Why did I chose to leave?  Well both my girlfriend and I worked there and what with all the redundancies going on it made me feel fairly uncomfortable staying there and relying on the same company for all the money coming into the house.  I’d also had itchy feet for a fair while.  After hooking up with the DIGWWW guys and being inspired by the fantastic work they were doing behind the firewall I started to think that was where my calling was.

I’ve met a load of good people at Pfizer, unfortunately I’ve also met plenty of not so good people but that’s inevitable in a company of that size.  However the memories are fond ones.

But I won’t dwell on Pfizer.  I’m now looking forward to an exciting future with Headshift.  I start in their London offices on April 15th and I’m over the moon.  I’d had my eye on Headshift for a fair while and when I was offered a position with them as a consultant it took a lot of effort not to burst into spontaneous cheshire cat style grin.  I don’t think I managed it.

I am heading there with mixed emotions.  On the one hand I can’t wait to get there and get to work with some good people.  On the other hand I’m absolutely shitting myself that I’m going to be in way too deep.  These guys do social software for a living, I feel like I’ve just dipped my toes into a hobby-like activity.  I’ll have a lot to learn and hopefully I’ll be able to show those guys a trick or two.  I doubt I’ll be able to match the experience they have but I’ll do my best.

Wish me luck!

Sid.

I’m only 12 pages into this book but so far I’m not really liking it.  It’s painting a very bleak picture of the corporate world.

It seems to me that the whole basis of the book is that when you work in a corporate environment all you do is argue.  Now I’ve had my fair share of arguments at work but I must say the majority of my conversations have been discussions.

I can only feel pity for organisations if they choose to implement this technique.  Why?  Well they must be in a pretty bad state if all people do is argue.  It would mean that they are going right back to basics regarding how people talk to each other, come to decisions, work together etc etc.

I think I’m going to stick it out a little further and see if it get’s any better but I don’t have much hope.

It’s a real shame since the last book I read, Dan Pink’s A whole New Mind, was pretty good.

For a while now I’ve been flicking between my RSS reader and Twitter as my sources for cool stuff on the web.  The RSS Reader for some reason feels like nothing is going to take me from leftfield.  I know who I get RSS feeds from so I know what to expect from them.  Twitter is a little different in that it aggregates feeds from all over the web and can throw up more random stuff through the power of the retweet.

One of the things I love about my RSS reader is that it delivers summaries (and full articles) to me so I can flick through fairly quickly without going anywhere else.  With Twitter however if someone posts a link they have 140 characters to get across we I should pay attention.  Sometimes that’s not enough.  Microplaza skips through that, concentrates all those cool links into one place, gives you a nice sized thumbnail and does plenty of other stuff that I’ll let you find out for yourselves.

Most of the MicroPlaza functionality is like Twitter on steroids.  The public timeline, the following, the sorting by popularity, the bookmarks etc.  Where it gets a bit more interesting is the Tribes and the “Being Someone”.

Tribes are basically groups.  You can group all of you stuff together.  If you follow a bunch of tech people, a bunch of mates, a bunch of cycling enthusiast then you just tribe them all up to split them out.  Very cool.  Twitter, take note!

Being someone is weird.  It feels quite stalker-esque.  It lets you see what someone else would see.  Cool but weird.

All in all MicroPlaza rocks.

If you wanna give it a try then head over and register.  It’s invite only still so only the first 20 of you guys who get on over there will be able to sign up through that link.

Have fun with it.

Sid.

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is privacy.  It started with a few internal work emails, continued with my Personal Information Protection post, was added to by a few more work emails, embellished upon when I read 10 Facebook Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know and has taken a good twist with Security at work trying to prove a point by finding out what they can about me from my online presence.

The more I think about it the more it seems to me like privacy is a thing to be cherished.  However, with the continuing use of social software it’s getting harder and harder to keep things private.  One slip on any of the networks and there’s sufficient crosstalk to mean the grapevine will take over and very soon your privacy won’t be so private anymore.

I struggle with this on a regular occurance because I don’t have an amorphous mass of friends.  I have friends from where I grew up, friends from Uni, friends from work and friends from various other places.  Some I like meeting in groups, others I like to meet individually and others I’d prefer not to meet at all (I still call them friends but they’re usually people I’ve met online and who I feel I have only one thing in common with.)  Add into the mix some work contacts and some mere acquintances and you’ve soon got a bit of a headache.

As I type this I’m currently custodian of a secret.  It’s not a big secret and it’s not going to come as a massive surprise to most people but it’s not quite ripe enough to be revealed en masse. The problem is I have a subset of friends who I really want to tell and a subset of friends who need to be kept in the dark for a little while.

So that means Facebook is out.  Even if I created a bunch of groups, set my security settings etc for this one occurance I would have to faff around changing them again when something else came round.  Twitter is out since everyone can see pretty much everything.  My blog is out since I don’t have control of who reads that either.  The list goes on.

So I started thinking about how you could work a grouping system or a tiering system to somehow control who sees the message.  But that’s not how the web works and it’s proving quite difficult to think of anything.  Come to think of it, it’s very difficult to do in the Enterprise too but for some reason we persist in maintaining ACLs etc.

So right now I haven’t shared my secret.  There are ways to do it, all old school technologies, face-to-face, email, phone etc, but I wonder if there’s anyway to keep anything private on the web.

It follows all of the hype created by Stephen Fry, Jonathon Ross and many others over the last few weeks.

As someone who has been talking about Twitter and other micro-blogging sites for a while it’s interesting to see how it’s taking off with celebrities in the UK.  It’s clear that they see it as a great tool.  Most people don’t “get” Twitter that quickly.  Most people have to spend time finding people they want to follow or building their networks of followers.  For the celebrities they already have their network.  It’s been built up over years of TV appearances and stints spent using classic media.  Twitter for these guys is a natural step.

The fall out for me as a Twitter user is that my use of it is changing.  If you look at my following list at the moment you’ll see it’s heavy on the “work-related” side of things.  As more and more of my friends get on there it’s starting to swing in the other direction.  That presents some difficulties for me since I like to keep personal/business separate and don’t really buy into the work/life blur as much as some people I know.

So will Twitter try and adapt to it or don’t they see it as a big deal?  I’d like to see a few things in there such as groups etc but I’m happy to wait and see how it develops for now.

Anyway, breakfast is ready (cheers Clare) so I’m off for my bacon and eggs!

Sid.

Most people have probably heard of the death of Tony Hart.  He is a legend when it comes to kids art programmes and I’ll always remember the mornings I spent watching Morph.  I also have many friends who are still a little bitter they sent so many pieces of their work in for “The Gallery” and never had any shown.

So it seems the country is reeling from his death and the crowds of mourners are gathering and demanding a memorial to be erected in Tony’s home town of Maidstone.  How are they doing it?  A facebook group of course.  According to the news this morning at least 3000 people have signed up to the group.

Well for me it’s another case of, “Only enough passion for…a facebook group.”  I haven’t looked into it any further but I suspect there’s not much else going on other than this group.

It seems like some people may have lost sight that for the things you truly want you still have to work bloody hard for them.  I blame Google of course since generally these days I just have enough curiosity for a google search…and only the first page of that.

Anyway, it would seem that…

Tony’s biggest wish was that people continue to enjoy his programmes above all.

So I think I’ll be spending a little time on YouTube and a few other places digging out some fond childhood memories as my personal tribute to Tony.

Sid.

My initial reaction was “OH NO!” and now my reaction now isn’t much different. 

Whilst I don’t think it’ll be a big deal if they opt for flagged revisions I do think it’ll have some subtle effects.  That immediate fix you get when you see your changes implemented instantly will be gone.  Also, some people will get sloppier whilst others will feel they need to be stricter with themselves over their entries.  To be honest though I’m not too concerned about these or the other smaller things and it’ll be a good test case to see what happens.

The thing that makes me worry a little more is the precedent that will be set.  Inside the Enterprise I imagine most people struggle with access control as much as we do.  Most command and control style organisations still want to have the command and control atmosphere.  It’s one reason why we’ve now got a wiki moderators group.  This move looks like an admission that a completely open environment, one completely reliant on soft security, may not be the best way to go.  I fear it may be fuel for the naysayers inside the Enterprise.  At a time when it’s still very difficult to push for more open access it’s something we could do without.

That said, there is a balance that need to be acheived in everything so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

This morning I did a little trawling of the internet to see how identifiable I was.  I scared myself.  In about an hour I’d found much much more than I ever thought I would and I’ve never done this type of stuff before.  I can imagine the pros do it a lot quicker.

So then the question is who’s responsibility is it that I’m protected.  I would immediately assume it’s mine but is it?  Many of the places I found information were places where I hadn’t been given a choice to opt-out or it hadn’t been clearly stated that by using the service I was going to make personal details available to people.  Also, the company I work for is doing well at trying to educate people on how to treat personal identifiable information so it makes me wonder why they feel the need to do it, are they doing the good thing or are they protecting themselves from something.

It opens a lot of questions but I think the first thing I’ll be doing is a little bit more trawling and tidying up my internet info trail.  I think I’ll try to educate myself a little more too.  I always thought I was quite savvy about these things but it turns out I’m not.

Here’s a couple of examples:

A while back I got talking to @Natallini via Scott.  We struck up a bit of a friendship and when I started chatting about pumpkin pie recipes she offered to send me some canned pumpkin pie.  On the back of that I was a bit cheeky and had my Common Craft mug shipped to her address so I could get the canned pumpkin and the mug shipped together for less cost.  It was actually free to me since Natalie paid. (I really owe her a big favour).  I can’t wait to get making the next pumpkin pie.

Yesterday at work I pinged a mail to someone asking about a service they offer.  I assumed I was making the email equivalent of a cold call but I wasn’t.  His reply came back today (which is very quick in comparison to most replies) and included the line, “It’s obvious from your Web 2.0/KM tool implementations that your organization has some good experience in leveraging technology to achieve your business needs (great use of the Drupal blog and Pfizerpedia, by the way)  We’re looking forward to working with such a well-educated customer!”

Combine that with a little PR from Fitness Footwear and a free Flip Mino and I’m pretty happy that I’ve demonstrated real value when it comes to blogging.

The purpose of this post is a little experiment.  I suspect that like most large companies Pfizer keeps an eye on what’s been said of it.  I don’t know this for certain.

What I’m curious to know is if anyone from Pfizer, other than the guys I work with, keep an eye on this blog.  I’m more curious about those with an interest in security and protecting Pfizer’s brand/people etc.

If you do then could you ping me an internal mail.  You’ll find me in the address book.

I’ll blog about this later but for now, that’s all.

Cheers

Sid.