In connection with the “History of Search” theme, below is an interesting infographic…
Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing
One of the people I follow on twitter is Shadeed Eleazer (@mrshadeed). He’s a cool guy and blogs about the digital world. He also creates video blogs.
One of the ones I watched recently was about Klout. He talks about what it is and how it works.
Definitely worth 3 minutes and 48 seconds of your time to view/listen to it.
The Ultimate Guide To “LinkedIn Today” & How To Optimize Your Presence On It
Modify the SharePoint Help Desk Template and New Request Forrm – YouTube
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions – Leadership Training from MindTools.com
Are Orphan Drugs Still a Licence to Print Money? by Andrea Charles
Dutch customs and etiquette – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nick Hadlee’s Blog on SharePoint and Other Occasional Rants…
is the circle crumbling?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t really “get” Google+. (Having never actually having used Facebook).
Just after writing that post, I found this article, by Matt Heinz, in which he said:
You can drive yourself nuts and waste loads of time chasing after every new technology, gadget, productivity tool, social network or other flavor of the week.
And if you insist on being the first to try everything and position yourself on the bleeding edge, knock yourself out.
In the article was also a link to another useful article in which Chris Brogan lists 50 useful things to do with Google+.
I’m going to read through this.
Maybe this social media troglodyte will learn something…
Ok – so I got myself a Google+ account.
…
Now I have to get used to using it. I’ve never done Facebook (and was damn proud of it), so this side of the online social media world is new to me.
What I mean, is that I had gotten used to checking my Twitter stream regularly, and kept an eye on Delicious’ “Recent” bookmarks (to see if anyone else had found anything interesting), but Google+ … well that was new for me.
So – I caught myself smiling when I saw a post on Google+ by someone that I had inadvertently “invited” when I had included him in one of my “Circles”. His comment was:
Ok, here we go…another social obligation. I wonder what the chance of me maintaining G+ as well as my Blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
I felt exactly the same way (with the exception of Facebook).
At the same time, I was hitting the Random button on the xkcd site, and came across this:
Note: I never waste my time with social media at work
It is a Facebook-like social tool, and one of the defining features is that it allows you to refine your online social network so that it represents real-life more.
About a year ago, I came across a presentation on SlideShare that showed some of Google’s early research into social networks. Now I see that this was for what is now “Google+”.
Interesting stuff…
The Real Life Social Network v2
I was at a client site, checking on someone’s work in migrating a SharePoint Search system from one domain to another.
Everything was looking good – the crawl was working, a search returned hits as expected. However when I checked the Advanced Search page, I saw the error:
The Search application is not available for this site.
Oops – that didn’t look good.
Grabbing the message, I plugged it into Google in hope of finding a solution.
Much to my surprise, Google listed 43 sites that matched that error message, and 38 of them linked to the Advanced Search pages of public sites that were having the exact same problem.
Now fortunately the first link in the search results had the answer. So, I had this one fixed pdq.
What amazed me was the other links that directed to public web sites. These included schools, a government department in Qatar, the Connecticut National Guard, the Massachusetts National Guard, as well as other “interesting” sites.
I’m flabbergasted. It would appearthat these sites have undergone a similar exercise where something was changed. Someone had done some cursory testing, and had given the “It’s all good” sign.
And that was it.
Here - have a look for yourself.
Related Posts
On the uber humor site there is a good explanation of the true meaning of that Google search results indicator that you see at the bottom of a search results page.
I thought it was funny, so included it here…
Check out their site for more (& sometimes, not) funny stuff.
When I started blogging, it was because I had been inspired to “write down” what I was doing. Just as a way of keeping a personal record. I just wanted to start…something.
At the same time, I discovered that I was actually having to “think” more about things. I found this really inspiring.
A post at the end of last year, by Bjørn Furuknap, led me to question this. In his post, Bjorn stated that if a blogger was offering no real value, then he/she would be better off doing nothing. (I wrote a post about this, that you can read here.)
To be honest, Bjorn’s post (as well as older post by Laurence Hart, aka @Piewords), make me think seriously about the posts I write.
On the one hand, I didn’t want my posts to fall into the “might as well just shut up” category, but I still wanted to use them as a way that I could record my thoughts, or offer tips, or advice.
In fact this conflict, would often prevent me from actually writing anything. I would start, but then doubt would enter my mind, as I tried to work out whether the post was indeed too much of the “just shut up” type.
Thanks to a tweet by @BizTeam lead me to a small video in which Seth Godin, and Tom Peters, talks about blogging. Seth commented that a blog is free, and it doesn’t matter if nobody reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it – the “thinking” about it.
Wow – when I heard these words, it really brought me back to my original “purpose” for writing. It’s something I mention in that earlier post – I blog so that I am forced to THINK about things.
Have a look at the video, and let me know what your thoughts are…
Through one means or another (I think I saw a Tweet about it). I “discovered” a presentation on Innovation. It was given by Scott Berkun at the Carnegie Mellon University.
I was really inspired by Berkun’s presentation. I watched it once, and then again, and then tried to make notes of what he was saying during the presentation.
Berkun talks about how much of what we know about innovation is wrong as he explored the history of innovation and creative thinking.
The notes I took take up eight pages. These are available via the links below. However, in a nutshell, Berkun points out that innovation is not some magical thing that just happens. It requires a lot of hard work, and a lot of failure. Often when we look at someone/something successful, we don’t see the work that was put in to get to that point.
Berkun gives many examples of people famous in history for their discoveries, and points out that it is the “mythology” surrounding that discovery that we actually remember without being aware of the hours put in to get to that it. Two examples he gives are Newton who is remembered for discovering gravity when he got hit on the head by an apple, Archimedes who cried Eureka! when he was in the bath.
He goes onto to illustrate how failure is also a part of innovation. The Colloseum in Rome is lauded as being an amazing piece of architecture, and shows what great builders the Roman’s were. However, we don’t get to see the attempts that failed. They don’t exist any more. We just have remaining the attempt that was successful. There are several modern examples also that include Google, Apple, Flickr.
At one point in the presentation, Berkun claims that James T Kirk is responsible for killing innovation. Why? Because, James T Kirk is the only modern day icon for exploration that we have today. The main story of exploration that is widely known is that of Captain Kirk, and the Enterprise and it’s ongoing mission to seek out new life, etc, etc.
The problem with this is that within the first few opening minutes of the program Star Trek, a new planet has been discovered. And then with the next few minutes, something exciting has happened. And so it goes on. We don’t get to see the boring bits. We don’t get to see the time spent just trying to find a new planet. And this is what happens a lot in real life . A new “discovery” is being made. There is a lot of excitement, and then…nothing. This is because it usually takes years, and years, and years before the new discovery is something useful, viable, or commercially profitable.
As I mentioned, Scott Berkun’s presentation really caught my attention. He had a very dynamic way of presenting this information. I recommend you follow the links below to learn more.
My Notes from Berkun’s presentation
Scott Berkun’s presentation on YouTube
