A couple of weeks back, I mentioned in a couple of twitterings how I was going to participate in an online video-conference interview around the topic of The Future of Work using the excellent Skype capabilities with a couple of IBM interns from Corporate Communications (Yes, indeed, no e-mail required to set it all up! Loved it!). I mentioned back then how I would be able to share with folks in this blog the actual video, the final version, so that you would be able to see / hear what my thoughts are around the subject of the next waves of interactions at the workplace.

And that time has just arrived. The video interview is up and running and available for everyone to download! But before I comment further on it, let me share with you how I found out about it. Not through e-mail, of course. Indeed!

Some time ago, Todd Watson, fellow IBMer and very good friend, mentioned a few weeks back what it’d be like coming back to work with no e-mail to process, based on the NYTimes article I got published not long ago, and just a couple of days ago, he picked up the subject, once again, in a subsequent blog post where he talked about that same subject as well as the landing page of where the video interview on The Future of Work was being hosted. I obviously picked that up from my feeds and here I am today, sharing your thoughts about it.

I don’t think that Todd will be reading this blog entry, since he is probably enjoying some very well deserved break away from everything, but the link he initially shared was the Facebook landing page from Start@IBM, a re-vamp of IBM’s new global careers Web site where you would be able to find plenty of really helpful info on how to land yourself in such a large company as IBM

On the Facebook page though you will find plenty of funny videos and interesting tidbits that will keep you busy for a while, but since you are probably much more interested in that video-conference interview, here are the details on how you can access it, since I can’t seem to be able to embed it over here.

Go ahead and check out Goodbye Cubicle, Hello Couch, which is the title of the video and which already hints some of the stuff I mentioned on the interview on what the future of work will be like soon enough. You will notice as well how in the video William Pulleyblank, Vice President, Center for Business Optimization in Global Business Services, also shares his views on what the future of work would be like, specially with the incorporation of the younger generations into the workplace. Quite enlightening to say the least!

The video lasts for about 2:25 minutes and it may sound like way too short, but not to worry, there is much more coming up shortly! I am working already with the same interns who put together the final touches of the interview into a much longer video which will contain the entire interview we did through Skype and I will then share the link to it. The video will be hosted out there on the Web, so everyone would be able to have a look into it as well. Oh, and I have just been told that the video contained in Facebook will also be shared in YouTube, so whenever that happens I will share a link to it over here as well, just in case you may want to reference it for those folks who cannot access Facebook.

Thus head over to take a look into Goodbye Cubicle, Hello Couch and get ready for the longer version of the video interview where, if you are into Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0, there will be plenty of different items discussed there to which you could relate to yourself. Stay tuned! …

Tags: IBM, Future of Work, Office2.0, Workplace, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Online Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Networks, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Generation Y, Gen Y, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Todd Watson, New York Times, Start@IBM, Start at IBM, Employment, New Hires, William Pulleyblank, IBM Global Services, Center of Business Optimization, CBO, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Conversations

Continuing further with the weekly progress reports on my new mantra of giving up e-mail, as in corporate e-mail, here I am again with another progress report, this time for week 26, where, it looks like, things have gone back to normal a bit. Or so it seems. You would remember how, for week 25 I reached a new low with regards to the incoming count of e-mails received, as I have blogged about it a couple of days back. Well last week things settled back into what I have been getting used to for the last few weeks already. Here is the screen shot of the report:

Yes, indeed, back again into the 30 e-mails coming through during the course of week. Somehow, I am starting to get used to such number, more than anything else because it makes a round number of 6 e-mails a day approx. although I am still keen on lowering it down more and more perhaps to 10 to 15 a week! Thus the fight is still on. Let’s see how it goes further…

For today though, I would like to share with you folks a couple of links that I have bumped into or that some other folks have passed on and which I am sure you are going to enjoy quite a bit. The first link comes from Alan Lepofsky, former IBMer and very good friend, and who recently moved into SocialText, for those folks who may not be familiar with the huge piece of news that hit a couple of weeks back! Alan pointed me to this particular wild idea, which I think is very much spot on with regards to the kind of e-mail overload that plenty of folks can identify with: "Broken business processes contribute to our email overload".

In it you would be able to find some really really good gems like this particular paragraph for which I just couldn’t stop smiling while reading through it:

"Worse than the volume of email is the amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker, to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650 billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions. And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010."

Indeed! Maybe that’s the problem we have been having all along. Maybe that’s where it all got started. Maybe it was down to use to complicate our own corporate existence by putting together whatever the various different business processes and then create exception after exception after exception to ensure we could all possible scenarios. And as a result of that we all went mad using e-mail all over the place to process those exceptions.

I can surely agree with the idea that business processes are the main culprit, perhaps, as to a large chunk of the e-mails we get on a daily basis and kind of wondering whether we may need to STOP, re-think things again and go back to K.I.S.S. Yes, keeping things simple, straightforward, brief, with not so many exceptions would probably help us improve the way we interact through e-mail. However, why not take things further into the next level? Why not re-think the model of engagement and move straight outside the Inbox and start re-building processes with a 2.0 flavour where perhaps openness and transparency would be part of the criteria behind them? What is it out there that may be stopping us from doing that?

I mean, we all know that most of the processes we work with throughout the course of the day are somehow broken, so why not fix them? Why not re-evaluate their validity, update them accordingly and start making use of social software tools within the enterprise. Wouldn’t it be quite something to, at least, give it a try? I am sure right from the beginning we would be able to see the benefits, like that former link / idea puts it nicely within the following quote:

"Socialtext has been building out business practice support using their customizable Enterprise 2.0 platform to return email back to its rightful place in the communication stratigraphy, which is not as the catch-all for exception handling. Their business social software makes the process more productive, reducing email by 30%."

If it sounds *so* easy, what’s stopping / preventing us from diving in and address those broken processes? Exactly! Nothing!

So what are we waiting for then? Are we just too lazy, or gotten to much used to dealing with the exceptions that we just don’t care in improving the way we work? I am not sure about you, but I refuse to think that is the case. So what is stopping us?!?

The second link is eventually a whole lot more fun, as well as educational and enlightening on what the possibilities are on moving away from the good old e-mail system(s) into a much more open and collaborative environment: in this case a wiki (This particular example coming from Socialtext as well).

The link is actually a screencast that Alan himself put together over here. It lasts a little bit over three minutes and it demonstrates how certain collaborative tasks, like gathering input, or brainstorming, can be better achieved through a wiki, which, in this particular case, taps into your regular e-mail. So those folks very keen on making use of e-mail, they still can. The rest can also then go into the specific wiki and see how they can each contribute into the overall effort.

Alan’s screencast is a very good example of how a wiki, Socialtext, in this case, can help you reduce, tremendously, the amount of e-mails you get on a daily basis as well as reducing your outbound e-mails to others. And if not, check out how easy it is:

After watching the screencast you would have to agree with me that most of the times it is not that difficult, right? It is probably just a matter of thinking outside the inbox and Alan just demonstrated it how easy it is …

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, E-mail Abuse, Visibility, Awareness, Think, Re-purposing E-Mail, Delegated Tasks, Education, Co-Working, Learning 2.0, Peer to Peer Learning, Screencasts, Wikis, Socialtext, Alan Leposky, Business Processes, Processes, E-mail Overload, Basex, Tutorials

Big, big news today! Specially for those folks out there interested in wikis and adopting wikis within the enterprise. I am sure that by now you may have read about them, since a couple of folks have already blogged about the massive announcement, but, nevertheless, just in case you may have missed it, I will share a couple of lines on it over here. Stewart Mader, author of the superb Grow Your Wiki, is going solo & starting his own consultancy business around organizational wiki adoption. Wooo-hooo!

Congratulations, Stewart!!! Way to go!!

In case you don’t know much about Stewart, which I doubt, since he is a very prolific blogger, incredibly engaging speaker, writer of one of the most essential books on wikis and corporate wiki adoption: Wikipatterns, active twitterer, too (On top of various other social networking sites!), I can honestly say that you are missing out on one of the smartest talents within the Enterprise 2.0 space we have nowadays.

I had the great opportunity of finally meeting him up in person in Varese, while presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Italy, after a couple of years of interacting all over the place in various Social Computing spaces. And it surely was one of my highlights from the event! He is even much smarter in person & we enjoyed quite a few conversations for a couple of days, specially a very very interesting and enlightening one over a beer at the airport waiting for our flights back after two and a half days of being disconnected from the world. Yes, we survived the temptation, till the last minute, at least, of getting connected and kept talking!

Either way, if you haven’t subscribed to his blog, I can certainly recommend you do so, more than anything else because otherwise you are missing plenty of good quality materials like 21 Days of Wiki Adoption that I have blogged about over here a little while ago.

I am sure that Stewart will be doing just fine going solo with his wiki consultancy and I am very excited for him and for all of us, because we would be getting even much more exposure into some of the really good stuff that he would be doing much more often from now onwards, like the ESSENTIAL presentation itself that he did over at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Italy and which is just one of many where you can see what Stewart is up to: Grow Your Wiki. I tell you, if there would be a single presentation that you would want to watch around the topics and the kind of impact they are having within the corporate world, this would be it:

CONGRATULATIONS, once again, Stewart! Well done!

You may have noticed how, over the last couple of days, things have been relatively quiet over at one of my Internet blogs: http://www.elsua.net. Well, things have gone quiet a little bit there on the front side of things, but on the background it has been one of the most intensive weeks I have had ever since I started blogging nearly 5 years ago! Yes, indeed, and that is not an understatement. And here is why…

A couple of weeks back I got an e-mail from the Google Quality Search Team where I got told that my site, i.e. http://www.elsua.net may have been compromised and that I needed to look into it or it would get banned from Google Search. Of course, with the limited amount of technical knowledge I have for these things I contacted my hosting provider folks, who told me that it was a spoof e-mail & that I could ignore it. So I did.

Big mistake!!

A couple of days later, and, while I was reading through the blog post from one of my colleagues, and good friend, Luis Benitez, (Yes, people confuse us quite a lot, too!) on the topic of his new business card I noticed that I could no longer find http://www.elsua.net through Google Search. Oh oh. No, that can’t be right! My comment in Luis’ blog post was going to be along the lines of "I hardly ever use business cards any longer. I normally just tell people "Hi, my name is Luis Suarez. Google me! #1 on the list of results!"". But apparently, not any longer! I could no longer find a single reference to my blog site.

I was banned! (Fun, fun, fun … NOT!!!)

From there onwards I went down into a spiral of frenetic activity, behind the scenes all along, except for my twitterings on the whole thing, sharing my views on what it is like being banned by such a powerful traffic driver as Google Search is and how to overcome the problem. So I contact my hosting provider once more and I mentioned that I was eventually banned, so it wasn’t so much of an spoof e-mail, was it? No, it wasn’t. Very real!

From there onwards, the interactions with the hosting provider have been rather sporadic from the perspective where they first tried to identify the problem as something to do with Bloglines, but Ben Lowery, came through to me on Twitter and mentioned there was no way it was a problem with Bloglines since the javascript I was using is not crawled by search engines. So second time I am being let down by the hosting provider. The search for the root of the cause continued…

It was then suggested that the problem had to do with http://www.elsua.net running a very back level version of WordPress, v 2.0.2, to be more precise, and that I needed to upgrade to the latest version, v2.6, as soon as possible in order to start addressing some of the issues. Yes, I already knew I was running a very back level version of WordPress, but given my limited technical skills in that area I procrastinated long enough to, apparently run into these problems. So I had to manage a way out of it and, again, with very little help from the hosting provider. Just a single URL link of where to get help! And it would take days before it could be actioned! Nice!

And here is where I got started with some more frenetic activities, because in no time I had to learn how to make the upgrade with the least disruption possible and get back in business soon enough. So, oh the irony of things, I used Google to find my way around and found the super nifty InstantUpgrade WordPress plugin and I made use of the 1.0-beta2 version.

The upgrade of the blog went by rather smooth and in less than 5 minutes! I tell you, if you would need a quick, clean, comprehensible (Even for non techies!) & easy to use plugin InstantUpgrade would be it! Yes, I know that you also have WordPress Automatic Upgrade, but that gave me errors that the former didn’t. Probably because I was running such a back level version of WordPress. Either way, I was getting, slowly, back on track. Or so I thought!

Once the upgrade was completed I noticed how everything seemed to be in place with the new 2.6 release, which is a fantastic upgrade, by the way, with plenty of great new features!, but there was a minor glitch. My entire list of categories was gone! Yes! GONE! All of them! By this time I was pretty much running into panic mode, not knowing what to do next! So I used Google again and I found the wonderful tutorial post from David Cumps (Thanks ever so much, David! Great giveback to the WordPress community!), where he explained, step by step, how to get them back! A bit of a labour intensive job, but since I only have 30 categories it wasn’t too bad.

I still needed to shape up my technical skills on how to get it all done, so I had to get a crash course, over the course of a few minutes, from another good friend of mine, and fellow IBM colleague: Brian Olore, who was patient enough to explain to me how to work and operate things with the SQL database (That was fun, once I got the hang out of it!)  and came to my rescue! Many many thanks, Brian! Appreciated the time and the just in time tutorial!

From there onwards I spent some time re-populating my categories back into the blog and despite some initial glitches here and there things worked out in the end rather smooth and there I was: fully upgraded to 2.6, categories all back to normal and with a huge sense of achievement for something that earlier on in the week I didn’t have a clue where to get started!

But that was step #1, I was still banned from Google. Still am, by the way. But thanks to various different folks, mainly through Twitter with the superb help from Laura Fitton, a.k.a @pistachio, and various folks behind StopBadware, I managed to find the way a couple of good links to follow to try to get me back in shape (Thanks much for that, folks! Great tips coming through all along!).

And just coincidentally another good friend of mine, and fellow IBM colleague, put together a blog post sharing some further details on a common problem we partially shared. Yes, indeed, Rob Smart (Thanks a million, by the way!), over at Google Ate My Blog, explained with screen shots, and step by step, how to get your Web site back into Google’s Search Index through Google’s Webmaster Tools (Yes, I know most folks out there would be familiar with those, but it was the first time for me taking a serious look into them, specially now that I was banned from Google).

Thus earlier on this morning, and after a rather hectic week with lots of activity behind the scenes on http://www.elsua.net, to try to get things back to normal, I have submitted a request for re-consideration by the Google Search Quality team and, hopefully, (Keeping my fingers crossed at this point in time!) I will be back into Google’s Search Index rather soon. Rob told me it took him a couple of days to have the request processed, so I am hoping the same would happen with my own blog as well. We shall see.

For now, I feel like I am at the end of the roller-coaster ride, and what a ride!!!, having had an exhilarating time experiencing what it is like not being indexed by Google. I have learnt lots and lots about managing your blog out there in the wild open Web, but at the same time here are a few other things I have learned along the way:

1. I need to find a new hosting provider… I wasn’t too particularly happy with the one I have got now, given their reaction & involvement with the problem(s) I had. Looking for one here in Europe, reasonably priced, too. Suggestions welcome!

2. http://www.elsua.net is going to go through a major facelift in the next few weeks. It would be about time! So if you see weird things on the main site itself, hang in there, will try to keep the disruption to a minimum (May want to subscribe to the RSS feed for the time being)

3. WordPress is an amazing CMS & blogging platform, but without the community around it of incredibly smart and talented people it would be … nothing! Yes, I just said that! How can you release a full upgrade, v 2.6, which you know is going to create a massive set of issues with missing categories, and don’t inform people about it ahead of time?!?! I had only 30 of them, but folks who have several more dozens, I am sure they weren’t happy. And a fix, v. 2.6.1 or v 2.7, is not going to help much. The harm is done! Long life to the WordPress community!!! (Thanks, David and the folks behind the InstantUpgrade plugin!). Oh, mind you, I still *heart* WordPress. Still think it is one of the most powerful blogging engines available out there! But, take the community with it, please!

4. I have got an amazing network of friends, both inside and outside of the company I work for, who went the extra mile to help out and they surely did! Many many thanks to Brian, Laura (And her network!), Rob and the folks behind StopBadware! Next time we meet up face to face drinks are on me!

5. I should not procrastinate any further with WordPress releases and jump into the latest one at a reasonable time, instead of waiting for far too long! And you shouldn’t either! Dive in, the waters are not too bad & trust your network(s)!

6. Google may still be my friend. After all, a good bunch of the pointers I have mentioned above were provided by Google’s Search engine. Would have been incredibly more difficult having to use any of the others, I can imagine.

Hopefully, I will be back into it over the next few days, so that when folks search for Luis Suarez, a.k.a. elsua, they would find who they were looking for in the first place: yours truly!

Now you know why things have been rather quiet over here this week… Have a good one, everyone!

Tags: elsua, Luis Suarez, IBM, Google, Google Search, Banned, Google Banned, Luis Benitez, Business Cards, Hosting Provider, Hostpc, Ben Lowery, Bloglines, Twitter, WordPress, Wordpress 2.6, Categories, InstantUpgrade, Plugins, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, David Cumps, Brian Olore, Rob Smart, Laura Fitton, Pistachio, Twitter, Communities, Learning, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Innovation, Personal KM, StopBadware, Tutorials, Personal Branding

Continuing further with the frenzy of shorter blog posts as well as injecting some rich media into this blog, I thought I would go ahead today and share one of the most impressive and inspirational videos I have bumped into for a long while! And I mean, in a long while! It is coming from a wonderful presentation that Michael Wesch did just recently at the Library of Congress and which has been shared across as well in YouTube.

I am sure that all of those folks heavily involved with Social Media / Computing would already know who Michael Wesch is (Have blogged about him and his work in the past a couple of times already!), so I probably wouldn’t need to make any kind of introduction, but for those folks out there who may not know about him, not to worry, I won’t be doing that intro either!

I will just ask you, all of you, eventually, to have a look into the presentation he did recently around the following topic: "An anthropological introduction to YouTube". The blog post providing an outline of what you would be able to find there can be found over at  “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” video of Library of Congress presentation and I can tell you, whether you love or hate YouTube, whether you would see its value or not, whether you would consider it a powerful platform to engage through video-sharing & video-blogging, amongst many many other things, or not, this is one of those presentations that will surely change your opinion, and inner thoughts, about YouTube and how it has changed our society and the culture of the entire human race!

It’s happened to me. Every time that I now go to YouTube, I don’t look into it with the same eyes or rules of engagement (Stay tuned for some more on that one!) as I used to. It has surely opened up my views on the kind of impact it is having within our society (And that would extend, obviously, to the role of ALL Social Media / Computing for that matter!) and if there would be a couple of words that I could use to describe his presentation they would be these two: a must watch!!! (Yes, I know that’s three words! But you know what I mean, right?)

Thus without much further ado, here is the direct link to the video, as well as the embedded version below, and after you have watched it, I challenge you all to confirm whether you have been moved by it or not. I am sure that you would, and very much so! (Specially towards the end of it!). And if not, nothing else would probably do within the social media space. I can tell you that, too! (That’s how incredibly moving, educational & enlightening it is!)

(Oh, and watch out this space as well, because it will not be the last time that in the next few days I will be talking about Michael and the brilliant piece of work he has been doing already in helping us understand how social computing is changing not only how we work, but also how we live our lives and the impact this kind of innovation is having in us all!)

Tags: Anthropology, Michael Wesch, University of Kansas, Michael Wesch, YouTube, Technology, Web, Internet, Human Race, Humanity, Life, Inspiration, Impact, Education, Learning, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Media, Social Computing, Social Software, Web 2.0, Innovation, Communities, Library of Congress

Continuing further with that growing trend of writing shorter blog posts than usual (Latest instance the article I wrote yesterday announcing my dive into the podcasting world, co-hosting, with Matt Simpson, The Sweettt Show, as we just launched our first episode), I thought I would venture into putting together another one, which I am sure you are all going to enjoy, specially if you have been doing Knowledge Management for a while. The reason why this blog post is going to be shorter than usual is no other than the meetings galore I have been going through for most of the day today, pretty intensive overall and therefore limiting my brain power to provide whatever other insights for a lengthy article.

Thus here I am, going into recovery mode for what’s left of the evening and sharing with you all something that has been flowing around in the Knowledge Management, a.k.a. KM, blogosphere for a little while now and which I am sure a good bunch of you may have been exposed to already, but, just in case you haven’t, here it goes. It is actually a video interview that Patrick Lambe, author of the super fine Green Chameleon, did with Larry Prusak & Dave Snowden, two of the most impressive, thought-provoking, enlightening and worth while following thought leaders in this space, on the topic of whether Knowledge Management is dead or not.

I have gone through the interview already a couple of days ago and, as you may be able to find out for yourselves, it is one of those interviews that will make you think for a while on the role of traditional Knowledge Management and what’s actually happening right now in that space as we speak. It will surely help you question what happened in the past, where we went wrong, what’s happening at this present moment in time and how we may have finally learned a bit from past mistakes. Yes, that thought-provoking, to say the least, I tell you.

So much so that, like I said earlier on, a whole bunch of the different KM bloggers I have been following for a while now have been sharing their views on the topic and adding further up into the conversation. Today I am only going to link to their various different blog posts, so that you have got an opportunity to weigh in a bit in what they are saying about the interview itself. In my own case, I will be chiming in accordingly sharing some further thoughts on the topics discussed a little bit later on as we move forward. Brain cells are eventually asking for an extended break at the moment, and there are tons of really good stuff I would want to touch base on, some of which I have already mentioned over here in the recent past.

Here is one initial thought though that has been in my mind ever since I watched the interview: it looks like my official job title of Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist has just been challenged and torn to pieces big time on that first bit. Has the role of the knowledge manager evaporated into thin air with the emergence of social computing?  Is there still a chance for those of us who have been doing that for a while to still claim we are knowledge managers in this 2.0 world? Are we a species at the border of extinction, if not extinct already altogether? That is right now what’s in my mind, after listening to one of the most wonderful interviews you could ever watch around the topic of Knowledge Management. Courtesy of Patrick Lambe, Larry Prusak & Dave Snowden.

We are in good hands! Enjoy it! (I surely did!)

Tags: The Sweettt Show, Sweettt, Matthew Simpson, Matt Simpson, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes, Series, New Media, IBM, Collaboration, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Traditional KM, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, Knowledge Manager, Patrick Lambe, Larry Prusak, Dave Snowden, Cognitive-Edge, Green Chameleon, KM Blogosphere