May 2008 Archives

I want a web site that combines an online poll with an open-ended survey to collect the poll possibilities. Let me unpack that with an example.

Suppose four friends and I want to meet for coffee on Thursday, but we don’t know where to meet. So we ask a question: “Where should we meet on Thusday?” The poll is open for a day and during that time each person sends in the name of a place where they want to meet. So at the end of a day you have a list of three choices: Primo, Caribou, and Starbucks. Now the computer automatically sends out a poll to each person invited to the event asking them to vote for where they want to go. The poll is open for another day and whatever location gets the most votes is where you meet your friends for coffee.

Basically this is a voting solution that steps through two parts: the nominations and the actual votes. Surely someone has built something like this before? But my cursory search of online poll products shows that most of them have one person/account that creates the poll and then whoever submits the online form votes in the poll.

Clubs or civic groups could use this to choose new leaders. Individuals could use it to setup meetings with colleagues. A book club could use it to nominate book titles and then choose which ones to read.

Spin-offs and enhancements are easy to think of: make it javascriptable and embeddable on web pages so it can be inserted into the middle of blog posts; go mobile and let people nominate and vote via text messaging; email people you want to poll and use the email addresses as an ID to prevent spam or unwanted access.

I spent most of Saturday hanging out at Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota campus at MinneBar 2008. I must say that the union has a pretty nice suite of conference rooms for gatherings like this.

I started the morning at Social Search for the Enterprise. Rich Hoeg from Honeywell discussed a nifty use of ConnectBeam to create an internal social bookmark store that integrates directly with Google search results. So when people go to look up a topic they get a page of Google results and an in-line column of internal Honeywell links. The internal information can also list similar tags and users, thus creating an instant community around a search topic. It was easy to see that this was much more effective than the skills directories or yellow pages that so many knowledge management efforts created in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Jonathan Dahl led an interesting discussion on Consulting for fun and profit. I liked the Jeopary format he used, it got a lot of audience participation.

Over the noon hour the big panel discussion was on the state of the state (of technical development in Minnesota). It had the usual rah-rah, we really are as smart as those people on the coast moments along with some exhortations to stop being afraid of risk and to get out there and form more startups. I thought the most salient point was that Minnesota has plenty of talented developers and designers but the networks between them aren’t as strong as they need to be. Another lack is business talent. Dan Grigsby called for product managers to become CEOs at startups. We shall see.

Curt Prins gave a rundown of the “7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing” from which I left early to see the tale end of the Distributed Teams panel.

Charles Gimon led a very interesting discussion about reputation. I’m not sure we were even able to define what reputation is, but we all agreed that it is transforming in the online world. I jotted down a bunch of interesting questions: do we have multiple reputations? how about reputations from inside and outside of networks/communities? is disemvowelling create liability for site owners because it is a type of editing? A couple of sites were mentioned: Naymze, iKarma, claim-id.

Jeramey Jannene talked about making money from blogging. He cited most of the typical ideas: stay focused, get ads, jobboards, sponsored posts, etc. I heard one person ask about investigative journalism techniques. Might be worthwhile as a niche blog topic.

Tim Erickson concluded the day with a discussion about E-Democracy and the challenges of online community building, outreach to under-served communities, and other miscellaneous topics.

I had a good time and had a chance to meet some very interesting people.

The silent litany of the workmen goes on –
Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed.
We make the flying, crying motors,
Clutches, brakes, and axles,
Gears, ignitions, accelerators,
Spokes and springs and shock absorbers.
The silent litany of the workmen goes on –
Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed;
Axles, clutches, levers, shovels,
We make signals and lay the way –
Speed, speed.

The trees come down to our tools,
We carve the wood to the wanted shape.
The whining propeller's song in the sky,
The steady drone of the overland truck,
Comes from our hands; us; the makers of speed.

Speed; the turbines crossing the Big Pond,
Every nut and bolt, every bar and screw,
Every fitted and whirring shaft,
They came from us, the makers,
Us, who know how,
Us, the high designers and the automatic feeders,
Us, with heads,
Us, with hands,
Us on the long haul, the short flight,
We are the makers; lay the blame on us –
The makers of speed.

— from Good Morning, America

Contrast the silent litany of the workmen to the noise of the engines they create. The gears, the clutches, the axles, and brakes. And the litany is a repetition of speed - the word.

Then the connection to we. Who is it that makes this thing called speed? The workers are "we" - the makers of speed. We lay the way and make the signals that propel this speed.

To the environment - the trees and the wood carved by our wants into the desired shapes. Something is wrong, something is destroyed by this thirst for speed, by our wants and desires. Drones and whines now fill the world built by us, the makers of speed.

Speed, a colloquialism for meth-amphetamine. It's a drug now, that we can't deny or relinquish.

Crossing the Big Pond two new words - "every" and "us". The point of the stanza - speed is everywhere, inside and outside of us. Us has a spectrum from the high designers to the automatic feeders, the long haul to the short flight. We're all encompassed now; we're all to the blame. And the blame is laid on us - the makers of speed.