barryjogorman

Another year has whizzed bye.  Maybe it’s something to do with running your own consulting business, having a very active family and having a curious mind.

So what sticks in my mind in terms of technology – looking back on 2011?

What have I really liked?

I have been very happy with my Android phone – Samsung II.  Great phone, easy to use, great camera, easy integration with lots of social networks etc.  Would be lost without a smartphone.

Have found myself leaning much more towards Twitter than Facebook.  Have really found Twitter useful in terms of work related research, staying in contact with other professionals, developing my own profile.  Notwithstanding this Facebook is a daily platform for me – and has lured me into chess.com.  Typically have one or two chess games on the go (48 hours to move).

I have stuck with FourSquare.  Most of my acquaintances run a mile from FourSquare – why would you want to share your location?  I think this type of location based software has a long way to run.

Have enjoyed listening in to TWIT.TV (Leo Laporte’s This Week in Technology).  I tend to download the podcast and listen to it on one of my walks.  He has had some great guests during the year and some great debates – even last week with regard to restrictions on software copying.

Leo Laporte has got me to sign up to tow of his sponsors: www.Audible.Co.UK and Carbonite.  Audible I sue to download books which I listen to when walking, taking public transport, even at home rather than reading the physical book (nice break for the eyes).  I am using Carbonite to back up my data.

I have implemented encryption using TrueCrypt – seems to work very well.  And seems to be gaining in popularity wherever I go.

And EverNote – what a great application.  Increasingly I find myself using Evernote to capture meeting notes.  And it’s available on my Android phone when I need to access a note.

Finally – Google+.  I definitely like it.  And it looks like it has traction.  But then Google has some influence!  And I should say I have had a great year with Google Apps – has not let me down.  The world needs Google and Microsoft competing – at least you can now shop and compare between the two cloud offerings.

What have been my other observations?

Lots of disillusioned IT teams in corporate world.  Lots of them working with reduced budgets, smaller teams but many of the same challenges.  Many of their users have lots more technology available to them at home or on their phones – real challenges in providing stimulating corporate IT environments to end users.

Understanding the economics of the cloud is challenging.  If I have 100 Offce/ Exchange users does it make sense to sign up to Office 365 (or Google Apps)? Do the price points make sense?  Green field site v. established business.  Many people unconvinced about the economics.  Many people committed to cloud approach.  Debate is vigorous.

Regardless, operating from Ireland, with its current economic challenges, web based technologies are being embraced and lots of entrepreneurs emerging with ideas which exploit these technologies.

Attended the ‘Opening Up Government Data’ day in DERI, in Galway, today.  Some interesting presentations and demonstrations of tools such as Google Public Data Explorer and Simile Widgets – to enable you to work with linked open data.

In one of our breakout sessions we discussed why companies would choose to share their data – ie publish it in formats which are easy for others to consume (e.g. csv, not pdf).  Granted many businesses have web sites, describing their offerings, providing some background on the company, potentially inviting comment or queries and answering some Frequently Asked Questions.  But very few offer much data arising from their product or market research, their production statistics or their sales campaigns.  In general they would regard this information as confidential and constituting some element of their ‘Competitive advantage’.

Today’s seminar really focused on government publishing data which it might be argued belongs to the citizens.  However, understandably, there was plenty of discussion around this in terms of the efforts required to publish it, the potential ownership of the data, maintaining the data going forward, etc.  There was some discussion as to whether ther should be a charge for this data on the basis of the costs associated and the potential for companies to generate come commercial benefit.  Plenty of solid reasons were put forward for publishing the data – transparency, accountability , etc.

Much of this debate brought me back to thinking about privacy, Mark Zuckerburg’s general approach with Facebook, differing attitudes to publishing personal information on sites such as Facebook, twitter, google+, foursquare, etc.  Why do some people choose to share their views on politics, on the economy, their location in a restaurant – whereas others want nothing shared?

I think this question ‘Why publish your data?’ can be addressed in all of these contexts – individuals, government and corporates.  And the answer is  - because the person or the organisation sees some value in its publication.  At the personal level the social networks and smart phones have made publishing data so much easier.  What we are now seeing emerge for business and government are a range of platforms and tools which may all of this a lot easier for government and companies.  And a little like individuals – not sure that anyone has really worked out where all of this is taking us.

Some newspapers have figured it out – by making their content available, by marking it up semantically, they become more relevant to more entities for longer.  But that’s a little different to publishing data which is a product of lots of research completed at your own cost – on the basis that it’s good for society or that of I do it then someone else will publish other data in exchange which I can exploit.

Excellent piece in today’s New York Times from Thomas Friedman (previous reference).  Greatly enjoyed his previous book ‘The world is flat‘.

Friedman touches on a three ideas:

• Advances in technology (since The World is Flat in 2004) e.g. twitter, facebook, freelancer.com are threatening white collar rather than blue collar jobs
• Stop talking about outsourcing – really just a question of sourcing
• There is now only good, better and best – and our schools need to catch up

Friedman has it right.  Social networking, mobile technology, free videoconferencing, tools to support collaboration, sites to rate resources – it’s all making for a world where you can assemble the best resources you require to do any task.  Increasingly there will be less room for inferior service.

In this era of smartphones and tablets even when we do watch the traditional television we tend to have another device on the go.  at the most basic level people continue to text while watching television. Many will be engaged in social networking while watching television e.g. commenting on Twitter or Facebook while watching a movie or a sports event.  Also if online you access to sites which may provide more information about the event e.g. players statistics, match statistics, actor profiles, etc.  and, of course, in many cases you will actually be watching the TV programme on a device such as a smartphone or a notepad.

Interesting piece here about potential use of semantic tags/links to improve the tv experience in this environment.  The general observation of the negative impact of traditional TV advertising is very interesting – given that there may be more effective ways to advertise through use of metadata/ semantic tags.

…and of course the usual challenge – lack of agreed standards for all of this.

I have been blogging recently, again, on the question of the misuse of the word ‘friends’ in the social networking world.  The use of the word ‘contacts’ by Linkedin may be a better use of the English language than ‘friends’ by Facebook.

Interesting developments recently from Facebook – it would seem that privacy and the meaning of ‘friendship’ are beginning to be of concern to Facebook.

The latest is the introduction of the ‘Subscribe’ button.  This looks like the introduction of Twitter type ‘follow’ functionality – in  Facebook context.  Will be interesting to see how the Facebook community takes to this option.  Looks like we will all get to choose the level of updates we will be bombarded with my our ‘friends’.

One can only wonder whether it has been the emergence of Google+ which has finally brought some real changes in Facebook and how its user community are treated.  (Perhaps no different to Ryanair beginning to be a little bit more passenger conscious as it seeks to compete for business passengers?)

I come across anecdotal evidence of people becoming bored with social networks – suggesting they may shut down their Facebook account, don’t see the point of twitter, etc.  Latest report from Nielsen on the US market firmly gives the lie to this.

The reality appears to be that people are spending more of their online time in social networks.  And that’s not really very surprising – particularly if they are managing their participation in a way which provides them with value e.g. using Twitter to follow particular interests, using Facebook or Google+ to interact with specific groups of people.

I posted the other day on the subject of ‘Friends or Not‘. Social networks are not without their negatives e.g. irrelevant data, self  censorship, etc.  But the plain reality is that they do offer all sorts of ways to present information in context.

Would be interesting to see similar analysis for the local marketplace in Ireland.  I suspect it is not very different.  I think the other day I heard back from a younger family member ‘No I did not get your email, I use facebook’.  Things continue to move on in social networking and instant messaging.

Jay Baer just beat me to it.  In his case this article seems to have been inspired by the tragedy of a suicide of an online friend.

I’ve blogged on this topic before – the misuse of the word ‘friend’ by social networks such as facebook.

Friendship takes time and lots more.  They develop out of all sorts of situations but they take time.  The trust in a friendship is not built online.  It requires real socialisation – being with people in different situations.  Some friendships last through rows, disappointments, whatever; other friendships dissolve.  And then retrospectively we questions whether it was in fact a friendship.

Baer touches on another interesting point – the self censorship that we exercise in online communities – because the ‘friends’ are not all friends.  And a downside of this is that the communication does not server to promote/ reinforce friendships as a result.

Initially many of used Facebook got friends and blogging, LinkedIn and even twitter for business.  That has since changed radically - a network of 700m+ people (Facebook) is too big to be ignored for potential business advantage.

Baer says that he is going to make a real effort – even at the cost of less online contributions.  I think he is right.

Image via CrunchBase

Experienced a great deal of frustration with this, initially.  Would have expected uploading video from a phone running a google operating system to a google owned video site would be straightforward.  Unfortunately experienced quite a lot of frustration.

The key to resolving this issue appears to have been:

While in the YouTube application on the adnroid log out.  Then add an account – not your gmail account but your YouTube account (i.e. exclude any ‘@gmail.com).  After that all seemed to work perfectly.

Found the relevant advice/ guidance eventually through one of the threaded discussions on google.

Image via Wikipedia

I am an avid user of web 2.0 solutions – in particular social networks including linkedin, facebook and twitter.  First impressions of google+ have been positive – seems to me to support, more easily, useful interaction between people sharing an interest.  Circles appears pretty logical.  Obviously uptake is very important (to obtain critical mass) but the level of uptake in the first few weeks would suggest google+ certainly has a good chance of gaining significant traction.

However – I am a google apps, paid-up, user.  google apps is at the centre of my day to day operations.

Not unusally I started with a gmail account and move to google apps as I established my own domain: http://www.barryjogorman.com.  I have a google profile – associated with my gmail account.  I do not have a google profile within the google apps world.  People interact with me using whatever medium suits them: facebook, linkedin, twitter, gmail, my google apps mail account, SMS, voice.  And now some level of interaction has commenced via google+.

Unfortunately, in order to be active in google+ I have to be logged into my gmail world – not my google apps world.  It’s almost becoming a question of accessing the google apps world from the PC and the google plus world from the smart phone – complete nonsense!

This posting seems to contain the current wisdom from Google: we hear you, we knew this would be an issue, we’ll get there because it is important to us – but it may take a few months.

For now it seems to be a question of ‘grin and bear it’.  Any solutions/ tips would be very welcome!

Image via Wikipedia

I attended today’s 6th Web Summit at the RDS in Dublin.  Paddy Cograve continued his run of sell out conferences – this time with almost 1,000 attendees, on a Friday afternoon in Dublin.  I have now attended 3 of Paddy’s 6 web summits.

I think today was the weakest yet.

Sam Barnett was a weak kick off act – did not provide much insight until he explained how he avoided paying rent in his startup (his landlord was a criminal).  Eamon Leonard offered a fairly laboured comparison between rockbands and startup companies (not sure how Paddy found this so interesting). However Eamon’s delivery style and sense of humour kept people amused. Strange that Jennifer O’Connell should pitch thejournal.ie and then announce she is moving on (hardly the greatest pitch for any business).  Emi Gal (Brainient) was exellent – speaking of personalisation and relevance in video).

The coffee break appeared to be sans coffee – a bit Irish for the price people paid.

Tariq Krim (Jolicloud) and Marcus Segal (Zynga) were excellent.  Microsoft and Techcrunch presenters were not particularly inspiring.

And on the networking front – yes probably had the opportunity to catch up with 6 or 7 people and make one or two new contacts.  The pre and post gatherings offered ample opportunity to meet with various people.

So – will I attend future web summits?  I’m left a little cold after today’s – but to be fair there were a couple of thought provoking presentations and the general atmosphere was decidedly upbeat in comparison to much of what we see in Dublin these days.