Social Glass

I safely arrived in Colorado last night.  It’s been 1 year since I’ve been in the US.  I immediately noticed how festive the US is around the holidays. Carols were playing in the LA airport and people said “merry christmas” to me.  This doesn’t really happen in Australia, where if they said it they’d prefer “happy christmas” instead.  It’s also pretty cold in Denver (at least compared with how hot it’s been in Melbourne this past few weeks).  And I had my first Chipotle burrito since last December for dinner tonight. 

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.

Rod Boothby was the first person who got me really fired up about Enterprise 2.0.  I remember last year he posted quite frequently, then things went quiet.  As he indicated he’s been busy over at Teqlo releasing and testing products.

But recently we’ve seen couple of posts from Rod.  Most recently he wrote about human behavior and how it’s influenced and molded by society. Rod does a great job of diving deep below the surface of social software and I highly recommend you click over to check out his blog as you’ll find some cool, sociological insight into the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon there.

A peer of mine within my company setup an external website (based on WordPress) for us to blog about internal matters, industry trends, what we ate last night for dinner etc. He and I are both Technical Managers and, as such, are responsible for about 10 people collectively. We asked each of these people to contribute to the site on a regular basis. Without much prodding and within about a week we managed to create a vibrant system of communication and sharing with lots of blog posts and comments.
What’s fascinating to me about all this as a Manager is the insight I get into the knowledge our new hires possess. Some of these kids, fresh out of university, are in the pocket with Web 2.0 and are able to relate it to business value – ideas like using Adobe Flex, Silverlight and Java FX to break out of the J2EE MVC rut and change the way we approach UI development and user experience as a technology organization. We talk about Ruby on Rails and one of our very junior guys has launched http://enterprise20.rubyforge.org/, an open source Enterprise 2.0 project using this technology. This insight is valuable to me when staffing projects or understanding my people’s strengths and weaknesses.

In a consulting organization we spread out, travel the world, and often find it hard to create or identify with our corporate culture. A very simple blogging application has gone a long way to create a community amongst resources working in Sydney, Melbourne, Austria and the US – all for just $8 per month. To me that’s pretty cool.

I was reading ITSInsider yesterday and was thrilled to discover Enterprise 2.0 TV.  I love the idea and definitely recommend you check it out.

An observation – I’ve noticed a substantial drop in posts over the past 4 weeks in Enterprise 2.0 blogs I read, namely:

• Firestoker Blog
• Innovation Creators
• Dion Hinchliffe
• The FASTForward Blog
• Ross Mayfield’s Weblog

While I must admit I miss the more constant influx of the latest on Enteprise 2.0 I’m going to take this as a positive sign.  Perhaps this means that the brain power behind these blogs is being redirected from the blogosphere toward Enterprise 2.0 software development or implementation.   Time will tell.