Shaine Mata Blog

I love social media. Make no mistake about it. However, one of the greatest examples of the limitations of social media is the use of these networks during a disaster. There are some glaring shortcomings when using social media to get your message out to the public. Limited Audience The biggest challenge to using social media to push information to the public is that not everybody is on facebook, twitter, myspace, or whatever network you choose. There are some people who live long productive lives without bothering with social networks. There are a bunch more who check their networks on occasion rather than daily. The vast majority are simply on a different network. You can't reach that many people. Access During a Disaster Modern living is highly dependent on electricity. In the event of a destructive hurricane, earthquake, or other event that knocks out power indefinitely, it is likely that many people will be unable to receive disaster updates. After all, batteries don...

I was reading a brief blog post by Seth Godin in which he states that you're already self-employed . This is something that I have understood for many years, even when I succumb to my own insecurities by getting a 9 to 5 job. Given today's economy, it may have occurred to many people that there is no job security. Therefore, as an employee of somebody else, it is incumbent upon you to always be on the lookout and have your resume ready for action. Why You Must Go Employers only really need a few star players on their team. Either you are the star player or you are there as a fringe benefit to the star player. The concept to take away is that the vast majority of us are merely adequate at our jobs; we are there to give the star performers some breathing room to achieve great things. In tough economic times, the star player is needed more than ever; and, given limited resources, it makes you expendable. Another reason you must go is cashflow. Businesses are not there to pro...

This blog post is written on Google Wave. RSS readers click here .

You can read this blog post on Google Wave here .

This probably applies to a few of you who have decided to move your Intranet to Google Apps. You can set up Google Wave for your domain so that you can use your email address as your Google Wave login and even set up groups. The best example I can give is if you have whatchamacallit.com as your company domain. If your address is bob@whatchamacallit.com, you can Wave with other whatchamacallit.com users using that email address. If you have signed up with Google Wave in the past, you know that whatever email address you use gets a user name and @googlewave.com appended to it. You might even get a Google user account created for you. Not so with Google Apps accounts. The really cool part about having a Google Apps domain account is that your admin can create groups. So, let's say that you create team1@whatchamacallit.com as a group within the company. You can then add team1@whatchamacallit.com as a contact within your Wave. This connects you to the entire team without having to a...

Blog post written on a Google Wave . Click to read and interact.

This blog post is written in Google Wave .

This blog post contains a Google Wave .

There is a Google Wave extension that has finally made the use of Wave for project management somewhat feasible. Unawave is a service that allows you to create projects, milestones, and tasks within the Google Wave ecosystem. Unawave automates keeping track of details in your project. You even get a dashboard Wave so that you can oversee the whole thing at a glance. Google Wave is now just over one year old . While many of us geek types ooohhed and aaahhed over the new things that Wave could do, when first announced, we were disappointed with how flat Wave fell on its face due to low adoption. Much of this was caused by the relatively few numbers of invitations available. It's not surprising that using Wave for managing projects was simply undoable. There would always be somebody who could not get in. Even if they did, they were confused by Wave itself. That has changed now that Google Wave has opened up to everybody . In my current experience, I am starting to see greater ad...

I am giving up on multi-tasking. If you know me, you have probably seen me doing all kinds of magic on the computer with mutiple browser windows, browser tabs, applications, and messaging all fired-up to switch from one task to another in an instant. There is an increasing amount of evidence that human beings are very lousy at multitasking. Yes, we may be doing two or three things at once; but in the long-run, it takes us longer to accomplish these things in parallel than it would have taken us to do them in series. So, if saving time is your goal, then multitasking is one of the the last things you should do. Not only do you take longer to accomplish tasks when switching back and forth, you also do a worse job than if you had focused on one task. Having a smartphone is great. It allows me to do many of the same things that I would normally do at a computer. As a matter of fact, I check more email and other messages on my phone than at the computer. However, I have started to que...