I’m delighted to hear that the BT Web21C SDK team has just won the eWEEK Excellence Award for Application Development, seeing off competition from Salesforce amongst others. Open multisided platforms are the way, and it’s great to see colleagues being honoured. Well done to the team. Full story here.
Disclaimer: I work for BT. And this is not an advertisement. Just a personal vote of thanks to the team.
So you’re finding someone’s changed his tweet frequency, he’s tweeting too often for your liking? Maybe he’s got on his high horse about something and he can’t let go. And you just wish you could tune him out for a brief period?
Help is at hand. Look at this:
TwitterSnooze. Personalised short-term filtering out of someone. Now all I need is the same thing for a something and not a someone. When I can choose to tune out tweets about a particular subject or topic or entity, for a short while. [Yes it can be tag-driven if required].
I don’t tend to do quotes du jour, but this time I had to make an exception, taken from this post.
A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews
In fact, the entire paragraph is worth highlighting:
A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews. Is it really even worth using at that point? The products themselves are commodities; I could buy them anywhere. Having dozens of highly relevant, informed user reviews means I’ll almost always buy stuff from Amazon given the chance. It’s a huge competitive advantage.
I could not agree more. So here’s my twopenn’orth:
Social objects are designed to commoditise over time. And as they commoditise, what makes them valuable is the tags, the reviews and the ratings around them. And in turn that makes the community around them valuable, the people who do the tagging, the reviewing and the rating.
So next time you get asked what the value of a community is, think about the role of the community in enhancing the value of objects that would otherwise be undifferentiated and valueless.
A month ago I wrote a long post about collaboration, and in it I said:
Collaboration takes place when you do what you are good at, and when you let other people do what they are good at.
Sometimes I wonder whether we as knowledge workers have learnt this. Somehow I don’t think so. Over the last thirty years, working primarily in service industries, working solely as a knowledge worker, I see something different.
I see people unable to respect the skills of others. Of wanting to be all things to all men.
Today, reading Andrew McAfee (a regular and recommended read, I’ve known Andrew for some time now), I saw this:
“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”
That was Eric Schmidt answering Andy’s question on what other companies and managers can learn from Google.
They can learn to listen……because it’s a great way to show respect.
I couldn’t agree more. The secret sauce of collaboration in five words. Or a baker’s dozen if you want the expanded form.
Thanks Andy, and thank you Eric Schmidt.
In between times spent snoozing in the sun, I kept an eye on the St Jude Classic. I quite like the look of Colombian Camilo Villegas, think he’s a fine young golfer who’s going to make a real name for himself, a guy who likes taking risks with his game, and blessed with great natural talent.
With today’s technology, there’s a lot you can “see” when following a game on the web, and pga.com do this very well. Which means I come across stuff like this:
A putt of 519 ft 10 inches. Now that’s what I call a looooong short game. Villegas is good, but not that good. I wish him well.