From making homemade bagels to  a talking suitcase, you’ll find detailed instructions on Instructables.   There are an incredible number of great ideas there.  Sure, there are also some not so good or poorly presented instructions and even some flat-out wrong things – but that doesn’t detract from the quality of the experience.  The how-to’s are clearly from individuals, with no promise or hint of any quality control – except of course for the user comments.  Instructables does host contests, with winners getting a nice badge added to their page.  But otherwise it is a free-for-all.

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Ruben Puentedura ponders the use of a smartphone to not just consume content, but also to create it.  And that got me thinking how I could adapt that idea to my own BlackBerry Storm in some type of platform independent way.  There used to be a handy service through FeedDemon that made it easy to read RSS feeds from both my mobile phone and multiple computers and bookmark them for later use.  It was a really handy way to collect ideas and then reference or blog post on them later.  But one of the hazzards with any such service is it may disappear, as the FeedDemon service did (the desktop software still exists but with a Google Reader backend.)  Delicious is another way to collect websites, but I can’t find an easy way to use it via mobile, and it is still too limited.  I want to collect everything — tweets, images, websites and random thoughts all in one place — and in a place under my complete control.

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I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow.  But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem.  If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck.   The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live.  I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by.  But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms.  Anyone got an answer?  Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?

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How is the information technology department viewed in your organization?  Too expensive, too slow, always say no, better to outsource?  If any of these sound familiar then it might be time to take some lessons from The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value.  Overall the book is excellent — clearly presented with plenty of real examples to illustrate the various points.  I found it tough to keep my attention focused on the book, not because is was boring, but because the ideas rang so true I found myself thinking through how I might employ them in my own workplace.

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Confused by what Google Wave might be useful for?  Here is a nicely demonstrated scenario going through a business process modeling project.    I like the example of new members re-playing the Wave to catch up on the team’s progress — very efficient.  It seems to me that a workplace effort to encourage this type of Google Wave use would need some type of kick-off/introduction workshop.  Get a big group together, have some scripted collaborative tasks, and have them use wave to accomplish those tasks.  You’d teach the tool and also work on the general topic of effective collaboration/team work.

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Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

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