Chameleon PR

Email is the bain of my life and probably most other executives. So I’m very happy when anyone attacks it as execessive, a drain on time and at worst, inefficient. Lucy Kellaway in the FT yesterday didn’t go that far in comparing email to the benefits of Twitter but said:

“To force everyone to say what they have to say in 140 characters deals with the communications overload at a stroke. Not only would messages be quicker to read and easier to understand, most would not get sent at all. The bulk of internal e-mails are exercises in back-covering or throat-clearing, and so if they were forced down to their barest essentials it would become clear that there was nothing there at all.”

I’d add to this that if most email messages sent were transparent to the world people would think a lot more carefully about the worth of what they write.

Earlier in the year Nielsen published research demonstrating that social networking and blogs had overtaken personal email use for the first time. But daily Tweets are 6 million according to Adam Stiles graph and emails sent daily total 2.8 billion (including 70-72% of which may be spam or viruses) according to Radicati Group’s figures from August 2008.

So Twitter has a very long way to go but I remember when Skype had 1 million users, now there are 405 million and regularly over 17 million online at any one time. We are big fans of Twitter at Chameleon but do people think Twitter, Yammer or another microblogging service could eventually replace email? Let us know here or @danieltwigg

Put a placeholder in your diary for 12 November, chances are you’ll be at the BCS & Computing 2009 UK IT industry awards.

Wisely, given the ‘beyond-frugal’ status of most budgets right now, the awards ceremony merges the BCS IT Industry Awards and Computing Awards for Excellence.

With 25 gongs to hand out, there’ll be a lot of companies on award shortlists and plenty of tables sold at £2K-£3.5K, depending on how much ‘free’ plonk you want.

So, it’s time to review the categories and tap the sales teams for happy customers…

Plenty of gossip and tall stories last night at our ‘Wobbly Wednesday’ event in the glories of Blue Posts in Rupert Street. A lovely selection of London’s finest tech journos, and even a few analysts no less, joined us to see how much we could get the tab up to.

Perhaps the biggest oddity of the night was the barman dropping his jeans to the floor to show off his leg tattoo.

It’s a little quieter than normal in our London office this morning, but it was well worth it. As one of the journos emailed us this morning: “It was like the 1990s all over again.”