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Interactive

I still don’t take meetings. I make tweetings. @clarocada

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” – Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

The change from meeting to tweeting – where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content – has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so – but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

IN GOOGLE TIME
I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. On my Nokia N86, as I move. As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things – I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.

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Will Amazon be your digital publisher this year, or next?

I had the pleasure to talk to Amazon’s Vice President Worldwide Architecture, and Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam earlier this month, and asked him about what’s next for Amazon’s ‘Kindle‘ product… just click on the arrow below to listen to our discussion, or click the image to go to utterz.com for other options.

Dr. Werner Vogel, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, talks about The Kindle. And what’s next, of course…

Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterz. Replies. mp3

Why it’s taken me 13 years to decide to attend The Next Web in Amsterdam…

I first got involved in online business around 1995, when I first bought a copy of .net magazine, after I got curious about a startup company in the next room of our business centre, who said they were hosting websites.

Back in 1995, most business people I spoke to didn’t know what a website was, let alone what a good one would look like, so I started to learn how to code HTML using a highly sophisticated tool called ‘Notepad‘, and registered some domain names where a committee of actual people decided on whether or not I could own a particular domain name…

By 1998, I was designing and managing sites for companies like The Alba Centre (a Silicon Glen incubator) Scottish Financial Enterprise, The British Blood Transfusion Society, and for dozens of conferences a year.

Of course, the dot com bubble burst around 2000-2001, with so much money following ridiculously optimistic business plans, but many survivors from that period are still strong and active today.

Here comes something new…
But around about 2003, a new type of web site started to appear, as what I considered to be a natural evolution coinciding with the high penetration of broadband internet connections into homes and businesses: sites with features that broadly are known as Web 2.0…
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You’re a Nobody unless your name Googles well – Wall Street Journal

It’s official – well, it is if you rate the Wall Street Journal’s front page as authoritative – if your name doesn’t Google well, you can have problems with your credibility – and not just with prospective employers.

You’re a Nobody Unless your Name Googles Well published on the 8th of May 2007, cites the example of Abigail Garvey, who, when she adopted the married name of Wilson, began to be questioned on publications she listed on her CV (rÃ©sumÃ©) because they weren’t finding the publications in online searches.

In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that’s becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type “John Smith” into Google’s search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. (See search results.)

Ask.com estimates about 7% of all searches are for a person’s name, and more than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by ExecuNet. ExecuNet published “Growing Number Of Job Searches Disrupted By Digital Dirt” in June of 2006, which found that “35% (of executive recruiters) have eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information uncovered online – up significantly from 26% just one year ago.
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