Archive for the ‘Comment’ Category

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Social networking eats time and bandwidth (allegedly)

January 23, 2008

Last week I predicted that social networking would narrow, but deepen, as the faddish nature of it started to wear off. There may be another reason why the vast numbers of people involved may start to drop: employers are waking up to the productivity implications of the use of social networking tools in the workplace.

A poll of office workers conducted by Global Secure Systems (GSS) (in association with the organisers of the Infosecurity Europe 2008 conference) seems to indicate that large amounts of company time and network bandwidth are taken up by staff’s social networking activities.
 
According to the results, 41% of the sample admitted to visiting these kinds of sites at work and the pollsters calculated that they were spending “at least 30 minutes a day” on this activity. Two respondents even admitted to spending three hours a day on these services. Global Secure Systems then carried out a kind of ‘back of a fag packet’ calculation to arrive at the conclusion that social networking was “costing UK corporations close to £6.5 billion annually in lost productivity”. The calculation involved multiplying the average time spent on social sites by the number of office workers who have Internet access at work and their average salary. All this was duly picked up by the Times Online with the lurid headline: “Facebook and MySpace a threat to Britain’s competitiveness?”
 
There is an important message here, but I reckon such figures need to be taken with some degree of caution. Firstly, the poll information contained in the actual GSS press release doesn’t provide any detail of how the sample (of only 776 people – a little on the low side) was obtained (for example, what types of employees were polled and when and where). Secondly, the assumption is that all social networking is non-work related, but these technologies are in part altering the way people work. A journalist or a sales manager, for example, might quite legitimately be spending part of their working day on Facebook as this is where people with a particular interest can be found. 

Nor did the final calculation of the billions being wasted take account of the fact that not all employers actually allow the company Internet access to be used for non-business related activity. I know from conversations I have had with friends and acquaintances that many corporate companies severely restrict Internet access to a number of industry-related websites or, even more punitively, only allow access to the corporate intranet. 

Whether the calculation and its attendant headlines are strictly accurate or not, it is clear that there is the perception of a growing problem. GSS go on to point out that in a recent round table meeting of 20 chief information officers held by Infosecurity Europe 2008, one of the biggest concerns was how to manage social networking at work. There were estimates, for example, that as much as 30% of company network bandwidth was being taken up with Facebook.

So maybe the whole thing will just be turned off by large FTSE 500 companies who want some ‘real’ work to be done in company time. Ironically, this might happen just as some useful work-related ways of using the tools are being discovered.

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Three predictions for 2008

January 15, 2008
 
As the year turns it is traditional to offer a few predictions for the future. Part of my work with JISC involves thinking about the future of technology and commissioning reports about the direction that computing will take. So I’ve dusted down the office crystal ball and here are three thoughts for the year ahead:

1. Energy will become a major issue within the computer technology industry. Widespread public concern about climate change, particularly following the UK’s Stern report, is working in tandem with real business worries about the rapidly rising costs of electricity. This twin effect is forcing the computer industry to seriously review its technologies and processes in order to reduce energy consumption. JISC TechWatch plans a report on this subject later in the year.
 
2. Social networking will narrow but deepen. There is a certain amount of faddishness about a lot of the fuss around social networking. Given the amount of time it takes to keep your network up-to-date and handle the ‘pokings’, wall postings and other social network paraphernalia, along with the recent worries about privacy, I suspect that some of this activity will start to die off in 2008. Those who remain, however, are likely to develop deeper relationships with the technology, making use of more services and features.

3. The use of touch and gesture to interact with computers (‘haptics’ in the jargon) will take off. I noted in a previous post that Bill Gates has been talking about this for some time, and he was at it again in his final speech to the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Gates’s ability to drive the future of the industry may be fading as he heads into charity work and retirement, but I think he’s got it right on this one, mainly because the iPhone has firmly implanted the idea of haptics in the minds of the general public. Using your fingers and hands as much as, or instead of, a mouse is just so intuitive it will take off. 

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Web 2.0 – All that glisters is not gold

December 20, 2007

Just in case you’re interested my editorial for the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science has just appeared in their December issue. It is called “All That Glisters Is Not Gold – Web 2.0 and the Librarian” and is also available as a pdf from the  Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).  A lot of it is based on my recent Web 2.0 report but I have aimed this more squarely at librarians and information science professionals.

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How many scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

November 29, 2007

A twist on the old joke may now have a more formal answer. I was recently pointed to a paper The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge, published in Science magazine, which looks at the size of teams involved in the production of new research. The authors, Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin Jones and Brian Uzzi reviewed the authorship of 19 million papers produced over five decades to see if there were any patterns.

What they claim to have found is a move from the lone artisan to larger teams of researchers. This was the case not only in science and engineering, where there are obvious, practical drivers to move towards teamwork (shared use of expensive equipment for example), but also, to a lesser extent, in social sciences, humanities and arts. The lone genius battling against the prevailing consensus is a powerful image in the history of science: think Darwin or Einstein. What these researchers are arguing is that they don’t believe this is the case any longer.

But is this accurate? I have to confess I’m a bit worried about this piece of research, partly because the authors only look at (predominantly US) research papers and patents and don’t take account taken of, say, the impact of funding regimes or the ‘politics’ of producing papers. I suppose what it boils down to is that, for me, if you wanted to investigate the question that the research purports to shed light onto, you’d have to do a lot more than add up the number of contributors to academic papers and show that this number has increased over the years. Still, the Wisdom of Crowds tribe will love it and I dare say we’ll hear a lot more about the paper from that quarter.

And the answer to the joke? According to the statistics given in the paper it’s 3.5.

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Lunch on the line

November 27, 2007

Lunch last Wednesday was courtesy of British Rail (as was). Nothing too exciting, just a cheese and pickle sandwich, but it was enlivened by the free cabaret courtesy of the staff. As we approached St Pancras, the guard went round collecting rubbish, asking for “any old rubbish, newspapers, magazines, weapons of mass destruction, secret and confidential documents about Nick Clegg.”

This kind of humour by public service staff was reflected in the story, yesterday, about the London Underground announcer who has been posting “spoof” announcements to her website. It’s not the spoofs that have got her into trouble, of course, but it looks likely that she will lose her voice-over contract for allegedly telling a Sunday newspaper that she thinks the tube is “dreadful”.

I think London Underground should extend her contract and include some of her spoofs in their normal schedule of announcements. These kinds of moments enliven the otherwise dreary experience of travelling.

As far as the railways are concerned—let’s hope the guard continues to brighten things up on the London run. He could probably now add CD-ROMs from the Inland Revenue to his list.

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Tax CD-ROM fiasco

November 23, 2007

An abridged version of this appeared in the Guardian newspaper’s letters page today

As chance would have it a major EU-sponsored conference on privacy, identity and technology was taking place in central London yesterday, as news broke of the UK’s tax CD-ROM fiasco. I was one of a hundred or so experts from across Europe from a wide variety of technology, research, and legal backgrounds who were debating these issues.

Whilst the discussion at the conference raised many pertinent points about technology and data protection, mainstream news reporting has centred on whether cost cutting within HMRC is to blame. Personally, I find this rather disappointing. No doubt this is great fun for political point scoring, but basic data protection measures cost little if any money, in terms of staff time (which is where the debate has focused), to implement.

For example, why was even the most simple data encryption not undertaken? Why in the age of the Internet and highly secure Government data networks are CD-ROMs flying about between different parts of the public sector. Sending a disc by TNT post surely costs more than using a data network.

It should also be borne in mind that none of this is new. As Jonathan Bamford, from the Office of the Information Commissioner, pointed out in his speech to the conference, the data protection framework that is supposed protect citizens’ private data in ICT systems has been in place for twenty years. I think that in the Tax CD-ROM case there seems to be some evidence that this was ignored, possibly with the knowledge of senior managers.

All of this means that there is a pressing need to address the lack of public confidence in the Government’s ability to protect our personal data. Jonathan Bamford made reference to the latest survey undertaken by the Office of Information. This shows that protection of personal information was ranked, by the general public, as their second highest concern—just below fear of crime. This survey was taken before yesterday’s events and placed privacy concerns above worries about the health and education systems.

Data protection of citizen’s information should be hardwired into the DNA of government departments and agencies. It clearly is not, judging from this case. Until it is there should be no more talk of a national ID system.

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Google goes crowdsourcing for an iPhone ‘killer’

November 16, 2007

I recently mentioned the rumours surrounding the possible release of a Google gPhone which would be in competition to the Apple iPhone. It appears that this is not going to happen now, at least not in the sense of a distinct, hold-in-your hand, physical product.

(more…)

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My online identity mash-up

November 14, 2007

There seems to be a steady trickle of whizzy little apps that manage one’s public persona in Web 2.0 applications. I recently noted the MoodBlast tool, but the latest, Second Friends, allows you to import your Second Life avatar details into your Facebook profile and comes courtesy of EduServe’s Andy Powell (via his Second Life alter ego Art Fossett).

By creating an open Applications Programming Interface (API), Facebook is encouraging this kind of innovation on top of its core product. Andy Powell’s widget could be the first stage of a larger development where you can control your avatar in Second Life, from within Facebook.

This got me thinking. Increasingly a real person is represented online by a variety of virtual personae, aspects of which are filtered through different applications.

Somebody, somewhere, probably in a back bedroom, is building some kind of amalgamating, persona application that allows easy control of all these aspects from one handy desktop widget. This would be a true identity mash-up.

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A summer romance? Geeks and unlocking the iPhone

October 31, 2007

Apparently, Britain is about to be hit by a two-week media barnstorm in anticipation of the long awaited launch of Apple’s iPhone on 9th November. Given the long dark evenings and the autumnal wet weather we probably won’t be witnessing the camping-out-in-sleeping-bags and sharing-of-thermoses outside retail stores that happened in America this summer when the product was launched. But there may be other reasons why the UK won’t be quite as head-over-heels in love with the iPhone.
(more…)

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Amazon’s Kindle

October 24, 2007

There have been persistent rumours that Amazon is about to launch an electronic book device called Kindle. Engadget claims to have a photo and a copy of its specification, and an article in the New York Times gives a price tag of between $400 and $500, and predicts a launch later this month.

Such rumours are given further credence when Mary Meeker, one of the leading financial analysts of the first wave of Internet companies in the 1990s, noted the product in a talk last week about Web 2.0. She makes the point that: “We know what Apple did with iTunes, could Amazon do the same for books?”

Personally, I’m not convinced, especially as it will be supporting Amazon’s own, proprietary e-book standard rather than the open e-book standard, something which education is becoming increasingly wary of. But what do I know? I still have vinyl records at home…

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