January 9, 2008 at 3:58 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Little Variety
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January 10, 2008 at 2:18 am
Amazing how often people come up with new paradigms based on theory, and then tout them without testing the theory against reality. "Our software's great. It lets you get all your info in one place. Why wouldn't someone want that?" OK, have you actually tested whether people like this consolidation in practice?
Strangely enough, given the example in the article, I am a mountain biker, and used to subscribe to a UK mountain biking forum. The forum was affilliated to a magazine, and that magazine had several sister publications dealing with various different flavours of cycling (road cycling and various different mountain biking disciplines), each with their own forum. The publishers decided to consolidate all the forums and all the web sites into one large online mountain biking resource, and the plan sounded great - get all your information in one place. Unfortunately, within a couple of weeks of consolidation, about half the forum members (and generally the more active half at that) had left and set up their own independent forums, leaving the large centralised online resource as a bit of a ghost town.
The point? No matter how self-evident a theory sounds, test it before accepting its validity. Pringo don't seem to have done so, so they're building a business on a guess. I hope for their sake that their guess is right, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Semper in excretia, sumus solum profundum variat
January 10, 2008 at 2:18 am
Steve your an idealist, and not towing the corporate line!:D
--Shaun
Hiding under a desk from SSIS Implemenation Work :crazy:
January 10, 2008 at 2:35 am
Hey
Good points. I am from South Africa and this is a common occurrence in the market here. The points stated would be the ideal, but that would never be achieved as there is always someone who wants in on the pie.
January 10, 2008 at 3:22 am
I guess that's precisely why SSC and other SQL Server sites link to each other's articles 🙂 I've been learning most of my MDX (amazing how similar and then ridiculously different it is from SQL) from databaseJournal because I found a series of articles originally linked to there from this very site. Diversity's a good thing.
And, whilst I'm not on any social networking site, if I was (I'm too busy as it is!) then I wouldn't want business associates seeing what I did on the weekend or for new years eve. The social network is for exactly that, socialising, not really for keeping in touch with customers.
January 10, 2008 at 6:00 am
Reading this made me think of my red-neck, hillbilly inbred cousin who said, and I quote, "If they don't have it at Wal Mart, we just don't buy it."
So, assuming you're not barefoot, toothless and living in the Ozarks, of course you need more than one source for material and information. However, you can come to rely on one source more than others. A certain web site where I spend time comes to mind...
----------------------------------------------------The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood... Theodore RooseveltThe Scary DBAAuthor of: SQL Server 2017 Query Performance Tuning, 5th Edition and SQL Server Execution Plans, 3rd EditionProduct Evangelist for Red Gate Software
January 10, 2008 at 6:12 am
I'm kind of clumsy, hard to walk a straight line. Occassionally gets me into trouble on Friday nights...
We definitely try to be THE SQL Server site you go to first for information, but I know we're not the only one. And I don't have to put Database Journal or any other site out of business to succeed. We can all succeed.
I almost think the "if it's not at Wal-Mart.." is the worst thing about Wal-Mart.
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January 10, 2008 at 6:29 am
I think that there are several issues that aren't well thought out about this type of consolidation.
The biggest, I think, is scale. I bike a bit, but I'm not a fanatic about it. I might be interested in bike tour/events in my local region, but I certainly don't care about events that are in a different state. Someone who is more involved in bike touring or racing might have an entirely different focus on what they want to know. If they market to me, they are going to lose the fanatic and if they market to him, they are going to lose me.
--
JimFive
January 10, 2008 at 7:04 am
"everything in one place" really goes AGAINST what people are looking for. For example, because I work mainly in MS SQL, I am here on a site that does not include much Oracle, Mysql or DB2.
Whether personal or business, different sites have different emphasis and different slants. This provides much more choice to me than a site that tries to be all things to everyone.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
January 10, 2008 at 7:19 am
:D...the sum of the parts is greater than the whole....:D
--Shaun
Fix the problem not the users er blame!
Hiding under a desk from SSIS Implemenation Work :crazy:
January 10, 2008 at 7:20 am
I think the one thing social networking allows you to do well is delegate the creation of security to users. You talk to a user about file permissions, folder permissions and user groups and their eyes glaze over, and you can't delegate permissions to them anyway without an awful lot of hard work. I've implemented a tool for document management over an intranet but the security is a tedious chore, you have to go into each document and select a number of parameters and say whether someone is an editor or an author or a reader etc etc.
I've only used facebook, so I don't know how the others work, but what it gives you is excellent access control functionality cunningly disguised as a completely understandable relationship to other people. In a corporate environment giving the users the ability to create groups, control who accesses those groups, decide who gets to do what within the group, then just dump documents into them is brilliant. You deal with your relationship with other people and departments first off and then you create as much content as you like and dump it to various places depending on it's relevance.
Leave all documents searchable - if someone wants access they have to ask a group admin, the group admin approves or disapproves. Add access history, version control and you've got a full document control system with self generating content and the only problem for the IT department is backup and storage, and maybe RSS feeds.
As to the point about a "one stop shop", well I think this Pringo guy has missed the main selling point of social networking in a corporate environment, what's he wittering on about? For what it's worth I believe everything I see on Fox News and never listen to the lies of the others.
Oh, and as all hardened IT pros know only too well, you never buy anything until it's at version 3.0, so I'm leaving Web 2.0 to the academics and the bubble blowers.
January 10, 2008 at 8:07 am
Shaun McGuile (1/10/2008)
:D...the sum of the parts is greater than the whole....:D--Shaun
Fix the problem not the users er blame!
.... or, perhaps, "When at the bottom of a whole, stop digging" 😉
Semper in excretia, sumus solum profundum variat
January 10, 2008 at 8:13 am
When AOL was new I had friends who thought all the internet they needed to see was on the AOL links. That was certainly a myopic view and kept them from so much of what was online. More sires lead to more viewpoints and hopefully more learning.
January 10, 2008 at 10:36 am
I believe that before the current rage of social networking and even Wal-Mart, the "one source of information" concept was tried. It was even before the Internet as we know it.
The initials of the project are most familiar: USSR
It failed too.
January 10, 2008 at 6:20 pm
The Wal-Mart model makes a lot more sense in the physical world than on the Internet. On the Internet, it is much, much easier (and less costly both in terms of time and money) to get to another site for information ("Click") than it is in the physical world to drive to another store, find your physical shopping cart, find another cart with wheels that don't clickety-clack at 50 decibels, find your items, go wait in another slow-moving checkout line, get in the car again, use more ga$, etc.
Click - Click - Click. Not a big deal. And I get with it the variety of opinion, information, and focus provided by each site.
The other major difference is the type of "products" you are talking about. With physical products the Wal-Mart model has its advantages of scale and lower prices. With information as your "product" it is not necessarily true that increased scale = better information. In many cases, the exact opposite would be true.
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