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Showing posts from February, 2009

Better Googling

Sorry I'm in Google mode today! Just read a nice article in The McKinsey Quarterly, 'Google like a pro' (not free). I Google a lot and mostly just use the simple term or string search. Occasionally I use more powerful queries. However, in this article I learned some new ones. I thought I'd share them with you (- and by typing them in I'm learning as well!). intitle: "plane crash" > finds the string in the title of a webpage site:nl or site:us for Dutch or US sites only. inurl:news or inurl:forum for news sites and forum discussions respectively. inurl:2008 to limit your search to a time period. view:timeline, gives search results in clickable timeline ~airplane, searches for airplane, plane, air, flight, aircraft, etc. Samuel is a *, gives search results telling you who Samuel is (according to Google...) I've been using these more often lately. I was thinking: why not put a little cheat sheet on the Google homepage to help u

Contact Info? Google Me!

Ran into this interesting post and picture of the "new business card" . I think it really neat. It relates to what is happening now. What do you do if you have an appointment with somebody new? You Google them. At least I do. The same goes for when someone's applying for a job and I have to interview him/her. I Google them. This relates well to what Dell's Bob Pearson said some time ago : 'Google is our homepage'. I think doesn't only account for companies, but for people as well. If this business card is not for you, try this one ! Thanks Geekdad , Jeremiah Owyang and Gizmodo for the posts. Tags van Technorati: google

Social Media for B2B too?

Just wanted to point you to two interesting posts on the use of social media for the B2B market. Everyone seems to agree on the fact that the social web is great and a must for the B2C market. Most B2C companies are actively using social media to engage with their customers. The B2B market seems to be lagging and wondering if 'social media' is really something they should get into. PR Squared and Chris Brogan don't understand this reluctance and clearly state what B2B companies need to hop in. And I fully agree with them. Some B2B companies (mostly with a US home-base) are showing how it's done. If I'm not mistaken most of these companies have some relatedness with the internet or computer world. I haven't seen many companies yet using social media that sell wafer steppers, large dump trucks, complex tractors, windmills, etc. Most of these companies still have very 1.0-ish websites too. But if I am mistaken, please let me know! Could it be that the relucta

Connecting Paper? Extending "the Internet of Things"

ReadWriteWeb regularly keeps us posted on "the internet of things". This is an interesting development and has even been called "web 3.0" (web 2.0 moving to devices, connect people and devices automatically, using semantic technology...). Their post gives an overview of the news in this world. What I was wondering though is: Paper is also a thing. And knowledge workers are still using lots of paper (printed articles (for reading and reviewing), books, etc.). Could "the internet of things" be extended to the office? We could 'internet' paper. With small (printable) RFID tags, paper documents and books (or even parts of them) could be retrieved (and stored) in a transparent way. What do you think? Could this be useful? And, does anyone know if this is already being done? Tags van Technorati: paperless , office , knowledge worker , web 3.0 , web 2.0

'Watch with Glittering Eyes...'

Ran into this great quote by Roald Dahl: And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. Tags van Technorati: quote , life

Filtering Your Feeds using Postrank

Filtering information has always been important, but seems to be ever more important in the networked world we live in. I'm experiencing this too. In no time I subscribed to lots of interesting blogs. And I love the way this can be done using a feedreader and RSS technology. But what to do when you have(?) to sift through hundreds of posts a day? Is there a way to help you decide what to read and what not? For this reason I thought I'd try Postrank (used to be AidRSS). And I must say it's been very helpful in several ways. Postrank ranks the feeds you get in your feedreader. It basically gives every post a number (1-10) telling you how popular a post is. This is nice. For me it doesn't imply I don't read post that have a lower rank. Sometimes these posts are even more interesting than popular ones! But Postrank helps me filter posts from blogs with loads of posts-per-day. And it helps me filter my Google Alert RSS feed. Lately Google Alert is giving me way to

Innovators can do everything?

Been reading an interesting article about innovation and innovators today. It was published in the Harvard Business Review, titled: "Finding and grooming breakthrough Innovators" (Dec. 2008) by Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach and Gus Vak . The article is a good read. However, one part of the article is buzzing through my head. It's about the profile of an innovator (so companies know what kind of person to look for and cultivate them). This is what it says about 'innovators': The best innovators have very strong cognitive abilities, including excellent analytical skills. (...) First, they never rest on their laurels. (...) "They are driven by a certain underlying insecurity to not rely on past success, and they evaluate each new challenge with a clean slate." (...) Second, potential innovators are, as Small puts it, "ridiculously socially aware of their surroundings at all times." (...) They leverage ... information to craft and com

Back to blogging...

Oof, I've been quiet for too long. Or have you been enjoying it? ;-) I don't know what happened, but I simply couldn't get myself to post regularly the last couple of weeks. I have been twittering though. Maybe this does imply conversation are shifting from blogs to Twitter?! My silence definitely doesn't say nothing is going on. I saved loads of interesting posts I would love to read, comments on and post about. Hope I find time for that. What have I been up to lately? 1. I'm still working on a future information architecture. This architecture should provide a sustainable, flexible way to support structured and unstructured information processes in our organization. Leading to more effective and efficient business processes. I find that an interesting and tricky job. In technical organizations the structured information processes are supported by heavy tools (PLM and ERP tooling). Lots of focus is on these processes (usually not an integrated focus, thoug