Networked Research: The Power Of Comments

When I first starting to seriously use blogs as part of my research mix, I tended to focus in on the postings. When printing, I used to get annoyed that I ended up with sheets and sheets of user comments wasting a lot of paper.

Strange thing though, I started to notice a change. Great postings elicit great feedback and great comments that often network me to even more interesting research, blog posts and more great comments.

Now the only question is how to appropriately cite blog comments in the footnotes! ;-)

Ps. Before anyone chides me for my old school ways of printing my research, let me just say in my defense that while I know it’s very old school I also don't know many people who can go through the amount of research I can, in the same time period I can, so don't knock my methods until you have tried 'em!

New Feature Idea

Ok it's really an old feature idea but can someone do this soon please? A 'printer-friendly' button on all blogs.

More and more blogs are being used for news and research (by the way i must owe Zoli at least a few thousand dollars for great quotes and insights just made for keynote/powerpoint) the ability to print without having a ream of paper attempting to print out side columns and pages of comments would be very helpful and good for trees.

Blogger product development? Anyone? Help?

Money Can't Buy You Community: Lesssons From Yahoo

I have complained for a long time now about what i call "Yahoothanization". What is it? It's what Yahoo does to perfectly good companies that they buy. They Yahoothanize them. Meaning, they attempt to force a whole bunch of Yahoo rules (the first of which starts with the old 'you must get a Yahoo ID') onto whatever community they have purchased.

And there in lies the problem. Yahoo thinks they have actually have purchased those communities.

These non-networked businesses who continue to have a top down command and control business approaches will keep running into the same issue until they get it. We only have to look at the transition of myspaces to Rupert's spaces to watch the phenomenon in action (Facebook anyone?)

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on the Yahoo subject and an even better quote:

"We debated for decades whether content or distribution was kind but it turns out that neither is. The community is the Kingdom."

So there you go. The only thing that is getting Yahoothanized these days is Yahoo but there is an important lesson here:

Technologies can be bought and sold, but communities can't.

PERIOD.

Waste Away

Walking the dog this morning, it occurred to me that retailers should just give away yard waste bags to their customers. I mean every third house had either a Home Depot or a Canadian Tire yard waste bag/billboard sitting on their front lawn.

I wonder what the media value of that would have been had they had to pay for it?

New Blog Strategy: Just Link To Marc A

Lol. So come on. Really the rest of us should just go home. Mr. Smarty Pants (aka Marc Andreessen) has another great post today on why NOT to start a start-up: Part I.

His closing metaphor from Star Wars is great - but leaves two questions in my mind:

Who does Princess Leah represent? and
When Han goes into the hole for protection and that safe-haven ends up really being the throat of a big monster - whose the monster?

(For the record from now on when I am too busy or too stupid to think of anything smart to write, I am just linking to him)

What Business Are You In?

"What business are we in" is one of the most fundamental questions that companies rarely if ever ask themselves.

If you haven't read the white paper by Mark Federman on this very subject go read it now. If you haven't read it in a while go re-read it.

Great reading and may just inspire you to go back to the office and get the conversation started

Letter To The Editor

My mom and I were discussing an article in the Globe and Mail the other day (yes she still gets a paper every morning) and at some point she said to me

"you know what, you should write a letter to the editor"

Letter to the editor? What's that?

It's funny that in her world blogging doesn't mean anything to her. She is 68 and the only blogs she reads are when i forward her something of note and then to her, it would be the same as getting any website url. It could be the Globe and Mail online or it could be Joe Schmo's blog. It pretty much looks the same to her.

So I laughed (with her, not at her - she's my mom after all) and said, yeah mom, those are called blog comments now.

Reminds me of when my daughter saw an old electric typewriter on the side of the road in a garbage pile and asked "what’s that mommy?"

Letter to the editor. Soon to be a thing of the past.