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Max Hemingway

~ Musings as I work through life, career and everything.

Max Hemingway

Category Archives: Social Media

A to Z of Digital

19 Monday Jun 2017

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

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Automation, Blockchain, Cobot, Digital, IoT, Machine Learning

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”?

 

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Social Media Identity Security

25 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by Max Hemingway in Security, Social Media

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Security, Social Media

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

 

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Social Norms: Credit and Loyalty Cards

02 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by Max Hemingway in Digital, Social Media

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Tags

Digital, Social Media

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.

 

 

 

 

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IFTTT – SMS when exiting a Location Recipe

19 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by Max Hemingway in IoT, Social Media

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

IoT, Social Media

SignsIn another step on my journey in the IoT (Internet of Things) I recently decided to use one of the digital recipes from IFTTT (If this then that) to use the location service to send a text to someone when I have left a particular zone.

The actual configuration of this task is very easy using either the web or mobile tool.

Using the tool in this example, I chose the recipe ingredients that related to my mobile. In this case an Android phone.

The interface takes you through an the process by clicking the relevant icons and entering some simple information. I have flow charted the process below:

IFTTT

You can install the application on your mobile and sign in so that it knows about the tool. Its also important that when using location recipes that you also turn on the Location/GPS function on your device.

I tried this recipe yesterday and it worked well. However it didn’t activate straight away from leaving the location zone that I had set up. I’m assuming that this is something to do with the polling or location services on my mobile. To test this I have set up a couple of other similar recipes to see if I can make the text message a bit more instant. This will be tested over the next week.

The text message itself can contain a number of parameters “I exited an area {{OccurredAt}} via Android {{LocationMapUrl}}”  which did put some context into the text message.

{{OccurredAt}} provided a date and time

{{LocationMapUrl}} provided a location in google maps

You can remove these from the message if they are not needed.

There are lots of sample recipes and ones created by others that you can reuse, or the site has the ability to create your own.

 

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An A-Z Guide to being an Architect

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by Max Hemingway in Architecture, Big Data, Cloud, Development, DevOps/OpsDev, Enterprise Architecture, Governance, Innovation, IoT, Open Source, Productivity, Programming, Security, Social Media, Tools

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Architecture, Cloud, CPD, Data, Development, DevOps, Innovation, IoT, Knowledge, learning, Open Source, OpsDev, Productivity, Programming, Social Media

Back in 2008 Microsoft published An A-Z Guide to ABCBeing an Architect in their Architecture Journals.

Here is my take on an updated A to Z Guide to being an Architect. A couple of these may be similar.

A – Architect

Having the right level of skills as an Architect or engaging an Architect with the right level of skills will depend on the work needing to be undertaken. There are several types of Architect with some specialising in certain areas and others being multi domain skilled. The list below covers some of the different types of Architect- this is not an exhaustive list:

  • Enterprise Architect
  • Information Architect
  • Solutions Architect
  • Software Architect
  • Systems Architect

B – Blueprints

Following Blueprints and Patterns either published by vendors (such as the Microsoft Blueprints) or developed internally around your products and services will ensure repeat-ability and cost control around the design process.

Some examples showing different pattern types can be found at Architecture Patterns

C – Contextual Web Era

The up and coming 4th Platform area is the Contextual Web Era

  • 1st Platform – Mainframe Era
  • 2nd Platform – Client Server Era
  • 3rd Platform – Cloud Era
  • 4th Platform – Contextual Web Era

This is an up and coming era with lots of new innovation and developments. Keeping up with developments is key going forward for any architect to understand designs/solutions, art of the possible now and future, innovation and for developing roadmaps for solutions.

D – DevOps

To quote Wikipedia – “DevOps (a clipped compound of “development” and “operations”) is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes”. Having knowledge of DevOps, OpsDev and Agile assist with Architecting a solution for a business understanding their practices and modes of interacting with technology to meet business requirements. A Good book on the subject of DevOps is “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim.

E – Enterprise Architecture

EA (Enterprise Architecture) is a blueprint that defines how a business can meet its objectives and strategy. This is achieved by conducting analysis, design, planning, recommendations and implementations through an Enterprise Architecture Framework

Enterprise Architecture Wikibook

F – Four Two Zero One Zero

42010 is the ISO Standard that most frameworks adhere to. Working to a Framework brings structure to your designs and life cycles.

There are a number of frame works available such as:

  • DoDAF
  • MoDAF
  • TOGAF
  • Zachman
  • Other Frameworks are available

Enterprise Architecture Wikipedia Book

G – Governance

Governance is an important part of architecture as it

  • Ensures Conformance
  • Controls Variance
  • Maintains Vitality
  • Enables Communication
  • Sets Direction
  • Issue Resolution
  • Provides Guidance and Prioritisation
  • Promotes Best Practise
  • Minimises Risk
  • Protects IT environments from tactical IT changes, project solutions, and strategic proposals that are not in an organisations global best interest
  • Controlling Technical Diversity, Over-Engineering and Unnecessary Complexity
  • Ensures projects can proceed quickly & efficiently
  • Control over IT spend
  • Quality Standards
  • Efficient and optimal use of resources and increase the effectiveness of IT processes

H – Hands On

It is important to be current and understand the technologies you are architecting. There are lots of options available to get your hands dirty using technology from using Cloud Servers to virtual machines on your compute device. There are other computing devices such as the Raspberry PI that provide a cheap alternative to standing up small farms to learn on.

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. My blog posts on IoT Device Security Considerations and Security Layers goes into more detail on this subject.

J – Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is something an architect should be doing to compare things/items/artefacts etc.
noun;
1. an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.
2.the state of being close together or side by side.

Source:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/juxtaposition

K – Knowledge

I would class Skills with Knowledge. It is important as an Architect to ensure that your skills/knowledge are up to date and where you are unsure of a technology, you have a plan to address and skill up. Build a good CPD (Continuing Professional Development) plan and work towards completing it.

L – Language

With the move to cloud it is important to ensure your scripting skills are up to date as most cloud platforms use scripting to assist with the deployment of environments. This is also true of other DevOps/OpsDev applications. If you are unsure on what to learn this guide may help you – Learn a Programming Language – But which one?

M -Micro Segmentation

Micro Segmentation allows a business to use Networks, Compute and Storage to automate and deliver complex solutions by carving up and using the infrastructure. This segments part of the infrastructures to specific functions/tasks. It can also be used in a security context to segment networks, firewalls, compute and storage to increase security and reduce cyber attacks.  VMware have produced a book “Micro Segmentation for Dummies” that can be downloaded from here.

N – Next Generation

Next Generation refers to the next stage or development to something such as a new release of hardware or software. Next Generation is becoming a common term now to define products and artefacts, an example being Next Generation Firewalls.

O – Open Source

Open Source has been available for a long time with software such a Linux, however there is a bigger shift towards using Open Source and acceptance by businesses. Some examples of Open Source that is now mainstream within business include;

  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • Docker
  • Puppet

P – Performance

Performance can cover people as well as solutions / systems. Performance metrics should be set out at the inception of an engagement then monitored and reported on. This will be a factor in driving Continuous Improvement going forward as well as forecasting / planning for future upgrades and expansion.

Q – Quality

Quality is a huge subject and has a lot if standards governing it and how it affects all aspects of business and architecture. Knowing which standards and how they affect a solution will assist in the whole architecture lifecycle. There are also a number of tools available to help you;

  • Architecture Frameworks
  • ITIL
  • Six Sigma

There is also a level of pride and satisfaction in producing a quality solution and system achieving the objectives and requirements set out by the business.

R- Roadmap

Any architecture/solution should have a roadmap to set out its future. Roadmaps should include items such as:

  • Current state
  • Future state
  • Innovation
  • Upgrades / Releases
  • New Features / Functions
  • End of Life / Replacement

S – SMAC

SMAC stands for Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud. SMAC is an acronym that covers the areas and concepts when these four technologies are brought together to drive innovation in business. A good description of SMAC written by a colleague can be found here Acronyms SMAC.

T – Transformation

The majority, if not all systems will undergo a form of transformation. This may be in the form of a simple upgrade or to a complex redesign and migration to something else.

U – UX

UX (User eXperience) affects how people interact with your architecture / design and how they feel about it (emotions and attitudes). With the boom in apps and the nearing Contextual Web Era, UX is one of the most important factors to getting an architecture used. If your users don’t like the system they may find something else to use that they like.

V – Vision

Understanding the vision of your customer and their business is the driving factor for any architecture.

On working with your customer you should look to become a Trusted Advisor and also with your colleagues. A great book on the subject is The Trusted Advisor by David Maister. The book covers 3 main areas which discusses perspectives on trust, the structure of trust building and putting trust to work.

W – WWW

The internet is a key delivery mechanism for systems. Knowing how this works and key components to the internet should be understood such as:

  • IPV4 – IPV6
  • DNS
  • Routing
  • Connectivity
  • Security

X – X86

X86 – is a standard that every knows as its one of the most common platform types available.

Y – Year

Year is for the longevity of the solution you are designing. How many years are your expecting it to last What are the Business Requirements, statutory obligations, depreciation etc that need to be planned in. Consider things like End of Life, Maintenance and Upgrades on hardware and software from a solution point of view.

Z – Zero Defects

The best solution is the one with zero defects, but reaching this goal can be a challenge and can also consume a lot of expense. The best way to ensure Zero Defects is to use:

  • Best Practice
  • Reference Architectures
  • Blueprints/Patterns
  • Checklists
  • Reuse
  • Lessons Learnt

This is my current A to Z and some of the entries may be different in your version so “What is in your A to Z of being an Architect?”

I will look to write some further blog posts on the areas listed in this A to Z

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Personal Knowledge Management System – Revised for 2016

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Max Hemingway in Productivity, Social Media, Tools

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Knowledge, Productivity, Social Media, Tools

I originally blogged about my Personal Knowledge Management System back in January 2015 and as we are beginning 2016 its time to review it again. I use my Personal Knowledge Management System to collect, sort and store useful artefacts, blogs, information, inspiration, articles and bits I find on the web.

PKMS

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 opt for recording these in a Moleskine – See my blog post No batteries required for further details.

Personal Social Media

This side of life I separate from my work life using things like Instagram and Facebook.

Research

I have split this into two areas:

  • Podcasts
  • Web

Podcasts cover both Audio and Video casts that I watch/stream online or download to my Media Player to listen to on journeys.

Web I pull down into one feed to read using Feedly.

Feedly

I am using this to collect the stories from blogs and web sites I regularly ready. A good tip picked up in the office today from a colleague. This allows you to scan the articles in a few minutes on a single screen without going via multiple sites. Using a series of key strokes you can read the headlines, then move down the articles, opening each one on the screen if you so wish.

Instapaper

I am using Instapaper to store the articles that I like and want to save. This is done via a manual process at the moment.

Twitter

Apart from my normal twitter account (link at the side of the screen) I now have a twitter account to show what I am currently reading. @HemingwayReads

Publishing my Blog

I publish my blog using WordPress which then posts to Twitter, Linkedin and G+ (While its still going)

Further Inspiration from others

Some other good Personal Knowledge Management Systems from my colleagues to read are:

  • Graham Chastney – How I process information
  • Stuart Downes – My Personal Knowledge Management Systems
  • Steve Richards – My personal work style

 

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Is your being social data being mined?

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Max Hemingway in Security, Social Media

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Tags

Security, Social Media

Over the festive break I have seen many people letting their guard down on my Social Media feeds and responding to those quizzes and prediction sites that scan your data and come up with some random facts about you.

PhoneTalkThe lure of finding out “Which are your most used words on facebook?” or “Which friend will be your luck charm in 2016?” is too much for some to resist. These apps usually result is a few words or a match of pictures that appeases the user based on the mining of data in their social feeds and friends profiles.

Examples of these types of apps are:

  • Who is your craziest friend?
  • How will your 2016 be?
  • Which friend will be your luck charm in 2016?
  • Which are your most used words on facebook?
  • Who should you start a band with?

Whilst there are a number of innocent apps/sites that genuinely provide this type of tool to tell you who your best friend is, there is a darker side to some of these as well.

On the face of an app it may look genuine, but you are not aware of what the app is actually doing with your data and to what extent your data is being mined. Where the results are stored or to what purposes it will be used for afterwards.

Here are some basic actions to follow to secure your social data

  • Know your security settings and lock down
  • Kee
    p personal information personal
  • Think before you give an app permission to access your account/data
  • Do not use apps that you are unsure of
  • Think what this app will do with your data

Some useful links

  • Twitter – Safe Tweeting
  • Facebook – Basic Privacy Settings & Tools
  • Sophos – Best Practices for rogue facebook apps

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Email Overload

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Max Hemingway in Productivity, Social Media, Tools

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Tags

Communication, Email

stampsHaving just had a few days off I have come back to the usual full mailbox and a quota that’s blown so need to clear items out before I can send anything.

This is a very common place occurrence for people now, but how do we actually behave with and use email?

A recent study “Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload” carried out by Yahoo and Cornell University studied more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months.

The study itself shows some interesting results, but is based between pairs of people who send more than 5 replies to each other and have opted in to surveys which provides a level of bias into the survey.

Youngest email users, teens, have the fastest reply times; as users get older they become slower to reply to emails.

Email

The survey provides details on the response times (medians of results)

  • 13 minutes for Teens
  • 16 minutes for Young Adults (20–35 years old)
  • 24 minutes for Adults (36–50 years old)
  • 47 minutes for Mature users (51 and older)

These figures for me show how the Younger Generations are more reliant on technology and interact with social media at a more frequent rate than their peers. It would be interesting to see the results on a wider distribution of users and email interactions though and if that has a skew on the results, also what device the users have access to which may dictate the speed of the reply.

Source : http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00704

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Professional vs Personal Social Media

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Max Hemingway in Productivity, Social Media

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

GTD, Productivity, Social Media

Having read an article from HBR on “How to Separate the Personal and Professional on Social Media” I decided to look at the Social Media tool I often use and in what part of my Professional and Personal life they fall.

Working on from my Personal Knowledge Management System there are a couple of others shown in the diagram. This is just my quick classification of SMT (Social Media Tools) – everyone else may have a different view such as Facebook for business to reach consumers in particular markets. However it is worth looking if you class the tools as Professional or Personal. A few do sit in the middle for me as they have a place on both sides of the page.

Some of the tools are clearly for Professional use, but some do step either way across the line.

One potential way of keeping things apart is multiple accounts on a platform, one personal and one professional, but it is important to understand and set some guidelines on how you use these.

SocialPP

If you are communicating on Social Media representing an employer, always check their policy on Social Media and communications.

If you don’t have any, there are a number of good rules available.  Kevan Lee has done some research into these and had come up with a list of 29 Social Media Rules

For all social networks

1. Share several times a day, but space out your posts every few hours.

2. Respond to all comments as quickly as you can.

3. Know the art of the hashtag. 1 hashtag is fine. 10 hashtags are not.

4. Always keep the 80/20 rule! Entertain and inform your audience first, sell to them second.

5. Use first person plural when talking about your company brand (We, Us).

For Twitter

6. Don’t automatically direct message people that follow you.

7. Don’t use all 140 characters. Give people room to retweet with a reply.

8. Don’t hijack another company’s hashtag.

9. Don’t buy followers.

10. Don’t stuff your tweets with keywords.

For Facebook

11. Don’t Like your own post.

12. Don’t post or tag photos of fans, customers, or employees without permission.

13. Don’t tag people or pages that aren’t relevant to your post.

14. Don’t ask for Likes, Comments, or Shares.

LinkedIn

15. Personalize your connection requests. Tell them WHY you’re connecting.

16. Once connected, send a “welcome” message.

17. Don’t join groups and immediately start selling yourself.

18. Don’t ignore the more professional tone of the network.

Google+

19. Always +mention users when commenting on their posts.

20. When sharing a post, always add your own commentary to it first.

21. Share to Circles to target your content.

22. Use Google+ formatting for your text—bold, italics, and strikethrough.

Pinterest

23. Don’t neglect to provide good descriptions for your pins.

24. Always link back to the original source and give credit.

25. Don’t use images that have nothing to do with your clickthrough content to get more pins or clicks.

26. Don’t pin just your own material.

Instagram

27. Don’t ask people to follow you or use hashtags like #tagsforlikes – it’s unprofessional.

28. Don’t overgram. No one likes their feed filled up with one user.

29. Use hashtags for your brand appropriately. The golden number of hashtags is 11.

– Kevan Lee (https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-rules-etiquette)

Social Media seems to have taken the theory of Six Degrees of Separation and in some cases turned it into One or Two Degrees of Separation!

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Lists – Are we addicted to them?

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Max Hemingway in Social Media

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Social Media

Maybe its me but there seems to be an increase in the use of Lists in both inside and outside of the work place. Social Media is full of them such as:

  • 14 Reasons to like….
  • 6 things you didn’t know about…..
  • 50 ways to…..

Businesses are also using this format internally to publish key information to their employees.

Lists (known as Listicles) are everywhere and ever popular as a way of getting information across to an audience. Listicles have been used for a long time in Magazines and now very common in all forms of media.

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is a short-form of writing that uses a list as its thematic structure, but is fleshed out with sufficient copy to be published as an article.

– Wikipedia

Why are they so popular?

  • They get a message across in the title
  • Quickly distil information
  • Popular form of getting the message across
  • Quick to read
  • Easy to write (no additional context needed)
  • Attract readers

So are there any dangers to lists? Readers are drawn into lists on Social Media which have been published with the sole reason of filling your screen with adverts. Known as Clickbait. We are so use to seeing lists and utilising them that we often click to read with no thought about where the link is taking us to.

There is some good advice on list writing that is often in the form of another list. The main key to a good list is the topic and the content.

Like them or hate them, lists have been around for a long time and will still be here for around for the foreseeable future.

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