Social Networking

Noel Jerke — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:34:34 +0000

We have been continuing to experiment with social networking and are beginning to see some success. The best success for a business of course is getting new work. But, its more than that. Its building awareness of your capabilities. That can be valuable in terms of finding employees, clients, partners, networks, and even competitors. We are now involved in several groups on Linked In that have allowed us to learn more about what is happening in our industry. And yes via Facebook I have personally connected with many old classmates, colleagues, etc. which has all been a great experience that was almost effortless to do.

Social Networking for business is real and its something every business needs to be considering their strategy. For large corporations, social networks can be valuable with in the organization. And yes, we believe twitter can play a roll in it. If anything with in a company its a way to stay connected in a more real time fashion – especially for manager, executives, communications personnel, etc.

A small roadmap:

- Blogging – regular communication to staff, clients, prospects, interested parties

- Twitter – real time updates, quick communication amongst loose groups, connecting with new people

- Linked In – Building connections and networks with easy ways to connect

- FaceBook/MySpace – Great for personal networking

Great Design

Noel Jerke — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:25:47 +0000

One of the things that often gets overlooked when building web apps is design. And there is often confusion about design and what that means. In fact application design enters into the realm of “Usability”. E.g. what type of interfaces will make the applications as easy to understand and pleasing to the user as possible. Great usability design will have an impact on support, adoption, productivity, etc. When you think great design and usability you usually think Apple – just ask Bill Gates (remember that whole saga with Windows…). If your assembling a team or selecting a company for complex application development, make sure design and usability doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Building Enterprise Apps

Noel Jerke — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:02:07 +0000

The reality of many web strategies is the requirement to build some fairly complex applications. Those can range from sophisticated applications that connect different repositories of data in a web interface to applications that automate processes and work flow. The key to success with these types of web apps is the up front design process. Having a well thought out strategy and roadmap is crucial. Here are a few things to consider:

1. What’s your budget – And we are not just talking licensing, hardware and development – make sure you consider costs in time for your team, your domain experts, your executives, your IT staff, etc.

2. What’s high impact or low hanging fruit – Big projects need big wins to be successful. If your not sure what those big wins are – then do a functional analysis and do some cross team rankings for priority and impact. This will help to get everyone on your team focused on success and priorities.

3. Roadmaps – One of the best things you can do if you are building a solution in stages is to develop a roadmap. Build the large targets on the roadmap and outline the key strategic goals and enterprise impact.

4. Technology Selection – Often large projects will require more than one technology to be utilized and implemented. If the technology budgets is high consider doing a more formal technology selection process with RFPs, demo sessions, etc. A well run process can help to ensure the right technologies are selected to implement the solution

Large projects can be wildly successful if well planned and thought out. Projects that are done in knee jerk fashion or with little analysis and planning can often be more negative than positive in impact.

Flutter

Noel Jerke — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:59:36 +0000

Had a good laugh over this. Flutter is the NEW Twitter. Makes sense to me!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/04/what-comes-after-twitter_n_183177.html

Content Management Systems

Noel Jerke — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:10:34 +0000

CMS systems are a critical component of any web strategy. Not only do most allow for “content management” but many also provide extended features such as document management, workflow, security, versioning and more. Whether you are focused on building a web site, extranet, intranet, etc. considering your CMS is an important part of the equation. Here are some things to consider:

Technology platform – .net, php, java, etc.
Cost – there are wide range of prices
Viability – given the large number of players in the marketplace, is the company competitive and viable
Third Party Support – Is there a market place of training, add-ons, developers, etc. available
Features – work flow, document management, ease of use, scalability, and security
Required Skills – What internal skills will be needed to use the system

Some systems to consider are:

DotNetNuke – open source .net based framework
Joomla – open source PHP based framework
Ektron – .net based CMS
SiteCore – .net based CMS
Drupal – PHP open source platform
Sitefinity – .net platform
Vignette – Java based platform

A good link for reviewing even more options – check out the Wikipedia entry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

There are a lot of excellent systems available. If you are looking for a feature rich system, don’t be turned off by open source – many of these systems are widely supported and continue to grow in feature richness. Open source pricing (e.g. free) can free up more budget for implementation and customization.

YouTube Helps Man Deliver Baby

Noel Jerke — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:06:02 +0000

As a follow on to the last post – imagine this – a man watches how to deliver a baby on YouTube. Sure many of us go to WebMD and look up the occasional malady. But this is pretty powerful stuff. What happens when the third world really gets connected – suddenly people who have little idea of what the modern world is a about will have access to a wealth of information.

The same goes for business – as a technical person when I have a problem – I Google it. All types of businesses are going to be empowered with the extensive growing database that is the web. The key is how to find that information and harness it.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23684595-details/YouTube+helped+father+deliver+baby/article.do

“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past,” – Tim Berners-Lee

Noel Jerke — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:59:49 +0000

The following article about Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau comments that the internet is something that has only just begun I strongly agree with. They speak in terms of # of people connected, new business founded, etc. That is certainly true. But I also think in terms of 21^st business practices and operating procedures we have only just begun. Its common now for businesses to do online marketing, e-commerce, implement communication work flow (email), share information (documents), outsource, collect data and more. The most sophisticated businesses, including notably many web based businesses, are going even further. They are creating virtual teams of loosely nit resources into cohesive working groups. Some organizations have “webified” complex business practices into flexible operating groups. But, what happens when every single procedure, step, bit of information and more is dynamically captured and mined for information value to the organization? Think of it like moving from the horse and buggy stage to the superhighway system we have today.

I truly believe we are just now seeing the existing Model-T era of the net move into a more ubiquitous era when the net will touch everyone’s lives in way they could not imagine. Take one small example, I recently decided to mine my network of contacts over the last 15 years into Facebook. Something that would have been nearly impossible 20 years ago to get accomplished with out a lot of research and hard effort, took a couple of days. That’s cool. Now imagine in 10 years when Facebook or some other app simply tracks all I do (under my watchful eye of course) and automatically maps and tracks my entire network of interactions through my entire life. I could connect to the pizza delivery guy who I get a delivery from 3 times a month to my Dr. and his/her staff instantly and more… Imagine that type of power in large organizations – finding people to solve problems, connect, share and more. And that is just one example… Recently we have been involved in software for major disaster clean up (e.g. Hurricane Katrina and Ike) – that entire process over the last 5 to 7 years has radically been transformed with web technology.

The future is very exciting and bright for the net. Hopefully we will also see it help to connect those who are right now left behind to open up a whole new world of opportunity as Berners-Lee and Cailliau suggest.

Article Link: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.3bb1cb136038ab4034b51162ec256bcc.2f1&show_article=1

Twitter Part 2

Noel Jerke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:06:08 +0000

Twitter Part 2

Well I am catching up on the world of Twitter. Just found out about TweepMe. Seems like the race is on to get followers. What I can’t figure out is how once you get so many followers and follow so many people you don’t just get overwhelmed and don’t read anything. Seems like they will eventually have to figure out a way to monetize priority of message viewing or something. It will be interesting to see what they do next. They definitely have their 15 minutes of fame now – I wonder if it will continue past 15 minutes or eventually lose its luster and people decide to stop spending time on it.

Another thought on it – in someways twitter is allowing us to have a virtual dialogue about how we want to communicate. Everyone is discussing it. Its not like text where it was a pretty simple model – pay to quickly chat with someone. Or like IM where you could real-time chat (btw I live on MSN) with a group of people. This is wide open, free, and loosely flowing medium is interesting and sparking a lot of public debate. Just ask CNN and Ashton :>)

Last thought – what is interesting is with being able to text message tweets and being able to protect your account – I can see some great uses for this – a way to log all that texting and conversation – especially for world wide team, teams on the go, loosely connecting working groups and more. Might try it for our group and see how useful it is.

Ok one more thought – the more I think about it – the key will be for Twitter to harness the uniqueness of this technology and medium to improve either a) group productivity or b) letting all those fun loving teens and 20 somethings chat and tweep and act fun and cute and cool or what ever :>)

For what it’s worth – check me out at http://www.twitter.com/noeljerke

P.S. One thing I have noticed is that I tend to only note messages “above the fold” – e.g. I don’t scroll down. Interesting… maybe somehow I pay for message display priority?

Twitter

Noel Jerke — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:04:51 +0000

It seems everywhere we look twitter is in the news. Even John McCain has it in the congressional record now that he tweeted thousands of people. I gotta admit I am not 100% sure I get it. You can check me on http://www.twitter.com/noeljerke. I can see the angle of keeping a small group of friends and having a sort of shared “texting” area. I can also see small working groups using it as a collaborative tool. Maybe the sweet spot is there. Right now I am following about 100 people and I just can’t keep up with it all. I think I need to kick a few “abusers” out of my list that clog it up each day. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. BTW – trying very hard to not click on the shiny links from the young ladies saying that if I click I will get a free laptop like them. Do people really click on those types of things? I guess that is “twitter spam”.

“Cloud Computing”

Noel Jerke — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:43:54 +0000

Cloud computing is an interesting topic these days. The idea of the “internet” cloud has been around a while – but now all that mass computer power is in some ways “generally available” for stuff – social networking, web sites and more. Good article on it here – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123802623665542725.html its really not a new concept – but as they note in the article the lexicon of “cloud” is much easier to understand for the general public and especially the business public. The net is truly evolving into one of the great wonders of the world.