Network Solutions – Small business conversations and working together for small business success

A Few Thoughts on E-Mail. Regards, Charcoal Grill

Scenes from my spam folder: I’m not sure what’s going on in Global E-Mail Spam HQ these days. (In my imagination, Global E-Mail Spam HQ is located under an extinct volcano somewhere; it’s where the world’s spam masterminds decide it’s time to cease the “clean the inside of your windshield” campaign and spin-up the global [...]

Social Media Policies: Trick or Treat?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend Tuesday’s Grow Smart Biz Conference, but by all accounts (and there are a lot of them) and my own dipping in and out of the live stream, it was a great success, so congratulations to the entire team and all the particpants and attendees.
Since I couldn’t monitor the entire [...]

Known Unknowns: Location, Location, Location

This past weekend, I was suckered by some friends into joining an impromptu bar crawl (hey, twist my arm, ow, okay) in Ye Olde Reston Towne Centre (it’s an upscale-ish, mixed use “don’t-call-it-a-mall” in the outer DC suburbs of northern Virginia).
Coincidentally, I’ve been getting more active trying out Foursquare, a location-based mobile social network — [...]

Everything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You

It should hardly need repeating at this point: When you post stuff to the Internet, people will see it, and quite possibly use it in ways that you don’t intend. And yet, either people keep finding new ways to make the same mistakes, or other people keep finding ways to use that information.
Two recent cases [...]

Book Shame, Information Hoarding, and Aspirational PDFs

Way back in January, I wrote about how small businesses (and people, too, of course), can share their expertise through social linksharing — that is, instead of bookmarking things in your browser where only you can get to them, publishing them to social linksharing / social bookmarking sites (or any other sites that can be [...]

Event Review: CongressCamp

While much of the attention of the day was focused on tea party protests, I was in DC on Saturday for a different purpose: The CongressCamp unconference, which looked at a specific subset of the Government 2.0 question: How to use social media and online community tools to encourage and support citizen engagement with Congress.

Obligatory [...]

Marketers Killed the Internet as a Medium for Introverts

Recently, I’ve seen Myers-Briggs Personality Type badges floating around on Facebook and other social Web sites. I haven’t retaken the test in a long time, but I used to be an INTJ (basically, an introvert), and I have no reason to think that’s changed in any meaningful way.
It did, however, get me thinking about how [...]

Idealized Avatars, Personas, and Perfect Robot Bodies

I thought I was going to be all clever by talking about a trio of Hollywood movies (out now or soon) that share a common theme of people controlling proxies to interact with the world, then using that as a springboard into a metaphorical look at how we use our online presences… but then Popular [...]

Deaugmenting Reality: When Less Is More

Following up on my entry about augmented reality, I did a little more reading and found the concept that deftly summarized what I’d been clumsily chasing: the Virtual Continuum, where you have the completely real on one end of the spectrum, the completely virtual on the other, and in the middle, a Mixed Reality, with [...]

Not an Event Review: Tap the Collective, Plus Social Intelligence Gathering

Since I arrived at the Tap the Collective discussion (on the application and implementation of collective intelligence) horribly, horribly late, this isn’t an event review, other than to show off a photo of the panelists, link to the Twitter discussions, point to a blog recap, and note that the full video of the event should [...]