October 2009 newsletter

Here’s a selection of October’s shared links captured via Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter. Organised into the usual suspects of Systems and their bits and pieces: People, Information and Technology. No one core theme this month. Quite a few product announcements (from Microsoft, Google and Amazon). Related trends: smart mobile devices meet the real-time web with people as the filling in the sandwich. Enjoy:

Systems

• Internet Trends in depth – Mary Meeker’s annual update at the 2009 Web 2.0 summit
• Why Email No Longer Rules – and what it means for the way we communicate
• YouTube: We’re bigger than you thought – 10 billion views in a single month!
• The Doers Club – how DIY can help transform Africa
• Is the Internet Age creating a utopian or dystopian UK – from Microsoft’s UK CTO
• How local businesses can benefit from mobile social networks – help your community
• Search vs Recommendations – Authoritative and related sources in a graph
• How high will real-time search fly? Is there a business model behind instant news?
• The Dark Side of Extreme Customer Service – being fair is better than great
• Antisocial – Why corporate America (and most places) keeps rejecting social media
• The power of tweets – a new age of democracy or a danger to free speech?
• Strategy and social computing – interview with Microsoft’s Lili Cheng
• 12 new cities built from scratch – interesting how our future is time-locked to the current.

People

• The value of visual thinking – captures attention, saves time
• The 4 ways sound affects us – TED talk with food for though in open plan offices
• Neuroanthropology – why you can’t separate brain and culture, it’s all in the mind 🙂
• The Fun Theory – replacing play with (home)work fails to realise potential
• When is multitasking not multitasking – can we really do more than one thing at once?
• Building a hacker culture from within – Mark Zuckerberg on the importance of long-term horizons (compares MS to Netscape in the browser battle)
• Lessons learned from innovators – the importance of play, connections and role models
• Introducing Google Social Search – why friends and contacts are a key part of life online

Information

• Not a faster horse – Google CEO Eric Schmidt on information
• Facebook analyses how happy we are – tracking positive and negative words. Remember, nothing gets deleted…
• The future is big data in the cloud – ability to tackle massive amounts of data will determine winners and losers
• Blog post: Introducing PowerPivot – analyse massive amounts of data
• Blog post: From PowerPivot to Pivot – another tool from Microsoft for analysing big data
• Data visualization in Second Life – adding another dimension to images of data
• Tweets from the jury box – controlling information even harder thanks to the real-time web
• Would dolphins yawn at this? Scientists discover a magnetic current that could store and transmit data
• Useful spreadsheet of all TED talks – only needs browser to view, so far all talks to end of Oct 09

Technology

• Cleverly simple – sales of normal mobile phones down, sales of smart phones up
• Blog post: Energy efficient web site design – will OLED change our use of black and white?
• Enterprise Search from a collaborative view – Google, Box.net and Microsoft SharePoint
• Blog post: 5 simple search tips – to improve relevance with SharePoint 2007
• Describing SharePoint 2010 – by the product team building it, good screenshots
• Engineering SharePoint – how products get built at Microsoft (and my how they grow)
• Blog post: SharePoint 2010 products and services – outline of versions and licences
• Microsoft Office Web Apps review – first looks by ITPro magazine
• Integrating Google apps with virtual worlds – virtual reality for geographical distribution
• Back to school with Google Docs – the benefit of not being tied to infrequent product releases
• Google Wave’s Best Use Cases – collaborative uses of information
• Amazon introduces a cloudy database – Amazon RDS and opinion on it
• Free PowerPoint Twitter Tool – see and react to tweets in real-time in your presentation

And a couple of finally’s. First: a more humorous video of the future than normal: The Ambient Life – a flavour of augmented reality:

To finish, Dilbert discusses the hidden strategy behind introducing workflow 🙂