Author: marionvermazen

I am a traveler, hiker, avid reader, Sun alumnus, computer geek, Spanish and French language student, knitter and genealogist. I am retired after working for almost 30 years in the Computer Industry. I live in Reno, Nevada with my husband Duke.

Jonny Lang

Last night we went to see Jonny Lang at Villa Montalvo   His singing and guitar playing were exceptional. The power  and energy came through to make it a great concert. He was billed as a "once in a generation blues talent" and I would have to agree. If you ever get the chance to see a concert of his I would highly recommend it. And he is only 24. His debut album came out when he was 16.  I felt like we got to experience something very special. And Villa Montalvo is wonderful outdoor setting.

Zipingo

It is bugging me that I can’t remember who first articulated the relationship between the number of participants in a community like ebay and its usefulness. The bottom line is that the bigger the community the more valuable the service. I know I have read this somewhere and it is one of the basic tenets of the Internet economics. As the number of people who use the  Internet increases so does the rate of attachment because the Internet becomes more and more useful. I can’t even figure  out how to Google this to find what I am looking for. If someone can point me to a link I’d appreciate it.
I remember that the principal was described much more clearly than I am describing it.

UPDATE: Thanks to  atthecrux for answering my question. The law I am looking for is Metcalfe’s Law , aka the "network effect".

But that is not exactly what I want to talk about here.  The purpose of this posting is to talk about Zipingo.com. It is a new service that Intuit has launched into beta test this week.  We are building a database of business ratings. The site describes itself as the "yellow pages with ratings."  Obviously a site like this isn’t useful unless what you are interested in has been rated. So for now we are trying to get a lot of ratings. By the way I am not working on this project at Intuit. When I say we I am saying we as in Intuit.  Anyway Zipingo is only going to be really useful when it has millions of ratings so Intuit has added a link to Zipingo from Quicken 2006 and a link from Quickbooks. This should make it really easy for people to rate their transactions. It is also really easy to rate a business or your optometrist or your chiropractor from the site itself. Give it at try! I am really enjoying watching the growth of the number of rankings on the site. I’ve done 27 so far and the number this week is up to  41,777. It will be fascinating to me to see how it grows.

 

Software for Independent Financial Planners

In a  recent blog entry Tom Peters addressed the  question, "Can a small financial services firm compete in a world of Citigroups and Bank of Americas?" Peters put together a list of 16 ‘Must Dos’, Two of the ‘Must Dos’  especially caught my eye:

  • " Sophisticated use of information technology.* (Small-"ish" is no excuse for "small aims"/execution in IS/IT!" 
  • "Web-power!* (The Web can make very small very big … if the product-service is super-cool and one purposefully masters buzz/viral marketing.)"

They caught my attention because the software for independent financial planners that we are piloting right now will help small financial planners compete with the big guys. If you are an independent financial planner who manages your customer’s assets and you are interested in helping us pilot test our software drop me an email marion_vermazen at intuit.com.

As I was writing this blog entry I discovered that  Tom Peters recently posted a blog entry about what he has learned in his first year of blogging. It resonated with me and it gave me a new perspective on a couple of things like the power of small posts and how blogging breaks can lead to better blogging. I really enjoy reading The Tom Peters blog. It is a group blog and the posts are almost always interesting and thought provoking.

Blogging Articles

There were two big articles about blogging in our local paper, The Argus, today. The first article titled Mainstreaming the blog, Corporate America leaps into the ‘blogosphere‘ is on the front page of the business section and features a half page picture of Paul Rosenfeld who is Mr Blogging at Intuit. He is general manager of the QuickBooks Online Edition group. I stopped by his office a couple of weeks ago and introduced myself. I was really impressed by his enthusiasm for blogging. I have pointed to the Online Edition Blog group blog several times.

The article quotes Technorati’s CEO Dave Sifry, "three-quarters of the  of the 9000 corporate blogs that Technorati has tracked are high tech companies and most of the rest are related to high-tech." There is no doubt that blogging has been slow to move beyond high tech. I can’t make up my mind whether I think blogging will catch on beyond high tech. On the one hand blogging is such a powerful medium and things that are big in high tech usually catch on elsewhere. But on the other hand you have to be a bit of a  techie at heart to blog and most people I know outside of my tech friends don’t really get it or even care about blogging. I’d really be interested in other people’s opinions on this subject.

The second article in The Argus is about employees who get in trouble blogging. Although it is not a new subject I did learn a few new things. I didn’t realize that to be dooced means to be fired because of your blog. Apparently the name comes from the first person to have that happen.

Blogging Easy?

I totally agree with Chuq. I just want to blog. I don’t have much interest in understanding the difference between Atom and RSS. I also use TypePad and I really like how easy it makes blogging. But easy is relative. I noticed that Chuq has pictures on  the side panel of his blog so I thought I would try to do the same. I also use Flickr so I knew it could be done. The trick was figuring out how to do it. Luckily I love a puzzle and a challenge and I’m pretty good with technology. It took me about an hour but I finally figured it out. The bottom line is that TypePad does make blogging easy but there are lots of parts of it that aren’t very intuitive.