Wednesday, May 04, 2005

moving away from university blogs for a while...although while on a couple of blogging professor sites today, they made me think of a few things... #6 - let's say you live in California and earthquakes make you really nervous. all you think about is the big one that is sure to hit any day....let's assume that you can't fathom moving away from earthquakes, high taxes, high cost of living, etc., but you would sleep better at night knowing what the tectonic plates were doing. sadly, without your own sophisticated seismic equipment, you pretty much are destined to be nervous. now, no doubt, the seismic scientists who do watch all of the earth rumblings likely have some information that gives them some clue of an impending earthquake. volcanoe watchers seem to have a pretty solid handle on impending volcanoe eruptions. i would assume the earthquake folks have a decent idea as well of seismic activity. trouble is, they don't seem to have a decent mechanism to alert anyone except via phone. enter the blog.... without too much imagination, i can envision the use of a blog to communicate unusual seismic activity to interested party's. either the scientist enters an alert message into the blog or the seismic equipment triggers an alarm that sets off a prewritten seismic alert blog post. once the post is submitted, "subscribers" are alerted via their preferred notification format. once alerted, they come to the blog for the information. seems simple enough.....this setup could work in a variety of ways and we will explore them later. #7 - also, while perusing Blogspotting today, I came across an interesting concept called crunkies. basically, a crunkie will be a location sensitive message that shows up on someone's cell phone. nice enough, but somewhat down the road. in the near term, here's how i think a blog can perform a similar function. for reference, in the post, a restaurant was the example. now, to me, an enterprising restaurant really needs to reach out to their customer base. they should have a blog that allows people to get to know the chef, the wait staff, the bar keeps, etc....obviously, these staff members would be the bloggers for the restaurant. now, let's suppose to have access to the blog, a customer would have to register for the blog so the restaurant now has some basic data about the person, including how they would like to be notified of blog content changes. so, this restaurant is really good at keeping up with who eats what and when. in fact, they are so good at it, they have a database on their customer's eating habits/favorites. since this restaurant has a blog and a good customer database, they can now marry the two together to communicate special events/meals that appeal to specific customers. at this restaurant, any time a special event or menu change is created, it goes into the blog site for posting. say, for example, Scott really likes Nebraska beef and eats it almost every time he comes to the restaurant. now, this blog is very sophisticated and based upon menu descriptions - such as Nebraska beef - it knows to send out a special alert to Scott via his preferred blog notification mechanism - to his pager/phone/IM/email. the blog will also send via RSS the same message to Scott's feed reader.....Scott gets alerted that Nebraska beef is on the menu, his saliva glands go into hyperdrive and shortly, Scott shows up for an unplanned steak dinner. a perfect blend of tieing a customer database into a blog/RSS strategy..... any comments out there??? 11:41:43 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 ridingo. Last update: 6/15/2005; 11:24:56 PM.