Hm... This study is interesting.  I mean we all take email overload as a given.  What if it isn't?

Contrary to the perception that workers are flooded with e-mail, most workers are happy with their e-mail levels and believe that it helps them in their work.

A new US-based survey carried out by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that e-mail is now used by more than 57 million workers, almost double the number that used it two years ago.

The survey found that the average American who uses e-mail at work spends about a half hour handling e-mail and that the majority of work e-mailers receive ten or fewer e-mails a day and send five or fewer.  [_Go_] [_More_]

And there is even a Slashdot discussion on it. [_Go_]  Bear in mind that the Slashdot discussion is more about Spam in offices than the email overload side of it.

That's a very interesting finding -- most of us real tech heads are actually overloaded with email -- but most of us aren't tech heads.  It does make you think that perhaps since the influential people tend to bitch about email so much that it may have helped create this myth.

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I see that Dave is asking if the SuperNova conference really matters:

It seems like it's been forever since I've been to an industry conference. Today's Supernova, with keynotes from execs from IBM and Microsoft and Howard Rheingold certainly qualifies as an industry conference. Then Jeremy Allaire and Mitch Kapor, both of whom have recently discovered weblogs, and are infused with interesting ideas. Then a panel with several weblog people. It's an unusual conference since I know so many of the people presenting, but I have mixed feelings about it.

Am I the only one who thinks we're not going back to the way things used to work? This conf is too close to the kinds of conferences we used to have before it all came crashing down. It's as if Esther passed the baton to Kevin, who used to be a key planner of her conferences. But does anything actually happen other than congratulations you're still here this year at these conferences? Is it in poor taste to say that I wouldn't go if it weren't 15 minutes away and a freebie for me because I'm speaking? Yeah, it is in poor taste, but I have to say it anyway. Maybe the conference will exceed my expectations. Right now they're pretty low.  [_Go_]

It strikes me, although know that I wasn't there and wasn't invited, that this type of conference really isn't relevant anymore.  Dave's right on this one.  I see the innovation popping up on the edges of the network.  Look at how Napster emerged from the edge of the network and then came to redefine the Music industry.  Or the same way that instant messaging arose back in the early ICQ days.  Or how UserLand came to define important standards like RSS< XML-RPC and Soap.  That's where the innovation will occur -- it's not at the big companies -- its out on the net and in the hands of the unknowns.  No wonder big companies just hate this brave new world.

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John's finding that Outlook has limitations when used without an Exchange Server:

I work at a company where there are roughly 900 employees. There are many different platforms and OSes running thoughout the organization: Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, Windows (name your favorite flavor), various flavors of *nix and other proprietary stuff in between. We don't have an Exchange Server at all, yet my department uses Outlook XP (great upgrade to Outlook 2000 btw). The first thing I tried to do was show some of the office staff how to share calendars last Monday... little did I know that we weren't able to do that... and the sad thing is, to me that's over half the value of Outlook. [_Go_]

Note: If I was at work and folks were around I'd save this link for later due to John's pretty pictures.

I think John's definitely right about this -- not only is NOT being able to share calendars bad but, what's worse, is that Outlook / Exchange client used to have this and Microsoft took it out.  Clearly to drive more sales of Exchange Server.

But you know something?  Even if they had an Exchange Server, their wide variety of clients -- Mac, Unix, Windows, etc, would prohibit everyone from taking advantage of it anyway.  Exchange Server really works best with Outlook as its client.  I'm sure there might be a way to take advantage of it from a Mac but for everyone else?  Nope.  This makes me think that WebCalendar might be interesting to him.

WebCalendar is how we personally do calendaring and we recmmented it to our consulting clients as well.  WebCalendar is a web based, open source, php implemented calendar.  It is totally free (GPL), supports single user and multiple user events and works like a snap.  Here's how we make it seamless: We tell our clients to drag the link to it into their Outlook Sidebar.  This means that it can be clicked on from our Outlook just as if it was the Outlook Calendar.  [_Picture_] [_More_]

The big disadvantage here is that you don't have an offline version of your calendar.  Although we haven't implemented it yet, we know how to solve this -- setup the calendaring system with either an automatic job or a manual function which emails an HTML version of your current calendar to your Outlook account.  Is that perfect?  No.  Is it better than paying for Exchange server for 900 employees if all you really need is calendaring?  You bet your life it is.  Although, since I use this on a daily basis, I'm definitely biased here.

Oh and here's the obligatory advertisment: If you need a calendaring system for your company let me know.  We've done this for clients and it's a very powerful, very sophisticated calendar that we can install for you.

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I see from Mitch's weblog that Chandler, the new Open Source PIM and email software, that they have new staff:

Welcome Chao Lam, Chandler Product Manager and serial entrepreneur; Lou Montulli, founding member of the Netscape engineering team and inventor of the browser cookie; and Aleks Totic, also a Netscape founding engineer. [_Go_]

The addition of a product manager to Chandler is a very, very interesting decision.  Few if any Open Source projects have a product manager and almost all of them suffer from it.  So this to me is very positive news for Chandler.  By having a non-engineer responsible for guiding the product towards completion (that's a huge part of what a product manager does), I suspect they will end up with a product with a much higher degree of fit and finish than most Open Source projects.  Awesome!

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I've never been a fan of the orange XML button which indicates your RSS feed.  On the positive side it is so small that it will fit into almost any blog layout but it always struck me that it didn't tell the blog novice anything about what it meant.  I mean XML != RSS.  I see over on the Kalsey Group that he's got a new design for his RSS buttons which is actually pretty nice.  They're located on the right, bottom of his blogroll.  Definitely worth checking out.  I hate to see existing UI conventions broken but there's good stuff in this new look and feel.  [_Go_]

Note: I know that this wasn't 100% his idea but I lost the link to the person who inspired his design. 

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Thanks to Dave I found this very interesting bit of research about weblog metrics.  Given that blogging still isn't all that well understood, it is really nice to see some actual research.  And even a pretty graph!

In particular, I wanted to know if there were correlations between things I control (frequency and length of posts and outbound links), and things I don't control (inbound links and other influences). So here's what I found (and this is hardly scientifically conclusive given that it's a one-off): [_Go_]

His point that "Frequency of posts is overwhelmed by celebrity, but may be important for non-celebs" is definitely on track, imho.  I've always thought that my near religious addiction to either posting something daily or at least stating that I wasn't posting that day helped my readership a lot.  And that's always by advice to people who want to get more traffic to their blogs -- post regularly.  Readership, like anything else, is a habit.  And you need to train readers to have that habit.

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I'm very much not a political zealot.  Nor am I generally interested but even I found this article at Kuro5hin.org very, very interesting:

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government. [_Go_]

To me this was an even scarier part of the same essay:

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change.

Do I agree with all of it?  Of course not.  Do I think the author has some very valid points?  Yes.  It does seem like we are in a rush to take hard won civil liberties and chuck them out the window.  Definitely worth reading.

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