Sidebar conversations are here to stay

My question for you today is this: when is it appropriate to have a sidebar conversation during a conference call or in-person meeting? By sidebar, I meet a parallel Instant Messenger chat session or texting someone or posting something to your Twitter feed. Whatever your tool of choice, you are sharing your thoughts about what is going on in the meeting to other co-workers who are bored/distracted/uninterested with the current speaker.

I am as guilty of this behavior as the next person: back in the day when I had weekly staff meetings, we had various ways to amuse ourselves over IM chats. I remember when the precursor to the Blackberry first arrived on the scene and we would hide them under the table and check our emails – now they are so much smaller and easier to pull out and use. So much easier, that even our elected members of Congress are sending out Tweets and texts from the House floor this week during Obama’s address. Color commentary at 140 characters at a time, coming to you from those folks that pass bills that most never read. There is some irony in this situation, somewhere.

And this week, the Billerica Massachusetts selectmen passed a law that prohibits people from texting and emailing during town meetings. I am sure more will follow, maybe even our Congress.

There are professors that prohibit Internet-connected laptops (or at least try to) during their classes. Back when I taught a bunch of high school boys computer networking in a PC-laden classroom lab, I had to routinely unplug their machines’ Ethernet cables when their attention wandered to the Internet and the call of more important things, like checking and updating their overnight gaming standings. At least I had a cable to unplug: this was in the era just before universal Wifi coverage.

Call it ADD. Call it multi-tasking. Call it sophomoric or just plain rude. But this behavior is definitely here to stay. And as someone who makes part of my living as a professional speaker, I find this trendlet both disconcerting and yet fascinating. Indeed, at a speech that I gave this week, one of the participants suggested that I should show a live Web link to a Twitter feed so the audience could post their comments on screen, for all in the audience to examine. (This was done last at last year’s South By Southwest conference, to mixed results, as I recall.) First I thought it was a good idea. Now I am not so sure.

Remember how when we watched TV back in the olden times there wasn’t anything on the screen besides the program? Now we have the ever-present logo, sometimes spinning around with the time and temperature. We have little people that pop up at the bottom of the screen announcing some more “must see TV” that will be broadcast later in the week. We have the “crawl” which used to be used to announce snow or other extreme weather conditions but is its own sidebar conversation for many news shows. And Bloomberg TV has so much going on that I get dizzy when I tune in there trying to track all the various windows of data scrolling by. Even “24″ shows multiple windows where each character is doing something to get across its real-time effect. (At least Chloe is back in the current season’s episode’s to save the day, we can all be thankful even if the underlying technology isn’t quite realistic.)

I am not sure where this is going, but it definitely is the brave new world of communications. Tweeting and texting during meetings is probably here to stay, regardless of what rules are put in place to stop them. And we as professional speakers will have a harder time unless we learn to incorporate these things and collaborate with our audiences, rather than competing with them. Of course, if we were more engaging perhaps all the sidebar chatter would come to a stop because people would actually want to listen to our speeches.

How reliable is your favorite social network?

The sharp folks over at Royal Pingdom have put together a report here that details the various outages they monitored during last year for numerous social networks. The graph shows the longest continuous downtime for each one, and is just one of many interesting items from the report. One result shows that LinkedIn’s outages are becoming more frequent when the end of 2008 is compared to the beginning of the year. Twitter’s reliability is actually improving.

Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V isn’t really gonna cut it

This is the  console screen that you get when you try to run the bare-metal version called Hyper-V Server, the stripped-down version of Windows that allows you to run virtual instances on it, similar to VMware’s ESX. Notice the return to the days of DOS? And this after trying to find a NIC that has 64 bit drivers too and can be recognized by the OS.

Interview on FreelanceSurvivor.com

Dee-Ann LeBlanc is a fellow tech writer and she interviews me for her Web site FreelanceSurvivor.com about some of the things that I have been doing, my likes and dislikes, how I review products, and other fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff that I rarely get to talk about in print. If you are the total Strominator groupie, this is a must read (only somewhat kidding).

Can collaboration save our economy?

The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love

Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don’t like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don’t agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can’t imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.

It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:

First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn’t any connectivity.

Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft’s SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.

Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don’t have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don’t have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.

Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don’t require any software to download, don’t have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.

Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague’s attention.

Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other’s computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post your comments here. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer’s Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.

Disttributing applications using Symantec’s Endpoint Virtualization Suite

Symantec Endpoint Virtualization SuiteSymantec Corp.http://symantec.com/20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.Cupertino, CA 95014The suite covers three separate products that have been acquired over the years by Symantec for applications delivery via streaming or virtual layers and a connection broker technology that allows enterprises to manage the way their applications are packaged and delivered to users’ desktops.We tested Version 6.1 on various test machines in February 2009.Requirements: Windows XP SP 1 or better with Java J2SE Runtime 5.0 update 6, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows 2000, Windows Vista Price: $360 (concurrent license), $270 (per node) for entire suite, Streaming + Virtualization $68, Virtualization only $44. Substantial volume license discounts. Pros:– Powerful software management for multiple use cases so that enterprises can configure and deliver a wide variety of applications and situations– Granular virtualization layer technology– Competitive price for the features that are includedCons:– Complex setup with multiple moving parts– No common policy management across the various software modules– Multiple management consoles for each software module

more about “Disttributing applications using Syma…“, posted with vodpod

Ten privacy settings every Facebook user should know

This is an excellent review, for those of us that are trying to use FBk for business purposes and want to keep our private lives out of it. From Nick O’Neill’s Allfacebook blog.

How not to innovate

Digital Landing.com: Internet Voice for small businesses

Internet voice offers plenty of potential savings and productivity for small businesses. You can pay a fixed fee for monthly calling plans that include unlimited long distance coverage of North America and have the ability to program your phone to follow your movements without ever having to talk to a phone company representative ever again.

You can read more about the various issues to consider over on my story for DigitalLanding.com here.

Ten tips to protect your network in a down economy

Times are tough for the good guys, but a recession is always an opportunity for criminals. Threats to your sensitive data, your customers and your infrastructure are increasing dramatically, from compromised and malicious Web sites to unhappy employees to poorly controlled partners.

The good news is that you can tighten your security and tighten your belt at the same time. Quick-payoff strategies can help you stay on top of evolving security threats without neglecting your network infrastructure.

There are many clever ways to do this. In this article in this month’s Information Security magazine, I’ll look at 10 steps you can take to improve your threat management posture that require minimum investment, manpower and give you a fast return on your investment.