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I’m back in Honolulu after my conference, and I am catching up with my social media sites today. Some of the sites have reasonable mobile versions, so I was able to post updates and stay current through my phone or my iPod’s WiFi connection:

• Facebook
• Plurk
• FriendFeed
• Twitter

At least one of my sites offer mobile versions with very limited feature sets:

• LinkedIn offers a contact list. On an iPod Touch, it’s a little clumsy to use. Other than that, there’s hardly any useful content available. 

For the last few months, I’ve been involved in Charles Wankel’s latest crowdsourcing project. He’s leading a team of several hundred managers and scholars who will contribute to Managing Through Collaboration. The paper edition of the book will be published in January 2010 by Routledge.

I’m editing Chapter 22 on information technology and e-business. Almost 400 of the contributors are at the Academy of Management meeting in Anaheim, and I’ve participated in several editor and chapter team meetings during the conference.

I’m also working on social media and a blog to support the project. Many of us are on LinnkedIn and Facebook, and I’m setting up a FriendFeed room for the project.

Last Thursday I said that I’m taking a break from blogging during my conference in Anaheim this week.

Instead, I’ve been posting a rant or article each day since then. 

Will someone tell me when my intervention is scheduled? I’ll block out some time on my calendar.

I’m flying to Anaheim this evening for the annual Academy of Management conference, along with 10,000 other management professors.

I’ll resume my daily blog posts on Monday, 18 August 2008. It’s not like there’s a daily quota or anything… although I’ve been posting an article a day for a while now. (See Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There’s No Quota.)

In the meantime, I’ll be on email, Facebook, FriendFeed and my other haunts.

Google has announced that there are over 1 million users for the education version of Google Apps. this doesn’t surprise me at all, as Google is offering very low per seat pricing on these contracts.

It’s always been difficult for universities to manage their email and messaging systems. Email is the lowest common denominator for Internet users, which is one reason why phishers, scammers and crackers target email users. Everyone on the Internet has at least one email account.

University users have adopted social media en masse as an alternative to email. But that doesn’t mean that email is not important. It’s still mission critical for universities.

See this announcement, Back to school with over 1 million users worldwide, for a list of universities and schools that are adopting Google’s enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 12 May 2008: Software and services - free or paid?
• 22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and email is still broken
• 11 April 2007: Google wants to hear about your university email service
• 23 February 2007: Google Apps vs Microsoft Office
• 7 December 2006: Spam is back with a vengeance
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of all e-mail is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken