Ray Lane:

The bright guy in product design, triple degree from the best university, is going to expect, at 25 years of age, to see this technology in place. And if he's told, "Well, you gotta use Windows, you can't use blogs or wikis or instant messaging any of that stuff," he'll say, "Well, why do I want to work here?" Young people are not going to go where these tools are restricted.

Now, I'm not particularly cool, nor am I young anymore. But I totally agree - and it's one of the reasons (but not the only one, or even the main one) why I've resigned from my current job, and will soon be moving to pastures new.

PS - this isn't a dig (well, not a bitter and serious one !) against my current company, as they're by no means the only company doing this, or even the worst - just a recognition that for many people, environment (social, physical, virtual) is important, and also that even though some of these tools can be regarded as social (instant messaging is something that springs to mind), the boundaries between social and business are fuzzy. Some of my friends are potential collaborators, clients or suppliers. Some are just friends. But if a company has no problem with asking an employee to work late, or read a proposal over a weekend, how can that company turn around and hinder social contacts during work hours ?

[tags]corporate, culture, social, tools[/tags]

I've previously blogged about Quicksilver equivalents for Windows, and came to the conclusion that Launchy would probably do everything an "average" user needed. 4 months later, I can confirm this to be true. I've got Launchy installed on every Windows PC I use, and what a time/life saver it is - no more digging through multiple nested menu options, trying to remember whether I'd classified a program as a utility, or an accessory, or a development tool, or maybe it's just in one of those 30 new folders created since I last cleaned up my Start Menu navigation structure. Nope, that's not how I play these days...Ctrl-space, type a couple of letters, arrow down or return, and that's your application launched. It's so useful, and has saved me so much time I've even ponied up and donated to the author. Oh - and the source code is available as well. A great example, from real life, of the limitations of a hierarchical classification system, with its rigid insistence on single dimension classification. [tags]quicksilver, launchy, classification, taxonomy[/tags]

Got a preview invite for Vox, and spent 10 minutes or so playing with it yesterday. Vox is SixApart's community oriented blogging platform - think Yahoo 360 / MSN Spaces / MySpace rather than Typepad or Movable Type. To be honest, I'm not really sure I'm in the target demographic, but I can see the value in aggregating posts, comments and other content from your community or neighbourhood. Vox seems to have most of the expected functionality - flickr, amazon, youtube integration (although it would be good to see other sites such as del.icio.us and last.fm being slotted in). But I don't think that functionality (beyond a base level which Vox reaches) is necessarily a key predictor for success - it's more about your network ("friends" in old-skool slang) - getting them onto the same platform, and actively participating (or at least reading) is key. Crowded space, with most of the major players having an offering. But, as with the instant messaging space, none of them really work with each other - I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for someone to create (and excuse the clumsy / incorrect terminology) a "meta-community" site that glue the various platforms together and show an aggregated view of one's community across the different platforms ? [PS - I seem to have some invites - does anyone who knows me / reads this blog want one ? Let me know.] [tags]vox, communities, social[/tags]

Videos of many or all of the talks given by invited experts at Google are available on Google Video. Lots of good stuff for all - well, some ! Highlights from the first couple of pages (out of 7) include:

• 15 views of a node link graph - an information visualisation portfolio
• Evaluating Similarity Measures: A Large-Scale Study in Orkut Social Network(below)
• The Science and Art of User Experience at Google
• Building Large Systems at Google
• Computers vs Common Sense
• Structuring Personal Information When Everything Can be Saved and Searched

Via EdTechPost [tags]video, techtalks, google[/tags]

I hadn't noticed this feature on amazon.com before - although it seems as if it's been there since April. Product pages on amazon.com now show the aggregated purchase behaviour for similar products. My initial reaction was that this was pretty cool - a great way of using crowd wisdom to inform a purchasing decision. I've blogged a little bit before about the problem of too much choice, and this seems like a great way of narrowing down the options. Which is great - for stuff like cameras, and flash cards, and hard disks. It's not great for books and music, even if, on first glance, the amount of choice seems far larger. But actually, it isn't, or not in the same sense, as the choices aren't mutually exclusive - once you buy one camera, you won't be buying another one for a while. Buying a book, however, doesn't prevent you from buying other books - even similar books. Amazon have, of course, worked this out, as they don't show this information for books and music. Nice feature, and given Amazon's focus on measurement and testing, it's a reasonable assumption that this is having a measurable effect on purchasing. [tags]wisdomofcrowds, crowdwisdom, choice, amazon[/tags]

Cogenz is a social bookmarking service (like del.icio.us), but explicitly designed for enterprises: instead of the del.icio.us model of a huge vat of shared tag soup (ignoring private bookmarks), cogenz pours the soup into different company bowls and only allows you to drink from your own bowl. OK, enough with the soup analogy - basically it allows companies to have a private version of del.icio.us and not worry about installing and maintaining scuttle or similar). Niall Cook noticed my attempt to sneak in and register before they officially opened up the beta, and was gracious enough to let me be the first external person to access the beta site, and I've been playing with it for a couple of days. After some problems caused by a slight mismatch in our shared understanding - read his post to be clear on what cogenz is and how it works, I think I can post some initial thoughts. Short summary - pretty good, especially for a first release. Clean and simple design, and does most of the simple bookmarky and taggy things one might expect. Everything is feed enabled, and the site throws up related users. If the site stays as it is and no more functionality was added, I think it would be of value to many companies wanting to experiment and start using social bookmarks without having to do it in public. So, now you can tag intranet pages and interesting external content without worrying about what is being revealed to the outside world. Of course, you still have to worry about who's reading it from inside your company, but that's a separate problem ! Of course, nothing is perfect, and here are some quick thoughts I jotted down (Google Notebook really is good for this kind of activity). Nothing horrific, and probably in the plan for future releases.

• Should be able to search for users
• Can't see how to tag a user (although people can tag themselves)
• Permissioning model may be too simple (although I could be trying to make it too complex)
• currently it looks binary (either part of company and therefore able to access all bookmarks, or not part of company and thus not able to read any bookmarks).
• But, how do we share a limited set of content with an external partner.
• Should the system warn if trying to share bookmarks that really are internal (ie point to an intranet that is inaccessible outside the firewall)

See my post for a link to a talk by Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us - where he talks briefly about groups and networks, and this post (in fact the whole blog) from Steve Eisner talks in more detail about some of the issues with permissioning tags and groups. Anyway - nice work guys, it will be interesting to see where this goes, and what the pricing model is ! [tags]cogenz, tags, social, bookmarks, delicious[/tags]