Comments for sandyblair

Comment on 5 books intranent managers should read (that are nothing to do with intranets) by intranetmania

intranetmania — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:06:34 +0000

1. Read; Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay. Why? He says the f word a lot.

2. Read; Margrave of the Marshes by John Peel. Why? ‘cos he was the world’s best radio presenter. Always will be.

3. Read; Any of the travel books by Bill Bryson. Why? he takes you to places you’ve either never been to, or have been to, and describes them perfectly. And he’s funny as hell.

4. Read; Freud Ego by Clement Freud. Why? he’s done it all with great panache. Not just the face of those adverts.

5. Read; Ronnie by Ronnie Wood. Why? it’s rock’n'roll innit.

And there are plenty of other books that have nothing to do with intranet stuff, that we can all learn from.

Comment on Language is a virus (from outer space) by V.E.G.

V.E.G. — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:05:56 +0000

Pinto Colvig is of Greek origin. His great-great-grandmother is Greek!

Comment on Language is a virus (from outer space) by Jim Russell

Jim Russell — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:38:15 +0000

Eight of ten on the voice actors. The quiz is a bit heavy on the recent “celebrity voice” trend — recent being a relative term for an old guy like me. I’m a big fan of the guys who made most of their living doing voices — Daws Butler, Pinto Colvig, Mel Blanc. Of course, they’re all dead. Well, we still have April Winchell, Bill Timoney, Nancy Cartwright, and the last of the old guard, June Foray.

(By the way — Hi, Sandy! It’s Jim from the ILink RockAndRoll conference all those years ago! I came across your blog, and added it to my Google Reader…)

Comment on Language is a virus (from outer space) by Angus

Angus — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:37:42 +0000

I particularly like the Irony presented by your third paragraph

Well that and the fact that I had to look up “Social Media”

Comment on What five metronomes, two soda cans and a piece of wood can teach us about intranets. by Bill Barnett

Bill Barnett — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:29:18 +0000

This is fabulous! Not only the video, but also the concept. The grass-roots-up, emergent behavior that you see in really active/successful/living wikis is a wonder to behold. This is important not just for the things we normally think of as collaboratively created — look at the total load of crap that most vendors and large organizations implement as SOA governance, for example. To make SOA governance work it has to be lightweight, driven by the folks actually delivering the services, and motivated by clear self-interest and value to current deliveries not just in some vague future that may or may not materialize.

I also love your blogging approach of linking IT topics to favorite pop songs. I used to run weekly staff meetings based on theme songs… I would start by playing the theme song, leaving the team wondering how the hell I would connect it to work, then follow up with staff meeting content. Worked really well — although I ran out of ideas before I ran out of meetings.

Whatever other frustrations I may have with Genius, I’m glad it led to a connection here!

Comment on Intranets: 1995 vs 2008 by sandyblair

sandyblair — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:46:54 +0000

Oooh great point Kerry, in several ways.

The ‘tidying up’ of the intranet in the late 90s seems to have been a feature of many companies’ intranet. They all did it for the same reason too, there was too much abandoned and poorly contected stuff.

In the internet abandoned sites isn’t an issue, there was enough good stuff bubbling to the surface, but that is a quite wasteful process (wasteful of a plentiful resource admittedly) and that mechanism wasn’t kicking in on the intranet.

Although it was an imposition to many sites to ‘go professional’ (and I’m poacher turned gamekeeper here), the end result was that a lot of un-maintained, badly organised sites were replaced by better sites.

I’m not suggesting another round of overly prescriptive governance, but that’s not the same as a free for all. I’m still not clear where the balance is between governance that ensures good, reliable content and one that doesn’t stifle innovation.

Neither am I saying that the governence needs to be top down there are processes that are inbuilt into social media / UGC publishing – however how close it is to the behaviour we see on the internet, the wikignomes etc described in wikipatterns.com is something that is still in doubt.

Comment on Intranets: 1995 vs 2008 by Kerry Buckley

Kerry Buckley — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:21:48 +0000

I think the tension between the two models existed even in 1995 (or thereabouts). Remember the attempts in BT to shut down the ‘unofficial intranet’ when intra.bt.com was created? On one side were the corporate relations people, the top-down publishing model, the ban on links outside of the controlled platform and the ’sorrying’ (automatic deletion) of all pages after two years. On the other, people running servers on scrounged hardware, ‘keep the unofficial intranet’ page badges, the denizens of bt.misc, and (for a while at least) most of the useful content.

Comment on The Style Council by sandyblair

sandyblair — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:06:30 +0000

The bold question was a bit of a swizz, everybody seems to be getting it wrong, probably because I didn’t word it as well as I could have done.

I’ve been trying to work out the answer to the question ‘how do you know if a particular wiki is any good’.

I particularly liked this blog post
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2008/04/29/the_importance_of_pigheadedness.php

And her highlighting of Clay Shirky’s comment that most wiki’s fail. Clay’s answer to that is move on, try again, my answer (in an intranet) is sometimes it might be better to spot and fix the reasons for failure.

Comment on The Style Council by Steve Ellwood

Steve Ellwood — Sat, 17 May 2008 12:19:23 +0000

7/10 – I got less style

[bold and u/l were my downfalls], but I agree witht he general thrust of the article, and I’d think a wiki gardner would be quite entitled – natch – to move to chosen house style.

I’d add that wikipedia has a lot of protected pages, so it isn’t all free for all, and AFAICR you have to log in to edit some pages.
[I've done 2 wikipedia edits; hardcore!]

Comment on What five metronomes, two soda cans and a piece of wood can teach us about intranets. by markmorrell

markmorrell — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:15:56 +0000

I like your postings – especially the videos which are beyond me to include in my blog (maybe your next posting explains how?). Very engaging and humorous!