SAST Wingees

Moblogging Suman’s session from barcamp.in

Suman has been blogging since 2002. Traditional KM doesn’t work because they’re top heavy. They talk about being people centric but they’re actually not people-centric. So if you use blogs you can create a grassroots KM.  Talks about internal blogging initiatives in major IT services companies that failed.  I asked Suman why and he said its due to a rigid framework. He says you should make it easy and flexible. For instance, he said companies use portal software like Documentum which aren’t real easy to use, so publishing doesn’t happen. His main theme is to keep it easy and says blogging comes in handy for that. Talks about a company of 10 that started an internal blog and gave access to its customers. I asked him – blogging requires sustained effort and how do you keep it going? Suman said he actually evangelized blogging throughout the company and also recruited some fire brand bloggers to keep the momentum going. He also said “you may not want to call it a blog, if you feel that may prevent adoption”. He can be read at http://www.sumankumar.com

Moblogging Scoble interview from blogcamp.in #2

1. What do you think about blogging within 2nd life?
Talks about 2nd life, virtual life etc. (Couldn’t understand very well.) Talks about trying to teach his mom about blogging. She couldn’t do it including reading blogs. Talks about various blogging tools typepad, blogger, windows live, wordpress and says he really likes WordPress. Windows live is still behind – its doesn’t support tagging.   2. Corporate blogging?
Most people have heard about Dell Hell. This is the perfect reason why your company should start blogging. Put your company name, product name, your competitor’s names into Technorati and start tracking blog conversations. Dell didn’t do that and they got into trouble.  People in MS have started doing that so they can track what people around the world are saying about their products. 3. Podtech’s India site is podtech.net.in. Sorry I couldn’t make it there. 4. Will blogging become part of mainstream education?
It has already become in some countries. I think it will become an important part of life. To me, this is the best way to push ideas, knowledge as well as aggregate ideas, knowledge etc from other people. There are some toolls that convert blogs into mp3. My father uses it. the interview ends. Scoble signs off.

Moblogging scoble interview from blogcamp.in

Scoble – its a real honor to speak to you all. I’m speaking to you on a Mac via Skype. You can see me and I can see you all as well. I have been blogging for 5 years since 2000. I googled and found about 200 blogs then. Then I started my own blog at MS. Now I am working for Podtech. Th whole thing about how my story of leaving Microsoft is a powerful example of blogging and word of mouth. Within 48 hours I had millions of page impressions on my site. 80percent of customers of my company (couldn’t hear the name clearly) came from word of mouth. Back then, you had to have true word of mouth. Now you have blogs, emails and other forms to get word of mouth going. Going back to my leaving MS, I had told about 15 people who started blogging and then the word got out quickly to create an avalanche of traffic. Microsoft had an RSS aggregator which spread the news to hundreds of blogs. A cool RSS aggregator is built into Vista. Talks about Techmeme and how they track a few hundred key bloggers and started tracking their linking behavior which gives rise to the stories moving up on Techmeme. I (scoble) actually start my morning reading Techmeme to see the important stories. Talks about MS – they hire lots of smart people. MS and open source – lots of groups starting to do open source. When I joined Podtech I had to fly back and forth to Seatlle and Silicon Valley until I found a perm place here in Silicon Valley. My thoughts on Indian blogosphere –
I read a few blogs, they give me a sense for what life is like in India and they help bridge my world and your world. Talks about offshring of programming and manufacturing jobs. I see that as a +ve because it forces us here to keep ahead, learn new things. We need you all Indian bloggers to help build bridges. Talks on best podcasting platform – don’t understand the question. My son has 6gb of podcasts downloaded using Itunes. Talks about Odeo for podcasting creation platform. Itunes is a good distribution platform. Talks about how even Z-list bloggers can make you famous (not sure I heard right) as much as A-list bloggers.  Mentions about Technorati (couldn’t hear clearly what he said sorry). Talks about some product that allows you to improve your baseball swing (not clear what product it is). Most people seem to be listening intently.  Now taking questions from Audience:
More to come. 

Moblogging from blogcamp.in

I managed to gate crash into the blogcamp event (billed as India’s  biggest blog unconference)  happening in Tidel Park here thanks to my Cognizant Identity Card (we have an office in Tidel). This is an unconference (you can look that up on Google).  I tried signing up through the wiki but found the process initimidating because it was marked  soldout and the extra attendees list was running into a few hundred. One of my colleagues Sriram (http://readsriram.blogspot.com) is part of the organizing team.  Happy to see the stars of the Indian Blogosphere like Kiruba (got to shake hands with him thanks to Sriram), Dina Mehta and others. When I entered the venue, someone Nandhu Sundaram from Deccan Chronicle on how blogging is an important media phenomenon. He was also comparing it with Citizen Journalism which predates Blogging. As a general observation, I found many people not listening (Sriram says people are tired being the 2nd day and all). I took that back. In all other sessions people seem to be listening intently. So my observation can be dismissed as an anomaly.  The age group is clearly in the 20s and early 30s making me feel very old ( I spotted a couple of grey haired men, but that’s about it). Ok, i am not that old, but still. We are waiting for the webcast with Scoble. First time, we almost got started, but thanks to technical glitches it got aborted. So people are using this time to have their lunch.

What your email inbox says about you?

Updated: Jeff wrote another follow-on article based on the 700 emails he received on the first one. He seems to have covered the Search stuff i mention below. But none on the personality type itself. Jeff Zaslow has written an excellent article recently in the WSJ titled “Hoarders Vs. Deleters: How you handle your Email Inbox says a lot about you“. Quoting psychologists, the article says that if you have a cluttered inbox, it could mean that the rest of your life is also likely to be cluttered. The article says, further:

On the other hand, if you obsessively clean your inbox every 10 minutes, you may be so quick to move on that you miss opportunities and ignore nuances. Or your compulsion for order may be sapping your energy from other endeavors, such as your family.

I have been thinking about this since I read the artice a few days ago and I think the article has missed 2 key points: 1. Why does one display such behavior?
If you look at one of the widely accepted personality theories – Myers Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI), and within that specifically at the 4th dimension Judging Vs. Perceiving, you will notice that Judgers are more likely to be the 2nd type mentioned above – cleaning the inbox meticulously and Perceivers are likely to be of the first type – keeping their inbox cluttered.  To understand this better, check out The Art of SpeedReading People by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger, one of the leading experts in MBTI.  In the above link, when discussing Perceivers and Judgers, Paul and Barbara discuss the example of Doreen and Ruth who do the same job and share the same desk. Doreen
is a Perceiver and she leaves a cluttered desk, whereas Ruth is a Judger and likes a clean desk. They summarize the behavior thus:

A compounding reason that Perceivers often have more paper than Judgers is that Perceivers like to collect as much information as possible, figuring: “Maybe I don’t need this right now, but I might sometime in the future.” This is true whether it is paper, old clothes, books, household gadgets, or just about any other object. Perceivers tend to be pack rats. Conversely, Judgers often take the position: “If in doubt, throw it out!” They reason that if they own something but haven’t used it for a long time, they probably won’t need it anytime soon.

This sort of explains how the Perceiver keeps accumulating emails while the Judger keeps the inbox clean. Being a Perceiver myself (I am a ENFP), I totally understand how this goes on. I have a lot of emails in my inbox. As I grow older I am reaching some sort of balance on the Perceiving Vs. Judging trait, but still i am predominantly Perceiving. Anyone that has seen my desk can attest. Another problem the WSJ article has is that it does not specify whether the inbox is cluttered with unread emails or with already read emails. In my case I would say, it is cluttered with already read emails. 2. Technology comes to the rescue
Perceivers need not despair. In the past, you had to meticulously move the emails into designated folders so that you can retrieve them later when needed. You no longer need to do that. With the advent of desktop search engines (I have used both Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search), you can index your entire email archive and then searching is lightning fast. In fact, this works so well that, once when on a call with a 2 year old acquaintance, i was able to pull up the email correspondence quickly and talk to the person intelligently about the conversation we had 2 years ago.  My acquaintance was so impressed, he asked if I was using some sort of CRM system. What I do these days is to just archive the emails in my inbox every so often so that my inbox does not become too big and just index it for search. If you have tried using Gmail, you can see that Google has completely done away with the concept of folders. Folders are outdated and don’t work well for the amount of emails we get these days. It may have worked when you got 5-10 emails a day. Not anymore. Additionally, one should also use the email management technique I had written about a while ago. I continue to use this technique and it works well for me. Notes & References:
1. There are a lot of other personality profiling techniques and I have used a lot of them. I find MBTI to be more comprehensive. Most other personality profiling techniques have a narrow focus like Relationship Awareness or some such. 2. If you want to explore MBTI further more from the perspective of a business or a career, I would strongly recommend Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger’s book “Do What You Are“.  It is a fantastic book. I have read this book a number of times, i find it extremely useful for understanding myself and my colleagues.