The Wayward Celt

Most of you who know me likely are aware of my distaste for YouTube; not necessarily because of the content, but because it is content that requires singular focus, much like podcasts, where I can’t multi-task through it. I prefer to consume information via text which I CAN multitask around without pausing and coming back only to re-watch the prior few minutes or entire video again between interruptions. Not to mention the system resource hog streaming video can be, as well as the constant ‘buffering’ when my network is being taxed by other applications. But, contrary to what I may say at times, I don’t hate YouTube, and will indeed watch videos hosted there when it fits within my capabilities. Generally this occurs more when I’m sitting on the couch perusing via AppleTv, though I will check out the occasional Facebook or Twitter shared video as well.

That all said, I DO have a business need to stay up to date on what is being shared in some very specific YouTube spaces. The best method I’ve found to stay up to date with new content is through RSS feeds. Combine that need with our “Working Outside the Inbox” (WOTI) initiative I’ve been blogging about, and you’ll understand exactly why I’ve written this post: YouTube and RSS aren’t exactly the best of friends and e-mail updates just aren’t going to cut it. RSS links are not visible on YouTube, in direct contrast to nearly every other website around. But this doesn’t mean you can’t get RSS feeds for YouTube content to update you when new videos are shared out; it just takes a little more effort. Hopefully the following will help reduce that effort and let you add YouTube feeds to the RSS reader of your choice and not have to go researching on your own.

Here are the various types of feeds I have found via my own research, which are also functioning at time of publication here. Keep in mind that these can change or stop functioning at any time depending on YouTube’s business needs. Caveat emptor, etc.

Building RSS feeds for YouTube:

• All uploads by channel/user: Replace the <user_id> variable with your username, or the username of the person/channel you wish to follow, then add the link to your favourite RSS reader:

  http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/<USER_ID>/videos.rss

• New videos added to Playlists: This will feed updates of the new videos added to the playlist specified in the URL. For this to function, you will need the Playlist ID which can be found in the link to the playlist on the YouTube channel. The ID will be a string of alphanumeric characters beginning with the letters “PL”. You will need to drop the “PL” prefix from the ID then add the remaining characters to the URL below replacing the variable. For example: where a playlist ID looks like: PL9C6B1C84E4869D16 only use the 9C6B1C84E4869D16 portion of the ID to build the feed URL. https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/<Playlist_ID>
   

• Want to know when a user creates a new playlist? This feed URL will show updates noting the name of newly created playlists by user ID. Simply replace the variable with the the person/channel you wish to follow:

  http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/<USER_ID>/playlists?v=2

• You can also follow RSS feeds based on tags: This allows for updates of videos across multiple channels/users based on how the videos are tagged when uploaded. Replace the <Your_Tag> variable with the tag you wish to follow.

  http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/<YOUR_TAG>.rss

• There is also a lot of information on how to follow all of your subscriptions in one feed, however through all my research and testing, I’ve not yet been able to find the URL format to make this work. It appears YouTube may have deprecated this capability as a business decision to counter some set-top device functionality. I leave the information here, however, as reference to what has worked in the past:Subscriptions can be sent to RSS feeds by replacing the <user_id> variable with your id or the id of the channel/user you wish to follow: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/<USER_ID>/newsubscriptionvideos
  or
  http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/<USER_ID>/newsubscriptionvideos?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published&client=ytapi-youtube-profileWhen the above was found to not function directly, another user was able to see success by creating a Feedburner (http://feedburner.google.com/) subscription using the YouTube subscription RSS url (http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/<username>/newsubscriptionvideos). Once created, add the Feedburner URL to your favourite feed reader. Technically, I don’t see why this intermediary step would work any differently than just adding the original RSS feed, but it seems ot have worked for at least on user out there…

Because I live and die by RSS feeds these days, I found it critical to be able to follow YouTube channels and playlists in my feed reader. Noting that even on YouTube’s and Google’s own developer resource pages there wasn’t a single place to figure out how to get what I needed, I found myself scouring forum threads across the internet to find a simple solution. As I was going through this process I realized that I was building a foundation of information in a draft email while I was adding the feeds I needed to my reader; why not share the information in a single post in the hopes others can benefit from it as well? I hope you find this to be as helpful as I did.

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Thanks to my dad, I was raised with a love for the aesthetics of both aerospace and maritime imagery. In lieu of a more word heavy posting this week, I’ll leave you with some of my favourite maritime photos which I’ve captured over the years:

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While Raz and others were out whooping it up in Vegas, Jean and I spent the long Presidents Day weekend at home painting our pantry.

Now, let me stop you right there: yes, it does take a whole weekend to paint a pantry… at least when your pantry is around 175sqft and includes a staircase, base boards, two windows, and a pellet stove. Sadly, because Jean got ill Sunday night, some of the trim work is still unfinished, though we were able to prime and paint all the walls and base boards before exhausting ourselves. Luckily I think we only have a day’s worth of work left and should be relatively easy to finish up soon.

We opted for a darker colour in the pantry to give it more of a root cellar/ wine cellar feel. For fear of making it too cave like, we retained the white ceiling and trim all around, which once completed, is more reminiscent of a farm house than a cellar. In any case, here’s some pictures for you to enjoy and see what I mean about it being a large pantry… Generally speaking the last two images are the closest to the actual colour which I was able to capture.

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Universal Truths, by definition are, well, universal… so it shouldn’t surprise me to have realized the connection one truth can provide to many seemingly disparate venues.

Earlier today I posted to Facebook and Google+ a link to an article by Professor Richard Beck outlining a particular break between Christian thought and behaviour. Beck had identified a thread of behaviour in Christian culture, which I am sure we’ve all seen as well: specifically the touting of Christian concepts while behaving in ways which don’t exemplify those same beliefs, and sometimes in ways which would appear to be even counter to them. At times, he challenged students, and those of us reading his article, with rather provocative words… which is, in all honesty, what got my attention and then held it. Go ahead, take a few minutes and give his article a read, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

What struck me nearly immediately when reading Beck’s insights, wasn’t how Christians are saying one thing but doing another, but rather how closely the concepts he laid out mimicked ideas I’ve been very close to in the past few years. In particular, IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. Sure, laugh it up, but hear me out on this…

The overarching theme in both IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines and Beck’s article is simple: “Don’t be a jerk”. Sure, there’s other various refinements and distinctions in the specifics, but really, they both distill down to the same thing. In my particular case, I am always amazed at how truly brilliant my company’s guidelines really are and often use the key components far beyond just my work life. In fact a few of these guidelines from IBM can easily and directly translate to what Beck is speaking of as well:

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• Respect your audience. If this isn’t obvious, well I don’t know what is. Can you imagine how this simple act would nearly wholly negate Beck’s article if we all abide by this guideline? Just imagine how many more ‘decent human beings’ would be part of this world!

• Be aware of your association. In IBM, we are reminded to be aware of how our actions and words can (and do) reflect on the company, that our social presences should reflect how we’d present ourselves to clients and colleagues. Likewise, in Beck’s examples, the Christians he has encountered could seemingly stand a reminder of this guideline as it seems their actions and words have reflected poorly upon the larger faith.

• Don’t pick fights. Another of the obvious tenets, but it goes on to also admonish us to be the first to correct our own mistakes. Not an easy task, but again, one which we could all benefit from regardless of our faith.

• Try to add value. This one may not be immediately obvious, but it does hold true for all of us as well; don’t add to the noise if you can’t provide worthwhile information and perspective. Imagine the shift we could see if Beck’s “Sunday morning lunch crowd” took this guideline to heart as well? Would he have such words as ‘entitled’, ‘dismissive’, or ‘haughty’ to define them, or would Beck be able to begin using phrases like ‘insightful’, ‘respectful’, and ‘engaging’ to define the same group?

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And so it came to me as I was reading Beck’s article: there are indeed universal truths which we all know deep down, but often gloss over and/or simply forget at times. Universal truths, which by obvious definition span religions, cultures, and even corporations. Truths as simply profound, and simply encapsulated by, single phrases… of those, I’d say “Don’t be a jerk” may be the greatest singular universal truth demanded by all of humanity, but far too often forgotten by the same who preach it.

So, a call to action and a challenge: Take time this weekend and read IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines, then re-read Beck’s article and reflect on how you (we) can implement some small change in our daily lives to ensure, in time, beck’s article is proven outdated and no longer relevant. Perhaps we can start by asking ourselves “does this add value?” when we go to post something online, or “am I respecting my audience” when we’re out to each for Sunday lunch…

At the very least I’ll bet you’ll like yourself a little more… I’m sure I will

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At work, this is the time of year we are all furiously working on our Personal Business Commitments (or PBCs since acronyms are more fun) for the year, essentially working out our goals for the coming months. While I’d love to blog about my PBCs externally, I can’t since that would expose company confidential information as it directly relates to business strategy (though you could expect to see things like working outside the inbox and driving social business initiatives to make appearances there, quelle surprise!) … of course in keeping with working openly and transparently, my colleague Kelly and I are working on our own PBCs in an internal community forum, and activity which will help us refine our goals to be more effective in our roles.

But, it also got me thinking… I CAN expose my personal, non-work related goals, be open and transparent, and find greater accountability than if I just kept them in a draft email to remind myself every now and again. So here we go, these are my goals for 2012.

Goals…

Fiscal:

• Pay off both Visa cards (Credit union and Bank)
• Pay off Motorcycle – done by May 2012 at latest.
• Plan and save for a trip to Ireland in 2013
• Research available channels/strategies and begin selling photos
• Stretch goal: Research avenues/strategies to enable some level of income for writing, outside of day job.
• Sell my SCA Armour (Photograph each piece and determine best channel for sale).

Self improvement:

• Take a week long motorcycle trip (Mt. Rushmore will likely be a full week out and back).
• Visit 2 or more light houses
• Get two more tattoos or equivalent sleeve work.
• Reduce my weight by 80lbs, again.
• Get a large, framed map of the USA to use for plotting out rides and general decoration.
• Build a personal 5 year plan and begin executing on it.
• Read 5 books by Dec 31. 2012 (2 already done:  Long Way Round by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman  and The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcycling’s Endless Road by Melissa Holbrook Pierson)

Home improvement:

• Clean and organize the garage including disposal of unneeded items.
• Clean and organize the home office, including filing and disposal of unneeded items
• Paint loft, hallway, guest bath, stairs, pantry, and laundry (Pantry planned for Pres. Day weekend)
• Build a 5 year plan for the next improvements to tackle.

The trick now, of course, is to focus everything I do to ensure it is working towards achieving one of the goals above. Anything that doesn’t support one of these goals will likely take lesser priority this year. Some of these are quite lofty (for me, possibly not for some of my readers), while others are easily attainable within a relatively short span of time, well before end of year.

Unless laziness wins out of course

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… and here’s what my numbers show thus far:

Yup, I received nearly twice as much email in week 2 as I did in week 1. And I sent four times more email. That’s actually not a failure to me though. It is expected that in the beginning of trying to reduce your inbox, your outbox may suffer a tad as I am ignoring step 2 (Stop Replying!) in favour of replying with guidance to better alternatives. Mind you I haven’t had much opportunity (contrary to the ‘opportunities’ line above ) to reply like that, but one of my colleagues has, and it seems to be catching on as others are starting to see the value with communicating in forums and wikis to solve problems across teams.

For me, however, this week saw a huge win:
I have been working off-hours (after “work” but before Jean gets home, that no-man’s land of time when I am normally sitting at my desk and working anyways) on a small javascript tool to generate URLs based on user entered variables. Thanks to one of my colleagues who did all the heavy informational lifting over the past nine months, I was able to dig in and get this javascript tool working initially just based on the fact that he had shared this information on a wiki already, allowing me to work when he wasn’t necessarily available… and here is where the really big win was seen for me (aside from the tool itself which will be a huge benefit for me directly):

I was able to collaborate, test, validate content and sanity check with five other colleagues, then roll out the tool to an internal webserver all without sending a single email. Zip. Zero. Nada. No email was harmed in the creation of this tool!

Think about that for a moment. Over the course of two weeks, we went from concept to delivery of an internally deployed tool without sending any email. This includes all the testing cycles where bugs were found, corrected, retested, and other changes were updated and re-deployed to a test server. How did we do it? Easy. We used two wiki pages, our SameTime instant messenger service, and a total of 3 phone calls (one of which was to show another colleague what it does before we roll it out to a larger audience).

This little side project just inadvertently proved to me that projects CAN be run from start to finish with a minimal amount of e-mail exchanges. I say minimal here as this was a small scale proof of concept, and presumably larger more complex projects may require an e-mail or two… but I’ve shown that our alternative tools do a much better job of getting the job done, and therein lies the huge win.

We moved “working outside the inbox” from concept to reality for this project… and that excites me even more than being able to create a useful tool for me and some of my colleagues within IBM (which is itself rather exciting)!

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 Today my colleague, cohort, and WonderTwin(tm) Kelly Smith posted an announcement on our work blog launching our mission to reclaim our lives and work back from the in-box of dooooom. She and I, along with at least two other colleagues are tackling these beasts we call our in-boxes.

Ok, so maybe we’re not being quite as provocative as it sounds, but we ARE jumping on board to what we see as some rather revolutionary thinking: starting today we are working outside of the inbox. (#WOTI is the tag and acronym for “Working Outside The Inbox” and one you’ll likely be seeing a lot of in the next year…)

We adopted the idea from our hero, Luis Suarez, and decided to follow in his footsteps this year. Still sounding too provocative for you? It really isn’t… everyone can play along, it’s THAT easy.

Don’t get me wrong, email is indeed a great tool for 1-1 discussion in a transactional format; that is, someone gives information or asks a question, and in return another person gives or asks as well. Email is decidedly not the best tool for many things that we use it for today: discussions, decision-making, file sharing, file repositories, knowledge sharing, newsletters, and announcements.

As Kelly notes in out work blog: “We have the collaborative technology. We have the skillz”. And she’s right. Over the past few years she and I have adopted a much more collaborative focus to our work, using the various tools at our disposal to ensure we can accomplish tasks with as much efficiency and effectiveness as possible and have both been preaching the word of transparent collaboration for quite a while now.

The difference now is that we’re more focused, more structured, and will be tracking our progress. I KNOW my incoming email had reduced significantly over the past year, but this year we are going to be able to quantify it and show solid results… starting today.

How, I can hear you ask, do we intend to accomplish such a hefty goal? Easy I say: we’ve absconded with Luis’ Magic 3 step program, and added a fourth step of our own:

1.  Stop replying to email. The more email you reply to, the more email you will receive. It is a never-ending cycle. Mind you, this doesn’t mean I won’t reply to ANYTHING that comes into my inbox, but rather that I will be much more focused and judicious as I implement step 2 before I reply:
2. Use the right tool for the right conversation. This means identifying conversations/tasks (use cases) that can be accomplished more easily, more transparently, more efficiently, and with less cost, using a more appropriate social tool. Sometimes that will be email. Most of the time, it won’t.
3. Start moving those conversations/tasks to their appropriate home. This won’t be a light switch situation, rather it will happen slowly and surely.
4. Record progress, set an example, evangelize and act as a change agent. This is the one we added on… because without monitoring progress, it is very difficult to show tangible value. Additionally, without evangelizing and acting as change agents, we’re just doing this in a silo with no further effect, which isn’t our intent at all…

So what IS our intent if it isn’t to just reduce the amount of email cluttering our respective in-boxes? Again, another easy answer: we intend to act as examples and agents of change to help show our organizations how much more efficient and effective we can ALL be by using the *right* collaborative tools.

We intend to do this mindfully and conscientiously; to drive change for the benefit of us all, not just the individuals jumping on this project… given Luis’ data over the 4 years he’s been doing this, he’s proven the value and effectiveness of such an undertaking.

Want to join us? Its easy! Just start following the four steps above!
We’ll be posting periodic updates over on our “Notes from Rational Support” blog so you can see our progress. Feel free to comment there with your own progress as well and before long you’ll start seeing marked improvement. In fact I’ve heard told that your hair will be more luxurious, you’ll become more attractive, you’ll be promoted to executive status, and money will fall out of the sky for you…

Okay, that last sentence may not be entirely (at all) true, but I can assure you, reducing the amount of email coming to your inbox will make you a much happier person.

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Last Thursday I hosted my last Knowledge Champion Consortium session, an internal group of passionate individuals focused on knowledge sharing and content curation.

After 3 years of running this 20-40 person bi-weekly conference call, I can’t help but to have learned a few things about what I believe makes conference calls work, and what helps them fail… as I was working on an email to my cohort, to give her some of the best practices I’ve learned and implemented, I realized this was more of a blog post than a single email… so I blogged about it over on the Notes from Rational Support blog:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/nfrsblog/entry/meeting_lessons_learned 

I’d be honoured if you’d take a moment and check it out… then let me know what you find works best on the calls you host or attend (if you’ve attended any I led, I’d especially love your feedback!). As I noted in the post, I’m likely not done hosting calls in my career with IBM and I’d love to be able to learn and grow even more through your tips and tricks picked up over the years!

Slainte’

(and yes, that IS a vintage 1960′s operator’s headset reworked with wireless Plantronics innards.)

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While I continue to work on being less negative, I’ll spare you with words and instead ply you with images during this past Sunday’s dusting of snow:

This time around I opted to play some more with texture, pattern, and chaos. This series lacks the rhythm, clean lines, and simplicity in the shots from the Chinese Garden previously posted, but seems to make up for the chaotic nature by capturing some of the drama in wintertime.  The sun came out about halfway through shooting, so you can see a shift in contrast and reflection. Seeing as the weather was very monochromatic, black and white imagery stood out as most suitable when I was post processing these, though you will see tiny hints of colour in some.

The last shot above, of course, being a “special” extra: a bad self portrait. You’re welcome.

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In lieu of more interesting topics which require proper words, I thought this week would be a good time to show a few images which I captured over the holidays; specifically when we visited the Lan Su Chinese Gardens in downtown Portland:

These were all taken with my Canon EOS 60d using the 18-135mm kit lens. All images have undergone some relatively heavy post-processing using Snapseed on an iPad2. I’m actually quite pleased with Snapseed as an image editing tool, as it is fairly intuitive and easy to learn. The only downside is no way to add a watermark directly, so I have had to import into Google Picasa, and then export with the appropriate watermark set.

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