I appreciate your time and would offer two alternatives:

• In lieu of blogging, I’ve shifted to a different kind of conversation on Twitter, tweeting more and engaging in dialog more often.  While I’ve been on Twitter for almost two years, I’m experimenting with how it might be used to reach people in smaller snippets. I’m also tinkering with ways to manage Twitter more effectively, which still seems to elude me (and lots of other people).
• Much of the content on this site is not time-sensitive.  In fact, one of the reasons I paused was that I was starting to write the same things over and over.  I’ve been heartened to see that traffic to the blog has continued at a sustained level as people discover older but still-relevant posts through Google and many cross-links.  In just the past week or so, these topics are still attracting readers:
  • The Original Social Media Guru – Dale Carnegie figured out how to reach people, way before Facebook
  • Measuring Metrics -The value (or lack thereof) in measuring things
  • Three Envelopes -Timeless advice on avoiding disaster
  • The Happy Path – Are you testing what you need to be testing?
  • Arbitrary Boundaries – the danger of pigeonholing people

  and a perennial favorite

  • “…I’ll never go hungry again” – Scarlett O’Hara as an indicator of generational disconnect

Until I resume writing, I hope you’ll join me on Twitter and take time to explore the archives on this blog. I trust you’ll find value here, engage in some of the conversations, and stick with me until I pick things back up.  Until then, look me up on Twitter!

I started this blog more than two years ago as a way to understand the technology. After intermittent posts for eight months or so I began writing in earnest, posting articles every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for more than a year.  245 articles and 125,000 words later, it was time to take a breather.

When I started writing, I had many things I wanted to talk about.  Typically, I had articles written two weeks in advance.  Over time, that lead time began to shrink, so that most recently I was writing the night before my self-imposed deadlines.  That resulted in rushed, poor-quality posts, which I won’t have and you don’t deserve.

I also realized that many of my topics are timeless.  On more than one occasion, I would write a post only to discover that I had written essentially the same article a year ago.  Rehashing the same topic serves no one.

Finally, I began to consider topics that really need more than 500 words, the typical length of an entry on this blog.  I prefer “short and sweet” articles; I know that I get turned off by enormous blog postings.  Nonetheless, certain topics deserve more scrutiny, and my current format does not serve these topics well.

On February 1, I just stopped posting.  I had meant to write this explanatory post soon thereafter, but became intrigued by the traffic behavior on my blog.  Instead, I stayed quiet to see what happens when a blog goes silent.  I was surprised to see that traffic takes a long time to dwindle. I don’t completely understand why, but it has caused me to rethink the impact of posting frequency and readership patterns.

So now what?  I will confess that my initial angst over stopping has been replaced by a sense of relief from not having to post.  I’ve been able to consider some more in-depth ideas (many in the area of cloud technologies and shifts in personal computing) that may result in longer, more detailed posts.  I’ve also been able to rebuild my supply of “short post” ideas, which I can draw on as the need arises.

It has become clear that every blogger needs an exit strategy, and that mine was ill-formed at best.  While I do intend to resume blogging at some point, I need to think about a real long-term strategy that will allow the content to continue to serve as a resource for those who are interested.

The best part of blogging has been the feedback and support from many, many people.  I appreciate your time when you read, and I really appreciate those who comment and extend the conversations I’ve started.  I hope you’ll continue to check back to see what I’m doing, and I hope to continue to provide value to you when my blogging becomes more frequent.  Until then, feel free to search for useful stuff I’ve already written, and don’t hesitate to connect through my Twitter presence. This experiment continues, and there’s still a lot to learn…

Like me, your first reaction is probably one of extraordinary relief, with the burden of missed sarcasm forever removed from your written communication.  How did we ever get along without a sarcmark before?

My second reaction is to presume that the creators of the sarcmark are simply engaging in a little viral marketing.  Although the mainstream media is treating this as a real news story (surprise!), the entire concept is outlandish and impractical.  That said, they are selling software that allows your PC to create and display sarcmarks, so there is a bit of entrepreneurialism in there as well.

It goes without saying that the sarcmark is doomed to fail.  Not because it is a silly idea (it is) but because it is going up against too much legacy technology to ever succeed.  From that perspective, the sarcmark does provide a useful lesson.

Modern punctuation was pretty much settled a few hundred years ago.  There isn’t a lot of space (or demand) for innovation in this arena.  Nonetheless, if we were all still writing everything by hand, you might be able to create a new punctuation mark and get some people to start using it.

Unfortunately, we produce most of our written content by machine.  Those machines use standardized encodings for characters and standardized fonts for presentation.  The idea that you could revise a standard like ASCII or Unicode to include a new symbol, let alone update a substantial portion of the thousands of fonts used worldwide, is ludicrous.  The combined inertia of these systems overwhelms a tiny effort like the sarcmark.

As agents of change, IT leaders must carefully assess and understand the inertia that threatens every initiative we undertake.  Is the inertia overwhelming?  Will it crush our efforts?  Is there enough value to overcome the challenge?  With careful consideration, we can choose our battles wisely.

More importantly, is there a better solution that simply circumvents all that inertia?  The best innovation occurs when a completely new path is developed, one that bypasses all the problems at hand.  People are far more open to solutions that relieve them of the burden of difficult change and allow them to easily adopt new things.

In the realm of symbols, emoticons have succeeded in creating new symbols by easily combining existing glyphs into new patterns.  No one tried to create a new symbol for “smiling;” they created the sequence “:-)” instead.  By stepping around the inertia of character sets and keyboards and fonts, people developed a whole family of new “symbols” that expanded the meaning that could be inserted into a message.

As we tackle problems, we need to find more solutions that build on existing successful tools and avoid those that creation unwarranted, expensive disruption.  At the very least, we stand a better chance of hearing “Nice job!” without needing a sarcmark.

In meetings, I can hardly stand to not draw on the board.  If something is worth talking about, it certainly warrants a diagram or two. I am a big believer in “boxes and lines” diagrams.  If any two entities have a relationship, you can create a boxes-and-lines diagram to help express it better. Charts, trees, lists, timelines, you name it: I’d prefer to draw it out.

I’ve noticed that some people share my compulsion and others seem to have no need to leap up and draw things.  My need is so great that it was a running joke among some co-workers as to how long I could hold out before jumping to the board. How could anyone live without a whiteboard handy?

Obviously, some people are wired for visual communication and others are not.  Some people can read volumes of information and internalize it without the need for pictures.  My brain is not so gifted; I need to explicitly render the relationship to fully understand it.  I also like to color-code elements if possible, to further elaborate on important aspects of the diagram.

This affection is so bad that when I do not have a whiteboard handy, I am almost at a loss for words. Almost.  In a pinch, I’ll sketch on a sheet of paper or a napkin, but it’s not quite the same as a full whiteboard. As much as I love words, they seem incomplete without a diagram.

Don’t get the idea that I’m any sort of artist.  When I say “boxes and lines,” I mean boxes and lines and not much more.  I once even took a course on how to doodle, learning how to create little people and other elements of quick sketches.  It helped a bit, but you won’t find any of my work hanging anywhere anytime soon.

This deep desire leads to one of my fondest dreams: a world where everything is made of whiteboard material.  Imagine being able to draw on the walls and doors and tables!  A quick sketch on the dashboard of your car (while safely parked, of course) would be a wonderful thing.  Jotting a note or two in an elevator or on a credenza might be just the thing to get your idea across in a pinch.

Sadly, as you move up the management ladder, the whiteboards diminish.  Cubicle farms and team meeting rooms seem to be covered with whiteboards; management offices tend to have fewer, smaller whiteboards, often hidden behind a wooden panel or a projection screen.  People at every level need to draw; why can’t we have whiteboards everywhere?

As I listened to this song recently, it occurred to me that a younger audience might be puzzled by these unusual lyrics.  What is an “operator?” Why would they be demanding money?  Forty cents for three minutes? How would you pay them? Technology has marched on, leaving language (and old pop hits) behind.

The operator, of course, was a human who helped complete calls.  Before cell phones, people used pay phones to make calls away from home, ponying up spare change to stay on the line.  While the first three minutes might run you a dime (and later, a quarter), subsequent blocks of three minutes could cost a lot more.  To stay on the line, you fed change into the phone.

To the modern ear, this sounds no different from instructions on how to tan your own leather or fashion a thatch roof.  The concepts are so foreign that the words barely make sense.  Yet this song describes things that were commonplace just thirty years ago!

Much of our language is derived from current technology, forming a common cultural base. As the rate of technological change increases, language cannot keep up, stranding all sorts of shared phrases.  While amusing, I think it also creates an ever-wider disconnect between generations, making communication more difficult.

Even in the past ten years, many ideas have simply disappeared.  Back last century, people needed to rewind things.  Now, no modern device requires rewinding.  We’re at the point where nothing spins to make music; how would a 50s DJ describe his world if unable to “spin stacks of wax?” People will soon wonder why we “dial” phones.  I suspect that the number of US citizens that have actually operated a dial telephone is rapidly declining.

In a similar fashion, acronyms continue to shrink, encoding more information in shorter sounds.  During World War II, acronyms started out as concatenated syllables from related words, pronounced as a single word.  “CINCPAC” is the Commander-In-Chief of the Pacific, “CONUS” is the Continental US, and so forth.

By the 1960s, acronyms became individual letters strung together to make words (NASA, ASCII, etc).  This happy state has existed for a while, and no product or process worth its salt is without a clever acronym that forms a related word.

Now we’ve started pronouncing the acronyms for shorthand abbreviations, creating new words. I’ve actually heard people say “lol” and “brb” in running conversation, without a hint of sarcasm.  This is different from traditional acronyms, which typically represent nouns.  Now we are collapsing and pronouncing verb phrases and even whole short sentences.  This cannot be good for general communication.

What to do? Not much, I’m afraid. In between more-frequent trips to Urban Dictionary, I’ll go back to listening to Dr. Hook. They had another hit song that involved getting their picture on the cover of a magazine.  As I understand it, a “magazine” is like an entire web site, printed and bound as a sequence of “pages.”  The “cover” is the first page, and often had a photo on it.  Imagine!

What a concept! It immediately brings to mind those timeless names that will never die, those rare few that have had an eternal impact on our lives and society.  But it also leads us to reflect on the billions whose names have slipped into obscurity, and whose impact, however large or small, has stopped reverberating in this world.

This idea was brought into sharper focus for me last week when I learned of the death of Tim Hartselle, with whom I worked many years ago.  I’ve written before about Tim here, but did not mention him by name.  Tim once worked for me as a Unix administrator.  He wasn’t very good at Unix but found great success in email administration.  I often tell Tim’s story as an example of how seemingly difficult circumstances (losing his dream job of being a Unix admin) can lead to unexpected success in ways you never imagined.

Tim was a great, gentle man, with a ready smile and a sincere heart.  His first death came at 47, way too early.  So I mention his name here to do my part in forestalling his second passing.  If you ever need a story that demonstrates success borne of adversity, you may wish to use Tim’s name as well, extending that second demise.

It may seem odd to start a new year on such a somber note, but I prefer to see the opportunity that is presented.  With a fresh year spread before us, what will you do to make your name memorable?  I’m not thinking of notorious fame, either criminal or celebrity, but the kind of fame borne of doing good things on a continuous basis.

Most of us start the year pledging to lose weight, exercise more, and to cultivate more good habits than bad.  Most of those resolutions fall by the wayside, even with the best of intentions.  This year, take a different tack.  Resolve to do things this year in such a way that your name will be remembered, long after you are gone. Being remembered, in a good way, may yield a better year than any other resolution you can make.

I was in line at a local craft shop. The fellow in front of me was part of a larger group of dads and their kids, making crafts as Christmas gifts.  Apparently, they all paid on arrival, but this dad had discovered he had a 50% off coupon in his wallet.  He was asking for a refund of half of his fee.  And thus the lessons in poor service began.

1. Develop policies that punish your customer. The salesperson immediately responded with “We do not give refunds.”  The customer was taken aback but undeterred.  He asked again, pointing out that he had just paid a few moments before. Apparently, the policy does not address timing, so again, the request was refused.  When the customer asked again, we moved to lesson two.
2. Blame someone else. The salesperson then shared that this wasn’t her policy, but instead had been created by “accounting.”  I wondered how big the accounting department might be at a little mom-and-pop store like this one, but no matter. Someone else had set this policy, and we were all powerless to change it.
3. Pass the buck. When the specter of “Accounting” did not seal the deal, the salesperson called over another employee.  Unsurprisingly, she confirmed the bad news: that was the policy, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It became clear that both employees had been taught lesson four:
4. Don’t care. It was obvious that these two had no vested interest in making this person happy.  For whatever reason, their engagement with the company simply involved showing up, doing their job, and going home.  Apparently, long-term customer satisfaction did not figure into their performance review. As a result, we finally got to lesson five.
5. Offend a member of a larger group. This guy was part of a group of dads.  You can be sure he told each one of them about the refusal.  You can be sure that when the group has to pick their next outing, this store would not be on the list.  For want of a small refund and a bit of kindness, a whole collection of families were alienated.

This whole conversation took less than five minutes before the dad finally gave up.  The salespeople had no idea of the damage they had done, and neither would the store owner, who was not present.

Good customer service is hard, but bad customer service is so easy.  For all of us in service organizations, we need to remember that good service is a continuous effort and even a slight slip can create lasting damage.

The unhappy dad went back to his child, and I moved forward to pay my bill.  I didn’t have the nerve to ask if I could use his coupon.

Last week I learned that one of the senior members of the communications group, Dan McRae, passed away.  Dan was a brilliant engineer, but he was also a kind, supportive mentor to many, many people.  As his coworkers learned of his passing, they began to share memories of Dan and the profound impact he had had on their lives.  Although I had only known Dan peripherally, those who had known and worked with him for decades echoed a common sentiment: he had made a profound difference in their lives.

Several people shared the same comment: that were it not for Dan, their lives would be dramatically different today.  His guidance and intervention at an early point in their career had led them to decisions that made a big difference for them and their families.

Dan did not set out to make a big difference.  Dan was being Dan, quietly inspiring people to do great things personally and professionally.  Yet the impact he had on so many people is immeasurable.

Thinking of Dan made me realize that to be remembered in this way may be the greatest achievement to which any of us could aspire.  Paradoxically, you cannot try to achieve this kind impact; rather, it occurs as a side effect of doing the right thing, all the time, for a long time.  I suspect that even if you had asked him, Dan could not have explained how he had this impact on people.

If you died today, would people say the same thing about you?  Do you live your life in a way that makes a profound difference to someone?  I hope that in the end, we will all be able to claim a similar legacy as Dan McRae.

There’s a common refrain that permeates a lot of these discussions: “It might be useful for others, but I just don’t think it’s for me. Who cares what I’m doing or thinking?” I have a simple answer for that: “I do.”  And lots of other people as well.

The concept of social media is not new.  Years and years ago, social media went by different names.  We used to call it “talking,” or “writing a letter,” or “making a social call.” As technology advanced, it became “sending a telegram” and “making a phone call.” Now we call it “updating my status” or “sending a tweet.” Technology changes, but the goal remains the same.

The point is to keep in touch with people you care about, and for them to keep in touch with you.  These simple interactions with others build a rich fabric that connects you and keeps you close. While some people belittle the trivial information that often gets shared, it is that information, in fact, that makes the whole exercise worthwhile.

In today’s world, we rarely cross paths with people and engage them in person.  When we do, we often spend time catching up: “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” We do it because we care, and the more we know about a person, the more we can connect and share.

Social media lets you share those little bits about yourself all the time.  Interested people can absorb them and keep up with you.  I call this information “social spackle.”  It is the stuff that fills in the cracks in our relationships and keep them strong. When you do finally meet someone, you are already up to speed on their life; you can have a richer and more valuable moment together.

Consider a simple example: an acquaintance tweets as he goes on a trip to visit his daughter and see his grandchildren.  Trivial data, he thinks; who would care about that?  But those who know him are glad to know it, and file it all away.  When we next meet, we have excited questions: How was your trip?  How are those grandkids? That little bit of social spackle strengthened our bond and made for a nicer moment.

Reluctant to try social media?  Don’t do it for you.  Do it for those who care about you.  Find ways to spread some social spackle and see what happens.  You will be surprised at the change in the richness and quality of your relationships, both with people you’ve known and the people you will meet.  What do you have to lose?

When I was half-finished with my coffee, the waiter came around and refilled it.  Aaagh!  This completely upset the careful balance of cream, sugar, and coffee.  Now I was stuck: put up with too-bitter coffee, or try to make corrections with partial portions of cream and sugar.  Either way, my coffee experience has been disturbed, if not ruined.

As I gave up on my coffee and decided to just eat the mints from the bowl on the table, it occurred to me that many of us in IT run around with coffee pots.  With the best of intentions (always have a full cup!) we disrupt the carefully crafted experiences of our users.

We talk a lot about change management and preparing users for the impact of system modifications.  Change is inevitable, and there is no way that we’ll be able to preserve everything a user likes about a system as we add new capabilities.  Even little changes in menu ordering or form layout can cause great consternation among people who have grown used to a system.

It is one thing when we recognize an impending change and work to avoid end user difficulties.  Big system rollouts usually have lots of formal change management to make life easier during transition. But how often do we send out little changes and ruin our users’ coffee, so to speak?  It doesn’t have to be a system change; a change in process can be disruptive, too.  Vendor changes to support or licensing terms are hard to deal with, even when they work in our favor.  Even changing a phone number or replacing an old piece of equipment with a new one can inject an unwelcome change into someone’s life.

Change is hard, whether it is big or small.  And the size of the change is in the eyes of the changee, not in the changer.  As we constantly improve and upgrade our world, let’s be careful when and where we decide to pour coffee.  Hopefully, we’ll have fewer users left with a bitter taste in their mouth.