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.
- Track competition product releases
- Track competition partnerships
- Track competition team changes
- Track competition advertisements?
- Track competition hiring
- Track competition research efforts (research publications, grants)
- Track competition presence in social media (twitter, facebook, linkedin)
- Competition pricing deals on the sites
- Track competition evangelism (where they speak, write, blog)
- Track the shows competitors go to
- Track where competitors advertise
- Track new RFPs from government
- Track funding on venture sites
- Track companies being funded (from a list on venture sites or other sources)
- Track job postings
- Track opportunities by tracking certain technology, job trends
- Track products in your customer’s space (PR companies, product groups)
- Track Services (professional) related to products (bizdev, marketing, sales)
- Track product enhancements (both inside and third party)
- Track open source initiatives in a specific space
- Track University Research
- Track social innovation efforts and initiatives
- Track Foundations and projects
- Track world bank projects and initiatives
- Track IMF projects
- Track government projects and initiatives in various countries
- Track NSF (Australian and European organizations) research funding efforts
- Material Research
- Science Research
- Energy Research
- Green Tech Research
- Take all the public data and put it in open linked data
- Take all the data and do entity extraction
- Go to magazine sites in a specific industry and get table of contents (scrape and RSS feeds)
- Mine ODP data
- Update ODP data
- Set up connections between entities – companies/orgs, people, places, products, technology, events, resources
- Mine Blogs
- Find blog rolls and convert them into opml
- Create faceted blog directories
- Find experts in different areas
- Find resources in different areas
- Track the customer mentions in magazines web sites
- Track customer mention in blogs
- Track customer mention on Twitter
- Track customer mention Social Networks (find groups, fans)
- Track customer mentions in discussion forums
- Track bookmarks to customer sites in social bookmarking sites
- Track customers competitors
- Track 1-6 for each competitor
- Build customer competitor portals (specific to each customer)
- Build customer industry events (based on customer interests)
- Track news for customer industry (based on interests)
- Track development tools
- Track technical books
- Track technical articles
- Track blog posts on a certain topic
- Track industry events on software
- Track trends in the software industry
- Track discussions
- Track code libraries
- Track design patterns and anti-patterns
- Track best practices
- Track programming language trends
- Track skill trends (from job trends)
- Track software methodologies
- Track web frameworks
- Track databases
- Track software standards
- Track jobs on your customers’ job pages
- Track jobs on job search engines
- Track specific job trends on indeed
- Track keywords
- Track searches on Google
- Track trends on Google
- Track wikipedia
- Track wikipedia’s changed pages
- Track new portals being setup in wikipedia
- Track planet (aggregation pages) like javaplanet, pythonplanet, dotnetplanet, rdfplanet etc.
- Track top bookmarks on del.icio.us, stumble upon
- Track open source collaboratories like sourceforge, google code
- Track discussions
- Track Digg (top pages or new pages)
- Track reddit
- Track slashdot
- Track answer pages
- Track skills required
- Track institutes building the skills
- Track google blogs for breaking news from google
- Track microsoft blogs for breaking news about microsoft
- Track you tube video searches
- Track conference wiki sites
- Track conference exhibitor pages
- Monitor websites for health
- Monitor websites for hacks (if any specific keywords phrases appear on web pages)
- Track gaming sites for new games or comments on games
- Track movie sites for comments, ratings
- Track lists (like alltop) for changes
- Track twitter Searches (create a search, track the page for changes and get notified if any specific keywords appear in changes)
- Track Facebook applications (for new apps) or other similar app directories
- Track government data sites
- Track different types of government data (state and federal initiatives) data.gov, xml.gov etc.
- Do legal research
- 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.