Words can't describe...

...the way I felt this morning waking up and not needing to check MindAlign. After nearly 5 years (7 if you go back to March 2000) of constant connection and chatting, the spigot is off on Parlano. It was like a drug for me, in a positive way. I was truly connected to my team and them to me. It was THE secret behind our success as a firm...now the rest of the world knows.

For me, I'm looking forward to new challenges. In the past several weeks I have had many conversations; my email and phone have been very active. I'm looking forward to attending Defrag next week in Denver. It's a very interesting Web/Enterprise 2.0 conference with some really cool players and technologies. It should be a lot of fun, especially as an independent. The only expectations and goals I have to meet are my own; haven't had that approach at a conference like this in many years.

I've created a new profile on Facebook (add me as a friend) and am looking at a few of the other social networks. They are partially filling in my need for group collaboration, after so many years connected to MindAlign, but I find that they lack the real time impact and meaning that MindAlign provides. I'm still searching for that "way" to use one of these tools in a way that will be meaningful to me professionally.

I have also started to really look at using RSS feeds for personal consumption of news stories/blogs and the stuff that NewsGator is doing. I love their reader, and the ease at which I can add new feeds. What I really need to do is find a way to narrow down the amount of stories/blogs that hit the reader...I find myself pre-maturely marking the stories as "read" simply to clean up the page, rather than focusing on consuming the stories of interest.

I suspect that I will find an intersection of these tools with real time communication that will enhance the way I like to work and add to my professional development. I think that's what we're all trying to do, isn't it.

More next week from Denver and Defrag. But for now, my communities live outside any organization...oh how I look forward to the days of using group chat again!

Comments

[matt lambert]

‘What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?’

Hope you enjoy the time - I don't suppose it will last that long for you.

Myself, I use a reader in combination with Del.ic.ious - anything interesting rather than read it at once, I save with a toread tag, I then subscribe to the toread tag

That way I can spend 10 minutes cleaning up all the feeds without distraction.

Organising the feeds into folders is great for prioritising which to read and when (with Google Reader for me)

There is a collaboration angle to the Google Reader and Delicious which I think you probably would enjoy.

The newsgator and traction case study was also interesting.

Matt