If you’re an investor in Apple or just one of the many admirers of this iconic business, you may be closely following news about the health of Steve Jobs.  The cliché that people are a company’s greatest asset was literally demonstrated as this news surfaced — AAPL lost 5.7% of its value after his medical leave was announced.  Is this the beginning of the end for the company or just a period of transition during a time of continued leadership?  An opinion on the matter is vital to investors - should you be buying on unnecessary weakness or be gradually reducing your exposure?   To develop an informed opinion you’re going to have to do some diligence.

I’m going to offer an approach toward diligence that uses web connections to define key topics for your assessment.  Web connections are links between a story you’re following and the endless number of topics that exist in the world.  It may sound quite broad and unwieldy but there is a manageable structure we can put around the information possibilities.

Web connections allow us to explore these topics by the degree of their relatedness.  Think of it as swinging from vine to vine in a jungle of information.  You can build upon a topic of interest by knowing what else is connected to it rather than limit exploration by direct coverage of what you’re reading.”

What’s useful about these connections is they transcend the obvious information you will find collected in most articles or coverage about a story you’re following.   As I’ll explain later on, that’s not a knock on reporters but instead a natural limitation of what’s possible for any writer to cover in a single story.  Put another way, web connections extend our journey into and behind the story.

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Filed under: Management, People, Search Technology, Web Apps, Web Connections | 1 Comment »

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