Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Joel:  E-mail condoms. 5:17:27 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Customer Service and K-Logs.  What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods): Researching product information (90%) Comparing product features and prices (58%) Contacting customer service (56%) Locating a store or distributor (42%) Checking product availability (36%) Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging? A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy.  This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system.  Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption. Contacting customer service on most sites is painful.  Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones).  A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog.  The question, including keywords, is the title of the post.  The answer is the response.  Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.).  A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice. New poducts should be hyped via a weblog.  Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts.  A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability. 3:11:40 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals 12:44:02 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Emergic.  The Lindows Webstation.  An inexpensive PC that boots from a CD.  With  dirt cheap (and getting cheaper fast) local disk storage, what's the advantage?  None. This question, and its inevitable answer, has damned the arrival of Network PCs (hard disk free PCs) since McNealy and Ellison began to promote them 7 years ago. 9:39:03 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Joe Firmage:  3-D portals and a global taxonomy run by experts.  Joe, a serial entrepreneur with a strong eccentric streak, is onto a good idea (a network of expert webloggers) but the path to implementation (it uses a strong dose of VRML spaces) doesn't sound plausible. 9:28:49 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

BBC.  Relatively random survey:  stress caused by a loss of e-mail worse than divorce.  What about the loss of a weblog? 9:01:45 AM    Comment_ Trackback []