Friday Jun 27, 2008
What I am going to tell you know will not come as a shock (I hope not), but it's a fact that recruiters are increasingly Googling a candidate to find out what the results are. I don't know how often you Google yourself, but I would recommend everyone to do that once in a while. It not only gives you a good idea of your digital footprint, but also lets you track what your activities have been recently. To reassure my manager, if he's reading, I did not do this because I am applying for a job.
These are my Top 10 results:
- LinkedIn - makes sense
- Facebook - makes sense
- Friend Feed - makes sense as well, this is a new one
- NonStick World - blog of friend and colleague who welcomed me, would like to see my blog here
- Pipl - completely unknown, at least I can't remember registering, must have been some time ago
- Amazon profile - completely forgot about that one as well, but you can see I like Space on Ibiza
- Twittervision - makes sense, I have been tweeting a lot lately, but would have thought my Twitter profile would show up
- Listserv 15.5 - this one continues to amaze me. This entry was made in 1995, but still shows up on my first page
- Footbo - recently joined this community
- Twitter page in Japan - completely baffles me!!!
So there you go, this is me letting you know what you get if you Google me.
How often do you Google? Let me know, and share some of your links.
P.S. Should we now write "to google" or "to Google"?
Friday Jun 20, 2008
Another week gone, I wanted to share some of the things that happened this week with ... well basically anybody ;-)
- Getting back to the Western rhythm of life is difficult, I am still somewhat in love with this place
- A program I was previously associated with has popped up on the radar again, sad to hear the same issues are still around, but glad to offer my help
- Doing spreadsheet entries for 2 hours gives a person a headache in the evening. And it doesn't help if 95% of your break time is spent on the MacBook Pro
- Wanted to sell some of my AAPL to take my profits (and have funds for the new iPhone), but made an error in the 2nd transaction so now I have sold all my stock. Well that leaves money for a new MacBook ;-)
- Had an excellent meeting with Peter Reiser on building a community. Great vision, really interesting to listen to. Folks, check out his blog!
- Social Media is hot, just to state the obvious, it's Friday after all :-)
- Holland is cruising through Euro 2008, but there is more to life than soccer, as we sadly learned this week
So, what do I plan to do once I finish the final call of the week in about 1 hour's time?
- Grocery shopping, it's no fun, but has to happen
- Tomorrow is the Longest Day event in Leuven, with lots of little stalls, bit of a fancy fair
- 20:45 CET June 21 - Holland versus Russia, bunch of friends are coming over to watch, will be fun as usual
- Sunday will be visiting inlaws and 20:45 CET Spain agains Russia. Spain has not won in 88 years, will this be their year?
That's me, what do you have planned for the weekend? BTW, I hope it's going to be a great weekend for all of you!
Tuesday Jun 17, 2008
Our team had a discussion yesterday on introducing a team wiki, followed by a traditional website vs wiki discussion.
During the brainstorming one team member commented that when we communicate with our internal audience, when that audience is coming to our information source (wiki or website), the way that the information is presented (look and feel, lay-out, ...) is very important. Her argument therefore supports the use of a website.
My counterargument was that if people are looking for information they put the quality of the information above the nice look and feel of the location where they find the information. Needless to say I support the use of a wiki ;-) To me it is more important to have good data rather than a nice website with poor data.
What we do agree upon is that the structure of the wiki or website should be simple, meaning that it's intuitive to use and easy to find the quality information that our team produces.
My question to you is as such: Do you care about the lay-out of a website if you are looking for internal information? If you are doing something similar than our team, would you go for a wiki or website?
Friday Jun 13, 2008
In my efforts to work on the Selling Business Value Community I have investigated a lot of options. I have been in Second Life, had the training by the Sun mentors, attended presentations by Sun execs, and I also sat in on a number of sessions during the big event Sun had in Second Life. Whilst I have to say I'm very impressed with Sun's efforts with regards to Second Life, I am a little bit concerned about the open structure of Second Life, I need something with a bit more security for my internal community.
During my browsing I encountered more information regarding Project Wonderland, I found some articles in the press, one featuring Nicole Yankelovich. I reached out to her, and she pointed me to Michel Denis in France, who has set up a Project Wonderland server in EMEA. And I was able to connect for the first time today, so here are some first impressions:
- Graphics are a lot less fancy than Second Life, makes sense as Project Wonderland is geared towards the business community
- Audio works perfectly, I was able to talk to Michel Denis, albeit with some technical challenges which were apparently on the server end
- Conference room looks magnificent
- Ability to open an Open Office spreadsheet, Firefox browser and other applications to be viewed and shared is awesome. It's like WebEx, but then in a virtual conference room
- More importantly, it's within SWAN, so no risk of non-Sun people flying into the room which don't belong there
All in all I have to say I'm pretty impressed at this. This technology is something which I will be very actively promoting in my team, and I hope to have a first test meeting very soon. Going forward I am convinced that Sun will enhance the capabilities, improve stability, so that in 12-18 months time all our meetings will take place in Project Wonderland. Who knows, if the team members like it as much as I do, that might be a lot sooner!
Some questions to try to open a debate:
- Have you been into a Project Wonderland environment? Or Second Life?
- What are your impressions?
- How do you see this technology evolving, what impact do you forecast it will have on the way you operate within Sun?
Friday May 23, 2008
A while ago I posted a blog entry on how my increased activity in the online world was having a negative effect on my reading time, and I asked my readers which book I should start reading. Only 1 comment from Pam, but a good one as I finished reading Thomas L. Friedman's 2nd edition of The World Is Flat yesterday. And this is an excellent book, I like books that make you start to think, that set your creative part of your brain in motion. Some observations that I want to share:
- One of the points that I will keep with me forever is the fact that when a country, company, community or individual starts to spend more time with his or her memories than dreams, it's basically game over. As more and more of the world's 6 billion start to live up to and chase their dreams, people who are stuck with their memories will be bypassed and left back by all the people entering the flat world to try to become what their imagination tells them they can be.
- The flattening of the world is a challenge, and the speed at which this transformation is happening can be frightening for people who are feeling the impact on their jobs, their quality of life. But there is no reason to panic. As history has shown, countries or cultures that have been open to innovation, continued learning, science and technology will rise to the occasion. There will be new products and services produced that take all to a higher level. And as the so called developing countries see this, they will be challenged again to raise their level, which in the end brings everybody to a higher level. We need to keep this in mind at all times.
- Following up on this point, whilst reading this book I had 1 idea that sprang to mind, and for the first time it keeps sticking with me, and I am contemplating taking this idea further, to explore it more and see if something can be made out of it. I'm not sure something will be made out of this idea, I don't think I'm there yet, but at least I am thinking about it.
As this is my last working day (taking 2 weeks vacation), I will not be posting here until I get back. These are the 2 books I plan to read during this 2 week break, let's see if these have the same effect on me:
Final thought: can you share books that have influenced you?
Friday May 16, 2008
Yesterday I received the item I have wanted since January 2007: the iPhone. No, it's not an official one, as we still are waiting for the release in Belgium. But I decided I waited long enough and bought an unlocked iPhone on the Internet. But this post is not about telling you how fantastic this device is, which it is btw :-)
What I discovered is that when the iPhone is connected over EDGE or GPRS you do not get your SMS, or text, messages anymore. It's similar to the old days when your US Robotics 28.8 modem was using the phone line. At first I was not pleased with this, but then I started thinking a bit more, and came to a conclusion that I had not thought about until yesterday.
How I stay in contact with my friends has changed quite significantly the last 6 months, and I can pinpoint the moment to when Facebook hit the mainstream, and my friends list grew from let's say 5 to over 100 (and counting). So before Facebook we used to rely on SMS to organise and set up a bar night, or just to say hi. But nowadays Facebook, and increasingly Twitter, is becoming the preferred way of contacting each other. And I seem to be "talking" to my friends a lot more than before as well.
And this leads to less texting to friends. I wonder whether the mobile operators are seeing the same trend, that's maybe why they are so keen to develop mobile social networking applications.
Anyway, to finish this post with a question: "How do you stay in touch with your friends these days?" I am interested to hear from you.
Have a great weekend all !!!
Tuesday May 13, 2008
I love Mac Mail, I have used it every day for the last 2 years. And to date, I am still pleased with this e-mail client. But the only thing that I miss in Mac Mail is the ability for it to be integrated with a calendar service from Sun. I want to be able to view my mail and calendar in the same application, and so far I have not found how to do this with Mac Mail. And until today, I did not find how to do this on a Mac, period. However...
Today I found a link on Sun's intranet explaining how you can install a plug-in, or extension into Thunderbird that enables you to view exactly that: your mail and your calendar in the same window. Even better, if you change something in Thunderbird it is updated on Namefinder, and vice versa. Exactly what I was looking for! What is it called? Lightning :-)
In case you are wondering how to do this, I can only recommend to visit this link where all is explained.
Will I never go back to Mac Mail? Never say never, I got married for the 2nd time 9 days ago, and I always said I would never do that again ;-) But for the moment I will give Thunderbird my preference, and I will certainly let you know if I switch back.
Oh, and if someone from Sun IT is reading this, I would really love an integration with iCal, this would help calendar management on my soon to arrive iPhone as well ;-)
Thursday May 01, 2008
About 4-6 weeks ago I decided to plunge fully in everything that is social media: even more Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter, started my own blog, started reading dozens of blogs, tried to get a collaboration effort launched within my team. What I realised is that the time spent online has changed quite significantly.
These days I spend a lot less time reading e-mail (apart from work e-mail of course, that continues to increase), and I spend most of my time on Facebook, LinkedIn, and reading all kinds of blogs. The site that I visit most often now is Google Reader, which allows me to follow the blogs, but also keeps me up to date about world events by following sites such as The Financial Times, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
E-mail used to be my primary source of contact with Friends (replaced by Facebook), and to be kept up to date via News Alerts (replaced by Google Reader), and I know find myself being surprised that I have not checked mail for a full day, which used to be unthinkable a few months ago.
So, I am curious if your online behaviour has changed as well. Where do you spend your time online?
Sunday Apr 27, 2008
One of the projects that I am working on is to put together a virtual community for our Top Accounts to interact with each other, and the Industries & Practices organisations. As this means working together within an Account Team, but also collaborate with other part of Sun's organisation, I thought it would be a good idea for people to work together on the collaboration strategy for our Top Accounts.
So I created this wiki page on our internal platform and invited my team members and stakeholders to jointly develop this collaboration strategy. This would not only lead to the development of an excellent collaboration strategy (Wisdom of Crowds, remember), but would in the same time demonstrate to any potential users, that such collaboration in the virtual world, using a wiki, is possible.
The problem I am seeing is that so far I have received very little feedback on this idea, let alone a lot of contributions via edits of the above mentioned wiki page.
I guess change really is difficult to implement at Sun, but I can imagine the same is true for other corporations and organisations. I do realise it's still difficult for people to see a wiki as a vital work tool, but I will not give up trying, as I am convinced of the tremendous value that such a collaboration tool offers.
So, now comes the "I Want You" part. If you feel that you can help us to put together this collaboration strategy, if you have any best practices experience or other suggestions that can help us to show how our Top Accounts can increase their productivity and sales successes, do let us know.
All comments on this blog are welcome, also alternatively, if you are a Sun employee you can directly access the wiki page, and make your edits there.
A big thank you in advance!
Tuesday Apr 22, 2008
OK, quick inventory of my Apple products: 1 PowerBook, 1 MacBook, 1 MacBook Pro, 1 Airport Express, 1 Time Capsule, 2 iPods and 1 iPod Touch.
Needless to say that I have an overload of cables lying around. This can lead to kind of embarrassing situations, as occurred this evening.
My iPod Touch needed some power, so I took one of the cables and plugged it into my MacBook Pro. To my surprise and growing annoyance the iPod Touch did not start loading. Tried another USB port, unplugged the power cord, plugged it back in. Nothing, so getting more and more frustrated. Until ...
There it was, the cable that was attached to my iPod Touch was tangled up with another cable, exactly the same one. So I plugged in the wrong cable into my MacBook Pro :-)
Who has similar stories to share, if you are bold enough to admit them that is ;-)
Thursday Apr 17, 2008
A full season, 81 games, and still the last game needed to decide places 3 through 8 in the West, that's something that I can't remember, and I have been following the NBA for a long time. Now that the schedule is fixed, let's try to make some predicitions.
East - who is willing to bet against a Celtics-Pistons Eastern Conference final? Not me, I don't see any team that is capable to keep either of the two teams out of the final. Last year was exceptional, I don't think this will be repeated. I don't see a repeat of LeBron and the Cavs, especially as they are up against the Celtics in the semi-finals. So I predict the Celtics to win it in 6 to progress to the Finals.
West - phew, do I really risk a prediction here? Sure, let me give you my take:
- Lakers-Nuggets: don't see how Iverson and Anthony can stop Bryant and co, Lakers win it in 5
- Hornets-Mavericks: will Dallas relive the first round nightmare of 2007? They will give it 200%, but I still think the Hornets will be the better team, Hornets win it in 6
- Spurs-Suns: for some reason I never liked the Spurs, and since last year's disgrace in the playoffs I hate them, so any team that plays the Spurs gets my support. Suns will take it in 7, with Stoudemire dunking in the last second to win it ;-)
- Jazz-Rockets: I think the Rockets are playing great, even without Ming, but I still think the Jazz will be the winner of this series, Utah to take it in 6
In the semi-finals the Suns will beat the Jazz, and the Lakers will conquer the Hornets to set up what I think will be a classic, one matchup that will be talked about for years to come. In the Western Conference final I think the Lakers will edge out the Suns, this time with a buzzer beater from Bryant from way-way downtown ;-)
As for the Big Winner, the Celtics will have played a lot less games than the Lakers, so I think they will be the better rested team, and take it in 6.
OK, that's my take, any comments? Who is your favourite team to take the 2008 NBA title?
Wednesday Apr 16, 2008
My cable company offers Prime Sports, with about 10 live soccer games each week, but more importantly 2 NBA games per week. Being a very big fan of basketball this subscription is a no-brainer.
During the broadcast of tonight's game (Hornets beat the Clippers), I heard the commentators talk about an interesting phenomenon of community building. The Hornets guard, Chris Paul, has other NBA stars stay over at his house if these players are in New Orleans. The mentioned LeBron James, Dwight Howard and others. If Chris and LeBron each have a night of, they will connect over the phone and start playing each other online.
The commentator mentioned that he could not imagine staying at another player's house when he was playing 20 years ago. His co-commentator rightly replied by stating that times have changed, and that connecting with other players has become much easier.
All in all, this is not something new that happens. People have been connecting with people forever. What is different now is that the way we connect is so radically different. 20 years ago I would connect with the neighbours, kids at school, at the snooker club. Now I am connecting with people all over the world, not only for work purposes, but also for fun.
Boy, have the times changed... I like it! Do you often feel nostalgic for earlier decades with no mobile phone, no internet, your Atari game computer? Let me know how you feel.
Tuesday Apr 15, 2008
The amount of press, and especially space on the social media blogs, that is currently allocated to Twitter gives a strong indication of its popularity and its user base, which is still continuing to grow. The blog article here asks the question whether Twitter has tipped. For those of you that are not familiar with the term "tipped", read the excellent Malcolm Gladwell book "The Tipping Point".
Since I started twittering myself, I have found it not only fun to connect with other people at Sun, but I have also become convinced of the business use, especially since the story I read about the Comcast Executive getting in touch with a disgruntled user as a result of a Twitter post. In the various blogs that I follow on social media, a number of Twitter apps get reviewed on a regular (let's face it, daily) basis, and one of them caught my interest. The service offered by Tweetburner is as such:
- allows you to shorten a url, which given the limit of 140 characters for Twitter posts is extremely valuable
- but it also allows you to track the number of hits for each url that you post
- and finally, on the Tweetburner homepage you can follow the urls that receive the most clicks at any given moment
- posting a new url can also be done by installing the Twurl this! button on your toolbar, very efficient and quick
Once this blog post is done, I will obviously add this to my Twitter account, and follow how many hits the post gets! My recommendation is to try it out, and have fun with it!
Sunday Apr 13, 2008
Saw a blog post this week on Techcrunch that talked about the Future of Social Networking, and I have to say this is beyond what I can currently imagine. I'm a bit of a geek, and I will try out any Apple gadget or thingie that they bring on the market. The same applies for web sites and tools, that's probably why the members of the team at work come to me for advice or if they have questions.
But imagining standing at the bar, waiting for subway, in line at the supermarket or anyplace else where we wait (and boy, do we wait in our life), and just being able to see which of my friends are around, that's currently beyond my imagination. The biggest value would be for singles (or the ones cheating), as this opens up numerous dating possibilities. Looking for a brunette for the evening, search your iPhone and there she is (might be).
Obviously this opens the question and debate around privacy. My take? As long as people sign up for any service, they need to be aware that their privacy just got a big hit. But I for one am willing to accept that hit on my privacy providing the return that I get from any tool or service is higher than the burden or worry about losing privacy. Any thoughts out there?
Thursday Apr 10, 2008
Ever since I started to delve deeper in the fascinating world of Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, del.icio.us and many, many blogs, I found that I spend almost all of my spare time in front of the laptop browsing the web, updating profiles, fighting space battles. As this is so much fun, I don't mind to invest my time. The big problem is that I recently had another burst of book buying, meaning I have a number of books that are on my book shelf, waiting to be read.
So question to my readers, which of the following books do you recommend I start with:
- The World is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman
- Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
- Legacy of Ashes - Tim Weiner
- Chaos - James Gleick
- Seeing What's Next - Clayton M. Christensen
Don't want to leave with two book recommendations, I found these excellent:
- The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
- Made to Stick - Chip Heath & Dan Heath
|
|
|
|
