The Obvious?

The power of the well asked question

I remember with fondness the power of Marko Tusar's questions on our intranet forum at the BBC and it is nice to see from this post on the BBC Internet Blog that he hasn't lost the knack.

Twhirl is raising funds at a $4.2 million valuation ...

... and in his post announcing the news Loic used the memorable phrase

"Given the market price of a tweet" ....

And people worry about the word social!

;-)

Girlie phones

Many moons a geek at the BBC used to try to wind me up by calling Macs Fisher Price computing. I used to wind him up by saying that I took that as a compliment as it meant well designed, easy to use and fun.

Several times now women who I barely know have seen me using my iPhone and come up to me saying they have one and how much they love it. Not just like it - LOVE it.

In the same inversion of it's possible sexist use I reckon the normally disparaging epithet "girlie" is high praise indeed for a bit of kit.

Geek & Poke thanks to Dave Snowden

Oh my gawd ...

The nightmare that called itself knowledge management would appear to be attempting to morph into wisdom management. Abandon faith all ye who enter ....

Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013

Forester are predicting this huge spend on bringing web 2.0 to the enterprise. I find myself telling people more and more that if they are spending loads of money on this stuff they are almost certainly doing the wrong things.

If any businesses want help making Forester's prediction look silly they know where to find me .....

The hidden benefits of social computing in the enterprise

Rex Lee has a great post listing the not so obvious, but in my view greatest benefits of social computing in a business environment.

More on the word social

Shortly after I responded to Dave's comment on my previous post my aggregator pointed me to this very interesting and different take on use of the word social.

Having just come back from The Czech Republic, where I spent a lot of time thinking about its past under communism, and having just finished the section in Modern Times which deals with the various forms of totalitarianism shaping the world at the start of the second world war, I have been thinking a lot more about the risks of revolutionary and utopian thinking.

The ideologies of the thirties filled the vacuum left by the loss of faith in religions triggered by the thinking of Einstein and Freud and the destabilization of the old order speeded up by the impact of the first world war. I am constantly thinking about the similarily major changes happening now in how we see societies and relate to each other, partly brought about by the impact of the web on our ability to connect with and understand each other, and the risk of slipping into utopianism and our own dogmas. It is so important to me to try to learn the lessons of history as I play my own small part in avoiding some of John Gray's ever decreasing circles.

For me the bottom line is that without the web and blogging, sitting here in rural Buckinghamshire I would not have been able to re-publish Hugh's cartoon which would not have been read by two people in totally different parts of the world who also think hard about things that matter and we would not have been able to engage each other in trying to understand our world and make it a better place each in our own ways.

This is soooo why I love blogging.

Spot on

I get frustrated when people in business turn their noses up at the word social and Hugh, as usual, nails it.

Homosexual Geneticists Isolate Cause of Christianity

via Tom Coates