Yes, indeed, I will be on the road again! This time around to Hamburg, Germany, and as early as next week to attend an external conference whose line-up put together so far is rather fascinating and impressive: Next Conference, a.k.a. Next08 - Realtime. At the same time that I will be attending the event, I have been invited to participate as one of the speakers (Have got a keynote session at 2.45 p.m. CET on May 15th) and will have the great honour of sharing the stage with one of the folks I have been following for quite some time now and for whom I have got plenty of admiration accumulated over the course of the years. Yes, I am talking about JP Rangaswami, author from Confused of Calcutta and today Managing Director of BT Design for BT Group, according to the Wikipedia.

If you care for a moment to check out the agenda you would be able to see the good amount of great speakers that will be there, too. Some of them folks I have been following, and violently agreeing with all along, for quite some time as well, but who I have never met face to face and next week may be the perfect chance to do so. Examples like Stowe Boyd, yes, that edgling, Steve Rubel (The one and only!), Stefan Kellner (From Plazes), Gunter Dueck (Fellow IBM colleague who has done some tremendous piece of work on Knowledge Management and data warehouses), Leisa Reichelt (Author of the super fine Disambiguity) and the list goes on and on and on.

Thus with that specific agenda and impressive list of amazing speakers, you can imagine that the excitement is starting to grow inside of me quite a bit. More than anything else, because it is just right around the corner and can’t wait to get there and continue to learn from all of these thought leaders who have been pioneering in the Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0 spaces for quite a bit already!

In case you are wondering what I would be talking about at the event, I am sure that, if you have been following this blog for a while, you would already have a sense of what it will be about. Yes, indeed, about my experiment on giving up on e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. And with the well known title (Put together already by Craig Cmehil and Ed Stephens, respectively) of "Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail". I have already finished the slide deck and this time around it is very much public, for open consumption, outside of the firewall, so once I get the heads up from the conference organisers I will be sharing the deck over here, after I upload it into Slideshare.

Yes, almost ready, indeed! You may be wondering when I am planning on getting there, right? Well, I will be arriving on the 13th, at around mid-day and will be leaving Hamburg on the 17th of May late in the evening. So if you fancy getting together for a drink or two, or to catch up with a lovely conversation while I am there, do not hesitate to contact me and we will arrange something, I am sure. For now, signing off and checking out some further details from the overall conference itself, which I am sure is going to be one of those special events where I might get to finally figure out whether I am a centroid or an edgling. Or something in between, who knows heh

Tags: Conference Events, Next Conference, Next08, Realtime, IBM, Hamburg, Germany, JP Rangaswami, Confused of Calcutta, BT Group, Stowe Boyd, Edgling, Centroid, Steve Rubel, Stefan Kellner, Plazes, Gunter Dueck, Lisa Reichelt, Disambiguity, Craig Cmehil, Ed Stephens, Slideshare, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Media 2.0, e-mail, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media

So, with all of that said, I am just going to put together a few lines in here to let folks know that, once again, I will be on the road travelling to meet up with a couple of customers. This time around, as you may have been able to check through my Dopplr account already, next week, on the 19th of May, and till the 22nd, travelling to Barcelona and with a fully packed agenda for the 20th and 21st meeting various clients to discuss Social Computing within the Enterprise, and the kind of impact Social Software is having within the corporate world.

I will be coming back on the 22nd and since I already got the flight tickets and everything I just need to worry about the hotel, although I have been provided with some excellent recommendations already. Probably staying in the city center to be able to move easily and quickly, too! I doubt I would be getting much free time during the course of the 20th and 21st, specially during the working hours, but other than that it looks as if I am going to be pretty free for the rest of the time.

Thus fancy meeting up? How about some lovely tapas, a couple of beers here and there and all of that on the beach?!?! That’s the plan I have already set up with Tom Raftery, who earlier on today contacted me through Twitter to let me know that he got notified by Dopplr that we would be both going to the same city at the same time! How cool is that? (Dopplr ROCKS!!!) He is going to be there for the Startup 2.0 event, while I will be meeting up with customers, but it sounds like a really cool plan to me! Not only will I be able to finally meet up with him in real life, but I would be able to catch up with the event he will be attending with his highlights while I treat him for a drink or two heh

I know as well that Ferdy Rodenas lives in Barcelona, so that’s probably going to make it easy as well to meet up with someone I have been looking forward meeting up for a little while now, after all of our online interactions in various different places, just like Tom.

Thus there you go. We got a plan. Tapas, beers, a bunch of good friends and all of that on the beach, because I am sure the weather is going to be rather nice. Want to meet up, if you are around? Do let us know. Through a comment over here, or on Tom’s blog or Ferdy’s or hook up with us on Twitter. Probably the easiest way. Hope to see you there!

(Not sure just yet whether I would be able to blog about the outcome of the meetings with these customers, you would need to wait for a few more days, but if I can, I surely will, because so far the the scenarios are just perfect on one of the core arguments that I use for my pitch on Social Software in the Enterprise. Stay tuned for more to come…)

Tags: IBM, Travelling, Trip, Barcelona, Customer Meetings, Dopplr, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Tom Raftery, Twitter, Startup 2.0, Events, Ferdy, Ferdy Rodenas, Tapas, Beers, Beach, Life, Work, Balance

As I have mentioned at the beginning of the week, this was going to be quite an interesting week, since for the first time in 11 years I have been working in the IT field, I have just been enjoying the rare occasion of having three national bank holidays in a row, followed by the weekend, while the rest of my colleagues have continued working as usual. Thus you would expect that things may have been relatively busy, or, at least, just as good as it has been over the last few weeks, right? Well, things have been even better! Here is the weekly progress report screen shot:

WOW! 27 e-mails! Yes, that is right! A new low in the total amount of incoming e-mails for a single week! Sweet!  If I was ever looking for a nice way to celebrate the three months mark since I started with this new experiment I guess I couldn’t, perhaps, have a better one. I am not even sure whether I should continue calling it an experiment any longer, since it has already become a reality for me, at least. Three months, I guess, is a good time to stop calling it that way and start looking for something else. Or just simply venture into implying a new way of interacting, collaborating and sharing your knowledge with other knowledge workers. Either way, not too worried about looking out for definitions

For the rest not much more to share at this point in time, except for one particular gem I keep bumping into from various other folks who have been blogging about it and which I think would make an interesting connection with this particular blog post. For quite some time now, one of the questions that I keep coming up against all over the place is how do I keep up with everything that is going around in the social computing space? Most folks seem to think it is easier to manage your time through e-mail than through social software, when to me it is quite the opposite. It is way easier, and much more effective, to manage your time through social computing tools than through e-mail. And now there is something else I can refer folks to that could help answer the question quite nicely as well.

Check out Clay Shirky’s keynote session over at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where you would be able to listen / read about some really fascinating stuff that Gina Trapani, over at Lifehacker, has put together quite nicely as a very thought-provoking summary in Where You Find the Time to Spend Online:

"We’re waking up from the "collective bender" of mindlessly watching sitcoms and instead, we’re choosing instead to spend our free time volunteering, interacting, and Web 2.0′ing online."

Just.Spot.On!!! And the same would apply to me, except that instead of T.V., which I rarely watch anyway, to be honest, it’s the time I save on processing / working through work e-mail that helps me free up enough time to collaborate and share my knowledge with other knowledge workers using social software tools. Because, after all, how much time do you spend on a daily basis working through your e-mail. One sitcom? Two? Three sitcoms perhaps?

Thus with that initial setup, off we went into what turned out to be, in my opinion and if I may say so, a fascinating discussion on the overall topic of stop using e-mail at work and use, perhaps, other much more productive and collaborative tools, within the social software space. So interesting that in the end what was supposed to be a single podcasting episode turned out to be three (Yes, three!) for a total amount of nearly 50 minutes!

Matt Moore himself has already blogged about each of the different episodes, so instead of just me detailing what you will find in each of them I am just going to keep things short and share over here the table of contents that Matt already put together. That way you can get busy right where the meat is and enjoy one of the best conversations I have had on this topic in a little while now. Here are the links with the contents then:

- Download Part 1 now (16:48, 4.0Mb)

01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.

- Download Part 2 now (20:23, 4.8 Mb)

00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 - The laziness issue.
09:00 - Do we love email?
10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 - Generational issues.
13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

- Download the final part of the email detox podcast

00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 - The email detox workout video.
10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.

And that’s it! Hope you enjoy it, just as much as we did getting together and exchanging some ideas on how it is really possible to move away from work related e-mail and still be as productive as ever, if not more, making extensive use of other more collaborative tools, like social software tools. The perfect segway for my next blog post where I will be sharing the weekly progress report on what’s happened this week. Stay tuned!

Matt, Patrick and Alex, a real pleasure taking part on the podcasting episodes with you guys and thanks much for such refreshing conversation! Excellent stuff!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Jon Mell, Trovus, Matt Moore, Engineers without Fears, Patrick Lambe, Straights Knowledge, Green Chameleon, Alex Manchester, Melcrum, Connecting Communicators, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes

Remember Jon Mell, from Trovus, who I have talked about about a month ago and who put together the superb blog post "Wikis as alternatives to email - find the ROI" where he built up a rather compelling business case for my new mission on giving up on e-mail? Well, just the other day I finally got to meet up Jon through Skype and we have a superb conversation about how the experiment was going and the kind of impact social computing is having within the enterprise in order to drive new ways, perhaps better, to share your knowledge and collaborate with other peers.

As a result of that conversation we decided to put together a podcast, where over the course of nearly 35 minutes, we discussed a number of items based on a good set of questions that Jon put together and which clearly detail some of the extended commentary I have been receiving from all over the place. To give you a sense of those questions we cover during the podcasting episode, here you have got them:

1. What has the reaction been from colleagues and friends in the industry?
2. Has anyone got frustrated / annoyed (said “why can’t you just send me an email?”)
3. How much time do you spend using social media tools?
4. Given you mostly use IBM’s internal tools, how do you communicate with customers / colleagues outside of IBM?
5. Do you think it’s possible for a 100% customer facing individual (eg. a brand sales rep) to reduce email so drastically as well?
6. Have you gained any net time? Is there value in using these tools even if you haven’t?
7. Aside from time-saving have you gained any insight / learned new things from interacting with social tools that would not have been possible by email?

You would be able to download the podcast from this particular URL:

- Case study podcast on escaping from email in corporate world.

And at the same time you could also have a look into Jon’s related blog post on that very same subject under "Case study using wiki and social software in the Enterprise - conversation with Luis Suarez", where he gets to detail as well some of the key items he took away from the podcasting episode. I am not going to detail all of them, you can surely go ahead and read further from his blog post, but, as a teaser, here you have got a couple of them, which I found really good and very relevant as well as incredibly descriptive of what I am trying to achieve with giving up on e-mail while at work to still get the job done:

"- The main incentive for the content provider (Luis) was to prevent the same question being asked of him over and over again via email
- Instead of getting answers from a person, he believes in getting answers from your network. This way if Luis is too busy to reply instantly, someone else will
- There was emotional relief and reduction in stress level of having to face a sea of unread email after some time away
- Email still has its place - private and confidential exchanges of information between two parties"

There are a few more insights from Jon over at his blog post, but I am just going to leave things as is over here, so you can head over there and read some more and then, perhaps, over a lovely cup of coffee / tea enjoy the conversation we had together and which trigger the creation of such podcast.

One thing for sure that I am really glad about this particular experiment I have started a couple of months back, is that fact that not only is it helping me become much more productive than ever before, but it is also allowing me to get to know some other folks out there who are also very much involved with social computing and its adoption within the Enterprise. Lots of incredibly smart talent out there, not to be missed. Like Jon Mell’s. I am glad I decided to get things going way back then and share my experiences as well outside of the firewall, because thanks to it, I have now subscribed to one really good blog and met someone who is bringing forward lots of great ideas into provoking that cultural change we would all need to go through, at some point, if we would want to talk Enterprise 2.0.

And really really glad to finally being able to share and exchange ideas with Jon! Great conversation!

(But not to worry, there is just one other little surprise I will be sharing in the next few hours. For now … getting ready to go and enjoy live Il barbiere di Siviglia)

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Jon Mell, Trovus, Wikis, ROI, Return On Investment, Business Case, Case Study, Enterprise Adoption, Social Software Adoption, Podcast, Podcasting, Episodes, Opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia, El Barbero de Sevilla, The Barber of Seville

No, I haven’t forgotten. It is that time of the week already where I will be sharing with you my weekly report on how I am doing with my giving up e-mail campaign. I was just mentioning how much of a weird week it was, since I was out of work most of the time and without even noticing. Yes, that is right, you would remember how Monday was the day I was coming back from an amazing week in the US, attending the Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit in IBM Yorktown Heights and visiting NYC for a couple of days, then Tuesday & Wednesday were a couple of in between days as I was preparing my way to participate in a customer workshop on Friday in Zürich, then time to travel again on Thursday and return back on Saturday evening.

Quite an intensive week, indeed! But, unfortunately, and, like usual, life had other plans for me. My younger brother was taken into hospital for an operation to address a Trigeminal Neuralgia on Tuesday afternoon, to then get operated on Wednesday and wait for a couple of days before going back home again. I am now happy to report that he is doing just fine and although he was supposed to leave the hospital during the course of today, he decided to stay in one more night and will be leaving back home during the course of tomorrow. So, that is a piece of big news. And good ones, too!

Then on Wednesday evening, and, as I was preparing everything for my trip on Thursday morning to Zürich, I finally developed a terrible cold and a very very painful sore throat with which I could hardly say a word, nor swallow a thing (Not even any liquids!). So when I developed 39 C of fever I decided to cancel the whole trip as there was not going to be a single chance I would be flying in that state and decided to spend Thursday and Friday in bed, resting, and taking it easy, while I was getting rid of that nasty bug I got while I was in NYC!

Oh, and a quick interruption in here, I have got some AMAZING colleagues at work, because within minutes of me canceling the whole thing I had one specific good friend who came over to the rescue, grabbed all of the materials I had for the workshop, flew to Zurich for me, and did a GREAT job! And today his manager had a lovely e-mail coming from me, and he himself a lovely surprise along with it as well! There, that’s social networking doing its magic once again. This friend of mine working for IBM as well, obviously, is someone I mostly communicate with through various social software tools, since we both work in different projects, teams, business units, countries, you name it!

Anyway, so you can imagine how awful it must have been having to experience all of that in a single week. It started quite all right with me returning back from a pleasant trip across the pond, but then over time it developed into plenty of different issues that have just gotten fixed over the course of the weekend. Younger brother is doing fine and with no more pain any longer! My cold is completely gone and feel much better, thank you very much and today has been my first day back at work after being knocked down for those two days for the first time in 11 years! Yes, *that* bad!

But, as you can probably imagine, there is one single thing that doesn’t stop in this life, and that is the amount of e-mails you get on a daily basis, so I have still been keeping up with the weekly report and if last week was the one that has resulted in one of the busiest so far from the 11 weeks I have been following this experiment, this time around, this week, things have gone back to normal! Phew!

I knew it! I knew that last week was an exception due to some  special circumstances I mentioned back then and surely glad to confirm that although I was gone again, for most of the week, the amount of interactions through e-mail have gone down again. Here is the weekly screen shot with last week’s results:

37! Yes, that is right! 37 e-mails, coming from 60, the previous week! Talking about having a remarkable difference from one week to the other! Who would have thought about that, right? Well, there you have it. Funny enough, I mentioned in a couple of internal social software tools that I was offline sick and that it would take me a little while to respond back in those same social software tools and the response seems to have even reached my incoming e-mails! Which I think, not sure about you, was just terrific, because just this morning, it meant that I didn’t have any e-mails to process and could just get to work right away, even after a tough week last week.

You see? This is what I mean when I keep saying I will not give up any time soon on this experiment. On the contrary. I am even already investigating some alternatives for diverting a good chunk of the e-mails I am getting at the moment, and see if I can reduce that incoming e-mail load down to 20, or under 20 a week! Will keep you all posted on it as time goes by.

For the time being, I am just going to leave things as is, and already getting busy finalising those drafts I mentioned I would be putting together summarising my experiences while I was at the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit as well as my experiences in NYC! Thus stay tuned as they would be finally coming up shortly!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Conference Events, Summit, Zurich, Family, Sick, Illness, Brother, Trigeminal Neuralgia, Balance, Life, Things That Matter

And here I am now, putting together some thoughts, as I am already back home, having arrived earlier on today, and trying to have some rest in between to get back to work tomorrow in full force. And faithful to keep capturing my experiences, I have been putting together some notes from last week’s weekly progress report on the my giving up on e-mail mantra, work related e-mail, that is, and must say that last week was not very encouraging. At all. On the contrary.

However, it surely was an amazingly exciting week having enjoyed one of the best conference events I have attended in years around the subject of social computing within the enterprise and beyond, met as well part of my team, and my new boss (Who, by the way, follows me now on Twitter. How cool is that?), went and visit New York city for the first time in my life (Yes, I know, about time!!) and, finally, met some wonderful people who, now more than ever before, are already part of my life as we finally had the opportunity to know each other face to face and the conversations, along with the experience, was just tremendously positive!!

Yet, after all of that excitement that I will be sharing some more thoughts on in upcoming blog posts, it was a disappointing week, at least, for my quest on giving up on e-mail. In a way, though. Not entirely, and over the next day or so I will explain what I mean. But before we all go into that I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks a couple of interesting links I bumped earlier on during the week, which I am sure you would find rather relevant to the overall experience.

They are both twitterings shared earlier on: by Stowe Boyd, who quoted Doc Searls on a particular statement which I have decided is going to be part of me and my online interactions from now onwards, specially as I move on further with this e-mail detox (As Matt Moore would say…): "Email is where knowledge goes to die" and by my good friend, Víctor Ruiz, who was quoting a rather enlightening comment with some wise words from Joi Ito under Loic Lemeur’s Seesmic du Jour 124: Joi Ito explains Creative Commons: "Email is user generated content to each other, is crap to everybody except for ourselves". Really worth while listening to the four minute long videocast, for sure.

At the same time a couple of other interesting links were put together by two folks I have been following for a while. The first one JP from Confused of Calcuta who comes to ponder some more on the role of e-mail with social networking sites like Facebook and how it is changing the game between enterprises to help them share their knowledge and collaborate closer. Good read! And the other link is from my good friend and one and only Kelly Drahzal, who seems to have started her own fight against e-mail and although perhaps not as radical as my approach, still a very good one, which I am sure is going to work for her rather well. No doubt! Oh, and Kelly was one of the many many folks I met while at the IBM Web 2.0 Summit and Beyond and she is even much more amazing in person! But more on that later on…

Like I said earlier on, this past week has not been very good as far as my giving up on e-mail experiment is concerned. On the contrary, rather disappointing! But not to worry, I am not planning on giving up any time soon! Like I have been saying all along, I am not going to go back. This new working environment where everything goes around through everything else but e-mail is way much more fun! But first things first. Here is the screen shot with the results from last week:

Whoooaaahhh!!! 60 e-mails in a week while away from the office? How can that be? I mean, the week before you would remember how I eventually got 38 e-mails, yet last week things have gone sky high! My goodness! The highest number of e-mails I have received in a week ever since I got started with the whole thing about giving up on e-mail! So, what happened? What am I going to do from here onwards to keep things back under control on that 30 to 40 e-mails range? Is there still hope to make it work?

Yes, there is, indeed! Like I said, there is no way for me to go back, so the first thing I will be doing from here onwards is to be a bit more aggressive in how I am going to keep diverting some of these conversations. And here are a couple of examples that would help illustrate the whole thing and what I am talking about.

As you would be able to see, most days from last week were all pretty busy. On Monday, however, I got 9 e-mails, out of which 7 of them were related to an urgency matter that needed my attention and which could have taken place in a collaborative wiki. It was for a project team and, pretty much like Ray Sims has been saying over at KM2.0 Presentation - Boston KM Forum (By the way, if you haven’t watched the referenced slide deck nor the blog post I would strongly suggest you do as you are going to get exposed to some very solid piece of work around the topic of Knowledge Management 2.0), ALL e-mails related to a project should be going into the team collaborative space and not e-mail. It would have had the same effect, except we would not have wasted so much time clearing the whole thing out through e-mail in the first place with people bouncing off and on different tidbits that we all knew we needed in a central place!

The second example is actually a result of something that I have been exposed to and which may not be that frequent to other folks. As you may have observed, specially if you have been reading this blog for a while, this year seems to be the year of the conferences and customer meetings for me, because I am getting to attend plenty more than the last couple of years combined! This, in itself, is a very good thing as it shows more and more folks are interested in social software in general and folks would want to know how they could make it work for their businesses. Unfortunately, this means that there is going to be an increase of incoming e-mails to try to confirm and finalise dates, agendas, presentation materials, etc. etc. So before I knew it I was already on 12, 14, and 14 e-mails for the last three days from last week, and that is something I am really willing to explore and find a solution for it, before it becomes an overkill.

So how about a wiki, an internal wiki space, in this case (Since some of those events may be of a sensitive nature), where folks who may be interested in inviting me to attend and / or present at conference events would have the opportunity to put a few lines indicating what it would be for, what they are looking for and then I can come back into the wiki page and share my take on it, i.e. confirm whether I can make it or not. And get things going from that moment onwards. The amount of e-mails exchanged to achieve this is something that has got me thinking and perhaps something that I will be giving it a try starting this coming week. I would be curious to find out how people react to this new approach of coming up with conference events invites. If it works all right, I am planning on sticking around with it. And if not, then I will have to look for something else, because most of that traffic has originated with such kind of events.

As an example, this past week I have managed to confirm my attendance and participation in events taking place in Spain, Germany (And several times while in there as well!), Zürich, and a couple of other places I will be mentioning shortly, as soon as I get a chance to update my Dopplr account.

Yes, I know, long blog post, but not to worry, I am going to leave things like this looking forward to this week to see what would be happening this time around. So far this past week has been an interesting one in this respect, since I never expected to reach such high number, but then again it was all due to a couple of items that I am sure are easily fixable. Thus let’s see what happens this week and I will surely keep you posted on progress, for sure. As a teaser, my Monday is now done and we are back on track!

Now… on to finish those draft blog posts with some of the highlights from the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, as I am sure you are wondering what the week was like and why I enjoyed it so much. Stay tuned for more to come …

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Conference Events, Summit, Twitter, Social Networks, Networking, Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls, Joi Ito, Victor Ruiz, Loic Lemeur, Matt Moore, JP, Confused of Calcuta, Kelly Drahzal, Kellypuffs, Ray Sims, Wikis, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, KM 2.0, Knowledge Management 2.0

But if I have to be honest with you folks, the main reason why I am so looking forward to this week’s Web 2.0 event is because for the first time in years I would be able to put together a face behind the text, the voice, the interactions of a whole bunch of people I will be meeting up with for the next few days. It is going to be one of those experiences where I will be taking social networking to the extreme once again. The experience through the Web on what you can get from social computing will have NOTHING to do with what is going to happen tomorrow and over the course of the next couple of days.

And today just saw a glimpse of it already. Arrived at the hotel, chilled out a bit, unpacking and getting comfy and, of course, had to get the wireless connection to see what various people were doing and right away and in less than 30 minutes I got my WHOLE week booked up with some really really cool events!! Way awesome! Not only meeting up with a great bunch of social software enthusiasts, but also exposure to lots and lots of great materials, fantastic keynote speakers, lovely dinners and meetups in the evening and after the event already packed with additional activities I will be confirming with different people involved. So if you tried to get in touch with me before, not to worry, I shall be sharing all of the details with you shortly. If you haven’t got in touch just yet, but planning to do so, by all means, I am sure we could spend some time catching up with each other! After all, one thing is the social computing interactions through the Web and another thing is just getting to experience it in real life.

Which is what I am about to do in the next few hours, so you may need to excuse the light blogging coming along, since I doubt I would have much time to blog it all initially due to the fact I will be running around like mad helping out that everything works out all right with the rest of the organisers. Plus attending some sessions, plus meeting some new people, plus getting to talk to some of those folks I know for years! and the list keeps growing larger and larger by the minute!

So much so that I think that in between enjoying the event, the multiple various conversations I will engage with, the social events and whatever else I sense there will be very little time blogging ahead of me. Thus that’s why this time around I am going to try something different…

Remember my twitterrhea over at Lotusphere 2008, where I got a chance to tweet quite a bit on all of the happenings during such a terrific event that I got exposed to? Well, this time is going to be different. To start with, I have gone ahead and created an exclusive new Twitter id: elsuacon, that I will only be twittering about the different events I will be attending from here onwards, and that getting started tomorrow. So I am planning to go wild on that one and make as much annotations as my little brain can process, with the hopes that those notes in Twitter will help with the creation of highlights through various blog posts on what the event has been. Thus the blog posts may not be that often, since the sessions are very very short and there are multiple places where I would have wanted to blog and won’t be able to, but my new Twitter ID, elsuacon, surely is going to get plenty of activity.

So you can imagine that with all that said, I am going to share with you one short, quick warning: do not subscribe to the channel unless you would want to go through some twitterrhea which may take over your own Twitter snippets. You can certainly keep commenting and engaging in the conversation over at my usual Twitter handle, but everything else, like session reviews, anecdotes, summaries, stuff learned, etc. etc. will go into this new Twitter account I have created.

Hopefully, that way, I can put together plenty of thoughts very quick for each session, which I could then summarise and put together with some nice wording after the whole thing is done as part of the Highlights. Apart from the day to day dialogue. At the same time, I am sure you have seen already how one of my fellow IBMers,  Sacha Chua, one of the folks I have been wanting to meet up for a long while now!, has created a hashtag for the event under web20summit, so folks can also follow our thoughts easier and much much faster.

And talking about thoughts, there would be plenty of other stuff I could talk about for what’s left of the week, but one step at a time, my body is seriously asking for some rest, and I think I am going to give in. So, stay tuned for plenty more to come and if you see I have gone far too quiet on this blog, it is for sure due to the fact that I am taking the extreme the usage of elsuacon, over at Twitter!

Can’t wait for all the fun to get started!!

Tags: Yorktown Heights, NY, IBM, Watson Research Center, Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, Web20Summit, Web20Summit2008, Web20Summit08, Conference Events, Summit, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal KM, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Social Software Adoption, MacBook Pro, Twitter, Blogging, Con-Blogging, Metablogging, BOFs, Birds of a Feather, Crowne Plaza, White Plains, Events, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, elsuacon, Sacha Chua, Hashtags

Must admit that, as you may have well been reading all along, my new mantra is on trying to give up just on work related e-mail, since I don’t get enough e-mail traffic externally, but if there is ever a chance where that would change I, for sure, would be having a good look again at Darren’s blog post and start applying some of those different techniques to handle large chunks of e-mail in a short period of time.

But for now, let’s keep things short again, so that I can finish up with all the packing and get some rest before the long trip tomorrow. Here is the screen shot from the weekly report from this week about to finish on the amount of e-mails I have received thus far:

As you may have been able to see, the number of incoming e-mails has increased a tiny bit, to 38, compared to the lowest number ever I got from last week on 34. I have also highlighted the highest number of e-mails received, on 47, so you can have a look at the main differences. So a little bit more than last week’s, but far away from that figure of nearly 50.

Thus one of the conclusions I have reached over the last couple of weeks is how I feel that over time it’s going to lower down that overall figure below the mark of 30 e-mails and perhaps not reaching further up more than 40. So depending on how it would go over the next couple of weeks, I may start pacing out these weekly reports, if they figures continue to settle in between the 30 and 40 a week, which I am not sure what you would think about, but to me is a huge improvement already, if you come to think that figure of 30 to 40 e-mails a week I am getting nowadays is what I used to get a day before I got things started. So, to me, that’s a massive improvement and over time, even though I will still continue to try to keep it on the low side, I sense I would have to come to terms with considering the 30 to 40 mark a really good start!

I know that for most folks out there, receiving 30 to 40 e-mails a day, before I got started with this experiment, was probably a very low mark already, compared to those who may be getting 100 to 200 e-mails a day, but I must say that the reason why I got that low mark already before getting started was because I have been diverting most of those conversations through e-mail into social computing tools, since I have been using them already for several months / years. But it is perhaps now when I have taken things to the extreme where I am seeing all of the various benefits.

This coming week, about to get started tomorrow, is going to be another interesting one, since I am going to be away from my home office the entire week attending a conference event where I am not so sure just yet what kind of connection there would be and then will be busy for the rest of the week with some more meetings and gatherings with friends and fellow IBM colleagues. Thus we shall see what happens. Hopefully, folks would keep finding the right social / collaborative tool to get in touch and although I will be blogging during the entire week on my experiences during the conference event, it will be intriguing to figure out what will happen. The first time I went away for the entire I eventually got less than 40 e-mails. Let’s see what happens this week…

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Private, Confidential, Darren Rowse, GMail, Summit, Inbox