How do I know what is happening in payments?
I am presently sitting outside Denver in a, seemingly misguided, attempt to watch the Perseid meteor shower. As of yet, the experience has been…uneventful. I have driven away from the city lights to get a clearer view of the night sky. Not surprisingly, I still have wireless internet coverage that allows blogging via cell modem. As I sit outside, shivering heavily, the thoughts of bits of ice and rock (the size of a grain of rice) has prompted me thinking about blogging and the challenge of staying abreast of the changes in the payments and technology industries.
If you will permit a rather belaboured analogy, or even if you won’t, gathering information about an industry is a bit like watching a meteor shower. Sitting and watching the north-eastern (at least in Colorado) sky waiting for a flare to trail across reminds me of sifting through news reports, rss feeds, blog content in other form, reading comments on articles, and sifting through a plethora of online information. It is incredibly fulfilling…and, frankly, time consuming.
I read.
I read a frightening amount
At present, I subscribe to 104 feeds (I recently trimmed my feeds to those I find most valuable…it was about 250) across the technology and commerce industries. This includes news aggregators, blogs, traditional media, as well as various other syndicated sources. It also translates to several hundred items per day that I parse for information that is applicable to the business of IP Commerce and to the industry at large. If you are interested, you can see the entire list of feeds as output by Google Reader on my personal website.
But can everyone be expected to do the same?
Simply, no.
As the Platform Evangelist for IP Commerce a good portion of my work is related to identifying patterns and trends in the industry and communicating this information both internally and externally. In order to simplify this process, I have created a feed of important payments information that is consumable by any feed reader of your choice.
I encourage you to subscribe to the feed (accessible via the link above or sidebar) if you are interested in what I find intriguing and my brief comments on those items. If, for some reason, you aren’t using a feed reader then the site is accessible to you here. Should you be using Google Reader, you can add me to your feeds from either location.
My hope is that, in addition to this blog, the information above will be useful to help synthesize all the information available. I am, in essence, that guy standing near me in the parking lot of the state park saying “Dude. Did you see that one? Awesome.”
What’s your perspective? Agree? Disagree? Anything to add? Critiques?
The comment form is below. . .
August 12, 2008