Monday, February 27, 2006 5:42 PM
bradley
Be careful what you ask for - Part Two:
Subtitled.... "Does Susan blog too much?"
Earlier today I talked about the member of my SBS Partner group who said he was getting near information overload from all the various vendors and sources of Small Business Information. My earlier post was asking us to brainstorm about the ways to make the various "official" web sites better.
This post is about “What if you were in charge of the Universe” and could change anything you wanted to on the community listserves and newsgroups and blogs and web sites and podcasts and what not…..
It’s come up before that someone has asked us a few years ago that wouldn’t it be grand if we in the community could all come together and coordinate and work on the ultimate perfect SBS site/web/wiki/thingamabob in the world. There’s one problem. Because we all come from various places all over the world, and for most (if not all) of us, the things we work on are a labor of love and volunteerism so you’d better make it in a venue that we find “entertaining” while we volunteer on it, it’s hard to get coordination from a bunch of volunteers. Add to that that most of us are control freaks, or that getting a collaborative site would probably mean that someone would have to sit down and understand licensing...and well.... this is why we sort of have all these places to go to for information.
So how do you harness this spirit to be able to make it easier for folks to find things with ensuring that the person in the community likes to do it and gets an “attaboy” for doing it? Look at all the volunteer energy that folks give around here.
It’s not easy is it?
I call SBSers “cockroaches”. We’re little, small, indestructible… and we’re EVERYWHERE. It seems like everytime I turn around there’s someone in some venue asking a question about SBS. And sometimes I know it's hard to be aware of all of the venues and resources and web sites and links and.... just everything we've got around here.
So let me ask this again…. So how do we as a community do better in helping you, the Var/Vap not get overloaded with information? I was reading the book by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble and one of the things they said was to blog consistently. Once a week, Once a month, Once a day. But be consistent.
The other day Jeff Middleton pointed out to me that I was about a three times a day blogger. And I think he’s right. A break at lunch. And two at night before going to bed for relaxation. But am I blogging too much? Should this blog be more on just techy geeky stuff or do you mind the occasional introspective post… the every now and then (okay so it’s probably a bit more often than every now and then) rant post?
What about our other communities? Are the listserves getting too much into theory? I think we’re not as patient in the listserves as we used to be….and I think we’re getting too much into theories and arguments and maybe a lot of folks are tuning out? What do you think?
Grey Lancaster used to say "kill folks with kindness" and "be patient with newbies". Now that "small business is big business" are we as patient with the newbies? Should we be? Or should we say "You know, if you are serious about small business, show it by buying a book, reading, and then come back." Or should we follow Grey's leadership and welcome folks into SBSland and help them learn and grow in this profession? Because all of us started just like that, with a kind word from Grey. Including me. When I was cleaning out my SBS 2000 notes and paperwork I found a bunch of newsgroup posts that Grey had done in the newsgroup that I had saved.
So how would you make the community listserves better?
How about the podcasts? What topics aren't being covered that you'd like to see (not that I don't think Vlad and Chris and Suzanne and the SBSPodcast gang aren't picking fabulous topics...but since we're brainstorming...let's have some fun and see what we can come up with)
What about SBS Partner groups? I know that SMBTN.org is doing mini conferences and emphasizing 'business' talks as well as tech ones.
Blogs? Websites?
What other community resources could be made better and how?
Now I'm not promising that I can keep myself to one post a day...but let's just brainstorm on some ideas. How can we make the community resources better than they are now?
So if you were in charge of the universe...what would you do?
Filed under: Rants
![[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.]](http://www.sbslinks.com/images/headertop.png "There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not!")