You may not know this, but the 2 year birthday for DocumentSnap.com is pretty soon.  I knew I wanted to shake things up a bit for that special occasion, so recently I did a reader survey and asked you what direction that you wanted the site to go in.

First of all, I wanted to thank those of you who took the time to fill out the survey. It was super helpful.

To run through some of the changes I’ve made based on your feedback, I put together this little video (the choice of wearing a brown shirt in front of my brown cabinet was a little suspect, but anyways).

(Here’s a link to the video if you can’t see it).

Here’s a few main things I heard in the survey over and over:

1. More focus on document management.  What you do with documents once they’re scanned
2. Focus on workflow – how you go paperless in the first place, what the steps should be, and how you stick to it once you’ve started
3. You’d like to see how other people do things to get ideas for yourself
4. Some people just want some extra help going paperless

I agree with all these points, so I’ve done a total rehaul of DocumentSnap.  I’m not going to go through everything, but here are the key points:

1. I’ve created a totally free 7 part e-course that takes you through going paperless, processing your documents, backing up, shredding, what to keep, and it gives some ideas that have worked for me for sticking to going paperless once I started.  You can sign up for that on the home page of the site or on the sidebar of the blog
2. I’ve created a newsletter that I’ll send out by email every week that will have additional tips for going paperless and sticking to it
3. People who sign up for the e-course or the mailing list will get a bonus report I called 4 Ways To Tame Your Documents that drills down a bit more on the processing part
4. To help us all share our paperless tips and workflows, I started making a forum, but then decided that since most people are already on Facebook anyways, maybe a Facebook page would make more sense.  You can get to it from the sidebar of the site.   When people post good tips or workflows, I’ll try to expand on them some more in an article on the blog
5. I’ve had people ask me if I do consulting, so now the answer is Yes.   If you’d like some extra one on one help, hit the Hire Me link up at the top of the site.

I have some more great stuff planned, but for now I just tried to make the site cleaner and clearer.

I’d love for your feedback, so you can find me on Twitter at @brooksduncan or @documentsnap, you can email me at brooks at documentsna dot com, or just hit the Contact link up at the top of the site.

Thanks again for everything over the last 2 years!

Photo: abakedcreation

Related posts:

1. The First DocumentSnap Reader Survey – Your Input Needed
2. ScanSnap Meets The Kindle – My Head Explodes

I know it’s strange for a blog like this to be talking about ordering business cards. After all, by definition it’s not exactly paperless.

However, since I have been going to some conferences lately I decided I needed some cards. For better or for worse, it’s still the most common way to exchange information.

I figured since I was going to order some cards, I’d try to do something slightly different (for where I live anyways).

A number of my friends are big Moo fans, so I decided to order my business cards from there. Moo business cards have printing on both sides and you can have a bunch of different designs for no extra charge, so here is what I did:

• Went to Wordle.net. If you’re not familiar with Wordle, it takes any text that you throw at it and then generates a “word cloud” weighted by the frequency that the various words show up.
• On Wordle, I input the DocumentSnap RSS feed so that my word cloud would be the most recent topics that we’ve been talking about on the site
• Wordle will generate clouds with different fonts, weights, and colors, so I generated 10 word clouds and took screenshots. That way, I’d have 10 different cards
• In Moo, I created my business cards and uploaded the 10 different screen shots for the back of the cards.
• I decided to keep my contact information pretty spare. I didn’t put a title or phone number. I have similar thinking to Darren Barefoot, but I couldn’t bring myself to be quite as hardcore as him.

Here are the results:

When my cards arrived, I was really happy with them. I get lots of compliments both on the quality of the paper and the word cloud on the back.

When I re-order, I’ll just run the RSS feed through Wordle again, generate some more screenshots, and then my cards will always have relatively recent topics from the site.

How about you? Do you have any examples of business cards you like, or even better have you done away with biz cards altogether? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Reader Question: What software do you use for Business Cards?

First I just want to thank you for being such awesome readers and providing great help in the comments. You truly do rule.

I am in the process of doing an overhaul of DocumentSnap.com and have some big things planned, but what I (an iPad) want (an iPad) doesn’t (an iPad) matter. It’s what you, the readers want that is important.

So, I whipped up the first DocumentSnap.com reader survey. It is very short (5 super quick questions), but your feedback would be incredibly helpful.

Click here to take the survey.

It is completely anonymous and you don’t have to give any personal information or anything, and this is not a sales thing where I will chase you down. It’s so that I can get a better idea of what you all are interested in seeing on the site.

Thanks again!

Click here to take the survey.

Related posts:

1. iBooks App For iPad and iPhone To Get PDF Capability
2. Reader Question: What software do you use for Business Cards?

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It’s fixed now, so thanks a lot Andy!  If you tried to get in touch with me earlier and was thwarted, go ahead to the Contact Form and try again.  Sorry about that!

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