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

Dramatic Weekend in Gran Canaria

Tags: Gran Canaria, Canarias, Canary Islands, Fires, Spain, Tragedy, Drama, Paradise

I know that this weblog post is very much off topic, and you would have to excuse me for it, but if there are ever pictures out there that would be worth while 1,000 words, the following set would be those that would provide you with a intensive sense of drama, if not tragedy. For all of us:

My dearest paradise is burning and it hurts. It truly hurts…

---

(Pictures courtesy from JrGMontero, rvr, elesar1)

Happy Earth Day y Las Cosas Pequeñas

Tags: Earth Day, Dia de la Tierra, Earth, Tierra, Macaco, Mama Tierra, Cuatro, Small Things, Life

Si el viernes pasado había comentado como lo que realmente importa son las cosas pequeñas, aquí os dejo un par de vídeos para celebrar el Día de la Madre Tierra (Happy Earth Day!) y demostrar cómo tampoco hay que hacer grandes alardes de nada para mantener el respeto con aquella madre que nos mantiene y que nos hace seguir adelante día a día sin pedir mucho a cambio. Quizá un poco de respeto y afecto para con ella. Tampoco es tanto, ¿verdad?

Pues aquí os dejo unos vídeos que, como veréis, tienen mucho que ver con las celebraciones de hoy sobre el Día de la Tierra. Los tres basados en una misma canción de Macaco que, seguro, a estas alturas, habréis escuchado en varias ocasiones y que se titula Mama Tierra. La canción no está nada pero que nada mal, bastante pegadiza, pero el mensaje que trata de dar no tiene ningún desperdicio tampoco y ¡ojalá! que cada uno de nosotros nos diéramos cuenta realmente de que tratarla bien es algo que está a nuestro propio alcance y si no escuchad la canción, disfrutad de los vídeos y ya me contaréis:

Versión corta de Cuatro:

Versión original en acústico:

Y, por último, ¿quién dijo que los jóvenes de hoy en día no están utilizando las nuevas tecnologías para compartir sus vídeos con mensajes tan claros, sencillos y a la vez tan contundentes como éste:

En fin, lo dicho, Feliz Día de la Tierra, Mama Tierra!

It Is All about You, Indeed, but the Social You - About the Power of Online Communities

Tags: TIME, Time Magazine, Person of the Year, 2006, User Generated Media, User Generated Content, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, KM2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Online Communities

Well, it is official! I am now on holidays! Yay! And for the next few weeks! Excellent! So, to start with, I have been enjoying a couple of days off and away from the computer for just about everything else. But you will get to hear about that shortly. Not to worry. However, what happened? I have just been away for a couple of days and it looks like a whole bunch of the folks I get to follow on a daily basis from all sorts of different interest areas have gone wild and pretty much crazy and decided to link to the very same story that has been going around in the last couple of days. You will have to bear with me on this one, but I am just going to link to all of the different weblog entries that I have been finding while doing a little bit of catch up with my RSS feeds as at the end of that exercise there is a message for all of us that we should not forget and should act as a reminder as well for all of us.

I guess all of this has happened because of the recent TIME magazine article "You — Yes, You — Are TIME’s Person of the Year". Yes, I know, I get to receive an award of such merit and I am not even there to pick it up ! How dare I do just that? Shame on me! I guess that next year it will be difficult for me to be even nominated for it again. I suppose I have now lost my lifetime chance. My very own 15 minutes of online fame. My opportunity to tell everyone what it has meant being there, through thick and thin, all of these years. Whatever. I am not going to bore you any longer with the typical speech everyone has been sharing all over. I rather prefer to comment on another subject, still very much related, and which not many people have been noticing all along since that news article was published.

Yes, indeed, TIME may have just announced that TIME’s 2006 Person of the Year is you!, which I know is pretty cool, but the thing that most people seem to have been ignoring is that this is not an award about an individual or individuals just for the sake of that user-generated-media buzz, on the contrary. It is actually all about that user-generated-content shared with others. Yes, that is the whole point to me regarding TIME’s article: You, the social you, gets the "Person of the Year 2006" award, because whether we like it or not, without that social aspect embedded on all of those different interactions we got nothing. No Web 2.0, no social computing, no social networking. Nothing. Nada. Zero.

Yes, that is what I have found very remarkable about the article itself and that is the fact that for the first time in a long while, perhaps even for the first and only time, here we have got one of the most frequently read, and influential, traditional magazines recognising the power of online communities to change the world in such a significant manner that it gets to be nominated for such award. How cool is that? Doesn’t that make you feel good? Specially if you are an online community builder who has been struggling throughout the years trying to convince people all over the place, both inside and outside of work, about the power of the group, of the community, to make things happen in much more significant and powerful ways?

I am sure that this article is actually going to change the way most folks out there, specially knowledge workers, think about being part of a community, of a group with a common goal, a shared purpose, a common tools suite to encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration on a specific topic and so forth. For us all, online community builders, it would mean that things would get a little bit easier, that we would probably not have to deal so much with the basics but from now on getting a bit more into the details on why communities just simply work the way they do.

So for that and for so much more, thanks much!, TIME, for such an award and for helping enlighten the world about what online communities and the power of social computing are all about. Appreciated waking them up!

---

Oh, and in case you may be wondering what have been my favourite quotes from the overall article here you have them:

"It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before [...] It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

And

"We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy"

Yes, indeed, it feels good!

So Close, Yet So Far - About the Impact of Technology in Our Daily Interactions

Fancy doing some really interesting and thought provoking reading on the always fascinating subject of technology’s impact in everyone’s day to day life? Yes, I know, I bet you would. Check out then Thomas Friedman’s So close, yet so far, over at International Herald Tribune, where he actually gets to share a great story on the impact of technology on him and those around him, specially in a recent trip to Paris where he actually got to interact, if you could say that, with a local taxi driver. I can certainly recommend highly for you to go and read the article because in it you would be able to find little gems like this one:

"[...] The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod

There was only one thing we never did: talk to each other."

Or this other one:

"I relate all this because it illustrates something I’ve been feeling more and more lately - that technology is dividing us as much as uniting us. Yes, technology can make the far feel near. But it can also make the near feel very far [...]"

And there are plenty more! I am sure that by the time you finish off its reading you would agree to some extent with what Thomas mentions and perhaps you could even relate to it, too. I know I have. Not here where I live, though. It is a rather small place still to be noticed by technology with such impact, but certainly in most of my travelling done over the last few years more and more I am noticing that, too.

However, the key message I got from Thomas’ article is that, contrary to what he seems to state, I do not necessarily feel that is a bad thing, actually. Yes, I can imagine when situations like that could be rather annoying as they facilitate providing a strong sense of ignoring those around you, but at the same time there are times when you are actually much better on your own and technology may be providing you with the perfect excuse for it. The key message to me though is to find a balance, because like I have quoted a few months back: "We create our own distractions and just need to learn to manage them".

So that is the whole point to me about Thomas’ article, that sometimes it is good to be left alone thinking about your own thoughts and some other times it is good to talk (with others). The key thing is to be able to distinguish when to do what and for what purpose and whom is it going to have an impact on. Because whether we like it or not, Thomas’s article is not bringing forward anything new in this scenario. For quite some time now, there have always been plenty of distractions around us and it has been up to us to decide when we would need to focus and when not. And if it has happened in the past for a number of years I just cannot see how technology is going to have such an impact. If it is used properly, that is.

As a wrap up to this weblog post let me now point you to a letter to the editor where a couple of folks have been commenting as well on this particular article. Check out Letters: Being good, Technology and Society. And specially read the commentary from Rhonda Kelner, whose last paragraph reads as follows:

"IPods, cellphones and laptops should certainly be shut-off at times, and used with great caution, or not at all in some situations, but these gadgets don’t necessarily stymie human interaction and attention. Indeed they often stimulate conversations about technology."

Just brilliant!

Tags: Technology, Thomas Friedman, Interruptions, Distractions, IHT, Technology Impact

Five Questions: Brian Truskowski - Emerging Technologies and Jams at IBM

A couple of weeks ago there was one worth while reading news article over at SignOnSanDiego where Brian Truskowski, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for IBM, was interviewed with five different questions where he actually got to talk about what IBM is currently doing around the area of emerging technologies within Web 2.0 and social software in order to enable knowledge workers to share more knowledge and collaborate with one another, along with customers and, perhaps, in a smarter way, and since it seems to be a recurring question that I get every now and then I thought I would link to it so that folks out there, who may be interested in finding out how such a large corporation is making use of all of these emerging technologies, would get a chance to find out some of the latest happenings in this subject.

Thus in Five Questions: Brian Truskowski you would be able to find not only some very interesting facts about the IBM adoption of weblogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc. etc. but at the same time you would be able to read nice gems like this one:

"These [technologies] are all better ways to connect people to each other."

Yes, indeed, something that I have been mentioning myself all along myself and for which I never get tired of reminding everyone. It is all about people, about making connections, about engaging in different conversations and whoever else says otherwise then I guess they would need to think again and figure out if they get it or not. There is always a good time to get started at some point though, just in case people out there may want to dive in.

In that same article you would be able to read how Brian mentions Jams as a way to engage IBMers and customers alike to drive through further on innovation and if you would remember not long ago I created a couple of weblog posts where I was actually mentioning the InnovationJam and how I actually managed to participate in Phase I of the initiative chiming in submitting ideas and collaborating with other folks.

Unfortunately, there was a second phase for InnovationJam that it actually took place while I was at the workshop in Cincinnati so I couldn’t participate as active as I would have expected. Yet, there have been thousands of conversations going on and at the moment, and as part of the catchup, I am actually reading through the archives of the event so that I can get some idea about what got discussed and where do we go from here. And by the looks of it not everything may be lost, because one of the new capabilities from the second phase of Global InnovationJam is the fact that there is still now one massive InnovationJam Wiki still up and running and which is still collecting, till end of the month, some further input on how to improve the quality of those ideas and make them actually into real opportunities for everyone to expand further on.

How cool is that? So even though I may have missed out on the overall event, Phase II, I still get a chance to participate with hundreds, if not thousands, of other folks expanding further on those ideas and see how things would move further. And yes, indeed, there are several ideas around the topic of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds and the impact they are having in the enterprise, but I guess that would be the subject for another weblog post …

Tags: Web 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Wikis, Weblogs, Podcasts, InnovationJam, Jams, IBM, Innovation, Emerging Technologies