Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

What place does twitter have in a corporate environment? Social networking sites such as facebook is largely banned in corporate workplaces, especially government departments. Most of these places also feel threatened by the idea of instant messaging and suspect that their workers become less productive as a result. And maybe they are right in some circumstances.

Twitter can be abused as can IM and facebook. If all workers are using these “tools” for is to share pics of their weekend parties, and organise their social lives then they are effectively “stealing” time from their employer. And their employer can rightly block that sort of behaviour.

So what is the place of these activities?

Hey there readers of GGB. I am sorry there hasn’t been any new surveys since the 5th of this month, and it is now the 25th. Ah, that’s 20 days! But there were other things like the dinner. Anyway, I enjoyed doing the job of creating the GGB article again, and Cathy McCaughan’s survey in particular was very enjoyable! Make sure you read her response to what her motivation for blogging is. Her blog is also really enjoyable to read. Don’t lose interest in this survey because of her occupation as a mom (mum) when you may have expected some fancy tech title. She is indeed a tech girl and her occupation as a mom is one of the most important jobs out there, so much respect for that.    Toodles!

Name: Cathy McCaughan
Screen Name: I use my real name for all posts and comments.  "I yam what I yam."  Although technically I am a transparent blogger, I think I can accurately be called a naked blogger. ;-)
Personal Blog/s: My blog is: http://domesticpsychology.com/blog/ 
but all of the family blogs can be found at: http://domesticpsychology.com/
Social Networks:
Twitter    Ning    Facebook
Current Employment:
Just an old hippie mom.
Location: USA, Tennessee, Knoxville, at a table in the corner of the kitchen

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)

On the 28th of August 2008, about two weeks ago, Tim and I attended the Girl Geek Dinner in Brisbane which was held at a Turkish restaurant.

The food was amazing!! It was worth going that night just for the food, seriously. But, besides the food, it was really interesting to spend that time with other women who are also involved in computer related work. Some people showed up already knowing other people there, others showed up not knowing anyone… it was interesting to observe the different ways everyone interacted with one another. We’re all so different! I was pretty quiet, but I wasn’t afraid to make conversation with other people, I actually enjoyed talking to some of the other girls during the night. However different from me, some ladies were quite loud and outgoing. Some ladies moved around and talked to most of the girls who showed up, whereas others stayed in their own seat the whole night and just talked with the girls sitting near them. But either way, everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves and I’m certain everyone loved the food.