Hey Gina, Lifehacker talked about managing your online reputation the other day.  I have a bone to pick with you…

The buzz about attention data has come up again and here with Google Reader announcing its trends feature. Should your data be your own or owned by the company that is providing the free service? It is a tough question. One that I have been on both sides of the coin and thought long and hard about. Its a free service and the price you pay might be your attention data and eventual ads targeted very specifically for you. On the other hand, it is my data and it is about me. I wouldn’t want my medical history shared. Why should my reading habits and interests be a whole lot different?

Who ever owns the data is not what I am getting at. If it is data about me why can’t I use it the way I want to? Nick and Google Reader team, et al. In my news reader you are collecting data about me and data about others, why can’t this data be culled to do recommendations? I shop Amazon, specifically for this reason. I love finding out new books and products that are geared towards me and my interests. Why can’t blogs and websites be the same way?

Google is a great web search tool, but this is “Web 2.0″. We are beyond simple searches. Social web sites are nice, but can be skewed and played. What I want is simple statistical recommendations not just search. What blogs and sites are like those that I have interest in? Based upon what I am reading now, what other topics might be of interest? What are others like myself looking at? These are the things that would be useful and more in line with the digital lifestyle.

The data is there and has been for a long time. Let’s do something with it that enhances the users experience. The marketers have had their shot with it and they missed the boat hard. It’s the users turn now.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, Feed Demon, Attention Data, User Experience, Web 2.0

Rajesh Setty talks about blogging and making content timeless. In context, he refers to making your content be able to stand up on its own long after you have written. It doesn’t expire because it is no longer current news.

You can and should take this one step further to refer to your career. What skills can you acquire that will be timeless? These are the skills that will benefit you the greatest in the long run.

Some examples are writing, presentational skills (speaking, written, and visual aids), user requirement analysis, software architecture, and networking.

What timeless core skills do you have and which ones will be your goals for next year?

Technorati Tags: Career, Development, Core Skills, Timeless Skills, Networking, Audience

The web has come a long ways in terms of usefulness. The interfaces are much easier and nicer. It is easier to search and share information. But has it become too easy and too mainstream?

The comments there are a good example of why I don’t get much value from Digg. Too much noise and very little knowledge. Robert Scoble

Robert’s comment strikes a chord that I have felt for awhile now. When a medium is opened to the public and becomes mainstream, it starts to loose its effectiveness and perhaps its authority. Look at the history of the Internet. BBS, newsgroups, forums, live chat, social networking, and social bookmarking. When it was a limited group, it had some use. As it grew the voice of the masses’ was heard and it became more useful. It then became popular and mainstream. All of these mediums suffered similar histories. When they became popular and mainstream the noise grew to deafening volumes and blocked out the knowledge.

It is easy to comment and do a straight mind dump or stream of thought. No filtering needed. Who is going to know who you are. Better yet, look at myspace, et al., most don’t understand or care that their lives are an open book for those who know how to look. If you don’t care that other’s know your personal details, why would you care that they find out that you trashed talked about something you knew nothing about? We are or are becoming an open society that hides behind fake annonynimity of digital life. There is no accountability and when you can sign up for a yahoo or other anonymous email account, there isn’t likely to be any anytime soon.

It isn’t as much fallen from grace as it has gone the way of most mass media and popular Internet services.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, social networks, social bookmarking, Digg, MySpace, Responsibility, accountability, audience

Today I had a very long and intense meeting about linking the system I built with a vendor’s system. I learned allot about their system, accounting, my customer’s processes, and generally more detail about how my customer runs it business. All in all a very knowledge intense 6 hours.

The goal of the project is to link the two systems which is now done via sneaker net, with required double and triple data entry and errors and delays that can happen with such system a labor heavy process. After going through all of it, the woman whose project this is, came up with a very insightful and poignant. She asked if only the main piece of it could be done (80%). That if we could do that much if it she could handle doing the rest of it manually until a later time in which that we’d all have more time and opportunity to attack the last 20%. It made sense. It also reminded me of an important rule. No matter how technically “right” your solution maybe, ultimately the customer is driving the project. In this particular case the customer clearly voiced what she was looking for and I had heard her underlying message loud and clear. (see Part 1: Listen) She was concerned that by the time we had cleaned up the data and figured out how to automate the whole process it would be “too late and too long.”

This woman is under a lot of pressure and really the brunt of the project isn’t to get it “completely” right, but to alleviate her from the responsibility of doing all of this manual data entry. She was right, in that we were losing sight of that main focus.

Moral: Listen to the Customer and let them steer the project.