Infobesity

Today on the news:

the newest risk to our youths health; Infobesity

How do they come up with it. Ok, it's not even a new term but Infobesity means as much as constantly consuming enormous amounts of non-information. Through tv, pda’s, text messaging, Twitter, blog’s and multiple social networks like Hyves and Facebook young people constantly update themselves with information from their ‘network’ and by doing so run the risk of getting addicted to this information and overloading their mind. Short for: it makes them stupid.

Sigh… It must be a slow period for news broadcasters to pull this one of the shelf.

Fleeting ideas or verbal diahrrea?

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Look sharply after your thoughts, They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen in your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear".

I wonder what he would have made of Twitter....

Valentine

I received a message last weekend with the subject "Er is iemand die van je houdt" ('There is someone that loves you'). Of course I was curious, it was valentines day so who wouldn't!

Unfortunatly for me, it wasn't what I was hoping for:

A marketing ploy, yes...., but in this case, a nice one. A group of 25 Dutch Business Partners has come together to start their own marketing campaign for creating a positive vibe around Lotus products. "Is that really necessary?" Well frankly, yes. Marketing unfortunatly isn't one of IBM focus points here in the Netherlands so it could do with some extra support.

Thus came they idea of doing a campaign, supported by IBM but led by the Bussiness Partner community. I love it! Not only because of the very strong theme "Lotus Loves People"

but mostly as it shows how the Lotus community here in The Netherlands is really committed to the Lotus brand and that by working together they can really accomplish something.

So ok, it wasn't the Valentine I hoped for but still I found it a really nice gesture to get. Let's hope it does the same for all those executives and decision makers out there that are thinking of buying Lotus products!

LCTY - Silverside

For everyone interested in knowing what was said at Lotusphere 2010: The date and location of our Silverside LCTY session is set!
 

Lotus Comes To You 
with special speaker Douglas Spencer - IBM USA

Date: 31 maart 2010
Location: Expo, Houten starting at 13:00
Sign in here


With sessions on Xpages, Social Internet, Security, Document Management and of course Project Vulcan it is going to be an interesting day.

Don't miss it!

Repetition

I was watching television yesterday when something caught my eye. For a while now we've been innundated with show reruns on television. Yes I know it's a very common thing in other countries but here they used to prevent that as much as possible. I don't know why but since about a year they completely dropped that. Now all blockbuster shows seem to be rerun at least three times within a two week period.

In between shows and during advertisement sections they sometimes list the shows that will be shown later that day or week as an appertizer. Because of all the reruns they started to list reruns as "-showname- (Rerun)" so you knew it was a rerun. Very handy if you are a regular viewer.

Now the thing that caught my eye today was that in such an appertizer listing they now actually listed a show as "-showname- (New episode)". So from running a show only once and maybe rerunning it half a year later we've gone to it being so extraordinary to get a new episode that they are actually emphazing it.....sigh.

No wonder I seem to read more books than ever....

Blog layout

As you can see I'm still exploring the different templates for this blog so don't be surprised if it changes a bit from time to time. I love to explore the different possibilities and features!

Lotus Knows video

Ok, it's been a couple of weeks already but I still get the vibe when watching this video that was shown at the closing session of Lotusphere 2010...

Workflow

One of the products Lotus has bought over the years and incorporated into their Lotus portfolio that always interested me was Lotus Workflow. I have a real admiration for this product that has been out there now for a over decade but still is more than versatile and resilient enough to be a strong competitor when it comes to workflow tools.Especially for Lotus Notes applications.

For years I've been fearing an End of Life announcement but I guess it keeps proving itself enough to keep on going. Last Lotusphere there was even a session in which some very nice integration with the sidebar and Xpages was shown and there is some discussion on the possible integration of Lotus Workflow into Quickr. A step that would benefit both products greatly and which I would really love personally. Let's face it, the current out-of-the-box workflow capabilities in Quickr (I wouldn't even call it that) are way too limited.

Recently IBM bought a company called Lombardi that also has a very good workflow/Business Process Modeling tool called Blueprint. I didn't know about it but was attended to it and I must say it looks pretty neat. I'm muddling through some of the documentation and online tutorials to get an idea of the product right now. Ok, it doesn't natively integrate with Lotus products (haven't found any reference) but with all the new techniques of accessing data in Lotus databases that shouldn't be to much of a problem.

The question of course is whether this tool isn't also a good competitor for integration with Quickr and if so what happens to Lotus Workflow... We will have to see and wait I guess.