Service interruption …

Hiya

Just dropping a quick post to let you know that I am now a proud father second time round - hence the absence of postings over the past couple of weeks… Normal service should resume from next week.

All the best

Wordle: A bit of fun

Wordle.net is a fun utility that picks out the most significant words in blocks of text (e.g. documents or web pages or RSS feeds). Like an automated tag cloud generator.  FYI I picked it up from this posting: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/07/07/transparent-and-explicit/

Here are Wordle pages for some supply chain blogs:

Spend Matters

SpendMatters. Lots of talk about Suppliers, Controls, Leveraged, Research but perhaps lay off the Metal Miner plugs for a while

Sourcing Innovation

 Plenty of talk about Challenges, Sourcing, Execution and Johnson (again - see Spend Matters)

e-Sourcing Forum

 And of course, mine:

e-Sourcing Place

Yikes! About time I started banging on about reverse auctions again methinks.

Where next for Where Next?

One day a long time ago I was trying to convince my CEO  to start a company blog; he ended up convincing me to try one myself. To see what would happen.

So I did. And looking back over these past 20 months I  can say it’s been great fun. And a very positive experience in a number of ways:

1. I’ve met physically and now count among my friends some great individuals who are as passionate about what they do, as I do about what I do. Like Jason who I have the good fortune now of crossing paths with whenever I’m in Chicago.

2. I’ve learnt about new technologies that are now making TradingPartners more effective at product development. In particular Rails (which we use for prototyping) … thanks Doc for posting about Coupa.

3. I’ve learnt a lot. “When Doc Searls first talked to me about blogs being provisional, I learnt something important for myself. Being unsure is a useful prerequisite for learning.” Thus spake JP Rangaswami and he’s right. Blogging ideas, and discussing them is (for me) a great way of thinking my ideas through properly, developing the good ones and jettisoning the bad ones.  

4. It’s also been very flattering to discover that I made it onto page 1 of Google for a search on “eauctions” (in the US only, admittedly – from Google in the UK I am nowhere but even so let me have my moment of glory)

However, it has been over a year and a half that I’ve been doing this. Like so many other people with a technical bent, I have a fairly short attention span and always want to figure out how to do/make things better. So while I was on holiday recently – in particular whilst spending an afternoon walking round the near-deserted remains of Rome’s ancient port, Ostia Antica - I had a chance to mull over the direction of the blog and try to figure out where next for Where Next.

Net result: I’m thinking about forking the blog into two: of taking one blog down a supply chain route while focussing another one on the life of a tech company CTO.

With two blogs in play I’d be posting even less frequently than today. But it would mean each would be more focussed which would be more satisfying for me, and hopefully also more usable for readers.

I’ve come up against 2 issues:
1. If I want to use my own domain name then can I still host on WordPress or would I need to arrange my own hosting?
2. What a pain it is to get a domain name. They’re all being squatted, or have been registered and then forgotten. I’ve dropped 2 emails to registered owners of (apparently unused) domain names and have yet to receive any kind of reply. Not even a “No, it’s not for sale”.

Any thoughts?

Off on holiday

So I’ve been a bit quiet recently - but will now be completely silent for the next week and a half or so. I am off to Rome on holiday. See you in a couple of weeks.

All the best

Alan

Web 2008 = Rock n Roll 1968 ?

The BBC may have written this in 2006 but I only just got it recently. Here are some quotes

If Web 2.0 is the new rock ‘n’ roll, who are the one-hit wonders and who will still be playing to packed stadiums in 40 years’ time?

The comparison isn’t quite as ridiculous as it may appear. Forty years ago, music was leading a social revolution, disrupting the establishment and empowering a new generation.

Today’s web technology and social media, known as Web 2.0, or the second wave of the internet, are leading a similar challenge and the long-term effects are likely to be greater.

Once again we are divided into those who get it and those who don’t. There is hyperventilating on the blog barricades about the end of the old order and the birth of the new counter-culture, information anarchy.

It was a recent posting on Confused Of Calcutta about Facebook that did it for me. JP is a long-time believer in the power of Facebook in the enterprise - but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Here are a couple of comments, one after the other, that really attracted my attention:

Ross Mayfield:

Part of what makes Facebook work across enterprises is it is new. That wont last. Part of it is fragmenting modalities, that will continue. Part of it is the trend towards the personal, but socially connected, and you know where that is going. Make things trend towards the transparent and you gain serendipitous discovery, and memory.

Ayesha Lakhani

But i guess..networking sites like facebook..if taken seriously can bring about a dramatic change in the appearance of the society.

I just came across one such group on facebook and i got to the positive effects of these applications..these are the highlights of the group:

Be the first generation to end poverty by 2015 with the United Nations’ Eight Goal Millennium Campaign.

1. End Hunger

2. Universal Education

3. Gender Equity

4. Child Health

5. Maternal Health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS

7. Environmental Sustainability

8. Global Partnership

Ross’s comment isn’t completely anti-Facebook. (The really anti-facebook people don’t spend time on the web reading and writing blogs). Yet there is a very clear difference in emphasis between Ross and Ayesha. On the one hand: Facebook is useful largely because of its novelty, which will wear off. On the other hand Ayesha’s wide-eyed enthusiasm does seem a touch, well, hippy-ish. Just as the BBC described.

And then here’s a comment on Sourcing Innovation about the power of social networkiness:

I am a recent Grad, who landed into the procurement industry extremely green (pun intend). I have found great uses for facebook, linkedin and recently www.iprocurement.org to help me network in this small but exciting industry. Due to the amount of Baby Boomers running around this profession, I believe this your reason for lack of new content and daily bloggers.

Now contrast this comment with the stated view of Sourcing Innovation’s owner in that post who is resolutely staying off Facebook (for example).

OK, I’m sold. But here’s the interesting point for me. If the Web in 2008 is equivalent to Rock’n'Roll in 1968 then .. well we’ve had our Monterey Pop Festival (1967) - but we’ve still got our equivalent of Woodstock to look forwards to.

a

eWorld reprise: eAuction Design Introduction

Thanks for all of you who came to the TradingPartners talk at eWorld last month. I’ve just seen the feedback and was blown away by the response. 5th out of the 21 “particularly good” presentations (not sure how many presentations there were in total). Obviously the big names Hackett came first, trailed by Oracle and CIPS. CombineNet did just marginally better than us. Which is all very cool. Good to see eAuctions becoming a topic of interest again. So thanks again to everyone who came and who left feedback.

With this in mind I figured I’ll post up here some of the key pieces from the talk over the next few days which will hopefully help you to some degree with your own sourcing (and auction) exercises.

Incidentally, for the presentation geeks amongst you: This was my first attempt at using Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule. Briefly this says: only use 10 slides, talk for 20 minutes and don’t use any font size smaller than 30. How did I do? Well, I did use 9 slides. I talked for a little over 20 minutes. And most of the time I used massive fonts. It was a lot of fun to do it this way – I think I’ll carry on aiming for this approach because it forced my to be more interesting. One more thing that I did, which I heartily recommend: give your talk to your wife/husband/etc. Until you get it right.
 

Go Go Ninja Dinosaur

The friday before Easter (good Friday) is a national holiday in the UK. Seeing as I’m awake anyway and on my laptop, here’s a completely non-work-related post. 

It’s great having a friend with good taste in music. Mine came to visit recently and gave us a copy of Colours Are Brighter . This is an album of music for children, but by “proper” bands. With profits going to charidee. It makes a refreshing change from Noddy etc.

It’s got the likes of Four Tet doing a great track called Go Go Ninja Dinosaur. And Belle and Sebastian doing a song about monkeys breaking out of a zoo. And a song about tidying up. And an epic Divine Comedy track about Winnie The Pooh.

Particularly poignantly for me (as I am sure will be for any fathers who work away from home from time to) is Snow Patrol doing a song called “I am an astronaut” which goes like this:

I am an astronaut
I am an astronaut
Daddy’s away and Mum’s asleep and
I am an astronaut

Lucian (coming up to 2 years old) isn’t too keen on Snow Patrol but is a sucker for the Franz Ferdinand track on there, Jackie Jackson. 

For those of you who can’t wait to check out the album here is the cute animation for (a shortened version of) Go Go Ninja Dinosaur.

(On a slightly more adult note, he also got me Burial’s 2nd album which is also excellent – like DJ Shadow does UK Garage)
 

Friday afternoon posting

Check this link from Neatorama: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/02/29/pulling-down-a-palm-tree/

“Maybe they just didn’t have enough cable. Or an axe. Or sense. “

Blogging: Reading vs Writing

Blogging started for me about in the middle of 2006. I’d finally “got” all this Web 2.0 stuff about user-generated content, blogs and wikis. I was trying to convince my CEO at the  time that he should start a blog. His riposte: “Why don’t you try one?”

So here I am something over a year later, and, I can tell you, it’s been great:

• It’s got me in touch with a number of interesting people I wouldn’t otherwise have met.
• It’s given me the opportunity to clarify my ideas, purely through the process of writing them down and debating them.
• It’s flattered my ego to see my Technorati rank increasing gradually

But I don’t consider myself “a blogger”. I have a day job to do that involves introducing new software products. I deal in things. I contrast this with people whose principle trade is in ideas and for whom the hallowed title of “blogger” is more appropriate.

For me: I write my posts during my commute. (Today I missed a train by 3 minutes: hence the extra time for a super-navel-gazing post). But this time competes with reading time. So I need to balance pontificating (writing, blogging) against learning (reading, listening).

Still, it’s too much fun to stop this blogging once you’ve started. And there is an appropriate balance for me, which on the blogging side means 2 or maybe 3 posts in a week. I hope you enjoy reading them. And please do leave comments, positive or negative.

Anyway, we’re pulling into London Euston now. Gotta go.

Some ramblings on culture

Confused of Calcutta had a great post on cultural differences some weeks back. In it JP references this post: http://www.adinochang.com/archives/chinese-culture-versus-german-culture.html. Follow the blog comments and you’ll find a similar lighthearted comparison of Italy and the EU (by which presumably they mean Northern Europe) http://www.lifeinitaly.com/flash/

Do check these 3 links out - they are fun and can teach you a think or two.

In my case I am half English/half Greek. I was born and grew up in England with the exception of a few years in Greece. Though when I say “half Greek” I should clarify: My mother grew up in Alexandria in Egypt and moved to England in her late teens. So her (and therefore my) view of what it is to be Greek is based on a version of Greece that probably diverged from mainstream Greek culture a century ago. Still - growing up in England in a household that frowned on going to the pub and getting drunk (in some versions of Greece, young people will stay up all night eating ice cream, seriously) made me feel like something of an outsider for a great part of my life.

Which is why I enjoy these cultural comparisons so much, I suppose. Because they help teach me about my own culture(s) as much as about other culture(s). For example I identify with a lot of the “Chinese” cultural elements in Adino’s post, particularly around the significance of the family, but in other respects I am much more “German”. These kinds of jokey stereotypes help crystallise some important cultural points.

So far so rambling, but there is something here about technology and business.

To date, “globalisation” has essentially meant the spread of North American firms and culture. But there is no way that this flow of globalisation can continue one-way. According to the BBC here it is expected that within 2 years there will be more internet users in China than in the USA. So not only does it make sense for westerners to make more efforts to understand cultural differences, but westerners shouldn’t be surprised if what passes for “normal” on the internet in China becomes more dominant globally. Perhaps the next generation of internet sites will look more like TaoBao than eBay.