Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr Brent Coker, from the Melbourne Department of Management and Marketing. Got that? You can spend as much as 20% of your time at work dorking around on the internet and still end up 9% more productive than people who don't! Print this article and put it in your wallet for the next time you get in trouble for browsing on the job, eh?

In fact, this isn't an entirely worthless insight. We like to use StumbleUpon every once in a while just to run some cool water through the pathways of the brain associated with imagination.

Really, though, reading news feeds at work and using social networking sites (especially Twitter) can lead to so many multiples in productivity that any surprise over this 9% finding is hard to wrap our heads around.

On-demand access to geographically dispersed, topic-specific knowledge and feedback through both synchronous and asynchronous communication over multiple technology platforms is what social media use at work can be and that is a game changer. Could someone please study that?

What this study says to us is that the social web is so incredibly powerful that even people who don't know how to use it find themselves made 9% more productive because of it - on accident. Studying that seems like missing the point, though it is interesting.

Photo: Shock-ed by Flickr user CarbonNYC.

Although most I.T. managers probably know that Web 2.0 applications are in use on their network, when comparing the survey results to the actual data, it appears they don't know how pervasive their use is.

FaceTime discovered that across the 80 companies studied, an average of 49 Web 2.0 applications were installed across locations. (It's worth pointing out that FaceTime counts everything from IM to IPTV as "Web 2.0," by the looks of the data, so take that finding with a grain of salt.)

Still, what is interesting in the data returned is that while only 60% I.T. managers surveyed thought that social networking applications were being used in their location, there wasn't a single company in FaceTime's study where social networking wasn't being used on at least one of the employee's machines.

As you may have guessed, Facebook was the most popular site overall, appearing in 50,000 instances across all 80 reporting locations. However, there was a total of 400 unique social networking sites reported in use. This "long tail effect," says FaceTime, should not be ignored when determining which sites to monitor and control for potential security and compliance issues.

Other popular activities included instant messaging (AIM and GoogleTalk were most prevalent), Meebo, IPTV, Virtual Worlds, VOIP (like Skype), P2P, and web conferencing.

Whether or not companies should be cracking down on these and other self-provisioned applications is a debate for another time. What's clear is that companies that think they have cracked down, are sadly mistaken.

Concurrently with this report - and perhaps because they were surprised by their own findings - FaceTime just launched a "Forget the Fees" program that eliminates the URL filtering fees for their customers. Because obviously, FaceTime's customers either weren't managing their network because they couldn't afford to do so...or they were just really cool about what their employees did at work.

It's still up for debate how much personal information you should share with others on your Facebook profile. Some people would argue that the time for us to hide behind our masks is over. If we're professional, good employees at work and good sons and daughters at home, it shouldn't matter so much if a friend tags us in a photo which shows us tipping back beers at the weekend party. The fact is, everyone has a personal life and it shouldn't matter who sees it.

Others would say that those are precisely the sorts of photos that make it dangerous to use online social networks like Facebook for both personal and business networking. "Don't friend the boss," they would argue. It's just too risky.

Sharing Some Things, Not Others

The issue isn't really that black and white, though. You may feel it's OK for your colleagues to see some of your Facebook photos (like those from the conference you attended), but not others (like those from the party). You also may be a little uncomfortable with the boss reading your wall posts, especially if your friends have an odd sense of humor at times.

If you're not ready to expose everything about you to anyone who asks to be your online friend, it's time you learned how to use Facebook's friend lists.

A little over a year ago, Facebook launched a new feature called "Friend Lists." With lists, you can create groups of friends on Facebook, separating work from family and close friends. It's simple to use, but it's definitely an underutilized feature. In fact, most of the people who spend their days "Facebooking," never seem to take the time to worry about who's seeing what...until it's too late.

But now, as more older generations are going online and joining social networks, the "Should I Friend Mom/Dad/Boss?" issue is becoming more prevalent than ever.

How To Use Friend Lists

To get started with Facebook Lists, you first need to build one. You can do this from your Friends page. (Click "Friends" in the blue bar at the top). On the left side of the page, click the button "Make a New List." Give it a title.

Now you'll have the option to add your friends to the list. You can either start typing in names one by one or click on "Select Multiple Friends" to add several people to the list all at once. (To add people, just click on their photos.) When you're finished, click the "Save List" button at the bottom.

Once you have some lists created, it's time to figure out who gets to see what. To edit your privacy settings, go to "Settings" at the top-right of the screen next to the search box. When you hover your mouse over the link, you'll see a menu appear; click "Privacy Settings"on this menu. On the following page, click "Profile," the top choice in the list of options.

On the profile privacy page, you have the option of customizing exactly who gets to see what. You can modify the following areas: Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. If you're unsure of what any of those things are, click the "?" next to the item to read a definition.

Using the drop-down boxes, you can customize who gets to see your info: "Only Friends," "Friends of Friends," or "My Network of Friends." To lock down your profile to friends only, you could set all these to "only friends." But since you have now created specialized lists, you'll want to use these instead.

To do so, click the fourth option from the drop-down box: "Customize." From here, you can add lists of people who should NOT be able to see this part of your profile. For example, if you wanted to block a list of work colleagues or those in your family from seeing your status updates, you could do so here - just type the name of your list in the box "Except these people" and save your changes.

Note: you can also block certain people individually just by typing in their names, but given the ever-growing number of Facebook users, you're probably going to need a Friend List at some point. We recommend biting the bullet and creating your lists now instead of treating everyone as a one-off. 

After you've saved your changes, you're done. You'll have your privacy back without having to change the way you and your friends use Facebook. Of course, keep in mind that nothing is foolproof - determined hackers can gain access to your account as can anyone who guesses your password....so maybe you shouldn't use your dog's name.

When lists are finally in place, you can assign new friends to a list right when you're accepting their friend request - just look for the option "Add to Friend List" before you click "Accept."

It may seem like quite a bit of work to set up, but you'll thank yourself for doing this later...like every Monday morning when you go back to work after a great weekend...or the next time you need to borrow money from mom and dad. You get the idea. Better safe than sorry.

Among other things, Millennials would prefer to use instant messaging, text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their clients and customers, though very few companies currently support these technologies. The report also highlights that a lot of employees are simply bypassing corporate IT departments if those don't offer them the services they need.

One of the most interesting results of this study is that this difference between expectations and reality has led over a quarter of the employees surveyed by Accenture to use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their corporate IT departments. Almost half of all Millennials who use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter do so without support from their IT departments (and often against the IT policies of their companies). Millennials also see no problem with using unsupported mobile phones or instant messaging services at work.

Interestingly, a quarter of those who use online collaboration tools and open-source software also do so without support.

A staggering 60% of the employees surveyed by Accenture argue that they are unaware of their companies' IT policies or that they are simply not interested in following them.

The End of Email?

The report also highlights that the slow shift away from email as a preferred way to communicate continues. While older Millennials still spend around 9.5 hours a week writing and receiving work-related emails, younger Millennials in the workforce only spend about 7.7 hours on email. In contrast to this, high school and college students only spend about two hours a week on email and clearly prefer instant messaging, text messaging, or social networking sites to talk to their friends.

Of course, these are also exactly the forms of communication that most employers are not supporting yet.

Choices

The Accenture report argues that, in the long run, companies will have to adapt to their employees' technology preferences. After all, over half of the respondents in this study (52%) said that a company's use of technology was a major factor when they select an employer (though the current economic climate might turn this into a luxury for many employees).

This report definitely makes it clear that IT departments can either choose to adopt some of these technologies, or they will risk that a large number of their young employees will simply go rogue.

We asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to tell us how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month - however their rates are set. Half of them told us, on the condition that we wouldn't disclose who they were or where they worked.

There are a handful of people in tech blogging that make even more than this but the vast majority of people who get paid to blog get paid far less. To be honest we have no idea what it's like outside the Web 2.0 world. (Honestly, is it raining?) We hope that no one will be too angry with us if these numbers lead their employees to feel newly shortchanged and protest. These folks are at the top of their field.

Our methodology was to email people we trust to be honest and who trust us to keep their identities secret, and ask them to post anonymously their rates and the rates they can confirm of co-workers or employees they've overseen within the last year. We realized after performing the survey that we should have asked our respondents whether the current US economic downturn was impacting their rates but to be honest, it didn't occur to us to ask. Maybe that tells you something, too.

We were told pay rates for per-post blogging jobs, full-time blog and social media jobs and for hourly consulting.

Payment Per Blog Post

Most people who are paid to blog are paid per post. What kinds of rates are our respondents seeing? The low end of the scale was $10 per post for very short posts. Almost everyone else said they were paid $25 per post. One person said they were paid $80 per post! One respondent said they were paid $200 per item of long-form writing; bloggers often do other kinds of writing as well.

How does this work out long term? Based on our experience working for many different blogs, we believe that most per-post blogging gigs assume you'll write an average of 3 blog posts in 4 hours. It often takes longer than that to write 3 posts but ambitious bloggers, like the ones we surveyed, know that at this stage you put in extra unpaid hours just to get ahead.

Let's say these people are half-time pro-bloggers making $25 per post, writing 3 posts per day. That's $75 per half-day, a little less than $20 per hour, about $1500 to $1750 per month for half time work. Take two of those jobs at once, do it for a year, and you'll make about $40k. Everyone's got different arrangements, though, so it's hard to take these kinds of annual projections too seriously.

The world is full of people who would be insanely jealous of people who make $40k a year blogging, if it was widely known that you could do that for a living. The biggest rewards aren't the money, though, but the thrill of writing and the ability to dedicate time to the subject you love.

The truth is, very few people are able to get jobs like this. A small number of those who are so lucky take the next step, financially, and move into a full time position with a blog or go in-house doing social media work at a marketing agency or software company.

The Wages of the In-house/Full-Time Blogger

Career minded bloggers coming up through the ranks of the per-post writers sometimes land full time jobs writing, managing other part time bloggers and performing other social media activities like events planning, promotion, etc. Sometimes this work is done as an employee, sometimes as an extended "consulting" relationship. Some of them get work at blogs, others do similar work for marketing firms and software companies. The founders of the big tech blogs now spend most of their time running the businesses they started. These second-in-command type social media positions have a wide range of pay rates.

Our respondents reported annual pay rates ranging from $45k and $55k with benefits (!) up to $70k, $80k and $90k with bonuses. We're tempted to say, based on the anonymously submitted but descriptive replies we got, that the closer to pure journalism our respondents were doing the lower their wages were. That's not always the case, but social media management and working for marketing firms were clear indicators of higher end pay rates. That makes sense.

Based on our experience and conversations in the industry, we can say that all of the people doing this work full time are putting in at least 50 to 60 hour work weeks, often longer. That means most are making the equivalent of $20 to $35 dollars per hour. One factor not taken into consideration here is equity, the full time bloggers and in-house social media pros who are working for startups are hoping to get a nice payday in the unlikely event that their company is acquired.

There are certainly a handful of full time bloggers making six figures, as well. Robert Scoble famously noted that even after everything he did to humanize Microsoft, they never paid him $100k annually, so we presume he's making more than that at Fast Company. He's barely a blogger, but Walt Mossberg is rumored to be paid $1 million per year. It's safe to assume that some in the upper echelon of traditional media reporters now blogging for mainstream press are making more than anyone we surveyed as well.

Consulting - The Big Money

Social media consultants, expert practitioners with multiple years of success in the kinds of positions discussed above and in some cases in traditional marketing jobs, are the ones making the most money.

No one we surveyed named an hourly consulting rate below $150 per hour. $300 per hour was the most common rate named. Some listed monthly rates of $2k to $4k per engagement, which we assume probably means 20 to 40 hours per month.

Social media (or in many cases Search Engine Optimization) consulting is probably making a fair number of people six figures. What are these people doing? They are advising companies on how to set up and run blogs, how to reach out to and relate to bloggers, how to use Twitter (seriously) and how to make advanced use of RSS. The SEO work is probably the most technical, but degrees of technical challenge are all relative. A lot of this work is about communication skills.

It's a new world online and people with experience succeeding in it are widely sought-after by businesses wanting to catch up fast. There's a nearly bottomless need for and a strong demand for high-quality social media consulting - the big challenge is bridging the gap between living a Web 2.0 life and reaching out effectively to people.

We believe there are a fair number of snake-oil salespeople in the social media consulting field as well, but we didn't survey any of those people.

Conclusion - This Part of the Economy Has Been Strong, if Small, So Far

We don't want to claim that there are a lot of people making the kind of money discussed above for blogging or consulting. It's still a very small sector. Between advertising and venture capital, revenues in this sector can't be considered secure during a time of economic down turn.

There are far more people working in social media industries making less money than the people discussed above and the vast majority of participants don't make any money at all in this economy. Making money isn't really the point for most people, but there is an economy around social media and so some people are making money. We believe that this informal survey shows how much money some of the top people in the sector are making. Does this sound crazy to you? Compared to other professions does it seem like too little money? Far too much? Let us know what you think in comments below.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

It's really a shame that more people aren't reading blogs at work, and we don't just say that because we'd like the increased readership. If you're not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be. Below we discuss three advantages to reading blogs on the job and offer examples of the kinds of blogs that people could benefit from reading in three different non-tech professions.

Think there's not blogs you should be reading on your particular job? We tested our theory in the second half of this post by finding the top blogs for Human Resources professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. We found good work blogs for them all!

The Advantages of Reading Blogs on the Job

Staying Up to the Moment on News

You may think you don't need to be any more up to date on the news in your field than traditional media already makes you - but those who hold that belief do so to their own strategic detriment. While blogs may suffer from looser editorial standards and fewer resources for in-depth research than traditional media does - those disadvantages are often less important than might be assumed. Meanwhile, blogs have a major advantage in terms of speed. Blogs write about things first and people who read blogs thus know things first. That creates what's called First Mover Advantage.

The Wikipedia entry on First Mover Advantage is an interesting collection of academic findings on the topic. Much of it comes from a study by MB Lieberman and DB Montgomery twenty years ago in 1987. To summarize: Being the first to know about important information allows you to do things like secure resources for which the cost will increase once the news increasing their value is more widely known. It allows you to position yourself as the incumbent party responsible for certain tasks, after which point others are unlikely to take the risk of looking elsewhere if you've already got that base covered. Knowing important information first, consistently, puts you in a position of leadership and opens doors for opportunities in general.

Admittedly this is an extrapolation to reference first mover advantage in the context of individual work performance, as it tends to be studied in reference to the performance of entire businesses. Even that research has come under question - Pieter A. Van der Werf and John F. Mahon argued a decade ago, for example, that studies supporting the existence of first mover advantage depended on particular research methodology and worked only when market share was measured instead of other criteria like profitability or survival. They argued that more objective study found no first mover advantage superior to random statistical chance.

All that said, we find the concepts articulated by Lieberman and Montgomery about first mover advantage to be compelling and valid in our experience.

Tools to Use

Reading blogs is great for first mover advantage, but if you'd like to take things to the next level - check out the various instant alert services online like Zaptxt, Pingie, Alerts.com and others.

Knowing What People are Talking About

The ClueTrain Manifesto famously said almost 10 years ago that "markets are conversations." What does that mean? That business in the age of the internet is done properly through communicative input and output. Reading blogs at work is an important part of that conversation.

The ClueTrain framed its insight largely in language of fear, that businesses who don't get a clue risk watching the train leave them behind at the station. The benefits of listening to what people are saying online can be articulated in a positive sense, though, as well.

Peter G.P. Walters recently published an article titled "Adding value in global B2B supply chains: Strategic directions and the role of the Internet as a driver of competitive advantage." In that article Walters explains that the "disintermediation" [bringing together for direct communication] effect of the internet in business creates new "opportunities for intermediaries [in a supply chain] to generate incremental value for other channel members." In other words: the internet lets us know more about each others' needs and thus see opportunities to fill them. Very few things are as helpful in learning about how people are doing business as the easy publishing of blogs and blog comments.

Are blogs representative of market needs in general? They may or may not be, but at the very least they will point you directly to particular business opportunities among their writers and readers. In as much as blogs tend to write about the world at large, we do think they are a good place to find an orientation with regards to larger emerging market trends.

Tools to Use

There are a lot of different ways to pay attention to what people are talking about in your industry's blogs. Some people subscribe to blog search for keywords instead of subscribing to individual blogs. Many good RSS readers allow you to create "smart folders" containing only the posts from your subscriptions that contain certain keywords. Our favorite method? A service called AideRSS will show you just the most talked about posts on any blog.

Reference Resources

While many allege that bloggers cannot be trusted further than we can be thrown, in practice there are many fields in which professionalism and blogging are no longer opposites. In search results, in mainstream media and in other places where bloggers used not to be welcome - we now are referenced as working experts on our respective topics. That's more true in some fields than in others, but the point is that there is a whole lot of useful information to be found in the archives of leading blogs.

Tools to Use

We've said it before and we'll say it again: few simple services on the web today are as powerfully useful as Google's Custom Search Engines (CSEs). Make a list, give it a name and Google will give you a link you can visit to search only inside the websites you put on your list. Here at RWW we use CSEs built from lists of top blogs in various niche topics all the time. We love them. They are timely, thorough and super efficient.

Topical Blogs

But I Work in Field XYZ - Are There Blogs I Should Read?

Yes. There almost definitely are. As we mentioned above, we've written here before about a number of ways to find the top blogs on any topic. Just to test our own theory, we used those methods to find some top blogs in three different fields outside of technology. Here's what we found.

If you work in Human Resources then you've got it made. There are a huge number of great looking HR blogs on the web, particularly when it comes to employment law.

We found active community and useful looking information on the KnowHR blog, which specializes in discussing issues regarding HR communication. The Employment Law Post is home to a number of popular HR blogs as well.

We'll stop there for now but there are a whole lot more to discover in the Technorati index of HR blogs. Give it a look and pay attention to each blog's "authority," that's the number of other blogs have linked to that one in the past 6 months.

If you are a Physical Therapist there is a smaller field of expert blogs but there are still plenty of options. We found the NPA Think Tank by looking at links tagged physicaltherapist+blog on Delicious. We found the much-commented on blog for MyPhsyicalTherapyspace by looking at the most popular blogs linking to the American Physical Therapists Association webpage via Ask.com's blogsearch. PT practitioners would likely benefit as well from watching the weekly summaries of the best posts from around the medical blogosphere in a years-old series called Grand Rounds. We found that fabulous looking resource via the Health section of blog and news aggregator AllTop.

What if your job is to be a Fire Inspector? Surely you should be checking fire-extinguishers, wandering around industrial facilities and making lists of needed repairs at work - not reading blogs, right?

Well, it turns out that there are some blogs out there for you, too. This was the most obscure corner of the blogosphere we looked at, admittedly, but we still found some good looking blogs on the topic. Inspector911 is appreciated enough to get comments on almost every post on the site. The blog at Fire-professionals doesn't get many comments but does a great job of collecting and commenting on fire-industry news from around the web. We found it by doing a Google Blogsearch for Inspector911.com and found the it via a link. Similar coverage is provided by ConstructionInformer, a blog about construction news around the world.

Finally, if you're a fire inspector then you probably pay attention to the International Code Council. They don't have a blog, but they do have daily news and issue regular news releases. Neither section of their site offers subscription so we scraped an RSS feed using Dapper.net and then ran that feed through Feedburner. Thus you can now subscribe to ICC News Releases in the same RSS reader that you read your fire inspector blogs in.

Conclusion: You Should Read Blogs At Work

That short survey of various non-tech occupations and the blogs that serve them left us comfortable saying that there really are good blogs for you to read at work no matter what you do for a living. We hope the links above are helpful for you to find good blogs about your work.

It's clear, by the numbers and in our anecdotal experience, that very few people who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We expect that to change, but for now we'll just argue here on our blog that it would be a very good idea for people to do so. It's an essential daily act of professional development. So get back to work and read some more blogs!

Title pic: "untitled" by Eye of Einstien

The gist of the analysis is that people who use the internet at work also use it to do work at home; it makes them more efficient but also increases the demands on their time. Any of us who live that kind of life could have told you that - but what we find more interesting is the surprisingly low number of people who say they use certain technologies at work.

Specifically, the Pew study focuses on "networked workers" - defined as anyone who uses the internet or email at their work. At all. Can you guess what percentage of employed US adults say they use the internet or email at their work? Only 62%. Even that number includes people who make only the most rudimentary use of the most simple tools, however. A look at the details indicates that anything beyond the simplest tools (like the browser) is still a real fringe case.

The big take-aways from the above for us? That only 18% of people who use the internet at work use IM, only 10% report using social networks like Facebook, LInkedIn or MySpace and a mere 11% report reading blogs at work.

Only 1 out of 10 people who use the internet at work read blogs about their work; that seems like a real loss of opportunity for them.

If you or someone you love falls outside of these categories - please take our word for it - those are really useful tools! You can communicate really well (instantly, in fact) using IM and there's a whole lot of valuable information on blogs in any field. As for social networks, you'll see the value in those after you get comfortable with IM and blogs.

If you use the internet every day at work but never use IM and never read blogs on your field, you're not really using the internet - or you may as well not be. There's no shame in that, but that's how it is. To be fair, the 60% of respondents who use the internet at work probably includes a lot of people who feel pretty advanced for doing so at all after years of working without it.

Combine these numbers, though, with another reputable survey from last year that found that 11% of US respondents "said they were very or somewhat likely to...implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely." An internet brain implant is a terrible idea, but they should definitely not be given to anyone who's never read a blog at work.

It's even crazier when you look at the chart above. Add the left-most numbers in this chart up and you'll see that 60% of these people use the internet at least once every day at work. But they don't read blogs, use IM or find contacts, answers or other resources on social networks.

Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand says these numbers are probably low because people don't report accurately how much they use these tools at work - but Pew studies are really well done, they are anonymous and there's no reason to think them inaccurate as far as we can tell.

What Does it All Mean?

The survey and some early analysis of this survey point to the encroachment of work machines into our personal lives. As professional internet users, we'd point instead to the apparently huge gap between early adopter activities and the rest of the "networked world."

This is why Common Craft can make an entire business out of licensing 5 minute videos of stick figures explaining how Google Reader and LInkedIn work. That stuff is like a bright beam of light breaking through the clouds of the modern workplace. It's an important light to look at, too. Though business can clearly be done without meaningful use of the internet (obviously) - competition will likely only grow more intense.

As geek photographer and friend of RWW Aaron Hockley said on Twitter this morning "Social media search feeds. If you're not using them, you're losing business to someone who is." Those who are using them have lots of business to take, too, because almost 90% of people in the US who use the internet at work aren't even reading blogs.

Usually team collaboration tools are separated into distinct categories. You have tools for presentations like GoToMeeting, WebEx, or BudgetConferencing; you have whiteboarding applications like Twiddla's team brainstorming solution and sometimes you have combo solutions like Adobe's Connect Now which lets you whiteboard and web conference at the same time. Or there's Vyew which lets you whiteboard and screen share. Then you have your project or task management tool set which can be anything from Basecamp to Clever Tools to Google Docs or it can even be an enterprise 2.0 app like the newly launched Qtask. Finally, if you just want to share screens live, you have to turn to solutions like Yugma (review), Yuuguu (review), or DimDim.(This isn't an extensive list by any means, FYI).

There aren't many apps that combine all these functions into one. OpenACircle, however, makes a good effort at doing so. The only feature they're lacking is a dedicated whiteboarding tool, but considering the support for everything else from file sharing to screen sharing, it's not worth dismissing the app solely due to that one missing feature. Besides, they're looking into adding that in a later release, if there is enough demand.

OpenACircle Dashboard

OpenACircle's Feature Set

What OpenACircle does provide is an extensive feature set that works well for distributed teams that still need to meet up regularly and share what they're working on with each other. To accomplish this, the app provides the following features, as detailed below.

Collaborate

The core feature to OpenACircle is the concept of the circles themselves. Essentially, a circle is a virtual team collaboration space where everyone can share information and work with each other in an environment focused on one particular area of a task or project.

If you have documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoints, or any other type of file, you can upload it to the circle. You can import contacts from your email program and you can invite other members to join the circle. From within the circle, you can quickly launch the other conferencing aspects of the program like web conferencing which is done using web cams or screen-sharing. Every action taken within a circle is meant to be fast and easy, often only one or two clicks away. In a circle, no one person is tasked with being the admin or organizer - everyone can upload files, start chats, or host a meeting.

A Live Room

Presentations and Web Conferencing

Whether you need to share your desktop for a presentation or just have an online meeting with other team members, you can accomplish this from OpenACircle. Anyone can schedule the meeting and invite members to attend. Although a dozen members can participate in a live audio or video conference at one time, OpenACircle limits you to viewing three web cams and one desktop at a time. They claim this to be an intentional design choice because "people talk in same clusters," but the reality is that the system might not be able to support a dozen live cam streams at once. That's not really a big deal for smaller teams, but those teams with more members might wish to see all the faces of the meeting attendees.

Meeting Participants

For anyone who missed the meeting, the recordings are made available for later viewing. What's interesting is that multiple recordings from each member's viewpoint are archived. This means that you could have Bob, who was watching Sue's desktop, saved in one stream and John, who was watching Bob's desktop, saved in another. That's a feature you don't see elsewhere.

Chats

While attending a meeting, you have the opportunity to chat with other members through an integrated text chatting feature. You can even privately chat ("whisper") to each other. Those public chats are later archived within the circle. They could be used for side discussions or even as real-time meeting minutes.

Conclusion

OpenACircle represents an innovative all-in-one solution for small teams. They could be teams in a traditional enterprise or SMB environment who are just looking for a better way to work together or they could also be distributed teams for whom geography is a challenge. Mobile professionals will like it too, as it allows them to attend meetings and have the benefit of team collaboration even when they're on the road alone.

Users today receive 25 circles with as many as 50 people in each circle with unlimited storage. OpenACircle.com will begin charging in January. Anyone who signs up now will receive 90 days free even if they exceed what is currently being provided for free. Pricing is $9.95 for a premium account that incorporates additional circles and additional storage. OpenACircle.com will always have a free version. A fully operable version will be free up to a certain memory limitation (1GB) and over that will be $9.95 per month per user.

You can now join the OpenACircle beta program from the company homepage.

UPDATE: In light of the comments below, it's worth noting that OpenACircle has initially launched Windows-only, but support for other platforms (like Mac) and browsers (including a mobile version) are coming in the future. More specifically, Firefox support is only 30-45 days out.

Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.

Help me: Search, Business Tools and Autocomplete

Search is the most important utility on the web and is indispensable in business. Whether you're a programmer looking for a library, a researcher seeking a scientific paper, or a doctor wanting detail about a drug, search helps you find information.

Today's search is dominated by Google. Much has been written about Google stagnation and many attempts to improve the search, but the fact remains, people prefer Google. Yet there has to be a better way to search. After each query we must sift through myriad choices. And we start each new search from scratch.

We're looking for software that will guide us through the pile and help us find the answer.

In business we have a set of tools to help get things done. From Microsoft Office to the skinny gems from 37 Signals, business tools enable us to collaborate, manage projects, sales pipelines, contacts, etc. While we complain about these tools, the fact is we couldn't do without them.

The most important factor about business tools is context. The best tools understand what we're doing. The best tools encode business flows and processes, and guide us through the process.

Back in 2003 at IBM, I encountered a giant flow chart that described the process of releasing a piece of software. My immediate reaction was, this needed to be a piece of software because no human could work through it without making a mistake. This is what software is for, to help us deal with complex processes.

The autocomplete function is common in your search box, iPhone and spell-checker. Autocomplete mode works by listing a set of choices that match what you typed. Imagine in the future most utility software understanding the context of what you're doing and offering an autocomplete: choices that make sense in this context.

We already see this in many systems. All popular IDEs offer automatic fixes for common programming errors, iPhone understands that you're looking at a phone number and offers you to make a call. Google understands that you searched for an address and shows you a map. These are examples of autocomplete or shortcuts, based on your context.

Truly helpful software of the future will be a sequence of shortcuts that understand your context and help you navigate to the next step. The computer will present the choices and the decision will be yours.

Entertain me: Twitter, Randomness and Recommendations

While utilities are getting more rigorous, entertainment software is getting more casual.

The new entertainment is based on a couple of patterns. First is brevity. With increasing (and nowadays unbearable) amount of information and choice, modern entertainment software knows it has your eyes for only a limited time.

Twitter is the proto entertainment riding the exponential curve of popularity. The reason is it's short. But there's another aspect to Twitter that's part of a broader pattern. Twitter is casual.

The Twitter UI is a flattened list of messages intended to be scanned. Unlike its archetype email (link), which is meant to be drilled into and answered, Twitter places no obligation on reading or replying. It's a feel good, hedonistic experience not meant to last more than a few minutes.

Modern entertainment is more casual and short because with ubiquitous web access, rise of the social web and work from home, people want to be entertained during the day. Nothing that takes a long time could work, but checking Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook for a few minutes is fine in most people's minds.

The other face of casuality is randomness. Apple made a brilliant move when it released iPod shuffle; a lot of people don't care about the order songs play. Netflix cracked it with the Queue a long time ago; many people don't care what movie to watch tonight as long as they pick it at some point. Digg shines with its top news because people are looking for random bits of information.

We still talk about personalization, and ideally we'd love to get the right recommendations for everything. But in the absence of such a magic algorithm, randomness and Amazon Bestsellers do the trick. We're entering the age where entertainment is a mode of browsing, where the browsing part is squeezed to 0. We don't want to spend time choosing entertainment. We want a quick pick, quick duration, quick satisfaction. Unlike business application where we must pay attention, we want entertainment to be relaxed, quick and simple.

Conclusion

Software is increasingly polarized into utilities and entertainment. Utilities help us work and are becoming more rigorous. We're looking for helpful software that understands our context and guides us through the process, whether it is search or a complex business task. Entertainment software is at the opposite spectrum, being casual, brief and random. We're unwilling to spend hours browsing, but instead seek quick and satisfactory entertainment.

And now, please tell us what business software is the most helpful to you? And what entertainment software you find the most entertaining?

The information overload problem has reached a critical point. Workers drowning in their inboxes and jumping from task to task have now cost the nation $650 billion in lost productivity. A research group attempting to understand and combat the problem has recently been formed. We can either wait for answers for them, or we can start finding solutions ourselves. Let's do what social media addicts do best: let's crowdsource this thing!

Without a thorough understanding of psychology, it's hard to determine whether those who keep up with the overload of information are somehow wired differently than those who become overwhelmed. We do know that there are varying levels of distractibility in children - the severely distracted are sometimes even diagnosed as suffering with a medical disorder. They are often treated with pharmaceuticals to combat this, so it seems entirely possible that that nature plays a role in how well we cope.

However, that's not to say that we all can't learn a few tricks to better manage our information overload. Below, we'll present some ideas to help fight this problem, but please share your ideas in the comments too, so we can all learn from each other.

Create a Routine

When facing a full inbox, new tweets, new posts on FriendFeed, and an RSS reader with 1000+ unread items, the stress often comes from not knowing where to begin. This is where having a routine can be important. An everyday ritual where you deal with A, then B, then C, etc. can help you put everything in order. Not everyone's routine will be the same - the trick is finding one that works for you, then sticking with it.

Last month, Jeremiah Owyang shared his morning habits on Twitter, which prompted a discussion on FriendFeed. For Jeremiah, he like to begin his day by reading then blogging for two hours before delving into email or work.

An earlier post by social media enthusiast Louis Gray also had him sharing his daily routine, something he called his "social media consumption workflow." This post seemed to conflict with a later post he wrote about continuous parallel attention, but, after speaking with Louis, we cleared up the confusion. For him, the trick is to begin the day with the routine, then continue the day in the parallel attention mode (more on that later).

For Louis, the routine is 1) Email, 2) Read RSS feeds, 3) Twitter, 4) FriendFeed, then 5) Miscellaneous Additional Activity. Others responded in the comments of that post and via blog posts with variations on this routine, but the elements were either very similar or the same, just in a different order.

Yes, structuring social media consumption sounds a lot like work, doesn't it? Well, considering the 8 or 10 hours some of us put in a day behind the computer screen, I'd argue that it most certainly is work. No matter what your personal routine is, the bottom line is to stick to it.

Easily Distracted? Dial Down the Noise...Temporarily

While it would be great to treat noise pollution like the goldmine it should be, the truth is, a good many people are easily distracted. Twitter, FriendFeed, email, IM, and RSS take away our focus when we're really concentrating and switching to and from each task can mess us up. Instead of pining away for the overstimulated sponge-like skills of Scoble, it may be time to embrace this quality about yourself and use it to your advantage. Just because you're not able to write a great post while concurrently dealing with new email and IMs, that doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with you that needs fixing.

Even the great American novelist Steven King admitted that when he's writing a novel, he locks himself in a room and commits to no distractions. In his book, On Writing, he says this about his writing room:

"Writing room: really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk...The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand...No telephone. It's wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it's best to try and take care of them before you write."

Want to eliminate your distractions, it's easy. Disable email alerts. Exit Twitter, sign out of IM or set yourself as "busy." Trying to write? Launch Darkroom, Notepad, or Windows Live Writer. Then just work...in peace.

Later on, as you become better at whatever it is that you're doing, noisiness can be slowly added back in, but you can't go from zero to sixty overnight.

That being said, it's not a good idea to spend an entire day in this state - as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote not too long ago, there are many reasons why online noise is good for you. However, if you need a quite half hour or hour to really focus, there's no harm in that. It's not the end of the world.

Learn To Embrace Distraction

No this isn't a contradiction to the section above, it's just what's next. You may find yourself easily distracted when performing a certain task whether at work or at home - like solving a complex problem, for example - but after that task is complete, you can turn up the volume again.

To get a crash course in this behavioral technique, we'll turn again to the post on "continuous partial attention" where Louis described how he deals with info overload. While it may seem unbelievable to some, Louis claims to be able to watch TV while writing blog posts or write emails while listening to music while reading RSS feeds and watching Twitter update.

"No way!," you think? It is possible - it might not come naturally to everyone, but you can, in fact, learn to do this...at least a bit. The trick here is to start small and not try to do this when performing those tasks that require the most concentration (as mentioned above). What throws people off is thinking themselves incapable of this type of multi-tasking because certain aspects of their work require more of their focused attention than others. You must first identify the areas of work where you need less distraction and turn down the volume. When those tasks are complete, crank it up again. Simple, right?

Create Your Own Filters

In order to process mass amounts of information, you'll also need to identify and attack what we'll called the unfiltered noise. This may be in the form of "bacn" in your inbox, busy Twitterers, RSS feeds spliced with links from del.icio.us, or extraneous information on FriendFeed. To get back in control, you have to invest time in structuring the noise.

For example, most email programs have rules or filters that you can use - whether it's Outlook at work or Gmail at home, you have to take the time to set these things up. Unless you're using the GTD method to immediately combat every piece of mail as it arrives - something which only certain people have been able to master - then you'll need to establish a routine to deal with the lower priority mail at a particular time. For social media users, the big problem in our inboxes is "bacn" - these are the informational, but non-critical messages from the networks and services we've signed up for. A suggestion here is to not let these messages constantly steal your focus - deal with them en masse on a regular basis, but have them automatically archived upon arrival.

For RSS, the trick is using folders wisely. Not all feeds are created equal. You can separate lower-priority feeds from high-priority ones, classify feeds by genre, or move the feeds from bloggers who write long, thoughtful blog posts into a folder so you can thoroughly read them at a later time. Whatever the method you choose, it's important to set up a structure so you know what to read and when.

For example, less important feeds could be in a folder that you can hop into at any point in the day and flip through quickly when you have a minute. Feeds that you only browse if you have time to kill can be put in a "Can Miss" folder. Feeds where you like to comment and participate can be put into a "Great Blogs" folder. Blogger Mrinal added he likes to use people as filters. for example, in Google Reader, your friends' shared items is a great place to find human filters for content. These are just a few ideas - all that matters is that it works for you.

For Twitter and FriendFeed or any other social network or service you're involved in, it's just a simple matter of time management. Don't get so caught up that you're spending every minute of your day there. Set a time of day when you're going to delve in and really participate and for the rest of the day just keep jumping in and out when you want to. Yes, you might miss something here and there, but it's OK. Really.

Conclusion

This is by no means a definitive guide to dealing with information management nor will these suggestions work for everyone. This is only meant to spark a conversation about the subject so we can learn new tips and techniques from each other. Please share yours in the comments.

Image Credits: Mobile Email: natala; Noise: GetEntrepreneurial

This will be post #1 of 2 posts on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

This $650 billion dollar problem made the headlines this week, getting write-ups in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Thanks to a research study by Basex, we now have new data on productivity in the workplace. The findings reveal that a typical information worker checks his or her email more than 50 times per day, uses IM 77 times, and visits 40+ web sites. These numbers were calculated by tracking software installed on the machines of the 40,000 people taking part in the study.

Often, workers are dropping high-level tasks to deal with mundane, low-priority tasks that come through via these unnecessary interruptions. The end result is fractured attention where the big loss comes from the time it takes to recover from the interruption and get back to work.

"Productivity" Apps

Although we should know better, it may already be too late for us; we're conditioned creatures who are drawn to these distractions. A pop-up alerting us to new email? We must check it. A flashing IM window? Just try to ignore it. These "productivity" apps, it seems, by their very nature, have been designed to steal our focus.

Big tech companies are worried, too. They've put together a group called IORG (Information Overload Research Group) whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions.

This group's mission is to:

"Conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload."

It will be interesting to see what they come up with as far as solutions because they're certainly not the first to attempt a solution to the problem. Earlier this year, we covered five methodologies to deal with email overload, which included popular techniques like the GTD method and the 4-Hour Workweek Method. Despite numerous proposed solutions such as these, no one has really hit the sweet spot when it comes to providing real solutions that work for everyone.

Social Media Addicts - Sink or Swim?

For social media addicts, which likely includes readers of this blog, the problem can be even worse. In addition to having our focus pulled away by productivity applications like email and IM, we're also pulled in a number of different directions as well - checking FriendFeed, Twitter, social networks, and more. (I wonder how many billions of dollars we waster per year?)

For many people, these distractions are overpowering. No matter the time commitment, social media addicts can't help but spend entire chunks of their day online playing with the new, shiny internet toys. When we profiled several social media addicts earlier this year on Twitter, we discovered that a good many people spent several hours - even as many as 10 hours per day - online, immersed in the web and social media tools.

It seems we're at a crossroads - there's so much information, but not enough filters. We can either drown in the lost productivity time sink that is the internet or we can swim...swim for our lives. The question is: how?

Click here to read Part 2 of this post

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

For every roadblock to using social media at work, there is a workaround. Maybe you've been nervous to try these things because you're not sure of how much you're being monitored by I.T., your boss, or even your colleagues. You don't want to appear as if you're goofing off all day, do you? That being said, even the most diligent office drone deserves a break from time to time, and these days, those breaks often include a little brain candy in the form of social media.

If I.T. has your PC so locked down, you can't add or remove anything, you can't download anything from the internet, and you hit blocked pages all the time, then good! I.T.'s doing their job. But here's how to get around that.

Bring Your Own Browser

Just because your PC is locked down, your USB ports are probably still available. Only the most paranoid of companies use software to disable the optical drives and USB ports. If you can open files saved on a keychain USB drive, then you're in luck - you can use your ports.

At home, prepare a USB drive with the PortableApps suite. The standard edition offers a web office to go, featuring portable editions of OpenOffice, Sunbird, Thunderbird, and AV.

But most importantly, PortableApps offers portable Firefox, which we all know no social media lover can be without. Now, just like your were installing Firefox on a new computer, prepare your portable version with all the toolbars, bookmarklets, greasemonkey scripts, and add-ons that you can't live without. Once back at work, just pop in your USB drive and it will be like you've never left your home PC.

Dying for IM

If your I.T. department blocks you from installing IM, you can try Gaim Portable that came with the Portable apps you installed.

If that doesn't work, you might find that a web-based alternative like Meebo meets your needs. You can try their Firefox extension, too.

However, savvy I.T. personnel have heard of Meebo and block it on the firewall. But there are a few alternatives that they may not have blocked just yet. These include MSN Web Messenger, Yahoo! Web Messenger, AIM Express, Kool IM, ILoveIM, Mabber, Snimmer, Google Talk Gadget, ebuddy, and Robin Good lists a few more. Plus, you might want to check out Gmail's integrated Gtalk client to see if that works.

Just be warned, if your company policy states IM is not allowed, being caught doing so could be serious. For companies that deal in trade secrets or financial information, such a violation could even lead to termination. So for the uber-paranoid, just break out your phone. Most modern cell phones and PDAs ship with an IM client or two already installed. If not, go grab your favorites from the web: MSN Mobile, Mobile AIM, Google Talk (for some smartphones).

Sneaking in Your Tweets

Not comfortable with twitter.com loaded up on-screen for everyone to see? There are other ways to tweet undercover. Download Twhirl if you can. You may also want to check out OutTwit which lets you get your tweets via Outlook email.

If you can't download or install anything, just subscribe to your Twitter feeds via RSS instead, being sure to use an online reader.

Of course, for mobile users, tweeting by IM (see above section) is a possibility, as is tweeting via various mobile apps, like Blackberry's Twitterberry, ceTwit or Twobile for Windows Mobile, MoTwit for Palm OS, Tiny Twitter or jtwitter for Java-enabled phones, or, for anyone else, EmailTwitter, which lets you send tweets and retrieve your timeline via your phone.

Mindless Blog Surfing

RSS. RSS. RSS. If you're not already using an online feed reader, like Google Reader or Bloglines, now's the time to start. Too busy with that "work stuff" to do more than just scan articles? Set up a tag just for your "read it later" items or star them. Revisit them later when you're back at home.

Another option is to subscribe to blogs in Outlook. In many traditional companies, Microsoft Office is par for the course. If your company has revved to Outlook 2007, you can read your RSS feeds right there, no additional software needed. To kick it up a notch, Inbox 3.0 integrates with Outlook, too.

Want to actually go surfing outside of your feeds? Any web surfing at work has the possibility of interruptions. So save the things you come across for later reading at home. Using your portable Firefox, install Idea Shower's "Read It Later" extension for saving items you come across on the web.

Even better, the new ReadBag app built on Google's new apps engine, lets you save links for later reading too, but this tool also offers a daily digest that can be emailed to you at the time you specify. Readbag works via bookmarklet or Firefox extension and provides mobile access to your saved items.

Facebook at Work

What's that? Facebook's blocked? How could they? Proxy sites come to the rescue. If you desperately need MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Digg, Mixx, or any other restricted site, you can try a proxy like: Access Facebook, Facebook Firewall, or VisitSitesAtWork. You can also check out the list at Proxy.org. Just be sure to clear your cookies, your history, and your cache when done. The domain names pretty much give away what you were up to there.

Another idea is, again, mobile access. Blackberry users have their own mobile Facebook app, iPhone users can go here, and, for others, you can visit the Facebook Mobile web site.

Fight FriendFeed Withdrawl

If you successfully installed Twhirl for tweeting at work, then you're in luck since it also lets you access FriendFeed. Other FriendFeed AIR apps you can try are AlertThingy, Feedalizr, or bTT.

If you are prevented from installing programs, consider FriendFeed access via RSS feeds. Just subscribe in your online reader. 

For mobile users, the moblf app can help. This app gives you access to FriendFeed, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn updates via SMS on your mobile phone.

Other Tips

If you can't download files form the web but you can install them, just load the executables onto your USB key and bring them into the office. Another alternative is to zip them up and store them online at an online storage site like box.net or SkyDrive.

You also need to know how to quickly minimize your activities. On a Windows PC, Alt+Tab switches you from window to window. Have only two open - the web browser and the spreadsheet, for example. This way, you won't accidentally mess up and Alt+Tab too many times in haste as your boss approaches, and end up switching to yet another inappropriate window.

Why?

Having been in I.T. myself for years, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to subverting I.T. policy to goof off at work. Why would I share this with the world? Because any I.T. manager worth their salt should know all these things already and how to combat them (if that's what the company wants.)

And every company concerned with employee productivity needs to determine for themselves where they draw the line on non-worked related internet activities and take the appropriate measures they deem necessary for blocking, stopping, tracking, and monitoring employee web use.

Finally, remember: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If you really are slacking at work, people know. I've honored more than one request throughout my years in I.T. to monitor an employee's activities on the DL and your I.T. guy probably will do the same. Proceed carefully.