I always love the stuff Doc does, and think highly of his VRM initiative. It's something I've always had an interest in, and wondered why with all the technology and disruptive effect of the net, why it feels like this area has gotten notably worse, not better.

The question I ask myself about VRM though is what does the Relationship mean? Many of the situations that have been proposed for VRM to play a role are Vendor (am I the only person to call them VenDUHs in conversations?) selection systems, where you establish a new relationship or transaction. I agree that's important as well, but what I often find more personally frustrating is the after-the-fact relationship. Examples are:
* tracking/shipping and order status
* rewards account status
* support/warrantee options
* transaction history
* upgrades, patches
* relevant product/service announcements

I'd like to manage the relationships I have with my existing Vendors on existing services/products better. I know this is part of Doc's vision as well since I've heard him speak about it, but I don't want VRM to come across as being overly focused on the selection part of the relationship.

One of my pet projects relating to this has been trying to formulate a simple set of customary guidelines for a Venduh to provide a "Secure Feed" for your account. Nothing fancy, just SSL+RSS/Atom and specific to your account. The idea is to simply have a better form of official messaging from a service/product provider to each customer (email is slum, barf). It's been an hour here or there over the last few months, but if there's interest I'll noodle it some more and post something to start that conversation.

I believe that we are all, each of us, you as you sit there reading this, only one thousand small decisions away from changing the world in a significant way.

Very few people ever get the opportunity to make a big decision that changes the world, but I think that everyone has the opportunity, every day, to make a series of correct small decisions that will ultimately deeply impact our future together. 1,000 is just a number, but it just means not a few, and not an unreachable amount. Just small decisions, holding the door, greeting a stranger, taking the scenic route, saying your sorry, all of them can create new opportunities to make more important steps on this journey. Make the right 1000 small decisions, and you can change the world in a huge way.

It's right there, within everyone's reach.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the new YES.com that we launched last week. It's only the beginning of the really rocking blend of social chat and broadcast that we're stewing up in the YES Labs, I just love using technology to help people connect :)

So I ventured up to BarCamp Milwaukee last weekend with Jerry and had a simply great time, am already looking forward to the BarCamp Madison that was mentioned coming up in Jan/Feb.

Quick note on cycloud, the most important feedback and realization was: "this is really really cool, but what's it useful for?", and folks, I may have discovered something it's actually useful for. Give me some time to see if it pans out, could be a breakthrough, could be a buzzkill, I should know soon :)

A couple of other pet projects I've been working on that I hope to publish/open soon:

* PDF Imprinting web service: submit a link to a pdf (which will get cached) and a custom footer, and it'll instantly gen it for you and return a link
* Tag a Day: super simple toy to submit a tag word for your day, and it makes a cloud of everyones, just for fun!
* Blog+Microformats: A unified simplified JS bookmarklet/link for prompting and creating or injecting any microformat into your blog post, fully open source/social service, just in the ideation stage
* Secure Feeds: Define a set of guidelines and vision for how web RSS/Atom feeds could be secured for use in more important ways

This phrase resonated with me recently (out of the blue): The Future Remembered. One of the ways I often like to make decisions is to think hard about every possible future outcome, play everything out as far and in as much detail as I can. Often this leaves an impression like memories, but of the future. What I enjoy most is to then decide towards the most unpredictable path, if I can "remember" it then why would I want to experience it again? I don't like to re-watch movies either :)

I just turned on public access to cycloud.com after a very rapid two week (part-time) development process. I set some very high goals and am quite happy with my accomplishments in such a short amount of time.

What is it? Well, besides being a very fun and potentially useful experiment in web search technology, it was also a goal to launch it with a business model behind it. Uniquely I believe, the entire business model is to produce an ebook that documents everything and sell it at a low cost (and comes with extra perks). So not only did I have to do the search experiment, I had to author and publish a book and dabble with ecommerce to get it all connected, pfew.

It's far from perfect, but I must say, it came together nicely for such little investment. I'm also really excited about how interesting the results of the clouds it generates are already even with the simple systems, perhaps as the approach improves in quality it will yield a whole new class of web search engines!

For now, it's all a big web experiment, smell the cheese? :)

It's been eating me since reading Stowe's Slammed By Context posting, and well before actually, how little focus there is in technology circles on the global social scale. We have all this neat Web 2.0 buzz, but does any of it really help break down the divides between cultures and enable people to understand each other? Sure, some, but you sure have to stretch to see the benefit.

What about the kids? All of our technology for the youth is primarily around making them smarter (in school, and more entertained outside of it), perhaps we're missing the opportunity to help them be more understanding. So I came up with one simple web site/service that feels like it could go a long way in helping our youth connect with and understand the perspective of others and the size of our great global society.

A myspace for school-kids, structured, private, and managed by the teachers and school administrators themselves. The intent is explicit, have a simple interview that will build a profile for any kid, and as part of a class assignment, every child must search and find a friend in another country or from another culture, and report to the class what they learned about the other kid's life. Access would only be inside schools, and only first names and interests/activities related questions asked. With enough international participation every kid would perhaps grow in even the slightest way to understand how different life can be elsewhere, from a perspective they can relate to.

It's pretty easy to shoot down and point out potential problems, and I don't have the resources to build it or even hardly an ounce of expertise on what works in school, but I'm trying to imagine how technology can help ease the stresses in our world and will continue to do so.