E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Evolution of the Web: Past, Present, Future by Nova Spivack

And continuing further with that series of blog posts with highlights from 2009, here is another one that I thought I would share with you folks today. It’s not going to be the only one touching on this specific topic, but I guess I had to start somewhere. Yes, that’s right! I’m talking about some of the most amazing presentations that I have been able to attend live, or rather, get exposed to them from services like Slideshare that some of the folks I have been following for a while have been sharing across in there.

One of those presentations that I have certainly found really inspiring, as well as very much thought-provoking, is the one put together by Nova Spivack under the title "The Evolution of the Web: Past, Present, Future" and which he gets to describe briefly over at his blog. If you are looking for one of those presentations that would make you think for a while where we are in terms of our own usage and exposure to the Web, and its true potential, and, much more interestingly, where we are heading, this is one presentation to go through!

When I was first exposed to it a couple of days back, I just couldn’t help pondering about what my own Web user experience has been throughout the last 13 years. You would think that it’s been one of those that some would consider mature, specially when I realised it’s been almost 10 years since my first exposure to social software. However, if you check Nova’s deck you will realise how it’s actually something more to do with baby steps. Right at the infancy of what the Web will offer not just today, but in the next upcoming decades.

Plenty of people seem to think that Enterprise 2.0, or Social Computing, whatever term you would want to refer to, is the final destination that will help change the way we work within the enterprise,  fundamentally transforming not only the business itself, but us all as knowledge workers who are constantly depending more and more on the flow of information and knowledge at our fingertips. Well, for all of those folks I can certainly recommend you check out Nova’s deck, because it surely isn’t the case…

Somehow, after going through his deck, that growing sense that Enterprise 2.0 is just the beginning, having just gotten started with its initial infancy stages, would become stronger than ever. Yes, we are at the beginning, or going through the initial stages rather, of a new (r)evolutionary way of conducting business, of having more information than ever before at out immediate reach and having to make plenty of informed / learned decisions that may well not only change, but also influence tremendously, the corporate world as well as knowledge workers. I know that some of you may be thinking out loud we are witnessing a rebirth of Knowledge Management, perhaps. In fact, some of the main principles, defined over 15 years ago, are still the same.

However, in my opinion, there is a big fundamental change taking place and Nova nails it quite nicely on that presentation shared above by using a specific term I have grown to become rather fond of over the last few months… Yes, I’m talking about the Intelligent Web. The last frontier for the World Wide Web, where, finally, we are starting to see how it will connect everything, bringing into reality the concept of Semantics, for which Nova describes five different approaches that combine some of the main key elements that long time ago KM tried to put together, but never succeeded, at least, completely: Tagging, Statistics, Linguistics, Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence.

That’s where Social Computing kicks in; it’s just the beginning, the first initial baby steps for us all to realise there is something larger out there on the Web that we will eventually end up with. It may take us another decade or two, but eventually the move towards it is inevitable. So I guess the mission for us all is to keep growing along with it; don’t think that Social Computing is the end of it all, but rather… just the beginning. And if you would need further inspiration of what may lay ahead I’m just going to leave things over here as is and embed Nova’s Slideshare deck below for you to watch and ponder about it some more … It will be worth it, I can assure you of that. If not, judge for yourselves …

A World Without Email – Year 2, Weeks 42 to 45 (50 Minutes a Week!)

While starting to look back into another amazing year with plenty of things happening all over the place, both on a personal and work related levels, I guess it’s time for me to start putting together a number of different blog posts on what this year has been like so far and what lies ahead for 2010. No, not to worry, *none* of these blog posts will be about the well-known, and already abundant, 2010 predictions series. Like every year, I’m planning to make it a bit more personal than just a business or industry focus. Like I said, for all of those there are hundreds of articles already out there which I am sure you may have been reading already…

So, over the next couple of weeks I am going to share a number of different reflections on what 2009 has meant for me and what it has enabled to prepare for the upcoming year. And perhaps the main major highlight that I have been thinking about throughout the last few weeks is how, once again, another year, I have managed to keep living "A World Without Email". Yes, that’s right! For the second year straight I’ve been able to carry on with my experiment of giving up on corporate email to the point where I never thought I may be able to pull it through altogether, but, here I am, coming closer to that date that will mark the third anniversary and still going strong!

It’s interesting to see how over the course of the last few months I seemed to have settled in with putting together blog posts with those "weekly" progress reports, but on a monthly basis. It looks like that’s the timeframe I keep coming back to in order to share what’s been happening. Interestingly enough, in a previous blog entry, I mentioned how I would be making use of my Posterous Web site to move those reports to. Yet, it hasn’t happened, as you may have noticed …

And judging for how attached I continue to be to this little project overall, I doubt it will ever happen. More than anything else, because I still want to keep things simple and point people to a single focal point of entry where they would be able to find all of the different progress reports without having to use multiple URLs, but just one. And besides that, also because I think the overall experiment still has got a place in this blog, at least, that’s how I feel about it and why, perhaps, I will continue to share those progress reports on a monthly basis over the next few months… Yes, I’m planning on keeping things going into the third consecutive year without using email at work! Yay!

I know that perhaps plenty of people out there bumping into these blog posts may not be rather excited about them, but, to me, it’s all about proving a point; and that’s been part of a reflection I have been pondering over the last few weeks as well: "A World Without Email" has always been associated with elsua. So why change that, right? That’s how most folks out there who have been following this blog for a while got to know someone called Luis Suarez, who nearly two years ago challenged the status quo of the corporate world saying out loud that enough was (Still is!) enough! No more email, please! Smarten up, think! and start making use of much more efficient and effective collaboration and knowledge sharing tools! Welcome to my Enterprise 2.0 world!

2009 has been quite a ride in this space, for sure! Having started the year feeling very much like I was alone fighting it all, showing and educating folks on how they themselves could move on further from email and into various other social software tools, surely has proved to be a rather exciting experience when at the end of the year I have been witnessing how several dozens of the people who I closely collaborate and share knowledge across with have managed to also cut down on their incoming email counts to the point where in most cases, and for a good bunch of them, I don’t even have their email addresses! Whoahhh!

Well, 2010 is going to continue with that trend. As more and more of my colleagues, and other fellow knowledge workers, get acquainted with a good number of social software tools somehow I sense how that third year without corporate email is going to be just as successful as the first or the second one. So if for this year I had set up a follow up challenge to receive around 20 emails, or less, a week, somehow I feel I’m ready to stretch it all out in 2010 and perhaps keep decreasing that number even more! Say between 15 to 20. Or even between 10 and 15, why not, right?

But how have I been doing over the last four weeks, you may be wondering, I am sure. Am I ready to keep things going with this experiment into the new year? Well, I think so. I hope so! If you take a look into the progress reports for weeks #42, #43, #44 and #45 you will see how over those few weeks things have been going really well (#20, #23, #12, #19, respectively, the number of incoming emails received) and since we are entering that time of the year where things are much slower than usual I can always be hopeful that I’ll be well into the new year right on target on that potential follow up challenge for that third year giving up on corporate email. W00t!

It’s interesting to see how when comparing the same periods of time from the first and second years the progression has been rather remarkable thinking that plenty of weeks I have been getting as much as half of the emails in the second year from the first one, so I keep being optimistic that things will continue going down, even though plenty of people keep saying that our corporate email usage will double in 2010. We shall see …

For now though, I’m just pretty excited that throughout these 45 weeks I have gone through without email at work I have been averaging around 24 emails per week. Yes, 24!! Which means that I have probably been spending around 50 minutes a week to process them all (Yes, 50 minutes a week!) and the rest of the time I have just been sharing knowledge and information (As well as collaborating across) in networked environments, i.e. social networks and communities, which is probably one of the best things I may have done in my 13th year working for my current employer: IBM. I may venture into saying as well I just regret one single thing from this whole experiment: not having started with it all back in 2000, when I was first exposed, and started using, social software tools… Oh well …

2010, here I come again! Are you ready?

Tags: 2009, Reviews, Yearly Review, 2010, Predictions, 2010 Predictions, Posterous, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Challenges, Experiments