The Week's Wunderkammer

Here’s a few items and thoughts from the week, emptying out the metaphoric notebook:

• JavaScript – have you noticed that JavaScript has become a “real” language? This was most recently highlighted by it being one of the languages you can infamously develop “native” iPhone applications for. Much of the Web and Mobile UI magic is done with JavaScript, and I’m starting to see folks play around with it even on the server side. My buddy Charles Lowell is speaking this week at the Red Dirt Ruby Conference on using Ruby and JavaScript together, but his examples are excellent as stand-alone cases for treating JavaScript as more than a “toy.” The question, then, is what tool support there is for JavaScript. What do you end up using?
• Email vs. Face-to-face – over lunch this week, a manager of what can only be described as a room full of Web 2.0 hyper-charged “The Kids” was commenting that The Kids prefer to email over talking face-to-face. This ends up causing more work as there’s some clarification that’s usually needed, and you have to sort through all the email. I suppose the same applies to IM. I’ll admit: I like text more than voice. I’d always rather email or IM than actually talk to someone on the phone or in person. I’m not sure why: I think it has a lot to do with being able to slow down and think and control how involved I am in the conversation.
• Management can only give permission, it can rarely mandate.
• There’s nothing lucky about change – I really liked this quote from Robert Brook in one of his R2 podcasts, talking about his reaction to people saying he’s “lucky” that his employer lets him be so “out there” in social media and the web:
  

  I actually fought very hard and for a long time against relatively organized opposition… Because I just through to myself: I’m going to be relatively more productive if I use system B rather than system A. [How did you do it? he was asked] Mainly by doing it very quietly. [After enough time had “quietly” passed] it was basically a fait accompli.

• Being a middle-man on the web is about providing analytics that someone couldn’t do on their own… and delivering eye-balls.
• Documentation is a storefront – while talking with a client today, I quipped that (online) documentation is a storefront, well, should be one. Open source vendors have long used their online documentation as part of their sales-funnel: if users logged in, they could track who was looking at what and jam all that into their CRM/sales process. More abstractly, companies need to take advantage of every interaction they have with customers and potential customers. Thanks to searchable with Google, online manuals, documentations, and forms can be part of that “engagement.” Sadly, most companies don’t take advantage of that. Put yourself in a sales person’s shoes: how would you start to leverage prospect’s interaction with online documents to close a sale? You probably wouldn’t, because it’s not instrumented. While she doesn’t address this aspect, on the topic of modernizing documentation, check out Anne Gentle‘s Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation