Curiouser and Curiouser! on networking

Homeplug

Sat, 24 Aug 2002 15:26:17 +0100

Where to Get Homeplug. Get Homeplug adapters from the same place you get your VPN router -- LinkSys. [Blunt Force Trauma]

» There might also be a small problem with the pins being in the wrong place :-)

Networking is the key

Wed, 04 Sep 2002 12:07:10 +0100

As so many people have told me: networking is the key to starting a successful business. To this end I have joined both Ryze and E-cademy which are online networking sites where you can build a profile and hopefully connect up with people who have similar or complementary interests.

Filling the pipeline

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 13:27:59 +0100

I haven't posted much about business lately. I've realised that I have fallen into the trap that lies in wait for so many people who go it alone. The business of business is quite daunting - it's very easy to focus on what you're best at and hope the rest takes care of itself. (Note to self: It won't!)

I have been struggling for some time to work out what it is that I am trying to offer, as a business, to whom and how. So far I've been doing it in an ad hoc fashion. Chip a little here, nibble at bit there. But like a pitcher who can't quite find the strike zone I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with my game.

I keep thinking that, by now, I really ought to be certain what the hell I'm doing and be out doing it. Instead I'm still circling the problem, unable to focus. As it always has been with me: lots of ideas, still need to execute.

So my coach "!coach" has introduced me to the Get Clients Now! approach (from the book by C.J.Hayden). Get Clients Now! is a repeatable 28-day marketing program which focuses on finding where you are blocked, suggesting strategies for going forward and then providing a 28-day program to further those strategies. The idea is that you configure each 28-day program to fit your current needs and execute on it. At the end of the program you evaluate, adjust (or totally change) and go round again.

It's a very simple system. The beginning is to work out your overall goals and where you are stuck in achieving them. I'm at still at stage#1 (sigh) or filling the pipeline. As someone coming in to this game without the 12-months solid preparation that it needs I lack the network of contacts or visibility required to be in business.

(Aside: although I've met a lot of interesting people over the last couple of months. Although I've done a huge amount of thinking and really feel I've achieved something personally, for me. Despite all that I haven't come up with a sustainable business model.)

When filling the pipeline the recommended strategies are:

Direct contact and follow-up
Networking and referral building

So those are what I am going to focus on in the next 28-days.

When "filling the pipeline" using these two strategies there are a number of techniques (ingredients as Hayden calls them) that can be practiced. It is strongly recommended that you choose no more than 3 for any iteration of the program. I've chosen:

Description of Services
Target Market Definition
10 Second Introduction

(Note: If you 'complete' your program early you can do more, but Hayden advises choosing no more than 3 ingredients up front)

And now, having reached this point I can see clearly why "!coach" got me to look at this program. Here, in a nutshell, is the focus I have lacked. When I have these three things I shall, at last, know:

What I am doing

&

Who I am doing it for

Then I can actually go out and start doing it.

It's going to be an interesting 28 days!

Nonaka's knowledge transfer patterns

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 20:42:41 +0100

Nonaka and technology. Last week, I ended a blog entry with the question, "Do current collaboration tools effectively facilitate Nonaka's four patterns of knowledge creation?" [Kumquat's Musings]

» Unfortunately I haven't found a reference to the Nonaka paper on-line. Nevertheless Andy's summary is interesting. Nonaka, he say's, identifies four interaction patterns that describe how knowledge is created/transferred in a company.

Tacit - Tacit (knowledge transfer by socialization)
Explicit - Explicit (formal and systematic, e.g. RTFM)
Tacit - Explicit (someone documenting their knowledge, e.g. a weblog posting)
Explicit - Tacit (as people read formal documentation it becomes, over time, part of their greater understanding)

Since tacit knowledge is, by and large, hardest to come by that makes capturing it the more interesting problem.

The question in my mind is:

How important do most companies think it is to capture tacit knowledge?

It seems to me that it is only those organizations that see themselves as learning organizations are interested in this sort of stuff and willing to invest time and money in it. I need to find people who see the capture & transfer of knowledge as bottom-line activities.

I haven't come across too many organisations like that. Oh well, networking is a major part of my Get Clients Now! program for the coming month. If there out there I'm going to try and find them.

[The Marwick article referred to in the posting looks very interesting]

First Ryze London mixer

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:25:50 +0000

I went to the first Ryze london mixer event at Bed on Smithfields last night and I must say I had a very good time. At least that's what my sore head and hoarse voice would seem to indicate.

It being my first networking event I was unsure what to expect and somewhat nervous. This wasn't helped by my being greeted by a huge throng of people packed into a downstairs bar. It sure was cozy. In the end that turned out to be good. Lots of friendly people packed together we all seemed to get along and talk to each other.

I met everyone from Jazz trumpet players to VP's of strategic planning. I met quite a few people in the same boat as me (starting a company), lots of people looking for business and even a mixaholic who just loves networking events and meeting lots of different people.

I will definitely be back and this time I WILL HAVE BUSINESS CARDS!

People as web-services

Sun, 01 Dec 2002 13:02:45 +0000

RDF Matchmaking.

Speaking of bootstraps, Ian Davis has a FOAF (friend of a friend) vocabulary for bartering. [Scripting News]

A related meme was Connecting individual people is the killer app.

[Seb's Open Research]

What an interesting concept, turning people into Web Services.

See also the XpertWeb link & comments in Seb's piece.

Technorati as RSS

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 18:47:14 +0000

I first saw Technorati show up in my referers early last week, but I'm just now getting a chance to play with it. It will take me some time to tour my own cosmos!

My first question is can I get additions to my list of inbound blogs and inbound links as an RSS feed?...

[The Shifted Librarian]

Technorati does have watchlists and this was my first question too. So far the answer appears to be no, but even if it is I doubt that will last long. These guys are too smart not to spot the opportunities that RSS presents.

The value is in the links not the nodes

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 22:47:20 +0000

"The value is in the links, not the nodes."

Thomas said this to me yesterday. I believe it. By which I mean that there is something I intuitively respond to in the statement. Intellectually I am still grokking.

Sun, 15 Dec 2002 10:11:51 +0000

Breaking the powerlaw:

1 Don't rank all blogs on the same index. This will at least allow more clusters to occur which is a good thing and, if this process were repeatable, could lead to a wider network.

2 Restrict networking, i.e. only allow 100-active links. This will then require you to network via the FOAF metaphor and choose your friends wisely.

Bad label type blues

Sat, 27 May 2006 22:10:27 +0100

For a few days now I've been having an irritating problem with the Mac. It manifests itself in pages not loading properly in the browser. For example I'll be happily browsing eBay and then, all of a sudden, when I follow a link the page won't load with a message like:

Safari can't open the page “http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/blah"
because it can’t find the server “cgi.ebay.co.uk”.

Can't find cgi.ebay.co.uk? What's up with that? A few retries will get the same response and then, mysteriously, a few seconds to a few minutes later everything will be fine, until the next time.

Then again I seem to see the problem quite a lot when using GMail. During one episode I tried using nslookup to confirm the problem and it revealed something quote odd:

> mail.google.com
;; Got bad packet: bad label type
49 bytes
33 62 80 80 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 00 48 0e cd 13 
6c 06 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 03 63 6f 6d 00 00 01 00 
01 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 04 11 fe 00 5b c0 
10

I've never seen a bad label type error before. Is this a DNS error? Or something to do with my ADSL modem perhaps (an old WebRamp 600i) which is acting as local DNS proxy?

As you can see, a few seconds (to a few minutes) later all is well again:

> mail.google.com
Server:         192.168.1.1
Address:        192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
mail.google.com canonical name = googlemail.l.google.com.
Name:   googlemail.l.google.com
Address: 72.14.205.83
Name:   googlemail.l.google.com
Address: 72.14.205.19

I seem to see this error only on popular sites like Google/GMail, Amazon, and eBay. But it may be that the problem is intermittent and, since I use those sites a lot, I just haven't noticed it for another site yet.

It's got me baffled and you'll notice that a Google search (when it works) for that bad label type error message doesn't seem to turn up anything relevant. This of course means that probably noboy reading this will have any clue what the problem is...

But if anyone can offer me some advice on this I'd appreciate it. It's not a devastating problem but it is becoming consistently irritating now.

I wonder if it may be related to an occasional problem I've had with lookupd since about 10.4.4 where, every now and again, it will spike up to ~100% CPU utilization and then sit there. Sometimes logging out fixing it, sometimes it doesn't.

I'd really like to get these two ironed out.