Posting may continue here again and my new role

When I finish from full-time looking after the Smarter Computing blog I may start to think about posting here as I’m now working in Analyst Relations for Systems & Technology Group, still in IBM.

Apart from understanding what AR is about I’ll be looking at ways in which social business can help us reach our objectives for the year, rather then setting up a standalone plan of activities. This basically means enhancing much of what is being done already in terms of events, calls etc and seeing where we can make the experience better for analysts and AR professionals by using these tools.

Just wanted to try it…

brand pages are NOT the most important new Twitter feature for marketers. ow.ly/80ElN guess what is…

— oneforty (@oneforty) December 15, 2011

And in other news….

IBM to acquire Emptoris zd.net/sDDcmD cloud-based supply chain analytics company

— Karl Roche (@ragtag) December 15, 2011

OK, not the most original use of the new feature for embedding tweets but you get the idea. An alternative to Storify? Not really but can certainly enhance a regular blog post.

That is all…

My quick guide to storify – news curation

Apparently I have this blog… been too busy with Smarter Computing that I just never get round to writing any useless stuff on here.

I put this deck together for someone and thought it could be useful if you have never heard of Storify.

Getting started with Storify

View more presentations from Karl Roche

People like to see others suffer

Proof, if proof was needed that we like to see people suffer. Perhaps not real suffering but the funny sort. The kind we put ourselves through for whatever reason.

I posted this a while back after returning from Taiwan and uploaded to YouTube without a tweeter-ye-not. Less than a month later it has over 3,000 hits. Whether it is because it has massage in the title or people really do like to see others putting themselves through torture, I have no idea and probably care even less.

What I do know is that this really did hurt. I had it done before the others, went back to the house and said how painful it was and so they all went round to see this bloke who took good money from them so he could hurt their feet.

Oddly, a day or two later, my feet felt great. I didn’t go back for more though. My sister-in-law, seen in the video, couldn’t walk the next day.

Shockwaves from Taiwan

Over the last ten years I have accumulated one year in Taiwan. This year was a slightly longer trip than expected due to unforseen circustances.

As usual my wife and kids headed out earlier than me, so I can do some work on the flat while they are away plus I don’t quite get 2 months holiday a year. However, halfway through tiling the bathroom I had a call from my wife I will never forget, “My Dads died.”

Quite a shock as you can expect and a phone call I will never forget. Within 36 hours I was on a plane heading to be with my family. What followed was an unusual two weeks to say the least. What has helped everyone are the kids, 6 grandchildren that never stop talking or shouting. Fully aware of what was happening and involved in all aspects of the funeral they bounced back but were never afraid to show they lost a lovely grandad.

We all had some good times too, may get round to writing about them later.

Bikes, bits, maps and data

I got a new bike on the cyclescheme this year, a nice new Giant Defy 1. At under £1000 it’s not going to set the world on fire but it so far has worked really well for someone getting back on a road bike and with the state of roads around here it can handle the potholes which more expensive and delicate components probably couldn’t.

Been wanting to get a road bike for a year or two to update my Giant hybrid which has served me very well through wind, rain, sun and slush.

Before riding to the office on it I wanted to break it in on the roads around home and sort out any little issues you always get as everything beds in.  I found myself going further and further and after a couple of rides finding that with the weather being so great it was a wonderful lunchtime workout.

Making a story never got so easy: Storify

One of my favourite tools at the moment is Storify, which if you haven’t come across it yet, is a simple way to search and gather tweets, photos, blogs, podcasts and all sorts of things into a lovely sharable format.

Image via CrunchBase

Since we started on Smarter Computing I’ve been playing around with Storify as a way to highlight key moments at events such as Pulse, zSummit and announcements such as this story on IBM SmartCloud.

It’s integration into things like twitter is great, in fact you will need a twitter ID to use it. However, it lacks the ability for me to post it here in WordPress. Partly that is down to WordPress not supporting scripts, but also I think it would be pretty easy for Storify to implement an iframe solution for extra portability.

Stories can be emailed but this week I’ve not been able to do this and there are some issues I find if I use it in Chrome.

Having said that this has huge potential and even in its current state (still beta of course) it provides a great platform for a wide range of possible uses, not least live blogging and live event reporting as pages are update dynamically as you would expect. A handy toolbar shortcut allows you to add content you find to current or new stories.

There are just under a dozen platforms you can search through including a place to create an embedded link from any url. The Twitter search is really great as you can select to find only those tweets with images, links or remove retweets. This makes it easy to create a picture story (assuming you find some) of the event or whatever you want to report on.

Finally you can easily add text between the posts you find so that you can create section headings or explain what people are seeing.

What I have found though is that people do like to share these. Some of my most retweeted and visited pages contain Storify stories. I’ve also started to use these internally at IBM on our intranet adding a new dimension to coverage.

Related articles

• What it Storify? (elizabethharmonblog.wordpress.com)
• Storify Turns Social Media Into Simple, Elegant Stories (fastgush.com)
• Storify for social media story-telling (reportr.net)

Building a sustainable business starts with collaboration

Back in September I returned from our annual family holiday in Taiwan to take part in the IBM Summit at Start, a 9-day conference looking at how businesses can become more sustainable. We livestreamed quite a bit – and did we have some technical fun with that.

Now it’s back. StartJam.

Most people are familiar with the Jam format (if not here is an intro) and this one is just the same. It’s open to just about everyone that is interested in developing sustainable businesses and cities.

No debate or collaboration is complete though if it only contains a bunch of nay-sayers or yay-sayers (thank you Martin Packer for that) for that matter. Coming up with new ideas is all well and good but to complete the picture you also need enough people that will be critical and questioning of such approaches and ideas, that can lead others to pull out the best bits and develop ideas further.

Why join?

One of the best reasons from a personal point of view is that it brings you into contact with all sorts of people interested in creating better, more sustainable business. Many people make a number of new contacts within Jams that they carry forward and develop.

Findings from the Summit are driving the six forums within StartJam, but that is only the beginning. What comes up in the Jam is often surprising and can take it down some exciting new avenues which haven’t been considered yet and forum 6 shows that we can apply that sort of thinking to all our businesses.

StartJam forums:

• New collaboration models
• Driving culture change in society
• Developing new skill sets
• Building sustainable national infrastructures
• Managing demand intelligently
• Using data to answer questions we haven’t thought to ask yet

Register for StartJam

StartJam runs from April 5-7 and you can join it from anywhere, at anytime. Leave 1 comment or 100 comments.

Related articles

• Charles R. Wolfe: Sustainability and Authenticity, Personified (huffingtonpost.com)
• Why We Need Heretical, Holistic Green Thinking (blogs.hbr.org)

100 years in 100 seconds

Will get back to blogging when I have fewer things going on. Lots happening, such as organising a Smarter Computing virtual panel for internal audience. Hopefully get one or two of those to be external later in the year.

But for now, another nice video from those folks at IBM…

Related articles

• IBM Expands Cloud IT Offerings With New Virtualization Software (techcrunchit.com)

Revolution

You and 86 million people like this

Congratulations #Egypt.

Related articles

• “Tahrir Square LIVE Video: Cairo Reacts As Mubarak Resigns” and related posts (huffingtonpost.com)
• “President Obama on Mubarak Stepping Down: The Egyptian People Have Changed the World” and related posts (blogs.babble.com)