Feel free to connect to me through Linked In, if you are interested in my professional wanderings as that tracks some.

Post grad school in English at UBC, I spent a number of years in the North Okanagan where my son was born, writing mostly and building homes and musical instruments for a living. I've thought about documenting those incredible times…sometimes maybe.

Re: business model. I'll be posting soon on the process of 'Discovery' not just for marketing but also for business model development. I'm a firm believer that the way to a model is to focus on the value of an interaction first and a model with a transaction will follow. Twitter found the former; the latter is coming.

Grab an email subscription to the blog and you'll get a sense of the what I think when that post comes out.

I touched on some of these aspects in a series of comments I made to an article in The Economist. Please take a look if you'd like:

http://www.economist.com/node/15351002/comments

It's so busy down in the Vancouver area now, I prefer to just avoid the place. The benefit of the internet is I can just go online and visit without spending all of the fuel to get there. We use Xplornet satellite for our connection for the past 4 1/2 years since moving from Lillooet, that had DSL. This was our summer place until we moved in '05. Our girls have enjoyed vacationing and living here, but the distance to town can be challenging.

I had this vision once that I could create an online town, where everyone had a storefront. You could choose to go in and see what was available, chat with the clerks, chat with other customers, make purchases and carry on going through town. I don't think that we're quite to that point yet but maybe in the future!

Feel free to connect to me through Linked In, if you are interested in my professional wanderings as that tracks some.

Post grad school in English at UBC, I spent a number of years in the North Okanagan where my son was born, writing mostly and building homes and musical instruments for a living. I've thought about documenting those incredible times…sometimes maybe.

Re: business model. I'll be posting soon on the process of 'Discovery' not just for marketing but also for business model development. I'm a firm believer that the way to a model is to focus on the value of an interaction first and a model with a transaction will follow. Twitter found the former; the latter is coming.

Grab an email subscription to the blog and you'll get a sense of the what I think when that post comes out.

I touched on some of these aspects in a series of comments I made to an article in The Economist. Please take a look if you'd like:

http://www.economist.com/node/15351002/comments

It's so busy down in the Vancouver area now, I prefer to just avoid the place. The benefit of the internet is I can just go online and visit without spending all of the fuel to get there. We use Xplornet satellite for our connection for the past 4 1/2 years since moving from Lillooet, that had DSL. This was our summer place until we moved in '05. Our girls have enjoyed vacationing and living here, but the distance to town can be challenging.

I had this vision once that I could create an online town, where everyone had a storefront. You could choose to go in and see what was available, chat with the clerks, chat with other customers, make purchases and carry on going through town. I don't think that we're quite to that point yet but maybe in the future!

Check out another post on measuring social media performance as I dug into this in some depth…http://arnoldwaldstein.com/2010/01/understanding-social-performance/. It is not a simple matter.

BTW–followed your link-100 Mile House! Long time ago, I lived in a bunch of spots in the N. Okanagan–Lumby and Grindrod and Mara to name three obscure ones. I hold a very fond spot for my time there.

To add to your comments about the authentication problem, another benefit is that no matter where I am, and what computer I am on, it's always me! When I go from home to work to my wife's business computer, it doesn't matter what my IP address is or if I have up-to-date cookies. Although individual authentication is valuable, they shouldn't forget to use IP addresses as well. For instance, the business traveller could be on the road for a couple of weeks and the IP address could be tracked to provide localized advertising. If social media does not stay on top of trends and looking for new models, they will slowly die away. All you have to do is look at Yahoo!/Google, MySpace/FaceBook etc, to see that if someone becomes too complacent, they WILL get left behind!