V Mary Abraham › Comments

Agreed, but do-lessers would argue that saying no lets you improve quality of work, creating more loyal customers that provide a steady (and reasonable) revenue stream. - Larry Hawes

Perhaps doing less follows same logic as self-care: If U don't do one, U can't do much of anything else. - V Mary Abraham

Good stuff. "There are consequences to asking people how they feel or what they like. The consequence is, you'll be lead to a false conclusion, because making people think about their preferences makes them stupid." - Kevin Gamble

Mary-- cover is good. :) I'm a fan of SenseMaker. I think there would be some things you could do in this space with narrative and tagging. The pre-hypothesis nature of the work helps to mitigate the problem of people wanting to give you the "right" answers. - Kevin Gamble

Like taking a nap, but more addictive. ;) - Meryn Stol

The catch is figuring out how to set reasonable limits. Has anyone done this? - V Mary Abraham

""The exercise is regarded as the ultimate measure of physical fitness for a reason: In order to lift your entire body weight, you need to engage almost every major muscle group - the arms, chest, abs, hips and legs," says Adam Feldman, a personal trainer in Nanuet, NY. So it's damn hard. But when you can drop and do 10 without a sweat, you'll feel a sense of pride you just don't get from doing a bicep curl. "We included a push-up in the Challenge this year and women felt strong and empowered when they were able to master it!" espouses Self's Fitness Director, Meaghan B. Murphy." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

Sure, but I had been *not* doing pullups for a good 15-20 years prior to that. Even in grade school we'd do a fitness test where kids were told to do pullups "if you can" or just do a flexed-arm hang if it was too much for you. For some reason I never really thought to learn how to do pullups until about a year ago. - Daniel J. Pritchett

In the Internet’s social contract, we seem to have given up our bargaining power. All too often we surrender our privacy because of laziness and inertia. Of course, we dress it up by claiming that a loss of privacy is the cost of increased efficiency. Thanks to the open way we transact much of our social and personal business online, there is very little that can’t be found out about us with minimal effort. Given the ubiquity of Google, much of our lives are discoverable by Google. Your e-mail? Google has it. Your social media exchanges? Google is indexing those as well. - V Mary Abraham

I’ve posted a video from Google that discusses their alternative to the Internet’s lack of privacy. Google calls it the Opt-Out Village. While the video is tongue-on-cheek, it does provide a sobering reminder of how much of our privacy we’ve surrendered. I suspect Google considers privacy an over-valued relic of the past. And, based on our recent behavior, it’s hard not to reach that conclusion. But is that a fair conclusion? On the other hand, do we deserve privacy when we seem to value it so little? - V Mary Abraham

@elsua Split of convo places is reality. Underscores need for good aggregation, filtering, and commenting tools (i.e. FriendFeed) - Larry Hawes

Unfortunately, there aren't any tools that really seem to do it all well. I'd love to be able to aggregate all comments about my blog (from Twitter, FF, etc.) ON my blog, but I haven't seen a tool that does this while de-duping. - V Mary Abraham

Thanks so much, Bianca. - V Mary Abraham

If you take a look at all the anti-clutter propaganda I've been saving for a rainy day, you'll soon discover that the first step to organizing stuff is -- get rid of what you don't need. By so doing, you reduce the amount of material you actually have to organize and maintain. I know we think we need to organize all the data in our firms, but do we really? Does it all matter? Does it all need to be saved and organized for posterity? Or, is some of it truly ephemeral? - V Mary Abraham

Now I'd like a few more E2.0 solutions! - V Mary Abraham

FriendFeed Fans Group: http://www.facebook.com/group... - Louis Gray

Request sent! http://facebook.com/kevinwh... - Kevin Whalen

"That's about as long as it takes for a longer form of content, like a blog post, to gather feedback from the moment of publishing. You know how you're doing within that time frame. No comments, likes, or retweets, and you can be sure it will just sit there, a virgin in your stream. That doesn't mean it's not interesting, it's just not timed right for some reason." - V Mary Abraham

Who told you to follow 100K+ people to begin with? - Chris Spizzirri

Twitter had me set up on auto- follow back in July of last year. At the time, it actually reduced spammer visibility in my Twitter stream. The bots and spammers were effectively drowned out. That reversed on me around April. So in May, I tried to manually unfollow all the bots and spammers... Which proved to be an impossible task. While I can selectively focus on multiple threads of conversation, I find that I do max out at about 150 at any single time. - Mark Davidson from BuddyFeed

Thanks a million, Kevin! It's worth doing only because of the terrific FF community. - V Mary Abraham

"The world is changing fast and if we don't stay focused on the road ahead, resisting the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting, then we increase the chances of a crash. Now is a good time to pause, prioritize, and focus. Make two lists: List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead) ... List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions) ... Some people already have the first list. Very few have the second. But given how easily we get distracted and how many distractions we have these days, the second is more important than ever." - Meryn Stol from Bookmarklet

I can't say I'm getting any smarter, but I certainly have a wider variety of reading material now! Thanks for the advice, Meryn. I've discovered that the availability of links worth sharing really varies from day to day. So, I'm not worrying as much about how much sharing I do. As for the engagement with others in the community (like you), I value that greatly! - Mary - V Mary Abraham

I’ve heard reports of investment bankers and lawyers around the world beginning their research assignments on popular internet search engines. What if someone noticed that lots of people at a particular firm were interested in Company [Y] and the topic “initial public offering.” That’s normally the kind of information that is considered highly confidential within a company, an investment bank or a law firm. However, do our searches on public search engines, social media sites or commercial subscription databases reveal information to a careful observer that we don’t intend to disclose? What could that observer do with that information? - V Mary Abraham

Interesting she thinks so. I'm not a hiring manager, but for me these recommendations do have value. Where else can you find so much persons being described by others? Yes there are all kind of biases and gotcha's, but for me - almost without exception - more information is better. - Meryn Stol

Doesn't the quid pro quo nature of the recommendations undercut their value (i.e., I'll recommend you if you recommend me)? - V Mary Abraham

thanks :) - Sameer

It's entirely my pleasure! - V Mary Abraham

FB is the one site that I've managed to keep the wall up. It's tough though, because I do get those people that I was barely friends with in high school and haven't talked to for 15 years adding me nowadays. - Bill Kinney

I wish it was easier to do that "lists" thing on FB. I have a lot of my friendfeed and librarian friends on there, but that means I always miss wall posts from my IRL friends. I either need to make the lists or unfriend anyone I don't know IRL. Bleh, I don't really care, though, because I hate facebook. - Laura Norvig

Gia's FF account is still private, can't wait for her to unlock it so I can start sharing. (http://friendfeed.com/gialyons) - Daniel J. Pritchett

So they've taken their marbles, but haven't found a better place to play. Too bad for them. - V Mary Abraham

Adoption is the holy grail. I'm so glad Susan Scrupski is doing something to spread knowledge about effective E2.0 adoption. - V Mary Abraham

So, if you’re serious about E2.0 adoption, you’re going to have to get serious about change management. You’re going to have to focus on building relationships. In addition, Dennis Stevenson suggests that “driving change in people is about motivating them to want to change.” Think about what motivates your potential users. Help them answer their first question: “What’s in it for me?” And then figure out how to support them as they begin to use the tool. After all, you’re not just trying to recruit users, you’re trying to create social media advocates who will help E2.0 go viral behind your firewall. - V Mary Abraham

Even hard-headed business people end up buying the thing they want, not the thing they necessarily need. The real danger of relying on facts to make your sale, though, is that when the facts are no longer on your side, you're toast. - Carl Rempel

"Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to build competitive insulation." - V Mary Abraham

Hooray for permalinked conversation threads - Daniel J. Pritchett

Cool! Thanks for the directions, Daniel. - V Mary Abraham

In the world of Enterprise 2.0, flogging people into submission and participation is a sure sign that you’ve missed the whole point of the exercise. When that happens, it’s time for you to walk the plank. - V Mary Abraham

I'm actually looking for more material on the nuts and bolts of adoption. Arguing about definitions may be fun intellectually (see Gil Yehuda's great piece about sparking fights in the SM community), but successful adoption actually puts bread on the table. If you can point me to good resources, I'd be grateful. - V Mary Abraham

So what might a future knowledge manager spend their time doing? Primarily, coaching individual knowledge workers to become effective personal knowledge managers and online collaborators. Secondarily, creating systems that facilitate collaboration and allow passive sharing of the results of these individual personal KM efforts. This mission critical approach puts knowledge management where it belongs — on the front lines and in the hands of the the knowledge workers who can use the information shared to strengthen networks and produce revenue. - V Mary Abraham

"A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time." - V Mary Abraham

I didn't realize you were on a mac - I guess I got lucky with my suggestion. It's not uncommon for me to have "hidden" firefox.exe processes loaded in Windows that cause me all manner of FF problems, solvable only by termination. The good news is that I have been using Chrome as my primary browser since its release. - Daniel J. Pritchett from IM

Hiya, Mary! Unfortunately, I haven't experienced such a thing and I am surprised you have, since weekends seem to be rather slow, specially this one with 4th of July, and most folks are hardly active to logging in should not present much trouble with API or Web site overloads... Go figure! Weird! - Luis Suarez

Hutch: Thanks a million! The most frustrating thing with the lock out was that I couldn't find any assistance in the official Twitter resources. (Finding a person to talk to at Twitter is, I know, too much to hope for.) Thank goodness Twitter wasn't business critical to me over the weekend. - V Mary Abraham

Lots of well-intentioned folks spend far too much time worrying a problem to death and yet, in the process, sometimes lose sight of what the end-user actually needs or wants. The best cure for this malady is to stick as closely as possible to the user during each of the requirements gathering, design and implementation phases. And, as you’re doing this, make sure that your work product reflects at each stage the users’ growing understanding of the tool and your growing understanding of the users. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a system that faithfully follows the initial requirements document while missing the mark on what the users ultimately realize they needed all along. - V Mary Abraham

I can think of many other metrics that could get at these four criteria that don't involve time. If you want a career or income that scales then you have to break the time-is-money mindset. - Kevin Gamble

It's not so much the time-is-money mindset as the acknowledgment that the only truly scarce resource is time. Once you figure that out, the rest should be simpler. - V Mary Abraham

It's beyond ridiculous! Can someone explain to me why it's so hard to provide connectivity at these tech conferences? And, once we've got an explanation, can someone please find a solution? - V Mary Abraham