Anyone who’s ever had to call or attend meetings before, for any reason knows the difference between a good meeting and a bad meeting.

Often though it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of discussion and everything to do with the attitudes and egos of the people attending. And sometimes to absolutely disastrous effects.

Think back to your last few meetings, how did they go? would they have gone better if a certain person wasn’t invited? or perhaps if a few different people were there instead?

Thus is the art of:

Not inviting people to meetings.

Meeting invites should be treated like dinner party invites, selective and with intent. Often people are not invited just because of their status, but because they can offer something to the party such as stimulating discussion or to raise the profile or tone of the meeting.

This is exactly what you should adopt when calling a meeting in your workplace.

Is there someone senior to you that will do nothing for your meeting? Then don’t bother inviting them. A colleague has a differing point of view on the topic? Then don’t invite them either.

What are the outcomes?

First of all you need to decide on the outcome of the meeting you want to achieve. It won’t always work out this way but with creative selection of people to attend then you have a much better chance that the intended outcome will be achieved.

So ask yourself, “What is the outcome I want to achieve?”

You might want to have people agree to a new arrangement, or deny a request from another department, perhaps to slow or speed up an internal or external process.

No matter what outcome, you want to ensure you have the best chance for it to naturally occur in the meeting without too much guidance, it is best if it happens of its own accord but sometimes a little prompting in the right direction is needed.

What is on your agenda?

Here is where you will carefully craft the items that you wish to speak about in the meeting you propose to others. These are incredibly important, especially if you are inviting select people to affect a specific outcome. Think about the people you want to invite and how they will read each item on your agenda but also remember to follow some simple rules when holding a meeting.

Rules of good meetings:

1. Have a clear purpose to your meeting.
2. ALWAYS stay on topic.
3. A short meeting is a good meeting.
4. Preparation, preparation, preparation.
5. Remember to include everyone.
6. Ensure the participants are available.
7. Never leave without a decision being made.

If you follow these seven rules of good meetings then you shouldn’t have any problem creating an agenda that is not only effective, but maximizes the time spent in the meeting addressing the topics you have brought to the table.

Who should you invite?

The selection of people who will attend your meeting is of course the most crucial step, it is these people that will decide the outcome of your meeting.

Before you add a person to a meeting ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this person relevant to the agenda topics?
• Will this person add to the meeting?
• Is this person agreeable or argumentative?
• Does this person often complicate things?
• Does this person raise the profile of the meeting?
• Is it appropriate this person attend?
• What is the influence this person will exert?

Once you’re able to answer these questions it should be a breeze to assemble a “dream team” for your meeting outcome to be realised.

If you want a positive outcome to help move forward with a topic then you would want a person who is relevant to the topic, generally agreeable who doesn’t complicate processes and raises the profile of the meeting.

However if you want a negative outcome then perhaps an argumentative person who does complicate processes that exerts influence over others in the meeting and also raises the meeting profile may be needed.

Know the people you work with!

The quickest way to achieve the steps outlined above is to know the people you work with. It is no good to call a meeting expecting people to behave a certain way to agree or disagree with agenda items if you don’t know them!

If you have been in your role for quite a while then you should already have a clear picture about the people around you, if not ask your fellow colleagues their opinions of your intended invitees or go for a coffee with your invitee and discuss other items (just don’t stray onto your agenda topics!).

Once you have a picture of the people you work with then you can easily qualify or disqualify people to attend your meeting.

Keep it safe, Keep it secret.

A meeting should be like a well oiled machine, all its parts working synchronously to achieve its purpose, but add too many parts and it becomes a hassle to manage efficiently.

Once you have set your agenda, selected the participants and called the meeting then don’t boast about the things you are going to achieve in the meeting lest it get back to one of the participants.

Avoid speaking about the specifics of the meeting unless approached by an invited person. This will stop other people inviting themselves and derailing your meeting so you can stick to the seven rules of a good meeting above.

It may sound suspicious to keep it secret, but it will work to your advantage to treat it on a “need to know” basis.

You are the chosen one.

Ok so you’ve followed the steps above, now you are staring down the barrel of the proverbial gun that is your meeting. What to do?

First, breathe, don’t fret about what you have just called. Don’t think negatively about the outcome. Don’t worry about the people in the room.

“But I just invited the CEO!” you might be thinking.

Yes, you might have done that, but he or she is just a person, like yourself. Don’t let another person’s position intimidate you as it will only serve to make you doubt yourself when the meeting takes place.

Be positive that the people you have invited are the best people for the outcome you need, think about achieving that goal and how to guide the conversation to the end game you want to see.

Remember, they are attending a meeting you have called. The fact that they have accepted your meeting invitation is indication enough that they are willing to give their time to hear what you have to say.

Use it wisely.

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It is 2012, social networks are the most common way for people to communicate and yet while there are clear leaders such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn there are also hundreds of other services vying for market share on the internet.

Google+ is of course the newest to the leader pack, but even it is suffering the slings and arrows of mediocrity when compared to the established networks.

So why is it failing? and why do so many fail where others succeed?

First a little history.

• 2004 – Facebook launches, limited to Harvard Students.
• mid-2004 – Facebook expands to include other university campuses.
• 2005 – A ‘High School’ version of Facebook is launched.
• 2006 – Twitter is launched limiting its users to only 140 characters per update.
• late-2006 – Facebook is opened to the public.
• 2007 – Twitter’s popularity gains ground with SXSW festival participants.
• 2008 - Twitter has 100 million tweets posted per quarter.
• late-2008 - Facebook sets up international HQ in Dublin, Ireland.
• 2009 - Twitter crash due to  Michael Jacksons death, 100,000 tweets a minute.
• late-2009 - Facebook becomes ‘cash-positive’ for the first time.
• 2010 - Twitter has 65 million tweets a day posted on average.
• 2010 - Facebook’s estimated value calculated to be $41 billion.
• 2011 - 20,000 pages are removed from Facebook per day due to security issues.
• late-2011 - Twitter rolls out its third major design change.

This of course is by no means a full and annotated history of social networks, but it does include several important milestones along the way. Both Twitter and Facebook have had their fair share of scandals and hardships placed upon them due to world events, international legislation and capacity problems, both services however have managed to keep afloat through incoming investments and several venture capital rounds.

You might at this time be wondering why I haven’t mentioned other networks like Bebo, Pownce, Identi.ca or Yammer. Well don’t fret, I’m getting to those…

With the success of the few have come the failure of the many. Plenty of niche services have started up, and even at similar times as other more successful social networks but have failed to capture user or market share, even where they may be a superior offering with better service.

So the question remains, what happens when social networks die?

So a few things happen when a social network ‘dies’, but there are so many different ways it can happen that it can be hard to keep track of what tolled the death knell for the network.

Lets take a look at Myspace as case in point. 

While Myspace is technically still around and I’m sure is still used by some people every day, it is perhaps one of the best examples of a quote unquote ‘dead social network’.

Myspace was insanely popular in its time, it was one of the first sites to merge a personal web space, photo sharing, music sharing, blogging platform and guestbook into a uniquely themed page for people to keep in contact with you.. and for a while Myspace was king.

So what happened? Why did the premier social network fail so badly?

For each social network that has failed to date the reasons for their untimely demise range from financial difficulties and legal battles through to competitive acquisition or obsolescence.

First kid on the block syndrome.

Myspace certainly suffered greatly for a variety of reasons and as they were forging new paths into the social media market. Scandals seemed to plague Myspace for years where people were stalked, suicides announced, murders plotted, social predators emerged and a whole host of other uses that the original developers had not counted on. While the majority of people who used the service remained tame and banal, there were those who sort to exploit the service for their own perverse needs.

Security? What’s that?

Another area that Myspace failed was a lack of implicit security. This is to be expected of a service that forges a path, mistakes can and will be made and can cause great detriment to a social network if they are not quickly addressed either behind the scenes or in the public eye. There were plenty of ways to view so called ‘private’ pages or photos over the years that had to be ironed out over time.

Here’s the keys don’t crash the car.

Public flexibility is also an area that caused downfall, too much user control isn’t always a good thing. When Myspace allowed the use of directly entered HTML to edit profiles it was one of the best and worst moves possible for the site. Not only did designers create amazingly clean and unique profile pages within the constraints of the Myspace system, but the general populace of the network turned to third party theme designers that often produced hideous results that resembled the early days of Geocities and Angelfire.

The use of HTML customisation also led to code and cross-site scripting exploits to run rife throughout Myspace.

Just shove another gimmick in.

Feature bloat was also another problem that was encountered, specifically gimmicky features. Instead of continuous improvement of the existing features available to users, the site was added to, only complicating the already cluttered profiles and hard to operate user settings.

Now don’t get me wrong, there also were a lot of good things that Myspace did for virtual communities across the globe. Unfortunately Myspace didn’t learn from their mistakes, but others took note and led to the rise in popularity of more constrained sites like Facebook and Twitter.

A cavalcade of imitators.

Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin… they all have their imitators. From sites that offer exactly the same feature set to niche networks that specifically cater for the needs of a subset of users.

Social networks that ‘borrow’ the features of the big boys still serve a purpose. For people who don’t want to be a part of the thronging masses present on mainstream networks the smaller more intimately focused social network may be more attractive.

The dangers for these users however are usually higher due to:

• The service may not be as security concious as bigger networks.
• Failure due to lack of funds.
• Extreme lack of administration.
• Selling to another network and integrated / decommissioned.

These factors are among the most common reasons a social network could fail.

Security is in the fore mind of most users and people have become extremely protective of their information so a site that is deemed as insecure or rife with hacking will be quickly disbanded for other alternatives.

Lack of funds may impede upgrades, force cutbacks or indeed prematurely shut down a site all together. Popular social network services are not cheap to run as costs amount quickly when considering domain registration, hosting costs, bandwidth costs, legal costs and more.

Bad administration can cause a loss of faith in a social network service as its users expect timely updates, upgrades, news about changes. If a standard of service is not met and maintained then users will leave in a heartbeat.

Selling is also often a concern, if a social network becomes popular or has popular features then it is always in the interest of the owners to sell the network for profit.

Who loses in the end?… the user.

Ultimately the user loses out when a social network dies, their friends migrate to different services and not necessarily the same services either. This can fragment an existing group or make it difficult to keep in touch with a select few.

Often a user will need to be a part of several social networks to maintain the status quo with friends or interest groups, which puts strain on the relationships already forged.

Worst of all is if the social network was initially started with a purpose.

Lets take a look at a hypothetical case. 

Lets fast forward to 6 months into the networks existence. The service has been successfully started, there are now over 1,000 users who daily talk to others who have similar thoughts and feelings on depression. The administrator announces that in the next few months there will be some changes that will allow people to use the service more freely with the release of an iPhone and Android application.

Another 6 months into the future and the word is out, the service now has 100,000 users, 20 million hits a day and has required the administrator to purchase a higher rated hosting plan to support the users.

Financially the administrator is feeling pressure as he is bearing the cost of the service by himself. He decides to add a donation button to all pages so people can help pay for the service. He also implements perks for those who donate on a regular basis, increasing overhead but hopefully also increasing funding.

12 months later, there are now 500,000 users and 50 million hits per day. The administrator loses his primary job, he posts that he may need to shut down the site for a while so he can focus on finding a new position somewhere to help pay for better hosting to support the site. The community rallies behind the admin and helps pay the operating costs, understanding that there will be no major changes to the service in the mean time.

6 months later the administrator suffers another bout of depression due to his inability to find a new job and decides to either stop running the site or to hand it over to another competent administrator to operate.

Ultimately no one comes forward to administer the site.

The site exists for a while with no administrator mainly moderated by some of the more faithful users, but eventually the donations slow and the web host cancels the account for lack of payment removing all existence of the network, its users and any shared information.

The users are now at a loss, they have no direct alternative to the site, the few people who can still contact each other either through other social networks or websites are now fragmented across different services.

Those people who do not have connections to other people from the site may feel left out, they now have nowhere talk to others who could understand the position they are in and also could fall back into depression or worse.

Obviously this is just a hypothetical circumstance, but it does raise certain concerns where a social network may become quickly popular beyond its initial boundaries and be shut down due to a single point of failure.

Have you ever been a part of a social network that has shut down or had become obsolete?

Put your story into the comments, would love to hear them.

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With the rumour mills firing up to full capacity about the next iPad and its specifications, the time has come to ask the question: Will I buy a tablet?

I personally don’t have a tablet device, I’ve never really needed one for home having both a netbook and desktop machine. Recently though I’ve been toying of the idea of using one for work.

What I’d want to do with a tablet for work:

• Take notes in meetings
• Record meetings (audio)
• Access previous meeting notes
• Access WiFi in meetings
• Create or Access documents in meetings

What I’d like to do with a tablet for home:

• Browse the internet
• Write on-the-go blog posts
• Play games
• Stream movies from network drive

The software I use every day like Dropbox and Evernote and Google Docs are supported on most devices these days so transferring from an Android or Apple device would be easy.

One thing I can see that may be a slight hitch in this plan is that I own an Kindle Keyboard. Now this doesn’t seem like too big a deal, but I do love my Kindle to death so moving to either Kindle for iPad or Kindle for Android may be either an enhanced experience or a degraded experience depending on the circumstances.

In any case I’ll still be keeping my Kindle Keyboard as it is the best travel companion one could ask for, other than some good human company of course!

So here lies the dilemma, jump now? or wait till the next Apple iPad is released?

Decisions, Decisions…

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How bright the candle burns during those times, how we feel like all the horrid things that have happened to us in the past aren’t of any consequence and finally the veil is lifted to see the light of all that is good once more.

But, just as quickly all hopes can be dashed against the levels of fucking bullshit that The Universe decides to throw back in our faces, when at your highest peak you can be thrust into the belly of dispair once more… dispair at an intensity you never thought you would feel so soon again.

You’ve got to laugh, why do we even bother? I mean is it worth it?

Does it feel right to focus all your hopes, dreams, fears and excitement into what you deem as so good, so pure that if it all fails then you will be left with nothing? As nothing more than a Human Being is it the great cascade of misery how we define ourselves? If so why do we even bother? What if nothing but heartache and misery could ever become of anything?

Looks fade, youth quickly leaves, feelings are fleeting and what is left over is but a withered, failed husk that is nothing more than the culmination of past miseries? Should I feel that? Should anybody?

Is it too much for an individual to ask for happiness, too much to know even for a fleeting moment what that is? Why when we are at our best do we end up so devastated?

What even gives us the right to feel happy? What gives us the need to feel fulfilled? What is it that takes special things in our lives and turns them to dust?

But this is just the way we all move through life, some crawl when they could run, some run when they will stumble. And so is the great cog of life, turning over itself until the death of the one it turns for.

I think I’ve finally figured it out:

The Universe is fucked…

and now…

…so am I.

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NASA have taken hundreds of images of the Aurora Borealis captured from passing spacecraft and stitched them together into the above video.

That’s enough from me, switch it to HD 1080p, hit play, go fullscreen and watch in awe.

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Street light flooded in through a small window and came to rest on an old orange glass lamp, casting a golden hue onto this mostly empty room.

All except for a single corner.

The corner was dim, light gradually faded, not ever leaving completely, but faded.

Residing in the corner was a writing desk covered in small pieces of paper from different sources. Books, magazines, pamphlets and all manner of printed material that had been mutilated to make a menagerie of text. Under the cuttings, drawn in a thousand different inks, were arcane symbols and images.

Accompanying the desk was a chair, small, quaint and covered with a badly worn red velveteen, but you couldn’t see the chair’s covering right now, not at this exact moment.

Here sat Emery.

Snip snip… snip snip, scissors glinted in the light, tiny reflections flecked the walls that darted here and there, a few moments later the literary works of Plato lay in tatters along with a copy of Science Weekly.

‘New Discovery in Quantum States’ read one of the cuttings, ‘Breakthrough in macro sub-particle research’ another announced from the desk.

Emery was searching, for an answer, hell he was searching for anything that could explain what had happened or that could help him figure out his existence, but he always ended up more frustrated than he started. The year is 2065, Emery doesn’t begin his story here, he was almost 130 years old but the tempest had not ravaged his looks, had not dulled his sense or wit, it only served to sharpen them.

He stared at the lamp in the room, glowing with a tangerine gild, the ambiance faded to match his corner. Emery sighed.

Standing up, he began to pace through the now dim room. When close to a wall the colour drained from its surface, only to return after he’d moved. “I’m not even sure how this happened, let alone why” the thought, “How could I become like this, become so… lifeless.”

Enraged he struck out at his desk, clippings fluttered through the air, turning over and over till resting on a pile discarded books. All but one had landed face down.

‘At my darkest, when at my worst, when I both loathed and loved myself, still… I could see an end’ it was the account of a junkie. Heroin, crack, smack, uppers, downers, she’d had them all but somehow still kept a even keel about one day not needing a fix.

The words filled Emery, he imagined a life without… without the struggle, just for a single moment the golden hue of the room began to return, soon to be reduced to the half-light of before.

A church bell tolled in the background, the city noise had dulled to reveal a chorus of insects. Emery preferred going out in the dark, he figured that darkness shrouded him from others. People couldn’t see the effects of his “condition” very well at night, everything tended to be dark already.

He avoided crowded locations, less people means less chance of hurting anyone.

At first he’d tried to visit busier locations, flitting from doorstep to alcove trying desperately to avoid the street light. But he’d been unsuccessful and more than a few had noticed this behavior. A policeman had stopped him at an intersection, trying to arrest him for jay walking, Emery looked particularly suspicious to the officer and wanted to take him in for questioning.

But mistakes were made, the officer was now dead.

The newspapers had called it a ‘Phantom Death’, an investigation lasted less than 3 days when the lack of tangible evidence was discovered, “A true cold case” the media had announced.

This wasn’t the first death, and although it would not be the last, Emery always regretted being there.

But that was more than 80 years ago, now Emery had traveling down to a fine art. He could slip between the streets without even a soul noticing he was there. Gliding from shadow to shadow, he was especially careful not to come too close to anything that was remotely colourful.

Emery wore gray fingerless gloves and a hooded black trench-coat that was buttoned up to his neck and tattered at its edges. He had the hood drawn and looked slightly downward so no one could meet his gaze. He carefully stepped between people as he proceeded down town, making sure that he did not touch anyone as he passed lest he arouse attention. A friend had asked him to visit a few weeks ago, back then he’d reluctantly agreed, but he now knew the reason for the invitation and was determined to make every effort to attend this very night.

He rounded a corner and saw the renovated warehouse where he had been summoned. All the windows were dark save one, it was illuminated from within by what appeared to be candlelight.

Emery stood on the building stoop in front of a grubby green door.

He reached for the door knocker, and sharply rapped.

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Its early days and I haven’t added Facebook Connect or Comments as yet (but I just might!) so for now it will just be the ability to like posts and send them to other people.

Anyhow, if you do like a post then don’t hesitate to hit the button below!

A little further…

There you go!

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While I have you, let me tell you about a few things I have on the cards for 2012:

• Deck 9 -  A novel that I’ve been hacking away at for some months now.
• SixInchPress.com - eBook publishing house.
• WriteSauce.com - A network for writers, more on this later.
• New Caledonia - I so want to go back there to see the rest of the islands!
• And probably a hundred more things I can’t yet think of!

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Probably the first thing I have to do is fix that HIDEOUS typography over there in the side bar… so if its not looking like default blue link text with an underline then I’ve at least done that…

So what do I have planned for 2012?

Well I’m a free man again, no strings attached… I can set sail wherever and whenever I like. But I do have some important goals for 2012, I’m going to make an attempt at beginning a writing career.

I love writing, fiction is my game and I’m knee deep in the first few chapters of a new novel called Deck 9, but if I keep writing back story then I’ll end up nowhere but I’ll have a kick-ass background for a ton of flash fiction, shorts and novella.

Well its 3:17am here and I have work in the morning…

Pffft, as if I sleep anyway…

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