There seems to be a spurt of new products/services launched recently to help us save/manage time with our recent information glut. The theory goes something like this.

1. Use our tool to filter the information coming into your reader (or whatever)
2. Our tool filters the the incoming stuff allowing you to only consume the stuff your really wanted.

I have a big problem with this, not just the system trying to second guess (even with the wisdom of crowds) my tastes or wants. Rather this whole thing is a strawman anyhow. Let me explain by means of an example.

My largest incoming data stream is feeds via google reader, I may be atypical here but I ruthlessly prune my feeds on a regular basis. This pruning occurs when I start getting to much stuff I am not interested in, but this doesn’t happen weekly infact probably not even monthly, so it’s not really a big chore or even a big overhead. But back to the point, I spend very little time dealing with non-relevant or uninteresting information, I step through a river of news (J,J,J,J,J…) when its interesting I read it, when it is not I press the magic ‘j’ key, I repeat this until my river of news is consumed - simple. So if I analyse my time spent (attention etc..) I spend less than 1% of it on uninteresting or non-relevant information. That means I spend more than 99% of my time consuming relevant interesting information. Thus these tools would offer me very little improvements in efficiency or time saving.

This post would not be complete however if I did not suggest an alternative to these tools to help deal with the information glut. Here are some tips that might help :

1. Learn to speed read
2. Subscribe to feeds rather than accessing the web site
3. Use strong ad-blockers because most advertising really is wasting your attention
4. Get someone else to aggregate and summarise for you and deal with not knowing it all i.e. delegation
5. Just fscking deal with the fact we are in a golden age of information availability and change your life around that fact to take advantage of it. You could start by charging by value rather than hour.

Am I atypical? only you can help me here, what are your tips?

Today my youngest daughter (6 years old) amazed me. She has a set of character dominoes based on 'Dora The Explorer', after tipping them out to play she said "I can't play with these daddy there are 2 missing". I was curious how she new they were missing and whats more how she knew instantly which ones were missing. She knew this within a few seconds and wasn't counting etc.. I wondered if she had photographic memory, so I asked how she worked out what was missing. She replied that two of the characters didn't have their doubles. In dominoes of course all members have doubles whether made from numbers or characters. I thought what a brilliant top down diagnosis (potentially algorithm) and great way of starting your check for missing pieces. She put them away and got the numerical (grown up) dominoes and proceeded along the same checking procedure before playing with them, astounding, she'd make a good programmer or detective or even doctor I guess.

Markets move slower than the innovators and disruptors, because crowds move more slowly than individuals. But some memes having staying power because they act on the crowd virally, they resonate and move through the herd, long enough to gather exponential bifurcation.

For as many years as I care to remember I have battled with the idea of CRM, those letters make me cringe - Customer Relations Management ? it's an oxymoron in itself, without even trying to comprehend a concrete systems implementation of managing relationships whilst still pretending customers are actually people. Yet over those years if I had been paid for the number of times businesses contracting me have sought 'CRM solutions development', I should now be retired on my luxury yacht, moored of some perfect Caribbean isle. The truth is however quite the contrary, the CRM dream fails to materialize every time and instead is replaced by various forms of Sales Force Automation (SFA).

But there is hope on the horizon, marketeers are starting to get things like 'conversations', organizations are waking up to the fact that customers ain't just meat for the grinder, but are actually real people just like them. Of course real people in the real world engage with each other, this engagement in the commercial world is what turns the financial cogs of production and consumption, that eternal dance dictating the beat of all business.

Thus it will come of little surprise that smart folk will put two and two together and work out how to grease those cogs to make things run smoother or faster. Much of this 'smart folk' work has already emerged, 'The cluetrain manifesto' (Cluetrain) is one of the seminal pieces leading to the emergence of  what I call the Customer  Engagement  Platform (CEP).

The second major ingredient of infrastructure required to make the leap from CRM to CEP is also now emerging, after it's Darwinistic period in the petri dish that is the internet - social software in it's many forms has risen from the quagmire. These forms are important, we have unwittingly been experimented on by these mutations over the years : Bulletin boards, email, user groups, irc, blogs, wikis, instant messaging, mailing lists and numerous emergent social platforms. This combination of social patterns, social production and social software, when combined with the social works such as the Cluetrain form the new CEP. Think of the CEP as hands reaching out from an organization ready to welcome, support and to help the people previously known as customer relationships. The big trick here is not to think about them as relationships anymore, rather engagements, you must engage your customer as a person and as an equal, just like you would a friend or associate. That means working with your customers so they aren't just customers anymore, they are part of your organizational fabric, it's like your all on the same huge waterbed, when the customer is making ripples you need to feel them and react to them instantly.

Why am I bringing this up now ? Well apart from it having been something I have been passionate about for the last decade, the time has come for action. Recently many of you have asked me what my Rel3 project is and where it came from, this post represents at least some of the motivation behind Rel3. So am I saying that Rel3 is a social waterbed attempting to kick CRM's butt? No, not quite, but it is most certainly something I envisage as forming part of that CEP fabric that I allude to here. Although the time is coming to enumerate Rel3 in more details over the next few months, I would be interested in what you, the smart folks, think about CEP concepts generally, does what I suggest here ring any bells, do you feel passionately about engagement vs relationship management or am I crusading alone on this horse?

*Update All occurrences of 'engagement' should be replaced by 'empowerment' its obvious to me now, thanks Doc.

I have been thinking about web 2.0 business models over the last few weeks and it occurred to me that there was a dearth of even anecdotal evidence pointing to successful business model implementations of web 2.0. My question is, which firms are operating in profit with a web 2.0 business model right now. Note I am not including those who have successfully sold out to larger players, I am confining my query to effective web 2.0 business model implementations, ones with ongoing profitability (sustainable). The only ones I could think of (off the top of my head) was 37 Signals and maybe EchoSign, thus I put it to you who can you add to this list, is there such thing as a successful web 2.0 ongoing business model, or am I asking the wrong question?

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This post at port 25 (thanks  for the heads up James) talks about how Microsoft are considering moving collaborative software development forward, something which as a developer I appreciate. Unfortunately their first point (Part 1) based on some internal Microsoft coder watching was ‘Code itself was a poor conductor’ or ‘Bad currency’ for transmission of design knowledge. This immediately stood out as suspicious to me, so much weight in the OpenSource development communities is rested on using and referring to ‘The Code’. This would suggests that many OpenSource communities are misplaceing their communication reliance on Code Sharing as a primary mechanism for knowledge exchange. The reality also seems to work against this internal Microsoft research, as OpenSource seems to thrive on this ingrained approach.

Thus I think what we might be seeing here is a difference in cultures, Microsoft favouring abstraction and visualisatiuon of the code Vs OS communties promoting the design/documentation is in the code. I also think the languages and tools have a major effect, for example Ruby on Rails (ROR) is a veritable ‘superconductor’ compared to the IDE assisted languages Like C# and Java with their complex libraries and syntax. here’s a couple of simple ruby examples :

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_one :author
end

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :post
end

One really doesn’t need to add any more documentation than that, no need for a UML diagram. This also helps with the other critical requirement of nowadays development - agility. To be agile one ‘codes’ rather than ‘procrastinates’ via abstract UML diagrams, that way you actually get to a more suitable, tested solution interactively and rapidly.

The article also goes on to criticize mailing list as another poor collaborative choice for information sharing on projects, I agree on some of this, but tools like GMail improve mail list experience significantly. Also Most larger projects employ Wikis, Blogs and RSS feeds to help augment such communication in addition to the mailing list. It is also important to note that many of OS community tools are chosen for low barrier, allowing maximum participation, unlike what may be hinted to in the article for our futures.

What do you think? Am I being old fashioned ?