Meet Carel Bekker, a technology expert, business consultant and Elance buyer, who left a corporate job to start his own strategy consulting firm, Beyond438. Beyond438 helps European and South African companies start business operations in the U.S.   

You can read the rest of the article here.

Here are the first ten things to consider when you start a corporate blog (according to Scrobleizer):

1) Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that’s better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We’ll find it anyway.

2) Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it — before the second or third site does — and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It’s all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don’t answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well?

3) Use a human voice. Don’t get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you’ll be too slow. If you’re the last one to post, the joke is on you!

4) Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards. If you don’t know what the W3C is, find out. If you don’t know what RSS feeds are, find out. If you don’t know what weblogs.com is, find out. If you don’t know how Google works, find out.

5) Have a thick skin. Even if you have Bill Gates’ favorite product people will say bad things about it. That’s part of the process. Don’t try to write a corporate weblog unless you can answer all questions — good and bad — professionally, quickly, and nicely.

6) Don’t ignore Slashdot.

7) Talk to the grassroots first. Why? Because the main-stream press is cruising weblogs looking for stories and looking for people to use in quotes. If a mainstream reporter can’t find anyone who knows anything about a story, he/she will write a story that looks like a press release instead of something trustworthy. People trust stories that have quotes from many sources. They don’t trust press releases.

If you screw up, acknowledge it. Fast. And give us a plan for how you’ll unscrew things. Then deliver on your promises.

9) Underpromise and over deliver. If you’re going to ship on March 1, say you won’t ship until March 15. Folks will start to trust you if you behave this way. Look at Disneyland. When you’re standing in line you trust their signs. Why? Because the line always goes faster than its says it will (their signs are engineered to say that a line will take about 15% longer than it really will).

10) If Doc Searls says it or writes it, believe it. Live it. Enough said.

It works great on my website, Beyond438.com.

While doing research for this post I found that Techcrunch has a lot to say about Scribd and similar technologies including: Docstoc, and edocr.

Issuu is a Danish company with a VERY cool pdf viewer. This one also messes with my blog layout (I think I have a problem with my blog template). See an example here on my website, Beyond438.com (scroll to the bottom of the page). Seems like Scoble and Webware both got this story before Techcrunch. Funny!

Scribd and Issuu are two tools and sources that I’m adding to my Entrepreneurs JIT toolkit.

Great place to meet all sorts of people that are part of the Atlanta (South East) tech scene.

Are you going?

I recently started to see that many blog URLS omit the www. prefix, e.g., using only blog.beyond438.com instead of “www.blog.beyond438.com”, or “jeffnolan.com” instead of www.jeffnolan.com.

Read all about the deprecation (I had to look up the word) of “www.”. The no-www.org site seems to be the definitive source. It’s a quick read and I decided to cite the main idea:

No-www.org philosophy

No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.

Wikipedia has a no-www entry that’s a bit more technical. This Dailyblogtips post is well written and understandable. I quote some of the article here:

The problem arises because Google and other search engines view the two versions as two distinct sites, even if they have the exact same content (technically, in fact, the “www” denotes a subdomain that could point to different content).

Search engine ranking is based, among other things, on the number of incoming links to your site. If you keep the two versions available some people will link to “http://www.domain.com” while other people will link to the “http://domain.com”, basically splitting your backlink count.

Dialyblogtips also posts on how to tell Google your preferred domain. If you have a Wordpress blog then you can use this no-www plugin from Mr WP himself (read the comments).

Finally, you can test your own site’s no-wwwness here…is it a class A, B or C. Be careful your site may end up on the “Wall of Shame”.

Ok folks, this is a test. In the comments explain in 2 sentences what all this means. Go!

• John C. Maxwell – author of many leadership books including, 21 Irrefutable laws of leadership,
• Andy Stanley – Senior Pastor of North Point Christian Church,
• Dave Ramsey – Radio host and NY best selling author,
• Tim Sanders – Former Chief Solutions Office, Yahoo!,
• Patrick Lencioni – NY Best selling author: Five Dysfunctions of a Team), and
• Rick Warren – Pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life.

My plan is to do some live blogging for the first time. Let’s see what happens. Hope to see you there.

HCM Blogs:

• Human Capitalist
• My friend Thomas Otter of SAP
• systematicHR
• Knowledge Infuser

Another one a stumbled across today: ERP Blog on HCM research.

All for now. You’re comments please.

[Added July 5, 2007: Here is another excellent blog on HCM technology. It's by one of my former colleagues, Leendert van der Bijl. Read it, he is a deep thinker and has some excellent insights.]

His post-SAP blog is called the Long Tailpipe. You can also find a great podcast here that he recently delivered at Stanford.

What is your view of Shai leaving SAP?