On Feb 12th i mentioned Ning in my post. I certainly was intrigued the first time i went to their site but it was only this evening that i got a chance to check it out in detail.
With its cloning features, within 30minutes i had set up a Bookshelf Ning where i can create and share book lists and reviews. The Best thing is that all the book information comes from Amazon so i had to setup a Web Services account with them which was super easy, so it shows off a little web services API action as well.
Ning allows you to create Social Web Applications in a flash-there are tons to clone from- awesome stuff
You can find my bookshelf here: http://readingiscool.ning.com and I will also add it to my links.
I also love the way they are displaying the tags that the users are applying.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Corporate Internal Blogs
There has certainly been a lot of talk about corporate Blogging with more and more conferences and blog gatherings focused on blogging as a corporate medium. I know that one of my RSS folder views includes the corporate employee blogs of my customers, so i see the power both ways (buying and selling). We also have a very aggressive strategy to bring in blog content into our platform and tools, so i certainly have been doing much thinking and reading about the subject.
There is interesting piece this week over at BusinessWeekonline about how companies are using Corporate Internal Blogs. Interactive and cheap to deploy some companies are looking at Blogging tools to enable business units to 'own' the content push and encourage conversations. Not convinced that it will replace portals and intranets, but likely to become a communication tools outside of the e-mail inbox shortly.
We just launch an internal blog for the launch of our New Search 2.0 tool and although i haven't seen much of a 'conversation' yet, i am sure people like me are at least looking at the posts as they are relevant to the product launch. It doesn't seem much different then the regular postings on our portal, but for some reason it makes sense to me.
Enabling 'conversations' around news content has been something that i have been talking to clients for a while, but being that it was a new medium, i have had little success with implementing really cool what i call 'Daily News Conversations'. Below is a mock screen (click on it for bigger view) of what it could look like as an 'Executive Blog' allowing execs to carry on conversations within online and subscription options (e.g. RSS delivery) around news content potentially influencing how as a team they use external news to guide the organization. It is done today with copy and paste and forwarding between teams and then posting on corporate portals, blogging tools might facilitate this and allow execs, managers and employees themselves an interaction point. As established blogging software goes behind the firewall, it will enabled these types of conversations even more so.
There is interesting piece this week over at BusinessWeekonline about how companies are using Corporate Internal Blogs. Interactive and cheap to deploy some companies are looking at Blogging tools to enable business units to 'own' the content push and encourage conversations. Not convinced that it will replace portals and intranets, but likely to become a communication tools outside of the e-mail inbox shortly.
We just launch an internal blog for the launch of our New Search 2.0 tool and although i haven't seen much of a 'conversation' yet, i am sure people like me are at least looking at the posts as they are relevant to the product launch. It doesn't seem much different then the regular postings on our portal, but for some reason it makes sense to me.
Enabling 'conversations' around news content has been something that i have been talking to clients for a while, but being that it was a new medium, i have had little success with implementing really cool what i call 'Daily News Conversations'. Below is a mock screen (click on it for bigger view) of what it could look like as an 'Executive Blog' allowing execs to carry on conversations within online and subscription options (e.g. RSS delivery) around news content potentially influencing how as a team they use external news to guide the organization. It is done today with copy and paste and forwarding between teams and then posting on corporate portals, blogging tools might facilitate this and allow execs, managers and employees themselves an interaction point. As established blogging software goes behind the firewall, it will enabled these types of conversations even more so.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
The Death of the Cold Call or Customers You Never Meet
Jonathan Schwartz President and COO of Sun Microsystems has an interesting post on his blog from Feb 4th- titled "The Death of the Cold Call". Based on his recent speech at Sun's annual Analyst Conference,
"It's my view that the growth in front of Sun won't simply be from stabilizing and growing our existing customers. It'll be from acquiring new customers. Large customers as well as small. The important point is we won't be able to meet most of them - there aren't enough sales executives on the planet to call on each of the 4 million Solaris licenses we've distributed to the world. But so long as the internet connects us to them, the distribution of free software allows them to discover us - and for us to invest in building a bi-directional link, ultimately driving revenue from only those who want added services and infrastructure (vs. those who don't). "
In the presentation he goes on to say that their "challenge is awareness"- i was not able to see the complete presentation video (couldn't get my real media player to work but i think this should be a very interesting presentation that i will try on another PC)- so working off the slide deck i am assuming what Jonathan is talking about is "awareness" as to where customers are going-what are their business development plans-and what their markets are calling for- whether their existing top 100 and top 250 or the "Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" (slide 43) that comes from startups and small institutions. sounds like he is purposing going beyond the traditional 'inside-sales' folks to drive the bottom of the pyramid and going straight to the developers as the primary influencers through the social networks that are driving the industry and obviously affecting sales at Sun and others like them. It is evident in their blogging strategy- http://blog.sun.com/roller/main.do
It also got me thinking about a book i am reading called "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" by Clayton Christensen - i could blog for pages on it- but will spare you for now- just assuming that Sun is on the verge of moving on something that will change the way they do business. I just hope that in delivering 'awareness' however defined by each of their market segments-i can help be a small part of that success.
"It's my view that the growth in front of Sun won't simply be from stabilizing and growing our existing customers. It'll be from acquiring new customers. Large customers as well as small. The important point is we won't be able to meet most of them - there aren't enough sales executives on the planet to call on each of the 4 million Solaris licenses we've distributed to the world. But so long as the internet connects us to them, the distribution of free software allows them to discover us - and for us to invest in building a bi-directional link, ultimately driving revenue from only those who want added services and infrastructure (vs. those who don't). "
In the presentation he goes on to say that their "challenge is awareness"- i was not able to see the complete presentation video (couldn't get my real media player to work but i think this should be a very interesting presentation that i will try on another PC)- so working off the slide deck i am assuming what Jonathan is talking about is "awareness" as to where customers are going-what are their business development plans-and what their markets are calling for- whether their existing top 100 and top 250 or the "Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" (slide 43) that comes from startups and small institutions. sounds like he is purposing going beyond the traditional 'inside-sales' folks to drive the bottom of the pyramid and going straight to the developers as the primary influencers through the social networks that are driving the industry and obviously affecting sales at Sun and others like them. It is evident in their blogging strategy- http://blog.sun.com/roller/main.do
It also got me thinking about a book i am reading called "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" by Clayton Christensen - i could blog for pages on it- but will spare you for now- just assuming that Sun is on the verge of moving on something that will change the way they do business. I just hope that in delivering 'awareness' however defined by each of their market segments-i can help be a small part of that success.
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