Yesterday, I was an attendee at the 2008 Chicago TECHCocktail Conference. It was an amazing conference with some amazing speakers (one of which, Gary Vaynerchuk, will be making a guest post soon). But I’m not here to talk about that.

I’m here to talk about business cards.

Most business cards are dull and lack any reason to notice. Most are discarded without thought. You’re at a conference to network. Hell, everywhere is a chance to network. How do you make sure someone remembers you or takes even an extra second to look at your business card?

There are three ways:

• 1) Make beautiful and memorable designs
• 2) Make your card interactive
• 2) Make your card personalized

For #1, I suggest visiting Creative Bits, which has an image library of some amazing card designs. I attached one of my favorites to the right: a lawn company that actually gives away seeds in their cards. I’d always remember a card like that, or at least give it a second glance.

For #2 and #3, I’m going to use my current cards as an example. I decided to individualize my cards. I did this by placing a fortune on every card.

The front tells you to do something. That’s the interactive part. I wrote a different fortune on the back of every single card. That’s the personalized part.

Take a look:

I’m sure I’ll be updating these cards soon with better designs, but the interactivity and personalization will remain. I got great reactions from the cards.

One last thing, I never said “here’s my card.” I always said, “Here’s a Fortune Cookie” Always caught them off guard and piqued interest.

Little things add up.

- Ben

According to Wikipedia, a bliki is a combination of the features of a wiki and a blog (duh. Oh, more names for it from Wikipedia: wikiLog, wog, wikiWeblog, wikiblog, bloki). It posts like a blog, but all of the articles are editable.

So why do I care about this? Because I’m looking for something to help me combine wiki functionality into this website. But not in the way I just described to you above.

I’m interested in creating a system where the top portion of a page or post is like a normal blog article, but right under it is a “wiki” section which anybody can edit. So the top portion is what I or guest writers post, and then the section just below that is editable by anyone and uses Wikipedia/Mediawiki syntax. This section would be above the comments.

My rationale? Well, I’m not about to give all of that away, but let’s say that I think having a section where the collaborative knowledge of the readers and users of different blogs to create succinct additions to article could be very useful in a variety of ways.

Anyone know of anything similar to this, preferably in Wordpress plugin form? Or is anyone interested in working with me to build it if it doesn’t exist?

Sometime in early June, Facebook will roll out its newly redesigned profiles. The clutter of 3rd party Facebook applications and the risk of becoming as messy as MySpace, among a myriad of other reasons, sparked the change. A lot is coming with the new profiles, so I’m here to enlighten you with 10 things that you should know about the new Facebook profile redesign.

So here are 9 things you should know about the new Facebook Profile Redesign:

1) Mini Feed: Now Front and Center

When you click on a friend, the first thing that appears isn’t their contact or personal information, but their mini-feed. The change is meant to make it easier for friends to see the updates, new applications, and changes they make in a more dynamic and prominent way. From Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook VP of Product Marketing:

“We see this big trend. People are publishing feeds all the time, and the point is, people are increasingly telling a narrative, and we want to make that easier for our users to do. And we want people to consume that narrative more easily.”

Overall, Facebook’s new design, as you will see, encourages people to tinker and change their profiles more and thus add more items to their news and mini feeds. So expect much more news feed in your life.

2) Tabs – The Reorganized Facebook Profile

Information is divided into tabs now, rather than the boxes of old. Tabbing has become the standard of web browsers and thus tabs are intuitive for most users. It also divides information into more manageable pieces. I’m very pleased with the tab organization: it’s clean and uncluttered now.

The tabs are as follows:

• Feed: This is your starting point on any profile, and it shows the individual’s mini-feed, fare more than just the most recent 10: the mini-feed goes back several days.
• Info: Your personal information, interests, work experience, etc. is placed into this section of the profile. It’s interesting that Facebook has not chosen to make this the default tab when visiting profiles.
• Wall: Your wall is bigger, better, and more prominent.
• Photos: Photos and your albums get prime placement. Read about it in item #3
• Boxes: All of your Facebook applications are placed here in order to avoid the clutter. It’s divided into a narrow and wide column, just like the current Facebook profiles (although the narrow column has flipped to the left-hand side now).

3) Photos are getting their own tab. Here’s why:

(more…)

Normally I talk about tech and entrepreneurial trends, but I couldn’t resist talking about this Scientific American story when it popped up on my Google Reader. Apparently, blogging provides significant physical and psychological benefits derived from the creative and expressive writing. This is even more interesting when you consider a New York Times article last month that talked about the high stress and unhealthy habits of some bloggers.

From the article’s opening paragraph:

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery.

Hell, I’ll keep blogging if it’s helping my health that much. But really, is this all that surprising? Doing something you love, getting your ideas off of your chest, using your creativity: they all are healthy habits that make for happier people. But unlike general creative writing, there is one added benefit of blogging:

Unlike a bedside journal, blogging offers the added benefit of receptive readers in similar situations, Morgan explains: “Individuals are connecting to one another and witnessing each other’s expressions—the basis for forming a community.”

The backbone of blogging: the community. So keep blogging. Just don’t start taking up Michael Arrington’s sleeping habits.

There are very few entrepreneurial groups on Facebook that don’t offer something you can’t find on another website or are extensions of someone’s blogging. These three, however, peaked my interest because of the resources and discussions occurring in each of them and I highly encourage everyone to join them. Don’t forget to comment if you know of any other groups to add to this list!

• 1) Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs): This is the FIRST group you should join. Over 40,000 members collaborating on Entrepreneurship in the internet space. Officers of the group include Kevin Rose of Digg, blogger Michael Arrington, Slide and Paypal founder Max Levchin, and the list goes on. But it isn’t the people in it that makes this a useful group. It has links to early-stage funds and incubators, resources for new entrepreneurs, and discussions on Web 2.0 Entrepreneurship on the boards.



• 2) Join a Startup: Now THIS is an interesting way to find and join a start-up company. Postings are up-to-date and relevant, and you have the option to sift through all of the comments and thoughts on most of the companies. If you are seeking someone to join your team, this isn’t a bad place, either, with 5000+ members and growing. Just be respectful. I suggest posting a video explaining your opportunity and introducing your workplace and some of your team.



• 3) Young Entrepreneur’s Network: Argh, grammatical errors, but who cares! This group’s useful! it’s regularly updated and there’s a slew of young entrepreneurs and (hopeful) world changers to meet, connect with, and network. There’s also some interesting threads that will provoke some thought.

Welcome to Part 3 of my 4 part series on the next generation of social networks. I’ve been talking a lot about social networks in the last week, so why stop now?

• In Part 1, I talked about the definition of a Web 3.0 Social Network and how it could be useful to us.
• In Part 2, I outlined the key components of social networks and explained the potential of that information.

So now let’s get to the fun stuff. What should the next generation of social networks include, and how should they work in our lives? I can only give you an overview of my thoughts on what the next social network should include because, well, it could take me days to write down all the features I’d personally want, and I’m not about to give away all of my ideas and secrets.

Overarching Design of a Web 3.0 Social Network

Remember, the goal of a Web 3.0 social network is to help solve a greater range and depth of world issues, often by analyzing the data at its disposal and making good use of synergies with other services and products.

So what are the key components of the Web 3.0 social network design?

• Utilizable for both business and personal use: The next great social network cannot only cater to one or the other: it must have the ability to be used for both. LinkedIn is business; Myspace is personal. Facebook is the closest we have to both, but it still falls into the personal side and it’s not simple to divide your personal contacts from your business contacts. There has to be easier division of use in this area.
• Integration with search: I agree with Robert Scoble that integration with search could be a killer application. I do think that a combination of search and social network can improve search relevancy. Facebook search is an abomination, I’m sorry to say. Searching people, fine. Searching for applications, groups, people with specific interests? Eh, not so much. Better search = more efficient use and less frustration.
• Integration with time and task management systems: Some people use the events they’re invited to on Facebook as their own calendar of events. Integration of these with an actual calendar system so we can better manage our lives is going to more and more prominent. If Facebook automatically filled in my RemembertheMilk task list with events from Facebook, or if it had its own advanced calendar and task management system, you’d see me using Facebook even more.
• Data Portability: It must be compatible with services like Google Connect or OpenID. Linking my friend list from LinkedIn or Facebook to Digg so I can find out which of my friends are Diggers is a far better method than going through your email. This also allows us to link data to academia for research purposes.



• Mobility and GPS Location: What do I mean? I mean that your phone is integral to the network. I mean that you can know whether or not any of your friends are in the city you’re visiting by simply opening up the social network. I mean the ability to get some data on the client you’re about to meet while on the train. ReadWriteWeb links us to four services to watch. Expect one of these services to skyrocket into prominence, and expect more to be acquired and integrated with existing social networks.
• Recommendations: The Web 3.0 social network has to be able to extrapolate from our patterns and likes/dislikes data that will help us manage our lives. That means ads that say this movie is coming out (i.e. it knows you’re a sci-fi fan) or knowing that you HATE religious events (it’ll give you the option to ignore all of them).

Clearly I only gave you a few, but the thread in all of these is data integration and data portability. Integrating our data with other services or creating those services within the social network interface should, and probably are, going to be features of the next generation of social network.

In the last part of this series, I’m going to do my favorite thing: try to predict the future.

Coming in Part 4: My predictions about what will happen in the world of social networking.

Tech rumors are always fun to follow. Today’s tech rumor is that Microsoft will buy Yahoo!’s search business and ALL of Facebook. And as you may have guessed, there has been nonstop chatter on the subject.

• Robert Scoble really got the ball rolling when he started theorizing on the synergies of such a deal, primarily that Facebook’s information would help lead to more relevant searches. Also, Google would have no access to all of this information, putting Microsoft at the advantage.
• A lot of people think Scoble’s theory is a bit out of whack. Nick O’Neil of the social times and Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch are critical of Scoble. Schonfeld makes solid arguments as to why Scoble’s theory could be done without buying a piece of Yahoo! or Facebook. But I think Erick’s missing some of the other synergies of Micro-hoo-book!, such as the ability to better target advertising on Facebook (and thus up revenue) with integrated search data.
• ReadWriteWeb frames the showdown: Microsoft/Facebook (plus a hearty side of Yahoo!) vs. Google. Or, in my opinion, Microsoft + shiny new weapons vs. Google

Why Micro-hoo-book! has potential

Short version: Synergies

Long version:

• Better search: Searches can become even more relevant as social data helps target our results towards our likes and preferences
• Better advertising: With Google’s Adsense, you visit a website and the content of that page creates the relevant advertising. Now imagine Microsoft advertising on a site (or in its search results) with Facebook’s data on you. Facebook weeds out dislikes and will make the advertising more relevant by catering to your routines and your preferences.
• Better advertising on Facebook: Search data from previous searches on Microsoft improve the relevancy of ads on Facebook. Plus smarter ads that work on better algorithms
• Facebook integration with other Microsoft services: Better email, search the web from Facebook, IE web browsing integration with Facebook, etc.
• New customer segment from Yahoo!: Increases Microsoft’s market share, can integrate Facebook features with Yahoo! search as well

Why Micro-hoo-book! seems unlikely to occur

Short version: Facebook

Long version: I seriously just don’t see Zuckerberg and the Facebook team selling Facebook just yet. I also don’t see them selling the rights to one of the key components, their data, over to Microsoft without a hefty price or something substantial just yet. Yahoo! will probably sell the search business and part of its brand. Microsoft, though it won’t gain any great tech this way, it will gain brand and new customers. Facebook, though, is still growing, they still have aspirations of an IPO, they still want to be independent. Unless Facebook believes its business is hitting a ceiling or going south, I just don’t think Facebook will (or should) sell.

Why Micro-hoo-book! reeks of disaster

Short Version: A slow and uninnovative behemoth that closes off its data and creates an odd competition between Microsoft and Google that will distract both companies from making new innovations and serving customers.

Long Version: See the short version. This week’s going to be interesting.

- Ben