Month: October 2006

Linda Ferguson: “Essentially, anchors are the tags we use to retrieve entire experiences rather than individual pieces of information. That makes them memories.”

www.iscrybe.com

BTW the visual examples of “context” in this video (particularly the longer version) perfectly describe what I was striving for when I spoke about trying to “map” my flow of information previously. This also relates to my post yesterday on OurStory. Again the idea is to give the user or visitor the control in dynamically changing their “context” viewpoint instead of just giving them a single static option (i.e. monthly archives for a blog).

Update June 8, 2020: Decided to see what happened with this product. Apparently it launched and became Convofy and then just Convo. Now the Founder of the company, Faizan Buzdar, works as the VP of Product Management of Box.

I was just reading through Fast Company magazine when I discovered an article on a new web service called OurStory. This is probably the best representation of what I was talking about before in my previous post entitled Storyboard Your Life. There are, however, some key things missing from the service compared to the idea I envisioned though.

• Filtered By Category/Tag – I should be able to tag entries as “Music” and then see a timeline of just my music (but still by my choice of Year, Decade, or Lifetime).
• Filtered Storyline – If I select Recent or click on a Decade, I should only see the storyline entries related to that time period.
• Non-Visually Focused – Your timeline only displays images. You should be able to display storyline titles as well, since not all entries may contain images. Even more so, an image in a story may not always represent the entire story well.
• Meaningful/Transitional Rating – I should be able to rate my storyline entries. Thus when I filter by my Lifetime and say by the tag “Music”, I should only see the most meaningful rated music over my life which in effect are the transitional music moments in my life.

Of course, most important of all, I shouldn’t need a proprietary service to do this. Blogging software should allow me to do this itself and very easily. In effect, instead of having a static archive view (i.e. by month), you instead have a dynamic archive view that anyone can change on the fly through the use of multiple parameters that are visible on the site. In addition, each dynamic view should have it’s own RSS feed so that each visitor can just stay aware of what they are interested in.

Jeff Jarvis: “The value is in relationships.”

With Thanksgiving just around the corner up here in Canada, I wanted to do a little something extra to give thanks for how good things have been going for me so far with regards to work. Therefore, just like how others are helping me to improve my business so that I can sustain myself, I’d like to do the same for others as well. With that in mind, and discovering Kiva.org just the other day, I decided to invest in a store owner, Adriana, located in Monterrey, Mexico to help her business grow so that she can sustain herself as well.

I can’t give much right now but hey that’s the beauty of the Web. Collectively, with each of us doing just our own small little bit, we can do some pretty big and amazing things as a whole community.  🙂

I just noticed that a company got “acquired” today. Who the company is, isn’t important. It’s the usage of the word “acquired” that always seems to make my skin crawl whenever I see it.

I guess the difference with me is that instead of seeing companies, I see people with ideas. Instead of seeing acquisitions of ownership, I see relationships of mutual respect and understanding. I’m sure people in these companies feel great when they get acquired by a prestigious company but I’m wondering how they’ll feel when they’re sold off to someone else at a later date (which I saw happen to another company just the other day).

“Sorry honey. We’ve had a great five years living together but it’s just not working out for me anymore. I’ve decided to sell you off to my friend Tony who’s going to acquire you. He’s a great guy and I’m sure you’ll be happy with him.”

Ugh.