Unchain the Office Computers! Great article bemoaning corporate IT’s tendency to block IT use, and hence stifle innovation.

Here’s my favorite quote:

The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

And then today I was listening to Buzz Out Loud, BOL1051 and from 28 minutes in, they were talking about the same thing. All good.

You might be prompted to choose ‘player 7′ or ‘player 8′ (Flash). Pick either one, both worked for me.

It’s a brilliant talk, but hard to follow. Quite complex, compared to other TED talks. I had to watch this one a few times to get the whole picture. But it’s awesome.

All the TED talks are amazing. Check them out at TED.

In the spirit of making stuff, check out Makezine too. It rocks.

The top 3 are Delicious, Firefox and Google Reader. Huzzah!

Quoting from the report cited:

“Specialized tools that focus on alumni networks, new employee orientation, and cross-department collaboration may continue to command price premiums, but generally – without significant functional advances in these tools – Forrester is not optimistic: we expect average deployment spend to fall by more than half to $15,300 per customer over the next five years,”

Good news if true. I’ll start touting at work because it suits what I’m trying to do, and then hope it pans out.

Craig Thomler’s first point is about quantifying and promoting satisfaction with an intranet. This makes sense to me because we don’t do this enough with ours.

I like the way he’s pointing out an opportunity within a potential obstacle. I hadn’t considered this at all. Very relevant and timely I reckon.

Quote:

I often advocate increasing intranet funding during cost cutting exercises as a lower cost channel for engaging staff and sharing information.

Seems like good advice.

Mashable’s 5 potential winners are:

1. Co-Working Spaces
2. Bootstrapping and Growth Based Businesses
3. Collaborative Tools
4. Idea Marketplaces
5. Workforce Marketplaces

Click for Mashable – 5 Web 2.0 Businesses That Will Thrive in a Down Economy

Webware’s 11 potential losers are:

1. Twitter
2. Meebo
3. TripIt
4. Zillow
5. Pandora
6. Second Life
7. Skype
8. Ask
9. DailyMotion
10. Netvibes
11. MySpace

Click for Webware – 11 troubled Web companies: The next Kozmos?

Meh, not so entirely sure about the loser list. Skype? RU sure? Apparently it’s owner, eBay, might drag it down. MySpace, hmm. Twitter, well OK so how does Twitter make money? Second Life, never clicked with me.

“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practising the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study.

And here’s a survival guide for parents of teenagers – Teens & social networking sites

Jotspot was more than a wiki. It was a platform on which developers could build applications. For example, the Jotspot site we use has a blog, an app called a ‘bug reporter’, a discussion forum, a ‘knowledge base’ app and a project management tool. There were many other apps you could choose to add. I was hoping that Google Sites would continue to deliver this great functionality. Sadly, it does not.

At it’s most basic level, when you created a page in Jotspot you were given a choice of Web Page (basic wiki page), Spreadsheet, Calendar, Blog, File Cabinet and Photo Album.

Google gives you less. When you create a page in Google Sites you have a choice of Web Page (wiki page), Dashboard, Announcements, File Cabinet and Lists.

The Web Page is pretty much the same as the old Jotspot with a slightly improved wysiwyg editor. The dashboard is quite fun, I guess. You can use it to show your Google Calendar, Google Docs/Spreadsheets, Picasa slideshow, and other widgets.

But there are two important omissions:

1. You can no longer email content to a wiki page. Each Jotspot page had an email address allowing users to email updates to wiki pages or to email attachments to pages. We found that really useful. Especially for the less tech-savvy among our staff.

2. Spreadsheets are no longer integrated into the site. You need to link to them from Google Docs and drop them into the dashboard widget placeholder or onto a new page. And, I have to say, I couldn’t get this to work in Google Sites.

Here’s more opinion, from a loyal Jostpot user and from a reporter

One good thing is the consolidated email login through Google Apps Team edition. That is a great idea.

So why the title? Googlestein’s Monter? Because you have to cobble together all the functions you need. Like Frankenstein’s monster, there are lots of great bits, but they don’t fit together very well. There’s just no clear integration of the Google apps suite. You have to switch between your Startpage (another kind of dashboard), Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Google sites. You need to plug widgets into pages to get stuff like the calendar to work. And the blog, well, that’s not there at all.

I hate to say it, but Sharepoint just got a whole lot more attractive.