b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Web 2.0 Writing Tools
Today I play around with two local wiki variants - Instiki and TiddlyWiki - trying to find a better route to write-once/publish-many nirvana. [More...]
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Thursday, September 15, 2005
Picture the Process
Australian process guru and ontological coach David Buchan has begun using flickr and, as is usual with David, has begun to brainstorm specifics on how it can be a tool for improving the way we work. This would not have been an interesting conversation a month ago, but with Yahoo! buying flickr a stable future seems much more likely for the online photo service. I like Davids three points at the end, addressing what are likely to be common objections to his idea.Using photos to job memories
Shawn Callahan extols the virtues of using photos to remember what has happened on a project.
Remember the last time you sat down to flick through a photo album and see the photo of Uncle Johnnie (substitute your own relatives here) building the sand castle with little Katie and you instantly recollect the story of how Johnnie got incredibility drunk that night and fell into the bonfire. The next morning he vowed to be a tea totaller. The same story recollecting effect can be created in your organisation with each each project you undertake.I really like this idea and agree that flickr is a good solution. If you're reluctant to start a photo archive today it may be because you are thinking...
- I don't have time to categorise everything so that I can find it again - well, flickr uses tags which are quick and sorts by date using the information from the digital camera itself. Photos of a project ar relevant to the people that were on it. They will remember the categories/stories themselves. For others it really doesn't matter so there is no need to invest the time
- I don't have time to take good photos or I'm not a good photographer - who cares? You want to capture the moment as it was, not as you thought it should be portrayed.
- The rest of the world will see us or the client will wonder why we are taking photos rather than doing work - injecting some humanity into work is always a good thing. And the rest of the world? Perhaps you will inspire them.
Terry Frazier at 12:25 PM
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Zimbra PIM: The Chandler Killer?
The Flash demo of Zimbra is quite interesting, but then demos always are. After years of hype the Chandler project of the Open Source Applications Foundation still languishes at release 0.5. Can AJAX, eXtreme Programming, and other techno buzztrends overtake the open source uber-PIM and deliver a challenger to Outlook in our lifetime?
Calendaring seems to be the barrier. E-mail and search are pretty standard. But calendaring, and sharing calendars, is a real bear when the Outlook-driven corporate world is involved. Im not at all sure iCal is up to the challenge, but we have yet to see a truly robust iCal app. [Link via Judith Meskill]
Zimbra is open source, AJAX-enabled email, calendaring, and collaboration
What I like about Zimbra is its open sourceness (natch) and its intelligent approach to information presentation as applied to email and calendaring. Think Gmail but with tight integration with a web-based calendar, and with a lot of neat little information integration bells and whistles â like generating a contextual menu from a phone number in an email with an option to place a VoIP call. AJAX is no mere hot buzzword here but is well applied such that mousing over bits of data can generate tooltip-style boxes with related information, such that rolling over a date will pop up any items on your calendar for that day, e.g. Also slick, it understands relative terms like tomorrow or next Tuesday and will popover relevant calendar details for those terms. Whats exciting about this is that it eliminates a sizeable portion of the need to keep switching back and forth between panes, interfaces or applications to access information youve always felt should be available to you from right where you are.
Terry Frazier at 9:37 AM
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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Find A Human
Zip past those annoying Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems using the Find-A-Human Quickbase by Paul English.What does this mean? IVR is the insidious way big companies avoid talking to you. Hire some woman with a robo-voice and get her to record layer after layer of idiotic droning that changes depending on which button you push. Of course, it's always prefaced by "Please listen to this entire message as our menus have changed." The menus have never actually changed, they just want you to wait on the phone until you get frustrated and go away.
Paul's Quickbase has direct bypass sequences for more than 75 companies. Better, if you discover the bypass sequence for a new company you can add it. Here are a few samples:
- Delta Airlines (utterly clueless) - Say "agent" four times - every time it asks for a response from you
- Dell Customer Service (an oxymoron) - option 1, xt 7266966, option 1, option 4, option 4
- DISH Network (clueful) - press "0" during menu
- Comcast (unnaturally clueful) - Customer service, but an IVR wants your number first.
Terry Frazier at 2:02 PM
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