Sharing at Work

We’re having a fun holiday season on the road visiting family. I’m lucky enough to have my wife, daughter, and dog all along for the ride. Hope your week is as calm and warm as mine has been.
- Daniel

You can't ignore mobile readers!

I’ve just posted a continuation to the mobile phone series from earlier this week, this time as a guest post at LouisGray.com. Head on over to Louis’s site to learn more about why you can’t ignore mobile readers and what you can do to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Thanks once more to Louis for giving me the opportunity to share with his readers.

Today I’d like to share some of the most though-provoking articles I’ve read this week.  Several of them confirm trends I’ve been wondering about myself.  Let’s talk about them, shall we?

These first two clips give a great look at technology adoption and avoiding “silver bullet” thinking.  Enterprise 2.0 strategies are definitely going to help your company improve responsiveness and communication levels while saving costs.  This is probably in your company’s recession-proofing strategy already.  Take some tips from Stewart Mader on the diversified approach to E2.0 implementations:

Technology Adoption Mistakes & Managing Digital Nomads

They offer excellent advice on how to avoid these mistakes, and their best suggestion is to try multiple things at once. Don’t bet too heavily on one choice, and don’t focus too hard on making that one bet successful. The combination of hedging bets and giving each one breathing room gives people a chance to find the best uses, and grassroots adoption is much more likely to stick, and stay successful, in the long run.

- Stewart Mader, Future Changes

Wiki++ in 2009: Moving Toward Suites With Wiki at the Core

This isn’t the oft-promised “portal” of the ’90s - it’s something different, and better, because people have a much easier time with a tool that’s centered on one major capability, but can do other things as needed. Think of email: you can send a simple message to one person, but you can also attach a file, send to multiple people, etc. That flexibility is why email has become so popular, and its why wikis are poised to keep growing dramatically as well.

- Stewart Mader, Future Changes

This next article says to me “someone at Cisco read Wikinomics“.  Suddenly we’ve got 500 managers involved in decision making and strategy instead of ten.  Responsiveness levels are up! Competitive advantages abound.  Let’s each of us figure out how to get this sort of first-mover advantage as we head into the recession, shall we?

Cisco as an emerging Enterprise 2.0 case example

The bumpy part — and the eye-opener — is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success. What used to be “me” is now “we.” The goal is to get more products to market faster, and Chambers crows at the results. “The boards and councils have been able to innovate with tremendous speed. Fifteen minutes and one week to get a [business] plan that used to take six months!

- Jim McGee, FASTforward blog

This last one attacks some of the sacred cows of Enterprise 2.0 and posits a few emerging trends for next year.  Most poignant to me is the following bit about picking up side jobs as a means of diversifying one’s income and reducing the risk inherent in relying on a single paycheck.  I hope you and I both make it through 2009 with our jobs intact, but if we don’t it will certainly be nice to have a little cushion in the form of a side job or even a self-sustaining business.

Will Your Enterprise 2.0 even make sense in 2009?

In a sense, there are no layoffs in the 2.0 era. You just reinvent yourself as a multiple-streams of income cloudworking professional. The people cloud lives in Starbucks, so even if they downgrade from lattes to regular brews, the coffee shop industry will revive and Starbucks especially will put its painful restructuring behind it. Of course, most of us have income portfolios skewed 90-100% in favor of one source, but still, these are better times to be thrown out of work than any other recession in history.

- Venkatesh Rao, Enterprise 2.0 blog

This week I’ve got a lot on my mind about mobile blogs, site accessibility, and promoting community amongst the readers of a site. Today’s installment covers the steps I’ve taken to make this site mobile friendly.

1) Install the MobilePress plugin. This plugin serves up a lo-fi version of the site when your browser identifies itself as iPhone, iPod, Windows CE, Blackberry, or a few other key words.

2) Install the WPTouch plugin. This is like MobilePress but it’s specifically customized for the iPhone. Mobile Safari seems to be the Cadillac of mobile browsers, so why not give it something blingy.

3) Give up on the WP Super Cache plugin. As much as I liked this (and as cool as author Donncha is supposed to be) I had to downgrade to the slightly less cachey WP-Cache plugin because that one plays nice with WPTouch.

That’s the quick hits on making your WP blog mobile-friendly.  I’ve finally eaten my own dogfood when it comes to mobile support.  This site should look just dandy on iPhones, Blackberries, and the like.  PLEASE let me know if that’s not the case for you.

The next few posts in this space will discuss mobile needs on sites other than blogs. I’ll also show you how to get a mobile look for a non-Wordpress site.

Were text messages ever cheap? iPhone users already pay a $30 monthly fee for unlimited data use, and I guess most of them are paying the $20 monthly fee as well.

This Monday I started sending my “direct messages” from Twitter to my cell phone.  Today I had to stop because I saw how much money it would cost to keep it up.  It looks like I’m paying twenty cents per text, which is twice what I remembered it being.  Worse, the unlimited message plan from ATT is $20/month, and I thought it was something like five or six dollars when I last checked.  That’s going to be $100+ for unlimited voice, data, and messaging for a single phone! I pay far less for my home service, but I am not sure it’s fair to compare the two.

I asked on Twitter if anyone was paying the $20 fee for unlimited messaging and two people quickly responded in the affirmative.  I know some folks run small businesses and probably need to be available 24/7, but I just can’t justify it for my personal use or my job.  I still do most of my online work at home where we have a $40 monthly DSL connection or at the office where we have a shared business connection.

Yes, we pay $20 a month for unlimited messaging.

Is ubiquitous wireless connectivity worth $100 per person per month for you? Maybe it’s worth that much for me too and I just don’t know because I haven’t ever experienced it.  I know plenty of iPhone users who swear by their devices and tell stories of emergent experiences like a barcode scanner with real time price matching and online shopping.

What does your connectivity spending look like?  Are you spending more on a phone than on home broadband?  Do you even have a home phone?  Maybe you’re tethering your smartphone.  Whatever you do, I’d love to hear comments from more people on this aspect of modern communication.