Andy's Biz Talk posts

When you can't read..

So I'm making another press of coffee as I hope that my words in the article I am working on decide to be read again.

When you find yourself re-reading a paragraph, or an entire document over and over again and it all begins to run together.. besides taking a break and walking away do you have any other tips for making sure things are as coherent as you hope they are?

Taking 5.. maybe 6.. maybe a little more.. ;-)

Requests and Future Thoughts

The more I use Biznik the more I appreciate it for the clean design that has been implemented and I try and hone my thoughts on improvements that will not distort that but continue to build upon. Please don't take anything I say with mal-intent. I know great things are coming and the technologist in me loves to refine and iterate.

Login

While it's more geeky it's coming along quite nicely, what about OAuth implementation. Does Biznik use hcard/microformatting?

Community Signups

When a new user signs up, if you know their zip/city go ahead and put them in their community. While it is easy to change many don't realize it's even a necessity.

Personalization

I would like to see a few more personalization's appear on your profile.

There are so many graphic data-stores we use, flickr, photobucket, picasa, etc, many of them have api's, I'd love to share some specific tags of my flickr feed.

The previous idea could also bridge other video media's too. Have a Blip, Youtube, UStream, Mogulus feed?

How about bringing in some further social media's like my twitter or plurk stream? Or this could be simplified by just allowing a few more RSS cached streams of choice.

Article Creation Previews (writing in my text editor w/ markup gets cluttered after a while.. I really need to see if it's aligning right) Draft Saving (Craft the articles anytime, anywhere) Ability to add Pictures/multi-media (Imagery is part of my life, many articles I have in my head would like more media for substance.) Some html is ok, what exactly is ok? img src? or just b/em ideas?

FAQs

Think about turning some of this over to a community driven wiki. Maintain your core concepts yourself but then let the community help to add to it. It took me a while this morning to dig out where exactly I could get Formatting Help since it was not in the FAQ and the button is not on all posting pages. The HTML question above can be resolved by that as well. Leverage crowd sourcing when you can, you've got some great members here that dig in.

Future Thoughts

These thoughts are just me casting my techno-vision forward, not necessary to implement, but might be cool if it was given thought.

With GeoLocation become more and more prevalent utilize the hooks in something like Yahoo's Fire Eagle to bring us closer together. If I'm on a trip to NYC or Seattle and Fire Eagle knows it because Dopplr knows it, show me some upcoming events or people I might want to contact when in that location.

Other Cities, the concept is a rough one to me. It changes your location, it doesn't deliver information from those cities as is what I think in logic. Think about having these action generate more localized information within a user determined, or predefined radius, 500mi? Clicking on them shouldn't move you but tell you something. I love Seattle but I live on the East Coast. Show me populated places around me. Atlanta, Raleigh, Columbia, etc, based on either users, events, activity, something.

Above all try and not recreate the wheel if you can help it. Save yourself time by leveraging other networks and the upcoming thoughts on the shared web. Expose hooks, and hook into those things exposed.

So these are some thoughts I've had after a few weeks of really digging in full tear. I'm looking forward to the communities growth and the next evolutions.

-andy

I say Good Day, and I mean it.

People often don't realize how much handshaking has to go on, on or offline, to make a difference in your bottom line. It's been said a numerous times opportunity doesn't happen, it is created.

I'm Andy Ciordia, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I've been digging, lurking, and mildly participating in some of the articles for a few months. I've finally become a supporting member as I have really found value in the community here.

I've had so many hats in my life it looks like my wife's shoe rack. From athletic trainer to systems engineer, graphic designer to photographer, small business strategy to internet marketing tactics and even more.

I've always enjoyed a life of many roles. They all coalesce into a wide array of skills I can pull from and if I don't know the answer, I probably know someone who does.

With my entry here I hope to become a contributing member and help others. Begin adding to the healthy foundation that exists and hopefully build a local presence where right now there is none.

If I can be of any assistance personally or professionally let me know.

ps, on the side I enjoy skydiving, scuba diving, foraging, and supporting regional agricultural in the sustainable good clean and fair ways that Slow Food advocates. I love to help and teach and try to broaden peoples mind whenever possible without preaching.