Black Country Communion

It's not often I feel the urge to write a review of a single song.

Planet Rock sent me an email today, promoting their showcase this evening for Black Country Communion's self-titled début album.

Not surprisingly, I immediately Googled for the band's web site. Promising - Jason Bonham, Joe Bonamassa, Glenn Hughes (all of whom I'd heard of and respected), and Derek Sherinian, a name new to me. With that kind of line-up, it should be a no-lose.

From that site, I hopped across to their MySpace page. That page only had one song - One Last Soul - to show for itself. A little sparse for an album release; I'd expect snippets from most or all of the tracks. Enough, already: let's hear it!

What an utter disappointment.

A track that white-bread parents would be comfortable for their 11-y-o son to own

"One Last Soul" has been produced to within a gnat's firkin of its life. The song itself is a monument to early 1980s Big Hair Rock, American style. Aerosmith, Europe, Def Leppard all spring to mind, not Led Zeppelin, nor more recent rockers. The track has nothing to say to me at all. It reminds me of all the AOR albums that came out in my student days - albums I never wanted to pay money to own, and gifts I would probably have passed on to more appreciative friends. There's no rock honesty here - just a track that white-bread parents would be comfortable for their 11-year-old son to own.

If this is the best that Black Country Communion can come up with - and given that it was the only promotional track on their MySpace page, we must assume so - then they ought to pull the big wigs off their balding scalps and retire to spend more time with their royalties. Sorry, but there it is. I don't need a banal track so over-polished I can see my razor stubble in it.

[Later addition]
Some time after I wrote this, I ended up on Black Country Communion's YouTube page. There were other tracks here. "Mistreated", a live performance evidently videoed by a fan (given the poor quality of both picture and sound); and "The Great Divide", filmed in the recording studio and overdubbed with the final mix.

A lot of fake emoting over dressed-up arpeggios

Mistreated is an improvement upon One Last Soul, but not by much, and The Great Divide is probably the best track of them all. Not that that's a great recommendation; more like damnation by faint praise. Both tracks involve a lot of fake emoting over what are essentially dressed-up arpeggios. Can some of rock's leading lights not manage better than this? I thought better of Planet Rock, too. Still, since they got an exclusive live performance, I suppose they were duty-bound to set their critical faculties to one side and use it to their best advantage.

[Even later addition!]
All is revealed! I hadn't been on the Planet Rock website for a while, so I hadn't realised that Joe Bonamassa is actually an occasional presenter at Planet Rock! Even if it is for just one show a month, at an inconvenient time slot: last Saturday in the month at 6pm. I wonder which was the chicken, and which the egg: did he take the gig to get BCC promoted through Planet Rock, or did his pre-existing presenter slot mean Planet Rock was honour-bound to do the launch show?

Actually, in all fairness I suspect it was a lot simpler than that, and less cynical: he probably gave them the launch party on a plate, and they said, "Ta very much, we like exclusives!"

Airport TV shows

You know, when there's a reality police show presented by some testosterone-boosted tooth-enhanced ex-Sheriff type, it starts with a load of legal boilerplate along the lines of "We're not showing this to entertain you (heaven forfend!), it's to educate you on what goes wrong when you break the law and run away from the cops afterwards."

But funnily enough, airport shows don't. The endless capacity of would-be passengers to admit the fault of anyone but themselves never ceases to amaze me. They probably watch the programmes at home, and jeer at the arrogant jerks who think that every rule will bend in the face of a loud enough complaint - then they arrive at Gatport Airwick (I might have got that wrong) and turn into just the same kind of clueless bozo they so despised last night.

So I thought, why not have some boilerplate for airport shows instead? Here's mine. Imagine the opening titles, and Sheriff Teeth (Ret'd) intoning this over them:

1. If you arrive at check-in after it's closed, it's closed, regardless of how inconvenient it is for you. The pilot has uplifted fuel for the calculated takeoff weight. The hold luggage is on its way, or already loaded. Every minute you spend harranguing staff and demanding to shout at superiors reduces your chance of getting a free ticket change. Oh, and the airport staff can't issue a refund. Get over it, and accept a later flight, or give up and go home. You choose.

2. If you roll up to check-in having chased ten beers with half a bottle of Smirnoff, don't expect to be accepted onto your flight. If you get rescheduled to a much later flight, and decide to drown your sorrows in the bar with something a bit more alcoholic than espresso, don't be surprised if you get refused later, too. Permanently. Just lie down, point your feet at your destination, and light your breath. You'll stand a better chance of getting there.

3. Don't expect an airline to accept your bus pass as a valid identity document. Nor your driving licence, nor the passport that's been through the washing machine, the tumble drier, and finally had its photo page steam-ironed.

4. You are not your sister, nor your brother, nor your cousin, not your deceased granny. The picture on that passport doesn't even look the same species as you, much less the same gender, and it expired years ago, as did its former holder. Under precisely which circumstances did you expect the check-in staff to accept it?

5. The hold luggage limits are stated, clearly, on the website through which you booked your tickets. There isn't an airline in the world that will accept your 120kg travel trunk, so undo the straps and tell your big sister to climb out. And no, you can't take her on board as cabin luggage.

Now travel safely, folks!

Friday 13th, three days late

Business as usual on Monday. Well, for the first ten seconds.

I couldn't log into my Linux PC. Which was a bit of an issue, because without it I wasn't going to get a lot of work done. A bit of exploring showed that it couldn't see the authentication server. So I try to log into the PC using a "local" user ID instead (one whose details are stored on the machine, not the auth server). No joy - it was still trying to check the auth server, and the login times out before it gets a reply. Actually, as it turned out, the heat death of the Universe would have happened before it got a reply.

Time to dive into what I jokingly call the machine room to check out the auth server. It's running, but won't respond to keyboard or mouse, and the screen is blank. Hmmm. Nothing for it but a hard reboot. Guess what? It's not booting. Take the cover off, and try again. The hard drive sounds like a miniature jack-hammer; looks like the heads are just ramming their end-stop. The auth server (a recycled older PC) is officially toast. And I don't have a drop-in replacement, not to hand.

It's time to go back to my Linux box, and reboot it into single-user mode (which means I can get into the command line without logging in). Set it up as a temporary auth server, in addition to the hundred-and-one other server tasks it's acquired. Reboot it back into a full running state, and log in.

Joy! I can log in now.

The joy is short-lived, however. I need to install PDFEdit, and I roll in a few security updates too. A quarter-way through, the download stalls.

I try to restart the download several times; no luck.

I reboot the Linux box. No difference.

I restart the local network switch. No difference; I can ping other machines on the same switch, but can't see beyond it.

I restart the powerline modem that feeds the switch. No difference; can't even ping the edge router that feeds the whole network.

I restart the powerline modem connected to the edge router, the other end of the connection. No difference. A laptop that connects to the edge router through WiFi seems OK, so we haven't lost the router.

I restart the edge router, just on the off-chance. Hah! I can see out again! Well, for a moment. About 3MB into the updates download on my Linux box, it stalls again.

There's only one thing left to do, and that's replace the powerline modems. They're both Advent units (PC World own brand; yes, I know, I should know better). I happen to have a couple of Devolo models knocking around and pre-configured, so I swap out the Advents for the Devolos.

It works! It was about time something did - I was beginning to lose the will to live.

This time, the updates and PDFEdit download and install without a glitch.

And then I discover that PDFEdit - the installation of which was the whole point of the exercise - can't even do something as simple as move an item from one point on the page to another.

Definitely One Of Those Days.

Accented characters on your UK keyboard under Windows XP

It's bothered me for ages that it is simply not possible to type most accented characters (other than acute accents) on a standard UK keyboard, under Windows XP. There were very few available: basically, if you press and hold AltGr whilst pressing a,e,i,o or u, you'll get the acute-accent versions of those characters. And that's it.

OK, I'm clearly slow on the uptake, because there is a way, it's just that Microsoft hides it rather well. Here's how to do it.

1. Firstly, go into your Control Panel and select "Regional and Language Options". (You thought it would be "Keyboard", didn't you? So did I.)
   
2. Click on the "Languages" tab. Under "Text services and input languages", click on the "Details..." button. (Told you it wasn't obvious!)
   
3. In the box centre-left, you'll see "English (United Kingdom)", and the keyboard option for that will be "United Kingdom". Click on "Keyboard" and click the "Add..." button to the right.
   
4. That should pop up a new dialog box entitled, "Add Input Language". The "Input language" option selected should be "English (United Kingdom)". Everything else apart from the "Keyboard layout/IME" checkbox should be greyed-out. Click in that checkbox. That should wake up the keyboard layout drop-down.
   
5. Click on the drop-down and select "United Kingdom Extended". Now click OK. That should put "United Kingdom Extended" into your "Installed services" list.
   
6. "OK" your way out of the other dialogs, until you're back to normal service.]
   
7. In your taskbar, usually at the bottom of your screen, you should see "UK" followed by a keyboard symbol. Click on the keyboard symbol. That should offer you a choice of "United Kingdom" and "United Kingdom Extended". Select the extended one.
   

That's the heavy lifting done. Now, when you want to type an accented character, it's easy. You can still get the acute-accented characters as before. But now you can have the other accents too. To understand how to generate the accents, you need to understand how "dead keys" work. A dead key is a key that doesn't show anything when pressed, but modifies the next key you press. Here is a list of the new dead keys that the UK Extended keyboard introduces. Where it says "AltGR + (some key)" it means "Press and hold AltGr whilst pressing (some key), then release both":

Dead key	Means	Affects
AltGr+apostrophe (')	Acute accent	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
AltGr+2	Umlaut / diaresis ('"' looks a little like an umlaut)	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
AltGr+6	Circumflex (see '^' above '6')	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
Backquote (`)	Grave accent	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
AltGr+#	Tilde	a n o A N O

Note that if you want to type a backquote on its own, you press the space-bar afterwards. In addition to these, if you want to type a Spanish/Portuguese cedilla-c, you type AltGr-c or AltGr-C depending on whether you want lower-case or upper-case. These are the only accented characters you can type using the United Kingdom Extended keyboard. If you want access to more, use a US-layout keyboard, and select the "United States International" option in the same way as above. To get a feel for how US International layout works, go to http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/goglobal/keyboards/kbdusx.htm - hover your cursor over the grave (`) and acute (') dead keys, and the AltGr key, to see which characters can be generated.

The one-page CV?

[From a comment on this post.]

I've been on both sides of this divide, having interviewed probably several hundred candidates in my time. I wish it had been fewer, but in many companies the CV filtration isn't done by people with skill types similar to the candidate.

Let's kick off with the thread subject: one-page CVs.

No. Well, a qualified no.

I want to see a front page that summarises the skill sets and levels - qualifications too, if the candidate's only had a short career so far - followed by 2-3 pages that go into more detail.

That first page tells me whether it's worth reading the others. It should be a set of facts, uncluttered, and unencumbered by fancy styling. Use one font, consistently. If it's hard on the eye, I've another ten in the pile that are more readable, plus evidence that you don't understand customer requirements, or don't care.

On the other hand, I don't want a Victorian novel, either. I've been programming since '75, in the industry since '85, worked with many companies, and my CV runs to four uncluttered pages. I've only recently expanded it from three. If you've written ten pages of florid prose (the current record is 14, from someone with eight years on the job), I don't want to know.

Remember you're dealing with several humans and a computer. The humans are reading your epistle; the computer is trying to scrape it for keywords. Keep everyone happy, and you're in the group that's in with a chance of interview.

Good luck.

Linux - a breakthrough technology?

(From a posting at LinkedIn)

I'm interested to see all the folks who've nominated Linux as their breakthrough technology. The thing is, Linux isn't a breakthrough technology, and never has been. When it was first written, it was already outmoded. It was designed only for a limited range of Intel PC hardware. It had a monolithic kernel that had to be recompiled any time you needed to change the options. The code was OKish, but not particularly smart, and there was nothing there that advanced the science of operating system design - in fact, quite the opposite. It was a college project.

What it had in its favour was one thing only: it was free, devised as a free alternative to Andy Tannenbaum's Minix.

And "free" is the breakthrough technology here. Even this wasn't unique. Richard Stallman, with his GNU project, started in the early 1980s, pioneered development and licensing of software that was completely free to use and modify. With Stallman's GNU toolkit welded to the Linux kernel, there was at last a usable, _free_ operating system, with source code for all to see. That's where I came in, at kernel version 0.12. The whole thing was amazingly robust and non-buggy, even at such an early stage.

In the subsequent development - essentially a full redesign - of the Linux kernel, it acquired platforms as diverse as the Acorn Archimedes and big IBM mainframe iron. It gained the ability to load and unload device drivers dynamically, whilst running, meaning that kernel recompiles became unnecessary. Its very freeness lended it to exploratory projects that led to new products, making it the cause celebre of the embedded systems world. And because it was licensed under the GNU Public Licence, modifications became integrated into the mainline kernel. Despite all that, there's still not all that much in Linux that's leading-edge, other than some funky filesystems.

So if you're tempted to nominate Linux as the technology that changed everything, think again. The leading edge technologies that changed your life were twofold. The first was called Richard Stallman, a man who wanted to change the world, and make software free, with source code visible to all. The second, made at his behest, a technology created by a lawyer: the Gnu Public Licence.

A man and a contract. Who knew?

The First Conservative Budget for more than a decade

I'm still "running the numbers", but at the moment it seems like it's the first time I've ever known a Conservative budget that wasn't completely ideology-driven, and actually did more than a dismissive hand-wave at those on lower incomes.

Harriet Harman's points (Merseyside worst hit, wealthy Cheshire least; substantial job losses to come) were well made, though.

Where I felt it was weak was in support of small businesses -- well, I would, wouldn't I?

In the current economic position, Big Business is more part of the problem than the solution. It acts as a brake on economic development. Equally, since the Tories are looking towards big Civil Service job cuts, there's going to be a fallback in tax receipts and an increase in unemployment. What will boost us out of the doldrums will be small business growth -- the only economic sector that can show genuine growth despite overall recession or stagnation ... provided that that growth isn't stifled by onerous taxation or bureaucracy. I didn't see much in the Budget speech that made a difference there, one way or the other. I'd hoped for more but, given the pre-Election manifesti of the Tories and LDs, I wasn't holding my breath.

Still, not as bad as I'd feared, nor as skewed to topping-up already full pockets. The full public services cutback plans will be the pivot around which the economic recovery will move. It remains to be seen in which direction it turns.

Phone tariffs, and bizarre ways to get them

I just had an interesting chat with Carphone Warehouse's Loyalty Team. The upshot of it is...a SIM-only tariff that costs me (well, LookBox) £5 per month, for which I get unlimited internet use¹, 600 call minutes and a never-going to-need number of texts each month. Oh, and 80% off call costs when I'm roaming abroad, which is often.

There's got to be a catch, right?

Yep. It's a cashback deal. £35/month up front, and you've got to send back your 6^th, 12^th and 18^th bill in order to get each of the £180 cashbacks. "Guaranteed" cashback, though, so if you miss your "slot", you can still claim it later.

I said, "Hang on - you already know my billing details, right? You already have my bills - you ought to, you send them to me! So what's that all about?"

"It's just what you have to do to claim the cashback."

I asked, "What happens if I can't find the bill?"

Now it gets really daft.

"That's OK. Give us a call, we'll print out another copy of the bill, and post it to you. Then you can send it to us to claim the cashback."

"Couldn't I just ask you to print out the bill and send it direct to the cashback department for me?"

"Sorry, it's just what you have to do to claim the cashback."

<*Wibble*!>


¹ The usual "Fair Use Policy" (i.e. to be fair, please don't use it!) applies, of course.

Diane Birch is channelling Sandi Thom!

I just heard Diane Birch on Later with Jools Holland.

She just sounds SO like Sandi Thom! Now let me say that that's no bad thing. I love Sandi's music and lyrics. But now I've got to buy another artist, dammit!

Shouty marketing

I really can't stand shouty marketing material. I unsubscribed from one online magazine when I got an email that took that to the ludicrous limit.

Here's what I wrote to them:

Dear Mike and Webmaster,

SORRY, but I REALLY can't STAND emails that insist on SHOUTING RANDOM words. It's a VERY ANNOYING way of writing, and DOESN'T SPEAK WELL of the journalism STANDARDS of the magazine it REPRESENTS.

Most PEOPLE wouldn't let YOU KNOW why they UNSUBSCRIBED, but I THOUGHT I'd give you that COURTESY.

All the best,

Jon

US Airways Free WiFi? No, not really.

I'm a pretty heads-up kind of guy.

Let me rephrase that. I'm pretty much a heads-up kind of guy. (I never claimed to be pretty!) Every computer I own or control has virus protection, firewalling (usually customised), intruder detection, and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm not going to discuss. So it takes a lot to put one past me.

Someone did.

This January, after the Consumer Electronics Show 2010 in Vegas, I was coming back via LAX. (That's Los Angeles International Airport, to anyone who still flies by boat.) I'm in the bloody-awful Air New Zealand lounge, which Virgin Atlantic has the misfortune to share. So I'm looking around for WiFi, and I spot "US Airways Free WiFi" on the list. Sounds good to me. LAX is a US Airways hub, and I've just flown from Vegas on a US Airways flight, so I'm entitled, right? I connect. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work, so I disconnect, and try one or two others. Eventually, I find one that does seem to work, check my email, and shut down the laptop.

Wind forward a month or so.

I'm at home, on the same laptop, when the router goes down. I power-cycle the router, and sit on the "Wireless Network Connections"¹ dialog, waiting for the network to come up again. And I see: "US Airways Free WiFi". Not in leafy Cambridgeshire, surely?

So, I've been "had". The apparent network I connected to at LAX was in fact an ad-hoc (computer-to-computer) network, not an access point. In my defence, if I'd not been exhausted from four days of exhibiting at the biggest trade show on Earth (and the inevitable evening entertainments), the subsequent teardown, and travel, I'd have spotted the "ad-hoc" symbol in the networks list, and avoided it like a leper. But that's exactly how hackers do these things. Travellers are weary mortals, and easy prey.

Ever since that airport incident, my own laptop had been broadcasting "US Airways Free WiFi" to everyone else, encouraging them to connect with me, and start broadcasting it for themselves. It's like sneezing in a crowded room.

What was lost? Nothing, as it happens. If I'd had any shared folders advertised, the peer to which I'd connected could have raided them, but for good and sound reasons I didn't have network shares enabled.

The fix is very simple, and I recommend it to anyone else who travels with their laptop. It assumes you're using Windows' own WiFi configuration tools: if you're using a vendor-supplied tool instead, you'll have to work it out for yourself.

The vast majority of computer users have never needed to use an ad-hoc network, so the sensible thing to do, since it's a vector for attack, is to disable ad-hoc networking completely until uncured ham flaps past the window, and you decide you do need to use it. Ad-hoc networking, that is; not the ham. Ahem.

Here's how you do it on Windows XP¹. I don't use Vista (in fact, I upgrade² all Vista machines under my control to XP), and haven't yet needed to buy a Windows 7 machine, so if you're using any other Windows, you'll have to adapt these instructions to your own operating system.

1. From the Start menu, select Control Panel, and choose "Network Connections" from the list.
   
2. Right-click on "Wireless Network Connection", and select "View Available Wireless Networks".
   
3. In the left panel in the pop-up window that follows, click on "Change advanced settings". You'll get a list of all sorts of stuff you don't care about.
   
4. Select the "Wireless Networks" tab at the top of the window.
   
5. Near the bottom of the page that's now show, there's an "Advanced" button. Click it.
   
6. There's a list of three options shown. Select "Access point (intrastructure) networks only". If the "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks" box is checked, uncheck that one too. Then OK your way out of the dialog, and close everything else.
   

You're now protected, at last. With that one, simple change, you've prevented hackers using your machine to propagate this meme, and you've prevented anyone from viewing your shared folders. Now, why couldn't Microsoft have done that by default?

¹ Yes, Windows. I know, I'm a Linux guy by preference, but I do use Windows. (And then spend most of my time in Linux sessions in VirtualBox, or over SSH-hardened connections to Linux boxes, of course.)

² When I install another OS version, and it goes faster, uses less resources, is more compatible with past programs, works with more hardware, has less bugs and dies less often, that's an upgrade, right?

Copy of a complaint to the BBC about proposed closure of 6Music

I gather from a variety of news sources that plans are under consideration at the BBC to close 6music. I believe that this would be a profoundly retrograde step.

6music is the only national radio station to address its specific audience: those who wish to listen to an eclectic range of music from the 1960s to the present day. Even Planet Rock, the nearest comparison, has a more limited range of music styles and dates.

6music's quality of production is second to none, and its presenter line-up is stellar.

The _only_ reason why 6music has low figures is that it is only available on DAB.

Let's draw a comparison.

If BBC Radio 3 was a digital-only station, its listening figures would be dire. Even though R3 is on all formats, and 6Music only on digital, R3's listening hours are only three times those of 6Music.

The unavoidable conclusion is that if 6Music were on analogue as well, its figures would leave R3 in its dust.

And yet 6Music is apparently under threat, and R3 carries on regardless.

6Music has an excellent, high-value audience demographic, comprising individuals with broad musical tastes that are unsatisfied by any other radio station. From a personal perspective, R1 is too oriented to playlisted low-grade pop, frequently repeated, R2 is too staid and uninteresting, and the BBC offers me no other music programming (except for 6Music) that I'm interested to hear. I do listen to Radio 4. If 6Music were on FM analogue, I'd be listening to that in the car rather than R4, much of the time.

6Music is a superb asset that the BBC should nurture and exploit, not discard as it if were an inconvenience.If its closure is still under discussion, please do the sensible thing, and find a better, easier target. Even after the firestorm over GCap's attempted closure of Planet Rock, I do not believe you have the slightest idea of just how big a hole you would be digging for yourselves. Stop before you see kangaroos; that's my advice.

Jon Green

The iCan'tPhone

So the speculation ends.

Steve Jobs has delivered us of an iPhone that can't phone, or a keyboardless laptop that can't multitask. Remarkable, since even Apple's Lisa, in 1983, could.

The Apple fanboi press predictably drooled over the prospect of a device that can't do email and web browsing at the same time, can't do USB unless it's in its Dock, and can't dock unless it's in the (less useful) portrait mode. Oh, and its screen resolution - 1024x768 - makes it even less impressive than the cheapest netbooks.

It's light, though, and it's got a fruit on the front. What more could you want?

[Ecademy] Community : Ecademy - making sales, or advancing business?

[This is one of the blog posts I posted at Ecademy. I am reposting them here as I probably won't be in Ecademy much longer.]

[Date posted to Ecademy: 09-Oct-2008. Original URL: http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=113882.]

Reading Nikki's recent blog, "I'm on Ecademy to make money, and so are you..." gave me pause for thought. [Later note: Nikki seems to have left Ecademy, so the links no longer work.]

Many Ecademists are here to promote their B2B enterprises - services, usually. It's a perfect playground for marketing and promotions people: in using Ecademy to sell their skills, they're demonstrating them. Job done!

I get worried, though, about Nikki's view of an Ecademy where everyone's here to make sales.

I have a vision of a circle of people in suits, each selling to the one in front, who's selling to the one in front of them, ... A bit like a sales version of MC Escher's "Ascending and Descending".

Clearly, that can't work, or involvement in Ecademy's a zero sum, and there are as many losers as winners. We all want to be winners, right?

As far as I can tell, and the Powers will doubtless be along shortly to set me right if I'm wrong, Ecademy was always about networking, more than direct selling.

The way it has to work is if we're primarily working towards promoting our businesses - and, more importantly, each other's businesses by referral - to non-Ecademists, with sales to Ecademists a secondary objective. That's how the zero sum gets broken. Coincidentally, it's also how networking works best!


As I've said elsewhere, I'm here mainly to get access to the right people, in the right places, to advance LookBox's success. Right now, I'm looking for a part-time (portfolio) CFO, and people to help with business development into Developing World educational projects, particularly Indian Subcontinent and China . In all cases, people who themselves have the right contacts to make things happen.

It's possible that, in the process of finding these people, I manage to jump a step and make direct contact with potential purchasers of our products and services. If that happens, I'll be delighted of course - but it's an aspiration, not an expectation.

Either way, with the right contacts made, we stand fair to make excellent sales ... just not in the direct model.

The quid pro quo for all of this - apart from the membership subscription, of course - is to be a connector, someone who enables connections, rather than simply exploiting them.

How many of the intensely sales-oriented individuals who blogspam are primarily connectors? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that in networking meetings, the most pushy self-promoters have been the least likely to say, "I can't help you with that, but [name] over there can, and I know a couple of others who aren't here who might be useful too. Give me a card, and I'll get you set up." And they've had a lot fewer around them than the connectors, the hubs of the room, as Mike Segall pointed out in a recent seminar at a business conference in Birmingham.


Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's wrong to promote one's business to Ecademists. For some, particularly the marketing and bizdev people, that makes perfect sense.

But I'm mindful that there's a lot more sales opportunity out there than in here.

If we're all to advance our businesses, doesn't it make sense to most of us to change the emphasis from "How much money have I made out of Ecademy"? to "How much money have I helped Ecademists make?"

[Update: please also check out Fraser Hay's blog - same sentiment, different angle.]

[Ecademy] Community: Autoconnect meets guanxi - a different perspective

[This is one of the blog posts I posted at Ecademy. I am reposting them here as I probably won't be in Ecademy much longer.]

[Date posted to Ecademy: 14-Jan-2010. Original URL: http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=142626.]

By now, anyone on Ecademy who hasn't been living under a rock has become aware of autoconnect. It's a feature that's being introduced experimentally, allowing its subscribers to make random connexions amongst the Ecademy community. If you've received a request recently that said:

(name) Was sending invitations to join their network on Ecademy, discovered you were already here and requests that you add them as a contact.

...that was an autoconnect request. If you've received one, you've probably received lots. Brace yourself; it's going to get worse yet.

This is scattergun networking. If you fire enough cartridges at enough trees, chances are you'll hit a bird eventually.

Let's draw a contrast.

I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard of it, to the Chinese concept of guanxi (關係 or 关系 ). Pronounced "GWEN-shee" (approximately), it describes your value, as expressed by the quality of the network of people upon whom you can draw.

Guanxi networking is often misunderstood in the West to be similar to the kind of business networking with which Westerners are familiar. In fact, a guanxi relationship is more personal. It must be maintained actively, or it will wither, and it's not as casual as Western network relationships. Properly managed, a guanxi network connection is for life.

The heart of guanxi is exchanges of favours. If I want to connect with a certain person, I will find out who I know has guanxi with them, and then I'll use my guanxi with that connector in order to make the connexion. Sometimes, there's a whole chain of connexions, and often you end up making further guanxi relationships as you work down the chain to complete the connexion.

Equally, it's expected that if a guanxi friend needs help, you assist without complaint.

When I joined Ecademy, the ethos seemed to me to be similar to guanxi. A business community that was oriented towards mutual help, and long-term personal relationships. In fact, the Blackstar concept seemed about as near to guanxi as I've ever seen in Occidental networking.

Contrast this to autoconnect. Networking by robots - about as far from personal networking as it's possible to get. I've commented here and expanded here about how autoconnect requests are functionally identical to spam. And like spam, there's presently no way of opting out. You get the requests whether or not you want them.

It's also about as far from guanxi, and personal networking, as it gets. Maybe a valuable - guanxi - relationship can arise from autoconnect, but the vast majority of autoconnects won't yield any benefit.

Let's consider that for a moment. You gain thousands of contacts - or, at least, try to - but only a small handful work out. You've put several thousand people to inconvenience for a marginal benefit for a tiny proportion.

The business model is depressingly familiar. "Spamford" Wallace would be proud.