It's one of 70 million of them. I chose Blogger for no other reason than I've heard of it, and it's free. Sorry TypePad. In the realm of social software (blogs, wikis, whatever you call sites like yedda) there are a lot of options, and I frankly do not have the time right now to research and compare them. Blogger/Blogspot seems to work for Mark Crofton at The Village View, Frank Scavo at The Enteprirse System Spectator, and other blogs which I frequently read, so I imagine it will work for me.
Mid post I took a peek at a recent entry on another of my favorite blogs, Procurement Central, and I see that Wordpress is also free.
Ok. Just shut up already. This is less about the tool and more about sharing what's in my head, should someone stumble across it and find it interesting.
Three Decades of Software Vendor Selection
3 months ago
Congratulations on the new blog :)
ReplyDeleteThat is a good question indeed... what do you call sites like Yedda?
Q&A? Social knowledge exchange? Or can we come up with some sort of shorter name that captures the spirit of the service? Qwiki? :)
I'm not sure how to refer to them, having only recetnly found them. I've been to Yedda a few times I like the concept.
ReplyDeleteA quick backgrounder since I have no profile set up yet...I'm currently self employed (for 10 months), but spent the prior 8 years working in competitve intelligence for the largest software company on the planet.
We sold our software via an indirect channel of resellers. Knowledge on competition is everywhere, and the toughest nut to crack was figering out how to capture and leverage the collective intelligence of the group.
A wiki is a powerful tool, but in some situations is almost too free form. Salespeople are mentally on to the next deal before they've even closed the current one. They live in thier inbox. The idea of having to remember to go to a web site, and looking at a blank wiki page (where they are simlply asked to "tell us what you know") is not the best solution. These guys need things pushed to their inboxes, where they live, and need a framework for sharing knowledge so it can be shared in bits and pieces as their schedule allows. It looks to me like Yedda is efforting to deal with the latter issue, but doesn't deal with the former. But please improve my knowledge of your offering if I am missing things, which I suspect I am.
Last thought...my concern with a tool like Yedda, as useful as it appears to be, is that I want a solution like this to lead to the creation of a searchable knowlede base, probably in wiki format. How do you bridge that gap without requiring the daily efforts of an "administrator" of the community?
Thanks for the intro, nice meeting you!
ReplyDeleteActually Yedda also deals with the "pushed to their inbox" issue as well. Once you register to Yedda, you can choose your favorite notification method. If you'd like, you'll receive notifications on answers to your questions, or on questions you're interested in, or on questions that you might want to answer, directly to your inbox. Is this the type of solution you were referring to?
The content created on Yedda is fully searchable using your favorite search engine, so this addresses your next point.
And last, Yedda can automatically create a "FAQ" for any topic, by aggregating the list of questions on this topic, and listing them according to their perceived value. So the more people find a certain answer valuable, and the more it is relevant to the topic, the higher it would be on the list. This reduces the administration effort associated with collecting the best content and surfacing it.
Note that finding the Q&As relevant to a specific topic is done in an associative manner, using our patented semantic search. This means that, for example, using "Scuba Diving" as the topic would also find Q&As tagged with "snorkeling" etc.