There is a cliche that says you should learn something new every day; well, I’m not convinced that’s actually possible, but every once in while something new-to-you comes along. If you keep your antenna active, you’ll pick up on some really cool stuff. Now whether everything will help you in your business…who knows. I came across something new yesterday when I read my weekly email alert from SocialMediaToday.com’s blog – they call themselves “…The Web’s Best Thinkers on Social Media and Web 2.0….” There are great posts at Social Media Today that often hold helpful and useful information that even I, a home-based business person, can use.
Yesterday one of the highlighted articles was, “If you create online content, Google’s SideWiki just changed your world, and I got intrigued. The article, by Mack Collier, used Seth Godin’s blog as an example of those bloggers who do not allow comments to be made on their posts. Oh, you can “favorite” Godin’s posts on various social media like Digg or Facebook, but you can’t leave a comment. Collier demonstrated that Google’s newest application, SideWiki, can change that. This interesting application lets you open a skinny column on the side of any web page you’re currently looking at and leave a comment – and read the comments of others. This looked pretty fascinating to me, so I installed it. It’s simple and easy and free of any cost. I’ve already utilized it twice since adding it yesterday.
To demonstrate, I created a screenshot of Women On Business’ “About” page, first as it appears on your screen, and then a second screenshot showing how it looks with SideWiki and the comment I placed there:
Sometimes I find in reading blogs, that I learn from the comments made by others. Sometimes a writer will do a post of “5 Tips for…” and in the comments someone will add two or three other useful tips or thoughts that have value.
SideWiki could provide a way for people to comment about goods or services on webpages with no commenting features, such as a product page. Yesterday I was looking for a printer driver online at a wellknown manufacturer and there was no way to garner information about other people’s experiences with the process of downloading. With SideWiki, I could leave a comment on that page and leave a hint about what I found easy or complicated and how I might have dealt with the issue or whether the process was successful. How would this help the website’s owner? If I were the manufacturer of that printer, and did offer the download, I could log into SideWiki and view the comments as a quality control function. This could be a useful application for business.
