Blogs

Technology or economics - the pain of blogging

12 August 2008

By Paul Miller

I’ve been reviewing blogs.  Just to get a feel for what this one should look like. There are LOTS. First of all I hunted for ‘best of blogs’ in the US and surveyed those identified by Forbes and then I did the same for the UK and found a similar effort on the Guardian’s site. What a mixture.  I found only one that tries to make money from their blog – typically an economist. This one sells advertising links based on the reputation of his opinions (which seems to be considerable – given the handicap that he’s based in Australia).

A lesson from this albeit brief review of the world’s blogs is that the specialised ones are better, whether they be about politics or celebrities. 'Stick to the Knitting' (as Tom Peters put it so succinctly).

The trouble with knitting is that there are many types and knowing which to stick to is …troublesome.

Take us for example – Gavurin. What should Gavurin people blog about? Are we a technology business (generating knowledge and processes to develop systems that solve problems)? Or are we an economics consulancy (helping clients achieve an end with resources that are scarce)?

We’re both. The two cannot be separated. That makes us different because technology and its application usually are distant from one another. 3G was developed well before we knew what to do with it. Online databases can deliver voluminous datasets divorced from any intelligence on what all the numbers might mean.

Saying we both develop technology and identify – closely – what can be done with it is confusing in a world where specialisation is all. Just try explaining to a venture capitalist that your business does TWO things and he’ll quote Tom Peters and his knitting at great length (or a VC variant of it).

Helping clients to achieve things with scarce resources cannot be done without recourse to numbers – often lots of them. It is incumbent on us to furnish clients with both the SOLUTIONS to a problem and the means to ACCESS the numbers that inform them. That means consultancy on the one hand and technology on the other.

So Gavurin blogging will be about both - and the pain of bringing them together.

Permalink: http://www.gavurin.com/technology_economics (copy'n'paste)

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