A Passion For ‘Puters

The thesis I picked from the Cluetrain Manifesto’s 10th Anniversary Project reflects my recent work on collaboration with “cloud” tools – #94 says that:

To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

Part of what I’ve been spending all of my free time writing about these days is the fact that we can easily circumvent the corporate pecking order and create our own conversations with anyone at all – just by using the tools that are freely available on the ‘net today. It may be considered by some to be subversive, true, but if you are active on Facebook and your boss’s boss is on there too, why not consider Facebook a valid way to communicate with him? If you have co-workers that are on Facebook, why not use the tools provided to work together in a way that the corporate hierarchy may not be ready for? We can do so much more as employees of a corporation (or as freelancers, self-employed business owners or members of a charitable or non-profit organization) if we cut through the traditional chains of communication in an institution and use the somewhat more freewheeling communication methods made available by Facebook, Twitter and blogging.
Of course, this assumes that your boss’s boss is on Facebook – if he or she considers networked conversations confusing and chaotic, however, Facebook probably isn’t one of his or her daily visits…
Corporate rules about how to contact people and who to contact for a particular project don’t have to be adhered to in this Web 2.0 environment. You can directly contact anyone who has a social networking account much more directly than in the past – and get an answer back to a question or feedback on an idea much more quickly!
The general rules against “facebooking” at work show that the folks in charge of traditional corporations don’t understand how much more productive being able to contact the right person, at the right time, about a potential problem can make us. (1) Until the people at the top of the corporate food chain understand this, the people in the trenches who are tasked with doing the work of the business will be forced to come up with ways of getting around these social site bans so that they can do their work more effectively than they could in a traditional, hierarchically structured organization.

1:http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/news/5750/

Just wanted to fire off a quick note pointing folks to the utterly hysterical goings on via Twitter today. Do a Twitter search, or a hashtag follow, on #queryfail and get “from the horse’s mouth” examples writers’ queries to editors and agents that failed. Some seem to have failed in epic ways…

Hey folks – I just spent an hour or so of my Sunday morning (cause that’s how big a nerd I am) updating my Letterhead theme to be widget-ready. You can download it and give it a whirl in Zip format only now – I didn’t have the time to tar.gz it, so it’s just a zip file. I’ll put it back on the sidebar for downloads eventually. Updates to the theme are found in the readme file in the zipped archive, but it’s pretty basic and very easy to use!

Google is going to be releasing, sometime this year, their GDrive application. TG Daily says:

Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.

This opens powerful possibilities. For instance, you could start working on a spreadsheet at home and continue via Gdrive web interface accessed in an Internet cafe. When you arrive back home, changes to the spreadsheet have already trickled down from the cloud to your desktop. The idea, of course, is all but revolutionary, but Google’s execution could set it apart.

Plus a whole lot more, of course. The question is, for me, will it work as seamlessly and as beautifully as my Dropbox account? I LOVE Dropbox – I have a Dropbox folder on my laptop, my home desktop and my work desktop machines and it does an absolutely effortless job of keeping the files in that folder perfectly synched up and perfectly usable. If GDrive does that for my entire computer… I may be even more in love.
Now, this is all speculation for now – there are no official announcements from Google to back this up, and there are issues (privacy, of course, but cost and reliability guarantees and various other niggling little details) that have to be considered before folks will willingly upload the entire contents of their computer’s hard drive to a corporation’s care. If, however, the service works as well as currently existing services do *and* if Google gives some thought to privacy and practicality concerns of users, this could be an AMAZING addition to Google’s services!
Finally – before I forget – as a Public Computer Center manager, I am always looking for ways for patrons to be able to use our computers as their “home away from home” without *actually* letting them save their work, install their programs or otherwise screw with my computers. This could be a good solution – something that many of them will already have a user/pass login for (their Gmail accounts) and something that they are familiar with. Hmmm, I’m already getting ideas and making plans and the silly thing hasn’t been announced yet.
The other big announcement this week was the release of the new Zotero plugin for FireFox. This new version now includes synchronization between multiple computers – so if you find a great resource and add it to Zotero on one computer, it will sync up and be available on any other computer you have Zotero’s plugin installed to. Finally, Zotero has made it so that I can happily use it! With my reliance on 3 or 4 different computers and my heavy use of Dropbox-like applications, I just couldn’t get into a single-computer use Zotero application. Making it available on multiple computers, however, means that I’m there!

The London Times has released its picks for the 50 Top Food Blogs in the World. A friend of mine tweeted about it, bemoaning the fact that there was no OPML file to go with it… Never one to pass up an opportunity to screw around with my Google Reader, I added in all 50 blogs (some of which I already subscribed to, but some of which were new to me) and exported the list for you all to do the same – only much more easily! The OPML file is here – download it, import it into your feed reader and you should see a new folder with 50 of the best food blogs in the world populating it. Easy as pie, one might say!!

A quote from an email interview I gave on using Twitter in my writing career is up at The Adventurous Writer. It’s a quick quote about how I got my book deal, but I thought I’d point you all to it anyway since there are lots of quotes from other writers in there too with interesting stories and ideas for using Twitter for writing.

The website for “Library Mashups” has been created and is available to peruse, just to whet your appetite for the actual book itself – due out sometime this year. I contributed a chapter to it – the LibraryThing Mashups chapter – and it looks like a lot of other folks contributed a lot of other really interesting chapters to the book as well. Check it out and send it on to your library’s collection development folks for inclusion in your professional collection. That’s what I’m about to do!