Thanks to Zoli, the 25% of my readers whose first language is probably not English (as indicated by the browser language setting) can now view this site in 50 other languages, thanks to a new widget in the sidebar.
If you read this through Google Reader, then you can set it to auto-translate there, instead: I do that for the few non-English BPM blogs that I follow, and it works like a charm.
If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:
Ignite T.O. Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.
I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:
If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.
For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:
The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.
Via Mashable, I discovered a cool little gadget this morning: Retaggr, which allows me to create a profile page and badge with all my social media links, then embed it on my blog or website:
You can click on the links within it to show the content from those sites directly within the badge, or click through to the whole profile page. The badge here updates when I update my profile on Retaggr. I can also create my own custom badge, although the minimum width is wider than my current sidebar so I can’t put one there.
I’ve already added it to the contact page on my website and the About Me page on this blog in place of the manually-maintained lists of contact information on those pages.
I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – with the exception of the links posts that are auto-generated from my Delicious bookmarks – due to a very heavy client workload and very few conferences to blog about. I have been twittering, but my Twitter stream tends to contain random thoughts and personal observations rather than BPM-related commentary.
The Twitterati may claim that blogging is dead, but there’s clearly a place for articles, reviews and opinion pieces that need more space to expand on a subject. There’s something about writing longer bits of prose (longer than 140 characters, that is) that helps my brain work around problems better, plus the comments and feedback from readers is a valuable part of the conversation. I plan to get back to more regular blogging, and to kick that off, I’ll be blogging from SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference this week in Orlando. I have a detailed review of NetWeaver BPM that has been in the works for a while, and I’ll be updating that with new information from this week and publishing that as well.
Stay tuned, and don’t delete me from your RSS reader yet.
I pledged to write a blog post for today, Ada Lovelace Day, in honour of a woman in technology who I admire. Although there have been some great women in technology throughout history – Grace Hopper comes to mind, and is the subject of many blog posts today – I wanted to write about someone who I know personally, and who I feel has contributed to my personal or professional development.
I didn’t have any women mentors in the early part of my technology career. I went to a high school in suburban Toronto during the mid-70’s where I had to fight to be admitted to the technical courses, and my mentors there were two male teachers who helped get me gain entry into the courses, then taught me the right (and wrong) way to wire circuits and design mechanical gearboxes. I moved on to engineering at University of Waterloo, where I recall one female professor and one woman teaching assistant during the entire time, neither of whom had a lasting impact. I did my work terms at mines, pulp mills and oil companies in northern Ontario and Alberta: again, not many women around. I came to believe that I didn’t need to have other technical women in my life, since I was doing just fine with male mentors (a convenient belief, consider that was my only choice).
That started to change when I owned a software services company, and was growing it to its eventual size of 40 people. As CEO, CTO and chief cook and bottle-washer, I was involved with pretty much every technical hire that we did. And something completely unintentional happened: I hired a completely female technical management team, all of them talented computer scientists and engineers, and also capable of leading teams. It wasn’t about equal opportunity or any crap like that, it was about finding people who not only had mad tech skillz, but who I trusted to run some part of my company, who understood my vision for it, and who could mentor the people on their teams. They just happened to all be women. That changed something for me. I realized that although I had learned a lot from the male mentors in my life up to that point, I had a lot to learn from the technical women around me, too. These women taught me that collaboration and compassion are not at odds with technology, but enrich it: this was in the late 90’s, when technology was still hard-edged, and the word “collaboration” wasn’t a part of most of our vocabularies.
That’s a lot of preamble, but when I sat down to write this, I felt compelled to explain why my first women tech heroes didn’t come along until I was already 20 years into my technical career. Since then, there have been many more, but I want to go back to one of those first ones with whom I entrusted a huge part of my growing team, Marion Cameron. Marion is a former developer, the best project manager who I’ve ever worked with, and was a tremendously calming and mentoring influence over my growing team of (mostly male) developers. She had stopped programming before I met her, but she has a degree in computer science (also from Waterloo) and spent some amount of her younger years working on contract as a developer in other countries, including a stint in Vietnam while there was a little armed conflict going on there. When I met her, she was a project manager working for one of my customers; she moved on, but when I was later looking for someone as our first project manager hire who could grow into a much more senior position, we tracked her down. As we grew, she took on the management of all project managers and developers, although we eventually split the role so that she could focus on the project management team.
One thing that Marion taught me is that you don’t need to raise your voice to make yourself heard. Petite and soft-spoken, Marion commanded respect from our team and our customers because she knew her stuff, and because she was committed to making sure that the right thing happened. I have heard her raise her voice only once in anger the entire time that I’ve known her, and she did that in private in my office rather than in front of our team or customers. I can’t say that I’ve stopped raising my voice or saying totally inappropriate things sometime, but it certainly seems to be a lot less frequent, and I credit her with helping me to understand the value of taking a moment to think about what I’m saying before I blurt it out.
Another key thing that she showed me was how to bring collaboration into a team. She is a natural collaborator, and manages to find the right path to a solution while gaining consensus, but without that devolving into endless rounds of meetings. I know that if we had had collaborative tools such as wikis back then, she would have been the first to find a way to use them to great effect.
She also taught me a lot about managing people, particularly that strange and wonderful group of developers that made up our team at the time. Most of them were young, talented and a bit full of themselves, prone to bruised egos and always testing the limits. She nurtured them in a variety of ways depending on the individual and the circumstances: part skills mentoring, part coddling, part constructive criticism, and always a healthy dose of respect.
Marion helped me to be a better technical leader, and ultimately a better person; for that, I dedicate my Ada Lovelace Day blog post to her.
Tagged ALD09postI just replaced the WPtouch iPhone Theme with MobilePress after seeing it on Doug Cornelius’ blog. I think that it supports a wider range of mobile devices; I also like the clean interface, and that the pages show at the bottom of the main posts list.
Feedback is welcome, especially from anyone on a non-iPhone/iTouch device.
Barton George tagged me on the latest internet meme to tell you seven things about me. Given that less than two years ago, I played along with the “five things you don’t know about me” meme, I figure that I only owe you two more:
I’m supposed to inflict this on tag seven other people with this meme, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. I also don’t forward chain letters, regardless of the dire warnings therein.
In a post about collaboration, of all things, a Gartner analyst shows how not to interact with his blog’s readers. If you’re a frequent reader of Jim Sinur’s blog, you know that in most posts he invites conversation with open-ended questions at the end, e.g., “What is your experience with this issue”, presumably to feed ideas into his research on the topic at hand.
In this post, he refers to the increasing number of BPM vendors that are including collaboration features, and his first commenter asks him to list some of those vendors. Jim’s response? “We will be writing research notes on this topic going forward that will identify those vendors that have unique solutions.” In other words, “I’m happy to collect your ideas for free as part of my research, but you have to pay for the results.”
I’ve just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7, which means that I never had to do the download-upload-upgrade cycle again. I upgraded two other sites earlier with no problems, and I don’t expect any here, but if you see any strange behavior, please let me know by posting a comment.
It’s time for the Canadian blog awards, and I’m nominated in the “Best Sci/Tech Blog” category. Feel free to head over there and cast your vote; you do not have to be Canadian to vote.
When I switched to the new Google-hosted version of FeedBurner (which soon everyone using FeedBurner will be forced to convert to), they screwed up my feed, causing my subscriptions to drop by about 20%.
Since then, my numbers have come back to to around what they were — presumably through organic growth of the people who figured out that it wasn’t updating and re-added me to their feed reader — until yesterday, when they dropped by 25% and even further today. Grrrrrrrr.
Even worse, my feed hasn’t updated in my own Google Reader since my first post of the day, so even if you are still subscribed, you may not be seeing the posts in a timely manner.
If you’re a victim of this, of course you won’t know, you’ll just think that I’m not blogging. If you check on my site directly and see this, try removing and re-adding my feed to your reader, hopefully that will fix it. At least until the next time GoogleBurner screws up.
Update: After two days of the “25% off sale”, subscriptions jump back to normal.
I’m doing the afternoon keynote at the Ultimus user conference on Wednesday (yes, I have to get from DC to San Antonio) on the topic of the future of BPM. If there are any particular things that you think I should include in my talk, add them as comments to this post or email/Twitter/Skype/Facebook me: in the spirit of social networking, I’ll give full credit to my crowd-sourcers.
As I mentioned previously, my feed subscribers dropped by 20% when Google switched me from Feedburner to the Google-branded feeds that are replacing them, and a couple of people have told me directly that the feed just stopped working, requiring them to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the new address. I subscribe to my own feed in Google Reader, and haven’t had a problem — it just switched transparently — so I’m suspecting that it’s some combination of specific readers and whatever Google is doing to remap the feed to the new location. Regardless, I’m not happy about it.
Coincidentally, I missed the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner this week, but saw this followup post about a TGGD blog feed created using RSS Mixer. Off I went to check it out, and to see if they had included my blog in the feed, and below the list of feeds that are in the mix, I saw this message:
I Googled around, and found this thread on the FeedBurner help group that indicates that Google is doing something different with the feedproxy.google.com feeds than was done with the feeds.feedburner.com equivalents, which is the likely culprit for having broken many of my readers’ subscription (depending on their feed reader) as well as the RSS Mixer feed (which would act sort of like a reader).
At least I’m in good company:
It’s official: Google screwed up my feed when I switched from the feeds.feedburner.com URL to feedproxy.google.com, even though it was supposed to remap seamlessly. Nice going, guys. I’ve had it confirmed by at least two people that the feed just stopped working, and they had to remove and add it again to their feed reader. I suspect that this doesn’t happen in Google Reader — at least, it didn’t for me, where I monitor my own feed to make sure that it’s working properly — and in fact, this may be specific to certain readers.
If you haven’t seen any updates on my feed for a couple of weeks, remove and add it again using the new URL: this one for posts, and this one for comments. Of course, if you only ever read Column 2 through your feed reader, you’ll never see this post, and just assume that I’ve retired or something. Sigh.
A few weeks ago, I switched over to the Google version of Feedburner for my RSS feed (since Google owns Feedburner now, they’re transitioning to feedburner.google.com), and my subscriber numbers instantly dropped by about 20%. Either the stats on one or the other are screwed up, or they dropped a bunch of my readers.
Anyone else seeing this phenomenon?
Amazing what happens when people lose sight of the need for civility in blog comments, just as they might exhibit in a face-to-face business conversation.
For posts on someone else’s blog where I add a comment, or where I’m interested in following the discussion, I tag it in co.mments.com and subscribe to it in my feed reader — that means that I might see two versions of a comment if it is edited by the original author (if the site allows commenters to edit their comments). Imagine my surprise at seeing the following comment added sometime last night on a long conversation thread that had been very professional up to that point:
Unfortunately this post is based on a lack of understanding of the real requirements of [deleted] applications. I’ve posted a clarification as a response to curtail this wayward discussion:
[URL deleted]
Hope this helps clarify.
I was going to post a comment to ask the commenter (in a nice professional way) if he knew that he sounded like an arrogant jerk, but within a few hours, he had edited the comment to read:
I’ve posted a clarification:
[URL deleted]
Hope this helps clarify.
For those of you who tend to write off-the-cuff nasty comments on blog posts, keep in mind that the internet remembers everything, even if you change it. It also knows your IP address, so using a fake name doesn’t help much.
Source obfuscated to protect both the innocent and the guilty.
I was off last week for a vacation in Iceland (photos), which explains why it was pretty quiet around here. It wasn’t my first trip there; I also visited in December 2003 (photos), at the complete opposite in terms of daylight hours, and loved it at both times of year for different reasons. I also had the opportunity to try a completely different way of information access while traveling: I turned off email forwarding to my Blackberry — my provider’s roaming rates are outrageous — and used my iPod Touch wherever I could get free open wifi, such as at our guesthouse or many of the cafes in Reykjavik. Although the iPod Touch interface is vastly inferior to the Blackberry when it comes to composing email for those of us who can touch-type with our thumbs, it’s fabulous for reading email as well as web browsing, which is all that I wanted to do while on vacation. Interestingly enough, after my friends became aware of the device’s capabilities, one of them asked me if I would use my “computer” to look up an address for her, showing that any device with a certain level of functionality will be perceived by the non-tech-savvy as a computer, regardless of form factor.
Today is Canada Day, a national holiday celebrating the country’s confederation in 1867, but Oracle conveniently scheduled their BEA strategy briefing at noon so I’ll be spending at least a couple of hours at my desk before heading out to enjoy a day of beautiful weather and some spectacular fireworks in the evening.
Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.
Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or “a-ha”, moment. It’s like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you’re twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):
Feldman took the opposite tack, saying that he thinks that micro-blogging will never take hold in the enterprise because of the openness and the brevity of the medium — the very things that people love micro-blogging — and Brogan mostly agreed that it would likely only be used for internal technical communications. In fact, Feldman referred to Twitter as “dopey” (he’s a video guy) and thinks that text, particularly 140 characters at a time, isn’t rich enough for the sort of immediate communication that Twitter is trying to provide. As someone who drives thought processes through writing, I don’t agree: I consume (but rarely create) audio and video at times, but text is a much more useful medium for me.
There was a lengthy discussion, including both the panelists and the audience, on whether enterprises would do this on a purely internal system, or on a public system like Twitter, and the relative advantages. There is no suggestion that micro-blogging would entirely replace other methods of enterprise communication, but it can augment them for cases when you want asynchronous but nearly-instant communication to a very broad audience in a public manner, with the capability for interaction between a large number of participants. It can change the velocity of business, critical in today’s market. It can also be a distraction, if people are micro-blogging (or IM’ing or Blackberry’ing) during a meeting or conversation, but that’s a matter of protocol and culture. I don’t even take interview notes on my computer because I think that it gets in the way between me and the interviewee in a face-to-face situation, so I’m very unlikely to ever micro-blog while in a small group, but others are more comfortable with that. If you’re micro-blogging in the context of real-life conversation, then it’s really no different than taking notes on paper in terms of attention.
Enterprise users are using social networks, whether their enterprise masters like it or not. If their work environment gets locked down so that they can’t use them there, they’ll use them from their mobile device (hence the popularity of platforms like Twitter, which is easily consumable on a mobile browser or purely through SMS). Enterprise computing policies will never go away, but it’s time for enterprises to realize that they might actually gain an advantage through their employees participating in social applications like micro-blogging. At the end of the day, I’m not convinced about the value of micro-blogging to me, but I’m not ready to write it off: I likely just haven’t had my a-ha moment yet. That being said, this week is the first time that I met someone who, on hearing my name, told me that they just started following me on Twitter.
James Taylor tagged me in the recent blogging meme, “What’s on Page 123″, where I have to write about the book that I’m currently reading, and quote the 6th to 8th sentences on page 123.
But it occurred to me that a young and docile Hexagon, with a mathematical turn, would be a most suitable pupil. Why therefore not make my first experiment with my little precocious Grandson, whose casual remarks on the meaning of 33 had met with the approval of the Sphere? Discussing the matter with him, a mere boy, I should be in perfect safety; for he would know nothing of the Proclamation of the Council; whereas I could not feel sure that my Sons–so greatly did their patriotism and reverence for the Circles predominate over mere blind affection–might not feel compelled to hand me over to the Prefect, if they found me seriously maintaining the seditious heresy of the Third Dimension.
I first read this book in late high school or university (yes, I’m a math geek), and re-read it when doing graduate studies in multi-dimensional pattern analysis, since it helped me to think about dimensions beyond those that we perceive. I won’t summarize the whole book — Wikipedia has a good summary, and I recommend that you pick up a copy of Flatland and read it for yourself — but it has operates on two levels. First, it’s a mathematical treatise disguised as an allegory: an inhabitant of Flatland, a two-dimensional world, is visited by a Sphere, who attempts to educate him about a three-dimensional world (given that the Flatlander is a Square, this is probably the first true instance of “thinking outside the box” 
). The subtext of the story, however, is a satire of the societal class and religious system in Victorian society at the time the book was written (1884).
I recently recommend Flatland to my other half, who has been writing a story about Sigma, but he just couldn’t get into it; I, however, am enjoying this reading of it as much as I did the first.
I’m bouncing this meme over to Bob McIlree, who is undoubtedly reading something more current about enterprise architecture, and Kate Trgovac, whose blog always introduces me to the coolest stuff and therefore must be reading something interesting. I’m probably supposed to tag five people, but James only tagged me so I figure that I can take some artistic license with this.
I attend a lot of conferences, and blog about them while I’m there. This is good for me in a couple of ways: it gives me lots of things to write about, hence increases my blog readership and therefore my exposure to potential customers and networking contacts, and I usually learn something by attending conference sessions. It’s also good for the conference organizers, since my blogging becomes publicity for the conferences or for related conferences or products. This symbiotic relationship is why I don’t expect to have to pay for admission to any conference that I’m blogging about, and why vendors not only give me free admission but also cover my travel expenses to attend their user conferences.
Some of the large software companies are starting to treat bloggers as regular members of the press, or as analysts, hence are including them in the expenses-paid press events such as conferences without special requests.
It surprises me, after that, to see the old-fashioned way in which some conferences still view the media credentials process. For example, there was a conference recently in Toronto (where I live, so no travel costs) that had a couple of interesting tracks on SaaS and Web 2.0, although large parts of it weren’t of interest to me. I received the standard attendee invitation, and emailed back to say that I was a blogger and ask for a press pass to the conference. Usually when this happens, the immediate response is “sure”, so I thought that it was weird to receive no response after a week. A friend of a friend recommended a different contact, I emailed again, no response. The friend of a friend then poked them directly, and finally I had a response from the conference organizer with a link to the media registration form on their site: a PDF that I’m supposed to fill out and fax back to them. No, that’s not a typo, I said “fax”. Welcome to 1985.
I then checked out their required press qualifications:
| Media Category | Please Provide |
| Editorial representatives | One of the following: • A business card with your name and title from an industry publication • The masthead page of a current industry publication with your name listed • A copy of a current by-lined article |
| Freelance writers | • A letter from the editor of an industry trade publication stating your assignment is to cover the [conference name] Conference for that publication. |
| Web/Internet media representatives | • Printed proof of the site demonstrating content to Linux/Open Source and/or Network technologies and/or Storage/Security technologies • Proof that the site has subscribers that are qualified and the site is secure. |
| Videographer Reporters & Magazine Producers from recognized broadcast media | • Business card with your name and title from a recognized broadcast media organization. |
| Press members w/press cards | • A photocopy of your press card |
I assume that I fit into the web/internet media representatives category, so checking out the qualifications… printed proof? As in printed on paper? This is starting to sound like a joke. And the second requirement: “proof that the site has subscribers that are qualified” — qualified for what? — “and the site is secure” — secure from what, in what way, or by what standards? Add to that the fact that the part of the conference that I want to cover has nothing to do with Linux/open source, network technologies or storage/security technologies.
I duly sent off an email to the publicist explaining that I’m an analyst and blog about a number of topics, including SaaS and Enterprise 2.0, and pointing her to relevant posts and articles of mine online. Of course, I didn’t fax it in, and I linked to the posts and articles rather than printing them, so I may have risked disqualification for those reasons alone.
Several days later, and only a couple of days before the event was to start, I finally heard back from the publicist:
There are some bloggers who request media badges, but they only blog every now and then and they just use it as a guise so they can attend events like [event name] for free. That’s why providing media badges to bloggers is evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Um, yeah. I really wanted to blow off two days billable time in order to not get paid to go to a conference where I would pretend to be a real blogger.
The best part happened a couple of days after the conference, when the organizer (the one who couldn’t be bothered to answer my original emails) called me to complain that he felt my blog posts cast the conference in a negative light — although I had been mostly positive — and wanted me to change them, but was unwilling to post a comment on my blog because, as he said, “some things should just be settled in private”.
I don’t want to pick on this little conference or its organizers, since I see the same thing from much larger conference organizers and from vendors. In the past month, I’ve had a vendor ask me to change a post that I had made about their product but refuse to comment on the post themselves, and another vendor pay my expenses to be at their conference but not let me blog. Vendors and their PR people are coming under a lot of heat lately, and for good reason: the new world order of press is about transparency, and many of the big guys aren’t quite comfortable with that yet. There are many exceptions to that — I have to say that SAP’s blogger relations is a stunning example of how to do it right — but there needs to be a lot more open communication in the industry to make things better for the consumers of the technology.
