I’m writing this from the plane, as I travel to Cambridge at Forrester’s HQ to teach a Social Computing Workshop with Peter Kim tomorrow. As I daydreamed while watching the clouds go by, I couldn’t help by reflecting on all the stupid things I’ve heard in my short 9 year career, here’s the real nuggets:
Here’s some ridiculous things I’ve heard in my short career of 9 years in web:
“The company is fine, despite some streamlining, we’re on a growth track” (My former CEO before we went Chapter 11 at Exodus Communications, FAIL)
“All those guys in the other group are assholes” J.M. (Hmm, if you think everyone else is the asshole, doesn’t that make you the asshole JM?)
“Yes, of course our system is scalable” Sales Guy, CMS company (before we deployed an un-scalable and inflexible CMS system)
“I read you email, my assistant printed it out for me this morning” executive at a large bank (during my meeting with him about the intranet)
“We’ve got that feature, here’s a screenshot of what we’ve got in development and in our roadmap” -web product manager (I reported to this guy, and he asked me to make mock ups of what we were going to deliver during an analyst review…we never implemented)
“Blogging is a fad” Web Developer at Hitachi Data Systems (guess not)
“Second life is amazing, there’s a future there” -Jeremiah Owyang (everyone’s smitten by cool technology, I’ve since learned)
“I can’t access the ‘C’ Server” -A mid-level business manager said to me (referring to her local drive)
“Backup? Nah, I just make changes to the live code” -Said a .net web developer (just hours before overwriting 3 days of development, oops)
Need to rant? here’s your chance: Add you own below, but no reason to leave the perp’s name, unless they’ve stated it in public. On a related note, my new favorite blog is the FAIL Blog, have a laugh, at the expense of others you mean son of a gun.
I know you’re quoting me with that “Blogging is a fad” remark. 😉 To be clear, when I said that, “blogging” was still a relatively new term and I was referring to the specific act of people writing “web logs” about themselves and their personal activities and interests. (That includes the HDS C-level blogs.) Which I still feel is sort of a fad. There are constantly people setting up new blogs (I’m referring to the old “web log” definition of blog here), but there are constantly people abandoning their blogs because they lose interest. So it’s no so much a fad for a specific time in history, but more of a personal fad that many people try and then move on. I think I am a perfect example of blogging being a personal fad. I tried it, I didn’t like it, I moved on.
But aside from the personal journals or “web logs”, today the term “blogging” has become much more broad and generalized and can refer to just about any sort of self-publication that has some sort of syndication and/or forum for feedback. This could be news sites, web comics, tutorials, etc. Basically what we call a “blog” in 2008 is what we would have called a “personal web site” in 1998. So by modern definition, blogging really just refers to self-publication, and that is definitely not a fad.
Did I use enough quotation marks?
When I worked at a large healthcare insurance company:
“Please print out every page of the intranet/corporate internet” (Chief Communications Officer of the company who had lost the web to the IT division but wanted it back).
“Read it on the Big E” (employee referring to our intranet site – the Big E was Microsoft Employer).
Thousands of inane remarks about our enterprise level, purely WYSIWYG CMS tool. Essentially, people wanted a big red button that would do everything.
When I worked for a large dot-com:
“Do not sell your shares.” A few days later, the CEO cashed out for about $70 million and we were all underwater.
From large publishing co mgment in 1996, re my content requests for their corporate website:
“Please tell Perry that we’re ready for her little internet project to be over so we can all get back to work.”
The conclusion of a Boston Consulting Group presentation at Charles Schwab in early 1996:
“The Internet MAY win”
(vs. proprietary online services such as Prodigy and CompuServe…remember them?!)