Do you take this Blackberry? (To the altar with you.)

[sensaes]

Click to view

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSkT5XykJzo

What's the betting that he's wearing one of those "I'm blogging this!" t-shirts underneath the monkey suit?

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Other Stuff: Erik van Ommeren of Sogeti (check out the downloads section of the site for a free PDF version of his book Collaboration in the Cloud: http://www.sogeti.ie) in many ways represents the antithesis of the stripped-down, back-to-basics, glitz-free approach to communications systems I've been outlining and promoting elsewhere. Although I have a lot of respect for the chap, I genuinely believe he's a little too much in love with the current crop of (allegedly) collaborative bells-and-whistles apps on offer, and his pronouncements about e-mail are indicative of this:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/14571/cio/email-is-dead-long-live-collaboration

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: If e-mail isn't working for you, then you're doing it wrong. Now that may be down to something as simple as poor language skills, but leaping for the latest, flashiest pseudo-alternative isn't the answer, even if you do have a vested interest in promoting a particular product. ;o) By the time your colleagues have got to grips with yet another non-intuitive interface, managed to re-think and translate what they would've said in a few choice sentences into a fully-fledged, mixed media package, and ensured that everyone in the recipient/client/co-worker environment both understand what's going on and are equipped to participate...something else has come along to replace it. The moment has passed whilst you were staring at that shiny new thing on your desktop.

There's a good reason that e-mail's been around for as long as it has. It works. So don't knock it, and don't seek to do it down just for the sake of appearing trendy. Master it.

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A couple of links on the Google compromise re: news access...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8389896.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/12/did_google_just_blink.html

...but the upshot is that, despite the naysayers, Murdoch's still winning this one. (And yes, D, watching Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC News at One citing the Wall Street Journal as an example of paid content did make me smile. Maybe he's out of the loop of what's on the cards there for January.)