Dan, this reminded me of an article I wrote on IT being a bridge or gatekeeper. This conversation constantly comes up, and you hit the nail on the head. More and more business units are seeking funding and support outside of the IT department, and this will continue to be a dicey issue for CIO's...

http://www.changeforge.com/2008/04/13/is-your-it-...

Dan, great comments... As always, you intrigue me by being focused on the "out there"... By that I mean you are perceiving things only on the fringes of my awareness. While I had always understood a process was needed to take an idea to reality, I had never extended the thought to such a point of available structure.

I suppose this comes from me liking to work the SMB market and really enjoying the fluidity of day-to-day life ;-)

Great article, Dan. I hadn't gotten to a point of looking for open source in the SaaS community just yet. I have been slowly looking at it for the core enterprise, but this definitely makes sense. Just like the new output companies sell pages not printers, SaaS sells a platform not software.

I liked your post so much, I just wrote a blog on it... http://www.changeforge.com/?p=44.

Funny thing was I did work through that process, but must've missed a save button somewhere. I'm going to look into the IntenseDebate toolset for my site. It seems very similar to the "Share This" widget.

One of the things I can't help but think is that who has the time to update all of these disparate social media outlets outside of professional bloggers? I know there are several in-roads being made to rectify this and interlink some of the major players, so that will be interesting.

This will definitely be an evolution I will enjoy seeing unfold. I have found that submerging myself in the evolving technologies helps me to understand them so much more intimately!

Keep up the great work!

Dan, it wasn't the write-up at all... rather the concept of what you were talking about. It blew me away that you had even had an inkling about this stuff that far back. Writing was on point and easy to understand.

Just grasping the extension of CRM and SFA applications to aggregate all of the social channels is crazy enough. Of late, there has been a lot of chatter about how do you keep up with all the places you are wired in? Things like OpenID and widgets are a stepping stone in that direction, but we are seeing the slow birth of a multi-dimensional and very personal Internet presence for the individual being formed.

So if there was an application that could aggregate all of those "presence" channels together, you'd have a very unique picture of a person. The person could tailor their own media consumption venues at that point. It all becomes very cerebral...

Wow, I consider myself ahead of the curve on most things, but this is absolutely a trip. It took me a second read through to really see the value, but wow! What a way to exponentially tap one of the best resources to find information about people from the raw Internet itself.