del.icio.us is clearly a site designed to help you manage your information (bookmarks) in a way that makes sense to you. In turn, this public collection creates a great searchable repository of bookmarks to information that other people found interesting. In addition, you have the ability to use it for business groups as well as purely social bookmarking. If I find a person who is discovering and tagging articles in my area of interest, I can include him in my network or subscribe to a feed of his bookmarks.

This brings me to Google Reader which is where I spend the vast majority of my online ‘feed browsing’ time these days. If I'm surfing the web and come upon a blog article that interests me, I'll run a quick check of the blogger's recent posts. If I think they're informative, I'll simply click the little RSS feed icon in the Firefox address bar which automatically adds it to my blogroll in Google Reader and asks which category to put it in. From that point on, I get articles delivered to me instead of having to go out and find them.

The knock I hear from people about using a feed reader is that it supposedly limits your ability to organically search for new information. The argument is that you've locked yourself within a closed set of information sources. However, I have found that this is simply not true. Browsing through blog articles has provided me with not only more content sources but more expert content. The social nature of the blog means that bloggers are always quoting each other and referring to articles in other blogs. This opens a discovery path that often leads to information being posted by leaders of a particular field. Most credible blogs these days also include a roll call of related blogs from people they respect and/or work with. Harvesting these links quickly provides a cornucopia of valuable insight.

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I would have predicted that investor relations would be the last thing brought in to the sphere of social media. But as you can see by this news item, courtesy of IR Magazine, Dell has made the leap and the new site is growing in popularity. It is apparently an industry-first.

What I like best about this story is how it portrays Dell's seemingly easy transition to an IR blog. In answer to all the usual questions insiders and outsiders submit whenever the notion of an open corporate comunity comes up, Dell has a reasonable, logical answer. No, we don't post everything. Yes, people must be respectful. No, it isn't just for Wall Street types.

All too often in my experience, the early stages of blog development discussions in a corporate setting stall when doomsday scenario questions inevitably arise. "What if someone leaves a really foul comment?" The right answer: We moderate it. The wrong answer: We better not do this blog thing.

It all reminds me in a way of the fairy tale involving, as I vaguely remember it, the lovely daughter living in a home where there is an axe lodged in the parlor ceiling. For years the family worries that the daughter will never be married because no suitor can come in to the house for fear the axe may fall on his head. Eventually some normal person comes along and takes the axe out of the ceiling. Problem solved.

Anyway, congratulations to Dell for putting a little Inspirational Reasonableness into Investor Relations.

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