My “frugal” Philips headphones

I blogged before about being an avid podcast listener. In my new job at RBC, my commuting time is longer (about 50 minutes door-to-door), so now I have full 100 minutes to randomly go through my ever-growing list of fluffy stuff. For years I’ve been using Sony Fontopia in-the-ear headphones. While not great, they fit my ears better than the ones that come with the iPhone – which kept falling off all the time. I’m not sure about the precise Fontopia model I had, but it looked like this one:

On Monday though, my 3-year-old decided to play hide and seek with them, and I’m still trying to figure out where they are. I bet that a few years from now I’ll find them inside some old shoes or some jar around the house. After a day suffering of podcasting withdrawal, I paid a visit to the Best Buy store at Yonge and Dundas to get a new pair, and found these Philips in-ear headphones (model SH5910) for CAD$ 9.99:

Call me cheap (or “frugal” as suggested by some friends on Twitter ), but I loved them. They fit my ear canal perfectly – I’m glad I’m not the only one with a wacky ear shape, they have the best isolation I’ve experienced to date, with the exception of those noise cancelling phones that I find eerily quiet, and, well, they are really cheap .

Of course, take this recommendation with a huge grain of salt. First of all, I’ve been wearing them just for a day. Also, I use these phones mostly for podcasts and audio books. At home, I have fairly good Sennheiser wireless headphones to listen to my favourite songs, but for the road I really need something I can fit in my pocket. Finally, the rush hour ride in the Toronto subway is not exactly a home-theatre like environment, so my number one need was good isolation, not pristine sound quality. The fact that I can now listen to podcasts without having to max out the iPhone volume is probably good for my hearing health anyway.

The Apple logo, Annie Hall and the single version of the truth

CreativeBits published last week a good interview with Rob Janoff, the designer of the Apple logo (thanks to TUAW for the pointer). Over the years, I’ve heard several theories explaining the bitten apple, from the obvious (Eve’s bite on the forbidden fruit representing the lust for knowledge), to the nerdy (a reference to the computer term byte), to the convoluted (like the one below from Wikipedia).

Another explanation exists that the bitten apple pays homage to the mathematician Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating an apple he had laced with cyanide.

Then you learn directly from the horse’s mouth that all of the above are just BS (his term, not mine). The real explanation turned out to be so much more mundane and simpler:

Anyway, when I explain the real reason why I did the bite it’s kind of a let down. But I’ll tell you. I designed it with a bite for scale, so people get that it was an apple not a cherry. Also it was kind of iconic about taking a bite out of an apple. Something that everyone can experience. It goes across cultures. If anybody ever had an apple he probably bitten into it and that’s what you get.

All the fancy theories about the bitten apple logo and the real reason is that Janoff didn’t want to have people mistaking his stylized apple by a cherry??? “Kind of a let down” is the understatement of the year.

This whole discussion reminds me of this classic scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall movie:

The video above is a bit long, so here is a description for the time-starved among you:

In one scene, Allen’s character, standing in a cinema queue with Annie and listening to someone behind him expound on Marshall McLuhan’s work, leaves the line to speak to the camera directly. The man then speaks to the camera in his defense, and Allen resolves the dispute by pulling McLuhan himself from behind a free-standing movie posterboard to tell the man that his interpretation is wrong.

I had a great literature teacher who told me many years ago that what an artist meant when creating his art is important if you are interested in history or passing an exam, but all the possible interpretations by consumers of that art are as legitimate as the one by the author, be her or him a writer, a musician, a painter or a sculptor. The bottom line is that once the art is out to the public, the audience owns its meaning, and that meaning will evolve as time and context keeps building on top of it, regardless of what the author’s original intention was.

Revisiting the Annie Hall scene from that perspective, Allen’s character, McLuhan and the Columbia U professor were all right in their distinct interpretations, and all wrong in assuming that only one was possible.

In the fields of IT and Business Intelligence, we often hear the (terrible) acronym SVOT, or Single Version of the Truth (sometimes referred as “one version of the truth”). While in very technical terms that may make sense – a person cannot have two different places of birth, for example – SVOT in anything above bits and bytes is just an urban myth.

A personal story to illustrate this: my maternal uncle’s place of birth was supposed to be some Japanese city named Keijo, according to old documents from my grandfather. As many of you know, my mother is Japanese, and I always just assumed that my uncle was born in Japan, so I never bothered looking for Keijo in the map. Last month, talking to my sister over Skype, I googled it and found that Keijo is actually the former Japanese name used for Seoul, the capital of South Korea, during the period of Japanese rule! In a few seconds, SVOT just became to me IDWTYART, as in “it depends what truth you are referring to”

Just to bring this post back to its original subject, I want to conclude it with a pictorial representation of SVOT vs. IDWTYART juxtaposing the iconic logo and its corresponding pwned version:

Aunt May 2.0

A few years ago, during a visit to the Portuguese Language Museum in São Paulo, Brazil, I found that one of my favourite childhood characters, Cebolinha, was getting into blogging:

2004 is typically considered the year that blogs went mainstream, so no surprises there. It’s expected that a cartoon character would just follow the habits of his target demographics.

That notwithstanding, I had a good laugh getting my weekly dose of geeky fix in this sequence of Amazing Spider-Man #599:

So Aunt May is active in both Facebook and Twitter? Is this just a Marvel plot to get more people to follow them in Twitter? One would expect Johnny “Human Torch” Storm to be twittering (see below), but Aunt May, seriously?

If you believe in this comScore report and the referred Reuters blog post from a few months ago, Aunt May could in fact be as likely to be a Twitter user as Johnny Storm:

comScore blog – (…) 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

Reuters blog – Twitter may even be catching on among people who have a reached a post-business phase of their lives: Of the 4 million U.S. Twitter users in February, 5.2 percent were 65 or older.

To keep things in perspective, if you Google “Twitter demographics”, you’ll find all kinds of conflicting data, like this one by Quantcast or this other one by Pew Internet & American Life Project, so don’t start placing all your Twitter bets on the older segments of your target audience just yet. But keep in mind that the online landscape keeps changing at a fast pace: if you are still stuck in believing that Social Media is owned by generation Y, maybe it’s time to check if that latest Twitter follower you’ve got is not your grandma taking a break from all the World of Warcraft craziness.

On being off-grid and Byline for your iPhone

The first 7 weeks after I left IBM were a trip back to my pre-Internet days, as I had problems with both my Twitter account and my Bell Sympatico High-Speed connection at home, and didn’t spend much time in front of a computer at work. Not being connected has its bright side, especially during summer time, so I’m not complaining too much. There’s plenty to do in our non-virtual lives, and an excuse to stay away from the computer is welcome, especially in the sunny days of Toronto’s short summer – by the way, the only reason I’m writing this now is that the weather is pretty bad outside and my golf plans were ruined .

In my case, Bell Sympatico High-Speed was a bit of a misnomer, especially in early July, when I was getting a download speed of 0.25 Mbits per second and learned from Bell that as far as my connection is up, they are charging for service. Last week I switched all my services to Rogers, and so far it’s been good. I’m typically getting very close to 10 Mbits, a 40 times improvement. Just in case, I’ll keep my fingers crossed, as consumers typically don’t have the upper hand in a de-facto ISP duopoly landscape.

In those 7 weeks off-grid, my iPhone became my online lifeline, but while the small screen is good to consume content, it’s less so to create stuff. Going down the Social Technographics ladder led me to discover a great tool for my iPhone, one that I highly recommend: Byline, by Phantom Fish. Here’s what their website says about the app:

Read the latest news from your favorite sites and blogs on your iPhone or iPod Touch, even when you’re offline.
Simply use your free Google Reader account to subscribe to websites you’d like to keep track of. Byline will automatically bring you new content, putting thousands of RSS and Atom feeds at your fingertips.

Stay in sync
When you read an item, it stays read. The same goes for the items you star: Byline will let Google Reader know the next time you have an internet connection.

Browse offline
Even when you have no internet connection, Byline’s offline browsing feature gives you instant access to complete web pages.
Perfect for flights, subway journeys, and (if you’re an iPod Touch owner) those long dry spells between Wi-Fi zones.
Byline will cache the web pages linked to by your notes, starred items, and (optionally) new items. This allows you to save any news item you read and any website you visit for offline browsing.

Here are some screenshots:

The offline capability is great for consuming comics in the subway ride or during those long, boring flights:

Byline is now the most utilized 3rd party app on my iPhone. To save on the meager data plans available in Canada, you may want to turn the “Cache by Wi-Fi Only” on. I typically synch it a few times a day, just before leaving home in the morning and whenever I drop by a coffee shop during the day. If you work close to the CN Tower in Toronto, the Timothy’s store there now offers free Internet for patrons.

Enterprise 2.0: Jennifer Okimoto and Antipatterns

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t join the Social Media crowd at the Enterprise 2.0 conference being held in Boston this week. But luckily for those attending, Jennifer Okimoto kindly offered to present the Enterprise 2.0 Antipatterns session, scheduled for this upcoming Thursday. You can take a look at the core slides I used in the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in SlideShare:

But even if you’ve seen me presenting it before, I highly recommend those attending the E2.0 event to see Jennifer’s take on it. She’s a great story teller, and her director’s cut will likely feel like a new presentation altogether. And if you can’t see her live there, make sure you follow her in Twitter for a daily dose of witty commentary and nuggets of wisdom 2.0.

Fame, Interactive Ads and Online Reputation

As previously seen at Biznology:

As marketers try to find ways to join the conversation enabled by social media, they face the challenge of scale. The virtual third space is becoming increasingly fragmented, to the point that engaging into every single thread of discussion pertinent to your business is no longer practical. In that scenario, can you meet the expectations of a target audience increasingly craving for individual attention? Can you effectively manage your online reputation?

Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas summarized the extent of the online conversations in the social web nicely in their conversation prism graphic:

The Conversation Prism, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0

Going through the petals of the chart above, it’s evident that the online chatter is much bigger than just Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. And it’s not getting any smaller.

In his best-seller book “Here Comes Everybody”, Clay Shirky pointed out that the web did not completely flatten publishing and broadcasting, as fame gets in the way of the elusive many-to-many communication nirvana:

“The Web makes interactivity technologically possible, but what technology giveth, social factors taketh away. In the case of the famous, any potential interactivity is squashed, because fame isn’t an attitude, and it isn’t technological artifact. Fame is simply an imbalance between inboud and outbound attention, more arrows pointing in than out.”

That imbalance can lead to unmet expectations on both sides: companies being frustrated by trying to join an ever growing number of online social spaces and customers demanding individual attention they can’t possibly get.

To mitigate this issue, some organizations have been relying on interactive or personalized online video ads that provide a middle ground between the one-size-fits-all model of traditional media and the many-sizes-fit-many model described by Chris Anderson in his book “The Long Tail”. Here are four examples:

1. Burger King and the Subservient Chicken

Launched back in 2004, this widely popular website (20 million hits within a week of launching, 14 million unique visitors in the first year) is still online after all these years. Its simplicity was captivating: a man in a chicken costume would perform actions based on what users asked him to do. It was based on pre-recorded footage, and more than three hundred commands were available. Sadly, it no longer reacts when you tell him to get a Big Mac.

2. Ms Dewey

This website was launched two years ago as an experimental interface for Microsoft’s Live Search. If you search for “Tiger Woods”, Ms. Dewey may surprise you by making a comment about professional athletes before showing the results. Behind the scenes, the apparent interactivity is achieved via an algorithm choosing one of 600 video clips that may fit the keywords you entered.

3. Antarctica Beer and the Tatoo Ad

As a friendly warning, know that this ad may be a bit too racy for some audiences. I like it for both the humour and the perfect execution. In the future, expect to see even more sophisticated techniques, mixing custom audio or even images with pre-defined content. You can find a rough translation from Brazilian Portuguese to English for the full video here.

4. MoveOn.org viral video

This blog post was actually drafted before the US elections, but I preferred to not publish it back then, as the intent was to discuss interactive ads, not to favour one candidate or the other. MoveOn.org effectively used this personalized video showing the November 4th election being decided by a single voter, whose name is digitally inserted in newspapers titles and video captions.

Interactive videos of course can only go so far. As the amount of user-generated content skyrockets, better tools will become available to marketers for following conversations, detecting trends and managing your company’s reputation. Two months ago, while in Singapore, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation about COBRA (Corporate Brand and Reputation Analysis), an initiative by IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services, that may be a sign of things to come. If you are interested in knowing more about it, visit this page (in the interest of full disclosure, note that IBM is my employer).

Living in exponential times entails developing exponential listening and conversational abilities, for both companies and individuals alike. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but you certainly can enjoy all the fun along the way.

Podcasts: What’s in your list?

I’m completely addicted to podcasts. Being able to board a packed subway and still get your daily fix of news or entertainment relief makes the 40-minute commute back and forth feel like a walk in the park. iPods and other MP3 players are so pervasive now, and most of us have no time to watch TV or listen to radio.

My podcast listening pattern mimics my old radio listening habits: I created a playlist with everything that’s recent and let it play continuously. This leads me to keep having senile moments when I can’t for the life of me remember what the source was for my references. I also wanted to tell Andy and the Michaels that I’m now subscribing to Dogear Nation, but my recollection of the shows is all mixed up with Buzz Out Loud and net@nite, so I’d better stay quiet .

An annoying side effect of having the so-called wisdom of crowds surfacing what’s worth talking about is that most of the tech podcasting tend to cover exactly the same things. They all seem to go to Digg, Reddit and Engadget as their main inspiration for news, so I’m getting increasingly more fond of listening to non-news radio shows from BBC,  CBC and NPR. The TED Talks are also top in my list, but I can only consume videos when I manage to get a seat, so there’s a lot to catch up on the video podcast front. Yesterday I listened to Ken Robinson talking about education and creativity. Fantastic talk, if you ask me.

I keep changing my subscriptions, but this is my full current list. Looking at it now, it seems obvious that I need to shrink the techie talks and get more of other stuff urgently there.

• Best Ads on TV
• Best of Today
• Best of YouTube (Ipod video)
• Boing Boing TV
• Book Review
• BusinessWeek — Technology & You
• Buzz Out Loud
• CBC Radio:  Ontario This Week
• CBC Radio: C’est la vie: Word of the Week
• CBC Radio: Dispatches
• CBC Radio: Editor’s Choice
• CBC Radio: Quirks & Quarks Complete Show
• CBC Radio: Search Engine
• CBC Radio: Spark
• CBC Radio: The Best of As It Happens
• CBC Radio: The Best of Ideas
• CBC Radio: The Best of Sounds Like Canada
• CBC Radio: The Best of The Current
• CBC Radio: Toronto This Week
• CBC Radio: Words at Large
• CNET News Daily Podcast
• CanadExport podcast
• Cranky Geeks for the iPod Video
• Digital Planet
• Dilbert Animated Cartoons
• Documentaries
• Dogear Nation Podcast
• Engadget
• ExtremeTech.com
• From Our Own Correspondent
• Front Page
• GeekBrief.TV | Video Podcast (iPod)
• Global News
• Harlequin Author Spotlight
• Harvard Business IdeaCast
• IBM – Powered by PodTech.net
• IBM DEMOzone:en Accelerating Web 2.0 for Government
• IBM Innovations Podcasts
• IBM Institute for Business Value: Insights and Perspectives Podcast
• IBM News Center – Audio Podcasts – United States
• IBM Small Business Podcast
• IBM WebSphere Technical Podcast series on SOA
• IBM and the Future of. . .
• IBM developerWorks – Powered by PodTech.net
• IBM developerWorks podcasts
• In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
• Inside Mac Radio
• Java News Podcast
• Learn French by Podcast
• Learn Spanish with Coffee Break Spanish
• Mac Tips Daily!
• MacBreak (iPod video)
• NPR: 7AM ET News Summary Podcast
• NPR: 7PM ET News Summary Podcast
• NPR: Books Podcast
• NPR: Business Story of the Day Podcast
• NPR: Environment Podcast
• NPR: Foreign Dispatch Podcast
• NPR: Fresh Air Podcast
• NPR: Health & Science Podcast
• NPR: It’s All Politics Podcast
• NPR: Koppel on the News Podcast
• NPR: Movies Podcast
• NPR: Pop Culture Podcast
• NPR: Shuffle Podcast
• NPR: Story of the Day Podcast
• NPR: Technology Podcast
• NPR: Tell Me More Podcast
• NPR: World Story of the Day Podcast
• NYT Op-Ed Podcast
• NYT Tech Talk
• Nature Podcast
• New Yorker: Fiction
• New Yorker: Out Loud
• NewsPod
• Nickjr: Diego (VIDEO)
• Odeo
• Onion News Network (Video)
• PCMag Radio
• PRI’s The World: Technology Podcast from BBC/PRI/WGBH
• Productivity @ IBM
• Rough Guides iToors
• Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American
• Science Times
• Sesame Street Podcast
• Slashdot Review – SDR News
• Spanish Podcasts for Beginners
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at D5 Conference
• Storynory – Stories For Kids
• Stuff You Should Know
• TEDTalks (video)
• The Economist
• The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos Video Podcast
• The Java Posse
• The Sarah Silverman Program (Video)
• The Web 2.0 Show
• The latest news from IBM in the US
• TimesTalks
• Tourcaster
• Travel with Rick Steves
• Wake Up To Money
• Walks of a Lifetime
• Weekend Business
• Weekend Explorer
• Wired Science Video Podcast
• World View
• net@night
• this WEEK in TECH – AAC Edition
• todmaffin.com

If you managed to get to this line of this long post, you may be wondering why the heck I carry Harlequin Author Spotlight, Diego and Sesame Street in my iPhone. I attended Jenny Bullough’s talk at the Canadian Institute Social Media event last week and was curious to see how them are using podcasts to drive revenues. As for Diego and SS, those are life savers when your 2-year old is having a tantrum in a crowded restaurant.

I would love to hear recommendations for good podcasts, as I keep tweaking this list, so please let me know what you’ve been listening lately.

IBM: Building a smarter planet

Note: most of you probably know, but for full disclosure, I work at IBM.

Update: just added some more meat to the post. Succinct is a quality that I definitely don’t have.

Sam Palmisano is speaking this morning at the Council of Foreign Relations. You can find all about it at today’s edition of the New York Times: “IBM’s Chief Sees Technology Leading a Recovery”.

Andy Piper has just blogged about it, so I’ll try not to just repeat what he said – but I whole-heartedly agree with him.

In our daily, mundane working life at IBM we go through mostly small peaks and valleys, but from time to time we get inspirational moments like this, when it feels good to be part of IBM. Google claims that their mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The smart planet point-of-view tells me that we are paying attention beyond just data. IBM’s reach and breadth positions it uniquely to aim higher than that. We have the potential to be a key enabler of a smarter, sustainable, better world by applying technology and business acumen. Our 3-letter acronym never looked so visionary.

I worked in University research for some time, doing obscure biochemistry work around fireflies, and also on the interactions between ferns and a Brazilian species of moth. When you are deep at work, you keep wondering why you are doing that, and how that is going to change anything in the world. I actually gave up on becoming a scientist mainly because I was not able to see the big picture, and I couldn’t explain to a normal person what my research was all about.

I firmly believe that having an easy to articulate vision is fundamental to keep focus and understand where we all fit in the big picture. A vision does not accomplish anything by itself, but fuels our passion, especially during the dull moments of doubt, like when doing expenses or sitting for hours at airports.

Of course, the actual challenge is to go from vision to realization. In a week where change is in everybody’s mind, the announcement’s timing is impeccable. I hope that a few years from now I can come back to this post and grin, seeing that the promise was fulfilled.

Yes, we can. But “will we?” is the question for all of us to answer.

I’m not a Mac, nor a PC

I’ve been using a Mac laptop for work since October 2006. Even two years later, every time I go to a work event, internal or external, people ask me how do I like it, and why I do it, as many still link IBM to PCs or Thinkpads. Others just assume that I’m a big Mac/Apple fan, as I also carry an iPhone and sometimes an iPod shuffle.

As some of you know, Apple’s ongoing ad campaign stereotyping Mac and PC users has been fought back by Microsoft’s ads “I’m a PC”, which were ironically made – at least in part – using Macs. All this discussion created an artificial dichotomy between PC people and Mac people. Apparently, you can’t be both, the same way you are either a dog person or a cat person.

When people ask me if I’m a Mac, I wish I could answer in Portuguese, or Spanish, like in “Eu estou Mac”. It’s not a permanent state of mind. The reason I prefer to use a Mac as my work machine is mainly because in an Intel Mac I can run both OS X and MS-Windows, and I can’t do it in a PC.

I really don’t get the fanboyism around Mac products. I do think they are more visually appealing than their PC counterparts, but they are far from perfect. Sometimes I have the impression that some Mac users use it as a way of saying: I’m a Mac, therefore I’m better than you, and just ignore or dismiss a number of Mac annoyances.

My MacBook Pro freezes from time to time, and has poor battery life and wi-fi performance compared to my Thinkpad. It feels uncomfortably hot to actually place on your lap, and it gets cold like ice after a walk outside during winter time. I can’t close the lid without putting the system to sleep. I tried InsomniaX, but the machine was so hot after a while that I was afraid it would damage the screen.

There are things Macs do better but the same can be said of Windows. For example, every time I need to write text in Portuguese, Spanish or French, I switch to Windows. The Mac way of dealing with accents using a standard US keyboard is just cumbersome. To write an “a” with a tilde, as in “São Paulo”, you have to type “Option + n” in Mac OS. In Windows, you just type tilde. No matter how much of a Mac fanboy or fangirl you are, you gotta admit that “Option + n” in not intuitive. The acute accent (as in “passé”) is “Option + e”, and the circumflex (as in “château”) is “Option + i”. That’s ok if you only type them once in a blue moon, but not ok if use them all the time.

Also, there are some freeware or open source programs that are only available in Windows. One of my favourites is the super-useful Bulk Rename Utility, very handy to rename digital photo files and adjust timestamps. Other good utility only available in Windows is IrfanView, with its batch conversion feature, free for non-commerical use. The list goes on and on.

Of course, by the same token, there are lots of utilities only available on the Mac side, like Skitch, a nice tool to annotate screenshots, and, of course, Apple’s Keynote, the best program to create presentations out there. Movie editing is also much easier in the Mac using a combination of iMovie and iMovie HD, compared to Windows Movie Maker.

Finally, there are areas where both sides could do better. As an example, the Mac OS Finder and Windows Explorer could borrow some features from each other, as both come out short in easy of use.

All in all, I slightly favour the Mac, due to the combination of SW & HW integration and overall user experience, but it’s far from being a slam dunk. I still think that the Thinkpad is a better piece of engineering, just not as pretty. The switch to Intel was a major factor in my buying decision, as it basically mean that I don’t need to give up on one in favour of the other.

Of course, I admit I may be the exception, or just a bad Mac user, so please let me know if I’m missing something here, and if there’s any easy way to address the Mac issues I mentioned above. Being a person who likes both cats and dogs, I just can’t see why you have to love or hate Windows or Mac OS X.

Meritocracy, Pauline Ores and the multi-dimensional IT Professional

Yesterday, I started reading “Crowdsourcing: why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business”, by Jeff Howe. I did not actually buy the book, it was given to me as part of the attendee package at the IBM Social Media event I attended 2 weeks ago at Ogilvy & Mather.

The book has good insights, covering the emerging reputation economy, where, contrary to conventional economics, rewards are often not measurable by dollars but by the desire to contribute to a worthwhile cause or just the “sheer joy of practicing a craft” and get some peer recognition for that. I like this quote in particular:

Crowdsourcing turns on the presumption that we are all creators – artists, scientists, architects, and designers, in any combination or order. It holds the promise to unleash the latent potential of the individual to excel at more than one vocation, and to explore new avenues for creative expression. Indeed, it contains the potential – or alternately, the threat – of rendering the idea of a vocation itself an industrial-age artifact.

Many years ago, I had a manager who told me that he could not give me a good rating in my annual assessment because I had done 3 totally different things that year: started as a Unix Admin, moved to a Performance Engineering role, and ended the year as a developer. According to him, you had to pick one role and stick to it, as nobody could do more than one thing really well. Needless to say, I couldn’t disagree more with the previous argument. It would be ok if he thought that I tried 3 different things and didn’t do particularly well in any or some of them, but saying that nobody can do that, and recommending anybody to be a one-dimensional professional sounds very Fordist to me.

Some people ask me why I blog about apparently non-work related subjects, such as vacation trips, soccer, or Moleskine Art. I wish I could blog even more about things not related to Web 2.0 or social media or conferences. We all have multiple vocations. I know IBMers who are great photographers, parents, writers, cooks, graphic artists, actors, athletes and scientists, and there is no reason for any of us to strangle those vocations to focus solely in our current professional role. In fact, both our careers and our workplace can greatly benefit from being more multi-dimensional. As work becomes more virtual, global and dynamic, and the pace of change accelerates, we all need to be more like Da Vinci and Marco Polo than assembly-line workers.

Furthermore, Web 2.0 and Social Media are leveling the professional playing field. Two quotes by Pauline Ores (who is the IBM personification of Social Media Marketing) during the O&M event caught my attention:

1) In the Social Media world, the most powerful person is the one who shares the most.
2) Control in Social Media is like grabbing water: the stronger you grab, the less you hold. There’s a right way to retain water, but not by being forceful.

Disclaimer: that’s my recollection of what she said, so don’t hold her accountable for the exact words

Not too long ago, knowledge workers had incentives to hold what they knew close to their chest, as a way of keeping their employability. The more they kept to themselves, the more their company and fellow employees would depend on them. This happened because the distribution of information was very inefficient, and the higher up you were in the food chain, the more channels you had to be known by others.

In the YouTube age, where everybody, anybody can broadcast themselves inside and outside of the firewall, the advantage of saying things from a higher hierarchical post had shrunk considerably. According to Howe, a meritocracy is now in place, where the only thing that matters is the quality of the work itself. If you believe you are the Subject Matter Expert in SOA, Internet Marketing, z/OS or Performance Engineering, you need to make evidence of that widely available. An increasing number of people won’t care much if your title says “The know-all see-all tech guru” or “Executive <something>”. If you know it, it should be made evident by the crumb trails you leave behind you. Your knowledge needs to be searchable and discoverable (not sure if those words exist, but you catch my drift).

Sacha Chua is one of the best examples I see of that trend. I learned a lot from just observing her working habits over the last year or so. Ten years ago, a recent hire direct from University would be years away from being known and respected across the enterprise. By sharing what she knows and what she does to the extreme, she is arguably more influencial than others with many years of job tenure. This is not a generation Y thing, as I see her more as an exception than the rule even among her young cohorts, and there are many boomers and Xers like her at IBM and elsewhere.

The one line summary for this post: If perception is reality, you only know what you share.

Minor update: fixed a typo in the final quote.

On Wi-Fi access, panels and building on your strengths

Last week, I joined a panel at the Toronto Tech Week, held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, with the theme “Online Social Networks Go To Work”. I got there early in the morning to catch Alan Lepofsky, former IBMer and now at SocialText, speaking on the use of wikis for the Enterprise. It was a good session, I enjoyed his casual style, and he mentioned IBM a few times in his session, as he still does in his blog. As the workplace becomes more dynamic, and employee-for-life is becoming a thing of the past, the new HR approach of treating former employees as alumni makes total sense.

Just before Alan’s session, I tried to get a wi-fi connection, so that I could twitter from it live, but this is what I got instead:

No attendee Wi-Fi access, only exhibitor access, and with a steep price tag. I complained last week that the wi-fi access at the Javits Center in New York was spotty, but for a convention facility who claims to be the #1 in Canada, “inviting, inspiring, innovative, incomparable”, they clearly need to do something about Internet connectivity, as one can easily think about 4 “I”s that are not as flattering as those.

I found my own participation in the panel to be quite flat, but in retrospect, I don’t recall any technical panel I attended lately to be memorable. Bernie Michalik, via Twitter, brought my attention to this gem from Dan Lyons (formerly known as Fake Steve Jobs):

Was at the EmTech conference at MIT today and suffered through a panel led by Robert Scoble with four geeks (Facebook, Six Apart, Plaxo, Twine) talking about the future of the Web. No prepared remarks, just totally random conversation. Basically they all just spewed whatever came into their heads, at top speed, interrupting each other and oblivious to the fact that an audience was sitting there, glazing over. A few people got up and asked questions and the geeks did manage to (sort of) address one or two but then they forgot about the questioners and just started rambling again, talking to each other and forgetting about the audience. It was like watching five college kids with ADHD and an eight-ball of coke trying to hold a conversation.

Jeremiah Owyang, from Forrester Research, wrote a comprehensive post on how to moderate conference panels, but I don’t think it’s even a question of better moderation. Asif Khan, a very articulate facilitator, did a fine job on that. What’s really missing in most Web 2.0 panels are two things:

• Distinct points of view: Frankly, I feel like watching Beavis & Butt-head when I see a panel composed exclusively of evangelists/early adopters/Enterprise 2.0 vendors. Panelist A says “Social Networking/Crowdsourcing/Long Tail/[place your favourite buzz-2.0 jargon here] is the way to the future” and Panelists B, C and D say “cool”. To have a meaningful discussion going you need to have some disagreement there. Put doubters and visionaries/futurists/dreamers face-to-face and then you can uncover real insights.
• Flattening of the discussion space: Having so-called Subject Matter Experts on stage and an audience attending passively most of the time is the total opposite of the Web 2.0 Architecture of Participation approach. I don’t think anybody can actually claim to be an SME in Web 2.0 or Social Computing. We are all learning, making mistakes and getting it right from time to time. Furthermore, people in the audience may have more interesting things to say than the panelists. But then you have a logistic problem, similar to the fame conundrum described by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: it’s not practical to have everyone in an audience having its slice of airtime. Ironically, what seems to be missing is exactly a two-oh-ish type of moderation, the enablement of crowd participation by other channels. Allow panelists to state their position briefly prior to the event, then allow potential attendees to get questions in advance. I’ve seen people using post-it stickers, emails, Twitter, SixGroups and Crowdvine for that, but all are kind of cumbersome to use. Google Moderator looks like a promising tool to serve this need. I’d like to try it out the next time I facilitate or participate of a panel.

As usual, the intent of this post is not to throw cheap shots at the MTCC or the Toronto Tech Week organization. They both play fundamental roles in positioning Toronto as a premier destination for large and relevant events, and there’s definitely much more to praise than to criticize in what they are offering Toronto. I have high hopes that the Toronto Tech Week will grow to be a major global event a few years from now. To have a more balanced view of what people thought of the event, check out this Twitter search.

In any case, I’m considering giving priority to standard speaking engagements rather than panel participation in the near future, as the latter is definitely not my forté.

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Dan Lyons (Fake Steve Jobs)

Okay, this is the last of my top keynote videos. This talk didn’t have any real insights, but it was very entertaining, so it is good for a Friday post. See the video:

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Genevieve Bell (Intel) and the other Internet

Genevieve Bell is not your typical energized keynote speaker, but she’s got a great message, and a distinct sense of humour. With extensive international experience, she shows that the flat world is overrated. The Internet may not be what you think in other parts of this planet. Enjoy:

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Clay Shirky and Filter Failure

I had great expectations about Clay Shirky’s presentation, as his book “Here Comes Everybody” has plenty of interesting insights and was one of the best books I read this year. So I was a bit underwhelmed by his presentation, but maybe that’s my problem, not his . In any case, it’s still a good talk, and has a Canadian flavour to it, by using the case of Ryerson student Chris Avenir, who was threatened to be expelled from school for creating a Facebook study group. You may like it better than I did, so here it is:

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Gary Vaynerchuk on Building Personal Brand

Gary is one of the most entertaining speakers I’ve ever seen. You may not like his message, but you gotta admit he’s got passion. But it’s better to hear directly from him:

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Jason Fried (37signals) High Bit Order

All the keynotes from the Web 2.0 Expo are now available in video on Blip.TV. For your convenience, I selected the ones I liked the most and placed them here. My first selection was Jason Fried, co-founder and President of 37signals, the guys behind Basecamp. Very engaging speaker. I don’t actually agree 100% with him, but he’s got some good points. His major message is that a software designer has to act as a museum or gallery curator: you don’t try and put everything you have or everything people ask there. You have to keep it simple. While I agree with the main message, I would say that museums and galleries have physical limitations, or shelf-space constraints that makes the metaphor less applicable. Implementing every single feature request people ask is not the way to go, but listening to feedback and making products rich in desirable features and still useable is still very important.

The initial iPods were very simple devices, and became very popular as they did their one thing very well. Over time, though, it evolved to the current iPod Touch, which is a very complex tool, and essentially can run hundreds of applications from the AppStore. The key is not to limit your product to a low number of features: the trick is to keep the product usable and useful. Here’s the video, so that you can make your own mind:

Web 2.0 Expo NY feedback: My wish list for a perfect conference

The Web 2.0 Expo in New York I attended last week was a great event overall. Like everything else in the world, there are always things to be improved, but the quality of speakers, the networking opportunities and the parallel events made it a memorable conference. Even the weather helped. You can find some of my pictures in Flickr:

I’ve been fortunate enough to participate of several conferences as a speaker or attendee in my 11+ years at IBM. I wish I could get the best each one had to offer and assemble a perfect conference package. Since dreaming is cheap, here’s my list:

1. Power outlets widely available in presentation rooms. It’s ok to have recharging stations outside, but laptops are increasingly replacing paper for note taking, so you need to be able to run them for 8 hours or more.
2. Decent wireless connections. Live blogging and microblogging are common even in non technical events now, so that’s a must.
3. Social networking cards (the good ol’ paper ones). IBM had those at the Technical Leadership Conference in Orlando back in 2006. It’s better than a business card, as it can have your picture, list things you are interested at or is knowledgeable about. Good to start a conversation, and also to remember the faces of people you meet. In the IBM conference, they even had a networking challenge: the back of the cards were like pieces of a puzzle, and you needed to complete the puzzle to claim your conference souvenir.
4. Online social networking. The Expo used Crowdvine, which was great to plan your week, know who would be attending your session, rate sessions you attend (the speaker rating was not working when I tried), and get introduced to people you may want to meet. The tool could use some improvements such as RSS feeds so you don’t have to keep visiting a page for updates, and a single page to view all ratings and comments for the sessions you attended. But it is better than anything I’ve used before, so kudos to them. Here’s a link to the Expo’s Crowdvine page.
5. Live feedback. I’d like every seat in a conference room to have a simple device for me to provide immediate feedback during a session, including rating each slide or topic as it happens. Even greater presentations have their dull moments, and boring presentations may have hidden gems. I had about 120 people attending my session, but only 10 so far rated it, and 2 bothered leaving a written comment. Coming back to my “Laziness 2.0″ point, you should make easier for people to give you what you want. And the best moment to get feedback in a conference is during the delivery of the goods. If that’s too fancy, we could have an SMS solution: just text message your rating or feedback, and give an extra memento to people who provides, say, 5 ratings/comments or more.
6. Dual slots for popular talks. There were two speakers I was dying to listen to having sessions parallel to mine: Jason Fried, from 37signals, and Jonah Peretti, covering Viral Marketing. That almost made me to skip my own session to attend theirs
7. Video recording of every session. It’s never the same, and nobody would ever understand me speaking in a video, but at least you can get a flavour of what you missed.
8. Smaller conference facilities. The Javits place is way too big, making networking more complicated. It would be okay if all the Expo activities happened closer to each other, but the Keynotes, the Expo Hall and Lunch were all far from the regular sessions. The Birds of a Feather sessions were hold in yet another location. Again, remember people (me at least) are lazy.
   
9. Location. Of course, hosting it in a great city like New York is a great plus.
10. Frills. Offering complimentary bus service to the hotels was also a nice touch.

Of course, it goes without saying that the major ingredient is content and speakers. Some of my friends complained that the sessions were a bit too high-level, but I honestly think they need to be. The first draft I created for my own presentation was too detailed, and I bet I would lose most of the audience in the middle of it. So, I took a step back and made it more consummable for a general audience. Large conferences as good opportunities to get the pulse of what’s happening around some specific area (in this case, Web 2.0 and Social Computing), to get to know new people, learn a bit from good speakers and widen your horizon to things that you may have been missing. For deep dives, you may want to go to smaller, more targeted events.

Just to make sure I’m not conveying the wrong message, I can honestly say that the Expo was one of the best conferences I attended in the last several years, so the feedback above needs to be read in that context. Great job, Brady, Jennifer and crew.

Live blogging from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York: Dion Hinchcliffe’s on the Next Gen of Web 2.0 Apps

Well, it’s more like tape delay, actually. I’m attending Dion Hinchcliffe’s workshop “Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications” at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. The room is practically full, and I’ve always been a big fan of Hinchcliffe’s great diagrams and clear thinking. His background is as an Enterprise Architect, so he speaks a language I can understand. I’m really bad in paying attention and taking notes, so I’ll just write the points that made an impression with me, or what I think to be the key messages of the session, not a summary of everything Dion said. As a final caveat, this is not necessarily what was said, but my imperfect and biased notes of what I think it was said. The slides will probably be available from the conference website anyway. Here is the just of it, in bullet points:

• Whoever has the best data wins: The most successful apps are fundamentally powered by data
• Attracting people to your website is a very expensive proposition, it makes sense to go where people are already
• RSS: Not only for people to subscribe in their readers, it’s machine readable, so it allows others to add your info to their apps (gave a Mutual Funds example, whose date was absent from many aggregation services just because it did not have a feed)
• Twitter had 10 times more users from its API than from Website – I’m surprised by how low that is, actually. I thought guess something like 30 times or more. Mentioned later that 90% of Twitter traffic is via the API, and related it to unpredictable scaling and peaks
• The days of the 3-tier app (presentation/app/backend) are long gone! Each of the 3 tiers is now broken in very distributed components such as mashups/widgets/APIs/RSS/storage.
• 3rd party sourcing allow scalable, cost-effective infrastructure (OpenID, Storage, Location services and others)
• Providers of 3rd party sourcing need to make their services more consummable and be good citizens for their partners
• Amazon’s S3 cost 10 to 15 times less than if you build your own storage capability
• The platform overtakes the web site: showed how the bandwidth consumed by Amazon Web Services passed the bandwidth consumed by Amazon’s Global Websites
• TechCrunch reported this morning that Google’s Chrome browser already represents 8.12% of their hits – Just checked that: Chrome is about to overtake Safari (8.84%) for TC visitors. Is the Googlezon Orwellian world happening already?
• The major issue holding widespread adoption of mashups in business contexts is the lack of access to a user’s private data
• A key Web 2.0 Strategy:Turning applications into platforms
• Openly exposing the features of SW and data to customers, end-users, partners, and suppliers for reuse and remixing
• This strategy requires documenting, encouraging, and actively supporting the application as a platform. (has serious governance implications)
• Provide legal, technical, and business reasons to enable this
• Fair licensing, pricing, & support models
• A vast array of services that provide data that users need
• Google’s OpenSocial: maybe the future of building social networking applications
• Apache now allows to run OpenSocial (and all Google Gadgets, for that matter) in any Apache server
• Demoed Flash Earth as a mashup example. Mashups are also moving towards standards.

Overall, I think it was a really good session, Dion’s message feels solid and authoritative. Some feedback for the organizers:

1. This was not really a workshop, just a regular lecture with Q&A at the end. I found the duration to be a bit too long, but I understand that having Dion speaking is a privilege and the session was dense with content, so maybe there’s not a really good solution for that.

2. Crowdvine is great, speakers should ask attendees to provide feedback and rate the session immediately after the session is over.

3. Need venues with more power outlets!

 

Santos-Dumont, The Wright Brothers and Innovation

This is a post I wrote long time ago in my internal blog at work and decided to publish here too, as it seems to still be current

Unless you’re Brazilian or an aviation enthusiast, chances are that you have never heard about Alberto Santos-Dumont. Most people in the world would not hesitate in saying that the Wright brothers invented the airplane. However, some claim that “the only witnesses to the Wright brothers flights (…) were typically close friends and family”, while “Santos-Dumont made his flights in public, often accompanied by the scientific elite of the time, then gathered in Paris” (read more about it here and here). The picture above (from Wikimedia Commons) shows one of his flights in the Bagatelle field (close to the Eiffel Tower). PBS aired “Wings of Madness”, a good documentary about Santos-Dumont, last year. Here are some excerpts from the program description:

In the early 1900s, the most acclaimed celebrity in Europe, and arguably the world, was a fashionable, frail, Brazilian-born aviator named Alberto Santos-Dumont. (…)Tiring of balloons, Santos built the 14bis, an ungainly tail-first flying machine that nevertheless made the first powered airplane flight in Europe in 1906. At that time, the Wright brothers’s secret early flights were widely disbelieved, so Santos and his adoring public were convinced he was the first to fly. When Wilbur made his triumphant European tour in 1908, Santos had to face the terrible realization that the Wrights were the true pioneers after all. But just before his long slide into illness began, he designed an exquisite new airplane out of bamboo: the Demoiselle, or Damselfly. One of the classic aircraft of the pioneering era, it was the true forerunner of today’s ultralight planes.

An interesting aside from this discussion is that the Gartner’s hype cycle around emerging technologies was already in full display mode 100 years ago: Dumont went from the technology trigger all the way to the plateau of productivity in a decade and was very hyped for a while to the point that the local Dayton Daily News in 1903 stated that the Wright brothers were emulating Dumont (Orville and Wilbur lived in Dayton):

In any case, the true answer for the question “Who invented the airplane” is: none of them. Or better yet, all of them: Orville, Wilbur, Alberto and several others pioneers, all should be credited with the invention of the airplane. We tend to like simple answers, and so we just accept that Gutenberg invented printing, Thomas Edison the light bulb and Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. In reality, all inventions and findings in the world are composites of ideas and experiments run by several people. That’s why I strongly believe that our current models governing intellectual property are outdated and preventing us from unleashing the true power of innovation. Our copyright laws are way too strict, and patents many times are inhibitors, not drivers, for new inventions.

Note that I’m not advocating that all IP protection should be dropped. However, the big accomplishment that should be awarded is not the idea, but the execution. Ideas are cheap, good implementation is the real challenge. This concept applies even in the case of artistic works like music, movies or books. Just imagine what would happen if everything was governed by a Creative Commons-like license, where anybody, everybody could share, remix and reuse whatever they want. Often times we see songs that were very flat in their original recording to become masterpieces with some novel interpretation. If we lower the barriers, even disasters could be rescued. Can you improve on “The Godfather” I and II? Unlikely. “The Godfather
III”, on the other side, had some good ideas ruined by a few really lame ones. The potential for a great movie was there, but it was never realized. You’re just left wondering “what if”. Of course, movies are not that easy to tweak, but scripts are. I bet that the last three Star Wars movies could benefit from better writing.

It would be interesting as a social experiment to establish a 5-year moratorium on all IP-related claims and see what would happen: chaos and the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it or an explosion in innovation. At a minimum, this approach would help us to find out how much control is actually needed to foster innovation.

Interactive video and viral marketing

Most Brazilians have already seen this site, but chances are that this was not widely known in North America. It’s a typical Brazilian beer ad, probably a bit too racy for some audiences, but it’s worth it a view for the novelty of it. I won’t say much more to not spoil it.

Here are the instructions if you still want to see it:

• Go to http://www.tatuagemdaboa.com.br
• After the animation loads up, you’ll see this image:

• Here’s a rough translation of the screen:

Invite a friend you want to tease to visit the Bar da Boa.
Here you can send a very special and personalized invite to a friend.
Juliana (Paes, a popular Brazilian actress) would say so!

For that, fill out the form below:

Your name:
(Maximum of 15 characters)

Your friend’s name:
(Maximum of 15 characters)

Your email:
(optional)

Your friend’s email:
(optional)

• Fill out the first box with your name
• Fill out the second box with your friend’s name
• You may leave the other two text boxes empty
• Click on “Visualizar”

In case you are curious, this is a free translation of the video:

“Hi, I had a tatoo done, you wanna see? Here it is.

Aw, poor guy, don’t be sad. There’s another one with your name, wanna see?

Hey Big Paul, come on here!”