Renaat's posterous

When you start typing in Google Chrome's address bar, the first letter already triggers the first suggestion of a site you've entered before. I love this feature because in most cases it speeds up your online experience. So this is my Google Chrome's alphabet (don't search for the naughty stuff though, Google Chrome has an excellent 'Incognito'-modus :-P ). Some results are irrelevant as I only used them a couple of times, the ones in bold are used almost daily.

And oh, I live in Belgium. Some sites may be in dutch. Don't tell me I didn't warn you ;-)

a - adrienm.net

b - buienradar.be

c - chip.nl

d - deredactie.be

e - een.be

f - facebook.com

g - goo.gl

h - hln.be

i - instagr.am

j - joe.be

k - klout.com

l - linkedin.com

m - maps.google.be

n - nasuni.com

o - openculture.com

p - pinterest.com

q - n/a

r - renaat.posterous.com

s - secondlife.com

t - twitter.com

u - n/a

v - vandenborre.be

w - workflowy.com

x - n/a

y - youtube.com

z - zdnet.be 

Other browsers have the same features but I mainly use Google Chrome.

So what's your alphabet? ;-)

I recently had a very interesting meeting with Noemi from RealDolmen and we were discussing user adoption of SharePoint. She had some great ideas about how to motivate users to contribute and to get them involved into corporate knowledge sharing and communication. Part of motivation is about being rewarded and one of her suggestions was to give a bottle of wine to the top-5 contributors. I had same ideas (although the bottle of wine would be replaced by a Ferrari sportscar and I would win it) but in the end it’s a one shot thingy unless you want a company full of drunken sailors :-)

Motivation to use new systems can be strengthen by affirmation. And the mind doesn’t need that much to get this. Let me explain this with an example : LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn. I like it more then cats (but less then fries and Belgian beer), I use it every day to connect to people and to discuss things. It’s nice to post questions and get answers in return. And you know what? In the end I look at the ‘Top Influencers This Week’-stats and I’m kinda proud when my name is in it. Silly, isn’t it? Look at an example :

There’s myself and only two gorgeous women and a cool dude did better this week. Great, isn’t it? Feeling motivated to contribute more to get on top of the list *grins*.

Another example is Foursquare, the location based service thingy. You check into places and oh my gosh, you get rewarded with scores and badges. It does sound silly but man, I left my house to check into some dumb place, only to get the 4SQ-day badge. Ha! It’s like publicity, everyone’s saying they’re not influenced but in the end, they do buy the ‘Fat Burner’, the ‘Ahh Bra’ (well, didn’t get that one) or the ‘Mister Steamy’.

I think SharePoint should have stuff like this out of the box. Perhaps I should check the box first but I don’t know if I’ll find some badges, rankings or scores. So perhaps one of you programmers out there *points at his screen* can write some great web parts? Gamify my SharePoint !! I want rankings for contributing, I want scores for top communicators, I want badges for value added bloggers. Hey, I have to motivate 1000 users at short notice and I don’t have the budget for giving away a red Ferrari nor 1000 bottles of wine. Thankies in advance.

As I revealed once more an awesome idea, you guys should send me lots of money now (or just drop a word in comments :-)

I like SharePoint and I like QR-codes (and  other things in life like fries, Belgian beer and my cat but this hasn’t got anything to do with this post) so I had this idea to mash-up those two things.

SharePoint 2010 has this new feature called ‘Document ID’ and basically it means documents can have a unique number. When you know this number you can find the document in SharePoint  even when you got an incorrect URL or  when it moved to another library.

Now what could we do with that?

Suppose you’re having a meeting and you distribute some documents. A paper version is nice to work with during the meeting but in the end you want a digital copy because you’re so paperless (at least I am, except for the toilet … uhm … nevermind). So the trick would be to add a QR-code on the printed page. Wait, I’m going too fast now … There’s something else. You also can create a ‘Document ID Look Up Scope’, and then if a user enters in a document ID it will directly open up instead of going to the results page.

But but but sometimes I’m rather lazy, I won’t type like 20 characters, it’s too much work *crosses his arms and looks away*.

So the trick is to print a QR-code of the document ID combined in a search string : suppose your document ID is APMWRSNS2CQ5-66-87, your string would look like :

http://intranet/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=APMWRSNS2CQ5-66-87 

Now put this in a QR-code and print it on your document :

Scan it with your PDA or wave it in front of your webcam (oh thàt’s what it’s for) and katsjing, you’ll have the digital copy on your screen.

As I revealed this awesome trick, you guys should send me lots of money now (or just drop a word in comments :-)