Some thoughts I had for Burlington Tech’s Careers in Design and Illustration students

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I’m on the advisory board of the local high school’s vocational design program: Burlington Tech Careers in Design and Illustration. I’ve been on this board for years and it’s always fun. I get to see some great work by high school juniors and seniors during their portfolio reviews.

Over the years I’ve had a slew of excellent interns who come well prepared both in terms of their technical and software skills but also in terms of their intellectual curiosity and work ethic. They’re awesome.

As part of my role on the advisory board I’m sometimes asked to give some insight or input that might help as these kids get ready for the next phase of their work. Today I got an email from Colleen Murphy, their instructor, asking for the single most important piece of advice I might give the class. Continue reading “Some thoughts I had for Burlington Tech’s Careers in Design and Illustration students”

Knowledge, data, meaning and stuff.

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I’m currently working on a web strategy project for an organization that is looking to up it’s game in data, meaning and services within an important industry: neonatal intensive care units. Some of our conversation is relevant to any company or industry where “knowledge” is an important factor of success. This is especially true for organizations going through continuous improvement processes or OODA loops.

In the course of a recent meeting I pulled out this little gem of epistemology, a list of types of knowledge.

  1. Data
  2. Information
  3. Insight
  4. Meaning

We were discussing ways in which their organization adds values to their customers. The way this list works is like so: Continue reading “Knowledge, data, meaning and stuff.”

Deal service

deal service
Functionality that matches a person’s location with potential deals or coupons offered by merchants who are nearby to the person’s location.
Functionality that pro-actively offers incentives to people who are within a geo-fence. The geo-fence is typically sponsored by a merchant who is looking to encourage specific actions (aka buy stuff) in people who use locative media nearby (aka check in nearby).

Example: a merchant offers a coupon via a locative media platform such as Foursquare. When a Foursquare-using person is within a few blocks of the merchant, an alert is given to the consumer which notifies him or her of the deal. The coupon is intended to be an incentive for the person to visit the merchant.

Online business strategy and blogging

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Garron Selliken, owner of Portland, Oregon real estate company M Realty, asserts today that blogging, at least in the real estate industry, is dead. Obviously when Garron says that he doesn’t mean that no one is blogging about real estate anymore. Instead, he’s saying that blogging lacks business value for the real estate practitioner.

This view could probably be shared across more industries than just real estate. For some time now there has been a cacophony of voices encouraging Continue reading “Online business strategy and blogging”

Venue

Venue
A specific geographic location that a location-service uses as a check-in. A venue can be considered the human-readable name for a specific latitude/longitude.
A venue is the first surface connection between the abstract and logical Cartesian grid system of a map and the messy, human-behavior driven understanding of location, place and space. People use venue names, computers use latitude/longitude.
A venue name is an indicator that a specific location has acquired human meaning beyond it’s simple location.

Seeking: California real estate website for a makeover

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I’m going to be presenting a few things at the California Association of Realtors Expo in a couple weeks. One of the things I’ve been asked to do is one of those “Real Estate Website Makeover” kinds of things. You know the drill: someone has a website that they don’t like for some reason and then we tell them how to fix it.

I’m only missing one thing: the real estate website to fix. Continue reading “Seeking: California real estate website for a makeover”

New Dictionary for Location Services

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I’m adding a new dictionary to the sidebar here at Thoughtfaucet. It’s a dictionary for the terms and concepts surrounding location-based services. There’s enough jargon and conceptual stuff out there that I think having a little repository of this stuff will be useful.

If there are any terms or concepts related to location-based services you especially want me to include let me know. Otherwise I’ll just add things now and then as I go along.

Following channels is like chasing shadows.

Switching Channels
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Gotta have the most friends on Facebook! Gotta start using Twitter! Gotta get to be Number ONE on Google! Gotta have the most “likes” on Facebook! Gotta get more tips about my place on Foursquare! New channels are introduced to our lives on a regular basis. The pace of introduction is increasing. The rate of change probably isn’t going to slack any time soon either.

It’s very easy and very tempting to get overly focused on the channels and lose sight of the human behavior that’s driving the use of those channels. The reason it’s easy is because there are lots of people (hey, me included) that will gladly charge you a few bucks to tell you how to increase your ROI with any given channel. And there are products you can buy that help you increase your ROI with all of these channels. And the people who make those products make sure to tell you about them over and over again. There are conferences devoted to all of these channels too, creating their own swarm of media and mentions and buzz and hashtags.

But when the dust settles, communicating with people online isn’t so much about the channels themselves. It’s about Continue reading “Following channels is like chasing shadows.”