtime is important, but I suppose not essential for me to figure out some more.

The web applications those days are fantastic, to the point where desktop applications try to look more like them. The boundaries are constantly being pushed. I am still amazed we can have a work processor and a spreadsheet with just html code (and JavaScript of course). Not always up to par but getting closer and closer. Not sure where Flash and Silverlight fit in, they can of course interact with the web pages. But they are not necessarilly part of the page. I am on the fence here as to where they belong. If they serve the page as opposed to be the page, I would be tempted to make part of the web technology.

However I have come across a few screens that I don’t believe would be possible in a web page. I am not one of those who think web applications are not user friendly, although I have found quite a few of those. The choice, as always, is it depends. What the requirements are should be the main driver. For complex screens, use Flash, and applet or Silverlight (no preference really). I think it should be the preferred solution and should only be rejected if notthing else can be done about it.

One of the greatest benefit I can see all applications benefited from the merge of those options is a greater freedom for designing the interface. We are not longer bound by what Microsoft thinks it should look like (the visual basic look I like to call it) or the not so good java look and feel. Every product should have a graphic designer, no matter how small the product.

A Culture of Communication

I had to present to my list of peers a list of initiatives  we had been taking in our group to facilitate communication and sharing of information. I felt some of the things we were doing would have been easily applicable to us. For a while I have been frustrated of the lack of communication within our group. We have so much in common:
- same job title
- same process to follow
- very similar challenges
- same base technology
In short we are all development managers within the same company, the only true difference was that we were working on different products.
We had no real communication or shared experiences. It was hard to feel we were working for the same company or worse, individual developers could not imagine being assigned to a different team.

So, I did the presentation, asked for feedback and nothing. I was a bit disappointed but then I thought about it. All the things we were doing within our group had been implemented over time and that it required quite a lot of work on my part to get people on board. It was not something we worked hard at until people saw the benefits and then we moved on to the next one. It was first thought as extra work that needed to be done in addition to anything else. It was a way to loose what made them special, the information they were holding onto.

Then I realized I was facing 2 things:
- resistance to change
- failure to understand that you grow by sharing information a lot more than by hanging on to it.
I remember trying to explain my manager 10 years ago we should have an intranet and him asking ‘why should we bother?’. Not everyone sees the benefit of creating a repository of the company’s IP.

What I probably need is getting support for their management so I can get them started on communicating and then hope that by doing they will understand the benefit of sharing. As we do it more and it then becomes a habit, the less of a chore it is and the more we benefit from it. I think it is one of those skills that you can develop by making it a habit. The more we communicate, the better we are at it and the easier it is. It dawns on me that we might not all be born communicators but it is something we can learn by doing. That is something worth thinking about.

About Creativity

I have just been to a project management class on creativity. The class was mostly about convincing people that they are creative machines. It was a series of quotes from motivational speakers and of exercising designed to convince us we can be creative and think out of the box. The presenter was very likeable and had some nice stories and jokes. The course created a few reactions for me.

• The presenter used some of his life experiences to make a point, I was then again reminded how we learn better through storytelling. It makes the material more enjoyable and easier to remember.
• It is really a shame that people need convincing they are still created. The presenter was agreeing with Sir Ken Robinson, one of my favorite presentation from TED talks, people are educated out of creativity.
• The course tried to convince us we are creative, but it did nothing to tell us how to cultivate it and and to create an environment of creativity in our own environment. That is a bit of a shame.
• He said he loved project managers and that we would be the ones to get the economy back on its track. That was a bit of a cheap shot, I suppose that might be part of the plan to make people feel good about themselves. Still the thing about project managers is that when something is wrong, it is all your fault but when all is good, it is thanks to the team. A project manager is nothing without his/her team, in the end, they are really doing the ones doing the work.

I think, with my limited experience, that the best way for us to encourage creativity is to create a safe environment where it is acceptable to make mistakes and fail sometimes. Especially if you are trying something new and out of your comfort zone. Of course you want to make sure the consequences of the failures are not too dramatic and affect the project. But then again, there is always something going wrong. During the course, someone mentioned that when something bad happens, they do not blame and address the issue. In a way it sounds nice but I also believe in accountability, I am not sure how to reconcile the 2 at this point. I think it is ok to tell someone they made a mistake and move on. The issue should be looked at to make sure it can be avoided in the future and does not become systematic. Sometimes it is just a mistake and there is really nothing to do beyond acknowledging it happened.

A follow up on Twitter

Just a quickly follow up on my previous post. I am not sure I made my point so well. I don’t mean to say we do not have a lot of applications possible from mining twitter information. I read this article (How NPR Tweets Topical Archive Material) and I really liked the idea. How a program identifies trends in Twitter and publishes content from existing material which will support the trend.

I actually Twittered about this article where we learn about some of the usage a company can use the information in Twitter to understand how ‘the mob’ perceives the company.

My issue I suppose is not so much about what can be done about the data but the incentive there is for people to Twitter. It is definitely a fad at the moment, people join just to be in. Technically I am joining to find out what the fuss is all about. I suppose its strength is the asymmetric associations which allows you to follow someone without first requiring their approval.

The conflict for me is that the benefits depend on the information entered and you can only enter 100 characters. You can only really enter keywords and then link to other page with the full information. That is quite restrictive.

Maybe the quick fix for me would be to just allow entering as many as you want and then it is a nice and easy way to have a blog. Maybe I just don’t get it and it will become a real source of information and not just a marketing tool.

Will twitter survive?

I know a lot of people have been writing about this already, I probably don’t have that much more to add that has not yet already seen but I do not get it. I can’t see how it can survive.

Here is what I know:
- You can only enter about 100 characters, this means you can reference information or not say too much. I suppose that is why it is called micro blogging. Of course referencing other pieces of information is very useful but as to publishing some, you can only really give a quick status update. I have been following a few people and unless I have some background on their status, it does not really say much.
- You can follow anyone you want and they don’t even have to approve you. Cool for me, it is a bit embarrassing to have to refuse someone because you don’t really know them well enough. On the other hand, you might end up by having so many followers that you don’t really know anymore who you are saying things to. That must be quite a restriction, of course I don’t really know, but it is not about sharing your status with your friends anymore.
- You can send messages directly to someone, whether you are following them or not. If you are a fairly popular person, again which I am not, that can make it very difficult for you to keep up with the ones you actually care about.
- There is certainly a good reach, lots of tools for you to be able to post from lots of different devices. The benefit of an open API I suppose.
- There are ways for now to search/tag/monitor the data going through twitter. This is great stuff, I remember looking at a map of the world and a popup would come up every time someone would twitter.
- They do not seem to have any business model yet. In this day in age, that is a small miracle. It does say a lot about how popular this is.
- Every now and then some suspicious user is trying to get me to follow them, I suppose we should invent a new word for this, it could be micro-spam.

I can see the benefit for a company to look for keywords about the company, the product and keep a pulse on what is being said. It seems to be a very good PR tool. It seems to have been used a lot during key and significant events.
Maybe I just don’t get it, but I still don’t really see the point. I can’t say anything of consequence, I could be referencing something I wrote from somewhere else but then I could just write it in Facebook and all the people I do care about will read it from there.
At this point twitter seems to be used so you can update your status in other applications at the same time, again the benefit of open APIs, but I can’t see why it can’t be done in the other ones.
You can apparently follow publishers you care about and read the news that way, but I already have a news reader, is twitter giving me anything different?
The bands, famous people and companies seem to be using it to be cool and publish ‘good’ information about them. They have other people populating the information for them.

If it stops being a fad, what else is there? Is it more a reflection on the fact that we focus less and for shorter period of time and all we can come up with is about 100 characters? Maybe I am just missing the point, the fad is the point and it will always be there. Some part of me can only hope that it is not the case. Maybe all we need is easier tools for blogging and we can still make quick and easy posts to the web for all to know.