Author Archives: grokiam

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About grokiam

Computer geek and innovation consultant. Worked on hundreds of technology initiatives in distributed, parallel and complex systems, massive data analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, business process design and am currently into EdTech and Blockchain. I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe. R. Buckminster Fuller; I Seem to Be a Verb; 1970

Email – the great consolidator

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Email is still the standard communications channel for most people I know.

I’ve ranted about this elsewhere recently in a discussion on collaborative tools. It seems to me that despite the proliferation of social media and collaboration tools, a lot of communications are done via email.  Whether it is blog or discussion summaries, or sharing files, many people say, “send it to me by email”. At least this is what I experience.

But my 18 year old son, is not so email-centric. His communication channel of choice is SMS from his phone or online texting, I think, not talking on the phone or composing or reading emails or blogs. I should ask him what he thinks about email.

That is sort of why I started this SoManySites blog in the first place – there were so many sites that I had to visit every day. I started looking for a “site consolidator” See the post https://somanysites.com/2012/02/16/14-personalized-homepages-compared-feature-by-feature/ but still, none of them do what I want, which is to collect all of my communications in one place.

Email seems to be the great consolidator – most people’s main channel for information.

So, for those of you who want to follow my blog by email, just click on “Follow” on the top of the WordPress menu bar at the top of the blog.  But I’m not sure that anyone wants a feed of my wanderings through cyberspace…. so you can also set the Email Delivery Settings to only get a summary daily or weekly.

Avatars Blavatars Favicons

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So I once was a techie but am now mostly a manger.  But I really like the challenge of figuring things out technically.  That’s partly why I have this blog, so I can learn WordPress and other interesting tools.

WordPress is the most popular tool for creating web sites.  It’s free for a yourblognamehere.wordpress.com blogging site and is *fairly* easy to get started for a person with some computing or word processing or html background, I think – what do you think?  How techie do you have to be to set up your own wordpress blog site?  Anyways, I digress (a lot (sometimes very far from where I started) (where were we?) oh, I remember).  It is not easy to customize much, though, unless you are really a techie.  And I’m not so much.

But, some things can be done fairly easily, like changing your favicon which is the little picture that shows up on you browser tab beside the name of the site.  Hey – I even created a transparent favicon for my grokiam.com site – that was a nice little piece of techier geekdom on my part IIDSSM IMHO.

So, if you want to know how to change your favicon in WordPress, go here Blavatars.

Invisible Children – Social Media Event

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OK.  This Invisible Children is by far the biggest international social media *thing* *event* *thread* *dialog* I’ve seen.  I don’t actually have the time or the knowledge to do it justice.  But here’s what I’ve seen.

It is now the evening of March 8, but it all just started yesterday….

I pay attention to a handful of blogs and follow threads that pique my interest.  And so, somehow the Invisible Children/Kony 1012 initiative came on to my radar on the evening of Weds March 7th.  Was probably via twitter, but I can’t recall….

I could not get access to the video for a couple of hours (I assume the video serving site was very busy as this thing went viral), but eventually watched the 30 minute video and thought that it was excellently produced and the message was very clear.

I, like many many many others worldwide propagated the Kony 2012 meme – I posted a supportive message on Facebook.

Then, almost as fast as the #kony2012 meme spread, an anti meme spread – “Invisible Children is a rip off”, “Kony’s not a threat anymore”, “there’s much more important things to focus on”….

The traditional media, newspapers, radio are now covering the story.

And the story continues.  Now it’s up to you and me to figure out where it goes and what effects it will have.  There’s a whole new world of social media now.  Information can spread like wildfire and it is becoming more difficult to tell the real from the unreal.

Friendsheet

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This is my Friendsheet.  What on earth is that, you ask?  You did ask, didn’t you?  I don’t know, I reply, but it’s something like pinterest, OK? Got it? My friendsheet just generated a page of photos that are somehow related to my Facebook likes and friends – at I think least that’s what I think it just did.  Like Stumbleupon in a certain imag-inary way (ha ha my pun my bad).  Plug for Stumbleupon which is a Calgary company that started many years ago and was bought up for $75M by Ebay but then resold back to the original owners for less.  Good deal if you can get it *Smile*

Zuckerberg ‘Likes’ App That Turns Facebook Into Pinterest

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So now there are Pinterest clones.  It seems to me that Pinterest just came out like last week?  Well probably not, though I just found out about it recently, it must have been around for a little while at least.  I read that they had raised I think $27M in Venture Capital in the last quarter VC report that I read, so that would probably be Oct – Dec 2011.  I dunknow, what do I do with it.  It just lets me pin photos that I find lying around the web.  Not sure what that’s good for?   Do you?

Zuckerberg ‘Likes’ App That Turns Facebook Into Pinterest.

My Twitter Home

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This Twitter / Home is my Twitter home page.  I am @Grokiam.  My personal home page is grokiam.com.

Why use Twitter? LinkedIn? Facebook? GoogleApps? Each has its own purpose.

Twitter is great for sharing up-to-the-minute happenings and following the interesting tidbits that are posted by your “colleagues”. I follow some humorous twits, like the fake Queen of England, some writers, some science geeks.  It keeps me up to date.  It’s interesting sometimes to see what’s trending.

LinkedIn has some interesting groups with good discussions.  It’s a bit like a constant professional promotion, but it does lead to some good discussions and sharing of information.

Facebook now is mostly for playing games and sharing photos and videos with personal friends.

Google apps and docs are great for sharing files and calendars with small groups.  It’s now being used by bigger groups – I wonder how well it scales?

Broke my Mac got new one

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Sorry, was away for a while. I broke the screen on my six-year-old-or-so Mac laptop. I was waiting for an excuse to replace it. I always have at least 2 computers on the go. I use a Dell PC laptop for most of my day-to-day work. I have a pretty reliable Dell, but it is actually about 4 years old now. My retired machine was a 15″ MacBook Pro, but it may even have a PowerPC chip in it. It still works when plugged into an external monitor. I use the Mac laptop in the living room at night and when I travel, which is quite often. So I got a new 13″ MacBook Pro. It’s actually the smallest, lowest end Mac laptop available now. It has a dual core Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD. It’s plenty fast and very light. It was $1250ish. A colleague just bought a used PC this week with a 2 year warranty for $350. What a difference in price.

But the Mac feeeeels soooo gooood!

What online tools do you use?

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I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter daily.  Try to update my blogs (one on blogger, one on WordPress) regularly (daily/monthly as appropriate).  Get around 100 emails/day.  Send around 20 emails/day.  Have 2 active and 3 lightly used email accounts.  Use Meetup for casual meetings, just joined FourSquare.  Have probably 50 other social media or SaaS accounts.

Question is, which are the best tools for me or for you?