Being here, being there

Jon Udell is one of my favorite authors.  He has consistantly written about many important technologies and issues, much of which has been related to small group collaboration.

In particular,  I love his screencasts.  As Senior Yahoo! Product Manager, Matt MacAlister writes in an article on digital story telling and learning, "His 'Heavy Metal Umlaut' screencast is the classic". 

Last week, Udell made some major announcements: he left InfoWorld, started a new blog and he is joining Microsoft.  Wow!

One of the comments that he received was concerned with collaborating remotely...

The culture at MS is very F2F-oriented…if you’re out of sight, you have to work hard not to be out of mind.

I found it interesting that Jon's response mentions "flow"...

On the one hand, I’ve learned that I can accomplish a lot because I spend an abormal percentage of my waking hours in flow rather than in meetings. I’ve also learned that network-mediated interactions can be more productive than F2F interactions. Consider my August screencast with Jim Hugunin, or my May screencast with Anders Hejlsberg, or indeed any of the other screencasts in that series. They’re all scheduled events, mediated by telephone and screensharing. I can’t see how physical colocation would improve them.

Well put.  Best of luck to you Jon!