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

The Second Coming of Blogging

At a time where a good number of folks have been validly questioning the future of blogging as we know it, and perhaps venture into what that future may hold for such an important aspect of social computing as the Act of Blogging itself, both Internet and Corporate Blogging, or at a time where most of the knowledge workers out there are starting to move into social networking sites a la Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. etc. trying to keep up with the various different lifestreams that keep coming out of nowhere, it’s always refreshing to know that what you have been doing all along still holds… And rather strongly!

Intriguing start of a blog post, right? Yes, indeed! I know. Done on purpose. For a good couple of years I have always been very certain that blogging, both corporate and Internet blogging alike, would always keep an important and relevant place within the social computing realm, despite the ever increasing trend of moving into other, more popular, social networking or lifestreaming sites. That’s probably why it keeps surprising folks that I still get to blog on a more or less regular basis on stuff I am really interested in and that I would want to come back to at some point.

My good friend Bill Ives calls it Personal Knowledge Management, a term I tend to come pretty close to in describing how I perceive my own blogging all along (Coming close to nearly six years now!). Harold Jarche calls it "Where’s your data?", a very thought-provoking article where he details the dangers of lifestraming through social networking sites you don’t have full access to, because they are all sitting up in the cloud.

I rather prefer to call it "The Second Coming of Blogging". I may be wrong about it. Maybe not. We shall see. But with the recent instances of how poor our data, effort and energy are being managed by applications like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. etc. I am starting to sense (From a few months back already!), how all of this lifestreaming up on the cloud is going to backslash as soon as people start getting exposed to more and more deteriorating experiences from those social networking sites. And how, as a consequence of that, they would want to still keep using social software to share knowledge, ideas, and collaborate with others in an environment where they have full control of it. With no regrets.

And that’s why very soon I am sensing we will be seeing what I have called that "Second Coming of Blogging". And the funny part is that the one and only, Seth Godin, also hints this very same trend, in a recent event whose video was recorded and distributed through YouTube not long ago. My good friend Jon Husband blogged about it already over the weekend under the title "Blogging – Still Good for You and for Organisations" and just this morning I bumped into it, as I was catching up with Twitter from over the weekend and David Gurteen tweeted about it.

Since my good friend David always shares plenty of really interesting golden nuggets, of course, I had to check it out. And that’s when it hit me. Pretty much the same way it will hit you, if you have been blogging in the past and perhaps may be thinking about quitting altogether. Well, maybe not.

Take a look and spend the next one minute and thirty-seven seconds watching this video clip in YouTube with Tom Peters and Seth Godin, and be tremendously inspired by Seth’s words. Yes, I know and I realise he doesn’t call it "The Second Coming of Blogging", but I do, because after watching that video, and after experiencing more and more frequently constant hiccups on our overall social networking sites experiences, there is something that tells me we will be back to blogging. And pretty soon! Perhaps in a new and evolved form. But it will be back nevertheless.

We need to have that personal space, where we reflect on ideas not completed yet; where we engage in much more meaningful and lasting conversations that most of the times are even better than the original article!; where going along with the flow of the lifestream every now and then we still enjoy pausing for a bit, ponder things around, come up with something really cool and move on; finally, a place where the act of writing online for yourself (And perhaps others, too!) becomes an art through your own blog. And at long last an online 2.0 space that you manage and that helps you, day in day out, improve not only your social capital skills, but also your own personal brand.

Yes, I realise this is an incomplete thought (Still thinking about it some more…), but judge for yourselves. Have a look into "Seth Godin and Tom Peters on blogging" and get ready to be wowed, because you will …

And just as I am writing this blog post in my own personal business blog, here I am as well starting to play this week some more with a rather interesting new social software tool that has caught my attention last couple of weeks and which I am going to be exploring plenty more this week and see how it may transform the act of blogging and lifestreaming (Altogether!) as we speak. Yes, welcome to Posterous!

Oh, yes, my Posterous site is over here, but guess what? I realise I haven’t started yet to share content in there, but it looks like at the time I am putting together this post, it’s down. Can’t access it. I have yet to remember when it was the last time any of my blogs were down for a period of time … Still think that blogging doesn’t have a bright future amongst us, knowledge workers, as our preferred Personal Knowledge Management tool of choice?

Think again!

Tags: Blogging, Metablogging, Blogs, Weblogging, Corporate Blogging, Internet Blogging, Blogosphere, Act of Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Lifestream, Lifestreaming, Bill Ives, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Harold Jarche, Data Management, Data Protection, Data Ownership, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Social Networking Sites, Second Coming of Blogging, Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Jon Husband, Wirearchy, David Gurteen, Gurteen, Branding, Personal Branding, Brands, Posterous, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Knowledge Workers, Social Capital, Social Capital Skills

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 13

As you would remember, today I am travelling to Hamburg, Germany, to spend the rest of the week in there, waiting for the 15th of May where I will be presenting at the Next 08 conference early in the afternoon and on the topic of "Thinking out of the Inbox – More Collaboration through less e-mail" (I am hoping to be able to share the slide deck shortly, by the way, in Slideshare, thus stay tuned!). And here I am on the plane, flying high up in the sky, getting ready to share with you my weekly progress report on my giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. But before I go ahead with it allow me to spend a couple of minutes thinking out loud about something that has been in my mind for the last few days.

I twittered about it yesterday and got into a fascinating discussion, probably too short due to lack of time while I was getting everything ready for this trip, with a bunch of others who were sharing similar experiences. Just recently I keep getting this odd feeling of having neglected, and still neglecting somehow, this particular blog since my regular blogging activities are not as regular as I thought they would be nowadays. Yes, way at the beginning of having started this blog, I decided that I was going to keep things going for a long while trying to post daily sharing my thoughts on interesting conversations or initiatives I was getting involved with around the areas of Knowledge Management, Communities, Collaboration, Social Computing, amongst several others.

That motivation to keep posting and sharing those thoughts is still as intact as it was many years ago, and will continue to be so for many moons to come, however the lack of physical time to do it, due to all of this travelling, conference events, their corresponding presentations (And having to put them together, of course!), customer workshops / engagements, etc. etc. is starting to slow me down with my overall blogging activities. At least, that is the impression I am getting at the moment. And I don’t seem to be the only one…

I seem to recall how Tara Hunt, a.k.a. missrogue, mentioned at some point in time in her Twitter stream, how she was feeling along the same lines saying something like people were having all of the fun, while she was on a constant massive burst of conference events and meetings, and whatever other engagements, with customers talking about Social Computing that kept her busy to no end and without the opportunity to jam where all the fun was happening. Well, that’s how I feel at the moment myself after all of this travelling and everything. No, I am not getting tired of it, everyone who knows me well enough would tell you how fond I am of travelling, but from that to say almost every week you are going to be on the road it is quite a bit, I am sure! Yes, I am missing all of the good fun! Got lots of stuff to talk about and share, yet, very little time to do it properly, at least, in a way that I would feel comfortable with it.

So one of the suggestions from yesterday’s conversations in Twitter (Coming from Steve Matthews) was to actually continue blogging at that very same pace, but perhaps keeping things shorter, meaning that there would be less time spent in blogging and perhaps more focused towards just that particular idea shared thus far, specially while I am away. Yes, I am sure you all know how bad I am at keeping things short, this blog post is another good example, but I think Steve’s idea surely is worth while pursuing, why not? I think it would probably be better to actually create a shorter blog post with an idea or two than none at all, right? Thus I am going to give it a try and see if I can come back to all the fun!

But for now, and like I was saying at the beginning of the entry, and as a way of getting back into the fun, here you have got the details from the weekly progress report from my giving up on e-mail new reality. Already on week 13! Yesterday I had problems trying to upload the screen shot of the report into Flickr, but I am hoping that today things would work out all right. Here it is:

As you would be able to see the number of e-mails has gone up a little bit, but still within the target of between 30 to 40 e-mails a week. In this case 35 e-mails!, which I think is very very doable and still within what I was aiming for. However, one of the things that I am noticing is how over the last couple of weeks and, after seeing how the experiment has consolidated into a total success, I keep getting a number of e-mails with which I am not feeling very comfortable, because I don’t seem to be having a way to get rid of them for good. At least, just yet.

Yes, indeed, I am talking about e-mails that are related to scheduling, setting up and participating in conference events, customer meetings / workshops, specially when it is to show my own experiences on this new reality itself. I am thinking that if I would be able to find a way to reduce those I would be getting my number of incoming e-mails down to 15 to 20 a week. If not less! Yes! As massive as that!!!

So that got me started into thinking about a way of getting rid of those e-mails and divert them elsewhere. And it wasn’t easy, to be honest. John Tropea (One of my favourite bloggers in the Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing & Librarian 2.0 spaces and surely one of those bloggers to add to your blogroll in case you haven’t done so already!) put together, not long ago, a pretty impressive blog post under "Examples of re-purposing e-mail" and he already provides some hints as to what I could be doing, but I will comment more on that blog post as time goes by. Too good to just mention it over here and definitely one that would be worth while exploring further into building a wiki space, putting together all of those different examples as a way of showing everyone else how they can start doing it in small, but steady steps.

John seems to be inclined to make use of Lotus Connections‘ Activities for the calendaring and scheduling coming through e-mails and I must confess that I have thought about it, too, myself, as well as a couple of other options. I have been thinking as well that a forum, with a discussion group (i.e. Newsgroup) may be another option, but kind of walked away from that idea since the IBM Forums I am exposed to cannot protect entries that may be of a sensitive nature. Then I thought that a wiki, with protected access where needed / required, may be another option to go by, but perhaps too difficult for other folks to engage with.

However, Connections’ Activities seems like it is an ideal way out for me. More than anything else because they can host both public and private events discussions. Also the fact that they are fully integrated into Lotus Notes 8 and Sametime 8 allowing everyone I may be working with to set up one of them and then send it over across to me, so that I can chime in and share a thought or two on the topic. And right there we could consolidate all e-mails exchanged thus far, IM chats involved as well as well as attaching the corresponding files as the final output of the event, and if there are any feedback forms collected after the event they could also be shared over there.

Thus here we go. I think that I am going to settle down for Connections’ Activities and start making use of them to walk away from e-mail one step further, as a way to arrange all of these different events and see if I got it right as to how further more I could reduce my weekly incoming e-mail count.

Oh, did I mention how you could collaboratively work together with other folks on the same activity? Let’s see how it goes from here… Stay tuned for further updates and see what happens in upcoming weeks! In future progress reports I am sure I will have an opportunity to share with you my experiences on them.

Now, off we go, on to shorter blog posts while I am away travelling and see if I can keep up with a nice pace of those regular blogging activities that were once part of this specific blog. Although perhaps Darren Rowse may be right altogether. I may not need to blog on a daily basis any longer… What do you think?

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, Hamburg, Germany, Next08, Next 08, Slideshare, Twitter, Blogging 101, Blogging Tips, Tara Hunt, missrogue, Steve Matthews, Flickr, John Tropea, Re-purposing e-mail, Lotus Connections, Connections, Activities, Forums, Newsgroups, Wikis, Calendar Events, Calendar, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Lotus Notes 8, Sametime, Lotus Sametime, Sametime 8, Lotus Sametime 8, Real-time Collaboration, Darren Rowse, Travelling, Blog Frequency

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 9

As I am getting ready to travel again to the US tomorrow morning, to attend IBM’s Web 2.0 and Beyond summit, here we are, once more, putting together some thoughts on the subject of my quest to give up e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. This past week about to finish didn’t sort of produce lots of interesting links related to this particular experiment of re-purposing e-mail, except perhaps the excellent article put together by Darren Rowse under the title From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours, which comes to explain how you can make use of GMail to process a huge amount of e-mail in just a few hours! Yes, just like you are reading on the title of the article: 10000 e-mail messages!

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