I attended the UBC e-Strategy Town Hall today, and much like last year with all of the thought-provoking questions, insightful comments, and handful of ideas, I came away with a sense of inspiration and motivation. The challenge here will be to take some of the high level thoughts and find a way to integrate these into the day to day realities of my daily work.

One step I’m taking in this regard is to note some of the ideas that popped up in my head today. I’ll start off with two of the brighter lightbulbs.

Lightbulb 1: So Long Web Surfers, Hello Feed Eaters
There will be a time in the not-so-distant future when the conventional model of visiting websites for news or any other frequently updated content will not be dominated by the current model of “searching” or “surfing”, but will instead be almost totally replaced by subscriptions to RSS or other web feeds, where we will only go to visit a website when we receive an update to the feed.

There are a couple implications of this.

One is that along with this shift in increasingly using “feeds” for keeping up-to-date, a lot of us will probably start using feed readers that will be providing enough information in the previews to help us decide whether or not we want to go through the effort of visiting the actual website.

If you’re ever used a feed reader, you’ll know that one of their greatest strengths is their quick load times and fast performance. This is largely the result of all extraneous markup being stripped out leaving the content in all its bareness.

What does this mean? It means that increasingly the decision on whether to visit my website or not will not be determined by the complete package of content, look and feel, but it will increasingly be based solely on the quality of the information. If the information itself doesn’t grab my attention and pique my interest enough to go visit the actual website, I may never go and visit that website again.

So the bottom line: Quality, engaging, and relevant content will matter more than ever.

Lightbulb #2: Specialized Service Delivery Depends on TRUST in Baseline Services
For any service-oriented team that has ambitions to build out their service offerings: Focus on building trust.

Providing a wide range of high quality services takes resources (time/money). If you’re planning on delivering high quality services, or you are planning on increasing the scope of the services you are already providing, your first task should be to build trust with your end users, which is in large part a confidence in the baseline services you provide.

Once you have established the trust for these baseline services, only then can you start looking at increasing your service offerings and expanding the scope of your business offer.

So, there you go. Two of the brighter lightbulbs that turned on in my head today. Next step is finding a way to do something with this new found light.