Biggest Business Blunders of 2006?

I received an interesting email from Eric Gertsman over at Global Fluency inviting me to ask you, my faithful readers, to pop onto his survey and vote for worst business blunder of 2006.

Here's the link: Biggest Business Blunder of 2006, The Survey

I'm intrigued by his choices, however, and thought it'd be fun to comment on the various selections he's made. In particular, I'm interested in which were the result of one person having bad judgment and which are the result of industry-wide stupidity...

Wikipedia's Wales creates new search engine, threatens Google?

What are modern journalists smoking that they are covering such a fundamentally uninteresting tech story as the announcement of Wikiasari as if it's the coming of the digital messiah or something? Let's be candid: for all that his brainchild Wikipedia is cool, it's also fundamentally flawed in many ways and suffers from a myriad of the exact problems you'd expect from a "wisdom of crowds" sort of solution.

Sample coverage: News.com Australia, Business Standard, India, Sydney Morning Herald, BusinessWeek and CBC Toronto.

But the bigger problem is that Wikiasari just isn't going to work, and here's why...

NewsGator Online solves the full vs. partial RSS feed question

I know that NewsGator isn't the first to offer this capability in your RSS feeds, but I find it darn cool that one of the new display options in my favorite RSS reader, the web-based NewsGator Online, now has a "summary" view:

The article that's in my feed from Gizmodo is longer than what's displayed because Giz uses what we blog people call "full RSS feeds". But I no longer am at the mercy of their RSS configuration!

Of course, with every positive change comes a negative aspect, perhaps somewhat of an unexpected consequence...

When is a blog too personal?

One of the great ongoing debates in the murky world of blogging is whether your weblog should be personal or professional, whether you should be revealing or private. There are, of course, many different answers and at some level the real answer is "whatever you're comfortable with", but I think it's a topic worth exploration nonetheless.

First off, I think it's useful to differentiate between a personal blog, which is probably serving as a diary or journal, and a professional blog: in the former case, there really isn't much question because you can't really have a personal journal if you're not being personal and writing about your life, your experiences and your thoughts.

If you're blogging for business, however, it's a different story...

Vote for AskDaveTaylor as best Tech Blog of 2006

I'm pleased to announce that my partner tech Q&A blog Ask Dave Taylor has made it into the finals of the 2006 Weblog Awards! Very exciting, but I have some tough competition though, including sites that I don't personally think of as blogs, per se, including slashdot, Engadget, Gizmodo and TechCrunch.

But you, dear reader, can help! Click and vote for AskDaveTaylor:

Here's what's a bit weird about how it's structured, though: you can vote once every 25 hours, so if you really want to hep me stand a chance against these excellent competitors, I ask that you vote for me as many times as you can until the voting period ends on the 17th.

Kinda like classic Chicago polls, vote early, vote often!

And, thanks!!

Saving the Consumer Electronics Business

In preparation for my week-long boondoogle business trip to the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show with two of my buddies staffers, I've been reading TWICE, the publication of record for the consumer electronics industry. If you've been to CES, you've seen their show daily, but the company actually produces a very good weekly newsmagazine that talks a lot about the retail side of the industry, rather than the consumer side.

The latest issue includes an extremely interesting column by William Matthies, partner at retail market analyst Coyote Insight, wherein he talks about what he believes ails the consumer electronics industry and how to fix it.

Why is this interesting? Because I believe that his set of identified problems are exactly what also limits both the online world as a whole and the blogosphere as a market and business communications tool...

Amazon Customers Vote: Good idea, gone terribly bad?

Fascinating to watch how Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) is trying to experiment with new business ideas within the context of its online store, even if most of their corporate efforts (according to BusinessWeek, at least) are focused on offering up their technological backend capabilities to everyone in the industry, even direct competitors.

For the Christmas shopping season, Amazon's taken a leaf from its online auction service [am I the only person who remembers that they're still kinda-sorta trying to compete with eBay (Nasdaq:EBAY), for that matter?] and are experimenting with customers voting on the best of a set of possible promotions.

Here are a couple of the offers up for the next vote:

Problem is, what happens in your customer community when things break down?