DISQUS

Whoa. I never noticed the alt text before! You have just expanded my world!

Don't forget to setup a Google News Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) on your name, domain, company name, etc. while you're at it.

I'm an efficiency consultant (yes, like Bob from Office Space...) and I'll readily admit that when I walk into an atmosphere where everyone is IMing and no one is doing any work, access to lots of things get clamped down pronto.

However, *my* computer terminal is never clamped down, and I've gotten countless new ideas that really helped my clients from reading blogs, seeing a tweet, etc. so I fully understand the value.

I'd listen to those arguments you outlined and take away restrictions IF it was preceded by "I'm caught up with or ahead on all of my projects." I can also justify access more for certain roles within the company than I can, say, for a data entry typist -- I see the value for a portion of the day (and arguably IMing might improve their typing!) but if they're falling behind on entries, that becomes a problem. There really isn't an exact formula for this kind of arrangement (nor should there be).

Sadly, when given an inch, many people take a mile.

Reminds me of that image of the birds carrying the whale that Twitter uses for scheduled downtime.

Jenna,

I agree that our personal lives are an extension of our professional lives, and there's nothing on either of my Facebook profiles that I'm trying to hide from the other group.

It's all about what information each group wants to read. My friends want to read quotations that are inside jokes from high school and want to know about events related to our social circle. My professional contacts don't care about my inside jokes and want to know if I'll be at PodCamp Seattle. Rather than clutter one profile with twice the information, I've found it most effective to maintain two separate profiles.

However, if one profiles works well for you -- all the better!

Naturally, Twitter is going to make money by blackmailing people over the contents of their direct messages.

I'm so proud to be your # :)

In The Ultimate Guide to New Year's Resolutions (at my blog), I emphasize planning ahead for goals. 2007 was my best year ever because I finally developed an organizational system that propelled, not hindered, me. I wake up each day and take a step closer to my Big Goals, and even more importantly, I thoroughly enjoy the process each day. (My definition of happiness is having the power to change what you are unhappy with.)

My 2008 resolutions center around expanding my blogging audience by providing useful, relevant content and expanding my efficiency consulting as a result. I have an action card each day that has at least one or two Next Actions that contribute to these goals. With the right foundation, it's almost harder NOT to succeed...

Most of the people I tweet with are also entrepreneurs, and most work at home, alone. Twitter gives us the water cooler atmosphere that is arguably the only upside to working in a "real" office. I get to bounce ideas off of other really smart, thoughtful, insightful people and get instant feedback.

Twitter is also the #1 source of traffic to my blog, and the coolest thing is, a lot of that traffic is other people tweeting the links, not me.

About 10 minutes ago, @dossy announced his Twitter Karma program. I asked him to add the ability to sort by people who were following me that I wasn't following, and vice versa, and he already updated it for me!

http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

So you could ignore all that bacn and just run this once a week and add anyone who is following you that you'd like to follow.

I need a contact management tool that lets me add RSS feeds to individual contacts, so when I click on "Chris Brogan" it brings up one page with your latest Tweets and blog posts and Utterz and Seesmics. Thing is, *I* want to set which feeds are there -- I don't want FriendFeed or anything that requires each contact's participation.

Then this dream contact management tool could have one main page for "all friends" and that would solve your Seesmic/Utterz/Twitter problem!

I also need partial RSS feeds to go away. (Ahem.) I read almost 800 RSS feeds. With one exception (this blog -- seriously -- because you're that cool), if it's a partial feed, I unsub immediately. As an efficiency consultant, I can't spend all day clicking through, or I might as well have just bookmarked the URLs for each blog and gone through del.icio.us every single day.

Also: more hours in a day :)

I lean more towards #1, myself.

The world is becoming more and more transparent, largely due to the Internet. Things marked as highly top-secret are leaked to the mainstream media on a near-daily basis. What exactly would make people think that something marked both "public" and "shared" would be more closely guarded?

Also, what on earth were people sharing in these "top-secret" pubic shared feeds? I subscribe to a little under 750 RSS feeds and I cannot think of a single post I would be ashamed to admit to reading, let alone that I would be ashamed to admit as marking as a Shared Item.

You convinced me on Twitter awhile back to take advantage of the Google Reader Shared Items, and I've since been sharing my feed with my blog readers, on my personal website, and through Facebook. I think it's a great service, and I'm glad you sold me on it. Thanks! (I've been enjoying reading your shared items, too.)

I also adore New Year's Eve/Day and the chance to "reboot" our systems so we run even smoother and faster.

Every year, I look back and can't help but smile at where I am today versus where I was the year before. I hope that continues forever.

It's absolutely important to write down your goals, but it's crucial that we not stop at just writing down the goal -- we also need a specific, step-by-step gameplan for getting there. After all, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Great post, Rob! I know exactly what you mean.

I'm going to blog on this later today (I would have yesterday if the dang Bad Behavior plugin hadn't blocked me from my own site!), but my goal is to get a lot of my projects to the "1.0" stage BEFORE the New Year, so I can start 2008 with a real productive bang.

I also really enjoy HooeySpewer's tweets!

I'm the one who suggested "Impro" -- but I also heartily endorse "Eat, Pray, Love," and I'm usually the last person to touch anything on the Best Seller list.

Great ideas, Thom!

I live and breathe by my 4x6 daily action cards, that include my day's exercise routine, food log, time-sensitive tasks, and 10 MITs. I keep past action cards in a little recipe box at home, and if I was ever in a jam I imagine going back through the last few weeks would allow me to recreate all my important current tasks and projects. (I actually keep them for use in brainstorming new projects, but backup is a good idea too!)

I like the integration of Bluetooth a lot. I need to do that more in my home office. (I was interviewed for an article on web work this morning and mentioned that Twitter gave me a new project/idea every five seconds. Thanks for yet another great one!!)

I still see a lot of separation between work and life -- she might listen to an audio update on her iPod during her evening run, but if you maintain a corporate Twitter/Pownce/Blog/Google Reader/Gcal/etc. and a personal one, that's a lot of overlap. I've discussed personal v. work Twitter feeds with other Twitterers and those conversations thus far have ended with the decision that the Internet is making it harder and harder to put those kinds of walls up.

Why is Sonia even *in* the office? And why do they have firm office hours that someone can be late for?

Why does she use Pownce? I know Pownce can send files and Twitter can't, but I could FTP the file in 0.002 seconds and Tweet the URL. A large corporate environment should limit the # tools they use to those that sync seamlessly with one another. (I have personally tried to sync Pownce and Twitter and given up. Maybe if it worked...)

I know Seesmic is the new thing. I haven't yet been filled in on the idea behind it, and I support everyone working in the way that's best for them, but ... I'm a corporate efficiency consultant with lots of clients around the country, and I never, ever, ever want to receive a video of anything that doesn't absolutely have to be video. Status updates should be text, and ongoing working relationships should build the trust that someone can handle a crisis, not my wasting time listen to them talk to me via video. Sorry, but I'm just not getting this new video trend.

You asked for holes, so there ya go. Very interesting concept, although I would like to see a huge movement away from traditional corporate environments like that altogether.

I vote no. I follow you on Twitter and I subscribe to your RSS feed, and I think each has its own place. I try to limit replication as much as I can in my life, and I think it makes more sense to leave tweets in their medium and posts in theirs.

I run into this problem all the time lately, especially when I was explaining how the heck I met Damon before meeting him in Seattle. "Perpetual Facebook status updates" has worked for people who are on Facebook, but for others I've stuck with "It's a website where you post little notes about what you're doing now like drinking coffee." Sadly, neither explanation really gets across the full networking idea of Twitter, but one day at a time.

Some people I follow seem to get all of their offline friends to signup, but I've seen others do that and they end up tweeting to a lot of empty air as their friends don't tweet/pownce and don't check the site again. I'd rather meet new people via Twitter and maintain my old relationships as they were (which worked just fine!).

I didn't leave for Paris in 56 minutes, but I did leave for Europe (London, Brussels, Budapest, Athens) for a month on a few hours' notice, and I regularly pack up and drive across the country on 30 minutes' notice or less :)

I cannot for the life of me use company-wide phone systems. I constantly hang up on people when trying to forward them, or vice versa. It's awful, especially because I wrote the help documentation for all the computers/computer systems in the building, but I can't answer a damned phone. (Disclaimer: Cell phones are no problem. My Crackberry and I arelikethis. It's just 'real' phone systems.)

What does a tattoo assistant do? Clearly nothing that involves training. Eek.

(Damn. I hit Enter before I finished typing...)

I have been an on-again, off-again fan of the soap opera "General Hospital" for almost 13 years now. There is a blog "written" by one of the veteran characters on the show. Problem is, I think ABC always puts *just* enough effort into these endeavors, and it falls short. Soap opera fans in particular are VERY loyal and passionate about the show, staging campaigns over love matches and such. When you write a half-assed blog that doesn't sound like it's from the character at all (not to mention their INCORRECT story summaries), I think it's a bigger turnoff than not doing anything at all.

My first love was Amory Blaine from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise." I could read that book forever and not notice the years passing by. Kazuo Ishiguro's books, particularly "The Remains of the Day," are also like that. I call them *sumptuous* books.

I don't know if I'd want to be immersed in them, though. Reading about a butler driving through the English countryside contemplating what it means to be a good butler made for good reading, but would probably be a bore IRL. Per usual, fantasy is (far) better than the reality.