Seven years at McGee’s Musings

Today is my seventh blogiversary.

Over time, we’ve seen a proliferation of tools and services that give us ways to connect and interact. Today we have Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. All are ways to improve our chances of connecting. As you can see in the sidebar, I  maintain some presence on most of them.

This space is the place where I try to get my thinking straight and immerse myself in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

Social technologies must be lived in to be understood. You can’t understand from the sidelines. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.

What I said in 2005 is still true:

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who choose to ignore facts and who can t or won t distinguish between the theory of evolution and the theory of who shot JFK. [McGee s Musings]

In years past, I’ve tried to acknowledge the interesting people I’ve managed to cross paths with as one of the primary benefits of choosing to participate in the read/write web. As those numbers continue to grow, that’s becoming unwieldy. I’m also reluctant to single out only those people who happen to blog themselves. Today’s environment is too rich for me to be that restrictive. Regardless of whether you’re another blogger on a similar journey, a friend by way of one of today’s social networks, a microblogger, or commenter here, thanks for participating and thanks for sharing. I will give one shout out to a new friend, Liz Strauss, to momentarily borrow her tagline…”you’re only a stranger once.” Tell me more about you and your experience.

11 thoughts on “Seven years at McGee’s Musings”

  2. Congratulations, Jim !!

    Social technologies must be lived in to be understood. You can’t understand from the sidelines. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.

    Yup.

  3. Lilia,

    Thanks to the magic of RSS and of Twitter I do continue to monitor your progress toward the finish line for that Ph.D. of yours. I can see the end in sight

  4. Jon,

    The question remains of how to help organizations obtain the necessary level of engagement and learning, especially as they pull into their shells in the current state of the economy

  5. Jim,
    I have been following your blog for a few years now. Congratulations on 7 years. You are an inspiration to me. I have been blogging for 4.5 years now.

    This line of yours is brilliant “Social technologies must be lived in to be understood. You can’t understand from the sidelines. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning. ”

    We have a thriving web2.0 km ecosystem within my organization but there are still several seniors who are on the sidelines without understanding that they need to embrace it before they can understand it.

  7. Jim,
    the one that has had reasonable success so far is the good old peer pressure. Try to get the open-minded-and-willing-to-learn types online first. That tends to put pressure on their peers. Of course, that still doesn’t bring everyone online, but it brings quite a few online. Over time, i hope that everyone will see the light. Evangelizing it is a constant thing to be done day in and day out because new people are constantly joining in our industry. Is there any approach you would recommend?

  8. Hi Jim,
    It seems like everyone is interacting in new ways with our writing. We’re showing up on different days or, like me, a day a late for the party. But somehow blogs keep linking us together with new thoughts and ideas that we probably would have found another way to share. It’s inspiring when I take a moment to reflect on what this has given all of us.

    I’m grateful to have met you! I want be here for every blog b-day to come.

  9. Liz,

    One of my goals for the next year is to promote and encourage the level of dialog and interaction here that you achieve in your work.

  10. One approach I would recommend as part of the necessary evangelizing/cheerleading would be to focus on gather stories and anecdotes of the value of engagement and participation. It’s an extension of your suggestion on using peer pressure intelligently.

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