Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Site in the clouds


The last couple of weeks I've been nibbling away at a new approach to staging knowledge portals by staging a pilot through Google Sites. It's the anti-intranet. It's the thousand tiny SharePoints of light. It's not proprietary although it is password protected. It's a portal into something larger -- not smaller than the sum of its hyperlinks. No one needs an encryptocard or a secret handshake other than the invite to join.

The one frustration is that the so-called scripts that pass for gadgets are as erratic as a unexpected and unwelcome one-two patch on a Windows update. I must have toyed with a half-dozen customizable RSS interfaces. They all fell apart the minute I went into tweak them. That's my kneejerk response to the false positives pouring from references to Obama that include neither 'government' nor 'politics.' (Talk about departing from false positives as usual).

The ticker display widgets, especially from one source called SaneBull are a hearty lot. The driving directions from MapQuest won't drain the batteries on your GPS compass. I am in awe of the Google spreadsheets that sing and dance or cry and mope depending on the market gyration du jour. It's also a guilty pleasure to be searching on filetype and trolling for all these "kickass PowerPoints." That's not my emotional connection but those of the consultants who respirate, perspire and dream in slideware. The punch line is that it's public domain presentations so the getting something for nothing buzz lasts a lot longer than the going rate on RSS feeds.

The nicest part about cloud computing for builders and users alike is that you've replaced Little IT with Big Google. And there are no bruised egos, server crashes, or even pink slips -- how beneficent can Google be?

The other knot that I still haven't untangled is that the Custom Google Search closes for business whenever I log off the web. This is never an issue on the blog where the Javascript holds the custom search in place regardless of whether hot PowerPoints can keep me burning through spent fuel rods well after the intranet shuts its doors.

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About attentionSpin

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attentionSpin is a consulting practice formed in 1990 to create, automate and apply a universal scoring system (“The Biggest Picture”) to brands, celebrities, events and policy issues in the public eye. In the Biggest Picture, attentionSpin applies the principles of market research to the process of media analytics to score the volume and nature of media coverage. The explanatory power of this research model: 1. Allows practitioners to understand the requirements for managing the quality of attention they receive 2. Shows influencers the level of authority they hold in forums where companies, office-seekers, celebrities and experts sell their visions, opinions and skills 3. Creates meaningful standards for measuring the success and failure of campaigns and their connection to marketable assets.