In my continuing search for examples of Small Business Blogs, I came across Industry Blogs, a listing of more serious, business-related blogs. I even got my own site registered. This aggregated site is still in its early stages but may grow. Many of the the sites are from the UK.
Once it fills up, this could be a good starting point for someone looking for examples on how to start blogging for business.
Comments back on
Well it seems to be that my problems with the comment spammer are over for now – you can now make comments anonymously or as a registered user (though it’s aways nice to know who you are). I got a lot of helpful pointers from Boris Mann, Robert Douglass and James Farmer, but in the end I think that it was an incorrect setting on the server. That means that Drupal is spam-resistant if you set it up correctly. It also means that there is a great support community to help you out if you have any problems – thanks very much guys.
Commons-based Peer Production
In my previous post on Obsolescing the Middle Men, I had referred to commons-based peer production. From George Siemens I learned that Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP Technical Strategy & Innovation at IBM, takes this form of production very seriously. Wladawsky-Berger states that :
Clearly, despite having built a highly successful, profitable business on a proprietary model, IBM takes the open source movement in its many manifestations very seriously. Working in an open community is for us a no-nonsense business decision, made only after considerable analysis of the technology and market trends, and due diligence on the community, its licensing and governance, and the quality of its offerings.
I think that we are seeing the next phase of open source getting bigger and more serious. Even more traditional business publications, such as Knowledge@Wharton are discussing open source models. This is a practical and pragmatic way of doing business which can be profitable, but also idealistic in that it fosters the common good. This may be the new model that our antiquated managerial capitalist world needs.
Commons-based peer production is a BIG idea.
For the past several years I have participated in a number of regional economic and industry-focused development initiatives. They have focused on how a region can be more innovative, get more jobs, create wealth, etc. In all of these cases the status quo remains, in terms of power and wealth. I also don’t see much real innovation, especially the quantum type referred to by Franz Johansson. The Commons could be the unifying idea that allows companies to make profits, individuals to opt-in on their own terms and non-profits to participate and benefit. However, to really make commons-based peer production work, the traditional power centres (corporations, executives, bureaucrats) will have to give up control, and that could prove to be most difficult.
Perhaps it could start with the CBC?
Just Can’t Get Enough Spam
I’m still receiving about 5,000 spam pings per day on my website. Since trackbacks and comments are turned off, none are getting through. I also thought about re-activating my old Blogger site, but as soon as I made my first post I received 6 comment spams (not from my personal gambling spammer though) in the first 15 minutes.
My key difficulties seem to be:
1. Spammers can post to deleted nodes and I cannot stop them unless I do a global "no comments allowed".
2. I can’t block-delete a number of comments in Drupal, so I have to individually review each comment spam before deletion – and these can quickly get into the hundreds.
Yes, I have the spam module activated, but it doesn’t address the deleted node problem. Am I the only person who has ever deleted a blog post?
So my situation is that I want to keep the +500 posts that I have made on this site. I also like most of Drupal’s functions. However, I am seriously looking for alternatives. Perhaps archiving my Drupal blog and adding a link to a better blogging platform would be a solution. Unfortunately this would mean running two systems. Another option would be to try to transfer the database to another system. Has anyone ever transferred from Drupal to another system?
Comments to – hjarche(AT)gmail(DOT)com
Furl: Small Business Blogs
I had previously asked if there were many blogs being used by more traditional small businesses. Since the anonymous comment function is temporarily turned off (until I get an easier way to reject the comment spam), I didn’t get many responses. In the interim I have kept an eye out for small business blogs and have created this Furl Topic – Small Business Blogs.
To date I’ve found a coffee company, a mortagage specialist, a real estate agent and a health food company. I’ll keep adding to this site, as I think that this is the real growth area for business blogging, enabling small companies to have direct conversations with their customers and eliminating the marketing middle men.
To date I’ve found a coffee company, a mortagage specialist, a real estate agent and a health food company. I’ll keep adding to this site, as I think that this is the real growth area for business blogging, enabling small companies to have direct conversations with their customers and eliminating the marketing middle men.
“The Corporation”
I finally sat down to watch The Corporation, as I could never convince the whole family to watch it with me. This is a great film, and unfortunately not much is surprising. We have arrived at a point in our history where the dominant power structure has outlived its usefulness to human kind. My most memorable line is from Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, who has seen the edge of the corporate/industrial cliff:
The first industrial revolution is flawed, it is not working, it is unsustainable, it is the mistake – and we must move on to another and better industrial revolution and get it right this time.
After the documentary was about 3/4 over, my boys came home from their pizza party and watched the rest with me. Now they want to see the whole thing :-)
Information on how to buy a personal copy of the film is available on the website.
Comments Disabled
The comment spammer has temporarily won the battle for my website as I consult with greater technical minds than mine. This afternoon I was receiving so much comment and trackback spam that it crashed the server. If you have a Drupal ID you can login to post a comment or you can always e-mail me at hjarche(AT)gmail(DOT)com. [BTW, my gmail account has received over 100 spam mails so far this month. I use my gmail account as a spam catcher, and it seems to work OK.]
Update on 15 August – We’re still working on installing the Drupal Spam Module developed by Jeremy. It seems that my site had over 10 times its normal traffic last Friday – too bad it wasn’t all folks interested in my writing :-(
19 August – Comments back on :-)
Connecting to Online Communities
If you’re not sure what participation in an online community can do for your business, then check out Lee’s post at Common Craft. Lee shows how online communities are separate from business operations, but that there are ways to connect without opening up the whole store. For instance, business goals can be shared with the online community.
Below are examples of the types of goals that can benefit from community participation:
- Identifying solutions to common problems
- Identifying innovative ideas
- Reducing bugs in software or products
- Counteracting negative or inaccurate PR
- Reducing support costs
- Increasing non-community participation in events
Lee cites a number of examples of community mobilization, such as the March of Dimes. This is a good summary for those not immersed in online communities but trying to figure out the business potential.
Obsolescing the Middle Men
Ross Mayfield’s recent article on the rise of the Commons-based peer production business model came with a quote that about 50% of US GDP consists of transaction costs. These are the costs of getting a product or service from the seller to the purchaser. The contention is that the commons model, used by open source software developers as well as others, reduces these transaction costs.
There appears to be a huge opportunity for nimble small companies (without huge marketing & sales overhead) to significantly reduce transaction costs and pass these on to purchasers. This is what Mancomm Performance did on our last project by using open source software and underbidding a Fortune 500 company by ~$2M.
Looking at this situation through McLuhan’s tetrad for the laws of media, here is how this could be explained.
Commons-based peer production:
- Extends each individual’s reach worldwide
- Obsolesces the middle men (accountants, lawyers, traders, brokers)
- Retrieves the barter system or the bazaar – (I can set my own rules for buying & selling)
- and Flips, when extended to its limits, the Commons into a whuffie economy
Virtual work, but we need you onsite
Nine Shift relates this story about a reader who had applied for a job developing ‘virtual’ learning:
“I wanted to share with you something that happened to me last week. I found an interesting position listed on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s jobs listing for an Instructional Designer to work with faculty at a large online university. Even before reading Nine Shift, I had toyed with the idea of teaching or working in some way with education online, so this sounded like a great opportunity. And, I reasoned that it could easily be done online (even if the ad was not specific), since the faculty the incumbant for this position would be working with would be exclusively online faculty. But, just to be sure, I contacted the HR Department at the university before sending in my documents. I was contacted back almost immediately (which was refreshing) and told that this was an onsite position and not an online one. It struck me as odd that even the people doing online education are not willing to see what could be done and are still requiring some jobs to be located on campus that could easily (and more effectively) be done by telecommuting.”
Many companies are developing products and services for clients all over the world but they may never meet their clients face-to-face. However, the urge to be able to watch over employees and keep them in one place/time zone seems to be hard to overcome. This mentality is also evident in the command-and-control systems (like time tracking to the minute) that these companies use.
Smaller companies and free-agents are starting to give these companies a run for their money. We’re not there yet, but we’re honing our virtual work skills every day.
I do a lot of virtual work and have done projects completely online. Our project teams embrace any tool that can help us, such as:
- Skype — for instant messages, presence monitoring
- eGroupware — for formal collaboration
- Gmail — for transferring large files
- Marratech — when we need real time video and document sharing
All of these applications are free and/or open source. We use them because they work and we don’t need an IT Department’s permission to use them either. We have also embraced virtual work because we can’t afford to spend all of our time traveling (especially traveling to the office). Free-agents have figured out how to use the Internet to make us more effective and get things done cheaper and faster. So far though, the corporate world still seems to be looking for clock-punchers who can be monitored close at hand. The situation doesn’t seem to be changing too quickly …