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http://www.itjournalist.com/
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Danny likes writing for Backbone because of the creative thinking that goes into commissioning the content and the latitude that he gets to explore technology subjects. As a freelance writer based on the lonely prairie, he is interested in how the Internet can help bring people together and create new ways of working.
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Using Evernote with a virtual assistant
I’ve been playing with Evernote for some months now, and I’ve been gradually integrating it into my working life. I had a bunch of different requirements, and I’ve been able to bend Evernote to support all of them. It’s a web-based system for storing notes, and it also comes with clients for the Mac, PC and iPhone that you can use to synchronise your notes with those devices.
Those people who’ve read this blog in the past know that I use a virtual assistant. The one I’ve been using for a year or so now is named Kim, and she rocks. She lives in Kansas and we’ve never met, but she helps me with my day to day tasks. She arranges pickup and delivery of review products, and books personal and business appointments in the calendar. She’s like a personal concierge service, and at this point I’d be lost without her.
I talk to Kim a lot via email and Skype, but I had problems keeping track of the tasks that I’d given her, and of the tasks that I needed to do myself. I still found myself a disorganised mess, even with an assistant to help, so I looked for a system that I could use to co-ordinate both my tasks and hers. I drank the Kool Aid and joined the cult of Dave Allen.
I won’t go into GTD in too much detail here, but suffice to say that if you’re like me and have 50 projects floating around your head at once, it’s a great method for getting everything out of your head and into an easily-manageable list. The advantage is that you don’t find yourself anxiously plate-spinning. You just work your way through the list of actionable tasks. Works great. Go buy the book. ‘Nuff said.
So, I had the following requirements for a tool:
- It had to support GTD.
- I needed a way to administer tasks for other people working remotely.
- I wanted to synchronise it between different machines.
- It had to support email ‘dropbox’ functionality, because an awful lot of my tasks arrive by email and I want to get them out of my inbox and into something more structured.
Evernote isn’t billed as a GTD product, but it’s flexible enough that you can bend it to suit your needs. I use its tagging system to label notes as tasks. I use the @Danny and @Kim tags to define who a task is for. Then I’ll use contexts like ‘@Computer’, ‘@Contact’, ‘@Post’ (for physically mailing stuff out), and so on. Most of my work is done at the computer, and I like to keep contexts simple, so I don’t go crazy with the number of different tags to use.
A lot of my work is project-based, and those projects are generally news and feature articles. I write features, and I also edit a couple of newsletters, so each newsletter feature that I’m commissioning and editing is also a project. Evernote has a ‘notebook’ system that lets you create separate notebooks for different projects. I use a naming system to make it clear what a project is. If it has an ‘F:’ in front of it, then it’s a feature that I’m writing. If it has a ‘P:’ then it’s in the pipeline - it’s a potential article that I might decide to pitch to an editor when I’ve done enough research (which is really handy for investigative stories that you’re trying to work up into a solid article). The newsletter features have ‘ELS: F:’ or ‘ELS: P:’ to signify that it’s for my newsletter publisher (Elsevier) and that it’s either a commissioned article, or a project in the pipeline that I’m currently negotiating with a writer on.
So, let’s see how this works in practice.
I get a new commission from an editor. It’s a piece about data-centric security for a security title that I write for. I create a new notebook for that project:
Then I create a note in that notebook listing the project details:
In addition to being a record of the brief that I can refer back to, this is also a task for Kim. Notice how I use the @Kim and @Article tags so that she knows this job is for her, and that it’s an article to process. Just as she can select the @Kim tag in the sidebar to find all of the tasks she has to work on, she can also narrow that down to find all the articles I’m currently working on by selecting the @Article tag:
In addition to the article brief, there would normally be other data in this listing, such as the wordcount, deadline, and the amount I’ll be paid for the job, but for this example, I didn’t put that in (you don’t need to see that). But Kim does, because when a note has the @Article tag, Kim does three things with it. Firstly, she lists the job on an internet-based spreadsheet system that we use to keep track of my earnings, etc. Secondly, she posts the article on a features list blog that I maintain for PR people who want to know what I’m working on. Thirdly, she schedules the feature’s deadline date as an all-day event on Apple’s Mobile Me system. Mobile Me suffered from a lot of synchronisation problems when it first started out, but it seems to talk to my iPhone and Mac properly at this point. So now, I know at the start of each week what articles are due just by glancing at the phone.
Now, I need some interviews arranged. I create a separate note for each company that I want to interview for the article. If I know the PR person or spokesperson directly, I’ll list their contact details for Kim. But sometimes all she gets is a web address for a company that looks interesting, or perhaps even an online news story with instructions to track down someone mentioned there and arrange an interview. In this case, I want to speak with Symantec, and she’s dealt with them before. So I create a new note in the notebook with an ‘@Interview’ tag. Again, that makes it easier for her to find all of the interviews that she’s currently arranging. Other than that, this note says very little:
Then, I sync all this up to the online site using the blue button in the top left hand corner of the window, and the next time Kim syncs, she’ll see it all in her own Evernote client and can begin working on it. The only minor problem with syncing is that you can end up with conflicting changes, but if I Skype her before I sync, to check that she recently synced her own client, we’re good to go. Otherwise, I might have to move the odd task out of a ‘conflicting changes’ folder that Evernote will create. No biggie.
Kim then sends an email to the PR team for each interviewee that I want to approach, explaining who I am and what I’m doing, along with an article brief, deadline information, and background on me. This (usually) gives the PR folks everything they need to get working on something. She can also add her own notes to the relevant tasks in red, and change tags to ‘@Pending’, ‘@Done’ or whatever’s relevant, syncing it back up to the central site so that the next time I sync, I’ll see the current status:
While she does all that, it leaves me with more time to research the subject matter, find other potential contacts, and so on. Any relevant research that I find can also be dropped into the relevant notebook for the feature in Evernote:
and documents that I want to keep after a project is finished can be dragged into the ‘Reference notebook’, which acts like a long-term archive. Evernote lets me do a full text search, so documents like this become easily retrievable.
Evernote’s email dropbox system is also handy for incoming pitches. PR folks who see forthcoming articles listed on the blog will often mail me asking if I’d like to speak to their representatives. Peter has emailed me offering a chat with his client. Sounds good. So while replying to Peter, I forward it via BCC to a special email address provided as part of my Evernote account that I’ve listed with the name ‘In’ in my address book, for easy access. I set that drop box to deliver to the ‘in’ notebook, which is where all mails sent to Evernote initially land:
After I sync Evernote to get the mail into my local client as a note, I drag that mail from the ‘In’ notebook to the “F: Data-centric security” notebook, and use the tags to tell Kim that it’s a potential interview. Next time she logs in, she’ll mail Peter to follow up and arrange the call.
Kim isn’t going to arrange all my calls. There are some investigative stories that I’ll work on where that isn’t appropriate. But for a lot of the trade magazine features-type work, this arrangement can work very well. And if a task is for me rather than her, whether it’s calling a sensitive contact, or just painting the steps of the house, I can handle that in this system, too by creating a list of next action tasks for myself.
My contact Tammi has mailed me telling me that a service I use has been updated, and that I need to update a widget on my web site to use the latest version. So, I mail it to Evernote:
When it shows up there, I will move it to the relevant notebook. All tasks that aren’t part of a project get moved to the ‘Misc’ notebook. If it’s a task that’s part of a project, then I’ll move it to that project notebook instead. I also mark it with the ‘@Danny’ tag to show that it’s a task for me, and in this case, I add a ‘@Computer’ tag to show me that I can do it while I’m at my machine, and a ‘@Next’ tag, telling me that I can do it straight away (it’s an immediate action, and I don’t need to do any other stuff first).
I’m also trying to remember to use time-based tags, based on my estimate of how long that task will take. I don’t think this’ll take longer than half an hour, so I mark it with the ‘@<30m’ tag:
It’s important to handle everything coming across your desk this way. If it’s a paper-based document, scan it and copy it to Evernote. If it’s a Word doc, then print it as a PDF and upload it (Evernote doesn’t consistently seem to accept Office docs in their native format, which is a major failing at the moment, and one I hope they’ll fix soon). If I handle everything coming across my desk in the same way, then I can be confident that when I select the ‘@Danny’ and ‘@Next’ tags from the sidebar, I’ll see all the immediate tasks that I can currently be working on, rather than have to flounder around figuring out what I could be doing. I can get in ‘the zone’ and focus on working my way through the list:
Remember the ‘@<30m’ tag that I put on Tammi’s mail to let me know that this is a task that won’t take longer than half an hour? If I only have 30 minutes of downtime before a meeting, then I can select ‘@Danny’, ‘@Next’ and the ‘@<30m’ tag, to show all the appropriate tasks:
In general, all of this means that I’m getting better at responding to people and getting stuff done in a reasonable time. I’m still not perfect - I flake out occasionally like everyone else, and sometimes forget to review lists and clean up tasks that have been dealt with. Nevertheless, this tool and Kim are both helping me become more reliable, and more responsive, bit by bit.
Danny Bradbury
ITJOURNALIST.COM
Fun with wireless networks
Most tech-heads will know what an SSID is. It’s the public identity of a wireless network that broadcasts itself to the public. You’ll see them in airports and coffee shops all the time. Spark up your laptop and you’ll find “Starbucks wireless”, or “Chicago Airport Public WiFi”, or “Boingo Hotspot”, or somesuch. Normally, those names are quite innocuous. Most people running private ones (eg ones at home, or in offices) encrypt them.
Someone on our block decided not to encrypt theirs. People decide to do this for various reasons. Perhaps they like the idea of providing free access to others (maybe they’re even running a FON box), or perhaps they’re too lazy, or simply don’t understand how to configure it or don’t know they can.
That’s their choice, of course. But what annoyed me is that whoever configured the box decided to give their network a nasty name. Most of the SSIDs on our block say things like “XX family network” (with XX being the name of the family in question). Or something preconfigured like “WIRELESS174″. The people who set up their network a few months ago decided to call theirs “F*ck you guys” instead (asterisk is mine).
Something about that, and the lack of encryption, irked me a little. I guess it offended my genteel Brit sensibilities. It bugged me that they were educated enough to set an SSID, but anti-social enough to engage in a form of electronic coprolalia, effectively shouting expletives at 2.4GHz. It’s not exactly going to ruin the planet, but they are inviting some feisty retaliation. What to do? How about a bit of value-added wardriving?
1) Join the network. Actually, you might be able to join the network even if it’s encrypted, using something like Aircrack. A lot of people assume that an encrypted network is unbreakable, but that’s not true. Many people use short, predictable passwords, and the shorter the password, the easier it is for a program like Aircrack to break by analysing the traffic. A mate of mine cracked a network in his building in about four hours. The guy who owned the network used a four-letter password, and then downloaded huge amounts of Bittorrent data over it. Short password + high traffic throughput = crackable password.
2) Once you’ve joined the network, find the WiFi access point’s administration page. Try http://home, or try entering IP addresses using 192.168 as the first two numbers (192.168.0.1, and 192.168.1.1 are both common).
3) The admin page will tell you what the router is. Take a note of the make and model.
4) Google the make and model, and add ‘default password’ to the search. Ker-bling. Google turns up all sorts of interesting stuff, and it’s amazing how few people configure their wireless routers properly when they install them, especially those that take the trouble to configure the SSID. Why don’t manufacturers randomise the password at the point of manufacture and put a sticker on the back of the hardware? Some do. Others don’t. Why? Because they don’t take security seriously, that’s why.
5) Go back to the administration page and log in as the administrator. Chances are, if they didn’t encrypt the network and they’re using ‘F*ck you guys’ as an SSID, they’re not that smart. Now you own their router.
6) Change the SSID to something you consider more appropriate. Personally, (and you realise, of course, that this is a purely hypothetical discussion), I like ‘We love you guys!’
7) If you’re feeling especially adventurous, you could always set your own password. You know, to protect them from themselves.
If you’re running a wireless network, and you want to protect yourself from people with a wireless card an adventurous streak, here are some pointers:
1) If you don’t intend to make the network public, then turn encryption on and set a long key. Don’t think passwords. Think passphrases. Take the first few words of the first sentence of your favourite book, for example. the longer the password, the longer an automated cracker would take.
2) Again, if you don’t intend to make the network public, then add extra security by configuring the system to only allow certain IP addresses or machines on. Look for MAC or device filtering features to set this.
3) Don’t be a jackass. If you’re going to set your SSID, play nice and use something civilised. It’s still a public space. Ideally, keep the SSID abstract, so that people don’t know whose network SSID they’re looking at and get any ideas. Or, if you want to keep your network really private, turn the SSID off altogether.
4) For godsakes, set the adminstration password! Leave it as default and you will get nobbled, sooner or later.
Happy new year. We love you guys!
In praise of virtual assistants
One of the things about being a freelance writer is that you spend a lot of your time arranging stuff. At any one time I’ve got tens of interviews that I’m trying to arrange simultaneously. Some of those interviews will be arranged directly with the interviewee, some will be through in-house PR, and some will be through agencies.
10% of interviews are easy, of the ’sure, let’s talk now’ or ‘call me tomorrow at 3pm’ variety. 70% involve some toing and froing: numerous email exchanges as PRs valiantly try to co-ordinate suitable times between the spokesperson and I. The rest are spent chasing PRs who for whatever reason ignore emails and calls, or come back declining the interview.
You can optimise the results by being clear up front - send a clear brief, and some general questions that you’re trying to cover off - but the headache and the time spent are directly proportional to the volume of work you have on. When you’re not writing, or interviewing, or reading, you’re worrying about which interview arrangements need chasing up, and constantly flitting between projects, spinning plates.
For 13 years I’ve felt like I’ve been two days behind. The more work I got, the more stressed I felt. There was never enough time to get ahead and start arranging interviews way ahead of time. Consequently, you’d spend days chasing people who were given very little notice, and eventually end up with 10 hours of back-to-back interviews for three days running.
Blogging? Forget it. No time, mate.
Then, I read a post in 43 Folders about the 4-Hour Work Week. It’s one of those management self-help, change-your-working-life-in-two-weeks books that I’m normally very sceptical about. The book’s title says it all. It proposes various ideas to get you there - touchless businesses, location-independent working, and so on - but one that really stuck with me was the idea of getting a virtual assistant.
The premise: find the stuff you do that supports your job but that someone else could do, and get them to do it, leaving you more time to do the valuable stuff. It’s a micro-version of big-ticket outsourcing (but without the five-year contracts, interminable rhetoric about core competencies and process efficiency, and hopefully without the multi-million dollar cock-ups).
One-person businesses generally can’t afford full-time assistants, but Tom Friedman was right with The World is Flat - the Internet really has made the world a smaller place. Because an awful lot of many professionals’ jobs are information-based, you can shunt the associated tasks around relatively easily, to people who only spend a portion of their time on your business, and who don’t require you to pay benefits or holidays.
So, I thought I’d give it a go.
I tried calling two organisations that Esquire editor A J Jacobs mentioned in his similar experiment. Both of these firms are in India. Brickwork sounded excellent, but failed to return the two queries I sent through the web form and the follow-up call I made. Strike one. Get Friday, a Brickwork competitor, failed to get back to me after an email query and four calls. This was beginning to look like hard work.
I checked out a number of North American virtual assistants via elance, and eventually found one I liked the look of. At the same time, another Indian firm came back to me and offered me a week’s trial. So I decided to compare them to each other over a week, asking them to arrange interviews for two separate articles. My proposition was simple: I’d give them the brief, and a deadline, and a contact or two to arrange interviews with. I use a shared Backpack account for them to arrange interviews on, which syncs with iCal.
The Indian firm didn’t work out. It was cheap at $5 per hour, but there was a reason for that. It sent out a message meant for me to the target PR person by mistake (the PR person and I have a good relationship and he’d agreed to be used as a guinea pig, so he knew that this was experimental and that things might go awry). It couldn’t handle appointments in different time zones, and it when the PR person suggested an interview time, it booked an appointment in my calendar without confirming back with him. It also took days to come back to me after I’d sent it a task. I suspect I could have spent a couple of weeks handholding the firm through things, but frankly, I wanted to save time, not invest more of it.
The US firm I tried was three times the price, but still less than half the price of most other VAs that I researched. It’s fronted by an MBA grad called Heather, who also owns the business. She handles all the virtual assistant tasks, but can also outsource to her team, who can take over if she’s sick, or away.
I started by having her book hair appointments, and lunch with a mate, just to ease into things and see how she did (the firm is a concierge service too). No problem. I started testing her with non-guinea-pig interview targets and it went well. Appointments started popping up in my calendar. I did the interviews. Great. Suddenly the time I spent arranging an interview fell from what seemed like hours to…well, no time at all, really.
I tried Heather on less structured tasks. “Find and order me a wireless doorbell for the office (she takes Paypal, so no credit card details are necessary)”. “Find me a supplier for a piece of magnetic metal, 5 x 5 feet, and arrange a quote”. No problem.
Then: “I read on a blog that Rogers Wireless has an exclusive on the iPhone. When’s it shipping? I want one for review.” She contacted Rogers, and also without prompting went to a mate of hers at Bell Canada, and eventually found the head PR bloke (who I happen to know). Rogers denied all knowledge. Bell is shipping in Q4. This was starting to get really good.
Now, I’m sending tasks like these:
“Read this news article. Find the guy who they quoted and set up an interview with him.”
“Here are six company web sites. Arrange interviews with all of them for this article.”
“I need to review this laptop for the National Post. Please sort it.” It arrived this week.
She also sources photos, and when a PR plays silly buggers, like trying to arrange an interview at 9am UK time having been told that I live in Canada, she handles it. The only thing that appears on my radar is the eventual interview appointment, or the explanation for why it didn’t pan out (at which point, I can either step in for some stronger persuasion, or direct her to another likely interviewee) .
Last Wednesday, two weeks after starting with her, was my first no-panic day. The end of the week was spent clearing some outstanding long-term tasks. Today, I cleaned up the office. This week, I’m going to spend time actually planning my writing and other businesses for a change, and setting some goals.
The work benefits are significant. Less than three weeks in with her, I’m doing just a few interviews each day, and for my upcoming features, I already have most of my research and interviews done at least a week before I need to submit the copy. I’m finding myself with way more time for background research, and more time to think about the interviews I’m doing, and the writing.
The personal benefits are even more important. Last Friday, I actually got to knock off early and spend the afternoon with the kids, having just sent Heather a bunch of interviews to arrange. This Wednesday afternoon, I’m probably heading off home to make art in the studio for the first time in months (and the first time ever, in the day). On Mondays, I might start going for a matinee (my office is in a rep cinema).
The cost? Less than the revenue from a feature article each month. The benefits? Time, which as both a writer and a parent, is the most precious commodity for me. If I wanted to fill the time I’m saving with more work, I could sell more articles and make more dough, but I don’t think I will. I’m hitting my financial targets, (with the cost of the service factored in), and for the first time in years, I’m relishing the ability to take some ‘me’ time and some more family time.
Finally, Get Friday came back to me, two weeks after my query, but I’m sorted now. I may not be working four hours a week, but I’m working way less than I did, and the work that remains on my desk is more valuable to me. I was prepared to see this experiment crash and burn, but all in all, not a bad result. Not a bad result at all. If you’re feeling perpetually snowed under, then finding a virtual assistant is well worth a try, I’d say.
Danny Bradbury
LinkedIn for research
I’ve been mucking around with LinkedIn. I’ve had an account for ages, passively amassed about 65 contacts on it, but didn’t really do very much with it. Then, someone asked me to write an article on social networking so I went and had a play. Blimey. It’s the new Sourcewire.
Automated pitching services like Sourcewire have been around for a long time. I used to use them a bit, and I programmed my own web site so that PR bods could pitch interviewees for articles. But I ended up binning Sourcewire and turning off my own site, because I found myself wading through lots of PR pitches that were more or less the same. You run the risk of doing journalism by numbers if you fall into the habit of using these services too systematically.
The other problem is that when you respond to a PR pitch, you’re going through a PR consultant before you get to speak to the interviewee. Love ‘em while I do (some of my best friends, etc etc), no matter how good a PR person is, they’re essentially a stepping stone to an actual interview with the expert.
So these days I rarely accept PR pitches for interviews, unless they’re really targeted, and from people I know and trust. Instead, I do more of what I’ve always done and manually find the people that I know I want to talk to. It’s fine, it’s easy and it’s what journalism is all about. ‘Nuff said.
But when I was playing with LinkedIn, I checked out the Answers feature, and oh my, does this contain a lot of possibilities. Given that I was writing an article on it I thought I’d test it out, and asked a question related to another article I was working on, just to see what would happen. I got back about six answers - all very relevant, intelligent, and right on the money. And the answers came directly from people associated with the subject. No intermediaries, no proxies. And I was able to check out their profiles to assess their background. This lets you know where they work, so you could call up their company, ask to speak to them, have a conversation and verify that they’re creditable.
This strikes me as a more honed, targeted way of supplementing your research and unlike some automated PR services it also means that you’re likely to end up speaking with people who haven’t paid for PR (which is a limiting factor elsewhere). It’s not something that you’d use as your only form of research, of course, but it’s a useful tool nonetheless.
I don’t think Facebook (which is trouncing LinkedIn in terms of numbers) will be useful for this. It’s too consumer-focused, even though it’s now being discussed by the business community, and there doesn’t seem to be an ability to reach out across an extended network in the same way.
Danny Bradbury
Is it time for us to stop flying?
I was in the states for a couple of days in December. It was only a short flight—about 1,600 miles one way and then back again. I saw a new town, met the CEO and a few other execs, picked up a few story ideas and a quote or three for some features I was working on, and then we went to dinner.
On the drive to the restaurant, we all got onto the subject of global warming. We talked about the Al Gore documentary and shook our heads sadly, as I have done with like-minded people many times before. “It seems pretty obvious to me, from the evidence at hand, that it’s a reality and that we’re changing the planet,” said one exec.
Fun time, very productive, and aside from the business stuff, we all felt very wise, having put the world to rights. The next day I sped home.
As soon as I got back, my wife mentioned an interesting show she’d heard on CBC Radio. The guest was Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who wrote “Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.” Monbiot was discussing ecotourism in the context of climate change, arguing that it was a paradoxical concept. By flying to get to the places that are in danger of disappearing or being drastically altered due to climate change, he worries that people are contributing to the climate change that is causing them to disappear.
So how much to planes contribute to global warming? I did a bit of digging. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the contribution of aviation to global climate change at about 3.5 per cent in 1992. It presents varying scenarios for future emissions from the aviation sector, drawing data from different organizations. The projections predict that the contribution to radiative forcing from aircraft will increase by between 2.4 per cent to 11 per cent over 1992 levels by 2050.
Issues factored into these scenarios include the likely possibility that regions currently expanding their air travel industries now will be able to do so more quickly than already-established regions did, because the technology for commercial air flight is now readily and cheaply available. Consequently, a lot of the scenarios show accelerated growth for air travel as these regions develop economically and then come online.
What does Monbiot say about this? Don’t fly, basically, unless your life depends on it. Enough talk, he says, what we need is action, and that requires sacrifices. Planning a business trip that isn’t absolutely essential? Forget it. Want to fly and see your loved ones each year? Don’t—go and see them every few years, and stay for longer.
Of course all of that would hurt. It has a significant impact on our everyday lives, and to be frank I don’t know if I could stop having my mum over every year, or forego the luxury of seeing friends and family occasionally. My mum’s over sixty. I like to see her as often as I can and once a year isn’t enough for me as it is.
But it does lead me to question our use of business trips. Whenever a company has called me and said “Come see us” I’ve generally gone. It has meant two or three days out of the office, which lowers my productivity, but I have gone anyway on the basis that meeting new people and learning new things will be worth the trip. Now, however, I’m becoming less certain that this is a good thing and I’m searching around for alternatives.
Consequently, I’m starting to change my mind about videoconferencing. Until now I’ve seen it as a bit of a gimmick, but I’d like to think that it might be able to replace at least some of the trips that we take, and make the face to face meetings less frequent. I don’t know about you but on the press trips I often attend, 90 per cent of the time is spent sitting in front of PowerPoint slides anyway.
What would be missing from the videoconference is the social bit—the one-to-one chats over coffee or dinner after the presentation, which is often where most of the good stories come from. You don’t get the same level of interaction over a video link, because they’re still so formal. If I conducted a videoconference rather than flying to see that firm in December, I may not have sat next to one guy at dinner and talked to him about his job before he came to this company, or discussed with another what it was like to live and work in that particular town. But sometimes I think the sacrifices may be worth it.
And I do believe that those more natural interactions would come, if the arrangements were not so formal. If we were all cammed up and we could just flick a switch and start visual nattering, conversations would become more fluid.
The trouble is that most of us working in the technology sector aren’t really geared up to do this. Since when did a corporate procurement department include a webcam in a standard desktop spec? I use a Mac now, and an iSight camera. On lower-end Macs, the cameras are for the most part built in. When other Macced-up friends pop up on instant messenger and we talk, it’s magic. It just works, and the quality is very good. But PC equipment is designed to be as cheap as possible, which means that few corps will tolerate the extra few bucks necessary for a built-in camera.
I’ve started fielding the question of video conferences with people when they ask me on trips. No wonder that when I ask this question, people seem a little doubtful and tell me they’ll get back to me (I’m still waiting and I’m not hopeful). It’s understandable because ad hoc videoconferencing isn’t part of a normal working day for them or the executives they represent.
It’s a bizarre world that we live in. I’m constantly hearing rhetoric about the communications revolution, and yet we’ve all been taught that it’s perfectly natural to spend days out of the office and burn tons of fuel just so that we can feel someone’s handshake and get the weight of them. The more that I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe that there’s something very wrong with this.
Shouldn’t we begin travelling less for business, and trying to build the infrastructures that enable us to do that? That way, the next time I start telling someone how shocked I was by An Inconvenient Truth, my words won’t feel quite as hollow.
Danny Bradbury
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