email

Would you believe United States employees cost their employers $650 billion in productivity costs in the seconds it takes for them to return attention back to the task at hand? The time spans lost are the same amount of time required to interpret a CAPTCHA. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. are all distractions from getting the work done. Those who choose to disconnect or limit the distractions improve their productivity. At least that is what the technology corporations studying the problem have decided. I have my doubts. This sounds like a restating of “all employees with access to the Internet just surf all day and get nothing done.”

What I like about instant messengers is they are more efficient than email but cheaper than a long distance phone call. By marking availability status, employees alert others not to contact them. Employees also may ignore messages until they have are done concentrating on the task at hand. Another article, also from the New York Times, supports this view employees using instant messengers effectively are not distracting.

Looking at an alert just to decide whether to respond would “waste time.” Then again, so would talking about a cool movie, the family, or any of the standard means of bonding which establish trust between individuals (without which far more time would be wasted in mistrust).

Guess there will be more research to debate what is really the problem.

Information is only valuable when found. It is great someone took notes during the conference call, but four months later, when I do not recall the date of the meeting or who sent the notes, I’ll rely on my computer searching for it.

Thunderbird returns pretty quickly when it searches subjects only. So I will start there. I will try a few terms. Probably it will yield a few results without what I seek or too many results to browse through because people rarely use descriptive subjects.

Next, I will turn to searching the bodies of emails. As long as the notes were taken by someone technical, they will be text in the body of the email. So I will find them easily. Non-technical folks send the notes inside Word or Excel documents. So I won’t find the notes.

Not finding information because notes are inside attachments has burned me lately, so I have taken to copying out the text and sending it to myself as regular text.

Doesn’t it always look like this?

1. User runs script against service.
2. Script operates so quickly and sucks so much traffic its obvious its a script.
3. Service’s automates systems detects the abuse.
4. User gets automated notice about violation of Terms of Use and prevention from accessing the site.
5. User pitches a fit because he is “famous”.

Services lock out abusive users because people conducting this kind of activity cause slowness. I’ve personally caught people doing this. How I got them to stop usually depended on my ability to contact them. People I knew or others directly knew, a phone call was enough to resolve it.

People outside of my social circle usually got an email and found their account locked. Doing so prevented their scripts from working. At Valdosta State, I would leave instructions at the Helpdesk for the offender to have to contact me in order to regain access to the account. Tyrrannical, I know.

UPDATE: So, it turns out Scoble was using an alpha of Plaxo Pulse. The ideas was to download ~5,000 images of Scoble’s contacts’ email addresses, text names, and text birthdays. Then the software would match them against people in Plaxo. He could then sync Plaxo with his Outlook address book for a good contact list.

He accuses Facebook of singling him out as others have not been caught. (Were the others trying to download and push 5,000 in a few seconds?) He also accuses Facebook of being hypocritical… They import contact information from other sources, but they do not allow anyone to export the same information.

I still think a user hitting 5,000 images for email addresses look like a spammer. Of course, I think Scoble is a spammer … Maybe its confirmation bias?

I’m so vain…. I probably think this post is about me….

Probably only people who do vanity searches notice this, but there are spiders pulling names off web sites. They link the names to companies, blogs, and other web content. Supposedly, these sites allow online reputation control. Rather than you claiming your identity as others in this market, they list you in their database with the hopes you claim it.

See, you probably have accounts on several web sites. The idea is to both aggregate the accounts and prove ownership. If your name is John Smith, then you probably are getting confused with other John Smiths. You’ll provide where you work, contact info, which sites belong to you. The site will provide a feed showing your activity in each of these.

My name is pretty unique. If you saw my full name on a site, then would you doubt that its me. Okay, let’s forget the guy who masqueraded with my name a few years ago. Lots of people say I have the best names. He took it too far. By contrast, there are others with my first name who pop up higher in Google. So, you’d need the whole thing. I notice people arrive at this site by putting that name in search engines, so I am pretty sure it works. Naturally, all the sites where I wish to stay under the radar don’t have my name on them.

See… I knew I’d make this post about me.

Am I the only one who remembers fascination with the Deep Web (aka Invisible Web)? The idea of these online reputation services, I think, is to bring positive content up in rankings up to the more shallow areas. Trick is, the users need to be aware of what is and is not positive. Linking your name to your Facebook (used to be Deep Web but less and less of late) profile and giving the world access to pictures of you passed out drunk probably isn’t positive online reputation control.