You can't put the Delicious Genie back in the bottle

December 20, 2010 • Joseph Thornley • Delicious

This was the week that delicious died. For me and for many others.

Delicious was one of the very first social services that I discovered when I became interested in blogging. It was a true pioneer. Delicious was my first working experience of social software that realized the full potential of folksonomy. The genius of delicious was the introduction of the concept that I could attach as many tags to an item as I wanted, ensuring that I could recover that item at a later time by typing in a keyword that was meaningful to me in the context in which I thought of that item. which I found infinitely superior to traditional rigid taxonomies. (If you’re new to the concept, David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous provides a great introduction to the opportunity that digitized data provides for us to organize information in ways that is meaningful to ourselves and the people with whom we have a community of interest.) Add to this the ability to share these tags with friends and co-workers and you had a tool that was unlike anything that had come before and instantly useful.

In many ways delicious is my online memory. I use it daily. I bookmark items for future reference in blog posts, in presentations, and when trying to make sense of the world.

When I saw the news of its impending demise, I realized that I couldn’t lose the data I’d collected in Delicious. So I looked for an alternative.

I wasn’t alone. Twitter and the blogosphere were full of messages about delicious alternatives. If the sheer volume of discussion is any indicator, delicious lost a huge number of users when the news of its impending demise spread.

Yahoo tried to put the genie back in the bottle with a post saying that the memo had been misinterpreted and that indeed Yahoo would find a new owner for delicious instead of shutting it down.

Sadly, I think the damage had already been done and loyal delicious users like myself discovered an alternative that actually offered many better features over a much loved service that Yahoo had allowed to languish and become a laggard instead of an innovator.

I’ve moved on, ported my Delicious tags into a new service, Diigo, and discovered I like it better. (More on Diigo tomorrow.)

Evernote makes my content available to me on all my devices

December 15, 2010 • Joseph Thornley • Evernote

There was a time when I worked on a personal computer. I’d start my workday by going to my desk and turning on the computer. When I got up from my desk and left the office, I left my work behind until I arrived at the office the next morning. Those days are long gone.

Today, I use many devices – in the office, while travelling, at home. Depending on where I am during any routine workday, I’ll use a notebook computer, a cell phone, a tablet, and a desktop computer.

In a typical day, I start to work on a presentation on my desktop computer, continue to edit it on my notebook computer when travelling, and show it on a tablet at a meeting. Along the way, I may want to jot down a voicemail or capture a picture via my cell phone that I want to integrate into the final product.

I use a great application, Evernote, to store my information in a place where I can access it from all of my devices. It lets me create notes, audio notes, pictures, and save files so that I can access them from any of my devices. And it synchronizes the data automatically each time I sign onto a device. So I always know I’d using the current version.

This is one of those applications that works, simply and perfectly. I can’t imagine going back to a time when I had to transfer files and notes from one device to another using a USB stick or e-mailing them to myself. With Evernote, my content is always available to me on any device I pick up.

If you’re interested in Evernote, watch this introductory video. It will give you a much better sense of how useful this program really is.

If you use Evernote, I’d be interested in knowing what you think of it. Or if you use a different program for the same purpose, I’d be interested in knowing about that too. Please tell me what you think in the comments section below.

You’ll also notice at the bottom of this post that I’ve integrated an Evernote Clip button into the design of ProPR.ca. If you haven’t tried Evernote, set up an account and use the Evernote Clip button to save this post. You’ll see how easy it is to grab content off the Internet.

Voice recognition software: finally ready for prime time

November 2, 2010 • Joseph Thornley • dictation, Dragon

Earlier this year, I posted about my discovery of the Dragon Dictation app for the iPad. I dictated a post directly into Dragon dictation on my iPad and then cut and pasted into Pro PR.ca.

Since that time, I’ve used Dragon on both my iPod Touch and iPad. If anything, I’ ve had even better results on my iPod Touch than on the iPad. But still, I do most of my writing on my PC and my notebook. So, when I saw that Nuance has released version 11 of their PC program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I thought I’ d give it a try.

I last used a dictation program on my PC a decade ago. At that time, I found I needed to correct so many words that the dictation program just wasn’ t of any real benefit to me.

However, the newest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking absolutely blows me away. I’ ve been using it for the past two weeks. I don’ t think I’ m exaggerating to say that it is 99% accurate, maybe better. In fact, I’ m dictating this post using Dragon and it has made only two errors: it wrote ” NaturallySpeaking” as two words, ” naturally speaking” and it wrote ” may be” instead of “maybe.” In both cases, it spelled these words correctly in this paragraph when I was more careful about my pronunciation.

Bottom line: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 achieves a degree of accuracy that makes it faster and more efficient to dictate first drafts of documents than to write them.

If you haven’ t looked at dictation software for your computer for the past few years, take a look at the current generation. Voice dictation finally is ready for prime time.

Dragon Dictation: a Must-Have App for the iPad

June 29, 2010 • Joseph Thornley • DragonDictation iPad app

I’m dictating this blog post directly into Dragon Dictation for the iPad. I’m not writing it. I’m saying it. And Dragon Dictation is transcribing it for me.

When I’m done, I’ll simply send it to myself and paste it into WordPress.

A great application!

If you’vew ever had trouble priming your writing, this application is for you.

Dragon dictation. A must-have app for the iPad.

Sent from my iPad

Want to see Dragon Dictation in Action? Watch this video of me recording this blog post.

One final note. If you look closely on the text on the video, you’ll notice some differences. Yes, I edited this post, just like I edit every post. Dragon Dictation is great to get your ideas out. But you’ll still want do an edit both for flow and minor typos.

Eqentia – a new social media monitoring tool for enterprises

June 7, 2010 • Joseph Thornley • davefleet, Eqentia, JosephThornley, SocialMediators, startup, WilliamMougayar

Eqentia is a social media startup headquartered in Toronto Canada. In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Eqentia’s CEO and Founder, William Mougayar, joins Dave Fleet and me for a discussion about Eqentia, what it does, who its aimed at and future plans for it.

Eqentia is positioning itself as a team-based knowledge dashboard that can be managed by one or two users, freeing others from the need to set up and refine searches. William hopes that managers will turn to it each day to answer the question, “What’s new that I need to know about?”

Eqentia’s text mining engine promises to deliver content to users in near realtime, providing them with an up to the minute picture of conversations and references to their brands and issues of interest.

William sees Eqentia becoming a productivity tool for medium and large enterprises. Initially, power users can curate the content to ensure that the highest relevance and most valuable content is featured, saving time and effort for the rest of the team. Once the principal user has set up the tool and refined the settings so that it focuses on the company’s specific interests, other team members will have access to the data without the need to manage the sources, relevancies and advanced filters and settings that make all of this possible.

Eqentia will be most attractive to teams that have both power users and executives who don’t care about how to use the tool, but just want to see its output. The power users can publish the information in user-friendly form for the end users – via email, Twitter, RSS feeds, or by giving end users access to individual topics.

Unlike many other social media tools that focus on providing users with the ability to build folksonomies by applying multiple tags, Eqentia incorporates predefined taxonomies to standardize searches and make it easy for end users to find the same data set with a simple search.

Still to come in Eqentia’s development – a comprehensive approach to social media metrics.

The company has some potential client deals in the works and hopes to be able to begin to announce these in the near future.

Eqentia has been seed funded by Extreme Venture Partners, who also funded Bump Top, which was recently acquired by Google. William says that he had the funding to carry on with the development of the product and to explore its marketing potential.

Have you tried Eqentia? What are your thoughts about it?

Windows 7 Review. There's a lot to like.

October 26, 2009 • Joseph Thornley • #VistaFail, Microsoft, Windows7, WindowsVista

If you follow me on Twitter, then you know that I endured a serious case of #VistaFail. Microsoft Windows Vista began to install a service pack on my notebook – and then it crashed. And it kept crashing. Ultimately, I was forced to reinstall the operating system, losing data in the process. (This happened while I was on the road and unable to back up my data.) Then, the ultimate insult. The morning after I got my computer up and running, as I was shutting it down to leave my hotel room, I received another unasked-for message that Windows was installing updates. Not just one update, but 32 updates. And, as always, the helpful onscreen message warned me not to shut down my machine.

windows7 Enough is enough. Happily, this last #VistaFail occurred on the morning of October 22 – the day that Windows 7 went on sale. So, I took myself off to the nearest Future Shop and bought two copies of Windows 7 – one for my notebook and one for my desktop (Did I mention that my desktop also was struggling to install the same set of patches?)

So, now I’ve been living with Windows 7 for several days. And I’d like to share what I think of it.

The Good

Wow. I love the new Task Bar. The Windows 7 version of the Task Bar allows me to pin to it the programs that I use most frequently. And instead of individual icons for each open document, I see only the program icons. If I want to see individual documents, I only have to hover my cursor over the program icon in the taskbar. A popup window appears above the icon showing miniature versions of each open document. Hover over a miniature version and it appears full size on your display. Click on it and it opens for editing. With the new Windows 7 Taskbar, all my favourite programs and open documents are right there where I can see them.

quickpeek

Windows 7 is fast. Much faster than Vista. This shows up when I boot up. But it is much more dramatic when I open programs like iTunes. With Vista, it could take as much as a minute when I plugged my iPhone into my PC before iTunes opened. With Vista, it now takes less than 5 seconds. Goodbye time wasted waiting for tasks to complete.

Finding files and programs. Windows 7 search function is vastly improved over earlier versions of Windows. Want to change opening folders and files to single click from double click, but you can’t find the right place to do this in Control Panel? Simply search the term “single click” in the Start button search and you’ll be provided with a link directly to the Folder Options screen in which you can make this change.

Even better, Windows 7 makes it much more simple to find files spread across folders on your hard disk and on external hard drives. They’ve added “libraries”‘ of your documents, music, pictures and videos. What’s the difference between a library and a folder? A library will display documents, pictures, music or vidoes that you have saved anywhere on your computer. Want to add the contents of an external hard disk to be displayed in your libraries? You can easily add a folder to a library from a drop down menu in the folder. Find your files easily regardless of where you stored them.

libraries

Home Networking is made easy with Windows 7. A new feature, HomeGroup, enables any user to set up a home network to share folders, files and printers with other users. A very nice, overdue feature.

homegroup

The Not So Good

I discovered that I couldn’t do a simple upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional. I had to do a much more time consuming clean install of Windows 7. More time consuming because I had to restore all my drivers and reinstall all my applications. That was a full day lost. I can’t understand why a simple upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional isn’t possible. The only advertised differences between Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate is that the latter offers Bitlocker data encryption and the ability to switch between 35 languages. I don’t need either of those features. So, I purchased Windows 7 Professional. It wasn’t until I had the disk in my computer hard drive that I received a message that I couldn’t upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional. My first #Windows7Fail. Another Microsoft “Gotcha.”

Once I’d installed Windows 7, it turned out that Windows 7 drivers are not yet available for each of my Dell computers. The Dell download site offered Windows 7 drivers for my enterprise-class Latitude E 6400. However, it did not yet have Windows 7 downloads for my Vostro 400 desktop. Given that the Vostro line is targeted at small businesses that don’t have dedicated IT departments, that was disappointing. Hopefully, Dell soon will offer drivers for the entire Vostro line.

Home networking. My home computer is on my office domain. And Windows 7 won’t allow me to set up a home network with other users in my family. Instead, I’ll have to ask my son or daughter to so that I can access files and printers remotely.

The Bottom Line

If Windows Vista is your current operating system, run, don’t walk, to your nearest store and get a copy of Windows 7. If you’re still using Windows XP, I think that you’ll find the user experience of Windows 7 more than justifies the upgrade.

Bonus Tip

The experience of using Windows 7 is quite different from Windows XP and Vista. You can start using it straight out of the box and discover new features serendipitously. But you don’t need to do this. Microsoft offers an outstanding set of introductory videos. I found several particlarly helpful, especially

Getting Started for tips on how to use the new Taskbar, the “jumplists” of recently or frequently opened files, and how to easily arranged windows to take all or half of your display space.

Find your files for tips on how to use Libraries and Search to quickly find files and programs.

Sharing files with HomeGroup to see how easy it is to set up a home network and share files and printers.

What’s your experience with Windows 7?

Are you using Windows 7? What’s your experience with it? Are there features you’re finding useful? Are you encountering problems? Share your experience by leaving a comment.

Twitter on screen at conferences: Good or Bad?

July 3, 2009 • Joseph Thornley • ALI, conferencetwitter, Twitter

Do you think that having the Twitter stream on a screen at conferences adds to the experience or participants and speakers or detracts from it?

The Advanced Learning Institute have asked my advice about whether they should have a second screen at all sessions of their upcoming Social Media for Government Conference to display the twitter stream throughout the conference. (Disclosure: I’ll be chairing the conference and presenting a workshop.)

I’ve seen this work well at tech conferences. At some conferences, a large number of participants are heavily engaged in twittering their conference experience – sharing points they think are important and then engaging in active discussion with other conference attendees as well as people joining in from outside the conference. For these people, the conference experience is greatly enriched. They can ask questions, consider alternatives and dig deeper through discussion with others. All in real time while the ideas are being discussed by the speaker.

How about the speaker, you ask? In my experience, a growing number of speakers embrace conference Twittering. Some follow the Twitter stream for questions. Others actually participate in it (This works especially well for panels.) After the conference, the speaker can gain valuable feedback on their presentation by reviewing the conference hashtag in the Twitter stream. And they don’t need to stop there. Savvy speakers can continue the conversation with conference tweeters after the conference.

However, I don’t think that Twitter is right for most conferences – yet. I think that may be overkill if your mix of attendees is not technically savvy. And that seems to be most attendees at standard business conferences. Just as important, some speakers are likely to object to it.

But that doesn’t mean that I’d leave Twitter out of a conference. In fact, having the Twitter stream on screen for select sessions demonstrates its potential to everyone. Having it up all the time may irritate those who are not on Twitter.

So, for the time being, I think that conference organizers should introduce Twitter at key points in the conference, but not have it present all the time.

What do you think?

Do you think that having the Twitter stream on a screen at conferences adds to the experience or participants and speakers or detracts from it? Am I underestimating the average conference attendee?

Other views on Conferences and Twitter

Ira Basen doesn’t like it

I do it

Dr. Shock suggests ways to use Twitter to get more out of lectures

David Berkowitz thinks conference blogging policies need updating

Blogging brought the world together. Twitter is pushing us apart.

February 25, 2009 • Joseph Thornley • community, communityofinterest, Twitter

When I first started blogging, I was struck by how quickly and easily I discovered bloggers around the world who shared my interests and from who I could learn. My community of interest spanned the globe, including people like Neville Hobson (in Amsterdam and later the U.K.), Darren Barefoot (at that time on a one year sojourn in Malta, now in Victoria B.C.), Allan Jenkins (Copenhagen), Katie Paine (New England), Josh Hallett (Florida), Shel Israel (California), the other Shel, Shel Holtz (California), Jeremiah Owyang, Lorelle VanFossen (Pacific northwest) and even and Lee Hopkins (Australia). Blogging had enabled me to form a community with others who shared my interests – a community that transcended time zones and geography.

Over the past two years, Twitter has taken up an increasing amount of my intention. Its 140 character micro bursts of ideas, links, emotions and idle musings bring me into instant contact with the people in my community. I drop in and out of the flow several times a day.

But at the same time that Twitter has given me the ability to connect constantly and quickly wiht the people in my community, it also has led to a shrinking of that community. Yes, it transcends geography. I regularly tweet to people in other countries and in Europe. But at the same time, it has restricted my community to people within a band of time when we are all on the network live. In other words, I’ve lost sight of that part of the world in which our business days don’t overlap.

In effect, my world through the lense of Twitter has shrunk to encompass only those people who are online at the same time as me. So, I’ve lost sight of those people whose workdays and online times don’t overlap with mine. They are invisible to me and I too am invisible to them.

So, Twitter is a good news / bad news story for social networking and its ability to expose us to different points of view and draw us closer together. In a way, Twitter has narrowed my horizons while making my experience with the smaller community richer.

Have you experienced this “invisibility effect”, losing track of people you previously experienced regularly? if so, what are you doing about it?

Hasta la Vista. It's Windows 7 or Nothing

February 4, 2009 • Joseph Thornley • Microsoft, Vista, Windows7

windowsvistacandothat-090203

Windows Vista can do that? Well it can’t give me a consistently reliable operating system.

That’s it. I’m fed up. I will buy no more PCs for Thornley Fallis or 76design until Windows 7 is introduced. (Listen closely and you’ll hear the roar of approval from all my fed up with Vista computer users.)

Since Microsoft introduced Vista, I swam against the current and purchased Vista Ultimate for all of the desktops in our company. But that’s it. Finis. Over. Done.

I’m prepared to call a dud a dud. And Windows Vista is the dud to end all duds!

I will not buy another new PC until Microsoft spits out Windows 7.

So, Friends at Dell, please tell MSFT to hurry it up.

No Windows 7. No new PC orders from Thornley Fallis or 76design.