BloggerCon Report – Blogging for Business
Among the many reasons to blog, one of the greatest is to
expand one's reputation and, unless you're Mother Teresa, a prime reason
for improving your reputation–your personal brand–is to get more
business. Any prominent blogger is implicitly available to speak or consult
on the
areas she discusses on her blog.
This motivation deserves more play than it's getting.
In commerce we discover how to value each other in the way that matters
most: exchanging the fruits of our labor for someone else's. Can there be
any greater way to honor another?
We blog not just to connect more but to be worth more
and to earn more.
What if there were a sophisticated form of trackback on
our blog to
aggregate the details
of our offline transactions? This would extend our blog's utility by presenting
our real-world activities objectively so our trust of each other might extend
beyond how we speak of ourselves. It would
also
capture
how others speak of us, and explicitly how they rate us as they pay us.
Peer-to-peer like the Blogosphere
An Xpertweb page can act as a supplement to a web log tracking
your words and another's words when you do a transaction together. It's
a highly structured trackback that records your effects
on others.
Every time a buyer submits an order, any data saved on the seller's site
is duplicated on the buyer's site, by the buyer's trusted script, in the form
of an order confirmation
page. Then, as the transaction progresses, the mirrored data store is enriched,
culminating with each party's grade and comment, which is the point of the
whole system.
All this data replicates to other sites in the same way that
the worthwhile things we say are quoted on other blogs. The blogosphere's
triangulation
of our posts is a part of its robustness and its reliability–we simply
can't reverse course too often or our personal brand is diluted. Xpertweb similarly
captures and publishes our quality ratings. The hardest part of the system
has been to make it as peer-to-peer as the blogosphere. It would have been
more straightforward to design it with a centralized data store. But then
it would have been too easy to succumb to temptations to charge for the service.
Better it should be a protocol rather than a service.
In the agora, everyone can watch each other shopping. The citizens
are on display like the melons.
BloggerCon Xpertweb Demo
Roland Tanglao and I will be attending
Dave Winer's BloggerCon, and will be demonstrating the Xpertweb tools at the Hotel@MIT.
If you'd like to have a look, please contact me through the little envelope
icon, or contact Roland directly.
11:14:22 AM 
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