Biznik - Business Networking that Doesn’t Suck

We’ve got some big ideas cooking here at Biznik, after our brainstorming session last week with Shelly Farnham, Peter Fosso, Lara Feltin and me, Dan McComb. I’d like to share some of them with you.

1. Social tagging. One of the things that’s been missing on the Biznik site is a ratings system with teeth. The reason it’s missing is because it’s so damned difficult to rate a person - not nearly as simple as rating a transaction on eBay, for example. But I think we’ve found a solution in social tagging. The idea is pretty simple, and it’s popping up on a lot of sites now: upcoming.com, 43things.com - even Amazon.com is using tags now. I’m working on a way for you to tag other members, and those tags will be visible to everyone else; the words that are repeated will be displayed larger than the ones that aren’t. This should give us a pretty good way of rating each other subjectively.

2. Growing Biznik. Last week someone from Hong Kong joined Biznik, and it was a reminder to me that we don’t yet have in place any structure for Biznik to accommodate members outside of Seattle. So we’re working on a way to scale it, so that someone in Hong Kong, or anywhere else for that matter, can join and start their own local Biznik and be part of the bigger Biznik network. Currently we’re looking at a grow-split approach, but we haven’t settled on a final approach yet. We’ve got a lot more thinking to do still.

3. Educational Events. We’d like to have more educational events. Byron’s presentation went over very well, so we’d like to do more like that. Few members seem interested in paying for these kind of events, so we’re going to try to create these educational presentations either from within our membership or by inviting outside members to present to us, and perhaps promote their services in return for spending time educating us. First up, we’d like to do a January presentation on business taxes. Christopher Braxtan, and Jessica Hale have all offered conference room space that will hold about 12 people for these events. If you’d like to suggest a topic for these events, know someone you’d like to invite to speak, or would like to present one yourself, please let us know.

4. Blogging options. Notice how the three most recent blog postings from the Biz Blog are posted onto the Biznik home page? That’s because we’re parsing the RSS feed that’s produced by the blog. We can do the same thing with your blog, no matter where you host it, and we’re working on a tool that will let you control this in your account. You’ll be able to enter the url of your blog, which will then pull the top 3-5 headlines from your blog onto your member profile page. If you don’t have a blog, we’ll have an option for you to have a basic one on your member page. This should help get your blog a wider audience, and be a great way to help you promote your business.