My view of the world and anything that might interest me.
The chat service on Facebook must be the worse piece of chat software around. It is one big piece of junk.
So please do not try to chat with me via Facebook chat .. chances are that I would not be able to respond since FB will probably tell me you offline while you are online or my response will disappear into the big unknown. Rather chat with me via gTalk or Skype and if you realy must you can even try Windows Live Messenger.
According to Twittersheep my followers talk about:
At least that is what your BIO claims you will be talking about 🙂
Technorati Tags: twitter, twittersheep
Wednesday evening I attended the 27Dinner and it was great to see some old faces and meet some new people Face to Face. All in all it was a great evening of just socializing with old and new friends. And oh the talks was great too 🙂
One of the questions I was asked over and over again when people hear I work for IBM, is what is a big corporate like IBM doing at a social event like 27Dinner. Few people know that IBM with 400000 permanent employees is dependent in its daily work on social software, networks and communities. Each of the social tools like Twitter, Blogging, Wikis, Forums etc has an IBM equivalent inside. Also we have social tools inside that I have not seen outside yet, but cannot say much about that.
One of my colleagues, Luis Suarez, has recorded a video on The Future of Work and the use of social networks and tools. To give you an idea how he works – he works for IBM Netherlands, stay in the Canary Islands and report to 2 bosses in the United States.
The Future of Work by Luis Suarez from Luis Suarez on Vimeo.
The video is fairly long but gives a good idea what he thinks. In the video he also discusses the use of email – here is a blog posting from him on that subject.
A colleague, IBMer Luis Suarez, wrote an article in the NYtimes on how he is using Social Networking tools to reduce the use of e-mail. And I quote
E-mail can become extinct, if not repurposed altogether, even at big companies like I.B.M. An e-mail in-box no longer needs to be like Pandora’s box.
I am not sure whether I totally agree with this … there is still a place for e-mail. As another IBMer Ed Brill say and I quote
Even if you move all of your collaboration to other tools, there still needs to be a prompt, a push, a tickle, an alert … something that draws you into the collaboration.
And this push or tickle as Ed calls it is usually via email. If somebody comments on a blog post of mine I get prompted about it via email. If somebody follow me on Twitter I get informed via email. If somebody send me a message via Facebook then I get informed via e-mail.
So to answer my own question, no I do not think so. Yes it can reduce the volume of email (an I do not talk about all the spam) in your inbox but totally replace, no I do not think so. I would love to hear your comments about it.
How embarrassing can Facebook be .. well a lot when one does not look what one does. All these apps does not behave the same and can confuse one when you are not on the lookout.
Over the weekend somebody (rather not say who) send me a Superwall picture. It was one of those picture one would not generally show around — you know what I am talking about. Before deleting it, I decided to send it to one of my friends. Not knowing that when selecting Forward in Superwall it selects all friends by default, I unselected the friend I wanted to send the picture to and Forwarded it.
After I hit the Forward button, I noticed to my horror that I forwarded the dreaded picture to all my Friends. Luckily one receive a notification of who all received the forwarded post and this allowed me to delete most of the forwarded pictures.
I know I did not managed to delete all and if you are one of those that got the picture before I deleted it, then sorry if it embarrassed you. It was a real boo-boo on my part and I apologize.
Lesson I learned the hard way. So be careful what you do on Facebook.
How great was the win against Argentina last night? Next week we can give the Poms a lesson in rugby again. So my prediction was not spot on but I really do not care who we play in the final. The main thing is that we there and that we will win it.
I have eventually cleared out all the backed up RSS entries in my feed reader. Here is some interesting tidbits:
With summer getting nearer and just being a patriotic South African and Cape Townian. How can one not love this place. 
Just returned from a business trip to Johannesburg and I have to wade through more than 4700 RSS items in my feedreader. As you can imagine, I am just going to mark a lot as read and skip over them.
Here is some that I did not skip over.
Today’s photo is an amazing eruption of a volcano: 
Credit & Copyright: Patrick Taschler
Tonight is the Cape Town Geekdinner which I cannot attend for a second time in a row due to other commitments. It is a pity that I will be missing this one since it is also Neil’s birthday — congrats Neil.
Also, Cape Town has put in a bit for hosting the 2008 Wikimania Conference. It is now down to 4 cities and the decision date is 6 October. There is still a lot to do before then so if you can help at all then please contact Ian (wikimania2008@greenman.co.za).
IOL Technology has an article on it to give you some more background.
The photo on the left was a traffic jam we ran into coming down Sir Lowrypass just before Somerset West. Luckily I was not in a hurry and I must say that I was impressed with the behavior of the other drivers. Actually thinking about it, all the way from Plett, all the drivers were courteous and most sticked to the speed limit.
Image: Marius Bock taken with Nokia N80
Onto tidbit from my RSS Feed reader:
Sunrise over the Hottentot Mountains: 
Image: Marius Bock taken with Nokia N80
I am trying out the latest beta of Windows Live Writer and so far it seems to be good. One little annoying thing is that the window for inserting Tags is a modal-window which means you cannot have it open to add tags while writing the blog.
While trying to recover from flu/cold and having time going through my RSS Feeds, here are some tidbits:
Space Shuttle Endeavour cuts a bright swath through the dark sky during this night-time launch in January 1998. Nearly six years earlier on Sept. 12, 1992, Endeavour blasted off, carrying Dr. Mae Jamison, the first African-American woman to fly in space, and Mamoru Mohri, the first Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut on a shuttle mission.
Image Credit: NASA