In early 2006, I was invited by ebizQ to move my blog over here for hosting: a non-financial but symbiotic relationship that increased readership for both of us. Since then, I’ve broadened my interests considerably beyond the integration space that is covered by ebizQ, and I’ve decided to resume blogging on my own www.column2.com domain instead.

If you're using my FeedBurner feed, it should switch over automatically, although I've noticed that Bloglines has, as usual, completely screwed up the feed and I highly recommend that you pick a different feed reader, or go to the new site and subscribe to the source feed directly.

Comments on this blog are now closed, please provide any feedback at the new location.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:29 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This entry cross-posted to my new blog location.

Jeffrey Walker and Stewart Mader of Atlassian spoke next on "Collective Intelligence: Monkeys or Memes?" (great title, making reference to the infinite monkey theorem), which was really about adoption patterns of enterprise wikis.

This is really going back to the theory that the IQ level of an appropriately organized collective can be greater than that of the smartest person in that group, and that's the whole reason for using wikis in the first place, especially in a corporate environment, instead of just picking the smart guy to write the thing.

There's some significant drivers for Enterprise 2.0 software, and they're not all about the functionality: some are about the fact that it's lightweight, easy to install (or software as a service, requiring no installation), easy to customize, and doesn't require months for the IT department or a third-party system integrator to create a working solution. Many companies, however, still believe that anything that can be up and running in less than 6 months is just a toy; this attitude is driven by IT departments trying to hold onto their job security in a world where the new applications and tools cause an ever-increasing commoditization of their role.

Walker was a very engaging speaker, quite funny and lots of great material. He spoke about some of the advantages of enterprise blogging, whether purely internal or external-facing, and some interesting differences in how companies approach external-facing blogs: Sun just lets you go to town, whereas Cisco requires that you have VP approval and go through corporate communications in a process that must discourage many potential bloggers long before they're (inevitably) turned down. He recommended checking out IBM's blogging policy as a good balance for enterprises; having talked with a few IBM employees who also blog, I've heard the same thing from them.

Not for the first time this week, I've heard SAP's developer network used as a great example of using blogs and wikis with their external community.

Pixar uses a wiki for project management of all film productions that they do; it started out in their IT and software development areas, but gradually moved into the business areas, which Walker feels is a typical adoption pattern. He also thinks that Enterprise 2.0 adoption is going to look a lot different in the next year than it has in the past year due to the ever-increasing momentum, market presence, and consumer awareness.

He finished up talking about Twitter, not just as a personal social networking tool, but as a platform that's starting to be investigated by organizations like BART and LAFD to provide public service announcements via SMS. I've always seen Twitter as redundant with something like my Facebook updates or a my Skype status, but seeing some non-personal uses of it all of a sudden makes it really interesting.

Mader came up next to talk about some examples of what's happened with collective intelligence. He's the author of the book Using Wikis in Education, and used a wiki to collaborate with several others in order to move from material that he had published in his blog into full-on collaborative authoring. He also talked about how he boosted the level of collaboration by creating a Facebook group, which gained more members in a number of weeks than the number of readers his blog reached in several months; this really points out that Facebook is inherently a more social environment (duh) than the more passive activity of reading blogs, and the very act of someone adding themselves to the Facebook group would cause its presence to be extended to that person's contacts, which is not true if someone is just reading your blog.

He took us through some of the content on wikipatterns.com, a site that Atlassian sponsors, which contains both people and adoption patterns and anti-patterns: another great resource if you're considering an enterprise wiki and want to assist its adoption. He also talked about some of the challenges of enterprise wiki adoption: overcoming resistance to change, establishing the right scope, gaining trust amongst the contributors (usually manifested in questions such as "someone else can change what I wrote?" and "how can I approve edits?"), and embracing emergent behaviours and making them part of the corporate culture.

Mader addressed an issue straight on that I've seen with both blogs and wikis: the attitude that "if I put my expertise in a public forum, I'm no longer an expert", or "someone will steal my ideas". I've had this argument with several other independent consultants when trying to convince them to blog; it's a little bit like an architect not wanting anyone to be able to walk through the houses that he designs in case they copy his ideas, when his real value is in both bringing those designs to life and developing new designs, not just selling the old set of plans over and over again. If the only thing that you will ever have to contribute is what you've already done in the past, then it's time for you to retire.

There were some audience questions at the end about people's need for attribution of material that they author; Mader feels that wiki editing history logs actually provide better attribution than an emailed Word document, and that the new generation of workers are more likely to be used to this form of collaboration. Attribution is an illusion anyway in this world of copy-and-paste; I've sent two documents to a client in the past several days, only to find that they copied the text out of my corporate template and put it into their own template before distribution within their company.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:17 AM in Blogging • Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This entry cross-posted to my new blog location.

Today started out with another panel -- seems to be the more common format for breakout sessions here rather than individual speaker. I was a few minutes late and came in on someone from a vendor that I hadn't heard of talking about his product, then Joe Schwartz of WebEx took over to talk about how they're doing Enterprise 2.0 internally using their own technology. Because they have large operations in China, they need to be able to collaborate across a wide geography, for which their using their core web conferencing/desktop sharing product, but also leveraging blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and other mechanisms in their outward-facing marketing. He also mentioned how they use social networking in the sales organization using tools like LinkedIn and Visible Path.

Because of the nature of their business and the fact that so much of their business is sold remotely, their sales force is really focussed on enhancing their virtual presence and touch-points. This is the first time that I've really heard about how social networking can make a difference for the sales side of the house; most case studies focus on inward-facing projects and people, or on the customer community in a post-sales scenario. They use a tool called SalesGenius, integrated with their CRM, to help with this; in fact, since it's a hosted service, the sales department started it on a trial basis without IT even knowing about it. Even now, there's no IT involvement, and a relatively low monthly cost gave them almost an immediate ROI.

Next up was Jeff Herrmann of Manning & Napier, an investment management firm, about how they implemented blogs and wikis internally using the SocialText platform. They already had a fairly collaborative culture, especially in their analytical team, but they had a problem with just capturing and retrieving knowledge (in part because of the relatively high turnover in personnel that is endemic in the industry), with communicating information between departments, and with facilitating virtual and asynchronous discussions. Funnily enough, he found it easy to get buy-in at the bottom (people who probably weren't being heard, and saw this as an opportunity) and the top (executives who had the vision to understand how social networking could make their business work better), but said that he's still working on the middle. And surprisingly, the most prolific blogger in the firm is the 71-year-old chairman.

We then heard from Maria Barnum of Bank of America on how they're using RSS to distribute information out to their branch network: this is one-way notifications of everything from weather alerts to fraud notices, and used to be done by faxing or remote printing. They're using a blog tool to publish information, since RSS is built right in, and categories allow for easy filtering of the feeds by region and role. They use a small RSS reader that sits in the system tray that alerts the user when a new item is available; essentially, they've created an alternative to email for distributing this type of information, which is a pretty interesting application for RSS. They use ActiveDirectory to determine that information and push specific feeds to specific people; I'd love to hear more about how they do that, since that's an essential part of using RSS technologies in some enterprise applications. Someone asked what blog and reader technology that they are using, and Barnum said that she was not allowed to do product endorsements; I don't think that the conference organizers intended that she not even mention the product name (after all, the previous speaker mentioned SocialText explicitly).

I consider RSS to be the next big thing in information distribution, and I'm actively paring down my email newsletter subscriptions (which I almost never read) in favour of RSS subscriptions, which assures that my email address isn't getting spammed. I also think that RSS needs to be used much more heavily to deliver alerts and other information from enterprise applications: it provides a standards-based way to send out information that can be consumed on a variety of platforms.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:02 AM in Blogging • Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This entry cross-posted to my new blog location.

Another panel, this one with moderator Brian Gillooly from Optimize, and including panelists Jordan Frank of Traction, Mark Mader of Smartsheet.com, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator and David Carter of iUpload (which I understood was going to undergo a name change based on what their CEO John Bruce said last month at EnterpriseCamp in Toronto). Since these are all product companies, I expect that this might be a bit less compelling than the previous panel, which was primarily focused on two Enterprise 2.0 end-user organizations.

I'm not going to list the details of each vendors' product; suffice it to say that Traction is an enterprise wiki platform (although there's some blog type functionality in there too), Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet-style project management application offered as a hosted service, Denodo does enterprise data mashups for business intelligence applications (now that's kind of interesting), NewsGator is a well-known web feed aggregator and reader, and iUpload is a hosted enterprise social software service.

Mader had some interesting comments on how by making updates to a schedule completely transparent, no one wants to be the last one to add their part since everyone will know that they were last; this, however, is not unique to any Enterprise 2.0 functionality, but has been a well-known characteristic of any collaboration environment since Og was carving pictures of his kills on the community cave wall.

There was an interesting question about who, within an organization, is driving the Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption: although the CxO might be writing the cheque, it's often corporate communications who's pushing for it. In the last session, we saw that in one organization, it was pushed by HR, but I suspect that's unusual.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:30 PM in BI • Blogging • Enterprise2.0 • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've just returned from 6 days vacation on Canada's east coast, and Monday is a holiday here as well so things will be quiet here until I hit the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference later this week in Las Vegas, where I'm speaking on the changing face of BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:00 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had a recent comment that the feed for this site is not working properly. If you're having trouble with the feed, it could be that you were using a feed directly from the site rather than the FeedBurner version of the feed that I have in the sidebar -- check your feed location and update it to the FeedBurner version, which is definitely working.

I use FeedBurner for my feed since it adds in a number of widgets at the bottom of each feed to make it more useful to readers, such as the comments count for the post and a link to post it to del.icio.us. It also presents an easy subscription page when you first visit the feed, optimizes the feed for your particular feed reader, and even provides a way to subscribe by email. It helps me out by showing me how many people are subscribed to the feed and which readers that they're using.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:10 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Forgive me readers, for I have slacked off. It's been 8 days since my last blog post. I blame the Canadian government, who insist on me doing my personal taxes by April 30th.

I've had a number of vendor product demos over the past several weeks, and it's time to start blogging about them before I start into a month of travel: I'm giving a presentation at the TIBCO user conference in San Francisco next week, then attending the BEA user conference in Atlanta the following week, a few days vacation in Nova Scotia after that, then on to Las Vegas for a presentation at the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference. Watch for live blogging from all three conferences, although not from my vacation.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:01 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In case you're one of the 5 people who subscribe to my comments feed (in addition to my entries feed), you might notice that I've now fixed the feed. Previously, clicking on a comment in the feed just took you back to the main blog page; now it takes you to the entry on which the comment is placed.

With proper comments spam filtering in place, this now works pretty well if you want to track the conversations here.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:14 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A while back, I started publishing blog posts that are a collection of my del.icio.us links for that day: I wrote about why I did it here, and you can find all the posts here. This is actually an automated script in del.icio.us, so I didn't have to do much except set it up.

Lately, I realized that a lot of the links are not really on topic for BPM and the other topics that I write about here, so I've moved them to another blog of mine where they're more topical. If you're interested, you can always find my links here, and subscribe to a feed of them using the link at the bottom of that page.

If there are particular links that I think might be of interest here, I'll write a quick post and include the link.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:47 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If you surf around looking for BPM blogs, you may have noticed something strange: my blog posts from here on Column 2 reproduced in their entirety and without permission on the blog of Mark Bean, the VP of Sales for an ECM/BPM-related vendor, Altien. I'm not linking to them or to the fake blog itself, called "Office 2.0 and ECM News", since I am definitely not encouraging traffic.

This is a clear violation of my intellectual property and copyright, and I'm amazed that anyone who works in this industry would propagate such an openly fraudulent and illegal activity. Maybe that tells you something about how Altien does business in general.

I noticed this a few weeks back, but I only noticed that he started stealing the full posts (as opposed to significant chunks of them) with my Gartner coverage this week. I sent Bean a request this morning to stop stealing my blog posts, and he replied "Sure thing", like I had asked him for the weather -- no apology, no admission that he might have violated blogging etiquette, much less copyright law. I've asked him to remove all of my full posts from his site, although obviously there's no law against him linking to any of my posts and publishing a short excerpt under fair use rules.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case, it's also theft.

Update: According to Altien's CEO, who left a comment on this post, Mark Bean is no longer in their employ. In my communications with Altien, it was clear that Bean's activities do not reflect their general business practices.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:54 AM in BPM • Blogging | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Lunchtime today was spent chatting with two other BPM bloggers: first, I met with Jesper Joergensen of BEA for a chat about what they're doing; then I spent some time with Keith Swenson of Fujitsu, mostly talking about BPM standards. Add this to the fact that I had breakfast with Jason Klemow, and there's been some pretty good BPM blogger networking today.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:08 PM in BPM • Blogging • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If you're a reader of BPMEnterprise.com, you may have noticed a new blogger on their list today: me! I had the chance to meet Dian Schaffhauser at the ARIS user conference last week, and she invited me to do a few guest posts on their site from the upcoming Gartner BPM conference. I'll still be doing my usual live blogging from the conference here on ebizQ, and this will remain my primary BPM blogging site, but I'll post a daily summary of the conference over there.

By the way, the spell checker in Windows Live Writer makes some pretty odd suggestions sometimes:

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:22 PM in BPM • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This blog, like all others at ebizQ, is hosted on a Movable Type platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress, but MT was ebizQ's platform of choice and hey, I'm just a guest here. In any case, we've had an incredible problem with comment spam over the past year, which led me to have to moderate all the comments that are put on each post (unless you use a TypeKey identity, in which case your comments can be auto-approved).

We're trying out a CAPTCHA plugin to see if it prevents the comment spam -- that's the numeric code below the comment field that you have to fill in before you can post a comment. If this works, then I'll turn off comment moderation and your comments will be posted right away.

If you encounter any problems with this, please let me know.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:05 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I don't usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.

We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.

My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.

I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA -- a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:11 AM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've just arrived back in Toronto after a month of holidays in Europe, and I'm still digging out from all my email even though I tried to keep up with it on the road. I haven't read anyone's blog since mid-December, and will likely just mark everything as "read" in Bloglines to catch up with the 5000+ posts that are waiting for me there. If there's anything that you blogged that you think I might be interested in, either send me an email or tag the blog entry with "for:skemsley" in del.icio.us and it will show up in my feed reader.

If you're interested, I posted photos of our visit to Zagreb and Osijek for Christmas, and Vienna for New Years. Enjoy those while I get my head back into BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:03 AM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Unlike almost everyone that I know, I'm still vacationing for another week -- I want to avoid the New Year's rush getting back to work :)

I'll be back to regular blogging after January 10th. In the meantime, check out BPM Enterprise's 5 BPM Trends for 2007, which includes one of mine (extracted from the article that I wrote for the Savvion newsletter). BPMtube? I love it!!

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:06 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Between travel, vacation and the Christmas holidays, blog entries will be pretty thin on the ground until about the second week of January. Things should get pretty exciting after that however: Mashup Camp 3 in Boston in mid-January, some in-depth vendor reviews in late January (based on the blog stats, I know that everyone likes those), the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in February, and I'm speaking at ASMI's BPM Summit in March.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:20 AM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Here's a cool twist: Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 writings I have often referenced in the past, has been using his Flickr account to hold the graphics that he uses to illustrate his blog posts. The twist this time, however, is that he's actually turned this "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites" graphic and its description into a mini blog post. Since I get a feed of all my Flickr contacts' new photos in my RSS reader, I see this just like any other blog post. Of course, his description also points you to the full article on his real blog.

Very Web 2.0.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:10 PM in Blogging • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I saw a post about Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging tool, on Rick's blog a couple of days ago, and decided to try it out. So far, I'm pretty impressed, although I haven't used any other offline blogging tools so don't have much to compare it to.

I do like that it integrates seamlessly with all three of my blogs: this one, which is uses Movable Type, my personal blog, which uses WordPress, and my wine club blog, which uses Blogger. I now have virtually the same interface for posting to all three blogs, and can even edit previously published posts. It also sucks in all the categories from each of the applicable blogs, so I have my full list of categories for tagging.

I'm sure that I'll manage to break it soon, and will be ranting about it by week's end, but so far I'm still having fun.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:54 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I noticed a blip in my blog traffic on August 2nd, and I'm never sure what causes that although I did post 4 times that day about subjects as varied as the TED talks videos and how Ventana shouldn't really be talking about BPM. Today, I caught up on some of my podcast listening and discovered that James Governer mentioned me in the Redmonk Radio podcast that day, too.

So far, my scientific analysis proves that if I blog four times per day and Redmonk mentions me in a podcast, my traffic goes up. ;)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:58 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I use del.icio.us for bookmarking sites that I want to remember, and I use a cool feature to post each day's links as a blog post. A while back, I learned about the "for" tag in del.icio.us, where if you tag an item with "for:username", that item appears in the "links for you" section for that user on del.icio.us, which they can also subscribe to in their RSS reader. In other words, you can tag a site using del.icio.us specifically for another person to look at.

Today, when I was tagging something, I noticed a new section in the tagging screen: usually there's just "recommended tags" (how most other people have tagged this link), "your tags" and "popular tags", but now there's also "your network", which lists the for: tag for each of the people who are listed as being in your del.icio.us network.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:05 AM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Things will likely be slow around Column 2 this week: I'm headed for San Francisco tomorrow to just kick around the city and meet with a few business contacts, then attend the ABPMP San Francisco chapter inaugural meeting on Thursday night, then down to San Jose for the BlogHer conference on Friday and Saturday.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:13 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last month, I tried out the Flock browser beta for a few days, but ended up abandoning it because their "cool" features weren't things that I could use, and it was just too much of a memory hog. This week, I'm trying out the Firefox 2.0 beta. Aside from being able to make it crash within 5 minutes (I have a talent for that, as many developers who have worked with me in the past can attest to) by copying and pasting some HTML around between sites, it seems to be pretty stable. Four things that I've noticed so far:

• The close buttons for the tabs are situated on the tabs themselves (like Flock), rather than a single close button at the right-hand side. I've had a few mistakes with that by closing the right-most tab rather than the one that I'm viewing, but I can get used to that. The nice thing about it is that you can close a tab without viewing the tab.
• When the browser crashes, it has the decency to ask on restart if I want to reopen all the same windows, which it does -- including any text that I had keyed into text fields before the crash. Handy, although wouldn't be necessary if it didn't crash. ;)
• I can subscribe to a site directly in Bloglines and other feed readers by clicking on the feed icon that appears in the right side of the address bar (the feed icon was there before, but wasn't an active control). Sweet.
• As I type in any text field in the browser, such as the one that I'm typing in now to create this blog entry, it spell-checks my text, underlines unknown words with a dotted red line, and allows me to add them to the dictionary or replace them with a known word from a (right-click) context menu. I'm totally in love, just for this feature alone.

Definitely enough good stuff to make it worth the upgrade, although you may want to wait until the final release if you're not into the occasional crash.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:18 AM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

To start on my goal of moving my corporate website to a blogging platform, probably WordPress, I've converted the Column 2 archive on my corporate site (where I blogged before moving my blog over here to ebizQ in January) to WordPress, just to start playing around with it. The permalinks are, of course, different than the old Blogger ones, and I've tried to repair all the ones on this blog and am working on the self-referential ones on the archive. If you find a broken link to the Column 2 archive from a post at the current location, please let me know.

From a blogging standpoint, there's certainly some nice advantages built right in to WordPress: blog search (try typing in the unlabelled, rounded entry field above the Recent Posts), categories, feeds for posts and comments (not turned on since there are no new entries on this blog). I'll try adding some non-blog pages once I figure out how some of the other bits hang together.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:00 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had lunch with a (relatively) non-technical friend last week, and she commented that she read my blog but sometimes doesn't understand the alphabet soup of acroyms. Instead of having some sort of glossary that you could go to, then search for a specific term, I'm going to try to be more diligent about including pop-up definitions (using the HTML acronym tag) -- just float the pointer over anything with a dotted underline to see the pop-up definition. Since I'm basically lazy and can't spell acronum acromyn acronym half the time, I wrote a bit of Javascript that I've installed as a Bookmarklet on Firefox and Flock:

Acronym Bookmarklet

To try it out, click on the link and a window will pop up prompting you for the acronym/abbreviation. Click OK (or press enter), and a second prompt will prompt you for the definition phrase. Click OK again, and a third prompt appears containing the tagged text, pre-selected so you just have to hit the copy command, and it's ready to paste into your blog entry or other HTML page. If you want to use this on Firefox/Flock, just drag the link onto your Bookmarks (Firefox) or Favorites (Flock) toolbar.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:26 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I downloaded Flock last night, about 12 minutes after the public beta was released, and I've been playing with it on and off since then. Some good stuff, some things that seem good but aren't so useful for me. Flock is based on the same code base as Firefox, so there's lots of similarities and it can even import everything from Firefox in its initial setup, including saved web form data.

Some unique Flock features and how well they work for me:

• Flickr or Photobucket integration right along the top edge, allowing photos to be dragged onto that area to upload it to the photo service. I'm not using Flickr much; I still create photo galleries using JAlbum and publish them for various websites, so this feature isn't as useful for me as it would be for a dedicated Flickr fan. I'm sure that will change as soon as I buy a pocket-sized digital camera and start snapping photos every day.
• RSS feed functionality built in. This is a non-starter for me, since I need a subset of my RSS subscriptions to drive my blog roll directly, which is what Bloglines does for me.
• Integration from the Favorites directly to del.icio.us. This is another non-starter for me, since it doesn't put me far enough into the del.icio.us environment to show me my del.icio.us tags, so I end up accidentally creating a bunch of new tags and have to clean them up later. However, the "add to del.icio.us" bookmarklet that I had in Firefox works just fine.
• Built-in blog posting tool. I'm using this now, and have even figured out how to post to both Movable Type (for this blog) and Blogger (for my wine club blog) although errors are occuring on the MT posting that I haven't resolved yet. It keeps the blog post window on top of all other Flock windows, which is a bit inconvenient since I often flip back and forth to the browser window during blogging to look things up. There's no obvious hot key to pop up the links window, which is annoying. It generates some extra tags in the source, and I'm a sucker for clean source. Otherwise, I like it.

Overall, the experience is quite a bit like Firefox, only slower since I suspect that there's some amount of test/debug code in here still. Given that the only extra that I might use is the offline blogging tool, there may not be enough to keep me here if it proves annoyingly slower than Firefox.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:01 AM in Blogging • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Heads down on a couple of client projects, plus a home project to completely disassemble a Compaq Armada M700 in order to resolder the power connector, which is conveniently located on the underside of the motherboard where you can't get at it without at least 45 minutes of disassembly. This is just one of the reasons that I keep an electrical engineer around the house -- my degree in systems design engineering qualifies me to correctly identify a soldering gun, but not actually do anything with it. However, since I'm the software guru of the household, I'll be installing SQL Server later this week as payback.

I also went out yesterday for my first sail of the season with my friend Ingrid, who owns a 25' C&C and is completely tolerant of my inability to learn much about sailing except how not to fall off the boat. She started a blog several months ago on my urging, and is now at the "so what now?" stage of business blogging. We talked about a number of issues with regards to getting customers -- especially somewhat technology-challenged ones -- to read her blog, and it's given me some great ideas for topics for BlogHerNorth when we get it kicked off.

Back to work...

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:42 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

My corporate website is pretty minimalist, since I'm a one-person consulting shop and most of my good stuff is here on my blog. However, I'd like to redesign the site to be a bit more dynamic, and I'm thinking of using a blogging tool to do the entire site, although I intend to leave my blog here on ebizQ where I'm part of an integration community.

My site is hosted with Yahoo! small business services, which offers me WordPress or Movable Type preinstalled, and I'm looking for any advice on which makes a better website creation tool. Any comments?

I have a bit more experience with Movable Type since I ended up rewriting most of the templates when I moved my blog over to ebizQ; I've used WordPress for blogging but never had to change templates or any other administrative tasks. However, as an old coder, I don't think that I'm going to have a problem learning enough about either one to do something interesting.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:51 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've been doing a lot of commenting on other people's blogs lately, and using co.mments to track the conversations. It's easy, just setup an account, install the bookmarklet in your browser, then when you're on a page where you want to track the changes, just click on the bookmarklet and co.mments will pop up to tell you that it is tracking the conversation. Works even if the blog doesn't have a comments feed, and also works even if you forget until after you've posted your comment (which was a problem with CoComment). In fact, you can go back to the post at any time and invoke co.mments. You can, of course, get the results as an RSS feed too.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:30 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's been a bit of a backlash lately about saying that some new technology is "easy enough for my mom to use" as if it denigrates women. However, when I use that phrase, I mean it quite literally: my mom turned 83 today, and for the past 15 years or so, I've been introducing her (and my dad) to more technology than they ever imagined possible, to the point where email and the internet are a daily part of their lives. At Christmas, she overheard me talking about my blog, and she asked what a blog was. I sent her a link to Steve Garfield's 80-year-old mother's blog as an example, and two weeks later she sent me the inevitable email:

As you know my computer skills are not too good but thought that learning how to blog might be fun. Can you send something about how to do this?

Today, she blogged about turning 83, the problems with their local hospital's IVR system, and a variety of other topics. If you have a minute, pop over there and add a "Happy Birthday" comment; just say that you know me and heard that it was her birthday, so that she's not wondering why strangers are sending her email -- her comments are auto-emailed to her, and she's still a bit confused about that particular piece of the technology.

Update: tell her where you're commenting from, she still can't believe that anyone outside her neighbourhood reads her blog.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:17 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A quiet day of catching up, since my neighbours to the south are all vacationing on their first long weekend of the summer. Here in Toronto, we're having 33C temperatures (with a humidex of 42C), our first smog alert day, and a wildcat transit strike that worsened the pollution problem by forcing thousands to drive rather than take transit to work.

I've spent the day reading a bunch of blog posts that have been languishing in my RSS reader, and tagging many of my bookmarks on del.icio.us, as you'll see when del.icio.us does its auto-post of my links later today.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:37 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Jean-Christophe Dichant is with the FileNet Paris office, where I had some memorable moments during my brief tenure with FileNet in the early 00's, and he blogs in French about BPM, which I've mentioned previously.

I invited JC to translate my "Short History of BPM" into French -- with his own commentary -- and publish it on his blog, and he has the first two parts up here and here. When you're mostly unilingual, like me (my French is so bad that I can't possibly refer to myself as fluent), there's something weird about seeing your own writing translated into a language that you know slightly, but it's pretty cool at the same time.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:23 PM in BPM • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I used to ignore blog posts that just contained lists of links, until recently when it finally hit me that if I value that person's opinions when they write a regular blog post, why wouldn't I value their opinion about what links that they find valuable? Of course, a list of links is really only valuable if the person adds their opinion for each link, which is exactly what del.icio.us allows you to do.

Thanks to Stephen O'Grady's post about an experimental feature on del.icio.us, my new links (with my notes about them) will be posted once each day, as you see in the post immediately before this one. I like this much better than the Link Splicer functionality on FeedBurner, since everyone reading the blog can see it (not just those subscribing to my FeedBurner feed), and it's a regular post so that you can add comments to it if you wish. You can also see what tags that I've used for each of the links, and click through to my collection of links with the same tags.

I'll use this method instead of the "link only" type of posts (like this one) that I have used to refer to another site with very little of my own commentary. There will likely be lots of links in the next couple of days while I sort out all of the things that I've tagged in Bloglines and turn them into del.icio.us links.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:44 PM in Blogging • Links | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Keith Swenson, chief architect at Fujitsu Software (and therefore of their Interstage BPM product), now has a blog. He's involved in the WfMC and BPM standards, which I heard him speak about at the Gartner BPM Summit earlier this year.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:54 AM in BPM • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'll never be in Technorati's top 100 (or anywhere near it), but I passed a milestone recently by breaking the top 100,000 with this blog. Not bad, considering that Technorati tracks over 35 million sites. If you're not familiar with Technorati, it allows you to claim your blog then see how popular it is based on the number of links from other sites to your blog. The big problem that I have with Technorati becomes visible when you look at my Technorati profile:

Is anyone else seeing triple on this screen? The first entry (with a rank of 225,034) uses the address www.column2.com, which is redirected to the actual address, www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2. The second entry (with a rank of 62,569) uses the actual address of this blog. The third entry is the old location of this blog, column2, where it lived until January of this year when I moved it over to ebizQ.

Okay, I understand why the third can't be combined with the others: it's actually a different site. However, why can't they consolidate the link count of a redirected URL (www.column2.com, which I use because it's easier for people to remember) with the site to which it's redirected? Obviously, the split lowers my ranking, since the links are split between the two "Column 2 - ebizQ" addresses which Technorati sees as different (even though they're the same).

Technorati support, in reply to my inquiry, just stated that they couldn't do it:

I'm afraid that we are unable combine links from different URLs at this time. Links are URL based and are unique citations to that blog at that time. However since you've updated your web server configuration to send a permanent redirect response (HTTP Status 301) to anyone requesting one URL to the other blog URL, then it will help consolidate your online blog presence for all web aggregators and help have your links reestablished eventually.

Their last point, about "having my links reestabished eventually" totally misses the point: I actually want people to use the www.column2.com address if it's easier for them to remember, and that's what's on my business card and in my email signature. In other words, www.column2.com is part of my online identity, whereas ebizq.net is just where my blog happens to live.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:22 AM in Blogging • Rant | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If it's easier for you to check your email for Column 2 blog posts than to visit this site, you can now subscribe to the posts by email. Just fill in your email address in the right sidebar under the text "Have Column 2 posts delivered to your inbox. Enter your email address:", and click the Subscribe button. This is a service offered by Feedburner, which also provides my RSS feed. Your email won't be used for anything except to receive new blog posts, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:13 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've just registered for the OMG's BPM Think Tank in Washington DC on May 23-25. The program is mostly about standards, which is a big focus for me right now. It will be a chance to see some people who I've met before, such as Phil Gilbert and Derek Miers, and meet a few others for the first time face-to-face, such as Bruce Silver, Keith Swenson (who I heard speak at the Gartner BPM Summit) and John Evdemon (who was referred to me by Harry Pierson when I met him at Mashup Camp).

If you're going, look me up. If you haven't signed up yet, discount registration fees for the BPM Think Tank are still available until May 1st.

OMG gets full marks for including bloggers when they're handing out press passes; my thanks to Dana Morris and Stephanie Covert for their forward-thinking press relations policies. I'll be blogging more about the event before, during and after.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:03 PM in BPEL • BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank • Blogging • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (2) | Add to del.icio.us

I realize that women bloggers in Toronto aren't exactly my main reader demographic, so you guys in Nebraska and Bangalore can just skip this, but there's interest brewing in having a BlogHer North in Toronto. Spurred on by a post from Elisa Camahort (cofounder of Blogher) about how the upcoming web 2.0 conference in Toronto, mesh, couldn't manage to find more than 6 women out of 50 speakers, Kate posted about the potential for a BlogHer North.

Count me in. If you're interested, add a comment to Kate's post or send her an email.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:48 PM in BlogHerNorth • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The biggest surprise that I had at the Gartner BPM summit this week was opening up the package of attendee materials and finding this ebizQ brochure with my picture printed on it:

I had several "don't I know you?" looks from people, and a few actually came up to me and told me that they read my blog. Very flattering.

The second biggest surprise was finding out that I have my own fan club inside Lombardi: everyone who I talked to at their booth claims to read my blog. Hi guys!

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:48 AM in BPM • Blogging • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us