Reviews

Attended BarCamp Chicago (Saturday)

So what did I think of BarCamp Chicago? First, I want to thank the organizers (I think Jason Rexilius was one) for putting the event together. I really enjoyed the cleversafe presentation. Cleversafe is a distributed storage company and uses Information distribution algorithms (Commonly used to secure private keys) to create a highly available secure storage grid. Very cool. The presentation by Sean Johnson titled “How not to Burn Your Business to the Ground” was interesting and insightful. There was definitely an interesting mix of people and points of view. So I enjoyed it. All conferences have issues and Bar Camp was no different but for the price I’m not going to complain.

Links:
Barcamp.org
BarCampChicago

Cleversafe

Technology

RSS Enterprise

I was reading James Governor’s post commenting on Moonwatcher Charlie Wood’s post “RSS is Velcro for Enterprise Applications”. James points out that Atom might be a better choice because:

[Atom]is more loosely coupled because it contains greater semantic richness.

I think from a technical perspective James makes a great point. The use of a semantically rich syndication stream, creates a world of opportunity for a whole new breed of enterprise applications.

But….. The challenge I see is that just mentioning RSS, Semantic, Atom and Loosely coupled would cause many technology leaders heads to explode. The reality is that these technologies, ideas and techniques are not well (or for that matter widely) understood, and that lack of understanding severely limits their adoption in the enterprise. I also see that enterprise software vendors are slow to generally adopt RSS/Atom and rich semantic notation because they are too busy trying to meet the customers other demands.

This ship will leave space dock, I’m just not sure when.

Links:
Charlie Wood’s RSS Feed
RSS is Velcro for Enterprise Applications
Charlie Wood’s Introduction to RSS

James Governor’s RSS Feed
RSS Spans Apps with Velcro Hooks

Food for Thought, Technology

Open letter to those without RSS feeds

To whom it may concern,

I will not join your mailing list.

If your company, service or group requires me to get information via a mailing list, forget about it. If you enroll me I will unsubscribe, I will not enroll, and I will do everything in my power to avoid using your product. PLEASE CREATE AN RSS FEED. An organization that I belong to offered events calendar updates via email. I will most likely suggest using an RSS feed, I will offer my assistance and then unsubscribe.

I know a great many people don’t know what RSS is, so I hope my little protest and offer of help (for those things I believe in) will encourage companies to find out about RSS. I then hope this new found understanding of RSS will result in an RSS option. The information flow that I sustain via RSS aggregation, filtering and classifying is far more efficient than email.

So please give me a break, wake-up and read the writing in my RSS feed.

Links:
Wikipedia on RSS

Food for Thought

Leadership Training and my personal work of art

I have been in a leadership program for about a month now. The session this week is “The Art of Leadership” based on the book by the same name authored by William A. Cohen PhD.. The class has been thought provoking, most provoking was the exercise where I identified the different types of advice I rely on and who provides the advice. I really thought about the various contributors in my “Board of Directors”.

The insight that I came away with is that for most of my career I have treated it like personal art, something that I created alone while integrating feedback from others. The reality is that as I seek to pursue the goals I have set for myself in the coming years I will have to become more skilled at treating my career as a collaborative piece of art. I may have to think about my career more like making music, because every great solo artist still has an engineer and in most cases a producer. The session really has focused my thoughts regarding how I care for and nurture my career.

attention, Lists

Things that chew up my attention
  1. Keeping My iPod updated
  2. Paying for my gas, (No! I don’t want to buy a car wash, No! I don’t want a receipt, Do I ever choose anything but 87 octane)
  3. Buying anything at CDW.com (But I still love the company)
  4. Television (I know I need tivo, heck I need digital cable)
  5. The weirdness that is Google reader (Love, hate. aaahh!)
  6. Link wandering (I have found great stuff but it takes forever)
  7. My corporate calendar (no mobile integration)
  8. Ubuntu, switch and you will know what I mean (Mac here I come, as soon as I save my pennies)
attention

More on Attention efficiency

The opportunity I see (not the only one) in the attention portion of the cognitive economy, resides in the creation of applications that reduce the amount of attention we have to spend doing meaningless or redundant stuff. If you run a business think about how much time a customer has to spend to complete a transaction with your company. Here is an example:

When you open a bank account why doesn’t the bank identify your preferred language on your ATM card. Better yet, the bank could set your default language based on the language you selected in the first 5 transactions. A simple attention efficiency.

The opportunities are endless and range from simple to infinitely complex. In complex and competitive markets attention efficiencies are powerful differentiators. Companies continue to think about the relationships with their customers in very traditional terms. The future is building systems and applications that allow customer to exchange information in return for future attention. Think of attention as currency, it’s always great when we get more for less money.

Food for Thought, Technology

eBay bans Google Checkout, not a wise move

It seems to me, if eBay believed in its payment service they would want to compete head to head. I think it is telling that Google offers links to competitive services. For example, if you search for an address on Google you get links to Google maps, Yahoo maps and MapQuest. If you believe you have the best service you look to create opportunities for customers to compare which positively reinforces a positive view of the best service. eBay is making a mistake by banning Google Checkout, head to head competition is the way to prevent the Google Checkout beach head. My guess is that right now eBay and Paypal provide a more robust feature set and that difference may be enough to slow or stunt Google Checkout. That attack should occur now not later after Google has improved on their service.

I once read an article where Meg Whitman talks about the value of the eBay community. It seems to me if the community wants to use Google Checkout then eBay should respect the communities demands.

attention, Food for Thought

Attention OS and The Cognitive Economy my thoughts

In roughly 50 lines of text Steve Gillmor roughs out the Attention OS. The article has triggered many thoughts, so I will just lay them out in a series of posts.

The Cognitive economy is based on value created by individuals powered by a cognitive suite of tools, services, repositories and raw computing power (includes the attention os). To create pools of value that are sufficient to sustain an economy, there will have to be:

  • Attention consumers that continually respect an individual’s usage policies and permissions.
  • Attention providers that share very similar usage policies and permissions.
  • A standard way of describing and communicating attention usage policies and permissions

For example, there are many French world cup soccer fans, but they may not have the same usage policies and permissions for their attention data and gestures. Some fans may restrict the use of their attention data to French companies only. Another set of French world cup soccer fans may have their attention data and gestures governed by more restrictive government statute. So the challenge becomes creating a constellation of French world cup soccer fans that allow their attention data and gestures to used in the same way for a similar result. The consumer of attention and gesture data will be required to be very aware of the current disposition of its constellation of attention providers. The attention consumer must also continuously update and reform the constellation based on changes in the change in provider policies and permissions.

More to follow.