Squatter's rights 

Crazy thing happened at work this week. Remember I'd set up a chat room for intradepartment collaboration? I used FlashChat, a LAMP app, but didn't lock it down. You've probably done that -- you're testing something, you're not sure you'll keep it and don't look into all the details. Then, when it works, you blow off the details. It backfired on me this time.

We use the chat room mostly on Thursdays when we're working on a weekly e-mail newsletter. Well, between Thursdays, a gang of kids moved in, and gave themselves admin rights because I hadn't yet registered myself as admin. I tried to scare them off with strong Mom language first, but they were so adamant that it was their chat, I started wondering if my config file still may have contained some default location. Nope, and all their messages were getting written to my database.

So the ownership they were so forcefully claiming was sheer bravado and squatter's bluster. I had a little fun with them first while a group of 12 or so chatters were in the room. Working directly from the database in phpMyAdmin, I made the rooms hold only one person each, and deleted user names and messages. I ended up nuking the whole darned thing and installed from scratch.

If I hadn't been at work, and if I'd thought it of it, I'd have done some word substitutions while I was toying with the little gatecrashers. That's my older son's specialty. He likes to change the MS Word dictionary for a prank, and once subbed "monkey" for "hockey" on his step-brother's computer. The step-brother is a hockey player, so his Christmas wishlist came out looking something like: monkey mask, monkey stick, monkey puck.

Fooled my eye 

Cool, Hil's using the shell of my old ice cream cone template for her OPML blog. Funny, I was deep into reading the first long post before I realized that her header graphic wasn't a glacial mountain. It's a part of her big Dave mask made of cellophone tape.

A part of VRM: personal RFP? 

TWIT hasn't been quite filling up that empty no-Gillmor-Gang feeling for me, so I've been cherrypicking old episodes here and there from IT Conversations and the Long Now Foundation lectures.

Here are a few observations on a Nov. 21 podcast with Doc Searls and Britt Blaser from IT Conversations' Technometria series.

If you're interested mostly in Doc's Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) ideas, skip to the middle. Try as they would to make a nexus, and interested as I am in Blaser's homegrown integrated social portals, I'm afraid I didn't really get much more than a tenuous connection between the show's two topics.

Personal RFP

As Doc pointed out, it's early days for the idea of VRM, a great name for the obverse of CRM, first coined by Mike Vizard during a Gillmor Gang show. In early days, to help people get a handle on the concepts, sometimes you have to put a handle on them, and I had an idea for one as I was listening to a description of one aspect of VRM. You might think of putting out your intention to buy something in terms of a personal request for proposals (RFP). Or individual RFP, or even consumer RFP.

Lending Tree, the mortgage finder, has some aspects of this, but it's way loaded to the banks' advantage, rather than the consumer's. I tried it once a couple years ago when thinking of refinancing my condo in Bloomington, and found it to be little more than a lead generation scheme. I was e-mailed by the bankers to within an inch of my life, and ended up banishing all the bidding companies to my spam folder. In crafting a personal RFP setup, I can't think how you'd prevent this except by not giving out the user's e-mail.

The shopping cart angle

Doc also got into a side of VRM that I hadn't considered to be a piece of it before -- the idea of somehow standardizing categories in online shopping carts. I know a little about that, having worked on a couple carts. No firm ideas, but it occurred to me that the e-commerce part of Amazon's new web services might be used to align categories across carts, maybe using tags and feeds? I guess I thought of it because Dave is thinking of building his VRM example app in Amazon S3.

VRM advocates also could approach services like Yahoo stores about providing specific feeds across storefronts. I'm not familiar enough with Yahoo's e-commerce offerings to know if they even have RSS, but it seems like feeds would be the way to do it.

Later: Another first experimental step might be to develop a plugin for an open source shopping cart like OSCommerce. There are no huge retailers using the free app, but there are a lot of them, and it might make a nice sandbox. You could present shoppers with the option of searching across carts and getting notifications from a central source when other vendors add products from a common catetory. You'd add a table to the database containing the user's interests (wouldn't want to get anywhere near the user account table or whatever location holds the credit card info) and share it among other vendors who use the same shopping cart software, and who had opted into the plan.