Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Greek that I may learn to speak

I spent a large part of yesterday in a tutorial with Betsey Merkel of I-OPEN. She was kindly trying to help me understand how Near-Time works.

For those of us who need to enhance the reach of our businesses by building online communities and markets for them, as well as increasing collaborations and partnerships, Near-Time may be worth looking into.

What it does - if I got the essence of what Betsey was saying - is make it much easier for entrepreneurs to create online spaces for their companies that serve not just as informational pages, but also as virtual meeting rooms, where people including customers and teams can gather, share ideas, work together and do business.

It sounded to me like a set of power tools that allows you to rapidly construct a combination of standard website plus media outlet, conference center and what Betsey called storefront. If that’s correct, it could be a godsend to someone like me who has to spend days, sometimes weeks or months, trying to figure out how to get certain site features and functions created, then more days or weeks waiting for someone else to construct them. 

I certainly don’t understand it all yet. But one thing I’m clear on: Anything that helps me reach more people faster and enrich my site with services more easily is something I need to check out. And I’m hoping that, in the course of studying services such as Near-Time, the techno-jargon of the web will start sounding less like Greek to me and more like the lingua franca I desperately need in order to communicate well with the designers, developers and other websters I depend on. 

So far for me, working with web technology has been like trying to read the train schedule in a foreign country. I know where I want to go, but I end up sidetracked or in the wrong city altogether because most of the words mean nothing to me.  Software ought to come with phrase books. (Donde es el Es Es El ? )

But since it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying to teach myself to understand things like Near-Time – with the help of patient people like Betsey.