lucidCircus

There is one thing I know to be true about myself.  I move slowly.  I’ve been in business for 10+ years and I’m finally  getting organized.  SaaS (Software as a Service) is the hot thing this year.  Or last year or well… these days.  I’m migrating lucidCircus’ accounting and contact management away from pen and paper onto web-based applications.  It took me 7 years to go from hand-coding HTML to using Dreamweaver… of course that had as much to do with how bad WYSIWYG editors sucked in the early days as my speed at adopting new methods.

Two things got me started on blogging and using “web 2.0″ services.  First, I’ve been helping clients as of last year ramp up their Social Media efforts.  Primarily LinkedIn (I just linked my linkedin page to my brand new corporate blog! How meta is that?), Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and corporate blogs.  I figure those are the basics.  As I go I’m discovering new tangential services like GetSatisfaction which tracks people talking about your company on Twitter as well as starts conversations with customers.  I signed up yesterday, saw Twitters corporate profile with a question about spam and wrote a mini rant:

I have not had a problem with spam. My problem is noise. When I first heard of Twitter I thought “what a retarded idea… who cares about other peoples minutia? Especially a 24/7 stream of minutia.” But then Twitter started to become useful for business. So now it’s a battle between Signal to Noise ratio. I don’t want to read about people’s cat sneezing or how much coffee they need but I also don’t want to unfollow them because they have shared good information in the past.

What I suggest is a radio button where you label each tweet as Signal or Noise. Then the users can set a slider to all Signal (relevant info) to all Noise (sleeping cute things) or anywhere in between. M-F 9-5 I want useful intel but maybe on Sunday afternoon I want funny links.

I have not had a problem with spam. My problem is noise. When I first heard of Twitter I thought “what a retarded idea… who cares about other peoples minutia? Especially a 24/7 stream of minutia.” But then Twitter started to become useful for business. So now it’s a battle between Signal to Noise ratio.

The second thing that got me started on this blog other than wanting to be walking the walk is my recent use of SaaS  has me all atwitter (sorry) about the holistic interconnectedness of it all. Wordpress to Flicker which goes to Facebook which goes to Twitter etc… That’s social aspect, then there is the business end.  In the last month I’ve signed up and started using first Curdbee and then Freshbooks for invoicing, Batchbook for contact management, iDevDirect for affiliate software, MailChimp is amazing for email newsletters… and lastly, I’m trying out this accounting software from IAC-EZ.

I almost forgot… we’re on YouTube as well.  Although much to my shame… I also have uploaded cute videos of my dog.