simondelliott

How to size an online community

Following the success of my thoughts on online comunities Ive decided to coint my own unit of mesure.

The Internt Gram or ig is a measure of the information in a website, discussion board or onlien community.

You can read all about it in my page on the subject here How big is an online community.

order vs chaos & who will win the recession

Imagine two hypothetical companies,

Spick & Span
This company is organized to the maximum efficiency
Their data is in the most normalized form (no one piece of data is repeated)
Their process are perfectly efficient and no task is ever repeated.
They do have redundancy in their system but this again is perfectly sized.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

Splat&O’Messy
This company is not organized in any way nothing is written down
There are no job titles, roles and responsibilities or appraisals.
Their data is literally strewn around the office.
Loads of tasks are repeated, there are teams that are entire duplicates.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

If you place these two companies in a stable environment then Spick and Span will naturally be the most profitable where as Splat and O’Messy could make loads more profit if they were organized, but they are all so busy they never get round to it.
Now imagine moving these two companies into an unstable environment. Suddenly Splat and O’Messy comes into its own, its own instability allows it to react faster than Spick and Span, also because information and resource is strewn around the whole company, vast parts can be cut off or become inaccessible and it can still function.

Companies are made up of lots of different types of people, during stability the organizers (project manager types) bubble up and start to run the company. On your P&L this will look great, but you must be aware that every process they implement or orgchart they publish is a nail in the coffin of your agility. You must balance this type of person with the type of person who is not well rounded, and who sometimes goes against the flow.

In short, a little mess is a good thing,

PONG is more than just a game … its a way of life

Have you ever wanted to learn a new programming language?
Have you ever had to introduce a student to programming?
Have you ever had to teach a team how to code for a new platform?

Well if you have you will know that all these are difficult jobs, most seasoned professionals will have done them many many times.

Its difficult to learn these things straight from books, infact to get the real experience you neeed to professionally make software quickly when you dont have the skills inplace its downright impossible.

I have a standard approach … and too keep it all fun it involves pong
.

When Im setting up a team using a programming language that they dont know, I ask them to make pong, without using copy and paste.
Pong is a simplistic game that involves very few computing tricks. However it is also very challenging for the platform. You dont need a functional spec before you start codeing as everyone knows pong.

The ball has to travel quite quickly.
The bats have move slowly enough to make it a challenge
The AI of the computer opponent can not be too good.

If they can make a good imitation of the game on the platform then you know that have a good grasp of the programming language. It teaches them how to structure the code, the repository, the build procedure and also how to get the most from the platform. You would be surprised just how many platforms Ive worked on that simply cannot run a good pong game.

If you love pong / programming and working in a team then join my Facebook pong group

Your not playing solitaire on your own

During 2008 humankind spent 9 billion man hours playing windows solitaire, or you could think of this as 5 panama canals. But, solitaire is not just a toy, way back it was instrumental in teaching us how to use a mouse, and to welcome windows into our businesses and homes, a job that it is still doing today.

Modern innovative companies are using this pattern to not only educate their customers but to directly generate value.
The movement is called serious games and uses the internet to bring players together either in an application as simple as google image labeler or in a MMORG such as Americas Army.

To be successful in 21st century organizations not only have to open their eyes to the possibilities that gameing offers to their bottom line but they will also need to open their firewalls and actively create a culture where games, crowdsourcing and virtual collaboration.

If you want to find out more …
David Edery and Ethan Mollick from Microsoft and MIT have written a new book Channing the game its a good read and there is a good audio interview with them here changing the game.

How a media company is organised

Ive had a pop at describing how the management structure of a media company works. Its a fairly accurate description of an ideally functioning company.

This is really important ….
Its not a hierarchy

read the full article here

I’m hoping that you will look at this and think, ah ha !!! thats how my company works. or even Ah ha thats what they do !!!

The 5 core presentation skills

An important aspect part of an architect, business person or innovators role is convincing other people that your ideas or your teams ideas are worth investing in.  So in good technical fashion ive been breaking down what makes a good presentation into its 5 elemental components.

copyrighting
This is the art of writing good strap lines, titles and points. You can learn this from advertisers and poets. Think about simplicity, delete pointless words.

typography
How you place words, emphasize them and where you place them in relation to other objects is important. The basics of graphic design can be self taught from the many books on the subject. I found that the story behind the helvetica font was an interesting starting place.

performance
This is showmanship – at the end of the day you have to present, if you are nervous, mumbling and faltering it will detract from the content that you are trying to present.  Actors and presenters have techniques to help you concor these

composition
This is basic artistic composition, look at how the diagrams you use flow. Imagine yourself looking at the diagram or graphic as an audience member. What does it mean to you? Art history is a good way to learn about composition, and you get to spend some times looking at some really good pictures.

collaboration
Ideas are fragile they need support, the best way to get this is to collaborate with others. Know your collaboration tools well  (wiki, svn, google doc) and use them to get the most out of your friends enthusiasm.

It is important to know these skills well. How can you inspire someone else if you have not been inspired yourself.

Check out my christmass themed graphic !

Testing a continous integration setup

I found a soultion to a problem testing CI, and I wanted to share it with you.

Im really into Continous Integration as a method to increase product quality and decrrease time to market, but I have been struggeling with creating a sand box where new ideas could be tested.

This is because the setup (developer work station, svn, cruise control, jira, test, stage and production environments) uses manny bits of kit and its not easy to tinker with all of them at the same time.

The solution I found was to use Virtual Box (sun opensource virtualisation) to emulate and run all the diferent instances on my laptop.

an added bonus was that I could just copy the files (one for each box) and share it with my developer buddies, who could see the idea without mis interpreting my meaning. They gave some excellent feedback too.

Im guessing that there may be thousands of diferent ways of acheiving this. I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on this subject?

Labeling or tagging content in a wiki

Only use labels that refer to the content of the article rather than the type of article.

i.e. if you are writing up the social networking label it with
Good >> Social, Network, Web2, Media
Bad >> wiki, page

Tag clouds are a good navigation tool when they are about context rather than construct.
Construct is better conveyed to the use in a more traditional navigation tool such as a menu, hierarchy or list. So try and highlight the content with the labels. A good way to think of what content is good to label is to think of the article as a classified add, where every word costs you money.

shameless self promotion

so you’ve made your site and no ones reading it …
either
get a professional production team
or …

1 – GET OTHER PEOPLE TO LINK TO YOU
this is THE  most important thing
make sure that the words in or around the link are good

2 – CHANGE THE FRONT PAGE CONTENT EVERY DAY
Google must see your rate of change

3 – the server side technology does not matter, microsoft, java, php whatever
4 – use permalinks (ie www.foobar.com/sales/information is better than www.foobar.com/contents.aspx?page=7867576564)
5 – use well formed html
6 – register the site with google
7 – register it with every other site you can find, especially … facebook, myspace, linked, technorati, bebo, project path,
8 – get other people to write up your site, especially the popular bloggers (do you know Scot Mc Arther and Steve Nimmonds?)
9 – book mark it in delicious,
10 – book mark it in stunble upon
11 – put an article on you site and digg it
12 – get everyone you know to digg it
13 – add digg links, (stumble upon, facebook, you tube, … )
14 – keep the html simple, best way is using lynx or an audio reader (if it sounds like nonsence then your site is wrong)
15 – put a video on to you tube that links to your site
16 – get the BBC to write about your site
17 – lookup SEO on the web and follow instructions
18 – allow comments
19 – use google analyitics
20 – constantly monitor google analyitics, add it to you igoogle, rss reader, livelink page,
21 – be controversial with your content
22 – use alt text on content pictures
23 – get your site in the press

be patient

Can government cut costs with social networking?

I have just read this http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39325058,00.htm?r=2

This point of view is fundamentally flawed and forgets that “government” is the action of authority, and that it imposes jurisdiction without unanimous, majority or even minority consensus. Where as the social network is the interaction of individuals with other individuals using technology.

The responsibility of government is to improve the lives of individuals via the application of abstraction i.e. legislation against cigarette advertising. Its judgements are guided by the research that it commissions, or secret information that it gathers.

Today the contents of the social network is massively influenced by the intelligentsia, who are the early adaptors of the technology, but tomorrow it will have mass market adoption.

Information and recommendations that can be derived from the contents of a social network will tomorrow reflect the reactionary majority view. It would be dangerous and irresponsible to allow research and policy to be solely guided by such networks.

The eminent thinkers of my great nation have a long and checked history of engineering large scale social change, and engineering large scale … errr … engineering.

We are behind many of the “isums” and machines that have shaped the world. Our age sees the direct conjunction of the two. I can not predict the outcome of this union, but it is a safe bet that the UK will first see the changes.