1) I don't want to blog where I'm blogging anymore, but is there a way to easily move my entries to an alternate site? (NOTE: I have not researched the availability of tools to do this yet, so they may exist)
2) Now that I'm moving my blog, where should I move it to? Google, Facebook, Windows Live, ....?
3) Is blogging still important, or is it now more effective to just post notes around the web like the bulletin board on college campuses? I received great visibility on posting a link on Plaxo Pulse.
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I remember when reports started to emerge in the latter half of the 90's and early part of the 2000's regarding how companies were losing productivity to employees surfing the Web and partaking in instant messaging chats. Well, Facebook is about to make the productivity losses from the Web and IM seem like those associated with a fire drill; especially with the introduction of younger employees between the ages of 21 & 30.
Facebook is a productivity sink (unless you're a Facebook developer, then you're doing pretty well). Expand your network while trolling friends networks, write on their walls, play a few games against your friends, send them some karma and try on some superpowers. These are just a small sampling of the activities available to your common cubical dweller.
Does this mean Facebook is bad? No, individuals needs to take responsibility for their own actions. Using Facebook on your own time is probably a lot of fun. Doing it on your company's time is wrong, as is personal email and phone calls. However, that's never stopped employees from abusing these privileges and it won't stop now. Companies may have to limit access to Facebook and other social networking sites that don't have redeemable business value, such as LinkedIn.
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It's taken more than 10 years, but I finally got it through my thick skull:
A design is only as good as the potential for it to be put it into practice.
I tend to come up with extremely elegant, agile and extensible designs. What I've learned, however, is that not everyone sees the elegance of the design as quickly as I do. They either are unable to see the value because of lack of experience or because other pressures are forcing them to limit their attention span to produce less elegant solutions faster even if they might incur the cost of having to be re-designed at a future point in time.
While I am glad to finally be able to accept this truth, it is a bit disheartening, because it means that most businesses are truly limited in its ability to apply technology effectively to their business problems. However, accepting this postulate means that now I can focus my attention on how to help them injure themselves the least. Most importantly, I learned that sometimes, we have to change the requirements because we cannot change the people or the tools.
Hence my new postulate:
Faster, Cheaper, Better -- Pick any 2
People, Tools, Elegance -- Pick any 2
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I signed up for a Windows Live account today. I just got the new T-Mobile Dash Windows smartphone and I wanted an email account that I could use specifically for the phone (otherwise, I have to sync email accounts with my Mac and that's a pain).
I thought about using Google Mail, as I just set up my daughter's Dash with it and it works fine, but the Dash has a built in client for Microsoft Live accounts and, well, it's just simpler to use than going all the loops and twists to make Google mail IMAP work on the phone.
Once I was in and exploring my new Live space and inviting people in, I began to think about all the criticism that would soon be flying my way. After all, I was signing up for the Borg version of a personal site. Then I began to get a little annoyed. What's so bad about using Microsoft's products if they meet your needs? Have we gone so far to the left in the computing industry that we can only use products from Microsoft's competitors? Am I creating the mortal sin of going against the all powerful Google/Facebook/Yahoo! contingent for email and an online personal space?
Look, I like .NET, I like C# better than Java, I like IIS better than JBoss and I like ASPX better than JSP. Why? I find that I'm able to do more with these tools faster with less effort. That's my personal opinion. Sure I wish I could do all this on an open source platform (yes I know about Mono), but that's still a project, not a product.
Truth be told, I think Microsoft develops some pretty good tools.
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I was watching Mark Zuckerberg's f8 keynote and all I kept thinking was, "what a waste of time" and "we've had these tools for years, so what." It's true. I've been using news feeds since 1994. I've been using the Web since 1995 (as Lynx). True, the adoption of CSS2 and Javascript has done a lot to enhance usability, but all sites have access to these capabilities. So, I kept thinking about what is the big deal about Facebook and it turns out that the Facebook's only advantage is its user community, which ranges in age 13-30.
It's not the platform, because Google has better widgets and better infrastructure. LinkedIn connections have more business value than Facebook connections. Ultimately, the value of Facebook comes down to fact that our youth have too much time on their hands and are willing to share more useless information than any generation before.
At this point I realized that I'm no better than an adult in 1965 telling other adults that "those Beatles are a bad influence on the kids." Its not like I don't see the value in using technology to connect up and share information. If I didn't see that value, I wouldn't have joined the movement behind XML and Web Services in its infancy. I just never dreamed when we created those early standards that they'd be used to speed the sharing of a picture of a teen's derriere.
As I get older, I also am very concerned that we have created a generation of individuals that don't know how to communicate without the support of an electronic device. I watch my teenage children, they talk to their friends over AOL, SMS, Wii, Facebook and e-mail. When there's somewhere to go or when planning to get together, its a stream of SMS messages.
I don't know when I got old, but I'll be darned if it didn't happen. Hey Frank, screw you, being young at heart doesn't stop you from totally not getting the real youth!
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McCain Names Drawdown Date
John McCain announced that he'd win the war and bring the troops home by 2013. I wonder how much he's betting on the Mayan apocalyptic prophesy for 2012. If the 2012 prophesies turn out to be nothing more than an astrological Y2K, McCain's might be in big trouble!
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I've come to think of companies in terms of brains. Like brains, companies build neural pathways which are common pathways which drive communications and behavior. Also like brains new neural pathways are created all the time as people come and go and processes change. However, what is really interesting is that unless there is conscious desire to change a particular pathway or a catastrophic event occurs damaging existing pathways, communications and behaviors will remain consistent in spite of the appearance of these new pathways.
For people, this is most recognizable when considering addictions, such as smoking or alcoholism. Unless the person consciously works to change their behavior, then the brain will continue to force the person to repeat their addictive behaviors. In it's less recognizable form, people gain new neural pathways when they create new memories. Until they access those memories, those pathways will exist, but not be accessed.
What this tells us is that companies need to take extraordinary efforts to bring new team members into the fold. I am familiar with many companies where a handful of individuals become identified as "heroes"--the group of individuals that are known because they consistently deliver. In these same companies, I've also seen many very capable individuals that are not getting a chance to participate and contribute because the company's natural behaviors are to go to the "heroes" first. One could say this is their addiction.
Overall, the hero syndrome works well for companies with regard to responding to crises situations. However, most companies don't measure the downstream impact of the hero situation on the rest of the organization. For one, it creates animosity for others capable of fulfilling the needs of a given situation, but not given the chance. Secondly, the company is at risk in the event that a hero leaves the fold. It's a short term impact though as this is an event that will force the company to access one of it's new neural pathways, thus raising one or more others up to the new rank of hero.
For me, the larger issue at hand is overall productivity. The company is a machine. When it leverages only known neural pathways, the machine is not running as efficiently as it can and the company is spending money on resources that are not being fully leveraged. By not expending the necessary energy to force the machine to change with the introduction of new neural pathways (new resources) it cannot scale efficiently.
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I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies engaged simultaneously in 50+ of IT projects as well as small companies with one or two products and I don’t believe there is a need for any organization to have a full-time software architect. Once the modeling is done, it is the work of coding and testing that truly takes the full-time effort. Once underway, 100 hours a month of time is enough for any architect to respond to most needs of all ongoing projects.
Those who have worked in software development, whether in corporate IT or in commercial software companies are most likely familiar with the analogy between building software and building buildings. That is, the architect designs the building and the software developer builds the building. Sometimes there is the equivalent of a structural engineer, but most often times the analogy is left in its simple form as a means of differentiating the roles and to demonstrate the separation of concerns and skills.
The importance of the analogy is to instill that without proper architecture up front, there is significant risk your building might fall down. However, the aspect no one discusses of this analogy is that the engineer is on site full time during the build out, while the architect does 80% of their work up front and then might provide intermittent reviews while the build out is occurring.
How do general contractors deal with this? They hire architectural firms to perform the design and review function. How do organizations deal with this function with regard to software? They hire the architect full time. Hence, the architect’s dilemma--what they heck am I supposed to work on when no new buildings need designing?
Additionally, it’s not uncommon to find that most commercial entities start building their software with engineers alone foregoing the architecture until a crises occurs, resulting in the answer, “let’s get an architect in here.” The belief here is that the architect will save the day and make sure all the buildings under development will meet coding standards and remove all future worry. Oh yes, and this is all to happen without tearing down the building and starting from scratch.
The architects answer of, “you need to start this over and do this right,” is often met with rejection and animosity toward the architect. Moreover, usually an engineer will come up with some hack to get the build out going again, which results in the architect now a full time expensive resource who in their mind couldn’t even come up with the simple answer that some engineer 1/2 the price figured out.
This all results in the architect stuck in a position where they deem all those in charge around them to be blithering idiots who have no care for the quality of the things they build as long as it leads to the end result of recognizing the revenue. In the case of real buildings, this approach cannot occur because life and death are at stake. However, in the case of software, since the impact to the actual business is minimal, when compared to loss of human life, the organization ends up with a group of hackers that look like heroes and a few architects wondering how they got into the mess they’re in.
Hence, it is my belief that until the IT industry recognizes software architecture in the same way as construction recognizes building architecture, that software architects will forever be frustrated by their situations.
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