September 2004 Archives

When I lived in Morocco, I developed a small business consulting project for Catholic Relief Services. The small companies we worked with were generally established by skilled tradesmen who were very good at a particular skill and had managed to build up a team around them. Often, these tradesmen wanted to bring on partners to handle the customer relationship. We always counseled against this, since the partner would own the relationship and therefore the business. I think similar advice may hold for building a business with web services.

If you are building a business with web services provided by others, they should not form a key component of your customer interface. If they do, you are in trouble. Your value proposition may be obscured, and your ability to deliver critical services may be hijacked.

Well, we are two weeks into the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere. Students are really contributing. We have a lot of information pouring in. Students are also being good troopers getting into unfamiliar technologies, trying to track each other's comments, and generally pushing forward. At this stage, I see the following issues:

1. Tracking conversations
2. Tracking the zeitgeist
3. Maintaining an integrated view of what is going on

One argument supposedly favoring online communities like the BIT320 Blogosphere is that they can scale beyond what a “real world” community can.

One datum is that real world communities can stay cohesive up to about 100 – 150 members. The idea supporting the scalability of online communites is that they make contacts between community members more efficient. However, I really wonder if that is all there is to it. The real issue to me seems to be keeping up with what is going on in the community, capturing the zeitgeist.

I have a new blog on the side called blogonaut where I'm posting directly into the “BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere”. We're under way, and students have really started to contribute. Of course, some are contributing more than others. I seem able to keep up a constant stream of posts. I'm just less inhibited in that blogosphere.

Another key feature of the BIT320 Blogosphere is the “Syndicated Guests” link list. This feature blurs the blogosphere's boundary. Is this a good thing? I think so.

We set up something called “Radars” in the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere. Radars are robots that query google and produce summary information on a given topic, say “social networks”. This information may be displayed as a web page or rendered as an RSS feed within the blogosphere. Each radar is updated daily to reflect the top 30 search results. How does this add value?