I hear it said at least several times a week. I see it posted on Twitter pretty frequently. It’s the simple statement that’s become cool to utter: PowerPoint Sucks. And often in the same breath I hear people extol the wonders of Keynote or Prezi.

I’ll be the first person to admit that I have seen countless horrible PowerPoint presentations. I probably see at least one PowerPoint presentation per day that is a crime against humanity. I’ve seen more poorly laid out slides, absurd overuse of ridiculous transitions and animations, badly-utilized effects, slides with so much text that Tolstoy would complain, more bullets than Rambo can fire off in full-length movie, and more light-colored fonts on yellow backgrounds than should be legal.

But this is not the point. It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools. Just because you produce your presentation on a MacBook Pro (and I’m typing this post on one right now) with Keynote it does not somehow imbue you with some sudden, instantaneous and deity-like powers to produce an amazing presentation. And using Prezi mostly just increases the likelihood of inducing motion sickness and nausea in your audience while reducing the reusability of your content and failing to add anything meaningful to your corporate knowledge base.

Here’s a news flash: a good presentation requires having a good story to tell and a good story teller. Period. The tools you might use are irrelevant, but if you do choose to use tools to add to your story you need to have a clue of how to use them and then use them in a manner that supports the telling of a great story. That’s it. A great story teller with a great story to tell doesn’t even need a series of slides popping up behind them. Great visuals, content and media that reinforce key messages and enhance the story can be tremendously helpful and effective when used properly. But they are still not the primary and most important element in a successful presentation that connects with the audience. You are.

Prezi and Keynote do not grant you mystical and magical powers. They do not make you smarter and better looking. They are not powered by Skynet and constructed on top of a positronic copy of the brains of Steve Jobs, Bill Buxton, Martin Luther King, and Zig Ziglar. They do not think for you. They do not know who your audience is, they do not know the purpose of your presentation, they do not know the message you are trying to convey, they do not know the desired outcome, they do not know how to connect with the people in the room. Neither does PowerPoint for that matter.

There are absolutely some minute feature details that can be argued about the different tools. I’ve used them all. Though if you actually take the time to learn them you find that for the most part each has their shortcomings and things they can’t do well, and each has capabilities the other doesn’t. But it still all comes back to you. Saying “PowerPoint Sucks” is quite simply a short-cut to thinking. It doesn’t suck. You do. Instead try focusing on coming up with a good story and learning how to tell it well.

And just to illustrate my point, here's this entire blog post re-done very poorly as a hack-job Prezi. It's a horrible presentation. Just makes you want to cry. Enjoy. http://prezi.com/4_muqjahha-g/powerpoint-doesnt-suck-you-do/

(Image Credit: Niall Kennedy)


 

Almost every week I continue to be shocked at some aspect of how Facebook is treating the privacy of their users. While I think Facebook has done some amazing things to redefine the landscape of connection and community in the digital age, the way they auto-opt-in users to new policies and settings that unwittingly further expose them in a manner that is beyond confusing for almost everyone is driving me crazy.

It seems to be a total disregard for privacy that leverages "confuser interface design" tactics and misleading redesign functionality alterations to extend their dominance at the unknowing expense of most of their users. They actively seek to get you to enter as much personally defining data as possible. They make it incredibly complicated to manage your assorted privacy settings, then they go and make significant changes that auto-opt in users to new options like making all of your posts available to search engines or to share your personal data with applications and sites using FaceBook tools. All of this while presenting typical users with a perception of communicating and sharing with their "Friends." Maybe FaceBook is just working towards a Nobel Peace Prize by wanting everybody on the planet and every corporation to be Friends? Ummmm.... no.

Conversely, while not exempt from scrutiny, Twitter takes a much different approach. They begin by having an established perception that what you post is public, they have one very clear and simple blanket option to make your posts private, and the information they ask you to enter for registration is extremely limited.

I'm also driven crazy by the constant changes to FaceBook API's that make the lives of developers miserable as they struggle to work with this juggernaut of social media and the fact that they employed algorithms that began to selectively decide whose posts among my friends they thought I should see (and even excluded my wife's posts from my stream until I manually added her back in)... but that's a whole other couple of blog posts to write. The following is a short list of things I actually find less annoying than FaceBook's treatment of the concept of privacy:

15.       SPAM e-mail

14.       People who post their every Foursquare or Gowalla check-in to Twitter

13.       The mere existence of Farmville and Mafia Wars

12.       The first time I saw Clippy

 
      11.    Developers that hardcode and use auto-code generators out of laziness

10.       Requirements documents for a web site or app that say: "should work in every browser"

9.       Web sites that dramatically over-use Flash for everything they possibly can

8.       People that show up for an interview and haven't read and reviewed your company's web site or have any ability to articulate what your company does

7.       People that text or use mobile devices to tweet while driving (or drive while talking on their mobile phone without using a Bluetooth or hands-free device)

6.   People that call themselves "Social Media Gurus" in their bios or otherwise

5.   People in busy airports that obliviously stop walking out of the blue and then wonder why everyone crashes into them

4.   Every scene on the Fox TV series 24 that ever involved Kim Bauer

3.   Stupid people (as one of my friends is fond of saying as he quotes his old high school football coach, "Ya can't fix stupid.")

2.   The continued existence of IE6

1.   The constant deluge of Top <insert number here> Lists

I recently overheard several discussions and have seen a number of social media posts mocking virtual MMO world Second Life. Many declare it and its ilk dead. People are openly cynical towards it. Laughing at it seems like the hip and trendy thing to do unless you want to appear to be an idiot. And you're not an idiot, are you?

When Second Life first came onto the scene it was the shiny new toy with all the typical hype. You couldn't swing a dead virtual cat without hitting a marketer or interactive technologist that wanted to talk about Second Life. People ran to it like moths to a flame and then they got burned. I once heard Second Life brilliantly described as marketing's Vietnam. No one wants to talk about it or how bad things got screwed up there.

People spent tons of effort on research around it, heralded it as the next big thing, many even asked their employees to start playing it in a rush to become subject matter experts on it and figure out how to pitch their clients on creating branded virtual islands and experiences in this brave new 3D immersive world. And truly, the potential was staggering, nobody was wrong about that. But the results weren't what everyone had hoped for. Far from it. The technology and interface still had a steep learning curve for many users, there were numerous barriers to entry that made it unwieldy for many potential customers, the experience was still a stretch for the vast majority of mainstream users who were just beginning to figure out FaceBook, and the ROI for the required effort simply wasn't there beyond some immediate PR value. But more than anything, there was a conundrum around the openness and lack of control over the experience, namely that Second Life was (and still is to a large degree) rife with adult content, porn, virtual sex and many other things that most brands simply didn't want to be associated with or risk exposing their customers to as those customers struggled to navigate their way to BrandXYZ Island. So people left in droves, most corporations that had tested the waters began their mass exodus. Those that jumped on the bandwagon (who still had their jobs) shook their heads in embarrassment and apology vowing never to make that mistake again.

But here's the thing. They weren't wrong about the potential. People were simply overly zealous, reckless, and so anxious to be ahead of the curve to appear innovative and be early adopters that they just made bad decisions on timing and failed to do their homework. They invested far too much effort into something that was still far from being ready for prime time and the mainstream. They wanted to be bleeding edge and guess what? There was blood. And now people either talk about it hushed tones or openly deride it.

But did you forget the part where I said that it's full of porn, sex and adult content? That industry and genre of society is so all over it and advanced in its use of it that it's crazy. That's right. The same industry and users that were the first to embrace newsgroups, web sites, e-commerce, paid-subscriptions for content, cross-channel branding, and on-line video. And they are always months to years ahead of the mainstream adoption and monetization. They happen to have a user base that will go to great lengths to extend their experience and be willing to deal with early shortcomings of the technology. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that time after time leads the way.

Meanwhile, another massive industry, Gaming and Entertainment, has continued to embrace the technology. MMORPG's like World of Warcraft and many others plus the continually enhanced experiences offered via services like Xbox Live leverage incredibly rich and immersive interactive 3D gaming and social experiences. Project Natal from Microsoft even looks to change the game further by enabling more physical interaction without the need for a handheld controller to interface with games and virtual environments.

The technology continues to advance. The processing speeds to accommodate these environments continue to increase. The typical memory of average computers continues to increase. Broadband keeps getting broader and the average technical proclivity of users keeps getting higher.

Second Life continues to evolve with a large number of improvements for user experience and better content ratings to segment world areas that are more "adult-focused" from those that are not (a move which has even been protested by some of the Adult-Content focused current users of the platform). By some reports the amount of Adult content is even growing in lesser proportion to more mainstream content. And their parent company Linden Labs has been hard at work developing the Second Life Grid that enables companies and organizations to have and create private worlds that are independent from the mass Second Life world. Companies like Unity are doing amazing things to enable 3D games and experiences to be easily developed and require nothing more than a browser. More powerful game engines are coming out every day. And Windows Phone 7, coming out soon, will enable Xbox Live right from a phone.

So it's not that Second Life is dead. Far from it. It didn't want to go on the cart. What's dead is the spirit and vision from some whose egos were crushed because they were burned by being reckless in pursuit of the next big, cool thing. Note to these folks for the future: if it's full of little besides porn and sex it's probably not yet right for most brands. But you're crazy to not see that means it will eventually make its way into the mainstream. It just takes time. It's probably not going to happen tomorrow. But when it does, don't call it a comeback because it'll have been here for years. If you're smart, you're still paying attention to what they and others in this space are doing. And you are smart, aren't you?

I recently had the opportunity to attend MIX 2010, Microsoft's annual conference for web designers and developers focused on building great user experiences, in Las Vegas, along with Definition 6's two interactive Creative Directors from Atlanta and New York.

MIX 2010 is highly unlike most other Microsoft conferences where the topics frequently focus on .NET, Exchange, Office, and Windows. Instead it's chock full of design and UX goodness - a geeky love fest for all the cool tech that goes into creating great web, mobile, desktop, kiosk, and other assorted technically enabled experiences using the Microsoft platform.

It's hard to argue that this isn't an arena in which Microsoft is still playing a lot of catch-up. Adobe Creative Suite and Flash/Flex are still easily the staple of most creative and design departments. And many people definitely hug their MacBooks and frantically wave their iPhones about when asked to provide examples of great user interface design. But if there was one thing abundantly clear at MIX 2010 it is that Microsoft has no plans to cede the battle on these fronts, they are rapidly catching up in many areas, and even appear to be leading the way in a few. Seriously.

Microsoft is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. And as Steve Ballmer said at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference last year regarding questions as to why Microsoft doesn't cede such battles as Search and Advertising and retreat back home to their core Windows, Office, or SQL Server business lines, "We. Don't. Go. Home." Anyone who doesn't believe him should have been at MIX. And do you really have to look further than an example like the Xbox?

Probably the hottest subject of discussion and presentations was Windows Phone 7 Series. I am, admittedly, an avid iPhone user who stood in line the first week they came out. I happily ditched my old Windows Mobile device and it's BlackBerry predecessors back then to live in Apple's world and I've never been seriously tempted to use something else until I saw WP7.

I really believe WP7 is a game changer for Microsoft and the mobile industry. Sure, it has some shortcomings. I don't know how they could decide to not include copy-and-paste as a feature in the first release. And like iPhone, they also do not have application multi-tasking and they appear to have similarly stringent plans regarding their app store.

But the interface is fantastic, I love the "hub" metaphors, streaming video and even Xbox Live over the phone looked amazing. Not sure exactly how badly those things will kill battery life, but they sure looked impressive. For heavy Outlook users, the Outlook mobile experience on WP7 may alone be enough to get you to switch. Just awesome. And there's a chance it could finally be the breakthrough that Zune has been looking for.

Silverlight 4 is definitely another big step in the right direction. They continue to slowly chip away at adoption and now claim that it's at 60% market penetration, probably mostly attributable to the Olympics and adoption and rollouts of Windows 7.

Tools like Expression Blend keep getting better, and Sketchflow may even be better than the competition, it is simply cool. IE9 beta demos also got big buzz. It appears they have surpassed Firefox on overall performance, are coming close to Chrome in many aspects, and for certain functions like handling of video and HTML5 they could end up being even faster and better (when running on a Windows platform of course) by taking better advantage of your computer's processor and using a form of background hardware-based acceleration. The head-to-head examples showing some really slick use of animation and video in HTML5 were really amazing.

The one thing that Microsoft has which no one else can offer (not Google, not Adobe, not Apple, not anyone) is an end-to-end story on tools and capabilities in this arena. The depth and breadth of their tools and services is truly staggering when you put it all together. And I'm not just talking about the typical story of Windows + Visual Studio + .NET + SQL Server. On top of that throw in Expression Studio with SketchFlow + Project "Dallas" + Azure + Silverlight + Surface + Windows Phone 7 + OpenData + IE9 + Bing Search and Maps and on and on. Sure you can poke certain holes in individual pieces versus their competitors. But the cohesive power of all that together makes for a truly impressive lineup.

There definitely were a few other good tidbits at MIX. Announcements around Orchard, freely available tools for WP7 development, great live streaming of Channel9 straight from the event, strengthening support for JQuery, and a surprising number of atypical logos on screens being talked about as friends (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, PHP, etc.).

And the keynotes included fantastic sessions by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu), VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, and great demonstrations by consummate tech presenter Scott Hanselman (@shanselman). But for me, the highlight of MIX was the opportunity to see Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research, speak live. He is simply brilliant and one of the most passionate people alive when it comes to interface design and technology.

If you've never seen him speak it is worth your time to google (or bing) for videos of his speeches and spend an entire day just watching them. As the conference organizer, Microsoft's Thomas Lewis (@TommyLee), put it in a tweet during Bill Buxton's keynote: "OMFG! Buxton's brutality has destroyed Vegas! Only zombies, mushrooms & lavender frogs have survived! DESIGN IS GOD!". I couldn't have put it better myself. Buxton's speeches are often too filled with memorable lines to count, though my favorite at MIX included "The most important thing in the system is the wetware... the human being" during a segment where he described the importance of taking into account all the users different prior experiences within the specific environmental contexts of where, when and how they will use a system that you are designing.

Side note: I still don't understand how such an amazing guy who lives and breathes design and is considered the Father of Multi-Touch can have such a horrible personal web site, but I can only assume it's a "cobbler's children" thing.

And last but not least, the overall crowd and dynamic of the attendees at MIX was fantastic if not a bit quirky. It was a great group of highly intelligent people that are all passionate about great design and truly unafraid to ask the hard questions of Microsoft and dole out praise as well as tough love in person in the sessions and in torrents over Twitter. Unlike typical creative and design conferences it's definitely rooted in a true developer core (e.g. more guys still talking about compilers as opposed to a more mixed-gender crowd talking about heuristics and having used many tools like these for years), but unlike normal Microsoft conferences it's a large group of people who love great creative design and have been dying for Microsoft to bring these kinds of things to the table.

This conference in Vegas was more WXSW for geeks than it was the concurrently running SXSW, but Twitter and Foursquare definitely reigned supreme there as well as the tools that joined everyone together digitally during the sessions, into the evening, around the bars, and throughout the event. Sunday evening even kicked off the conference with a massive tweetup at the MIX Lounge at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay. There is a real embrace of Twitter showing through by Microsoft that is really uncanny with regard to how they normally react to any tech service that they don't build and own.

At Definition 6, we do use a lot of tools and services across platforms including a very significant amount of work in the Microsoft platform. And we do use tools and design for platforms that are competitive to many of those that were showcased at MIX 2010. But there is no doubt that what we saw there has given us a lot to think about, some great ideas, and a few new weapons to put in our arsenal. We look forward to using many of these to create great solutions for our customers and to seeing them continue to evolve and improve.

Last week Interactive Marketing Agency Definition 6 launched TwitterINGO, an online game of sorts that leverages Twitter. I won’t go into all the details of how it works in this post, but essentially it’s a free downloadable desktop widget you run in the background while working (or at least trying to work… the game is a bit addictive to watch) as the game is played each Tuesday at 3PM EST. The tweets of all the people you follow stream down the left hand side while you get a 5x5 game board of keywords. When someone you follow posts a tweet containing a term you have on your board the square will highlight and fill in with that person’s tweet.

I am a bit biased of course in thinking the game is cool, I helped create TwitterINGO. The idea came from watching multiple columns of twitstreams in Tweetdeck and thinking how it almost felt like modern-day BINGO card. After a couple of brainstorming sessions we arrived at the current design. It has several premises.

1.       If you use Twitter to really, effectively follow the pulse of news and information that you care about you typically have to follow a fairly large number of people (typically at least in the hundreds and often in excess of that) and learn how to organize those people into groups in addition to creating effective searches for subjects.

2.       Finding the right people to follow who discuss the subjects of interest to you beyond your immediate circle of friends and colleagues takes some time and can be a bit of an art form as you sort through the clutter

3.       One of the real powers of social media is in how we help each other to find great people, pearls of wisdom, diamonds in the rough, etc.

4.       It can be really hard to identify the holes in your Following (you often don’t realize that you aren’t following certain subjects that interest you as well as you could be).

With this in mind we created TwitterINGO. With over 100 keywords “baked in” to the cards (all of them relating to popular and highly relevant subjects in the areas of interactive marketing, technology, media and advertising, application development, and social media), plus 20 current “terms of the week” on trending subjects sent out at the beginning of each weekly game, your card populates with a randomized selection of 24 of those terms, the middle square is free of course. Then you can simply sit back, have some fun and see what happens.

If you follow only a handful of people you will invariably become quickly disappointed as you realize none or few of your squares are populating. This can be a quick hint that you aren’t yet following the global conversations on tech and interactive or current events very well. On the other hand, if you follow a few hundred people who do talk about these subjects you’ll likely have a very different experience. I found myself fascinated watching my squares fill in (and unfortunately being less productive than I should be). It was amazing to see who I follow that randomly starting giving me the keywords I needed as I sought to get a row, column or diagonal completed to win. Every 5-10 minutes I’d get a square. First I got my “SharePoint” square filled by SharePoint Samurai @Gannotti. Then my “Brand” square filled by a post from @TobyDiva. Then Sun Microsystem’s Social Media guru @Sumaya posted a tweet with the term “open source”. I was off to a great start and saw another 4-5 squares fill in. And I came close to winning. But as I looked at what terms I needed to win (without cheating), I stared at the empty square with the word “Linux” in it. Why was nobody that I follow mentioning the word Linux? Hmmmm… there it was. A hole in how and who I Follow. I realized that I follow a lot of people on a lot of subjects but perhaps only a few that talk about Linux. To quickly rectify this I searched on the term Linux on Twitter and looked to see who the major contributors were and began following them. It was too late for me to win TwitterINGO this week, but it helped me do a better job of following that rather important part of the global technology conversation. The same can be said of many other terms I saw on my card that sat empty, I set out to see who was talking about the terms and found some really great people to start following.

While the game itself was rather fun, the real value was in seeing how it could help me. Plus I could then go look at the Leaderboard to see who the major Tweet Contributors were and who won and who they are following. The game is helping me to be a better user of social media to benefit my professional and personal interests and awareness. And I found a few extremely interesting people who played the game and won, people I’d never met before but that I certainly follow now. That's a game worth playing.

According to recent studies and surveys over 50% of all smartphone traffic in the U.S. now comes from iPhones (AdMob Mobile Metrics, March 2009). And it’s growing. Other platforms are starting to catch on, but Apple truly succeeded in building and proliferating a means for people to have a vastly improved mobile web experience. Add to that a rabid user-base and the result is that iPhone’s Safari browser now starts showing up more and more on the overall analytics reports when companies review what browsers are accessing their sites. As an avid iPhone user myself since the first version I’ve been amazed at how I could navigate sites on this platform despite site designs that still required extensive zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth. I was so enamored that Apple designed UI mechanisms to help accommodate sites not designed for mobile that for a while I was simply excited to be able to use them at all. But slowly some sites began creating better mobile versions to make navigation even easier on the iPhone and other browsers. Now I grow greatly annoyed when I try to access a web site from my phone and find myself staring at a microscopic version of the homepage which makes it difficult to even find the buried link that says “Contact Us” just so I can find their address or phone number to get directions and a map while I’m out and about. Or even worse, the site is built in Flash with no HTML version and for whatever divine reason Apple has still not decided to support Flash on the iPhone. So the site is essentially useless on my phone and in some cases looks uglier than a Nip/Tuck season finale. I found it funny when I tried looking at the web sites of some of our competitors, some large digital agencies, and found they had sites built in Flash which are rendered useless on my device.

Numerous solutions exist for creating mobile presentation layers for even the most complex and transactional web sites to handle every different mobile device under the sun. We’ve helped many of our customers do exactly that. But there wasn’t a simple, fast and inexpensive way for a large majority of companies who just have a typical web site with typical CMS needs managed by a small number of people to easily publish and manage simple mobile site versions. With all this in mind, Definition 6 worked to build some simple scripts, toolsets and templates that integrate directly into a Content Management System enabling re-purposing of content by a non-technical marketing manager to easily deploy a site that looks great in an iPhone Safari browser. It leverages iPhone navigation mechanisms, and helps you to offer mobile users with the experience they desire and the information they likely need while mobile which is often quite different than what they want when they are sitting in front of a laptop or desktop computer. We’ve also packaged it all up in a simple series of offerings to make this an easy decision for our current and future customers so they can cost effectively begin to meet the needs of a growing market. If you don’t have an iPhone you can test to see what your site looks like using an iPhone simulator which we have posted at http://www.definition6.com/our-services/mobile.aspx and if you do have an iPhone just visit www.definition6.com now on your device to see an example.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll also be releasing the same kind of CMS plug-ins and templates for other mobile browsers as add-ons to these tools. But we thought we’d start with the one that represented the most traffic. For a quick and simple way to manage mobile sites in a CMS we think this new toolset makes great sense for a large number of businesses.

I had an extremely interesting experience last week that forced me to undergo a thought exercise that I think can be extremely valuable for everyone to consider using on a regular basis. We all get so hung up in our particular expertise and the advanced nuances of our individual focus areas that we often fail to think about the basics and even more frequently we end up failing in our communication to others. My recent experience went something like this-

My wife came over to the Definition 6 offices along with my two year old daughter Mika to bring me some lunch. After lunch Mika began running around the office exploring a bit. I followed her as she ran into our main floor executive conference room. Now, I’m a bit biased, but for a child that just turned two she’s pretty impressively conversant with a great vocabulary. Here’s the conversation that followed:

Mika: What is this room?

Me: It’s a conference room.

Mika: What’s a conference room?

Me: It’s a room where people meet to discuss things.

Mika: Can I sit in one of the thinking chairs? (The “thinking chairs” reference is from her favorite show Blues Clues)

Me: Sure

Mika: What are we thinking about?

Me: Well, in this room we are usually thinking about interactive marketing?

Mika: What’s marketing, daddy?

Me: Hmmm… well, marketing is doing things that get other people to think a certain way, do certain things, or to buy things you want them to buy.

Mika: (thinks for a moment) I don’t understand marketing, daddy.

And there you have it. The question, my particular answer, and her response are in many ways less important than the thought exercise itself in my opinion. Try it yourself. Without thinking for more than a second or two, blurt out your definition of marketing as you’d answer it to a two year old. Try it again with “technology”, “managed services”, “open source”, “.NET”, etc. etc.

I’ve noticed in countless meetings how often people make assumptions about the level of understanding the audience has regarding certain terms or shared meanings. And also how often people throw around terms and concepts that they don’t seem to understand. I can’t count the number of people I have interviewed who list certain expertise and terms on their resumes only to be incapable of defining it in an interview. Go ahead- next time you interview someone lists the term “web services” on their resume ask them to define a web service, it’s components, and what exactly a web service does. You will be amazed and bewildered at the answers you receive.

Quite a few years ago when I worked at a different company and .NET first came out I recall the CEO asking via the discussion group email lists for people to explain to him the value of .NET. After dozens of convoluted and complex answers were offered he finally replied to all with the single line “Someone explain it me like I were two years old.” It’s not that he wasn’t an extremely bright and technical individual, he’s one of the brightest people I know. But it wasn’t until he asked the question in this way that people finally gave answers that culled things down to the key points and basic value.

Take this all for what it’s worth. I plan to run a lot more of my ideas and future presentations past my newly appointed diminutive advisor. There’s nothing like a two year old to keep you honest, accurate and off your high horse.

I’ve been a fan and follower for years of the series “24” starring Kiefer Sutherland. The first season was nothing short of amazing, it was absolutely a ground-breaking television series. The action and suspense is always top notch as Kiefer’s character, special agent Jack Bauer, pulls off amazing feats and defies death again and again to save millions of lives from terrorists and rogue forces from around the world. And of course it requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. I’m good with that, though as the series continued over the years, like most series, it’s stretched things further and further and has accordingly become less and less believable. This year, I think they have finally jumped the shark. And as a technologist I’m having a really hard time even watching the show at this point when I try to swallow the storylines they are feeding us.

I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that the beginning of the season featured several shows where terrorists had created a “CIP Device” (I won’t bore anyone here with what a CIP device is, but picture a small piece of hardware that you plug into a network) that gives them absolute access to every government controlled system and allows them to bypass all firewall protections. With ease they begin to take over air traffic control, override safety precautions in chemical plants and according to government officials could take over just about anything. They go on to say that it would take 7 days to restructure their firewalls and security to guard against the device. And since the whole season is supposed to occur within a 24 hour period that definitely presents a problem. Luckily, within a few hours/episodes the device is destroyed. The whole concept that such a device could exist is a bit beyond ridiculous not to mention how easily and quickly they created it. And that doesn’t even take into consideration how preposterous it is that some of the agencies and installations out there are even close to being advanced and well networked enough to be so easily connected to and controlled in the first place by those who are supposed to have such access.

But the most recent episodes didn’t just jump the shark. They circled around and had a pyramid of leather-jacket-clad Fonzies jump 100 meters over an entire school of sharks. In the show, a group of about a dozen terrorist commandos from a fictional small African country called Sengala manage to break into the White House and take the president hostage. To do this they go underwater (in a river about a mile from the White House) and drill a hole to enter the sewer systems, then march right up to underneath the White House where they drill another hole only to be confronted by a series of glowing laser beam motion detectors criss-crossed in front of them. Their “inside guy”, a lowly janitor, then cuts the power to the detection grid so they can rush across the tunnel, emerge on the other side in the White House and begin their assault. Really? I mean… seriously?

At Definition 6 we host and manage web sites for a large portion of our customers, including sites that see hundreds of thousands of users per day and process millions of dollars in transactions each day. Very important stuff, though not even close to the value of the White House and the President of the United States. We have so many different mechanisms in place to guard against power outages (like enterprise class data centers with more power backups than you can shake a stick at including diesel generators that could run for weeks… power isn’t interrupted for more than a millisecond without back-ups kicking in, alerts being shot off and warning boards lighting up like Christmas trees). We have monitoring and alerting systems that tell us the moment a site or system is down and even proactively look for warnings that a system is degrading. We have monitoring systems that monitor our monitoring systems to make sure they are up. Tiny outages launch alerts via several different mechanisms to an army of engineers who receive instant notifications. And even if someone on our own team who has all the needed admin access and knowledge wanted to maliciously take something down and try to obscure this from others it would be amazingly difficult. There would practically need to be collusion amongst all the top engineers with some pretty impressive and clandestine planning – even then they would only be buying themselves minutes. And given the work we’ve done over the past couple of years related to helping our customers with PCI compliance the processes, procedures and training (and in some cases even background checks) we’ve put our teams through and implemented it makes it even more unlikely anything like this could ever happen.

So as much as I love a good action TV show with outlandish plot lines, as soon as you try to make me believe White House security is that poor I’m faced with either having to change the channel, or I need to consider they could be right in which case I’m packing my bags and moving my family to rural Montana to build a bunker. In this case, I think I’m going to put my bunker plans on hold. And for web sites and their security I’m going to keep my faith in the engineering teams of Definition 6. Keep up the great work guys, and maybe we can get you some work as technical plot advisors with the Fox Network. They could definitely use some help.

In my role as CTO of a company that utilizes technology as part of everyday life not only in how we work but in what we build as solutions for our customers it is of constant interest and concern to me how people use technology and emerging technologies. But equally important is how people misuse technologies. As a heavy consumer of social media, social networking, communication and collaboration technologies I am intimately aware of the value these can provide. Time saving communication technologies that also let you expand your reach, do more with less, and be more effective are wonderful but only when used appropriately.

Particularly, as more and more of the masses of people who are not necessarily technically elite or savvy become daily consumers of this same technology we begin to see confusion about what technology is appropriate for what use, and a reciprocal amount of misuse or lack of understanding of appropriate etiquette in their use.

That’s all my really, really, really nice way of saying that a lot of non-tech people are using these amazingly powerful communication technologies and driving me and many others completely crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled they are using them and that adoption is becoming so widespread. But many of these users jumped the adoption curve of predecessor technologies or aren’t aware of surrounding technologies and are thus left with no notion of how to use them properly or make discerning variances in how they use them. The results are creating scenarios that threaten to kill the use of the same technologies that can be so valuable to us. The digital highways are becoming littered with the early adopter corpses of people once enamored with micro-blogging and social networking who found themselves unable or unwilling to withstand the barrage of misuse. They have either abandoned use, retreated to more secretive and closed usage, or moved on to lesser known emergent technologies. And that’s a shame.

I’m going to address two main things in my upcoming rant: using the right communication technology for the right purpose, and good etiquette when using these technologies. I’m absolutely certain many will disagree with my assertions on both of these areas. That’s fine. We all have our perspectives. If you disagree, go write your own blog. This is mine.

I’ve noticed widespread use of one technology for a purpose another was intended to serve. Different communication technology is intended for different purposes and we need to be aware of this. Misuse leads to discontinued use. I’m sure we’ll eventually see some consolidation in the marketplace among vendors and tools leveraging capabilities of one platform and another into a combined format. But the ideas I’m talking about still apply. You need to take into account a number of principles in your communications before selecting a means and technology for that information dissemination: is it short form or long form, one-way or 2-way with dialogue, intended for the masses or reasonably private, one-to-one or one-to-many, synchronous or asynchronous, personal or business, welcomed as a constant or desired as occasional? All of these factors dictate how you should communicate your information and what medium you should use to communicate it.

To put it simply: I don’t want you to be my friend on Facebook if I just met you at a networking event or in a business meeting, that’s what LinkedIn is for. You are not my friend if we just met and I don’t care to see constant updates that you just enjoyed a great latte. And even if you are my friend I don’t need to see an update of every 5 minutes worth of a conversation you are having or a presentation you are listening to. I’m not saying you shouldn’t share it. I’m saying Facebook isn’t the right forum for it. Nor is text messaging or e-mail. But Twitter probably is right for that purpose. I could subscribe to your tweets and read them all day long if I wish. If you create more clutter in people’s lives which are already overloaded with digital information then you will become worse than noise and static, you become a negative force.

I recently opened up my Facebook page to see the same persons face staring at me 10+ times in a row. It was a series of updates on what they were doing, all centered around the same subject. I wanted to scream, “It is possible to comment on your own thread!”. It could’ve been a nicely condensed thread that people could expand if they wished. In this instance I suspect it was someone who’d tied Twitter to Facebook and didn’t even realize what kind of end experience they were inflicting on their friends and followers. Don’t get me wrong, the material was of interest and I’m ecstatic to see people engaged in sharing information so instantly and constantly. This kind of communication is making things extremely interesting. But consumers of these technologies need to really get to understand them from both their perspective as well as others. And unfortunately you simply can’t expect the providers of the technology to make everything 100% immune to improper use.

I don’t want to see a personal argument or discussion between people on a social media site. Do it in email or even better… call each other and talk! If you want to espouse your personal political, religious and social beliefs in long form then use a blog and tell people on MySpace and Facebook and Twitter to go visit it, keep your Status posts short and to the point. If you want me to know every web site you think is cool just let me visit your del.icio.us account. You can still post killer links in your various social networking forums, but if you find yourself posting a half dozen links a day I might suggest you are cluttering up a lot of people’s reading material who don’t necessarily care.

Text people when it’s important. Use email when it’s interpersonal, inter-team or intercompany and long form. Twitter to the masses. Facebook with your friends. LinkIn with your business connections to find out how far you are from Kevin Bacon and reach out when you need a job or need to reach that key client that you are just 2 degrees away from! Yammer to your business colleagues from atop the highest mountaintop from which you still get a signal!

And there is still something called a phone you can use to talk and avoid countless back-and-forths. You can still pull up a chat client like Skype and have a great textual conversation in real time. And you can still hop on a web meeting conference to work more collaboratively.

Now it’s one thing when an individual gets confused in this communication quagmire, there is a lot to take in and learn. I fully understand that my mother may have just heard from her friends about this new fangled Twitter thing and wants to know what her grandkids are up to so she can be a part of it and that some degree of misuse will occur in the valid purpose of moving to ubiquity. But what shocks me more is when I see companies failing to do their homework before embarking down the social media highway. These technologies can be tremendously powerful in helping drive sales and furthering your brand in the minds of consumers. There are great case studies on how companies effectively use social media and networking. But there are far more examples of those that do more damage than they do good. Use must be metered, highly targeted, and seen as useful and welcome by the receivers. Companies need to have more of a plan for their social media communications, just like they do for their websites, press releases, TV advertisements, and e-mail marketing campaigns. It’s a very different medium and you need to understand it well instead of playing ready-fire-aim. To do otherwise is to become noise, static, or much, much worse: an annoying nuisance who simply detracts from my effectiveness like that guy in Nigeria who keeps sending me e-mails so I can help him move his millions of dollars out of the country. Damn, I hate that guy.

Director of Software Development, Graham Street on the popularity of website integration with content management tools.

I've been noticing in recent months that the development projects crossing my desk for estimation have more and more in common. It's CMS, CMS and more CMS (Content Management Systems.)  Everyone feels entitled to have administrable content on their corporate website. CMS solutions have been around since the good old days of dial-up BBS systems. They've been steadily improving every day, from complicated systems that allow you to jump through 10 hoops to edit a sentence, to 1 hoop to edit a whole page. But this incremental improvement in CMS technology doesn't explain the spike of interest that I am speaking of.   

My father even asked me about a CMS topic on a recent trip home. This is the same Dad who showed me Lotus 1-2-3 on my first Compaq 286 in 1984. I still receive all tabular correspondence from him as a 1-2-3 attachment. So for him to be asking about easy self administration of web content for a non-profit, I was a little perplexed.. Excited and definitely proud, but also perplexed.

It's like activism for free speech at the corporate level. Only the cause for oppression is the "old system" that either allows very limited content administration, or perhaps offers too much flexibility with no boundaries, requiring that "editors" learn a syntactically obscure markup language specific to their respective system.  

As an employee of an online agency, with experience in website development and website integration, I hear things like "I want to update every page on my site, and I want to be able to do it just like I do here on my MySpace." It seems these users have learned how easy it "should be" to author some content and publish it to a web-page. I'm quite sure we can thank MySpace, FaceBook and Gmail for much of this. They've set a precedent for what is literally "even your parent could use it" usability standards.       

This new user group is a diverse group of people from all walks of life, from all generations,  who are ready to add content to their respective  enterprise's website. And where CMS systems do not already exist to support that in those organizations,  they're ready to spearhead an initiative to get it implemented,  because they know it can be done at a competitive cost,  almost as easily as creating a new my space page.