Technology As Innovator

Dear friends,

You have my appreciation for your tireless efforts to keep me up to date with your super cool web links. I have a modest gift back

How to make your link tempting

A link is a message that you want to convey to your trusted recipients. Sending a naked link is equivalent to sending raw, meaningless bytes of data. It’s better to treat your message in grace!

I’d advise to include a subject/description/abstract of the information contained within the link.

The additional information determines whether a non-free recipient would open the link. My apologize I tend to ignore naked links when boiled under all the pressure.

The subject should be

• Meaningful
• Relevant to the recipient or the relationship between the sender (you) with the recipient
• Descriptive and informative
• Silly-free. Subjects like “this is hot” or “come in to see” are what I consider silly
• Wherever possible, include language-specific notations. For example, you would want to type Vietnamese with accents.
• Avoid virus-like tempting invitations. BTW, most of virus invitations I received recently are stupid if not even, pardon me, illiterate.

By adding the advised information, you have made your link from raw data to becoming meaningful, human-friendly information.

—————————————————————

Above is a simple tip in the form of a quick fix. Now, I guess you’d love to you’re your message personalized.

An all-but-trendily-crazy-word: blog it!

Societies realized the power of blogs. People read and comment blogs. The best way of republishing a message in your own personalized, characterized way is to blog it with your own analysis, reflection, evaluation, and solutions where appropriate.

By blogging, you have transformed the human-connecting information into powerful individual-in-a-solid-community knowledge.

Utilize web services to their best. Knowledge sharing, not data transmitting!

Reflective listening is an inter-personal skill that has been written by many authors in books, journals and articles.
I hereby put a focus on reflective listening when replying to messages via Internet-based media. It can be either replying to a personal email, or replaying a post in a forum, or commenting a blog entry.

I am able to see two parts in a message: the meaning and the expectation. Apparently, people post on forums and blogs with a hope that their readers will read, understand, sympathize and respond in the ‘right’ way.
However, my observations point out that the responders have the temptation to respond in their own way – with what they were able to see. The ‘real’ message and feelings the initiator conveys are easily lost.

Improving the skill in replying and commenting is improving interpersonal skills. How to improve reflective listening is a complete topic of its own and can easily be searched for. The purpose of this piece of writing is just to increase the awareness of communicators (including myself) of how we can constantly improve our communication in the right way.

A simple reminder: communicatioN, not communicationS!

It’s easy to interchange communicationS for communicatioN.

Communication is the very human interaction of exchanging information and knowledge. Communications are tools that help reducing the geographical difference for transmitting data and information.

It is a mistake to invest a lot in technology without encouraging open communication between people in an organization. It is also a mistake to heavily rely on communication tools like Internet-based and cellphone-based activities rather than ‘frictional’ interactions.

We are human. Technology is invented to assist, not replace.