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.

I wanted to send a file to a Gen Y co-worker and asked if he had Skype, GTalk, Yahoo Messenger or MSN. He said:

No man, I don’t use thick clients any more.

I’d often wondered if SaaS (Software as a  Service) could provide all of the features/capabilities required to support and operate a business.  It seems the answer is yes.

Joe McKendrick has written about Ismael Ghalimi who “documents all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network” (SaaS).  Check out Ismael’s list here.  It’s worth a read, especially if you’re thinking of starting your own company and don’t want to worry about IT.

I’ve just come back from an interesting Enterprise 2.0 conference hosted by Dow Jones in Melbourne, Australia. Dow Jones has a product called Factiva, which they’ve recently relaunched as “Factiva 2.0″. The goal of the conference was to give an overview of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0, then dive into Factiva. I wanted to share some great quotes from Greg Merkle (he’s also a guitarist), Vice President and Creative Director of Dow Jones, on the topic of Enterprise 2.0:

The corporate intranet is where content goes to die.

Workers have adapted their habits to work the way systems work, instead of systems adapting to work the way workers work.

Collective Intelligence - No one knows everything. Everyone knows something.

I wouldn’t have picked Dow Jones as being innovative in this space, but they seem to have a lot of great ideas.

I wanted to share a great quote from a Gartner Analyst responding to CIO criticism of Web 2.0:

“Security is not about zero risk it is about managed risk. Accept there will be a few security failures.

“No risk means no reward. Stop talking about all the bad things that can happen and talk about what these technologies enable”…

“Relax, innovate. The goal is managed risk.”

Read more at computerworld.com.au.