List of 100 as a Thinking Tool

Last week, I was looking at an article about thinking titled – Tackle Any Issue with a List of Hundred. I liked the concept but I was not sure about finding a list of hundred ideas. So I decided to give it a try by listing  different ways of using InfoMinder, one of our products.

Here is the list. To be true to the experiment, I did not try to organize it too much, remove duplicates or even refine it too much. Now that I made the first hundred, I am encouraged to make it 200 or even more. The items are not that important or interesting to you (unless you are an information professional). However, the process of going through the exercise and making the list is important.

1. Track competition product releases
2. Track competition partnerships
3. Track competition team changes
4. Track competition advertisements?
5. Track competition hiring
6. Track competition research efforts (research publications, grants)
7. Track competition presence in social media (twitter, facebook, linkedin)
8. Competition pricing deals on the sites
9. Track competition evangelism (where they speak, write, blog)
10. Track the shows competitors go to
11. Track where competitors advertise
12. Track new RFPs from government
13. Track funding on venture sites
14. Track companies being funded (from a list on venture sites or other sources)
15. Track job postings
16. Track opportunities by tracking certain technology, job trends
17. Track products in your customer’s  space (PR companies, product groups)
18. Track Services (professional) related to products (bizdev, marketing, sales)
19. Track product enhancements (both inside and third party)
20. Track open source initiatives in a specific space
21. Track University Research
22. Track social innovation efforts and initiatives
23. Track Foundations and projects
24. Track world bank projects and initiatives
25. Track IMF projects
26. Track government projects and initiatives in various countries
27. Track NSF (Australian and European organizations) research funding efforts
28. Material Research
29. Science Research
30. Energy Research
31. Green Tech Research
32. Take all the public data and put it in open linked data
33. Take all the data and do entity extraction
34. Go to magazine sites in a specific industry and get table of contents (scrape and RSS feeds)
35. Mine ODP data
36. Update ODP data
37. Set up connections between entities – companies/orgs, people, places, products, technology, events, resources
38. Mine Blogs
39. Find blog rolls and convert them into opml
40. Create faceted blog directories
41. Find experts in different areas
42. Find resources in different areas
43. Track the customer mentions in magazines web sites
44. Track customer mention in blogs
45. Track customer mention on Twitter
46. Track customer mention Social Networks (find groups, fans)
47. Track customer mentions in discussion forums
48. Track bookmarks to customer sites in social bookmarking sites
49. Track customers competitors
50. Track 1-6 for each competitor
51. Build customer competitor portals (specific to each customer)
52. Build customer industry events (based on customer interests)
53. Track news for customer industry (based on interests)
54. Track development tools
55. Track technical books
56. Track technical articles
57. Track blog posts on a certain topic
58. Track industry events on software
59. Track trends in the software industry
60. Track discussions
61. Track code libraries
62. Track design patterns and anti-patterns
63. Track best practices
64. Track programming language trends
65. Track skill trends (from job trends)
66. Track software methodologies
67. Track web frameworks
68. Track databases
69. Track software standards
70. Track jobs on your customers’ job pages
71. Track jobs on job search engines
72. Track specific job trends on indeed
73. Track keywords
74. Track searches on Google
75. Track trends on Google
76. Track wikipedia
77. Track wikipedia’s changed pages
78. Track new portals being setup in wikipedia
79. Track planet (aggregation pages) like javaplanet, pythonplanet, dotnetplanet, rdfplanet etc.
80. Track top bookmarks on del.icio.us, stumble upon
81. Track open source collaboratories like sourceforge, google code
82. Track discussions
83. Track Digg (top pages or new pages)
84. Track reddit
85. Track slashdot
86. Track answer pages
87. Track skills required
88. Track institutes building the skills
89. Track google blogs for breaking news from google
90. Track microsoft blogs for breaking news about microsoft
91. Track you tube video searches
92. Track conference wiki sites
93. Track conference exhibitor pages
94. Monitor websites for health
95. Monitor websites for hacks (if any specific keywords phrases appear on web pages)
96. Track gaming sites for new games or comments on games
97. Track movie sites for comments, ratings
98. Track lists (like alltop) for changes
99. Track twitter Searches (create a search, track the page for changes and get notified if any specific keywords appear in changes)
100. Track Facebook applications (for new apps) or other similar app directories
101. Track government data sites
102. Track different types of government data (state and federal initiatives) data.gov, xml.gov etc.
103. Do legal research
104. Convert web page changes to RSS feeds

Who can use it?

Almost any one who need to keep track of information on the web but do not want to go and check your book marked pages periodically. Some of the uses are very simple. Just add the page to the list you monitor. Some of them are more complex or require you to customize InfoMinder results. Our customers use it for job tracking, lead generation, competitive research, legal research, PR and include government agencies, financial institutions, small businesses.

Now that I have a list, I can think of 100 landing pages or even cluster them based on the type of professional who may use it and do sub-lists.

This exercise has been useful. I think I will make List of Hundred a frequent exercise. It is a great thinking tool.