Steve Sanderson

making

Mar 24, 2009 ∞

Intriguing (and radical) approach on how to operate a business

Check out  “The Open Company - Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project. It describes a radical approach (at least from my POV) on how to operate a business. I’m not a business operations person, so I don’t have the chops to completely evaluate the proposition here ahead of time. However, there are some intrigiung ideas in this article and I love where this could lead (not to mention the potential to upset the apple cart).

Jan 22, 2009 ∞
Build a personal relationship manager on LinkedIn... maybe
I’ve always wanted some simple ‘personal relationship manager’, i.e. the problem is that I’ve got friends and acquaintances I want to keep up with - but I am lousy at reminding myself to follow-up when I don’t see them regularly. I want a way to:
• get a dashboard that shows me what's new with people in my social networks
• organize the dashboard based on some heuristics on what social networks are more important than others (e.g. ex-Excite people, current co-workers, etc.)
• default and customizable alerts to notify me
  • when it's been a long time since I communicated with someone
  • when something about those people or their company has changed
• a single place to view and edit some basic info on a person (e.g. notes)
• all based on an understanding of my social networks (e.g. declared social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter and implicit social networks like email)
How to solve this? Up to now, I've thought about ways to augment my email, i.e. using my email history and address book. From the looks of it, Xobni does something similar with Outlook and there's chatter they may do this eventually for hosted email (e.g. gmail). However, last night I realized that (for the moment) much of what I care about could be in LinkedIn. Surely someone has solved this via a LinkedIn application... Unfortunately, no, e.g I didn't even find any way to keep notes on other people in my network. No problem, I'll write an application... but right away their stance isn't encouraging. While their wording does not encourage me to take an exploratory run at something new on LinkedIn,  I'll apply and see what happens.
Jan 7, 2009 ∞

Clarity in the cloud & congratulations to whurley

Open source “evil genius” whurley has announced he will be writing a column for InfoWorld on cloud computing, and it appears that his initial focus will be to help bring clarity to ‘just what cloud computing means’. I’m looking forward to reading it.