![Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]](http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/wp-content/themes/starkers/images/blank.gif)
14/01/08 A Conversation With Yourself
SINGAPORE - For the last 3 months I’ve spent much of my working day thinking about how a global company can increase collaboration levels between staff located in 196 countries. Part of my solution is to help people nurture their network of contacts by providing metrics for them on how well connected they are around the world by looking at the dispersion of their network. You can feel very connected to a colleague on the far side of the earth with conversational tools such as IM, Twitter, Blogs, Facebook. It’s all about the conversation, we know that.
But what if you’re having that conversation on your own?
The true test of your network diversity is to time shift it +8hrs to experience the Asian web and offset it against Europe & USA. My network failed, drastically.
It turns out - my contacts, my subscriptions, my news, my reading-lists and my background-noise are all located there. In GMT+8 My web is now dead. I’ve never been so connected while travelling, yet never felt so disconnected. There is a big difference to texting home vs the presence awareness the internet can bring.
Email - I get on average 40+ emails a day, only 5 arrive while I’m awake (all bots doing their 3am GMT mail-outs for morning inboxes).
Twitter - I pick up the midnight nattering’s in the first hour of the day. 7hrs now, not a peep. Around 5pm here I see the ‘morning all’ tweets start to appear.
RTE News - No updates all of my working day. By the time I leave work there are maybe 3 stories.
TechMeme - hasn’t changed since I woke up this morning. It won’t until around midnight here.
Google Reader - Richard McManus (RRW) in NZ is the only active subscription in my timezone. Otherwise I have a ‘0′ unread for the day.
Jaiku - No conversation, no replies, just pages of delayed feed updates.
IM - lots of orange ‘away’ dots. The only green one is the twitter-bot, and no-one’s on there anyway.
Who can blame ‘the valley’ for not getting excited about Europe, we’re all sleeping through their afternoon and evening conversations, we’ve just not got a presence in them.
-Robin.
(Image Credit: My new office, secret jungle hide-out.)
Tags: asia, conversation, timeshift, timezones
8 Comments
Welcome to the world that I lived in for 2 years. Although I also had to contend with the great firewall of china at the time, fun fun fun…
This is where the issues of the ‘real world’ cause problems. No matter how well connected, how many different feeds into users - it just doesn’t matter when there’s different timezones involved. Is there an answer to it? I’m sure there will be (a filtered version of your Twitter feed perhaps to give an idea of what the person is up to - although I’ve no idea how to filter!).
I suppose, which you hit on, was to spread your contacts worldwide (find some more in Asia to cover that part of the world/timezone (which I’m sure you’re already doing - NZ seems to have a few good blogs coming out over there from what I can see)….
I know what this will sound dumb, but is there where an off-line reader / client comes in handy?
More to the point, you’ll make contact over there soon, and gain more green dots.
So, how will you make a name for yourself in the Singapore?
@jonathan - I’ve subbed to your blog :-) I’ve friends China doing the same deal.
@Neal - breaking the timezone problem has potential MASSIVE money behind it.
@will - why an offline reader? It’s not about reading the info, it’s about being IN the conversation. Commenting before the thread dies. Twitter/Jaikuing back while the topic is hot. It’s about being suplimented with content & conversation throughout the day.
15/01/08 Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » ● Fluffy Links - Tuesday January 15th 2008
[...] shows we are still very much geographically limited. World ain’t flat [...]
15/01/08 steve white
did you get more work done?
oh loads more, yep :-)
eye opener… but you get more work done :D Maybe I should move to Singapore as well
