Get ready for the gold rush of 2009.  ICANN announced on June 26th that starting in the second quarter of 2009, you'll be able to purchase a generic Top Level Domain (TLD).  Up until now, web addresses have ended with one of 21 TLDs accepted by ICANN, the organization which oversees the names allowed in the Internet addresses we use every day.  This is great news for organizations which may have showed up late to the first domain name party only to find that another guest had taken the domain of choice for their association.  This new ruling by ICANN will pave the way for...

Most strategies fail.  The research backs this up and most likely your own personal experience too.  Not your strategies, of course. You're strategies probably succeed most of the time, at least when the strategy depends only upon your own stage 3 doggedness and persistence to get things done.  No, we're talking about the strategies of your organization that require buy in and proper execution by an entire team of people.  And because research shows that these strategies fail most of the time, it's essential that systems be in place to help ensure that your team is able to avoid the most common pitfalls that stand in the way of achieving the outcomes that are important within your organization.  Can technology help with this process?  I think so, but let's find out together.

This has been a series of articles on Tribal Leadership, a great book that has helped on a number of levels to identify the underlying dynamics of organizational communities.  In this post, we pick up where our last post left off.  How do you facilitate stage 4 connections in your organization?  The authors of the book give some great recommendations and I'm sure that if we think about this ourselves, we could extend the conversation and come up with some ideas of our own.

Warning:  technical post.

Those using SubSonic¹ Tools for Visual Studio will be glad to know that it's easy to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008.  Here's how...

While chances are that there are probably people in your organization that are naturally gifted at networking, one thing is for sure. If I were a member of your organization, I would not be one of them.  And I suspect that I am very much like many in the technical crowd and possibly even very much like a large percentage of those on the business side of an organization.  What can we learn from these social savants?  A lot...

I love Windows Live Writer, but my love for posting with Windows Live Writer has a side effect.  In a little over a year of posting to a variety of blogs I have managed to accumulate 770 posts on my hard drive and consequently, Windows Live Writer performance finally reached the state where I had to find a workaround...

We're into the second year of research related to Member Crossing, a community product we are researching and building which is designed to help organizations use technology to create engaging communities where members are able to share highly discoverable information.  Connect and Share.  Those are the two core aspects of our product. 

Amazing, or Xobni...you decide.  I would recommend downloading and trying this new Outlook organizer that was just released in beta a day or so ago, is available for free and which Bill Gates has called "the next generation of social networking."  I was just reading a blog post the other day where the author was describing how depressed they were when they installed Outlook 2007 to see that there really wasn't any paradigm shift in productivity.  Well, it took a small startup to create it, but here it is.

If your organization has an online store, you'll want to keep an eye on the deadlines Visa has set for compliance with Payment Application Best Practices (PABP) certification.  Here's the timetable for certification requirements:

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Should they be separate or the same?  It used to be that this question related only to blogs, but now you'll find both of these metaphors used in online stores, in forums, in comments related to products or related to news articles.  An interesting approach was suggested for blending the two ideas into one last week by one of the members of the DotNetNuke¹ community.