Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Due to playing a little bit more with JotSpot, I now created ourselves a little last changed miniWindow for our Toolbar. I really like to know what is changing around me, so something like this should be on the main page or somewhere else. I opted for the Toolbar as there is an error message for people using the WYSIWYG editor on the main page otherwise.

The script is rather simple.

<jot:miniWindow title=”Latest Changes” contentStyle=”font-size:8pt;” width=”80″ hidden=”false”>
<jot:search order=”editTime-” set=”nodeResult” limit=”5″ forAll=”true” />
<jot:loop over=”nodeResult” set=”node”>
   1. [[wiki:${node/path}][${node/name}]] (${node/time/relative} by ${node/user})
</jot:loop>
</jot:miniWindow>

Remember that the spaces are important. A 3 whitespace indent before the 1 will make this into a list going from 1 to 5 (due to the limit=”5″) in the loop. You simply need to create this code in something like LastChangedBox within your Wiki and then include that in your Toolbar (simply click edit in the toolbar and it will be self explanatory). Bingo, you now have your last 5 changes pages, with the time from now and who changed them in your toolbar.

Ralf posted a deep one again entitled Swarms, Pipelines, Design Thinking and Heraclitus. He is really pushing the blogging part in his work and I highly recommend reading his blog. But I wanted to comment on a few things because in many I agree violently.

For one, focus on the user. Yes! Yes! Yes! Who does really bring you the money? I mean really! This is especially true for web sites. You can’t build your web site for the advertiser in mind. You need to build it for the user, because the user is the one that at the end brings in the money. Without users you are nothing. Of course, you still have a ballance between all your stakeholders, but the user is the one that counts counts counts.

Prototyping… hell yes! We are clearly running into wicked problems with innovation as the right path is not paved yet. We are walking around on a plane hoping to find fertile ground and we need to walk. This means you need to change things around, try stuff, measure, watch.

Observation; Orientation; Decision; Action - Boyd’s OODA loop

The wide range of influences that Ralf talks about is really more than a range of influence in one person, it is as Victor Lombardi said in his post, about collaboration. You don’t develop a product on your own and that’s what strangely often is thought with web sites.

The emotion part is really important but that is more of a management issue. You need to make people feel your emotion, pull them along and push them further out.

Leaders don’t just make products and make decisions. Leaders make meaning. - John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC

If your company has no meaning, then it will not build great products. You will build good ones, but there will be no emotion attached to them.

Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but it is not the purpose of living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not hte reason for its existence. - Dennis Bakke, CEO, AES

Ralf currently seems to be working, with others, on setting up something he called Design Thinking Institute. Ralf, I am suggesting registered with JotSpot for a team Wiki. If it is a none profit thing I am pretty sure we can work something out. Just contact me.

Through charlie’s post I came to Darla Mack’s post entiteld Nokia 20 Lives Kicks Off on September 19. The post gives a good roundup about what the game replacing the now famous yearly Nokia Game will be all about. In short, you will be stepping into the lives of 20 different people and live their lives, make their decisions. The prices will be related to the different lives the people you step into lead, like a trip to a Formula 1 weekend in Monaco. Check out the game at www.nokia.com/20Lives/

John Battelle has a good link to a the WSJ. The article makes me remember my Gasoil Inc thoughts again (By the way, Gasoil is not listed in the personal profiles of the Google people anymore.) As the article states, it looks like Google is thinking themselves that GOOG is overvalued. They have no apparent reason to sell another $4 billion in stock, unless they think it will crash sooner or later, which means getting cash is good. On top of that, Insiders have sold $3 billion in stock (!!! $3 billion !!!) and internally, Google now does not issue stock options anymore (which would be worthless if the stock crashes) but Google Stock Units, which will not crash with the stock price it seems. All highly strange stuff if you think about it. Oh, and Google’s Talk service, which is built on Jabber, is all right but it seems to be only able to talk to people that use Jabber with Google Talk accounts and now with all the Jabber users. So much for interoperability.

Yes! You can now customize your outgoing eMail Address in GMail, meaning that you can enter a different eMail into your GMail account that is used as the From: Address in all outgoing eMails. This makes the POP and SMTP access a lot more convenient if you are really using it for another eMail address that you just forward to GMail. Here is the Help Center page about it: Gmail:Help Center.