Internet traffic growth

This is an amazing graphic (please click to enlarge):

According to this Cisco blog post, the amount of traffic generated by 20 average households this year will surpass ALL of the traffic generated in 2008.

The illustration attempts to identify some of the sources of all that chatter:

• People communicating with other people
• People communicating with machines
• Machines communicating with other machines
• Machines creating smart networks of related machines

In one sense it's mind-boggling and a bit scary. Where will decision-making responsibility and accountability ultimate rest? If my refrigerator orders milk in error, who is liable for the purchase? If my car fails to tell me about my brakes, who bears responsibility for an accident?

We haven't even begun to wrestle with these questions, but they're coming!

Read the entire blog post: The Internet of Things

Social Media at Work

Corporate marketing departments have made huge investments - mostly in time and energy - in social media. The major names - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn - are all firmly established as necessary communications channels, deserving of strategic thought and management.

But what about internal communications? Will social media tools ever catch on inside the network?

Microsoft has built a variety of social media tools into its integrated offerings of Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, and Office 365. Yet activity streams ... which seem to be the primary currency of Facebook and Twitter ... have yet to become relevant to the day-to-day technology at work.
But I believe that will change soon. The answers to many age-old office space questions can all be easily answered with status updates and check-ins:

• Where is [fill-in-the-blank] today?
• Where are we meeting for lunch?
• How is the new product development coming along?

Right now, using a Facebook or Twitter-like tool for such things seems silly.

Two years ago, many people thought 140-character mini-updates ("I am on the patio") seemed silly, too.