Oh what a tangled web we weave… - Sir Walter Scott

Ok, so perhaps I’m not practicing to decieve (the full quote is “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to decieve”), but still, the web is tangled regardless.

I posted on Why Enterprises are Sucker-punched by Web2.0 earlier which got me thinking about what the complexity and interaction on the web really looks like so I thought I’d further illustrate that the web is an eco-system by trying to map out my own little corner of the web.  This brings me nicely on to the next topic of my re-factor your digital life series which is to Interoperate.

But first, here is my little eco-system:

As you can see, it’s a tangled web indeed. This is really only what I consider my core on-line presence, I haven’t really included other services that I don’t use (Plaxo), are incidental in nature only (Feedjit), I still intend to get rid of (Jaiku), or are more personal in nature (for example Dopplr also links to my family blog).  I also haven’t shown the series of feeds etc. that keep me on top of what’s going on.

The coloured dots represent the direct inputs into the system, either mobile, through a PC client or via the Web.

The dotted lines show the various automated data feeds between the systems.

The solid lines show the direct links and click-throughs.

A few comments on all of this:

• The hub of my presence is now this blog.  All relevant services feed into and can be reached from this blog.  I’ve tried to close the loop.  It’s paying off, a contact from IBM commented today he had seen the blog because he linked to it when we connected on LinkedIn.
• Actually it’s not as complex as it looks in some respects because much of the networking below the interface layer is now self tending and it’s actually contextual in terms of time and place at the input layer.

Of course, the choice of services is not as random as it might appear.  I’ve been putting a bit of thought into the core services I want to use and why.

• Wordpress (binaryplex.com) - Drives this blog and is very customisable to let me link in my other on-line presences in a nice, clean template.  This blog represents to some degree what I am thinking about and exploring where I can share and learn from others.
• Twitter - I use Twitter because it keeps many of my profiles “fresh”, for example, even if I don’t post daily, the Flash badge on BinaryPlex let’s you know I’m still around.  TwitterFeed promotes my blog entries in Twitter to those contacts, while TwitterSync means that my FaceBook status is always fresh and up to date.  I’m also learning lots and making connections with Twitter (especially since I discovered Summize which lets me discover people and conversations I might be interested in).
• Dopplr - My main purpose for blogging and my on-line presence is ultimately to connect with people around ideas.  Dopplr gives me the opportunity to take this one step further and potentially lead into the physical space as well.
• LinkedIn - People’s mileage on LinkedIn will vary, but for me, it’s a better address book, which has the advantage that you update your contact details without me needing to keep track of you.  With many sites adding LinkedIn support it’s a nice way to get set up with new sites and quickly find friends you want to invite or who already use a service and you connect to.  Finally, it’s the other half of my on-line presence - if Binaryplex.com is what I’m thinking and doing, then LinkedIn is a more professional, consolidated record of what I’ve done.
• Del.icio.us - I could use Ma.gnolia.com, I’m used to del.icio.us, it does what I need and others I work with use it too.  My challenge on the social bookmarking front is that with a trial of an internal bookmark service in DogEar now, I’m struggling to figure out how to manage both services — I want my bookmarks external, but I recognise the value internally for people who won’t use a service like del.icio.us.
• Facebook - Actually I don’t really use Facebook much at all anymore, I got sick of the spam and generally speaking the people I want to connect with on a more serious level aren’t on there anyway.  With TwitterSync, my Facebook friends get a live update on me and what I’m up to, I’ve turned down all the notifications and I go on-line occasionally to connect socially with some of the people that I don’t find in other spheres.

So that’s step 6, inter-operate, plug and connect to make a more streamlined, connected on-line presence.

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Step 6: Interoperate and connect

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection — Charles Darwin

Survival of the fittest - evolve, weed out and select your on-line services with vigour and rigour. Try them but if they don’t work, ditch them.  If you want to preserve the weak, then invest the time to upgrade them to today (I say this after having spent the better part of 4 hours taking old manually crafted HTML from an early web-site and merging it into my personal blog on Saturday).

It doesn’t need to be hard, search for what you are trying to do and typically someone has done it (import Blogger into WordPress; it’s simple there is a built in Import function in Wordpress itself for this!).

The message here is in two simple parts:

1. Always try new things.
2. Don’t be afraid to throw the new things (or the old ones) that don’t work out, or bring them up to spec if you want to keep them.

The web is a vast eco-system of natural selection, the best services will evolve and the others will, over-time, wilt, die or more likely be consolidated into bigger and bigger social service companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, IBM etc.).

Step 5 in re-factoring your digital life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Not least because I had a similar great idea a couple of years back, except I didn’t think about how cool it would be on the web.  We travel a lot where I work, and I thought a system which fed out of the travel booking system and let people know who was co-inciding would be great.  I even put up a project submission, but it was declined.  Good thing, because now we have even more incentive to use Dopplr!

I’m adding a feed of my Dopplr trips into the sidebar of the blog.  If I happen to co-incide with you, wether I know you in person or not, let me know, I may just have time to catch up for a beer and say hi!

Would you like to buy the Brooklyn bridge?

I was reflecting on some internal conversations around blogs a couple of days ago, and it really struck home that Enterprises haven’t really “got” blogs as one example only.  “What!” you cry. We have a blog, that our (insert marketing / managing director / team leader) regularly pontificates on things for us to read.  But how many Enterprises that have blogs have a rich internal blogging culture that exists on the internet, of these how many of them are non-technology companies?

The analogy for me is the plain old car.  Which came first? The car of the petrol (gas) station?  For cars to work, there is a rich eco-system (aside: is using the word eco-system and car in the same sentence an oxymoron).  For cars to operate effectively and safely they need, to name just a few things:

• Roads
• Petrol (gas) stations
• Standards (Road rules, safety standards etc.)
• Maintenance

Each of these in turn is part of a richer eco-system that maintain and produce these.  I don’t need to understand how roads are maintained, or how petrol is refined to know that I’m glad these things happen and I can reap the benefit.

Which brings us to blogs.  The first time user of a blog rapidly comes across these kinds of issues:

• How do people find out about my new posts? Ahh, well you need RSS / ATOM feeds. Oh and you need to deploy these readers to all of your staff and train them in how to use them.
• But how do I trust what this random person I don’t know has written? Oh, that’s easy, you need pingbacks, trackbacks and it really helps if you have a service like Technorati which provides an authoritative rating.
• How can I find what I’m interested in amongst these hundreds of posts? Easy! Just implement a feed aggregator and subscribe to a collection of tags.
• But no-one is writing anything! Ahh - you need a critical mass of 1000’s if not 100′000’s to be sure that your generating enough content for all these rich services to actually “trigger” in a meaningful way.
• Do you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

The Internet has evolved (and continues to evolve) a rich and mature set of integrated services and standards that are not easily transportable to the inside of the Corporate Firewall, particularly when people tend to look at only one part of the problem “I need a blog”, “I want a wiki” etc.

This is why products like Lotus Connections, Jive and Sharepoint are important to Enterprises because while no individual component within them is as rich as a given tool in the OpenSource world, they help transplant an eco-system that works.

The current situation is a bit like a sucker-punch for Enterprises that are trying to move in this area, failure to see the bigger picture makes it hard to drive the culture change which is needed to be transplanted along with the technology.

Gia Lyons tweeted “[can someone tell me] the value of the data portability movement for enterprises, i mean. Not consumer sites”.

I thought I’d put my thoughts down here, not least because I know that Elias Bizannes and Chris Saad, both players in the Dataportability movement occasionally stumble across my musings and will no doubt carry the conversation back to Gia.

So, while under time pressure to watch a movie with my wife, here are three reasons to describe the value the dataportability movement brings to the enterprise.  Chris has also blogged on this just recently and I have appropriated some of his themes here.

1. Dataportability provides a language to combine previously disparate standards.  As an Enterprise Architect, I love standards and I love them even more when my two largest vendors, Microsoft and IBM are expressing interest and supporting at least some of the same ones.  Some Enterprises may not care about dataportability as a whole, but they will care deeply about the artifacts it produces and helps drive, like APML, OPML, OpenID etc.
2. Enterprise Social Networks are rapidly evolving.  Todays solution may not be tomorrows winner.  To be able to move and migrate easily between Confluence, Jive, Lotus Connections etc. etc. at will is always appreciated.
3. Enterprises will begin to break down the firewalls.  Ultimately Enterprises want to work with their clients; it won’t be tomorrow, but Enterprises will realise that clients don’t want to fill out yet another profile form, but want to share their own data in controlled ways with them.

There will be bumps along the way, but while the dataportability debate may not be critical to Enterprises today, the outcomes will be crucial.

I’ve added in feedburner to get better stats on readers (I’ve used it for ages on some other blogs but just never got around to putting it on here!).

I’ve also added the wordpress plug-in which should automatically re-direct your feeds to feedburner, if you have trouble, perhaps re-add the feeds.  Although of course how will you know if you don’t get this feed?  It’s a twisted world…

Going straight home tonight to steal the kids DS and try this out…

| View | Upload your own

If you’ve been following my series on re-factoring your life and want good evidence for why you need a new browser, look no further than this very attractive graph from John Resig.

Reputation is character minus what you’ve been caught doing — Michael Iapoce

On-line you can be who you want to be, however I think most regular bloggers will agree that reputations are built and enhanced by interacting with people who aren’t afraid to be themselves, rather than hiding behind a persona.  Of course, over time we accumulate baggage that doesn’t represent us fully now.

When I started blogging, I was more protective of who I am, but over time I’ve appeared in so many places that identifying and tracking back the real me isn’t actually that hard.  This leads to an inconsistency.

I’ve also experimented with several blogs over the years and under some pseudonyms that I’d rather weren’t attributed back to me (personally I think that there was a positive message in my LazyLeaders blog, but at first glance, which might be all you get if someone is looking to employ you, the title isn’t really that flattering).

To achieve this, I’ve been slowly doing several things:

1. Linking the value sites together - LinkedIn takes you to this blog, this blog takes you to LinkedIn and Twitter, Twitter will bring you back here.
2. Deleting accounts that I no longer need or use.  Nothing wrong with them, but I’m trying to centralise and consolidate my identity on line (goodby Jaiku).
3. Deleting old blogs where I just don’t need them.
4. I’m claiming my identity (http://claimid.com) which will also give me an OpenID.

So here it is, Step 4 in re-factoring your digital life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

The debate around Web 2.0 Vs Enterprise 2.0 etc. is an interesting one. Ultimately though, these are tags for concepts.  An interesting question is what does an Enterprise 2.0 actually look like.  Can we describe explicitly the functions, features, capabilities, staff, management style etc. that all build together to make this the Enterprise of tomorrow and not today.

The reality for Enterprises is that they need to work out how to rise to this challenge and meet the needs of staff who are demanding new and different ways of working, while still providing the seamless experience, security and control that they have traditionally required.  Unfortunately Enterprises almost always exist as a point in time; a combination of old systems and old ways of doing things which conflict against the need to change to meet new challenges with limited time, budgets and often buy-in to new approaches.

For a thought experiment, lets envisage the impossible; a mature enterprise that has no baggage; that can instantly adapt it’s system; where staff adapt and change as technology and process demand — what would it look like?  What would it be like to work and operate in Enterprise 2010 today — the Enterprise that we all believe we can deliver given a little bit more time?  Can we build a vision that could be achievable today if the constraints were removed.

There is only one rule — the technology that makes Enterprise 2010 must exist today.   Why? Because no real Enterprise can move that fast; it usually takes at least 2 - 5 years for consumer concepts to percolate inside the corporate firewall.  If it isn’t very near to being in the market today, then there is a strong possibility that the Enterprise of 2010 wouldn’t even be considering it anyway.  While I think removing constraints is important, I think this one rule helps keep us out of the realms of spacemen with little green suits into what could be done today with what we’ve got.

This begs one other question — am I in fact really talking about Enterprise 2008; the mythical Enterprise which makes the best today of everything that is on offer?

I’m going to let this topic sit for a day or two and hopefully elicit some comments from the usual suspects before I jump in with some of my visions on what this Enterprise would look like and what’s achievable.

This one is short and sweet.

Update your blog software AND template. Do it. Do it now.  And if you use a hosted platform like Blogger, laugh out loud at those of us who don’t but need to keep this step in mind.

I’ve been using my favourite template since I downloaded it probably more than two years ago (which is not the same time I started blogging with it, that came later).  I’ve always updated with each Wordpress release, but I’ve never upgraded the template until last week.  What I had never really paid much attention too, was that some of the new features required new templates to take advantage of them.

All that hacking PHP to add in support for various things you want to link in to your blog? Not any more with the text widget.

It’s also a great opportunity to revisit your template and ask if it’s really representing you properly now?

So step 3 is simple, update your blog platform AND your templates on a regular basis.  You’re digital life will be made that much easier (and secure) because of this simple step.

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Time to deal with that pesky e-mail.  Actually this is one that I *mostly* have under control, but I think there are a couple of valuable tips.  Depending on how you approach your e-mail, your mileage will vary.

Broadly, there are four different types of e-mail you can have:

1. Corporate e-mail address.  Most people will have at least one of these.
2. ISP e-mail address. Most of us will have one of these too.
3. Web Mail address (Hotmail, Google Mail etc.), also very common!
4. Your own domain mail address.

There are a myriad of options, but for my money, mail re-directors are the key.  This is going to be different for each provider, but roughly speaking, most mail hosts provide you the ability to automatically forward your mail to other accounts.  In some cases (typically web-mail) you can’t always forward, but you can consolidate multiple accounts in to one.

Again you’re own choices will vary, but my choices are as follows:

1. Corporate mail - I can’t do much with this, so I like to have every thing come here.  You may not want to answer your mail from here, but it’s nice to know you’ve got it during the day.
2. ISP - I’ve re-directed my ISP mail address (which typically only receives mail from my ISP) to my own domain address.
3. Web mail — I dispensed with these a long time ago, although there are reasons why I wouldn’t mind one.  The major issue is that personal mail I recieve in my corporate mail account is branded as my company when it goes back out.  This generally doesn’t bother me, but it may not always be appropriate.  Web mail account would help me here, but I want one branded with my domain name (I think I can do this, but it needs some play time and signing up with GMail or Hotmail to try it out….).
4. Domain Mail — All other mail, including multiple mail addresses on the binaryplex.com domain are eventually forwarded to one mail box, and this is copied off to my corporate address.  This means I am notified when I get mail, but can access my mail from home later and be branded as binaryplex.com when I want to deal with it.

Ultimately a Domain Mail account with a web host is really powerful and lets you do lots of neat things.  I like to have the ability to setup my own e-mail addresses and do so on occasion for web sites that I don’t trust for various reasons.  I can then just delete the mail account when I need to.

So here is the newest step in re-factoring your digital life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

There are many places one can begin, but for me the first step in the journey is my internet browser. For various reasons (not least because we still use it at work) I’ve stuck with IE6. I played with version 1 of Firefox, but the performance was terrible and it used to lock up on me all the time, so I never went back.

Step 1 in re-factoring my life is getting a latest release browser. To that end I’m (as much as possible) using Firefox V3 (currently RC1). Where RC1 doesn’t work, I’m falling back to Firefox 2. Why? Well beyond the obvious things like tabs etc., when compared to IE6:

1. It’s faster! That’s right, browsers like all applications improve in speed and memory usage with each release. Unlike the olden days of the internet, where processing all happened on the server, now a lot of the underlying technologies that deliver that Web 2.0 experience happen on your PC client. A fast browser makes for a better experience.
2. Plug-in support and extensibility. If you’re on IE6 still and use del.icio.us, try this one simple step. Download Firefox 2, and install the del.icio.us bookmark tools. Game over IE6.
3. A lot of the new release software I’m working with is written by developers who use Firefox. I shouldn’t forget our users who are stuck with IE6 for various reasons, BUT particularly with beta software, I get a better first look experience with Firefox.
4. I hadn’t realised until I started using Firefox V2+ again, how many sites now don’t render properly in IE6. When you’re writing a consumer focussed application, support for IE7+ and Firefox2+ is the minimum it seems. If you’re looking at this site (http://binaryplex.com), it doesn’t render properly for IE6 — you have to use Firefox2 or IE7 to get the proper experience.

So here it is, step one for re-factoring your life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

You’ll see a few changes across the board in the next week or two as I gradually re-factor my digital life.  What’s this mean?  Well I have 4 blogs, 4 active e-mail addresses (other inactive ones), three web hosts (only one I remember the password to and it’s broken), 1 old http site archived on disk, more social network accounts than I can track, e-mail spam from sites I don’t read, feeds from sites I do and generally a fractured on-line identity that has evolved as the internet has evolved.

I’m going to be actively stream-lining all this activity to centralise it into services that I do use, where you can come to get the latest.  I’m going to actively shut-down accounts I don’t use (Jaiku) and make more prominent services I am using (Twitter and LinkedIn).

I’ve already created an OpenID account (yes, I’m slow) and I’m setting BinaryPlex as a delegator of my OpenID to http://claimid.com.  In light of this I’m going to actively re-consider my use of sites like http://del.icio.us (which doesn’t support OpenID) and consider http://ma.gnolia.com instead which does.

The end aim will be a new, streamlined, re-factored Internet me, that is updated to take advantage of the latest trends.  I think it’s an essential piece of housekeeping that everyone should do!

To that end, I’ve reluctantly retired the old green BinaryPlex format for a much more up to date, 2-column, widget and WordPress 2.5.x compatible theme.  I hope it grows on me, I have been very attached to the greenery one :-).  The 2-columns will become more important as I intend to feed more meta information into this site than I have in the past.

As I conduct each step, I’ll blog about why I’ve made the moves I have and what I see the advantages are. Maybe some of you will join me on this adventure and I hope to take small steps towards catching up with those others of you who have passed me by while my digital identity has been standing still over the last 12 - 18 months.