Entries Tagged 'Participation' ↓

Truly interesting, and thanks to CBS for allowing the embed below, but this 60 minutes clip talks about how to deal with Millenials as they hit the work force. Managers and co-workers beware, the “coddled” are just not prepared to work for your company.

How much of this is fear, how much of this is pandering to an agenda is anyone’s best guess, because while the video is a broad paintbush, parental interference is something to think about. While I have yet to have a parent call me wanting to know why Junior got canned, the potential is there.

Ahh yes, your precious snowflake is about to hit the cold harsh reality of business, where it is not merit, not everyone wins, and sometimes people get their feelings hurt. The oddity in this is that one of the interviewed says that it is ok to have four jobs in a year, guaranteed as a hiring manager, four jobs in one year is going to make a hiring person stop and think.

While it is great to have time to go do the things you want to do, and many companies are just not there, this video raises some interesting provocative ideas. Can business accommodate the millenials, and 20 years from now, who will win the change of culture?

Tags: snowflake, millenials, jobs, working, fantasy, 60 minutes, paintbrush, thanks

I know it has been very quiet this week on Techwag, but what has been keeping me busy is teaching Web 2.0 to some great students over at CityU of Seattle. The video is being edited, but these are some rush photo’s from the shoot. There is nothing better than teaching students how to use a video camera, record, lights, and getting support from two program managers.

Two of the students were working out how to frame the shots when the speaker is ready to start pacing the front of the classroom. This is an excellent shot of them collaborating on how the video will be shot.

This is one of the senior faculty members giving their presentation on equity markets and debt instrument management. This looks like it will be a lot of fun, especially as they teach stock trading, debt instruments, and how to run a financial portfolio.

This is me preparing for my coverage of the information systems program at the school, in which Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies are going to be a big part of the program. I can honestly say, that this is going to be a kick butt program.

Of course it is just exciting to watch someone speak through a camera.

In all you cannot beat the experience that we had over the week, from orchestrating the whole production to actually getting to shoot and capturing video. It should be very interesting to see what comes of this project. In the longer run though even if we don’t ever use an ounce of video, or the videos are so poor that they cannot be used, this is still one great learning experience. It was also fun that CityU of Seattle would let me use their facilities to do this.

Tags: cityu of seattle, web 2.0, web 3.0, video, shoot, students, learning, education, teaching, programs, fun

If you never followed the Kathy Sierra debacle then go quickly catch up on this one, then start following the saga of Ariel Waldman.

Kathy Sierra who has been silent for far too long at the hands of trolls and people who were truly evil is just one example of when otherwise good social networking goes bad.

Ariel Waldman is now on that list of folks who is dealing with a very unfriendly secret stalker who is following her via Twitter. Twitter rather than deal with the issue directly and banning the user has decided to do nothing about the issue and rewrite their terms of service rather than enforce it. That essentially means that twitter is now giving a green light to a big pile of badness that is going to descend on the service, if they refuse to reign in folks who are clearly harassing other members of their service.

The harassment continued throughout the course of 2007. Since Twitter and I had an open dialog started, I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment. Unfortunately, in 2008 it escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored. Tweets were being fired off directly calling me a “cunt” amongst other harassing language. On March 14, I wrote to Twitter, giving the example URLs of abuse and stated to them clearly: Source: Ariel Waldman

While web 2.0 is generally a wonderful thing, this type of behavior is nothing new, the idea of harassment even to the point of death (MySpace Suicide Debacle) means that as community managers, regardless of how you look at yourself, service or whatever, the enforcement of the Terms of Service essentially becomes an obligation if you state what is and what is not acceptable behavior. If you say “no harassment” then you have to believe and act on what people are calling harassment. You as a community manager might think it is trivial, but to the person who is believing they are being harassed, then it is a very real issue to them.

Not saying that Ariel has thin skin, putting up with an uncomfortable situation for a year all the while reporting it is also interesting, and not saying this is bad, it just shows that she is committed to the Twitter service. Twitter stands to lose a customer because of someone else, that customer will talk, and if Twitter is perceived as a haven for trolls, trogs, and other Internet miscreants, they will have people who will drop their accounts, stop using the service, and they will lose customers.

Can twitter afford to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

Do they want to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

All good questions, and if they rewrite their TOS (Terms of Service) to remove section 4, then they probably are going to do themselves more reputational harm than they will be doing things well. Even the phone company will help you track down someone who makes threatening harassing phone calls so you can report them to the police. For twitter to do any less than this could cause them reputational damage that they can not afford.

Tags: twitter, harassment, ariel waldman, kathy sierra, troll, Internet, service

More disturbing news coming out of the information security business today about the McAfee hacker safe program that is fairly disturbing in the longer run. Not just for the industry at large but for people who tend to trust that web sites and other sites are doing the right thing to keep their customers safe.

There are just some ideas that are fundamental to hiring someone, and that is the background check. Only to find out that there is yet another security person who has been indited for securities fraud. I wrote about that here.

This is more my general thoughts on things, like run a background check on those you hire. Not everyone is going to want to work for your shiny new company who has your companies best interests in mind.

There is a long trail on friend feed about this one as well right here.

While there are a lot of folks who are generally decent, but you can not trust everyone you hire, you want to, but some folks have motivations that can destroy a team, a company, a group, even a product, there are far too many examples of this kind of behavior.

This story here is one of those “prime examples” of otherwise good employee causes company lots of pain. These kinds of stories are far too common.

I keep on saying to just about anyone who will listen that people who are in the security industry have the same ability to mess with someone’s life as a bad lawyer, a bad doctor, and a bad nurse. Maybe it is time to clean the industry up, bring some real professionalism to it, so we can catch people like this earlier. Of course this takes a lot of due diligence on the part of an employer, we might not get there.

Tags: hire, information security, trust, false, sense, security

May 21rst is the “Boycott Twitter Day”, which is generally, refuse to use twitter for one day because people don’t like the outages that Twitter has been having. Twitter is a great service, that has seen its own share of outages and performance issues, but is that worthy of a boycott?

Probably Not.

So is this boycott really about teaching Twitter a lesson or is it a group tantrum? Source: Mediaphyter

You can read other equally interesting statements here.

Lets see, will anyone die, is there blood, anything broken in terms of life and limb, no not really. While the ebay boycott folks had a leg to stand on, if you hate twitter, go to Jaiku or Pownce, they exist, they are alternatives, do what you want. But this is really on the lower end of the totem pole in terms of significance or duration.

If you really hate twitter go somewhere else.

Just a thought, and good luck with that boycott!

tags: twitter, boycott,temper,tantrum,ebay,jaiku,pownce

You can get to the podcast right here, and there is a lot of humor here. Really if you want a laugh, you gotta listen to this.

Go screaming to minute 45 to get to the fun bit, it is great hearing pundits swear on a pod cast about “hiding behind a shroud of privacy while pushing their business forward” when it comes to Facebook agreeing to play in Google’s playground on the whole open ID single sign on hoopla that is infecting the tech elite this morning. There is some humor here listening to Robert Scoble and others go at it.

So what this centers around is the idea that Facebook and Google are working on the whole Friend Connect program allowing anyone to take their friends along to any social network. The main argument centers around plaxo which is now part of comcast, and the reputation really of the social network that your friends are trying to get you involved with.

While Robert really likes plaxo, given their checkered history, many people use LinkedIn rather than Plaxo. So as people in the podcast really start getting into the whole idea of friendship portability, what they don’t get and what is not mentioned in the process is that when someone takes your contact information and dumps it into some other social network, it does not mean you have to accept that.

Picture from Google.

Many friends have tried to get me involved in plaxo, and some other weird reputation system, and it is really easy to just ignore them, dump them into the spam directory and not sweat it.

A good question is the Facebook privacy standards too protective? Do you really have to follow your friends around especially amongst the tech elite that tend to way early adopt any shiny new system just because they can. If you look at what happens fairly frequently, a large herd of people will follow along when the technical literati talk about something, but then actually using the system months later is fairly rare.

The initial boost in traffic is good, the follow through is fairly bad. Friend Connect and other systems are really designed to ensure that systems can work on one ID. The idea of having users allow their data to be ported to other systems, other networks, we don’t have that yet, but it is a good idea in the longer run to have something like this. The reason that I won’t use a lot of Facebook games or apps is because the data access that they have. I seriously doubt that based on my past behavioral patterns, that if my friends try to rope me into some other system, that I’ll just blindly go along with it.

In the mean time, go to minute 45, have a laugh, and then wonder what happens when your friends try to bring you into every other social network on the planet. Do you really have the time to beboMyspaceFacebookLinkedIn and the rest of them?

Tags: humor, Sam Whitmore, Marc Canter, Dana Gardner, Mike Arrington, Mike Vizard, and Robert Scoble Potty Mouth extravaganza, podcast

In another rude surprise from stumbleupon, but probably one that is good for everyone, stumbleupon also has a banning system in place for all those who are quietly stumbling their own sites, or hitting up their friends to stumble each others sites as well.

There are a whole lot of folks leaning about this as well, while not new news, and not exactly something that anyone would be surprised by, I know how I use the system (bookmark every source for a story that I am writing in SU and call it a day), I run across sites that have been busy getting banned, and that can be interesting when it is something that degrades how I use the system.

Not a major deal, but something that people need to know about the system and how it works, if you hit your own site getting addicted to SU traffic, you will eventually get banned, just like theAsk the Admin folks who got banned at Digg.

There is something to be said about the misuse of Social Networking sites, either through own actions, over zealous parents and friends, of just having something popular every day (which happens, ask any of the top bloggers, they have fans and friends, some who hit every article on every social networking site everywhere).

Maybe much like the “how to submit to digg” that Read Write Web did, someone needs to come up with a stumbleupon guidelines for their sites.

If submitting techwag articles to Stumbleupon, we love it, and thank you, just don’t do it too often, don’t want to get banned.

Tags: psa, stumbleupon, banned, zealous, friends, family, parents, snowflake