Changes

Changes, changes, changes... Please, do not tell my mum about them, because she would be very upset with me!

Last July I took a two years leave from IBM. In a very smart move (in my opinion), IBM is paying me a third of my salary during a period that is forecasted to be of low business. I am allowed to work (and I need to!), but, obviously, I cannot work for IBM's competitors. They are investing this money to get a re-energized employee or, if the employee doesn't go back, to have him leave without having to lay him off, saving quite a bit of money.

I plan to take advantage of this by doing lots of learning and following some long time interests that I was performing on top of my formal role of at IBM: dealing/trying to make sense of organizations and teaching.

So what have I being doing during this months? Besides lots of reading and learning, Ganyet, Banzy and I toyed with the idea of working together in super-secret super-cool project, but, after a few weeks, I did not find a way to fit my skills into their needs; it is a pity, because world domination is in their road map.

When I left university, I should have made a project to become officially an engineer. I then joined IBM, and I was not disciplined enough to spend my free time finishing the project that I just started before joining. Almost 20 years later, I'm fixing that. And I'm very excited about it, because my project is about the software that should help to build a community around 1x1microcredit.org, a peer-to-peer micro-lending website that will offers people the possibility to lend money at low interest rates to poor people so that they can escape poverty, just like kiva.org. PHP aside, I feel very lucky for being able to work in a project that is technically cool and has an even cooler goal.

Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter

Sacha Chua rocks, as usual

Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

Tweets my friends like

Twitter lets you mark as favorites the tweets you like. Some people doesn't care about this, but others do add stars to tweets that are fun, enlightening, or both. I wanted to be aware of what my twitter friends mark as favorite, and after no obvious google hit, Yahoo! Pipes came again to the rescue.


The pipe creates a feed with the tweets that some one's contacts have marked as a favorite. Keep in mind that it only works for the up to 36 contacts that are shown in a user's page, since I did not want to get into the authentication issues required to get a full list of contacts. If you want, you can add additional users, that don't need to be your contacts.

Customize it with your accounts and grab it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/friendsfavs.

Credits: Microformat-scrapping the page is the only way I that found to get access to a list of contacts without authentication. I used Duane Cato's Microformats contacts extractor as a starting point, and just copied how he uses http://microformatique.com/optimus/ to grab the info that twitter kindly puts in hCards.

Social Note Taking

I just played a bit with Ripplerap, a tool to take and share notes during conferences. Brilliant. If downloading and unziping is too much for you to get an impression, take a look at Phil Whitehouse's ripplerap-is-about-to-be-born post.

It is in its infancy, and there are several things that need some ironing, but I believe that its simplicity gives it a huge potential. Good news for us compulsive note takers and/or conference-life-blogging addicts.

And I must confess that I did not see much of a point in one of Ripplerap bulding blocks, TiddlyChatter...

Update: It is a funny coincidence that the very same day that I played with Ripplerap for the first time, fellow IBMer Sacha Chua - tech evangelist, storyteller, geek - made me aware of this collecton of tips for conference bloggers.

Rethink ourselves

Me-too post about a popular and highly rated video: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us (4:30 minutes). I loved it.

Update:
Bonus links: A transcript and the video on Mojity, a cool video+comments mashup.

Del JazzSí a Tagzania passant pel Flickr

Buscant-me un concert baratet al JazzSí, ensopego amb Tagzania o Tagging the planet: tags, llocs i mapes. Bona idea.

Sembla què ara hi ha quatre gats que ho fan servir, i la cosa perd gràcia (em precipito cap a aquesta conclusió en veure que no hi ha res etiquetat aprop de casa meva). I si té molts usuaris, funcionarà? O hi haurà massa soroll? Em caldrà veure on és la casa de la teva tieta Conxita?

El concepte és molt similar al de wikimapia.org (e.g. bars a barcelona? en falten alguns...).

El blog dels tagzans (Conspiring for world domination from the Basque Country. Tagging the planet to set up our targets) és xulo. I em fa guardar-me la url dels fd's flickr toys (no, no cal flickr-ejar per fer-ne servir alguns).

dW chats: Grady Booch on the latest Rational tools release

Another developerWorks chat that looks very interesting: Grady Booch answers your questions about this week's Rational tools release. On Thursday December 7th, at 4:30 pm his time or 10:30 pm my time.

I did not learn about this from Booch's blog itself, but from a comment by Ferran Rodenas to a post in Kelly Drahzal's blog. The interesting bit about this is that Ferran works for "la Caixa", a very important ibm client, and it is a very good thing for me and some team mates to be able to read his posts and keep track of his blogroll. Or explore his linkedin profile and our common connections. The openess that blogs and social software have brought rocks!