Should you post about your work?

If you have worked in any large organization for a long period of time then you have lots of stories about what can go wrong and hopefully quite a few about how to do things right.

You can talk about people making decisions based on gut feel rather than facts and the times when this was successful and when it was a disaster.

You can talk about failures to communicate and (perhaps harder) when a message was shared well.

But all the stories are about real situations and real people, even if you disguise the story it can be very obvious who you are talking about, especially in a small industry and these days everything is a small industry.

Posting real stories is fraught with difficulties, they may make your company look bad but worse may make individuals look bad (or perceive that they look bad).

So what's the solution?
Wait till you move on?
Change the story so it has little reality left in it?
Become a consultant and work with multiple companies and blend the stories?

I don't know. So far most my postings and comments on others' postings have been pretty generic so I'm still playing it safe.

Any thoughts?

Augmented Reality Presentation

I attended the BCS Glasgow Branch tonight for a presentation on Augmented Reality given by Yolande Kolstee, who is the project leader of the AR+RFID Lab, a collaborative initiative of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

before the meeting I had been following a couple of keen AR people and had retweeted the odd message about things that had taken my interest.

But everything I had seen before was about static AR, whereas Yolande's team seem mainly to be looking at mobile AR, effectively like next generation virtual reality (except its not because it mixes in reality rather than being all virtual). They also use RFID tags to enable the user to interact with many objects and the systemm to know what's going on.

Some interesting bits of art, interesting ways of prototyping new furniture, but it still feels like it has the same problems of practicality of the hardware, immersion helmet style.

She also demonstrated some static AR, particularly things they have done for a museum where they have digitized ancient pottery and when you look at the page in the "catalog" you see the pottery in 3D, with music of the era, etc. Those were wow displays and maybe that reflects the areas where AR will make a huge impact over the next decade.

Do you need a strategy for friends on Twitter?

When I started using Twitter I believed the hype.
Everyone is using it.
You just log on and search on your interests and you will find a huge wide circle of friends without doing anything much.

But that's not the reality I found.

If we exclude the celebrity gossip then probably 80% of the traffic seems to be from people and organizations trying to sell something and a huge proportion of the followers are coming from bots that are linked to the organizations that are trying to sell something.

So there are a huge number of tweets and tweeters the vast majority of which are just noise.

Sounds dreadful, but it isn't as bad as that.

A fair proportion of the automated following (i.e. I mention a keyword and someone starts following) are from people I would have wanted to follow.

Some of the best (professional) contacts I've got so far have been people I've come across through meetings, magazines articles, Linked-In and then starting following them and checking out who they are following.

So where does this leave me?

The random way I have identified people to follow gives me a mostly useful stream, but not as wide as might be ideally.

Equally increasing the number I follow into the thousands would give a lot of noise and swamp the whole process.

I'm planning to start a new strategy for 2010, I'll do much wider hunts for contacts and store them in lists (and also checking out the lists of people I follow) and review the lists on a periodic basis to find the best of the lists and start following them.

Any other suggestions?