Category Archives: Social Media

Personal Knowledge Management System – Revised for 2020

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Digital, Productivity, Social Media, Tools

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As the new year has begun, its time to review my Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) on how I consume information and knowledge, I have blogged about this before and have updated for 2020.

I still split and keep apart my personal and professional lives on Social Media, although occasionally they may cross where appropriate.

Since the last time I wrote about this the amount of information and data that is available has grown and multiplied on a huge scale. Keeping track of what you need to drink from the fast flow of the firehose of information is itself something that needs managing. This is why I have set up my feeds in the manner illustrated below.

PKMS

Personal Life

Personal Journal

Journalling in both a Personal and Work life is a useful tool to keep notes on your thoughts and ideas. In my personal life I still opt for recording these in a Moleskine – See my blog post No batteries required for further details. I find the Moleskine a great notebook to use and the pocket version a good size to use.

Social Media

I separate from my work life from my personal life using things like Instagram and Facebook for friends and family with appropriate security settings in place. Even with those settings you still need to consider that once something is online, it could be public in the future. Wikipedia lists 186 Social Media Websites and this list is out of date. I choose a few mainstream that I am comfortable with. 2020 may see me have a look at some of the others to see if there is any benefit or other data I am missing.

Professional Life

Research

This is split into several areas and these are a few of the inputs that I use to grab information, feeds, data from:

  • Podcasts
  • Audio subscriptions
  • Videos
  • RSS Feeds
  • Web Searches
  • Blog Posts

Podcasts cover both Audio and Video casts that I watch/stream online or download to my Media Player (Audio and Videos) to listen to on journeys (Audio). The mobile is a great device for using as a media player across these casts.

Flipboard

Flipboard provides another stream of data that I consume bringing in news feeds from many sources around a series of topics. It does work well on a mobile device allowing you to flip the pages through the articles.

Feedly

Feedly provides an aggregation tool which I use to collect the stories from blogs and web sites I regularly pull information from.  This provides a list of stories that can be scanned tin a few minutes on a single screen without going via multiple sites. Clicking on a story will bring up a snippet from the source site and provide the link to read the source article if required. Using a series of key strokes you can read the headlines, then move down the articles at a reasonable speed, stopping and opening when needed.

Sources can be categorised to allow an all view or just whats new in a category.

IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) provides a level of automation to my lists from saving articles to creating alerts on topics and triggering different actions as needed to my devices. I would like to automate more of this PKMS to bring the information I need, but it can also help to scan other information to help innovate and see other points of views.

Thinking / Learning Time

This is where view the data streams through the tools and assimilate and think about what has been reported/said. I also use this time to learn and take courses.

Courses

Coursera is a great site to used, but there are lots of others from Industry and Vendors to open learning sites that I use as needed. Relative exams and certificates are then added to my LinkedIn pages.

Blogging and Being Social

From thoughts and research I will write about things through my blogs and publish these into Social Media streams such as Twitter and Linkedin.

I have also been producing a few podcast episodes with other technologists and will look to do some more in 2020.

I have been using GitHub to mainly support some courses but its there as an option to publish data and code in the future.

Do you have a Personal Knowledge Management System or using tools not mentioned above?

Digital Fit in 2018: Balancing the Noise

13 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Uncategorized

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Sound DeskListening is one of the key skills in life and it is also the same across the various information streams, however you can get flooded with “noise” that you need to filter out to get to the messages and content that you want to hear about.

I have written in the past about a Personal Knowledge Management System that can be used to help filter out noise and focus on the streams and information that is relevant to yourself.

We have many forms of information streams that can be tapped into such as email and social media platforms. It can take time to keep looking at each stream in turn and scrolling through the history. Many of the streams change at a very fast rate – for example how many people you follow on twitter and who you follow can make a difference. If your following a bot that basically picks up other tweets about a subject and re-tweets them you will be picking up a lot of traffic from many accounts.  This can be to coin and old phrase “drinking from the firehose”. You are only able to take in so much information.

Top 4 tips for Balancing the Noise:

  • Manage who you follow. If they get too noisy about things that you don’t want to know about you can unfollow them (and re follow them later)
  • Be wary of following too many bots as they can fill your streams quickly.
  • Think about using tools such as feedly to bring some streams together for viewing in a list.
  • Set up your own Personal Knowledge Management System

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

Digital Fit in 2018: Get Social

Digital Fit in 2018: Build up a Readership

A-Z of Digital – K is for Knowledge

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

 

Digital Fit in 2018: Build up a Readership

25 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Tools

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binocularsIf you have been following this series of blog posts, you should now have a blog and a set of social channels. That’s a great start, however how do you get noticed? How to you get a readership? How can you increase your Digital Profile? These are questions that I was asked yesterday following my last post. Here are my thoughts on this topic.

Have you ever Googled yourself? (other search engines are available). Did you appear in any of the search results or not? Did you check the images as well?

If you already have a presence in a blog or social channels the chances are that the search engine has found one of these – unless you have a name that competes with someone with a stronger profile, where if you go through the results you should be there.  If you do not have any social presence its most likely you will not feature in the results.

Looking yourself up on a search engine is also a good way of checking any security or privacy settings you have on your social platforms. Have you opened up enough for the search engines to find you, or have you exposed too much and need to dial it back a bit.

There isn’t a super magic sauce for building a readership and some of it will happen over time, however there are a number of things you can do to get started.

The content you post is only half of the story. People will often like to click through if the content is good to find out who has written it. Having a profile will help the reader understand who you are and your background.

Lets break this down into two main headings. Profile and Content.

Profile

Blog Profile

In most blogging platforms you can set your profile within your account. It is important to ensure that you have a good profile picture in place as well. Search engines love profile data as it tells them who has written the blog. Make sure you set the metadata on the picture as well. Name, Description, and Keywords which search engine pick up on.

Blog About

Setting your About page to a good description of yourself. Think about using other sites such as about.me Here is my profile as an example – https://about.me/maxhemingway. You will see that it links back to my blog, twitter and other sites. You can also set these on your blog site using icons to link back to other pages.

 

Social Channel Profiles

Again it is important to set your profile and picture. Keep consistency in your profile information, although an alternative profile picture can be used.

At the end of this you will end up with a small web of interlinks between your sites.

Content

Searchable Subjects – Blogs

Your subject and content are key in order to gain a readership. This will be down to what subjects you blog on, however using tags and keyword functions in your blog can also help search engines find your content. There are lots of search engines in use today and each has its quirks on how it ranks results and collects data, however using the standard features in your blog for Categories and Tags can help search engines. It also helps group content you write on your site and makes any local site searching using the blog search engine easy.

Posting regular content also helps build a readership and following.

Broadcasting content

When you write a blog or post something in a social channel you can link between the channels so one post can automatically be posted in other channels. For instance, when I post a blog, it also gets broadcast out on Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn using the Sharing function. You can link to a number of other channels as well.

Once a reader finds your blog post, they can have a look at the other content on your site. If its good, you can build a set of followers.

Timing

The time that you publish your blog or tweets can also have an effect on your readership levels due to different time zones around the world. I find that publishing after GMT 14:00 is usually a good time, but this may differ depending upon your own timezone and your target audience.

Headlines

Popular Press has mastered this art and provides its reader with a catchy headline to its stories. You need to think about the message your headine or tweet is trying to convey. Will it attract the readers you want, or is it not quite on message. Short snappy headlines pull in the readers.

Social Channels

Social channels can provide a readership and following for your content. For example Twitter uses hashtags which are searchable via twitter and let you view tweets of a similar hashtag. Love them or hate them, the hashtag is a useful tool in building your readership.

Following the followers

You don’t have to follow lots of people to get a good following, however if people are following you, its because they like the subject you are communicating. They may have similar views or posts, so following them back may help you with research into your next post.

The important part to remember (as mentioned in my last blog post) is that social platforms are relational not transactional. Following people in your field/subject also shows your readers that you are interested in your topic and the views of others.

Re-tweeted

Having good content and messages that are re-tweeted or re-blogged by someone else introduces your post to a different circles of followers. This only happens though if people consider your content and messages to be relevant to their followers and readership.

Talk

When your in conversation and a subject comes up that you have blogged about, tell people you have a point of view on that as reference your work. Send out links to people so they can find it easily.

Guest Write

Consider guest writing for a blog or channel as they often provider a link back to the authors blog/twitter. This usually needs you to be established with some good content in the first place before being accepted as a guest writer.

Lastly, time is a factor. It does take time to build up your content, build followers and getting the search engines to list you in the results, however once you start getting noticed, your readership does go up.

Try searching for yourself in a couple of weeks again. Any change?

 

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

Digital Fit in 2018: Get Social

A-Z of Digital – K is for Knowledge

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

 

Digital Fit in 2018: Get Social

24 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Tools

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SocialFollowing on my series on Digital Fit in 2018, being social is an important part of building your Digital Profile. There are two main things which spring to mind when you mention the word social. Going out with family and friends, and using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc.

In this post I mean the latter. Using these social tools to gain an understanding of what is going on in the world, industry and your focus areas, as well as using the platforms to broadcast your own views and opinions.

There are groupings of favorable social tools which depend upon your age range and have become the defacto tools you use. For some its Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. For others its Snapchat, Flickr, YouTube, Pintrest. There are many different combinations and its mainly down to what we have been comfortable with for a period of time.

There are many different social platforms available and some are more mainstream than others. Some are new and some have fallen out of favour with people and usage has decreased on them. Which ever platforms you use will be down to how you want to evolve your usage of them.

Social tools provide an abundance of information that you can consume real time and through historical views. Choosing what to view will be down to personal preference.

Using the social tools as a broadcast channel is a good method to getting your voice heard on subjects that you want to discuss. It will take time to build a following or readership so don’t be put off by this or the fact that people may follow then unfollow depending if your messages are useful to them. The main thing is to keep up a regular drumbeat of postings or tweets, even if its once a week.

It is important to remember that social platforms are relational not transactional – understanding your audience is key.

Here are some tips to help you:

  • Check your messages before posting
  • Respond to comments
  • Give credit
  • Pick who you follow and regularly check to see you have
  • See who is following you – Are your messages pulling in the right audience – do you need to change anything
  • Don’t over hashtag your posts

Here are my top 5 tips on being Social Media Savvy

Social Channels – Choose the channels that you want to use and look at the audience on those channels. They type of things being posted. Split your channels between personal and professional work.

Listen, Research, Listen Again – Listening to what is going on in your channels is important to understand the trends and topics being talked about.

Be Authentic And True – Be yourself – don’t try to be someone your not.

Keep It Regular and Relevant – Posting a couple of times a week is a good measure. Making sure that your posts are relevant to what you want to say and what your audience is looking for.  You could always automate your posts – e.g. writing some blog posts and having them published during the week via a scheduler.

Think Security – Would you want anyone outside your friends network seeing that post? Eventually your post could be public as once something is posted you don’t have control on what other people can do with it.

Source: A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

A-Z of Digital – K is for Knowledge

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

02 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Tools

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Blog TilesThis is the first in a series of posts I will be doing in 2018 about getting Digital Fit. By this I mean achieving the right Digital Mindset for your current or future role and honing your skills to meet the demands of the Digital Era.

There is no single course or video that can achieve this goal, however there are many that can help you along the journey.

“To Blog or Not to Blog!”, Blogging isn’t for everyone and may not come naturally, however it plays a big part in the Digital Era, whether you are reading them or publishing them, you will read blogs at some point. Your reading this one!

One of the biggest issues with starting a blog is what content should you be writing about. Having an idea about what your blog is going to be about is the first step. Here are some ideas:

  • Work based subject area
  • Re-enforce your learning areas by blogging about them
  • Hobby or interest

The main key points to blogging for me are:

  • Be Authentic
  • Be yourself
  • Don’t be afraid on posting that idea or thought
  • Don’t be afraid of posting different opinions
  • You learn things doing research for your blog posts
  • Post regularly
  • Blogging helps build your confidence
  • Blogging helps build an audience

The next stage is to choose where to host your blog. There are many different blogging platforms available that you can choose from. I have listed two Free Blogging Sites below, but there are many more that you can find using an internet search. There are already lots of reviews on which blogging site to choose and it really depends upon your needs. I’ll leave the choice down to you and your own research:

I myself have chosen WordPress* as my blogging platform as it is well established and has a set a great features available on the free tier:

  • Sharing with Social platforms
  • Scheduling posts to be published at a later date
  • Good site usage statistics
  • Search indexing

 

When you publish a blog, you should use other social platforms such as Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook (to name a few) to share the post which will help build your audience.

References

 

(*I am not affiliated with WordPress or receiving any kick back from this post from them)

 

Having the Right Digital Mindset

04 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Innovation, Productivity, Social Media

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Digital BrainDigital is used as a title to cover the current business and computing era. Being Digital is about having the right mindset. There is no magic course or exam that you can take that will pronounce you as being “Digital”. Its how you apply yourself against the changing landscape of business and technology.

There area many areas that could be included to help shape your Digital Mindset, however for me these fit into six main areas:

The Digital Era is enabling “A Growth Mindset in the Age of Abundance”.

Business

The business area covers the skills and thinking that are needed in your workplace and what you need to succeed. Businesses are being constantly challenged in the way that they operate today and look forward to tomorrow against what their customers demand, the market wants and competition are doing.

There may be a number of business processes that are in place that have been there for a while and are expensive to change constrained by a number of factors. This has meant that the processes haven’t grown. The changes that the digital era is bringing helps to remove these constraints and costs, allowing business to rethink how they achieve these processes. With the constraints being removed through innovation and advancements, with costs coming down, how can you change/transform these processes to meet the market challenges of today. What can you change/transform/automate?

Technology

The technology area covers existing, new and emerging technologies in your life. What you use in everyday life and what you could use or imagine that would help you complete tasks and achieve goals quickly and efficiently. Defining which technologies you should be using and learning will depend partly on what your job role is and the road maps and trends for the industry/sector. The aaS (as a Service)  economy is providing the ability to consume technology at a faster easier route with an abundance of choice of service to go with. The need for a growth mindset is key to navigating a direction and path through this and making decisions on which technologies best meet your needs. The key is to understand and keep up with the trends and technologies.

Social

The social area covers how you interact with the rest of the world, including your work and family life. Reading everything that is going on Social Media is literally “drinking from the fire hose” – so much happening you can get easily swamped with noise.  Building a Personal Knowledge Management System is one way of keeping in touch with what is happening and trending on topics that you are interested in on Social Media. Setting yourself a series of Social Media Rules will help define when and what you should put in the public domain and when not to.

Personal

The personal area covers yourself. Ensuring that your health is good and you are living life to the full or best you can helps. Eating well and keeping fit help keep the mind fresh and positive.

Understanding that change is happening everyday and we need to embrace this with a positive attitude and work through the ambiguity that it presents. A blog post by Richard Branson recently wraps this up nicely “You can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react”

Fear of failure is another area that often lets us down and stops us from trying things, however we can learn from our mistakes so it is important to experiment and innovate. Doing small things and trying them – Theory of small bets – allows you to fail fast if things don’t work and keep any cost/consequences small. “Successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas — they discover them.” ~ Peter Sims

Application

The application area covers how you apply these mindset areas into your everyday life using method that are well documented such as Agile and Design Thinking. The key is choosing the right method for the situation you are in. Using aids to help you may be one way of doing this – Playing a game with innovation and thinking.

Learning

One of the biggest areas is learning. Keeping your skills up to date with the latest advancements in all the areas above. You should be looking to do 50 to 60 hours learning a year as a minimum (some professions require higher number of hours). Learning is easier with the internet through online courses, videos and podcasts allowing it to be undertaken at anytime. Re-enforcing your learning through explaining it to someone else or blogging about it is part of  The Nature and Cycle of CPD.

There are arguments for and against learning to code, however having an understanding of what is going on in the coding world helps with today’s advancing technology.

 

Further Reading

Twenty First Century Digital

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business (Change, Agility and a Growth Mindset)

** (Blog post updated with links to latest series of blogs on Having the Right Digital Mindset)

 

 

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Digital, Social Media

≈ 8 Comments

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SocialFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “S is for Social”.

Years ago people gathered in a market square to hear the latest news and gossip and meet in a tavern to hear the tales of friends and strangers from afar. Nowdays we just pick up our smartphones and have all that information at or fingertips.

Being a member of one of the many social tools available today is seen as the “norm”. The majority of people joining the well known social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, or one that’s less well known or used for specific purposes. We publish details of our lives online for all our friends and followers to see what we are up to or use the tools to help gather information and keep up to date.

Being social is not just around how you use the tools and what you communicate, but also what you don’t say and being Social Media Savvy on your communications. What ever is posted online even if its in a private group should be considered to be in the public domain as at some point someone could easily open that communication up outside of your group.

Here are my top 5 tips on being Social Media Savvy

Social Channels – Choose the channels that you want to use and look at the audience on those channels. They type of things being posted. Split your channels between personal and professional work.

Listen, Research, Listen Again – Listening to what is going on in your channels is important to understand the trends and topics being talked about.

Be Authentic And True – Be yourself – don’t try to be someone your not.

Keep It Regular and Relevant – Posting a couple of times a week is a good measure. Making sure that your posts are relevant to what you want to say and what your audience is looking for.  You could always automate your posts – e.g. writing some blog posts and having them published during the week via a scheduler.

Think Security – Would you want anyone outside your friends network seeing that post? Eventually your post could be public as once something is posted you don’t have control on what other people can do with it.

 

 

 

A to Z of Digital

19 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by in Automation, Cobotics, Digital, Innovation, IoT, Machine Learning, Open Source, Programming, Robotics, Security, Social Media, Tools, Wearable Tech

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ABCBeing Digital, Journey to Digital, Digital, 21st Century Humans, are phrases that are common place in many conversations around business and technology. But what does it mean to be “Digital”.  This is a wide subject to cover in a single blog post, so here is an A-Z of Digital to help.

I will break these down in further blog posts going into each subject in more detail.

A – Automation

The manual tasks of today should be the automated tasks of tomorrow, achieved using tools that interface with systems using API’s and commands that join them together to carry out tasks. From turning your heating on using an application to automatically carrying out a set of repetitive tasks to allow other more complex tasks to be undertaken.

B- Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed database that is used to maintain a continuously growing list of records, called blocks. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block. A blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. By design, blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the data. (Wikipedia).

C – Cobots

Cobots are Robots that are adapted and programmed to work and interact with humans in various tasks and levels of activity. Imagine you’re working buddy is a cobot that can perform tasks hand in hand with you, take over if you need to do something else, increase its speed of completing the tasks, then sense your return and slow to the speed your working at.

D – Digital

“Digital” is an umbrella word that covers many different topics. There are many definitions available, but for me this is about how we unlock the capabilities available today and use them to better our lives and society. From a business view this is about growth and transforming through processes and technology. Being Digital is not necessarily about having the latest gadgets, but more around how you are using them and what you do.

E – Evolution

Evolution covers the advancements and new technologies that are being discovered and created every day.  There are lots of new ideas and products coming out of sites such as crowdfunding and crowdsourcing sites, some work however some do fail. These sites are worth tracking to see what developments are coming around the corner.

F – Fitness Trackers

Fitness trackers are probably one of the most common wearable that is available today and have been around for a number of years.  Trackers have developed to include a wide range of functionality including heart rate, blood pressure, location, altitude making the data useful to the health and medical industries to understand how we lead our lives.

G – Geolocation

Geolocation ties into a lot of the items in this list and provides a basis for providing location and tracking capabilities for devices and applications. It is also used to locate and pinpoint where users are. Some services cannot be consumed these days without agreeing to having this information shared with a site. The most common type of application in wide use is a Sat Nav.

H – Hybrid

Hybrid is used as a term to describe a mix of public and private services, such as a Hybrid Cloud where services can be mixed between traditional on premise/data centre services and cloud services, providing some control or orchestration layer across both to allow users to consume based on policy or requirements.

I – IoT

IoT (Internet of Things) is where physical things are connected by the internet using embedded sensors, software, networks and electronics. This allows the items to be managed, controlled and reported on. There are many reports estimating the number of IoT devices likely to be connected in the future, these are between 20 and 50 Billion devices by the year 2020.

J – Jacking

Jacking is a term used when you plug into something. Body Jacking is a growing area where the body is being used from generating power through movement to implanting chips to interact with the environment such as open a door or unlock a computer. This also covers Bioables which collect data on your body such as glucose levels using sensors that penetrate into the under the skin.

K – Knowledge

Understanding what is going on in your streams, market places and industries is a big task. Lots of information coming in on a daily basis – drinking from the fire hose, not able to consume it all. Creating your Personal Knowledge Management System will help navigate the sea of information and pick out what is key to your situation and what can be dropped.

L – Legal

With the increasing about of things interacting with our daily lives, the area of Legal and Security play a big part. There are a number of important questions to ask – Where is your data being stored and who actually owns it. Is your data secure and have you implemented all the right controls? What does Legistlation such as GDPR mean to you?

M – Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) allows a computer to learn and act without being explicitly programmed with that knowledge. An example of Machine Learning Algorithm is a web search engine that brings up a number of results based on your search criteria and shows which could be most relevant to what you are looking for.

N –  Networks

Networks and connectivity form the backbone of the systems in use today. Using a number of different types of network from Cellular (3G, 4G) to traditional networking and futures of 5G and Neural Networks speeding up how we create, consume and process data.

O – Organisation

Infrastructure as Code looks at making hardware being able to controlled at a code level, allowing Microservices and the ability to consume capability quickly. The next stage is the Organisation as Code. A great example of an Organsation as Code is Uber, building services and the supporting organisation in the cloud that allows it to be consumed anywhere and the drivers to login and become part of that organistation for the period that they are employed.

P – Programming

Everyone should learn to code. Learning to code (Programme) in a language like Scratch, Python, Java, C, etc. The ability to code will allow someone to understand how they can automate a task using tools and API’s.

Q – Quantum Computing

A computer which makes use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to store information (Dictionary). Quantum Computers are being developed with the ability to compute data at an exponential rate allowing for quick computing of complex data.

R – Robots

The vision of Robots has been around in early Science Fiction and are very much a reality today. From an automated manufacturing plant to a robot to help you shop and carry out tasks. The field of robotics is advancing bring in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to boost their capabilities and means to learn, self-think and complete tasks.

S – Social

Being social is not just around how you use the tools and what you tweet, but also what you don’t say and being Social Media savvy on your communications. There is a large number of social tools available with some well-known such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked in to those not so. It is also about how you organise your life with these tools and use them for productivity and security.

T – Twenty First Century Digital

The term 21st Century Digital applies to the current century and how you are using Digital to better your organisation and yourself. The LEF (Leading Edge Forum) has information that covers these two topics as the 21st Century Organisation and 21st Century Human.

U – Usability

The usability and user experience of devices is key.  Understandoing and being able to interact with devices is important. If a someone can’t use the application or device they may start looking for an alternative that they can use.

V – Visionables

Visionables moves the wearables market to technologies that help enhance our experiences through what we see. This covers things like Smart Glasses, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality.

W – Wearables

The field of wearables is expanding with more ways to attach sensors and record data about our daily lives. This typically covers anything that you can wear or attach to your body and in the main interfaces with a mobile to be the central data point, although many devices operate separately and can transmit data themselves.

X – Xperience

Xperience covers how we use these technologies and advancements to shape our lives and the effects that they have on them. How we have moved from the days of the first computer to today’s wearable and interactive society.

Y – Yottabyte

Yottabyte is a term used to define an amount of storage.  The prefix yotta indicates multiplication by the eighth power of 1000 or 1024 (Wikipedia). The amount of storage used today is seeing huge daily growth with systems currently using petabytes of data. The trends will increase the amount of storage needed to hold data.

Z – Zabeta

Zabeta is a noun meaning Tarrif or Tax. As we move to a more automated society there is a view point that automation and robots should be Taxed.

This is my current A to Z and some of the entries may be different in your version. Do you agree with the list? Whats in your “A to Z of Digital”?

 

Social Media Identity Security

25 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Security, Social Media

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GoldThe use of Social Media Identities, have been used for a while now as an alternative to the usual username and passwords traditionally used.

When signing up for a web based service you are presented with a dialogue box asking you to sign in with one of a number of Social Media Identities, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google or another service. Usually near the bottom of the dialogue box is an option to set up a user id and password.

Its common place now for users to just click one of their identities, to gain immediate access to that site. But how often do they stop and think about what the effect of that is.

Why is this important. Here is a good example:

Recently Spotify have been informing users to change their passwords:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/134717/spotify-password-compromised

Hi Spotify User

To protect your Spotify account, we’ve reset your password. This is because we believe it may have been compromised during a leak on another service with which you use the same password.

Don’t worry! This is purely a preventative security measure. Nobody has accessed your Spotify account, and your data is secure.

What is happening is that your data is being checked against a  hack list and a cross check against their system. This is based more on the email than password.

The bit of information that is missing though is what is the other leak? Is it a recent leak and is this a published or unpublished hack list?

You can use a service such as  https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see if your email address is in a known published list, however it cant check those lists that haven’t been published.

If your Social Account is hacked does that compromise and open up all of those linked services. Most probably.

Some simple steps to follow:

  • Don’t link everything to one Social Media Account
  • Think about using the traditional username and passwords for some services
  • Dont use the same passwords across your Social Media Identities
  • Change your passwords on a regular basis
  • Follow a good password length and characters (Alpha, Numeric, Special Characters)
  • Use an additional layer of security, see: Are you using 2 step logins

 

Social Norms: Credit and Loyalty Cards

02 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Digital, Social Media

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wallet-908569_960_720A round the watercooler discussion with a collegue this morning (Graham Chastney) sparked an interesting discussion about one of lifes Social Norms. Credit and Loyalty Cards and their uses and sizes. The conversation came about as we were discussing paying for a coffee and the merits of cards vs mobile pay systems.

As a society we have over a number of years been enticed with small bits of plastic containing chips and tags for Debit/Credit Cards and Loyalty Cards.

But why is it the size it is?

Forbes have an article that looks at “How Was The Standard Size Of A Credit Card Or A Business Card Established?” The post says:

The credit card was just the business card juxtaposed to the size of the standard business card, for ease of use in the wallet.

Faisal Khan, Forbes

and goes into some of the history behind this as well as a useful infographic on the subject.

Its size has been adopted into many things such as a typical pass to get you through doors at your place of work and past Security/Reception in the morning.

In the main these have stayed the same size with a recent change to keyfob versions of Loyalty Cards, being approx a third in size to the normal cards. I have seen a few dropped and discarded keyfob versions around supermarket car parks as they have fallen off a set of keys through wear and tear.

The standard size of the card has allowed us to secure them in ways that make us comfortable such as wallets, purses, card holders.

With the move to contactless payments there has now been an increase in the variety of RFID blocking wallets availble in the marketplace to help prevent accidental contactless payments and broadcasting of your data.

We also expect to see a standard sized card when someone transacts with us as second nature.

But what is next for the card. Are cards still needed?

One could argue that the card size has changed a lot going to digital payments and not needing the card, but there is something about having that piece of plastic to make a payment with.

There are applications now available that replace your plastic loyalty cards with an barcode on your mobile device that can be scanned at the till.

Going outside of the norm and showing innovation one lady has taken the chip out of her Oyster Card (used around London to pay for and gain access to travel/tube/bus etc) and embedded them into a set of false finger nails.

One company has a single card that can replace up to eight of your cards in your wallet https://onlycoin.com/ storing the data on a chip in the card and allowing you to select the card you want to use via a simple button.

The card size is an integeral part of society and whilst there are many devices built to accept the size of the card (tills, cashpoints, wallets, etc….) it will continue to be the norm. A move to the next generation of Digital Solutions will help reduce the number of cards we carry, however it will still remain as the size of card thats easliy recognisable throughout the world.