August 2007

With no fanfare but the simple gesture of a link, I discovered that CODA has a blog, Finance Reinvented. It’s been going a couple of weeks and looks like an adjunct to the company’s marketing effort. I don’t mind as long as I learn something along the way. The named authors are marketing director Dave Turner and CE Jeremy Roche. I hope they’re able to keep up the effort. And fix the non-working comment system.

I seem to be the only one who thinks that Robert Scoble is onto something when he talks about how business search could be so much better through the melding of services like Mahalo, Facebook and Techmeme. It seems he’s stirred up a hornet’s nest among the search engine optimization crowd. They miss the point altogether and seem far more intent on defending their position than looking to see where Robert’s argument holds merit. That’s the blogosphere for you.I spoke to Robert about this in the context of what matters to business people…. He also agrees that humans don’t scale – the premise upon which Mahalo’s human built directory operates…. What matters is that someone is out there thinking about how search can be weaved into the fabric of emerging social networks. This is exactly the way services should be developed for business because, like any other relationship, we reach out to the people we trust. If they’re creating content that might be useful we’ll search their stuff first.

If this sort of thing floats your boat then I recorded a quick instructional video for SAP’s BPX Business KPI wiki…. I like the idea of building out the Business KPIs as a community effort so that on the long term, there is consistency in what they mean. My initial experience with the wiki was not so great and that was because navigation was not as I expected it…. In this case, rather than using kyte.tv’s otherwise excellent publishing tool, I cobbled this together using iMovieHD, an application that comes with the MacBook Pro. This allows me to use video clips, screenshots and voice in a brain dead easy to use package. Again, there was a bit of a learning curve but I suppose the whole thing took less than 30 minutes, including screengrabs, arranging them on the iMovie HD palette, recording the intro video and the voice over. I can see this kind of multi-media experience becoming the norm for quick access training…. Disclosure: SAP is not a client but it does cover my TE when they stage events to which I need to travel.