I fear blogging about my job because what I say might come back around, but I would never know that the blog is what bit me. There’s a lot more to it than just convincing my manager (and his manager) that blogging would be good for the company’s relationship with its employees and customers; unfortunately, my company is in an industry which itself shuns change and fears that the public will discover their dirty secrets of inefficiency-at-the-public’s-expense. It’s a mess. We’re trying to fix it but you become like what/who you associate with and entropy is not on our side.

Corporate Fear.

Fear of being different. Fear of telling your boss your ideas. Fear of speaking up in meetings. Fear of going up to someone you don’t know and introducing yourself. Fear of doing something that might destroy your career.

Fear of weblogging.

It’s time we get over our fears.

I meet a lot of people around the industry. Almost everytime I meet someone, I ask them “do you have a weblog?” That’s my way of saying “I like you and want to hear more of your ideas.” Even deeper: I want a permanent relationship with you (and not of the sexual kind, either).

I’ve asked this question of people at Apple. Google. IBM. eBay. Real Networks. Cisco. Intel. HP. Amazon. And, yes, here at Microsoft.

Too often the answer is “I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because I might get fired,” is often the answer. I hate that answer. It’s an example of corporate fear. An artifact of a management system that doesn’t empower its employees to act on behalf of customers.

I find this fear disturbing. Imagine being a flight attendant with this kind of fear. “Sorry, I can’t talk to the passengers in this plane today cause I might get fired.”

I’m not the only one who sees it, either. John McCain, in the September 2004 Fast Company, went looking for courage.

Lately, more and more people, both inside and outside of Microsoft, have been asking me for ways to convince their boss to “get” weblogging. Translation: they are trying to

…excerpt from: radio.weblogs.com…

I know this is extremely stale news by now, but for those who might not have otherwise known about it I think it’s worth posting…

September 1, 2004:

The waves of disappointment directed at Friendster this week illustrate the power of employee-driven community-building using blogs (good) and failing to comprehend and appreciate that power when things don’t work out between employee and employer (bad).

Friendster programmer Joyce Park has been an occassional blogger, writing mostly about programming issues that interested her. The company fired her Monday, she says on her blog, for a few posts about Friendster’s switch to a different programming language. Anyone with a beginner’s knowledge of programming would notice the change on the Friendster site, so it can hardly be deemed proprietary.

But that was the point. Or the lack of it. Park told ZDNet: “I only made three posts about Friendster on my blog before they decided to fire me, and it was all publicly available information. They did not have any policy, didn’t give me any warning, they didn’t ask me to take anything down.” That set off her online community — and by extension, the world of fanatical bloggers, or blogonatics.

One blogger is encouraging people to quit Friendster. News stories sprang up across the Internet. Bloggers howled. A fast-moving chain reaction ensued not just because someone lost a job, but

…excerpt from: Church of the Customer

If you’re interested in psychology and have ever taken a Myers-Briggs test (the one that classifies you as ENFP, INTJ, etc.), ACM’s Queue has a fascinating article on how these personality types function within effective software development teams, particularly small ones. Specifically, the author studied:

• The effect of the project leader’s personality on team performance;
• The effect of team members’ personalities on team performance; and
• The effect of heterogeneity of personalities on team performance.

t programmers are naturally introverted, or that development teams are led best by the “sensing” type who focuses on actual details and facts (as opposed to the “intuitive” type), be prepared to have your thinking challenged.

(Incidentally, the last time I took one of these tests, I came out as an ENFP, but pretty close to an INFP. This statement certainly speaks to me: ENFPs hate bureaucracy, both in principle and in practice; they will always make a point of launching one of their crusades against some aspect of it.)

…excerpt from: feeds.feedburner.com…

You know you play too much Scrabble when…
Caterina.net…: Freak Words
Scrabble maniacs who, when not competing at tournaments, hang out in coffeeshops, belch loudly and yell out things incomprehensible to even Jeopardy Prizewinners, such as: “GUACAMOLE with an F!” And their friends respond “CAMOUFLAGE!”

I’ve been trying to figure out how to broach this subject at work, and with whom if I did. This paper should help a lot.

cameronreilly: Trevor Cook on Corporate Blogging
Trevor wrote this article on the benefits of corporate blogging for AFR BOSS.

cameronreilly: What hit the Pentagon on 9/11
What hit the Pentagon on 9/11

A friend just sent me a link to this site which has a well-put together Flash animation detailing some of the evidence that suggests it wasn’t a Boeing 757 that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. I’ve seen a lot of this stuff before, but never put together in this fashion. It’s worth a look. And turn your sound up.

Cool, you can check out your Netflix queue in your newsreader. Not terribly useful, but cool.

Netflix – Rent DVDs Online – Try Free
Netflix offers RSS feeds as a convenient way to pass information about your Netflix account or that is publicly available on the Netflix site to your RSS reader or an RSS-associated website of your choice.

*sigh* Twenty bucks says my DirecTiVo won’t be able to do this… suck-ola.

TiVo, Netflix sign movies-on-demand deal | CNET News.com…
Netflix and TiVo on Thursday announced a partnership to develop a movies-on-demand service as well as efforts to secure content from Hollywood studios.

And in related news:
Netflix, Warner Bros. in video-on-demand test

I suspect my cats would like this a lot, heh.

DrQue.net…– Andrew Que’s corner of the net

Robs Blog: Gmail Tools & Plugins
Plugins and tools to make Gmail easier to use are starting to pop up on the web

Damn, people can be weird. But, at least they’re not out preemptively f*cking other countries (just [fake] bush, it seems).

So, giving away free shirts is a great branding opportunity, but every now and then it can bite you in the bum. I wonder if Nokia had this in mind when they came up with their “connecting people” slogan? Oh, and check out the rest of the pics in the series by following the links in Adam’s post (he has way more patience than me).

Rather strange you might say…!

…excerpt from: www.helloworldblog.com…

GooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org…)
Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that’s been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly:

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

This is great, of course, but when is Mars Co. going to start putting some decent chocolate in their products? By decent, I mean something with good flavor and not just alkalinity (that the processing is supposed to reduce but doesn’t much since it wasn’t good quality chocolate to start with).

The New York Times Magazine: Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

– John Cleese
…excerpt from: www.williamgibsonbooks.com…

Microsoft Researchers have an answer for this old, slightly twisted riddle. They’ve put together a nifty interface that will find all the data on your PC that you need, be it email, documents, tablet notes or spreadsheets. You can find all the data that people have sent to you, all the Web pages you’ve ever seen, and all the attachments you’ve ever forgotten to save. Its called Stuff I’ve seen and you can read about it here.

It’s an important concept in Personal Knowledge Management.  I personally have been using X1 for about 6 months and also use Lookout to search my RSS feeds.  I find the two incredibly useful and routinely find things now that I would never have tried to even find before.  The level of re-use I am now achieving is significantly greater. 

I figure these tools probably save me an hour a week, that’s a very impressive ROI, and X1/Lookout don’t do everything that Microsoft are promising.

There is a downside though, I suspect that these capabilities will only work best when the products your use to create, manipulate, views and store the data all come from Microsoft. 

Not suprisingly the Open Source community are

…excerpt from:

Red text is from the other site; blue text is my type.

ISTJ Serious, quiet, earn success by concentration and thoroughness. Practical, orderly, matter of fact, logical, realistic, and dependable. Take responsibility.

ISFJ Quiet, friendly, responsible and conscientious. Work devotedly to meet their obligations. Thorough, painstaking, accurate. Loyal considerate.

INFJ Succeed by perseverance, originality, and desire to do whatever is needed, wanted. Quietly forceful; concerned for others. Respected for their firm principles.

INTJ Usually have original minds and great drive for their own ideas and purposes. Sceptical, critical, independent, determined, often stubborn. (Thats me)

ISTP Cool onlookers – quiet, reserved, and analytical. Usually interested in impersonal principles, how and why mechanical things work. Flashes of original humour.

ISFP Retiring, quietly friendly, sensitive, kind, modest about their abilities. Shun disagreements. Often relaxed about getting things done.

INFP Care about learning, ideas, language, and independent projects of their own. Tend to undertake too much, then somehow get it done. Friendly but often absorbed.

INTP Quiet, reserved, impersonal. Enjoy theoretical or scientific subjects. Usually interested mainly in ideas, little liking for parties or small talk. Sharply defined interests.

ESTP matter-of-fact, do not worry or hurry, enjoy whatever

…excerpt from:

I have just started to think through some of the processes, I take for granted.  One of these is ”researching and decision making”.  One of the first approaches I came across was the “Six Thinking Hats”; approach it stunned me that a process I am so familliar with could be so dramatically improved through applying more structure.  What particularly appealed was how the approach works within teams to avoid conflict.  Here’s a summary of the approach:

• White Hat:
  With this thinking hat you focus on the data available. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.

  This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.

• Red Hat:
  ‘Wearing’ the red hat, you look at problems using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.

• Black Hat:
  Using black hat thinking, look at all the bad points of the decision. Look at it cautiously and defensively. Try to see why it might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan. It allows you to eliminate them, alter them, or prepare contingency plans to counter them.

  Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans ‘tougher’ and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. Black Hat thinking is one of the rea

…excerpt from:

Canada, Mexico, Spain, The United Kingdom, France, Russia, Israel, Australia, Japan, and South Korea: together with nine other newspapers, Le Monde has conducted an opinion poll [concieved of by the Canadian daily La Presse] on the perception of the United States and the stakes of the American presidential election. The rejection of President Bush, in the name of the good relations hoped for with The United States, is massive. Full Article here (Text in French).
…excerpt from: www.kuro5hin.org…

15 Oct 2004: ” I’ve felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn’t have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.

I continue to feel that the desktop is interesting, because it’s how I personally have always used Linux, and what I myself have been interested in. It’s also the technically (and marketwise) most challenging area, whic
…excerpt from: RootPrompt.org…

I’m late to this linkathon, but let me add my “Yay” to the chorus: William Gibson is back to blogging, and none too soon.
…excerpt from: weblog.siliconvalley.com…

If you read Lexar’s documentation, their JumpDrive Secure product is secure. “If lost or stolen, you can rest assured that what you’ve saved there remains there with 256-bit AES encryption.” Sounds good, but security professionals are an untrusting sort. @Stake…
…excerpt from: www.schneier.com…

Google has quietly launched the Google Desktop Search, a utility designed to allow users to search their local file systems fast and efficiently.
…excerpt from: arstechnica.com…