scrambledmindsMixed up thoughts on the web world, photography and life.

Public goodwill for Telstra has been dwindling over the last few years. Speaking for myself I think they’re a bloated, egotistical organisation with an overrated sense of self importance. And I don’t even own their shares. Or maybe that was just when Sol Trujillo was at the reins.

Why the rant? I just saw an article on Australian IT titled – Shareholder value key in NBN: Thodey which, to be Frank (or John), annoyed me. I don’t think Telstra get it.

Customer service is there, but it is all about protecting shareholder value. I cannot stress that enough. That’s the way we have discussed it with the government, the way we talk about it, and the way we’ll move forward. – Thodey

Why would you say that in the press? I’m coming at this from a consumer point of view and all I hear is “We like you Mr Customer, but sorry, we’re too busy playing games with other people so you’re second best. We don’t love you.” Even if I did own shares, which I don’t, I’d be seriously wondering what their game is. No Customers = No Shareholder Value.

I hope that they get a limited stake in the National Broadband Network, otherwise Australia will continue to suffer in the telecommunications stakes on a world stage.

I’d love to hear some perspectives on what people think they are trying to do. What are your thoughts? Throw your 2c in.

ps. Get my home cooked updates home delivered through my RSS feed.

Sharing information on the web just got a whole lot better for me. Google Reader, Google’s RSS reader has just introduced “proper” sharing features. Until recently, you could click the “Share” at the bottom of each article to share it. Yep, share it.

“Share it where?” you might ask. “Share it, why?” you might ask. To be honest I’ve got no answer for either of those questions. I’ve actually got no interest in the answer to each of those questions either. All I know that it felt good to be part of the Social Media pie and contribute by “sharing”.

Things changed today when Google announced what I consider to be some very important changes to Google Reader. They’ve introduced “Send to”, a feature which allows you to share any article in your feed to popular social sites (e.g. facebook, stumbleupon, delicious and, you guessed it, twitter).

I love this introduction for two reasons:

1. It’s now really easy to let share what you’re finding interesting. Contributing to the social web sphere.
2. I now know where my sharing efforts will be going. They’ll be going to where the eyeballs are.

I don’t know why it’s taken them this long but hopefully they’ll be able to keep the “Send to” sites up to date with the latest and greatest.

You can enable the “Send to” feature by heading into Google Reader Settings -> Send to and selecting the networks that you want to be able to send your items to. Once this is done you’ll get a new link in the action bar.

For more details, head over to the Google Reader announcement A flurry of features for feed readers.

Twitter is definitely a the hot topic these days.  I was interested in how strong the relationship (correlation) between the number tweets people are doing versus their number of followers and thought I’d share the results.

Correlation

Before we move on it’s time for a quick primer on Correlation.  It’s a statistics term.  But before you tune out, it’s simply a calculation to determine how strong a relationship is between two things.  Basically the closer to 1, the stronger the relationship (i.e. if it was 1 then there’s a direct relationship between tweets and followers).  The closer to 0, the weaker the relationship between tweets and followers (i.e. if it was 0 then there’s no relationship between tweets and followers).  If you want some more detail, check out here.

The People I Follow

At the time I did this little experiment I was following 54 people.  It turned out that the correlation between the number of tweets and the number of followers those people had was 0.66.  So what does this tell us?  Well, it says that there’s a reasonably strong relationship between the number of tweets and the number of followers you’re likely to receive.

The Conclusion

I suppose it stands to reason that the more you tweet, the more you’re visible, which means the more followers you’ll receive.  What this little calculation doesn’t do is give a measure of the “quality” of the tweets.  This is subjective but I’m sure plays a part as well.  As does real-world notoriety.  I guess it’s not Rocket Science.  More time tweeting = More followers.

Have any of your heard of The Flight of the Conchords?  They’re a comedy musical duo from New Zealand with a fantastic album and TV series.  If you haven’t, you should check them out.  Here’s some stuff on youtube.  They’re hilarious!

I’ve found some peculiar inspiration from their song Business Time (linked above).  I’ll let you listen to it, but towards the end of the song is a lyric along the lines of  “… and you know what time it is when I’m down to just my socks?  It’s business time!  That’s why they call them business socks…”.  Genius.

Apart from being genius, and referring to something else entirely, this line holds some truth for me in my career.  After quite a few years in the Enterprise IT space, I’ve been thinking for some time that I needed to do something else.  I wanted a change.  I needed to strip back to my socks and start again.  I came to the conclusion that it was time to merge my love of technology, particularly the web, and my love of helping people.

Great linkage, huh?  But wait!  There’s more!

As a result I’ve decided to start my own thing providing training and advice to businesses about how to bring the power of the web to benefit their business.  I get to talk about the web.  I get to meet cool people.  I get to help said cool people.  Enough?  I think so.

It’s time to give it a go.  I’ll be at least able to say I’ve tried!  So, as the song says – It’s Business Time.

ps. When I launch, which will be very soon, it’ll be called 101 (i.e. one zero one).  The first offering will be training for virtualising your business to work from anywhere, opening the doors of the web through search and getting your goods in an online store.  What do you think?

If you’re still reading, why not subscribe to my feed.  Get it home delivered!

“Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise its not better.”  Avinash Kaushik – Analytics Evangelist – Google

To say that Social Media is all the rage could be considered the understatement of the century.  Having been around since the beginnings of mass adoption of the Internet, I do look at the current rage with curiosity and more than a little bemusement.  Does anyone remember Internet Relay Chat (IRC)?  If you don’t it was a tool for meeting and holding conversations with people online.  You had a nickname (handle) and you joined conversations (rooms or channels – guess what? They were lablelled #topic like in everyone’s favourite tool at the moment).  Sound familiar?

The Present

Fast forward 15 years and the tools to create, publish and broadcast your thoughts and creations (content and media) are far more powerful.  The technology advances to help get that information to your computer is faster.  You can now consume all this creativity in many more places than just your computer room, such as TV’s, media centres and mobile phones.  The ability to create all this content (media) and share it in an interactive fashion (social) has resulted in the coining of a new term – Social Media.

The Principles

But have the “Social” aspects really changed?  Did it really need to be labelled just because it was an electronics conversation rather than a physical one?  I guess the reality is that the Internet, like Twitter did recently when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher brought it to the masses, went mainstream.  It needed a new label.  And we thought the Information Superhighway was the Internet going mainstream.  Hah!  Well, it’s no longer just a big pipe full of fantastic information, it’s (back to) a place for fun, creativity, innovation and social interaction.

The Loss of Perspective?

I think this is great!  But with all this I still have a weird feeling that there seems to have been a little loss of perspective.  I would suggest that people aren’t learning Social Media.  They already know how to be social, interact with other humans, the principles of trust, relationships and conversations.  Implicitly if not explicitly.  They should continue to apply those principles in the electronic world.  Maybe the lack of a physical presence (tone, body language etc) causes a loss of perspective?

Or maybe, because the Internet’s gone maintstream, there are a whole new swag of Internet users who are trying it for the first time in earnest and trying new things.   Maybe I’m just old!  Bah!  Humbug!

Poor Me!

Well, if you’ve read this far – Thanks!  I’m not sure I’ve sorted my thoughts out on this one yet and I didn’t want to make it sound like a rant.  I’m just a little bemused by the “Social Media” phenomenon but don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s fascinating.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for the hard evidence for it being beneficial for business.

What do you think?  Maybe someone fancies some homework?  Who knows who coined the term Social Media?

The web is a powerful information resource for individuals and businesses alike.  Whether it’s to keep up with the sports results or keeping up with industry news and the activities of the competition.  It’s invaluable but with a with a wealth of information there is the risk of overload.

Have you ever felt like it’s all too much?  That you should just give up and stick with the newspaper?

Well, there is a tool that I think is superb at helping keep on top of the firehose that is information from the web – Google Reader.  Read on to see how you can use it effectively.

……

Have you ever thought about what you “do” on the web? Have you ever thought about where you “are” on the web? I spend my whole day on it but I haven’t really thought about it in a particularly structured way.

I had to think structured thoughts today as I wanted to finally get scrambledminds up to scratch as my place to waffle my heart out to the ether that is the web. I started with making sure that the blog had all the right elements, including some reference to where else people can find me.

This led me to jotting a quick diagram of where I spend my time from a web social sense. Or in more common parlance these days – where was I social networking. Where was I creating social media? Catchy stuff huh?

So, apart from being a very abridged version, this shows how complex the presence or landscape of anyone can be on the web. I thought this was particularly interesting in the context of what you actually “do” at each node. I’m updating my status, keeping up to date with the activities of friends and colleagues, creating and sharing content, having real time conversations. It’s had work!

It also raises the question of where do you spend your time most effectively. These things can be massive time wasters. What were people doing before this stuff existed? I should write about the techniques that I use to filter out the noise. It raises even bigger questions for where time and dollars should be spent for a business.

Do you know what your social landscape/presence looks like? How do you use your web tools? How do you filter the noise? Let me know.

I use facebook. Not like a lot of people who are actively doing stuff there every day, but I use it occasionally to contact pepole who seem to have adopted it as their only form of electronic communication.

I received this message from one of my “friends” the other day. It smacks of SPAM.

I’M SORRY TO HAVE TO SEND THIS! Reply Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,there have been many members complaining that Facebook is becoming very slow. Records show that the reason is that there are too many non-active Facebook members and, on the other side, too many new Facebook members.

We will be sending this message around to see if members are active or not. If you are active please send to at least 15 other users using Copy Paste to show that you are still active. Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks will be deleted without hesitation to create more space.

Send this message to all your friends and to show me that your still active and you will not be deleted.

Founder of Facebook,
Mark

I’m going to go out on a limb here and:
a) not forward it on.
b) guess that my account will be just fine.

Anyone know any better? I doubt that my facebook account is going to be deleted, I’m worth too much even if I access it infrequently.

So it seems it’s available as of not too long ago (Wed arvo US time). I’m just about to download and check it out. A beefy 230mb. I don’t even know if it will make my life easier. Actually, there is one thing that does really bug me, and no it’s not the lack of cut and paste as every man and his dog seems to think. It’s the inability to set up a meeting with invitees from the phone! Looks like this is included in the new software.

Fun fun.

I use a lot of the google tools like gmail, google calendar, google analytics etc etc. When I started using Google Gears so that you could use these web tools offline it started creating shortcuts on my mac that could be put straight into the applications folder and used to start them like normal local applications, including putting them in the dock for easy access. I did a bit of digging around and created similar shortcuts for other services as well and thought it might be useful for other people. I’ve included:

• Google Mail – email, the greatest time waster of the 21st century.
• Google Calendar – track where you’re supposed to be right now.
• Google Docs – online document storage, creation and collaboration.
• Google Reader – read news (rss) feeds to your hearts content.
• Google Analytics – get stats about your website.
• Google Webmaster Tools – understand how google is interacting with your website.
• Google Adsense – place adverts on your website and get paid by google.
• Google Adwords – advertise with google.
• Remember the Milk – a great web based todo list manager.

These currently load safari as the browser. You can download the files here.

Technical bit – not an expert, just enough knowledge to cause havoc

To modify the shortcut, just right click or click while holding the control button on the keyboard and select “Show Package Contents”. You need to change the name in the Info.plist file, change the url in the launch.sh file and change the icon file. You can then make any shortcut you want. You’ll need to do this if you use Google Apps for Your Domain.

I assume you can also change the browser in launch.sh by changing the line ‘/Applications/Safari.app’ to ‘/Applications/Firefox.app’ or any browser of your choice that you have installed. I don’t know if you can just set it to start in the default browser. Does anyone know?

If you want to change the icon, you can replace the icons.icns file. BTW, if you want a tool to create the required icon file in a snap, check out img2icns.