I was chatting to a friend who is CEO of a online vertical content company, and he told me about a recent domain name purchase his company had made - quite an important one for an area they’re moving into. He told me that they’d been after the asset for two years, and for the last two years that he’d called the owner of the domain (an individual) once a week every week to see if he was ready to sell, chatting about price etc. He was unsure whether he wanted to sell it, or do something with it… but the persistence paid off as he called back and agreed to sell it.

The point here is never to give up; a point also made by Joe Kraus in the interview with him concerning the Excite-Netscape deal in Founders At Work. The truth is that most of us give up when we meet (sometimes even only minor) resistance. To be able to persist when you know there is a long-term value there or even just have a hunch that there is, and to focus your energy and resources even if they are only a small amount applied regularly… that’s a special discipline. It applies as much to relationships as anything else - many of the most valuable business relationships are ones that have been nurtured for years. Something that I’m thinking about now is fighting patterns, and one of the most basic human patterns is to give up (unfortunately). Don’t give up.

I’ve been working hard on starting a new company. It’s still under the radar and it’s not a side project, but a fully-fledged Internet application. I will start to share details towards the end of the year with select individuals (you know who you are!). In the meantime, stay in touch especially if you are doing cool stuff in the online advertising industry because there are going to be plenty of opportunities to work together with what I’m going to be doing.

The web as seen through the blog readers lense is becoming more richly textured and is starting to show us that there is a true collective intelligence that will come forth out of the aggregate connections between elements. It’s pretty easy to observe in the world of blogging and social media: referencing, cross-linking, blogrolls, “digging” a post which then in turn gets commented upon, becomes more popular, myBlogLog and MySpace relationships between individuals who post messages and so on. What is fascinating to me is how still ‘node-centric’ we are about intelligence and meaning. It is going to take a long time for us to get out of this mindset. For example within LinkedIn, there is very little “meta information” about the links between one person and another except when they endorse one another. There’s only one level of “relationship” between two people when of course there can and should be several. BUT I am also skeptical of allowing people to simply classify the relationships themselves. There can and should be automatic classification based on behavioral data for example…

UPS has been making sure it can avoid left turns wherever possible, and “has technology in its systems that help map this out routes that minimize the number of left turns the driver has to make” [Multichannel Merchant].

It’s one of those things you probably wouldn’t think about at first, but once you do think about it, it makes perfect sense as a way to save time and gas - and technology is what makes it possible by automating the figuring out of when it pays to change routes and do the left-turn thing. There are probably quite a few “left-hand turns” in your company’s business processes. The key is to be able to find and measure them, and figure out how technology can help you automate alternatives. Sometimes it means really low-tech observation of what people are doing (I recall a study I did that had people report every 5 minutes on the task they were doing, and where we found out some surprising things about where they were spending a lot of their time and we could prioritize our internal development efforts to create tools to automate some of these time-intensive tasks).

So what it says to me is that technology is all fine, but in order to use it to improve productivity you have to start with the human element, closely observe, and have a bit of imagination about the kinds of way you can apply it to problems.

I like this idea and would highly recommend that people take up (former Jupiter analyst and research director) Mike May on his generous offer for March 30th.

I tried to check out MSN Spaces this morning, and found this:

The MSN Spaces network is being upgraded and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

Wow, eerily reminiscent of the first time I tried the “new” MSN Search. What’s up, guys?

I’ve never been completely satisfied with keeping a “to-do” list, either on paper or on the latest of a long-series of under-utilized PDAs (my current one actually I do use quite a lot, but more to listen to music and audiobooks than the core reminder/address functionality!). These types of explicit reminders I find to be far less effective than more implicit reminders. We’ve all experienced the power of the implicit reminder - often for example at the office it might be passing someone in the hall and then remembering to address a particular issue relating to that person or their team… An implicit reminder is one generated by the context of a particular interaction, whereas an explicit reminder is more likely a written list, a formal way of grabbing context and trying to preserve it across time. Memory practitioners will tell you one of the keys to remembering things is to make outrageous mind-pictures of things and associate real items with these pictures, e.g. seeing a big monster jumping in front of your kitchen door and eating the rubbish bin as a way to remind you to take out the garbage before you leave the house.

Of course we sometimes combine implicit and explicit reminders in our minds or in reality — but in the case of business, some desired versions of these would defy the conventions of the workplace. I’d love to put up post-it notes on the company’s office door to remind me to grab my coffee cup to take it home; or to paste that list of questions I’ve been meaning to ask John in engineering to the outside door of his office… but it would get way too confusing for everyone else I think. It’s just a matter of time before technology helps us out here. But in the meantime, we’ll have to focus on using our blunt explicit reminder tools and of course the hardest part, remember to check the reminders!

Mindjet gave me some of their mindmapping software to play with, and I really like it. I’ve been a long-time user of the Personal Brain software, which I’ve used for organizing data/notes from vendor briefings and company meetings for my own personal use. These mind maps (a la Tony Buzan) are perfect though for organizing information from/for meetings and discussion with others …