This weekend, storytellers from around the world gathered at Colonial Williamsburg to participate in the Third Annual Storytelling Festival. Art Johnson, a historical interpreter, talked with Lloyd Dobyns, host of Colonial Williamsburg podcast series. Art brings up a very interesting point when he states, “Listening to a good storyteller, or listening to somebody you are interested in hearing what they’re telling you about, you get wrapped up in their voice. Their voice will lead you to a place that you forget about where you are and what you’re doing; you’re in their world. That’s the difference between a good storyteller and somebody just talking to you in front of an audience.”

Where is the connection to IT? No, nothing to do with making up meaningless metrics to impress the CEO. Storytelling can be about real facts and events, just told in an engaging manner. The real connection is that both storytelling and IT deal with handling and interpreting information. This can be done both through the written word or through speech. In other words, through blogs or through podcasts.

Dr. Rohit Khare, director of CommerceNet Labs, had a discussion with Jon Udell on “Syndication-Oriented Architecture (SynOA).” Dr. Rohit points out that rapid innovation of “Web 2.0″ syndication and social collaboration tools are spurring enterprise leaders to implement syndication as a core component of their Service-Oriented Architectures. The increased volume of unstructured data is overwhelming employees, customers, and customers. Businesses are challenged with finding a way to connect relevant and actionable information with the people that drive business. Dr. Khare states:

You do in some ways centralize the information flow, but you get the benefit of decentralized awareness — it’s an interesting paradox. If I have one syndication bus that’s responsible for delivering information to all of my users, and everyone in the community, then that same piece of software is in a very good position to detect patterns and emerging trends. If you think about meme trackers that can report, hey, this is a hot story that’s come up in the last few hours, that’s going to be really powerful when it mainstreams.

Dr. Khare goes on to say, “Syndication standards are no longer just formats for relaying headline news. Now they can enable ‘information agility’ for all of the knowledge flowing inside and outside the enterprise.” This basically is the idea of “RSSifying” everything, then putting all the feeds through a “syndication bus.”

Dr. Khare points to Facebook as an example of a syndication-oriented application. Facebook users are constantly interpreting and publishing events onto a syndication bus while at the same time subscribing to aggregated feeds published by their friends who interpret and publish events. On and on it goes. What data gets delivered to the individual and how it gets presented depends on what their friends decided to publish and how their friends interpret the event. In other words, people are the storytellers.

Now consider Art Johnson words:

Storytellers tell their stories their way. Those who are more creative, who can create stories, they definitely tell it their way. The way they tell it, and if you listen to them, they could tell you the same story three different times, in three different ways. If you were to put them all together, you’ll hear there are a whole lot more likenesses than there are differences.

Personalization is exactly what both storytellers and the subscribers of Facebook are doing. SynOA is meant to guide a wide range of services. Under SynOA, information overload is broken up into five layers of increasingly sophisticated capabilities: Publication, Subscription, Distribution, Personalization, and Collaboration.

Tom Kelleher and Barbara M. Miller did study for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, titled “Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes.” They evaluated the potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. What they found is that blogs are a good place to speak candidly with a conversational style. This conversational style, “may be an important part of the process of building and maintaining computer-mediated relationships. Among the most important findings of this study are that:

1. blogs were perceived as more conversational than organizational Web sites
2. this conversational human voice correlated positively with other previously-identified relationship outcomes.

The perceived personal nature of organizational blogs, in this case, is related to relationship indicators.” They go on to state, “To enter the market conversation, Web sites need to have a voice, express a point of view, ignite a dialogue, and give access to helpful people (Searls & Weinberger, 2001). It all starts with having a voice. Expressing a point of view in a personal tone in a blog is likely a good way to get a conversation started.”

Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger write in their book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual“, “the best of the people in PR are not PR Types at all. They’re the company’s best conversationalists.” The point being, one has to engaged the reader or listener. That is a key attribute of an effective storytellers.

I have heard from some busy people how they prefer RSS feeds over podcasts, because podcasts can get a bit off topic and chatty. With RSS feeds you can scan for information. There lies a potential problem. Nielsen Norman Group researchers did a study involving newsletters. They found that the average time allocated to an email newsletter after opening it is just 51 seconds. People scan the text, with only 19% of newsletters being read fully. Eyetracking observations of users reading RSS news feeds showed that people scan the headlines and blurbs in feeds even more ruthlessly than they scan newsletters.

Having people scan posting and read only 19% or less of what is written does not seem an effective way to engage the reader or listener. Michael Stelzner, in his posting, “Using Voice to Engage Readers, A Case Study” makes some interesting points. When he was a sales manager at The Sharper Image, they found that if they walked around the store with an expensive product in their hands and showed folks how it worked, the sales of that product grew dramatically. Michael experimented by recording a voice snippet that auto played after a few seconds, when someone visits the website for his book, “Writing White Papers.” The recording just told visitors how they could hear a sample chapter of the book by clicking on a link. While the link had been there all along, Michael reports that, “Indeed people did follow my voice instructions significantly more AFTER I asked them to click on a special link.”

The moral of the story is that one has to engage the reader. Some folks are just going to want the facts. Their limited time might make them less inclined to care about the personalization and collaboration stage of SynOA. These folks are like that manager I wrote of earlier, who was so busy he did other work while in meetings. I would caution that there is a real danger in not taking the time to listen to others and learn how to communicate effectively. I worked with a guy once who was a very hard working and intelligent individual. Because he was so hard working, he was promoted to the point where he had several people working for him. The problems was, he valued his own abilities so much, he never saw the value in others. He never developed effective communication or collaboration skills. There comes a point where no matter how brilliant and hard working you might be, there simply are not enough hours in the day. People have to rely on each others to get complicated jobs done. We can learn from each other. On a good team, each member brings their own perspective. It the classic story of the blind men and the elephant. It is through the collaboration phase that we gain knowledge of the larger picture. If you cannot communicate your knowledge, good team work is impossible and your effectiveness is severely limited. This is why IT needs good storytellers.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed, one of the first thing the engineers had to do was to securely anchor the bridge’s two towers on the solid bedrock. The problem was, the bedrock was under many layers of mud below the East River. The solution decided upon was to use a huge wooden caisson, which was assembled on land, towed to the site of the tower, and sunk. Compressed air was pumped into the chamber to prevent water from leaking in. The caisson’s false floor was then ripped out so the workers could dig up the river bottom.

The EyeWitness to History.com website described the working conditions of the caisson as follows:

The working conditions within the caisson resembled a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The tremendous pressure, the suffocating heat, the lack of oxygen and the noise all combined to limit a worker’s time within the caisson to a maximum of two hours. As they ascended through the compressed air to the top of the caisson, the workers were threatened with the crippling and painful effects of the bends – an imbalance of nitrogen in the blood caused by a too rapid ascension out of the compressed air.

Initially, 80 of the crew’s 352 sandhogs were affected by the agony of the bends, and 15 died. Work continued with slower ascent times.

Sandhogs continue to do their work, and die, under New York. Most people do not realize that New York City has a $6 billion water tunnel project that has claimed 24 lives, endured six mayors and survived three city fiscal crises.

The sandhogs have my utmost respect. My great grandfather was a coal miner in Scranton, PA. My gramma would tell about him coming home completely black from coal dust. Only his eyes remained white. They knew the coal mines would kill them one way or a another. They did what they had to do to take care of their families. It is an amazing quality in people. They will sacrifice themselves for the hope of the future. The people who are left behind also demonstrate such courage in continuing to live and by not allowing the sacrifices to be in vain.

I grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. As a child, I could see the skyline of New York City from my bedroom window. My childhood home was within fifteen miles of the World Trade Center. My family attended St. Joseph’s church in East Rutherford where Father Mychal Judge, affectionately known as Father Mike, was a friar. Father Mike was the Fire Department chaplain killed six years ago today following the World Trade Center attacks. He was one of the first to die when struck by falling debris as he anointed a firefighter and a fallen office worker.

People much more eloquent than I can post tributes concerning 9/11. I just wanted to take a moment and remember those whose lives ended and the many more people whose lives were permanently altered by the events of September 11, 2001.

Back then I was working at a government facility, many states removed. I first became aware that something was wrong when my mother called to tell me that a plane had flown into the tower. Just to be clear, I was not working in intelligence or any organization within the government that should have been aware of what was going on. As I headed to an area where a television was located, I ran into people who had heard the news on their radios. We arrived and had been watching the news for only a few minutes when the second plane hit.

There was a married couple working at this location. The husband had flown out that morning to DC. I was scheduled to fly to DC for a meeting the next day. Fortunately, the husband was able to get a call through not long after the plane crashed into the pentagon. To say the wife was relieved is an understatement. My brother was working in Time Square for an engineering firm. My mom talked to him after the towers collapsed. The engineers were in shock. The towers were suppose to be able to withstand a plane crash. It would be a long day for my brother.

Fortunately, no one close to me died in the attack. I do mourn those I once knew. My life’s path was altered. Not surprisingly, security became much more important to me. Like many, watching and listening to the news started taking up a decent amount of my spare time. I found some news programs better than others and I would go off to web sites for more in depth coverage. I began having my computer record programs off Internet radio. It seems like a lifetime ago. I use to copy these recorded programs to rewritable CDs. Fortunately, I soon switched over to an MP3 player. To some degree, wanting to get my fix of news helped me start regularly working out before work. I was pretty serious and lost seventy pounds.

Later, I realized that knowing what was going on in the world, while good, was not real helpful in daily life. Sure, one could sit around at parties and make other people feel dumb. But I was never one to take satisfaction in that. Besides, anyone could bring out Trivia Pursuit and turn the tables completely around on me. I have lived a fairly focused life and I am terrible at trivia. At that time, I became aware of podcasts. While I did not have an iPod, I learned I could still listen to podcasts on my MP3. I started putting my listening time towards security and information technology podcasts.

Tom Bishop, of BMC Software Inc, talked with Ynema Mangum on Technology Trends. They talked on various trends, and it is another great TalkBMC podcast. When they brought up Google Reader, I found their comments particularly interesting and accurate. When you describe Google Reader to someone as a “web-based feed reader to keep up with blogs and news,” people respond, “big deal.” It sounds so simple. It is when you start using it, you realize how fundamentally important it is.

Recently, I was talking with folks about good sites for security information. These folks were saying, “Yeah, I go to this site, and that site…” As I listened, I was transported back to a time when I had to go off to one endless progression of sites on a daily basis just to keep up on news and information. I was trapped in IT hell. That was before RSS saved me. I knew I had to help these poor people. So I climb up on my soap box and start evangelizing about RSS. They cried out in despair, “But my company will not allow RSS through the firewall!” I enlightened them about Google Reader’s ability to pull all the feeds into one location, all accessible via the web. They could even pull the postings down and go off line. They rejoiced.

If this blog seems a bit rambling, it was intended to be so. Remember the subject is “Winding Paths.” Life is full of decisions and pathways to take. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe points out, “Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.” I wanted to do a post today that reflected on paths I have taken and paths others have taken for me. Fortunately I am not working five hundred feet below New York City. Yet, I have clean drinking water. Nor do I come home each night covered in coal dust. Yet I have heat, air conditioning, and electricity. When alarms go off and people are evacuating a building, my job is not to rush in to put out fires or help get people out. I am one of those people who is helped out. Nor am I overseas serving in dangerous theaters of operations. Yet, I benefit so greatly because of their service. I might spend a little too much time working, and fail to get much sleep, but those are minor inconveniences. I am thankful for paths that have brought me to where I am. I am thankful for those people, past and present, who sacrifice so much. Thank you.