I live in the future, I do… wonderful devices

When you can buy thumbsized computers for less than $80

When I can get something way cooler than Dick Tracy's wristwatch radio for $150

When a really cool functional tablet computer comes in at less than £200

Cycling, Team GB and Systems Thinking

If Team GB followed the approach of most organisations, then Chris Hoy would have been set a target to win gold, whilst riding a Raleigh Chopper in a borrowed PE kit. When he failed, he would have been downgraded in his performance review and new talent would have been brought in to replace him. The new recruit would be passed Chris’ bike with their name stuck over his etched-out badge. Continuous improvement? Continuous change of personnel is always more likely until businesses become more like Team GB and create systems that utilise the raw talent at their disposal.

… and a bit of Performance Management for good measure!

Rise of the Indie Web – cast off your silo chains #btot #fb

10 years ago nearly everyone at SXSW Interactive was known by their own personal site or blog.What happened?Over time we shifted our creative energies to the emergent “social web”, sharecropped our content like so many serfs across Flickr/Twitter/Facebook, and watched while our work was framed with ads (or placed inside them!), sold like so much cattle, or often shut down with permalinks and conversations lost forever: Geocities, Etherpad, Pownce, Vox and others. Never forget.We’ve had enough and we’re taking it back. Our content, our data, our online identities. We’re rebuilding the Indie Web, this time with conduits to social silos so we can control our creative destinies without abandoning our friends.Join SXSW veteran Tantek as he leads a discussion on a variety of different approaches and learn how you too can get started and join the new Indie Web.

will you start to federate your content from your own domain?

How Facebook is infesting the web #btot #fb

Berk did an extensive crawl of the web and found that 22 percent of all pages now contain Facebook URLs, a number he senses is “rising, and fast.” When you consider the vastness of the web, and how long its sites have been proliferating, that’s a striking figure. As Berk observes, “it’s taken roughly a decade for Facebook to not only accrue roughly a billion users, but to entangle itself in about a fifth of the Web.” Even more striking, and troubling for anyone concerned about the web’s future as an open, popular network, is Berk’s finding about the way in which Facebook is entangling itself in the web:

Although about a fifth of the Web (based on this sample) references Facebook, and despite there being close to half a billion references to Facebook URLs, there are only 3.5 million unique URLs in the sample set. The bulk of these are for Facebook-specified integrations (those that add social dimension to a Web site), as opposed to specific inbound URLs. My key takeaway here is that although Facebook may know about a sizable portion of the Web, the Web barely knows anything about what’s inside of Facebook.

Interesting methods used to get the numbers in Berk’s report, too.

Uncovering the learning habits of leaders and managers – #KM implications #btot

In very broad terms, managers indicated a strong preference for ‘informal’ learning methods, with support from peers, senior managers and internal experts cited particularly strongly.

Interesting report, which points to a preference for learning informally and internally. Surely this points to the requirement for supporting a sharing/collaborative culture? Does your organisation actively support this?

KM, Agile, Kanban practitioners as Craftsmen? #KM #btot

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

― St. Francis of Assisi

really interesting post from Dave Snowden (@snowded). I cavil a bit at “KM is now a subset of IT”, but like the idea of how to build accreditations and find the idea of leveraging improving Wikipedia entries interesting.

Recruiting staff from vendors? You sure about that? #btot

An interesting couple of tweets from an ex-colleague @9600

Why do $BIGCORPs make senior hires of people previously at a major vendor critical to their operating cost base? Insanity!

I suspect he’s talking about the sales at Nokia…

he then adds

It’s highly likely they’ll have a strong vested interest in $VENDOR (stock) and are almost certainly at least wedded to their tech.

It’s an interesting point, and many of my colleagues will have noticed managers coming in from outside industry; making wide changes and leaving (cf. seagull management). If this happens with these sort of hires, you can then get stuck with $VENDOR solutions, while those who brought them in depart…