for a little perspective.  Think what you do is hard?  Meet Marcus Luttrell.  He is a former Navy SEAL that lost his team on a mountain in Afghanistan (via Instapundit).  He has written a book called:
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

http://admin.brightcove.com/destination/player/player.swf

My second one…and I must say being a dad is pretty cool.  Dads teach us a lot of things – some we don’t appreciate until we get much older.  My Dad did a lot of teaching and I suppose I learned a little along the way.  Thanks for the patience Dad.

This is a good read posted by Martin Tobias.  This is from an email (of course) he received although the authenticity of the sender is up for debate.  Agree or not, the message will make you think. 

So here’s a question that comes up often in helping our customers interpret information about their messaging traffic and is something for us to think about on an individual level.

Does the frequency (how often) someone emails, calls, or otherwise "pings" you define their level of importance in your social network?

I see two sides to this:

1.  Those that have not contacted you before or have done so again after a long period of time are not part of your frequent contact universe. 

• This includes unsolicited emails, telemarketing calls (which I both create thru programs and receive as a favorite target for vendors), spam, spim, etc.
• These *should* be defined as low-value contacts

2.  Those that contact you often are part of your frequent contact universe

• This could include spouse, children, co-workers, supervisors, etc.
• This should be defined as a high-value contact

But how do you determine a high-value new contact event from a low-value new contact event?  Or even how do you differentiate between a common low-value contact (newsletter, system alert, relentless salesperson) and a common high-value contact (supervisor, co-worker).

Maybe through some sort of validation – be it a referral like LinkedIn or social intelligence tool like Visible Path

Or the addressing or structure of the message could shed some light.  Where you are a cc or one of many cc’s, this could indicate low-value correspondence.

As more and more instant communications tools are made available the number of inquiries demanding our attention will only increase  Having a way to intelligently or at least pro-actively segment this traffic regardless of source seems the next logical step.

Value-added information or creative way to drive traffic?  You make the call, but I found this a good list to understand the "demand" side of the content equation.  I am sure there are other lists, but this one helped me get my head around it.

After tinkering with this for some time and wondering who in the world has time for this type of thing, I have now officially joined the blogosphere.

Whether anyone cares about my ramblings and musings is another thing, but I will do my best to create relevant and compelling content.  I read many other sites and will link shamelessly, but my motivation is not to make money from this.

So, what is my motivation?

I have spent my entire professional career focused on collaboration in some form or another from the days of telecommunications deregulation to low earth orbit satellites to cellular networks to electronic communications and the current thorn in the side of corporate america – email.

Most of that experience is through early stage or start-up companies anchored by several years of consulting with the now vanished Arthur Andersen organization.   

My selection of "Reply to All" as a title of this blog is indicative of the challenges and habits created by our technology "enablers" in our modern workplace.  I seek to touch on how we communicate as people and how young companies struggle and strive to make the process better, faster, cheaper, etc.