There’s one significant constraint in this form of publishing: Leanpub uses Markdown text-files for input, which is a fair bit more limited in its formatting than my books normally use. But that constraint fits well with the very tight limitations of .MOBI (Kindle) files – the cause of so many of my conversion-nightmares prior to finding Leanpub – and it also works well with automated import and conversion of blog-posts, which is something I’ve needed for a very long time.

Leanpub also presents e-books as a ‘package deal’, with EPUB, MOBI (aka AZW, for Kindle) and portrait-formatted PDF formats all included in the one price. They also support an automated means to sell via Apple iBooks (for iPad etc) and Amazon (for Kindle), but doing that costs a fair bit and it’s a much lower royalty, so I’ll only be able to do that for books for which there’s a sizeable demand. For everything else, Leanpub is simple enough and cheap enough to make it worthwhile to publish a lot more of my material that way.

A key theme at Leanpub is publish early, publish often. If you buy a book, you not only get all three file-formats, but you also maintain access to all future updates – Leanpub send you an email to let you know whenever a new update is available.

See my home-page at leanpub.com/u/tetradian for the current status of each item – published or in-development – and, if published, the current content.

—-

I’ll be doing three types of e-book publications: books, practice-notes, and anthologies of posts from the weblogs.

Books (Tetradian Enterprise Architecture series)

These are straightforward e-book versions of my existing books, though in some cases with additional content from the blogs. The aim is that these should also move out to Amazon (for Kindle) and probably Apple (for iBooks). Once published, the content should not change – in other words, the same as for a conventional printed book.

Pricing will be a lot less than for the respective printed book.

Already published on Leanpub:

• The enterprise as story - same as for the printed book
• Mapping the enterprise - with an additional appendix on the simplified notation for Enterprise Canvas
• Everyday enterprise-architecture - same as for the printed book

Conversion from Word is not all that simple: each book takes a few days to get ready for publication, so it’ll be a few weeks before all of the existing books are up there. My current priority-order for conversion of the other published Tetradian EA books is:

• The service-oriented enterprise - with some additional notes linking it to Enterprise Canvas
• Doing enterprise-architecture
• Bridging the silos - with some additional notes on working with TOGAF 9.1 and Archimate 2.0
• Real enterprise-architecture
• Power and response-ability
• SEMPER & SCORE

Please let me know if you need my to change that sequence.

(I’ll probably also do all of the books in the other series at some stage, but it’s not so much of a priority.)

Practice-notes (Tetradian EA Practice series)

These will be ‘mini-books’ – typically about half the length of my usual books – that cover a specific topic focused on some practical theme. The content will be based on existing weblog-posts, but will usually be edited quite a bit to make a more consistent structure and story, and there’ll also be a new introduction-chapter to set the context in each case.

These will be updated occasionally, to keep in line with developments in practice, but also to keep the number of updates sent to Apple or Amazon down to a practicable level.

Pricing should be around half that of the full-length e-books.

Titles already in plan include:

• Using SCAN for sensemaking – about sensemaking and decision-making for enterprise-architecture with my SCAN framework
• Modelling with Enterprise Canvas – the simplified notation for Enterprise Canvas, plus model-development methods such as the ‘This’ game
• Backbone and edge - about the architecture trade-offs between slow-changing core and fast-changing edge, waterfall versus agile, and governance to match
• From business-model to real-world practice - conversion from Business Model Canvas to Enterprise Canvas, customer-journey mapping and implementation-layer models such as UML and BPMN
• Modelling service-content - how to use the expanded Zachman-type taxonomy from Enterprise Canvas for whole-of-enterprise modelling
• Whole-of-enterprise architecture - how and why to extend enterprise-architecture beyond its conventional focus on IT

Again, let me know if you want me to add other themes or to change that priority-order – and keep an eye out on my Leanpub page as to when new Practice Notes e-books will be coming out.

Weblog-anthologies (Tetradian EA Topics series)

These will be straightforward anthologies from the Tetradian and Sidewise blogs – the kind of publishing for which Leanpub was initially designed. There’ll be a very simple introduction-chapter, and some minimal clean-up editing, but otherwise each chapter will essentially be the same as on the weblog.

(Note that, for obvious reasons of cross-reference and cross-linking and the like, some blog-posts will appear in more than one anthology.)

The main purpose here is to sort the many posts on enterprise-architecture and related themes (more than 500 posts so far…) into a more usable form, and in a format that’s convenient for offline reading on Kindle and the like.

These will be updated quite often, whenever a suitable set of blog-posts come along – and because of the frequent updates, will probably not go to Amazon’s Kindle-store or Apple’s iBookstore. (You would do a simple file-import to your reader-device instead.) Perhaps the key point is that once you’ve bought the anthology-book, you’ll continue to get all of those updates for free.

Pricing will be minimal – it’s mainly to cover my time for conversion and clean-up. But the price for each book will rise slowly as the amount of content increases – so the earlier you buy the book, the better the deal you’ll get.

Some key topics already identified include:

• Tools and toolsets – including all the discussion around metamodels and the like
• ‘Really Big Picture’ enterprise-architecture – applying EA principles to themes such as economics, sustainability and society as a whole
• The architecture of management – rethinking management and the like from an EA systems-thinking lens
• Story and narrative in enterprise-architecture – the underlying themes behind The enterprise as story

Again let me know if there’s any specific theme upon which you’d like me to develop an anthology.

Comments, anyone?

The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years or so: more than 40 posts here on various aspects since ‘The enterprise is the story‘. And as in the post ‘The no-plan Plan: architecture as story‘, it’s one of the five key-themes in my ‘no-plan plan‘ for my current and future work-direction. So it’s something I need to get down on paper, in more direct, usable form.

There’s a definite deadline of end of February for this one, because I’ll need it available in time for my presentation ‘The enterprise is a story: a narrative approach to enterprise-architecture‘ at the Integrated EA conference in London on 6-7 March 2012.

The second has a working-title of The business-anarchist: enterprise-architectures for the edge of chaos. This has perhaps been a less prominent theme on the blog, but it’s turned up quite a few times, such as in the post ‘Analyst, anarchist, architect‘. In essence, it’s about being deliberate and responsible about working with disruption in the business-context, preferably before that disruption is thrust upon us – a concern which is rapidly becoming more and more important almost by the day.

I’ve been nibbling at this one since mid-2009, and even wrote a fair chunk of it at various points last year, but didn’t finish it then, in part because it didn’t feel like the right time. Now, post-Occupy and suchlike, it does feel more like the right time, so I need to get it done. It’ll have to come after The enterprise as story, but with luck and lack-of-distraction it should be ready somewhen in April.

There’s also another enterprise-architecture book I’ve been working on for quite a while now with a colleague in Guatemala, Michael Smith. We don’t have a working-title for this one yet, and it’s rather further away in time – somewhen mid to late next year, probably – but it’s probably worth mentioning at this point. It’ll focus on the Five Elements theme that comes up in quite a few places in my work – for example, the structure of the effectiveness model used in SCORE strategy-assessment and the book Real Enterprise-Architecture, and the core of the market-cycle that’s used in conjunction with Enterprise Canvas.

Will let you know when any of the books become ready and available, but thought I’d keep you up to date with this part of work-in-progress, anyway.

So far there are well over 400 blog-posts here on enterprise-architecture and related themes, plus a few more on the companion Sidewise weblog. That’s a lot of material – probably somewhere upward of half a million words, with literally hundreds of diagrams as well. Kinda big, even in EPUB format, and not easy to navigate in one go, given that that the various themes have been weaving through each other in different forms and with different emphases over the years.

So the idea at present is to publish them in the form of small anthologies, each of perhaps 15-30 related posts that focus on a single theme at a time. Some posts might appear in more than one anthology, but that probably won’t matter too much, I hope? – especially as keeping it simple will keep the costs right down, to perhaps $2.00-3.00 (£1.50-2.00) each.

Themes for the first few anthologies would include:

• the Enterprise Canvas set, including the simplified notation for Enterprise Canvas
• rethinking Zachman and the TOGAF ADM for whole-enterprise use
• foresight, futures and ‘really-big-picture’ enterprise-architecture
• the human side of enterprise-architecture, including management-structures and tacit-knowledge
• narrative and story in enterprise-architecture
• business-architecture and enterprise-architecture (including ‘translation’ between Business Model Canvas and enterprise-architecture notations such as Archimate and Enterprise Canvas)
• taxonomy, ontology, (meta)metamodels and toolsets for enterprise-architecture
• sensemaking with context-space mapping and SCAN

These should start to appear on Amazon and elsewhere in the next few weeks – I’ll post more details here as they become available, of course.

Any other requests for ebook anthologies? Any comments about pricing, formats, availability or anything else? Over to you, if you would?

Many thanks, anyway.

Whilst writing an article on the enterprise-architecture and the Shirky Principle that I’ll post later today, I needed to add a reference to my old Sidewise article about the role of the business-anarchist. So, like anyone else would, I did a quick Google search for my own post. Didn’t find it at first (turns out I needed to refine the search with ‘sidewise’). But up near the top of the results, I found an interesting-looking article: ‘The Rise of the Business Anarchist – R2 Global Meshwork‘, dated 31 May 2011. The first few words, as shown in the Google search-results, looked interesting too:

If you work in a large organisation, no doubt you’ll have analysts everywhere; you may well be one yourself. You know who they are, …

So click on the link. Look at the first few sentences. Then realisation: wait a moment, this looks a bit familiar, doesn’t it…? Very familiar, in fact?

Yup. It’s scraped, word for word, line for line, format for format, from my original Sidewise post ‘The Rise of the Business Anarchist‘, dated 24 Aug 2009. But in this case, credited solely to Robin Wood, the apparent owner of that website. No attribution, no link to the original, no nothing.

Not impressed.

Seems that the only way on the website that I can complain about this somewhat extreme example of plagiarism is by becoming a ‘member’ of the ‘R2 Meshwork’ – which means that I need to be personally approved by the perpetrator of the plagiarism itself. Hmm… don’t think that’ll work… Hence the only option I have left is to make it public here.

Oh the joys of plagiarism… hey ho…

What follows is perhaps my favourite story-fragment, “Mishie’. (A gentle reminder that it’s fiction? ) A bit of context first, though. The fragment takes place perhaps thirty or forty years from now, some decades after one country has shifted from a ‘conventional’ possession-based economy to a responsibility-based (‘no-money’) economy. The latter is that ‘world’ that Mishie inhabits, has grown up in – and wants, very much, to see more of the world. A few terms: ‘vizzie’ is a ‘visitor’, someone from a different country; ‘GA’ and ‘garda’ are police, ‘tucker’ is a standard current Australianism for ‘food’; the language is basic English with a fair few adaptations over time, and a lot of local slang. The reference at the end to ‘that book we did in Year Nine’ is Ursula le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Dispossessed. What happens in the story-fragment is a simple contrast of before, and after…

Over to you after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway: have fun, I hope?

Mishie

Baz,

U know i said this course was just a trick that Overseas uses to make it difficult to get a passport? Gods is that true or what! This bloody stuff cant be real, u would not believe the crap they make up about what the vizzies are supposed go through for resources – even the most basic everyday stuff!

They made us all sit through the most boringly stupid bloody lecture this morning, about what they called ‘the economics of money’. It made no sense at all: how u have to have credit or this actual money stuff – paper and coins and so on – before ure allowed to take anything, or use anything, or do anything, really. And if u live there u can only get the money by working for someone else, and they have to get it by working for someone else, and so on. If thats real, gods only knows how parents would survive, or kids, or the old, or the sick. Perhaps Overseas think they dont? though apparently theres something called ‘welfare’ which we wont get anyway. They said something about how all that works, with something called ‘taxes’ that everyone hates, and that we would have to give them even though we dont get any benefits, but it was all so bloody complicated i just gave up. I mean, who gives a shit? the headcases get into that stuff, but i just want to get on the road, dont i?

I guess they must be making it look worse than it is just to keep us on our toes and all that. They keep on saying stuff that the money has to do a two-way balance, to the dot, in everything – but everyone knows u cant get that in real-world systems, I mean, thats basic system-symmetry stuff from primary school, isnt it? And then they say that the more u have – the ‘richer’ u are – not only does that get u to more stuff and better stuff, but they give u more money as well, just because uve got the money in the first place. So theres no way it can balance anyway. I really dont get it. I mean, no-one could design something that stupid.

We had a go at it this afternoon, but gods its crazy! Theyve got this place laid out like a store street, like in a country town they said, but all the store windows are these bloody great sheets of glass and everythings on display and all really pretty and stuff. Everythings got prices on, money-labels, except for a couple of real fancy stores where there werent any prices, they said the idea was that if u have to ask the price it means u cant afford it, which apparently makes it better or something, but i cant see the point. And the prices are all different for the same thing in different stores and u have to go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards to work out which ones less, they called it the ‘cheapest’, in each place and get each thing in turn from each one and it takes ages to do it and noone would do it for real anyway so obviously its just another Overseas fake.

Theyve got actors and stuff to pretend to be storekeeps and so on. So they gave us this stupid moneyfold thing, which the girls are supposed call a ‘purse’ and the boys a ‘wallet’ even though its exactly the same thing, and got us to sit down in a cafe place and pretend to be prissy ladies and gentlemen from some poncy old pommy flick, drinking afternoon tea and all that kind of crap. And were supposed to look at the menu thing and check all the prices and look at the folds we each have and each count all the coins and paper in the fold and make sure we have enough to match the price of everything we ask for, then the biz takes the order and brings it all back and we have the dainty tea and she brings back a single bill and we all have to work out who ordered what and put it all in the middle and it never adds up because noone has the right coins and stuff, and the biz adds it all up again and makes sure weve given her enough and then e takes it away and brings back the extra – the ‘change’ – and we have to check es given us back the right amount and then were supposed to divvy that up and it doesnt balance either so were supposed to argue about that till its fair somehow, and then we have to work out an extra bit called a tip that goes to the biz and we have to argue about who pays what of that too and we put that on the table and then we can finally walk out the door. Overseas must be making all this stuff up to be stupid, of course, i mean, its like the prices thing, would anyone do all of that kind of petty crap for real?

So they took us next to a store and told one of the boys that the travel-pack e uses is bust and e has to get a new one. So e goes looking for a return bin to put the existing pack in for repair but e cant find one so e leaves it by the door to the back storeroom, then e goes to the rack and e picks out one thats the right sort of size and fitout, even waves at the storekeep to let en know es checking it out, and e goes to an unused scanner and e scans it and heads out. U know, just like anyone else would do? But no, Overseas want to make it all complicated just for the hell of it. Alarms go off as soon as e gets near the door, some lump of a guy in a black and white uniform thing comes out of nowhere and grabs en and yanks the arm of en up the back and other people come running up and call en a thief and the rest, and all other sorts of crap.

Its all play-acting of course but the Overseas instructors look smug and say they did it to show us what happens if we get it wrong like that. What es supposed to do is really stupid, even worse than that fart-arsing around we did in the cafe. First thing is – get this – there isnt a return-bin, in fact if e leaves the pack by the back door for repair itd be called littering, es supposed to just throw it away someplace else so it doesnt get repaired or reused. This is ‘good for the economy’ apparently though id say its totally bloody mental. Then e goes to the rack and theyre all different prices with long-use ones more price than short-life ones, which again is stupid because everyone knows the short-lifes are more wasteful. Then e has to look in the fold e uses and see if e has enough money for the pack e chooses and if e hasnt then to use the credit instead and if e hasnt enough in credit e has to forget it or pick out a crappy short-life or something, and i asked the instructors how es supposed to know if e has enough credit or not and they said e has to know the ‘balance’ for him at all times even without a telelink, which again must be just them being petty for the sake of it. Then when e thinks es got the right pack and the right money e has to go find a queue for a scanner that one of the storekeeps is using and wait in line for that and then the storekeep scans the pack and asks for the money and e has to give the coins and paper or the credit and the storekeep then checks all of that and gives back the change if es used coins but this time there isnt any tip, and the storekeep clears something in the scan because when thats all done the alarm doesnt go off and es allowed to go out of the door without being attacked by the thug in the white shirt. It all takes about twice as long as the ordinary way and ties up about twice as many people and its really really stupid. So i think Overseas are just making it all up to try to put us off. Well it hasnt worked for me – Im still going.

There was more of that crap for the rest of the afternoon but i couldnt be bothered, i just went to the cafe instead with some of the others. And we didnt play their stupid money games, we had drinks and tucker in the normal way just like we should.

This evening there was another stupid lecture about how its sposed to be easier if we stick together as a crew and use someone whos been before as a kind of guide. Well im stuffed if ill do that, im nineteen years old for gods sakes and i know how to look after the self and i don’t need a bloody nursemaid, thank you Overseas!

Just two more days of this crap to put up with and then ill have the passport so i can at last get the hell out of this stupid back­water of a country for a while at least, until they drag me back or something. Ive managed to scrib a flight slot on Monday week, so see u again in a few months time!

Mishie

———

Baz

Im in the pound at the consulate. Theyve booked me on the next flight home, so Ill probably see you tomorrow.

I lasted one day, Baz. Just one fucking day. Thats it.

One fucking awful day.

I got in from the port, dumped the packs at the hostel, went out for a drink, like anyone would. Its real pretty out there, lots happening, lots of girls, the rest. Went through a couple of glasses, pints they said, and had a few laughs with the girls in the bar and the mates with them and all, and they said that i was paying for it all, which was fine, its just a drink, right? that’s what u do, isnt it? Well, not there, apparently, the barkeep said that was most of the money for the week for me gone in one hit. I was just about trying to make sense of that when i went out for a piss, left the fold on the counter, came back and the fold wasnt there any more and the barkeep said e didnt know anything about it and it was the fault of me anyway for not looking after it and told me to piss off because i didnt have any money left.

So fair enough, id had enough to drink so I left and went to a cafe down the road for a feed. All smiles and such, and nice tucker, too. So id finished and i got up to go to the door, like u do, and this biz whod brought me the meal comes running up and says i havent paid. So i says, yeah, i dont have any money with me any more, someones walked off with the fold, so whats the problem, all this money stuff its all some stupid bloody game isnt it? And e gets real pissed off at this, and this big hefty security guy comes up and starts being snarky at me so now im getting pissed off at the lot of them, so i just walk out the door of course. Then the stupid bugger comes after me and tries to grab me, and ive had a couple of drinks and im half out my skull from the jetlag so i think were back in Defence so i flip en onto the floor and leave en there and keep walking.

Next thing i know theres a couple of GA cars come screaming up and they all jump out and they push guns at me – the fucking garda have guns here, Baz! – and they mustve thrown a vomit-comet because thats it, its like someones hit me with a sledge­hammer and im on the ground puking the guts out. They pick me up and slam me against the wagon and turn me round and tie the hands behind the back, but as soon as i open the mouth to ask what the fuck theyre playing at, someone says something like, shit, its a jaffa, means just another fucking aussie apparently, and they stop playing quite so bloody rough and just turn sarky instead, which i guess was kind of them but it didnt bloody feel it. And then they do an iris-and-retina and they cant find a match of course and they ask questions and more questions and more bloody questions and they bundle me into the back of the wagon and take me back to the hostel.

So we get to the hostel and at least the doorkeep says es seen me check in before so they ease off a bit at that. But they want to see the ID for me because i havent registered at the GA yet and they keep saying there will be charges but i dont whether they mean money or court or both, and we get to the dorm and the packs arent there which means the passport isnt there and noone knows where theyve gone. So im up shit creek apparently.

They bundle me back in the wagon again and we turn up at the consulate and the sergeant says to the counterkeep im making out im ‘one of your fucking lot’ and that if e can show a match for me e can keep me and theyll hit the consulate with the bill, otherwise theyll take me to the cleaners and the rest of it. So thank the gods for the consulate and for bloody auto-DNA or i really would have been fucked i reckon.

The guys here have been pretty good about it really, specially after i said it was the first day and all. They said i was bloody stupid to try to go it alone as a first-timer, but that was about it: u arent the first and u wont be the last, someone said. So now i got a bunk for the night and a change of clothes and some proper tucker this time, and ill be off in the morning.

They even said i can have another passport and another go if i do the course again and come over with a crew next time, but i dont think ill bother. They are mad here, Baz – fucking insane. And they can keep it. Ive had my adventure – “true journey is to return”, wasnt it, in that book we did in Year Nine? So i reckon im staying home from now on. Isnt so bad after all.

See u soon

Mishie

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

The real yabby is a small Australian crayfish, a kind of miniature freshwater lobster. They’re common all over Australia, particularly in the south-east, and can frequently be found burrowing into the sides of a farm dam – hence their Latin name cherax destructor. They seem to come in all kinds of colours, from muddy brown to red to white to a really startling blue, such as this fairly large one at something close to actual size:

Yet what’s the connection to the book? Uh.. not much, to be honest. What’s now come out as the book first started out more than a dozen years ago as an idea about sustainability: namely, that we won’t be able to achieve any kind of sustainable economy unless we have a system of law that supports it – which we certainly don’t have at present. The working-title for the project was ‘Yet Another Book Idea’ – hence the acronym YABI. Which had a nice ring to it, and hence kind of stayed in the mind as ‘Yabbies’. Which is what the project has been called ever since. A bit unfair on real yabbies, and yabby-farmers and the like, perhaps, but there ’tis.

The idea of story-fragments that could assembled in any order came on quite early in project – in fact the first form in which it surfaced was as an interactive website in which people could make up their own story and add their own story-fragments to build a richer picture of the YABI ‘world’. (This was in the days before social-media, so it never really went anywhere: perhaps it might be worth-while having another go at recreating that website somewhen soon?) Later on, I tried doing it as a screenplay: it worked quite well as a story, but with so many characters in so many cameos it would almost certainly be too complicated an expensive to produce as a conventional film-type story. (But it might work well with current transmedia – another avenue to explore, perhaps.) All sorts of other frames I’ve tried out over the years: one version had technical notes attached to each story-fragment, another split it into separate story-streams for distinct audiences, and so on. But this version will do for now? – enough to get the story-ideas out there, anyway.

Its real aim, I guess, is to get some pretty challenging ideas out there in a more palatable form – hence packaging it as fiction. The ideas behind it, though, are not fiction at all: they’re real issues that somehow, collectively, we must all face, and definitely sooner rather than later. Make of it what you will, perhaps?

And the yabbies themselves? Yes, they’re strange little creatures, “all in their own world at the bottom of the dam”. Feeding on whatever falls down from the surface, making sense as best they can. Linking that across to my more usual ‘world’ of enterprise-architectures and the like, that’s kind of what we do every day, isn’t it? So I kind of like yabbies as a metaphor for ourselves…

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

There is of course no backup and no way to retrieve the lost posts and comments, since it was the previous backup that overwrote it. My apologies to all…

In Twitter, many people aim to follow just about anyone who follows them. Quite a few people seem to think that this is a matter of etiquette, that it’s rude to not follow someone who follows you.

And yet here I am, a fairly ordinary, nothing-special kind of guy, with a fair few more than five hundred followers at last count, but only following rather than less than a hundred. In terms of those views about etiquette above, it might seem like I’m more than a bit rude to the Twitter community. So if my follow/not-follow seems unfair to you for that reason, I do apologise.

But it’s not about rudeness, I promise you – in fact it’s simply a matter of managing Twitter-overload. Let me explain.

As I understand it, many people just let the Twitter-stream go by: wash past them in a swirl of unending opinions and experiences. (If someone is following literally thousands of people on Twitter, I can’t see how they could do otherwise than let the stream wash past.) This would mean that the only option is to trust to serendipity: that the right Tweet, the meaningful Tweet, will somehow jump out of the stream, demanding attention at just the right moment.

I know that works for some people, perhaps many people, but it doesn’t work for me. Instead, I treat Twitter as my main business-intelligence tool. I assume that every Tweet is potentially meaningful – which means that I read every single Tweet that comes my way. I manually check just about every link presented in those Tweets. And I read probably at least half the articles linked-to in those Tweets – not just skim-read, but read carefully enough to make (I hope) useful comments on them.

In short, it’s a lot of work. As it is, it already occupies at least a couple of hours every day, and often more. That’s why I’m very careful about who I follow, because I have to – I don’t have any other choice, if I’m to stay sane and get any other work done in the day.

I’m an ‘aggregator’: I collect information, annotate it, and pass it on. I reTweet an average of about ten Tweets a day, sometimes more; many other Tweets that I receive (totalling more like thirty a day) will end up, often with extensive annotations, in my weekly ‘A week in Tweets’ blog-posts. That’s why I tend to restrict my ‘follows’ to those who are other ‘aggregators’ – people like Oscar Berg, Sinan Si Alhir, Craig Hepburn, Trevor Snaith and Pat Ferdinandi, to arbitrarily pick a few examples – yet who tend to post only a relatively small number of focussed Tweets. I also follow a few specific ‘thought-leaders’ in a much wider range of disciplines, but again, only those who post a relatively small number of Tweets.

I do believe I deliver a useful service in annotating all the Tweets that I reTweet or re-post. (Several people have told me this directly, which is kind of them.) Yet the only way I can do this is by keeping down to something manageable the numbers of Tweets that I have to deal with – which at the moment is around 150-200 Tweets a day. Hence the tight restriction on who I follow, and how many people I can follow.

The simplest annotations I do are the addition of specific hashtags. I’ll admit that a few of these may not be readily comprehensible to everyone, particularly:

• #entarch – enterprise-architecture
• #bizarch – business-architecture
• #bmgen – business-architecture, especially business-models, linked with themes from the book Business Model Generation
• #itarch – IT-architecture
• #e20 – ‘enterprise 2.0′, the use of so-called ‘social-media’ in a business context
• #km – knowledge-management, usually with an emphasis on narrative-knowledge
• #ux – user-experience, particularly the design and usage of online-tools

My longer annotations always occur after the link (if any), and are preceded by a ‘<’ sign. Occasionally I’ll have to abbreviate or edit the original Tweet to make room, but otherwise I try to keep them intact. And wherever possible I try to include the Twitter-ID of the person who provided the original Tweet. (I notice that quite a few people don’t bother, but to me the attribution is an important point of professional etiquette, and also important for those who need to follow citation-trails in future.)

One other point: blocking. Like everyone, I receive quite a few ‘follow’-requests that are from spammers, time-wasters and people who are just trawling for auto-follows in the belief that quantity is more important than quality. (It isn’t. ) I check every follow-request, and allow or block accordingly. There are also a few people whom – politely, I hope – I will block on the grounds that my work will be irrelevant for them: for example, someone from a building-supplies store who misunderstood the context of ‘architecture’ that I work in. In general, that check of the initial follow-request is the only time that I will block a potential ‘follow’. In fact I’ve only had one case where I had to block someone who’d been following me for quite a while – and that was because that person had become openly abusive to me and to others on my Tweetstream, and was frankly beyond a mere nuisance.

So that’s it. If I don’t follow you, it’s not because I don’t think that what you say is interesting – because it almost certainly is interesting. It’s just that I’ve found that this is the only way I can cope with the flood of information and still stay sane (or vaguely-sane, anyway… ). If there’s something that you think I should know about, please Tweet me direct as @tetradian – because, again, I do read every Tweet that I see.

Many thanks to all, anyway.

• Mythquake
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

I also have a fairly large collection of research-material in electronic form, and a matching domain-name, mythquake.com .

If someone wants to take over the project, all I’d would ask for is some kind of credit in the final product. That’s it.

Anyone interested? If so, please let me know via a comment here.