How many items on your desk are "NZ made"?

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Knowing good info from bad - how do we?

This posting inspired by the latest Gerry McGovern newsletter - read it for his views We vote. As an example, that's the power of Google search - it uses the concept that web pages with the highest 'vote' get put at the top of page 1. The 'vote' is a weighted one using the number of pages that reference it multiplied by a lot of clever algorithmic type activity - highly technical insight from Google themselves . In essence you voted me top of the "mike riversdale" Google list by linking to me. However, voting is spreading through the web in many more ways than simply linking to pages and I believe the driver is that people are starting to use the tools to group themselves into communities. In the good ol' days before " Web 2.0" (say before mid-2005) there were many informal methods of finding the 'best* content' - we would send emails to our mates pointing out cool sites, read about it from dedicated "Best of the Web ..."

#bigness

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What I found searching "bigness NZ" I have a theory ( another one ) - and this one I call Bigness , or on Twitter #bigness. Here in New Zealand, a country with a population of 4.471 million, living on land bigger than the UK (pop: 64.1m) we have many cultural attributes that are uniquely Kiwi, just look at the reaction to the flag debate and how people are expressing their, "This isn't us!" to see it in action. Many of these Kiwi attributes are awesome but one, that I have labeled #bigness, is a problem. It is an attribute that slows us down, holds us back and ties us to a thinking we don't need to. New Zealand is, to all intents & purposes, a Western-ised, predominantly white (male) country. When it looks to role models it immediately gravitates to those like it, Australia, UK, USA and Canada (the Five Eyes ). When we look for help, guidance, "lessons to be learnt", processes to copy, institutions to emulate it is to these that we a

Reinventing The Wheel Is For The Machines

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"AI is not all that it's cracked up to be!",  and you can go search for as many articles as you like expressing such a view. As I sit here listening to a work conversation it strikes me that LLMs, especially generative LLMs ('AI' from now on) are gonna take a lot of 'work' from knowledge workers. Reinventing the wheel is, I suspect, what a LOT of people are doing in office pods around the world. It's rare, very rare, to experience a problem that has not been encountered, discussed, resolved, and published about. This is why code ("programming") is such a rich area for 'AI', almost everything that needs resolving has been by someone and is on open places such as GitHub. Your particular coding opportunity might be unique when seen as a whole but the individual components are likely already out there just waiting to be put together in your novel way. This applies to your policy, your work programme, your leadership challenge, anything th

Webstock 2009, Talking About Fear

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This is just for me, you don't have to watch me take my clothes off on the Webstock stage 🫣 " Webstock Undressed", filmed by Sigurd Magnusson - Mike Riversdale doing his 8x5

The 3 C’s – Communication, Consultation and Collaboration

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[this is an old WaveAdept post archived here] You've got the technology (be it Google Apps, SharePoint or whatever) and your IT people have integrated it, patched it, set you up and handed it over... now what? Well, for a start, sit back and congratulate yourself that your organisation is: Saving costs (NZ$2 million per year for NZ Post with their Google Apps roll-out, and they've just started) Freed up your IT staff to concentrate on your company's particular 'secret sauce' No longer have to wait to benefit from the latest features Instantly given access 'anywhere, any time and (almost) any device' Really, celebrate that you have switched from old to new. But once the party is over you're going to have to get back to work getting the true benefits from your new toolset. And before you dive into the full on, "let's all collaborate, be open with everything and change the world" maybe planning out some interim steps to world domination