Only 5 years ago, RSS was seen as the most effective way to allow web viewers to receive federated content.

Two things changed this.

First: Firefox 2 and IE 7, launched within days of each other in October 2006, both chose to only render RSS (along with other XML) as XML. This meant you could no longer present RSS as formatted HTML so content providers were stuck with having to write and verify two types of page even if the content were the same.  For automated generation, this was no issue, but for smaller news channels such as school journals this meant changing how you were reporting the news.

Second: people, groups and organisations started to tweet either through twitter, launched June 2006, or via Facebook, 2004.

Twitter is an easier way to reach an audience in that you can make all of the content public whereas only fellow Facebookers can view a Facebook tweet (I appreciate that many, like me use Twitter to update their FB accounts).

This public portal allows your audience to pull of the information they are interested in either by searching in Twitter or in Google.

That short tweet can be made in a variety of ways from separate apps on a smart phone to text messages and Facebook trackers.

Short links allow you to feature longer pieces of information in a properly branded way but the short tweet is the real hook.

After all, who has time to read a 150 word hook via a newsreader?

There are many sites giving you great advice on how to get your message across but I often find it’s the little things that get in the way of that message I’ve spent hours honing.

So for those out there who like to look good even if you’re doing something for the first time here are some tips of getting the most out of your great presentation…

1. Know how long you’ve got, otherwise it can be really awkward to rush your material.
2. Have some material to cut if the discussion takes off; this is what you’re looking to achieve and the great presenters manage this effortlessly.  Again, later presenting tools will allow you to jump without the audience knowing.
3. Allow things to be taken off line if necessary: remember you have a fixed slot.
4. Make use of a presentation login - one that doesn’t launch your mail client, IM clients, cartoons, web home pages, anything that might trip up the message.  Some computers focus on a single user, but I make sure there is a basic, often blatantly corporate login for use when roving.  Prep the demo web browsers to book mark only the sites I really need and make sure I know them backwards.  Saves having to know how to shut off all my functional tools and let’s my friends know for an hour or so, I’m off line.
5. Get a site for sharing the slides…  Be it the corporate wiki or your own space.  I know some favour PDF to ensure things don’t get shared, but if I quote or link an image I put the site details in so I don’t really see the point of that.  HTML is possibly best as it works for all.
6. Maps and details of how to get there and who you are talking to - OK really obvious but this sets you up.  Understand if you need food when you get there and remember when the adrenaline has gone, you need to be able to get home.
7. Remember to enjoy the experience.  You have been invited to talk because your work is contributing something people are interested in hearing.
8. You can get all the benefits out of your PC without having to buy a new one.  Windows 7 is awesome and is surprisingly not resource hungry.  You can download a checker to verify it will run without going to the expense of buying software that won’t run on your kit.  My 5 year old PC is Windows 7 compatible (64 bit even) so don’t feel you can’t enjoy the benefits…  I’m doing this in the next month.
9. Learn to exploit your software tools…  I love taking my PC to do presentations: Office 2007 allows you to do the split view (most Mac users will talk enthusiastically about this) where the laptop will show you not only the current slide and the next along with the time remaining and any notes but hide all this from the main view.  Really useful and your laptop doesn’t have to be that flash to use it.  If your work doesn’t supply Powerpoint 2007 ask them if you can upgrade your software build yourself or take your own machine.
10. Memory - if you can, get RAM and hard disk space.  Laptops will have the ability to add some more, use the web to check out how to do this for yours.  Windows 7 allows you to use every last byte but even XP and Vista benefit from a little extra.

Only today, BBC 4 news stated how few people were able to do (and get paid for) overtime.

Smarter harder not harder is coupled with the need to promote yourself in the work place.

So here are some things I thought I’d share with you, dear reader.

1. Detlef Nauck has said a few times “data -> information -> knowledge”.  knowledge is achieved when you read and reuse.
2. Even Google has problems finding things in spread sheets, never mind people.
   Do not use spread sheets to store data - that’s the job of great databases such as MySql and Oracle.  I’ll be honest, they’re the only two transactional, sql based databases I’ve used, so I guess probase, mssql, etc can be swapped in here :-).
   I’ve not seen a wiki or blog based on Excel spreadsheets.  I have seen terrific graphs drawn with them though.
3. Data driven can work on different layers.  From adding a row to a table and not having to touch the underlying code, so automating the driving of all your rules.  Policy driving is the ultimate here, not easy to achieve in some cases and very easy in others.  I actually think where they work best is where the rules are described by queries rather than pattern matching.
4. Great programmers do make data driven programmes.  It allows them to move on to more interesting problems.
5. Wikis and blogs are not the only answers to information sharing.  They do make achieving publically avaialable information very easy.
6. Difference between a wiki and a blog: wiki documents are collaborative, your audience can change the information.  Blogs aren’t but allow the audience to give feedback regarding an article easily.
   I think it is much quicker to write my blog than write a page on my wiki to the same standard.
7. Dictation is difficult to transcribe automatically especially with a sore throat, but so much quicker for a blog entry.
8. If you want to make the same changes to multiple files, use imageMagick.  Fantastic tool and many, many people publish their scripts so there’ll be something you can reuse.
9. Allow multitasking - using Facebook along with the corporate mail client for example.
10. Have lunch: walk, talk remember there are people outside your office.  Some of them are your potential customers or end users.

Do you agree?  Do you have some better ideas?  Please share them.

Yet, by the nature of the mathematicians work, this stereotype must lack merit.  The letters between Isaac Netwon’s and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz are possibly the best known recorded discussion on how integral calculus should work and two minds working together on the problem, steering each other to very similar conclusions.

Pythagoras was almost certainly a group of philosophers discussing how geometry should work which almost certainly makes the formulation of mathematical language one of the earliest recorded theories reached by a group and not an individual.

The language of maths itself proves that it must be uniquely defined as a purely team activity or else why would a language have been formulated to express its ideas so eloquently?

I’d like to know who first established the idea of the solitary mathematician?  How did this stereotype come to be so readily accepted?

Work slave?

I hung on though and treated myself to a Siemens SX1: I never did get my mail to work reliably but we had browser email access, so in a real emergency, that was always an option.

Jon then got his first N80, and I was smitten. Wifi access to your work email. No clumsy phone to deal with either it seemed a good option. But then Jon managed to kill it and the second one never did do wifi properly.

So, I kept with the SX1 and waited. The iPhone arrived just after I got into internet tablets: my N770 seemed to cover the gaps. So, who needed a smart phone?

Last Feb, I bought my Nokia 5800 Music Express. Compared to my friends and family I am no audiophile but I love it’s prowess in music reproduction. Having a removable memory card means I can switch the play list easily too - no reliance on bits of cable and 8G cards mean I can carry a presentation around with me and keep it separate to my Dvorak and Guns and Roses. The video is pretty good too, especially when driving the TV, though to be honest we have other solutions round the house.

It’s the mail I really love though. My “mail for exchange” client runs between work hours and switches off automatically; I can still get mail, but I am not bothered if I don’t want to be. The client I have for my personal mail works at the same time. Fring handles my tweets which automatically handle my FB status updates. I can skype for free where-ever I can hook up to the wifi

I have plenty of fun apps too. The one I have paid for allowed me to catalogue my books without having to buy and own a mac.

Heaven. And it’s all mine, so if I need to leave my company, it not an issue. Quality of life and ease of contact while working. It all sounds really good to me.

Indeed, at the moment, many companies are so busy trying to balance reorganisation against redundancies and making money against keeping old customers happy and new ones to your door.

 Where you have very large companies, there are often people who see better ways of doing something (e.g. expenses, time management, media production, community building) and often take the initial first steps to making that change, maybe to a paper, or even a prototype.

This is then the basis for their elevator pitch which they can demo until, within the company, they find a sponsor.  Initial development can then be funded and it can be released, a programme of support built round it and such ideas are then proper, supported and aligned projects.

Hey, I thought things had moved on a bit since then

they have, but funding models have not.  When Gary Hamel talks about needing a different way of motivating and enabling people in the creative economy (please don’t laugh, the economy is out there, whatever shape it is in), how can these, often small, projects be meaningfully funded?

Often these ideas and tools have the potential to form your operational tool set, your knowledge repositories and the means of accessing them, or ways of making the processes works as efficiently as possible.

These ideas may even form your next product catalogue.

How to support the ideas

at the moment, enabling your team, indeed your company, to be as agile as possible and be able to reward those with the potentially great ideas is not easy.  The space to gamble feels restricted to the few with the right ear.

Why not give each person in your organisation some “support credits” (I’m waiting for a better name)? In a large organisation these could be around 10 credits per person.

These can support anything: from a set of web pages that support a process to a video service to a search tool to a new way of looking at the filing.

When someone uses such a tool, they can support it by paying the team who run it one of their “support credit”.  (Think micro payments, an internal version of paypal supporting an individual to do a particular job).

So

OK, lots of the small things that make a huge difference need machine space to run on, need people to originally do the idea and then keep it alive.

Often, this work is unseen in a larger organisation and when changes are needed the original team can no longer support the item because they have had their prorities changed and no-one saw this as being a big thing.

I still don’t get it

OK, if this idea has consistently got, say 1000 credits, it’s not a small thing to a group of people in your company, indeed either 1000 people have paid 1 credit each or 100 have paid 10 each - so to them it’s important, either to a 1/10 of their “support” budget to 100% of it.

Maybe your organisation could not support actual cash going towards this piece but it’s obviously a key thing.

And now, not only do those “supporters” know it, but so do the team in question and everyone in the organisation.

But no-one will do any proper work

Fair point.  This is where group policy comes in: prioritisation and focus.  “Support credit” work needs to be correctly assessed and plans built around them.

Do this, and the effect may be survival of the fittest applications (imagine if your expenses system received no “Support credits”) and evolution of tool sets for no external expediture.  It could allow for organic growth of powerful tools  (viral comms) and a low cost way of recognising who comes up with these ideas.

I produce two blogs, run four wikis and have produced various user generated content sites from scratch.

In five years of doing this I am coming to the conclusion that there is no single correct answer for achieving a goal.

Platforms are evolving all the time: I love word-press but I wouldn’t dream of using anything by 2.7.  I love TWiki - a powerful incarnation of the wiki with many powerful tools and my ultimate preference for creating web sites with many contributors (I even formed a company offering consultancy on this) but for small, quick collaborative tool mediaWiki is perfect.

So, there are a lot of great, evolving web tools out there.  Go on, try one a as solution for your problem.

Mine was spent with my family, which was ace but meant that recovering from a security hack on my server took a little longer to resolve than normal.

Thankfully though, I keep a regular backup.  I also make sure my web user has limited access to the rest of my work.

So, system is re-hardened and normal service has been resumed.

Happy new year everyone!