2006 March 03

Connecting the Dots podcast for March 3, 2006

Ipod_2
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done a podcast. I’ve been busier than a one-armed, wallpaper hanger but had a bit of time this afternoon and have really been missing it — so here you go. I’m geared up to continue the weekly podcast series so keep those earphones in.

This week’s show covers my current adventure…and some things you might want to consider if you’re working (but not feeling like you’re in the right spot) or are considering an entrepreneurial adventure of your own. Understanding your values, purpose and what puts a spring-in-your-step is key to creating your future, and there is some data you can gather that will help you understand yourself and the choices you make will become increasingly clear.

Staying with my roots of connecting dots, I then segue in to a discussion about Web 2.0 companies and this list of 907 of them…and something to consider before you embark on
investing your time, energy, effort or money in a new Web offering.

Listen to or download this week’s show

The Internet *is* a platform

UPDATE: Graeme Thickins will be posting from PC Forum and has an excellent prelude post today. It covers many of the issues important to the success of internet as a platform.

If you have *any* doubt that the internet is a platform — and that the future of the Web is upon us and accelerating — then I provide for your clicking, your experiencing, and your gignormous investment of time, this site full of 907 Web 2.0-ish links.

Some of these sites are peripheral to Web 2.0 (or what is increasingly being referred to as "Next Generation internet") meaning they’re not actual web application offerings. An example is the AttentionTrust.org attempting to ensure that all netizens own the data collected from our attention invested in all these Web offerings. You can also click "Category Definitions" at the top of the page to see how the eConsultant has categorized the list o’ links.

I’m going to come back to a recurring theme I posted about earlier: there are too many value propositions and too many Web places expecting us all to invest our attention, time, energy and effort with them.

Heck…I can’t even get through a list of 907 links like this one…let alone decide upon who will survive and be worthy of my attention. Which online storage place do I choose to safekeep my precious digital files? Which calendar application can my family and I use to input all birthdays, events and work on it as a shared calendar? Lastly, which of the collaboration sites can I either use or recommend to clients (e.g., Basecamp, Foldera, Joyent, Rallypoint, ProjectSpaces, StikiPad, et al) will still be with us a year or two from now?

Imagine a small business, with collaborators geographically disbursed, begin to use Foldera. Everyone participating climbs the learning curve, invests in uploading and input into the various calendars and other collaborative aspects, and then what if Foldera folds in 2007? They’re now offline and all the data is sitting on their servers. This team is screwed.