Sameer Agarwal

Oh yeah I am and I feel like kicking myself. For months now I’ve been thinking of an idea to link up the stock market with social networking. I mean using the “wisdom of crowds” to decide which stock to pick. After all don’t we follow tips given by analysts and friends!

Good idea, yeah… but the trouble is that I just kept thinking and someone else executed! Stumbled across CafeStocks which is still in beta doing exactly the same thing that I kept thinking about for several months. I mean it’s exactly the same thing that I was thinking – sharing tips, ranking stocks based on tips received, ranking people who provide tips, the works! 

So many times we just think, and think, and do nothing beyond it. I remember Michael Dale (corporate trainer) once saying this, and it’s so apt:

You’ve it all figured out in your mind. Now DO IT!

Hope I take some learning from this and don’t miss the bus the next time I’ve some idea.

There’s a site called Browse Happy which is nothing but a campaign against Internet Explorer. That’s “hate groups” coming of age! Well disclaimer – I’m not supporting this campaign in particular… especially because I’m making this particular post from IE (my office computer ‘standard built’ browser) even though I use Firefox on my home computer.

Firefox is of course good with plenty of plugins freely available, tabbed browsing (that’s standard in IE 7) and “more security”. Though I know nothing about what that “more security” is but guess if the world thinks it’s more secure I’ll assume it’s more secure.

But anyway, I guess what’s happening is that it is a war between communities and organizations. Organizations are sort of trying to create communities (that’s the whole Web 2.0 strategy piece) while communities are sort of becoming enterprises (take Firefox or WordPress as examples) in a way. It’s a strange convergence where warring factions seem to be becoming more like the other, even though the purpose of their existence ‘was’ different.

Someone asked this question on LinkedIn and I was surprised to see responses like – “who has the time to blog” and “its and extra overhead” etc. Here are my two cents on the topic (that I posted as a reply there):

Completely echo Andrew’s thoughts. Just to add – knowledge workers need to ‘ask’ and ‘tell’ to be more effective in the way they do their work. Also, they are only interested in contextual knowledge – that means they only want to know what ‘they’ want to know. Given all these ‘common-sense’ observations, it makes sense to deploy contextual tools – and what’s better than Web 2.0.

A blog can be used effectively for internal communications and believe it or not, knowledge sharing. They are far better than “best practice documents” produced in a ‘standard’ and lengthy format, tagged un-intuitively. There are examples galore and I can respond back if someone disagrees. We have used these techniques very successfully at HP.

Afterthought.Some people have mentioned that it’s an overhead given they already receive 50+ emails a day. My only comment on that is that Blogs = Less Email. Think about an org announcement that needs to be sent out to all employees over email. Contrast that to it being available on the blog. Go figure the bandwidth saving! More – employees can subscribe to the feed of the blog and view the notifications at their own convenience. Lastly, everything put on the blog is available literally forever, whereas “email is where knowledge goes to die”.