MiramarMike: Blog

It's been an interesting few weeks in the consumer "online collaboration" world. Stop! If you're reading this from within the (not so) cozy walls of a company thinking that the crazy, fast moving, unfocused consumer world of online collaboration won't affect you for a long time then I'd recommend you stop, take a look around at the newbies within your organisation and see where they spend most of their online time. And if your (IT Dept) response is more site blocking think of it as another brick in the dam's wall holding back a river of online services flowing faster and faster - "she's gonna blow captain!". Or, you may be an enlightened organisation and on to it. And so, you need to know what's already coming through the cracks in your wall and more importantly what is just around the corner. Once you know you can then divert the flow you want, use it for the betterment of your company and discretely let those parts of collaboration y

Here at MiramarMike.co.nz we know that the Internet, and in particular the Web, can have a huge positive affect on the work community agencies perform every day. And so when we read over at Scoop that the Wellington Council is reviewing its support of Wellington Community Net (a free website hosting and support service for community groups) we know it will be a huge retrospective step that will hurt these agencies. In a nutshell the situation is (as outlined by Mike Rumble , Director of Wellington ICT ) So if our funding is cut next year – as the council proposes – the Wellington Community Net will no longer be viable. The service will have to be handed back to the council. The council will then end up with more than 570 community websites to support, but with no money to do so. This is what YOU can do to help Note: the deadline for submissions is 5pm Monday 18th May Read (and comment on) the Scoop article Sign the official e-petition Submit a comment on the LTCCP Submissions page

Everyone that has an intranet probably suffers from an ill used and badly conceived "news" section purporting to give you the latest happenings within your organisation but is generally ego-centric publishing's from upon high that have little if any impact on your day-to-day job. Of course this is unlikely to be 100% of the time for 100% of organisations but if it is, GET OUT! But hey, it's my role in life to take these issues and, for your organisation, make it better and to that end I started writing this posting before discovering someone had beat me to it. Yep, James over at Step Two Designs (Sydney, Australia) wrote the post I was going to waaaay back in July 2006 - Intranets as a news channel 2006, so has much changed in 3 years ... no, not really, the issues are still the same: ... issues arise because the news section is implemented as a ‘default’ element of the intranet home page. Little consideration is given to the design or management of this news channel,

I'm on a bit of a mission to get as many of my @miramarmike Twitter friends onto FriendFeed AS WELL. Just sign-up and let me know and then you can go back to Twitter and tweet happy in the knowledge I also get to see all your stuff. Please :-)

Geek and Poke: How Times Have Changed Brilliant, just brilliant - here's part one, "Web 1.0" which is followed by "Web 2.0" and "Today" See the complete cartoon ... "at least three out of every five people who sign up for a Twitter account bail within a few weeks" (see Nicholas Carr ). How times have changed!

I discovered this article, 7.5 Rules for Working Together , quite some time ago and it's been sitting in the "drafts" of this blog waiting for a good moment. Now seems to be a good time as the previously understood hierarchies of organisations are stripped away due to "cost cutting" and the need to collaborate through a much more meshed/networked environment both within the corporate walls and more and more through and beyond these walls. Having said that I'm not convinced that these "rules" are perfect and may even come from a time of "to hell with the costs, let's just play at being a business because there's money to burn!" Here's the opening blurb: Honm Friebe is an economist and journalist and one of the managing directors of Zentralen Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin. Holm Friebe’s book, Wir nennen es Arbeit (”We call it work”) is a bestseller in Germany, describing how to work creatively and with integrity in “the hedonis