There’s no doubt that social networks, lead by Facebook and Twitter, have engulfed most of the world’s population, or at least the part connected to the Internet.

Broadly speaking, Twitter appeals to those seeking to promote their personal brand, establish a following and influence other people. Facebook appeals to those who are comfortable sharing and conversing in a milieu of friends and casual acquaintances- the on-line equivalent of a social networker.

And yet, in my experience there is a 3rd yet-untapped sector. This is a group of individuals who are not comfortable in either of these social networks. Typically, these are people aged 40 and above who grew up in the pre-Internet area.They view friendship in a much more traditional way and tend to associate with a much smaller set of friends. They don’t understand why their friends would be interested in trivial aspects of their life, such as what they had for breakfast, let alone acquitances they barely know. They guard their privacy jealously and rarely post photos of themselves or their children online. Their typical method of sharing content is via email. If they do post content online, it is typically in online forums or discussion groups where they feel comfortable conversing with people who share similar interests.

I believe that the newly launched Google+ may have an opportunity to appeal to this sector through its use of Circle and streams. Google+ makes is easier to share content with specific subsets of people that you know or are friendly with. To be fair, Facebook also has the concept of groups, but I suspect its a scarcely used feature that most people don’t even know about.

Googles has done a great job with this feature. Its implementation is much fundamental to the product, making It much easier to mange groups of people. The fact that you get to choose how to classify your friends as well as  those you choose to follow, seems much more natural than the Facebook approach of mutually agreed connections. The multiple streams ensure that a user knows exactly in which circle he or she is currently operating, thus minimizing uncertainy and the risk of unowingly posting to the wrong group of people.

Furthermore, I believe Google+ offers a natural migration path from limited sharing to broader sharing. As those users who “dip their toe in the water” become more comfortable posting to smaller groups, and start to understand the dynamics and social codes that govern social networks, they may be encouraged to share with wider circles of friends and acquitances.

Though it may seem otherwise,there are lot of people who have yet to buy-in to the idea of social networking. Can Google+ seduce this crowd ?

Thus, any self control techniques that allow me to consume less carbohydrates are like gold.

Recently, after polishing off three rows of Milka chocolate in quick succession and then sitting down to lunch, I reflected on hunger and our attitude to it.

We tend to view Hunger as a pain, something to eliminated as quickly as possible . Most diets I know focus on combatting hunger in a variety of creative ways, such as frequent snacks and food that makes you feel full.

And yet, hunger, whether metaphorical or physical, is a powerful life force. Hunger is the yearning for something we really want. Its the anticipation that makes our mouth water.

On the rare occasion when I get the flu, one of the first symptoms is a lack of appetite. It’s usually one of the last things to return, often one or two days after the other symptoms have disappeared. And it’s not a pleasant feeling. It’s as if one of life’s greatest sources of joy has been temporarily taken away from you.

So next time you get hungry, resists the temptation to extinguish it with some readily accessible piece of junk food, whether chocolate bar or potato snack. Enjoy it. Revel in it. Savor the feeling for as long as you can. Then, when you finally sit down to eat, enjoy the satisfaction of a truly great meal. Food is always at its most enjoyable when you are really hungry.

To be clear, I am not advocating starvation as a form of diet. One should always eat well. I am also well aware that there are millions or people in world for whom starvation is a semi-permanent state. I pray that humanity will succeed in solving this problem. This post is intended for those of us lucky enough to live in a world where hunger is a temporary state.

What I am suggesting is that you aim to satisfy your hunger with the highest quality of food available. Your body is worthy of no less. In the process, you might find that you are eating better and feeling healthier.

In the coming year, may you :

• Read more than you write
• Burn more than you eat
• Walk more than you drive
• Create more than you destroy
• Give more than you receive
• Gain more friends and less enemies
• Save more than you earn
• Play more than you work
• Enjoy more than you suffer

However, this setup wasn’t perfect. For a start, Toodledo is much more sophisticated than I actually need. I am not one for managing task priorities and inter-dependencies. A task description, a context and maybe a due date is pretty all much all I want to capture. All the rest get sorted out as part of the weekly review.

More importantly, I wasn’t happy with the fact that my notes and todo were split across two separate repositories. The boundary between a note and a task is not always clear-cut. Often, I have notes associated with tasks which I want to keep long after the task has been completed. Similarly, my notes contain some items which lend themselves to be checked off even though I prefer not to manage them as distinct actionable tasks. These includes checklists, shopping lists, books I want to buy/read etc.

Enter Egretlist, an Iphone application which seems to have solved both of these problems for me.

Egretlist is great as a task management and list management solution because it doesn’t manage tasks in its own repository. Rather, it relies on integration with Evernote.

Once you have entered your Evernote credentials within Egretlist, it scans your Evernote notebooks and looks for items that have a checkbox. Any such item gets to be displayed within Egretlist on your Iphone as a list item. You can then capture new tasks or lists and these will be stored as notes within Evernote (where you can view them Via Evernote’s website or PC client).

Any content following the checkbox, including photos, is visible within Egretlist as a note that is attached to the item.

Lists can be setup such that each item is a separate Evernote note, but you can also have a single list with multiple list items associated with it.

I contemplated the merits of both options and finally settled on a hybrid solution whereby the lists that are reasonably permanent over time but where list items change (such as shopping lists, checklists, books to read etc.) are managed as a list of items, whereas all others (mainly tasks) are managed as separate notes (this means that in Evernote you see a note with a title and within it a single checkbox with the same title following it).

Egretlist recognises note tags, which can associated with categories, such as Contexts, Next Actions, Someday/maybe lists, projects etc. This makes is quite easy to use Egretlist as part of a GTD approach. You can customize application start page, and you can tag important items with a star, causing them so show up on the start page and also incrementing the application badge counter. Egretlist will even archive completed items so that they don’t continue to show  (they are still available in evernote). A recent update allows capture of task due dates and it will even supposedly plant a task in your Iphone calendar, though I haven’t been able to test this feature as it is only supported on IOS4 (I am using a first generation Iphone).

Egretlist isn’t perfect. For one thing, the user interface for adding lists is confusing. Secondly, the way in which tags are associated with categories can be a bit complex from a GTD perspective. For instance, I found myself having to create an artificial tag called “Projects” which I then associated with the Egretlist category called “Projects”.

Nevertheless, it is a great solution for my needs and I would have been willing to pay more than double the Itunes purchase price.

The only feature I really miss from Toodledo is recurring tasks. I may consider continuing to use Toodledo to manage my recurring tasks, unless of course the engineers at Egretlist can come up with support for this feature.

Several weeks ago I happened to catch Yes Man on cable TV.

Jim Carey portrays a loser – a banker whose wife has left him, whose friends refuse to spend time with him, and whose main activity at work involves rejecting loan applications.

On the advice of an old acquaintance, he finds himself at a motivation seminar where he commits to a new approach to life – saying “Yes” to any proposal that comes his way, no matter how ludicrous.

In true Hollywood tradition, this triggers a complete turnaround in his life, by the end of which he has found his true love, boosted his career and become a hero to all his friends.

Maybe I’m going through a minor mid-life crisis, but lately I find myself reading, seeing or hearing a lot about personal empowerment and self improvement.

As anyone who has ever dipped into this rich world knows, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of different techniques, all promising to help you get more out of life.

Some focus on positive thinking, some stress action. Some recommend top down goal settings. Others focus on bottom-up task management.

One message that is to common to most of these philosophies, and that somewhat resonates with me is this :

“Do the exact opposite of what your first instinct tell you”

If our rational mind tells us to remain safely within our comfort zone, to seek out the safe and secure approach, the road to empowerment lies in venturing outside, taking risks – pushing the envelope so to speak. If we tend to gravitate toward the path of least resistance, we should tackle what is difficult, challenging and frightening. Therein lies the reward of satisfaction, achievement and fullfilment of our true potential. Instead of being guided by our rational mind we should follow our much deeper instincts that come from the heart.

Lately I have been trying to implement this approach in my life. I use it like a compass, but a faulty one that always points in the opposite direction.

If my first tendency is to avoid something, whether due to fear or laziness, it serves as a clear indication to me that it is what I must do. Almost always, the decision turns out to have been the right one .

In conclusion, I recommend viewing the very inspiring TED talk given Roz Savage, who left a lucrative yet unrewarding job to pursue an extreme goal, through this found her true calling in life.

I started up Outlook.

42 unread messages – typical for a three hour absence from my desk.

I quickly scanned the list to see if anything warranted urgent attention.

One email stood out – from my boss. It was a forwarded complaint from a customer with an added directive : “Please summarize the current situation and provide your recommendation for the best course of action”.

I recalled having answered a similar request a year and a half ago. I searched through my email archive and found the relevant mail. A few minor changes to bring the information up to date, and the response was in my Boss’s Inbox within half an hour.

I have worked for the same organisation for the last 9 years. During this time I have amassed thousands of incoming and sent emails. They are all organized in PST files – one for each quarter. Naturally, amongst these thousands of emails there are tens (maybe hundreds) which are still of economic value to the company. They include correspondence that lead to important business decisions, previous versions of documents, approvals and sign-offs by various departments, strategic papers that were ignored at the time, etc.

Some of these are duplicated in the network file system or filed in paper form. Others are not, partly due to lack of time, and partly because  they didn’t seem particularly important at the time. They are indexed based on a unique system which resides in one place – my brain.

If and when I leave the company, all this information will be lost !!

Like me, there are hundreds or thousands in every big organisation.

I believe that the solution to this problems lies in importing the habits and processes that govern social media on the Internet. Furthermore, I believe that we are on the verge on a revolution in this area.

When this change reaches maturity, intra-organizational knowledge management processes will be entirely different from what they are today.

Today, most written communication within the enterprise is based on “pushing” content to specific people via email. In future, content will be “published” to a shared repository, and co-workers will “invited” to access it, in the same way that social networks operate.

We will collaborate on documents using a Facebook-stlye internal network. We will tweet urgent messages, such as schedule updates or last minute meeting room changes. Complex business issues will be discussed and resolved using a collaborative tool not unlike Google Wave. Meeting Summaries will be published to a shared site and will be automatically linked to a task management system, allowing status tracking. We will be encouraged to post new ideas on the company’s internal network and co-workers will be encouraged to comment and even to further develop those ideas. Those of us who are most creative will have the opportunity to post videos to a You Tube-like internal video sharing site, in order to further illustrate a business idea.

Obviously the much loved and trusted email will not disappear. It will still be used to contact specific people. But increasingly, emails will not contain the actual content, but rather a link to a shared repository.

There are some interesting up-and-coming start-ups in this space. Yammer, has developed a platform for enterprise micro-blogging, a-la Twitter. Spigit allows employees collaborate on innovative projects. Chatter is like a corporate version of Facebook.

Clearly, knowledge management and sharing within an organization is not a new concept. Most large corporations already have an Intranet site, a corporate portal or a knowledge management site. Some companies have more than one infrastructure, and typically these separate site are managed independently by different units. It has been my experience that these solutions hardly manage to capture even a small percentage of the collective wisdom of the enterprise. Maintaining them is considered a chore or an overhead, and they are usually managed by dedicated employees or by a small number of workers on a voluntary basis.

I believe the main reason for this is that the emphasis is typically on the content, which is usually organized by topic, project of organizational unit.

What social networks manage to do very well, in my opinion, is to focus on the individuals who contribute and their social connections. This helps make the investment in content creation personally very rewarding, and it also provides an excellent vehicle for self promotion (in a positive sense).

Of course there are risks to implementing this type of change within the corporation and various challenges have to be overcome.

For starters, significant change to the corporate culture is required. Knowledge is power, and employees tend to resist giving up too much information.

Companies will have to setup schemes which provide incentives for knowledge sharing. On public websites and social networks, various paramaters have evolved which measure a person’s popularity on the net, such as number of twitter followers, number of facebook fans, visits to blog etc. Similarly, employees will be assessed internally based on measures such as amount of content shared or no. of positive responses from colleagues. In a sense, this new approach will help managers. It will enable them to identify experts. It will allow them to pinpoint those specific employees who are constantly developing and/or implementing new ideas and creating real value for the company. It will shed light on the way information is shared and expose informal teams structures that have evolved.  It will help in breaking down barriers between units operating in separate silos.

Secondly, information security is a major issue. Often, knowledge need only be exposed to specific individuals within the company. Corporations will have to setup sophisticated mechanisms which limit access to content areas by organizational unit or hierarchical status. They will have to develop clear guidelines and procedures in this space. Having said that, I believe that this approach has its advantages from an information security perspective. A document sent to the wrong recipient is an irreversible action. The document will forever be in his or her inbox. However, granting  someone access to a shared document can be reversed. As long as the other party has not yet accessed the document, no damage has been done. Even if the other party has managed to access the document, cancelling the entitlement can minimize further damage in the long term.

Its a well worn cliche that real business doesn’t take place in the boardroom but rather next to the water cooler or in the smoker’s corner. I am constantly surprised by the number of instances in which I was able to prevent a business problem from occurring simply by eavesdropping on a colleague’s conversation (open space does have its advantages). I often wonder how many of these conversations did I miss and what might the impact have been if I had. Social networking provides a way to formalize and organize this chatter in order to turn it into a valuable asset. In the not too distant future, the Workstream (as in Lifestream) will become one of the key managerial tools available to the corporation. Those companies who adopt early will reap the benefits. As an added side benefit, they will be able to attract highly talented Y-generation employees, from whom using social networks is as routine as brushing their teeth.

“I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it” (Thomas Edison)

Whether or not Apple’s new tablet announced today is a success, it seems to me that this is a major step forward in the evolution of one of three competing paradigms for human interaction with mobile devices.

The first paradigm has been around since the first portable PC’s were developed, that is, a keyboard, screen and pointing device all bundled into one package. This approach is used on most laptops and netbooks, and even some mobile devices with keyboards such as the most Blackberry devices, Nokia E72 etc . It appears to be the most appropriate for serious productive work.

The second paradigm is the touch screen, brought to a new level by the Ipad. This appears to be a more intuitive interface as the user interacts directly with the objects on the screen without the keyboard or mouse as a mediator. However, there are still some major issues with this approach,  including arm fatigue and fingers blocking out the screen. As anyone who has ever attempted to write a lengthy email on the Iphone, it is quite a slow and tedious process.

The third paradigm, which to my surprise has not received much notice, is the mobile Keyboard approach that is mainly being pushed by Asus. The idea is to have a PC bundled into a keyboard, which wirelessly communicates with a screen nearby. To my mind this is a very interesting concept, as I can imagine a future where flat screens are ubiquitous, and where we walk around with lightweight (potentially collapsible) keyboards that contain networking capability and some basic storage for our identity and preferences (presumably most of our data is stored on the cloud) and we wirelessly connect to freely available screen at work, in a cafe or in our airplane seat.

Which of these paradigms triumphs in the long run remains to be seen. Most likely the Laptop approach will continue to be used for work related applications, tablets for recreational activities such as web surfing, video, e-books etc, whilst mobile keyboard will target the gaming and home media market.

Perhaps a new paradigm will emerge that trumps all three. In this space, its interesting to look at 10/GUI, which attempts to merge the first and the 2nd. I for one look forward to interacting with mobile devices in new and interesting ways.

There’s one thing you can never change – the sports teams you support.

Having lived in the Israel, Australia, the US and the UK, I consider myself a fairly eclectic sports fan, with my interests ranging from Cricket, to baseball, rugby, football (soccer), basketball etc.

For the record, here is a list of the teams I support and the reason why.

	Because I grew up there is the golden age of Zahi Armeli, Roni Rosenthal (later a Liverpool star) etc
	Maccabi Haifa Basketball Club – Refer above, except for the part about a golden age
	Liverpool FC – because I grew up in the golden age of Ian Rush, Kenny Dalglish etc
	Philadelphia 76ers – because I grew up in the golden age of the Dr, Moses Malone etc.
	Chicago Cubs – because it was the 1st baseball team I ever saw live, because of Rigley field and because of its tragic history
	Israeli National Football team – Always a a true patriot
	Dutch National Football team – Because Dutch people are nice and because of its tragic history (refer Cubs above)
	Brazilian National Football team – Because of the way they play
	Sydney city (formely Eastern Suburbs) Roosters Rugby League Club – Because I used to live in the Eastern Suburbs
	Barcelona FC – Favourite city in Spain
;	Australian Wallabies (national Rugby Team) – Again – true patriot
	Australian National Cricket Team – Ditto

For Herbrew, press PgDn

“A blog of a thousand posts begins with one Chinese proverb” (Lao Tzu paraphrased)

So, I have decided to start my own blog.

Why the hell am I doing this ? Partly for the technological challenge of getting a respectable website up and running (I figure someone in my line of business ought to have a some first-hand knowledge what goes on under the hood) and partly because everyone around me seems to be doing it.

What will I write about ? Anything and everything that interests me, including Politics, sports, economics, quality coffee, IT, and generally coping with life in the 2010′s.

Will I have enough to write about ? That remains to be seen, but I already have several ideas in the making so I am pretty much set for at least the next two months.

If I build it,will they come ? Other than my family members and closest friends probably not, but then again who knows.

What’s special about this Blog ? If your not me, probably not much, though I do have one unique selling point. I intend to post both in English and in Hebrew. There might be other multilingual Hebrew-English blogs out there, but there certainly can’t be many.

What will my blog do for humanity ? For starters, halt global warming, solve the Iranian problem and end the Chicago cubs curse.

So come back to visit again soon. Should be quite interesting.

(S787XBW9BZCM)

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