Update in Basecamp

Bit of a geeky one this, but I love the [UPDATE] feature that has just been added to basecamp. Essentially you type "[UPDATE]" and your text is replaced by a wee green UPDATE icon. Simple but effective, like the rest of the application.

CRM and call centres

Having once worked in a call centre for a bank during its first e-banking forays (although very much in a "grunt" capacity to rip off the G.I. term), I feel quite sensitised to telephone-based customer contact: for this reason, I was initially delighted today when phoning Dell, I was given the opportunity to opt for a call-back (while retaining my place in the queue) instead of just holding. This reminded me of BA's callback confirmation for ticket amendments that they ran around 2000/2001 (haven't bothered to check if they still do).

Anyway, I said initially delighted, as Dell have yet to call me back, about 5 hours later for an estimated 5 minute queue. Obviously, I should have held on - my first two attempts to ring back were cut off, then I hit another queue. I'm not saying Dell have missed the opportunity of a purchase, but I can't say I'm impressed at the performance of functionality which gave me the initial "great" factor. I'm assuming it's just a glitch, but I might give it another go and see if it works...

Time Management Again

One thing I have worked out about my failures in time management is the work/home/not at work/not at home series of divides. I try to use a Palm Zire, a Nokia phone, Outlook (home and work) and scribbled lists in pads/calendars/diaries and on bits of paper to keep track of everything, but I cannot use anyone of these except the last to keep all my diary and task information together. I often wish that I could have one to-do list/diary that I could access and update from anywhere - pen and paper wouldn't work, I'd never manage it, and I wouldn't get nice ringing/vibrating reminders for things I had forgotten!

UPDATE - 30/10/2004

Funnily enough, here's John Udell chatting about much the same thing!

Middlespace

Via Lilia Efimova, this quote from Ross Mayfield:

"Where the bottom-up and top-down meet -- middlespace -- is the realm of policy, metrics, incentives, cooperation and sharing control."

I like this term, it's a nice way of looking at the messy area that is all about stimulating interactions (be they collaboration, co-operation or communication), but also about the governance and control issues that go with them. Having spent a portion of today writing a set of Terms & conditions for our intranet bulletin board system, I've had fun with just what messy territory it can be. Having checked with Legal and Information Security teams, I'm looking to engage what I call "controlled freedom" (oxymoronic, eh?) - which I now realise is middlespace, the hinterland (or is that tweenerland?) in between allowing more direct communication in the enterprise (making sure that initial enthusiasm is retained), and ensuring that this stays within boundaries acceptable to the enterprise itself...oh, and of course, delivers benefits to the enterprise, its formal departments and groups, the individual worker and any Communities of Practice. It's actually a neat representation of the conundrum posed by Jesse James Garrett's Venn diagram of Content, Context, Users (which I thought was in "The Elements of User Experience" but which appears not to be on a quick flick-through) - how do you satisfy this middlespace of competing needs, how do you hit the sweetspot?

Intranet Benchmarking Forum Live

Intranet Benchmarking Forum Live was a great success - and I'll try and put up some relevant notes and links over the next few days. Highlights for me included another excellent presentation from Adam Joinson of the Open University on online behaviours, an insight into tasks on the BBC intranet (they have a nice attitude toward user-centered design), and chats with some of the guys from search vendors, Endeca, Kevin Keohane of the IBF as usual and Dr Liz Daniels of Cranfield University's Information Systems department - and my presentation on intranets and crisis communications seemed to go down reasonably well... (I hope!).

Some of the other attendees were particularly taken with Gerry McGovern's presentations - personally, I felt that he was preaching to the converted (but that might be because I used to be an editor, and have read his book, Content Critical - but at the very least he was entertaining.

Perhaps the best thing about the day, however, was that the stated aim of being a more interactive conference pretty much succeeded - although as the day was very packed, everyone looked fairly bushed at the end. Personally, I felt that the table-topping exercise I ran at the end of my presentation (ably facilitated by Bridget Peake) ended up being more useful to attendees than my presentation itself. I was also happy to coin a catchphrase during Plumtree's portal presentation - "Take care, low-hanging fruit can sometimes be rotten" (surprisingly Gerry also made use of a rotten fruit metaphor in his presentation, but was referring to out-of-date content).

Slippery Words

I love the slippery nature of language - particularly what I like to call semantic wobbles (although I'm sure there's a technical linguistic term for them) where not enough attention has been paid to the rules of language, and a phrase "wobbles" away from its intended meaning. Take this example from my workplace, for instance:

"Soap Machine
Sometimes Jams
Press repeatedly"

Because the phrase misses out the definite article, and takes on a telegraphic style, I now think that our dispenser may occasionally bring forth a raspberry preserve or plum compote if I "press repeatedly". Pedantic I know, but it made me chuckle.

Relevanta - online reputation

I was meithering quite a few months ago for a while about online reputation particularly insofar as it could be leveraged to deliver either "personalised" results or results where it was easier to evaluate the relevance of results returned on a search query. With this in mind, I am intrigued by Relevanta - which I came across via the Social Software Weblog. At the moment, you can sign up and then post comments and ratings to a political area, thus building (I assume) both the content authors reputation, and your own reputation as reviewer and commenter using their experience system. I've not yet entirely grasped how best to use this, but it seems like an interesting implementation of some of the areas I was looking at in particular. Take a look, it could at least be fun...

JotSpot - interesting looking wiki

In looking at various online authoring tools along the stasis-flow line, I've just come across the interesting-looking Jotspot (via Jon Udell). It's a WYSIWYG interfaced wiki tool with additional application-type add-ons. Worth further investigation...there's a beta sign-on available if anyone is interested.

Information Foraging

I haven't seen anything on this for a while, but here's a good introduction to Information Foraging at InfoVis by Juan C. Dürsteler. I always think that the sorts of Web tools that add "good scent" are breadcrumb trails, faceted categories for search showing the number of results under each facet, recommendation metadata and search categories - including best bets.

Time Management

I have been really under the cosh over the past few weeks (nay, months) both in personal and professional terms (in fact, my blog reflects this with a dip in postings). What I'd really love to know is:

When you really have too much on your plate, how do you decide which important items may actually have to be dropped?

One of these days, I am sure I am going to get this sussed, but if anyone has any thoughts, let me know...

Collaborative / Social software strategy - help?

I have been taxed with putting together a "taster" document for my company to put out the feelers within the business for online collaborative working and communication tools - the document is supposed to cover Blogs, wikis (blikis), online project management, bulletin boards, RDF (including RSS) etc. What I want to hear are successful stories of the implementation of such tools on an intranet to support specific business aims - I'm not looking at outward facing blogs etc., purely inter-staff communications very much from a Personal Information space / Communities of Practice / Formal company groups perspective if that makes sense. I know that there have been a few comments on this sort of stuff, for instance on Lou Rosenfeld's bloug and Michael's urlgreyhot in the past few months, but I'm keen to hear specific stories that may help me in initiating such practices.

The sort of stuff I've been looking at is Basecamp (which I really like) and Web Collaborator (which is useful in a stripped-down-to-basics way), Ikonboard, and general wiki and blog bits and pieces...

UPDATE - 02/10/2004

Many thanks to Lee Bryant of Headshift who pointed me to his presentation on informal, joined-up knowledge sharing [...] - which at first glance looks a) useful, and b) very much in line with my thinking.

Speaking at IBF Live, London

I'm going to be speaking at IBF Live on the 20th of October in London about using an intranet in a time of rapid change or crisis (from a communications/governance perspective rather than a technical side, but I might touch on the odd techy aspect). Anyway, IBF Live looks like it is going to be a good opportunity to catch up on a number of interesting intranet aspects - I think the event is being partly sponsored by PlumTree and Endeca - don't know too much about PlumTree's CMS activities so I'm looking forward to speaking to them!

Readings on Web Credibility

Via the Stanford Captology Notebook, the references for an HCI encylopaedia chapter on web credibility and online trust: Readings on web credibility -- the best list ever compiled. This is a bit of a bookmark to myself to trawl through the list...

Learning Management

I'm looking at e-learning strategies at the moment, specifically the delivery of Authorware content over an intranet. The way I see it, a good strategy would be to have some form of XML based Learning Content Management System to produce and amend content, feeding into an AICC/SCORM-compliant Learning Management System for tracking and admin (then pumping it out via the intranet). Are there any LMS/LCMS combinations out there that fit tightly with Authorware (I'm assuming this must be a yes), and does anyone have any experience of them? All useful feedback appreciated.

Feeling a Bit Guilty About the Lack of Posts

I'm feeling more than a bit guilty that I haven't posted to my blog in almost a month. To be honest, however, I've been so busy with work and my wedding, that the blog has had to suffer.

I was intrigued yesterday to receive my company's "Human Performance" training (which was surprisingly good) which forms part of a wider company improvement initiative. One thing that stood out for me was the use of the idea of "human error" to mean any undesired human event, where both "human error" and "human mistake" should have been used. It's fine to cover unintentional, automatic events, but the more intentional should also be dealt with as well.

Accessibility and Intranets

I was told recently of a case in the UK where a woman who became blind, was subsequently unable to access applications on her PC, and litigated against her employers. I may have got the wrong end of the stick on this one, but if anybody knows the details, can they let me know? I'd be interested, as it could be an excellent stick for good practice, standards adherence, accessibility and treating your employees right (it always helps to have some convincing ammo).

Probably won't be posting over the next fortnight as I'm off to get married in France.

Sweets delivering results!

I had an email from Scott Berkun - who always writes such interesting pieces on www.uiweb.com - yesterday in response to my suggestion to him that small, unexpected treats (like a sweet) at the beginning of a training session lead to more creative training [NB: this was in response to an article of Scott's - I think it was The problems of training]. I'm sure it's ust a matter of relaxing people (and giving them a mild sugar rush), but it works for me - I hope Scott gets similar results!

Laziness

By dint of being a bit busy with other things, I haven't posted anything on the blog for a while. I would cite Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness", but I haven't been exactly idle... I've also been concentrating on writing on my other new blog, Semantic Wobble, which is mostly about cinema as I seem to have been spending a deal of time glued to the silver screen (and the smaller screen too with DVDs - Pirates of the Caribbean: what was the big hoo-hah about, I thoght it was a bit boring, myself). So this is an abject apology to myself for not putting the effort into the Info Blog!

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This via nate's notes:

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.
Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.
The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)
INSTRUCTIONS
To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).
REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://natek.typepad.com/blog/
(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Newsreader Software
(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://marktsinfoblog.blogspot.com
(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 05/08/2004
(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 09:37:00
(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
(7) My blog is hosted by: Blogger
(8) My age is: 31
(9) My gender is: Male
(10) My occupation is: Online Strategist
(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines
(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Blogger
(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 27/05/03
(14) My web browser is: IE 5.5
(15) My operating system is: Windows NT

Another helpful accessibility widget

Via the Ease of Use mailing list, I learned of an IBM addition to the accessibility checker/assistant tools list. This one, aDesigner, looks like it could be useful in combination with other tools, heuristic evaluation and user testing (probably at the early stages). As the description states:

"The aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired.
Voice browsers and screen readers read aloud the text on Web pages and are used by visually impaired people. However, these devices are less effective with certain kinds of content, such as highly graphical material. Web developers can use aDesigner to test the accessibility and usability of Web pages for low-vision and blind people. "

Sounds interesting and potentially useful - one to download when I get 5 minutes.