Ed Batista

A Little Housecleaning

This morning I finished some long-overdue housecleaning around here.  I'm always tinkering with the site, but it's been five years since my last full-on redesign.  This latest round wasn't quite that drastic--some of the changes aren't all that obvious, and there's still some work to be done--but hopefully the result is a slightly cleaner, livelier and easier-to-use site.

Just for my own record-keeping, here's what's changed:

• Nav Bar, Search Box and Banner
  
  • No more separate "Home" link in the nav bar, as I think people are sufficiently aware that a blog's banner image serves that purpose.
  • A larger search box, relocated to the lower right corner of the banner, to make it easier to locate and capable of handling longer queries without scrolling.
  • Resized the banner to accommodate these changes and provide some empty space to set off the search box.

• Feeds, Tweets and Pix
  
  • No more separate link for email subscriptions--it didn't seem to justify the high-profile real estate, and I reconfigured my Feedburner landing page to continue to provide a link to that service.
  • Links to my social networks clustered below my feed link on the left-hand sidebar, along with a Twitter feed that displays my most recent tweet.  This recognizes Twitter's unique role among my networking tools, provides a connection to the range of topics I tweet about, and brings some energy to the site during periods when I take a break from regular posting.  (The Twitter feed appears to be a little buggy, so you may or may not see a tweet.)
  • A thumbnail of the most recent pic I've uploaded to Flickr and a link to my photostream.  This provides a connection to my physical world and brings a little more life and color to the site.  (I'm using the Flickr uploader on my laptop and PhotoSync on my phone.  I'm still sorting out the  photo-sharing connections among my various networks, so bear with me if something looks amiss.)

• Archives, Categories and Thanks
  • A link to my full archives and list of categories moved to the top of the right-hand sidebar, just below the search box.
  • A drop-down menu linking to my "main categories," the topics that are currently of greatest interest to me.
  • Behind the scenes, a streamlined list of categories--I removed 10 or so that no longer served a meaningful purpose.
  • I created a separate "Thanks To..." page and linked to it, rather than maintain separate links in the right-hand sidebar.  I want to continue to express my appreciation to various people, but this seemed like a better way of doing it.

And here's what remains to be done, the next time I'm so motivated:

• While I'm happy with the visible results, a lot of the underlying code is pretty ugly.  I'm not a web designer, I just play one in my spare time, and I'm certain that I'm violating all sorts of sound coding and design principles.  Hopefully no one who knows what they're doing will peek behind the curtain.
• I'd love to smarten up the "Main Categories" drop box and make it a little more stylish.
• While I remain a huge fan of TypePad and a very loyal user, I'm not thrilled with the comment functionality, and I'd prefer to implement something like Disqus that's more social-media oriented.  I gave it a shot, but couldn't make it work--maybe sometime in the future.
• I'm ambivalent about my home-grown banner, which I stitched together myself over 5 years ago when I formally launched my coaching practice.  OTOH, it feels like me--colorful, engaging, a little quirky--and I've grown attached to it.  OTOH, who knows?  I just may be ready for a change.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.  Some day I'm sure I'll need to grow up and bring in the professionals, but nearly 7 years after getting started with TypePad, I'm still having fun rolling my own.

Photo by U.S. Army Environmental Command (Really!)  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons

Digital Social Grooming

Umair Haque recently complained about "a surplus of...digital social grooming" on networks like Twitter:

I'm not saying don't ever RT stuff, but I see a lack of real microblogging. And a surplus of (to put it politely) digital social grooming.

Haque explained his definition of the term in a subsequent tweet:

By digital social grooming, I mean a) dominance displays b) social climbing c) conciliatory grooming d) social appeasement e) scapegoating.

Seeing social networking as a form of "grooming" isn't new--the brilliant Danah Boyd used the concept to defend Twitter just over two years ago:

I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society. And what they’re doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected.

And while I agree with Boyd's basic premise--i.e. social grooming is an innate behavior so of course it's going to find expression within social networks--I also agree with Haque's critique that those networks are devalued when too much content takes the form of ritual displays of grooming behavior.  Some amount of digital social grooming is inevitable and healthy, but in excess it turns our interactions into formulaic protocols, like we're living in a 21st century version of Versailles.

So what can we do about it?  One way to start is to question the various forms of social network etiquette and explore our alternatives.  Here are 3 initial suggestions:

• Fewer exclamation points.  I'm not pointing fingers here--I'm as bad as anyone else when it comes to conveying! how! enthusiastic! I! am! about! this! topic!  But while there's obviously a need to fill in the blanks left by the absence of facial expressions and tone of voice in online interactions, an excess of exclamations quickly turns social network discourse into a sort of shouting match among exhaustingly happy people.  This both cheapens real enthusiasm and joy and makes it harder for other, more somber tones to find expression.
• You don't have to thank me for thanking you.  Given the insane amounts of hate and vitriol spewed across the intertubes daily, an excess of politeness would seem to be the least of our problems.  And yet there's something about the endless round of social network thank-yous (often coupled with exclamation points!) that seems related to Haque's critique.  As with exclamation points, I think too many formulaic expressions of gratitude devalue the real thing.
• A little self-promotion goes a long way.  I have no problem with people using social networks as a complement to their RSS feed by tweeting or sharing their blog posts or other self-referential content.  I follow people on Twitter and Google+ precisely because I'm interested in what they have to say (and because those sites give me more control over what I see and when--I generally ignore Facebook because its forced reciprocity doesn't allow me that control.)  But when you're retweeting the fact that someone has retweeted your tweet announcing your recent post, well, that's when I unfollow you.

All this said, we don't use nearly enough smiley emoticons :-)

Photo by jinterwas.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

 

Tom Peters, Twitter, Good Moods and Enthusiasm

I'm a big fan of Tom Peters.  I regularly cite these words of wisdom from November 2007 (intentionally posted in all caps to express his rage):

BOB WATERMAN AND I, IN 1980, DEVELOPED A MANTRA IN THOSE DAYS OF YORE WHEN "STRATEGY [STRATEGIC PLANS] WAS EVERYTHING." WE SAID:

HARD IS SOFT.
SOFT IS HARD.

THE READILY-MANIPULABLE NUMBERS ARE THE TRUE "SOFT STUFF."

THE RELATIONSHIPS-LEADERSHIP-"CULTURE"-"ACTION BIAS" [OR NOT] ARE THE TRUE "HARD STUFF."

PERIOD.
END OF STORY.
[I WISH.]

I've learned a ton from his slides, which he makes freely available.  And his tweets are to the point and thought-provoking.

So these two exchanges were a high point of my day yesterday:

A colleague saw this and DM'ed me, "I love the world of 2010. Blows my mind on a regular basis."

Agreed.  And these exchanges serve to reinforce my perspective on the issues Peters raised, which I see as closely related.  We can be infectious agents of enthusiasm, or of any dynamic we want to express in the world (so choose wisely.)  And while enthusiasm--like leadership--can't be "taught," we can help others learn about the sources of their enthusiasm, tap into them and cultivate their ability to access those feelings more readily.

Top 150 Management and Leadership Blogs

(Hey, that's me!)

Jurgen Appelo, a Dutch technology manager and software developer, has devised a method for compiling "top blog lists," relying on Google PageRank, Alexa traffic rankings, Technorati Authority, other search engine links and numbers of comments.  (You can read about the process in detail.)

Earlier this month Appelo compiled a list of the Top 150 Management & Leadership Blogs, and I was surprised and gratified to see my own site listed at # 48 (two spots below Stephen Covey, of all people.)

Appelo's method seems reasonably defensible, although I'm certainly in no position to validate it (and it's worth noting that Appelo's own blog comes in at # 16 on the list.  That may be perfectly legit--I'm just sayin'.)

In any case, I'm honored to join several people on the list whose work I read regularly and respect immensely:

• Dispatches from the New World of Work by Tom Peters (# 9)
• Grant McCracken (# 16)
• Chief Happiness Officer by Alexander Krejulf (# 25)
• Work Matters by Bob Sutton (# 27)
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter (# 29)
• Trust Matters by Charles Green (# 30)
• Positive Organizational Behavior by Bret Simmons (# 33)
• WeeklyLeader by (among others) my friend Pam Fox Rollin (# 34)
• Management Craft by Lisa Haneberg (# 35)
• Employee Engagement by David Zinger (# 59)
• Marshall Goldsmith (# 61)
• Unfolding Leadership by Dan Oestrich (# 86)
• Studentlinc by Tim Milburn (# 122)

While the list's uppermost spots are occupied by high-profile types like Tony Robbins, Guy Kawasaki, and Daniel Pink, many are occupied by ordinary people like me, an executive coach in San Francisco and a Leadership Coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; Bret Simmons, a professor at the College of Business of the University of Nevada, Reno; Pam Fox Rollin, a coach and consultant in here the San Francisco Bay Area; and Tim Milburn, Director of Campus Life at a university.

I can't speak for the others, but my site is a strictly personal project that I support entirely with my own resources.  To the extent that we can rely on the validity of Appelo's method, it would seem that the web is doing its usual effective job of breaking down hierarchies and promoting conversations on the margins.

That said, it's also worth noting that despite this technology-enabled democratization, the list is thoroughly dominated by white men, primarily Americans.  So some hierarchies remain firmly in place.

Thanks to Jurgen for his efforts--his list is both a great collection of valuable management and leadership resources and an inspiration to further diversify this conversation.

Chris Anderson on "Free" at Global Business Network

I heard Chris Anderson speak tonight at the offices of the Global Business Network in San Francisco. He's promoting Free: The Future of a Radical Price and is tight with GBN co-founder and Chairman Peter Schwartz, who introduced Anderson and led the Q&A session, so this was presumably a friendly stopover on his media tour.

Anderson opened with the story of how Jell-O was launched in the early 20th century: they went door-to-door and gave away richly illustrated Jell-O cookbooks, creating demand for the new product among consumers, who then flocked to grocery stores seeking it.  (It's similar to the story of King Gillette subsidizing the cost of razors to sell blades, which Anderson used to open his original Wired article on the topic in early 2008.)

Anderson discussed the work of 19th century French economist Joseph Bertrand, who argued that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.  (A brief exploration of the Bertrand competition model suggests that Anderson is oversimplifying to make a point, but let's not quibble.)

In Anderson's words, "The Internet is the first truly competitive market the world has ever seen," and in this environment we experience "the law of gravity online: If marginal cost is zero, and competition is unlimited, price will fall to zero."  Anderson's quick to note that he's not saying the price should be zero or things should be free; he's merely observing the dynamics at work in the market for any products or services that can be converted to bits.

He also noted that it's not simply "free" vs. "paid" products and services, but rather free versions supported by advertising and "freemium" versions in which consumers and users pay to get something extra.  What will people pay for?  In Anderson's words...

• People will pay to save time.
• People will pay to lower risk.
• People will pay for things they love.
• People will pay for status.
• People will pay if you make them (once they're hooked.)

The key opportunity created by offering your products and services for free is that "free allows you to fully explore your customer space... How do we use free to increase our audience [for Wired] and convert some of them to a higher price?"  He noted that you can read Wired for free online, you can purchase single copies at newsstands for one price, and you can purchase a print subscription for yet another price.  But why be limited to just three prices?  "We need more prices... What is the $100 version of Wired?"  Referring to the recent uproar over the Washington Post's plans to host a "salon" for health care lobbyists at $25,000 a head, Anderson noted, "That wasn't the right answer, but it's a really interesting question: What is the $25,000 version of the Washington Post?"

Appropriately, Anderson is offering "Free" at a range of prices: The hardcover book was $26.99 tonight (and it's $16.19 on Amazon as I write this.)  Almost all digital versions of the book are free, but most come a with a variety of limits on how long you can access the materials.  The unabridged version (6 hours) is free, but the abridged version (3 hours) is $9.99.  (Now you know how Hyperion prices 3 hours of your time.)

And Anderson strongly believes in the future of books.  Printed materials will survive to the extent that they add value to the online version of the same content.  Anderson expects books, which are convenient for long-form content and "look nice on a shelf," to make it.  He expects newspapers to die (or at least to be radically reinvented.)  And magazines?  They'll eventually be replaced by Apple's version of the Kindle, but the rich graphic experience they offer will keep many of them safe for now.

Anderson was asked about Malcolm Gladwell's dismissive review of "Free" in The New Yorker, in particular Gladwell's skewering of YouTube as a paragon of this new economic model.  From Gladwell's review:

To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube's ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the "abundance thinking" that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Anderson's not-quite-compelling response was that Gladwell underestimates the power of Google's economies of scale, his figures are off by a factor of 10, and "advertising always lags the audience" (i.e. they'll figure it out eventually.)  To Anderson's credit, he deftly acknowledged and defused the issue of his apparently inadvertant plagiarism from Wikipedia in "Free" by telling his questioner, who had apologized for asking such a tough question, that there were much tougher questions he could have asked, which prompted a chuckle from the audience.  A colleague said the Anderson-Gladwell dustup was "the nerd version of Biggie vs. Tupac."  Outstanding.  (I'll let him remain anonymous, unless he asks for attribution.)

I was reminded of my "attention economy" experience with AttentionTrust and others by Anderson's comment that the 'net and its attendant armies of bloggers, videographers and garage bands has yielded an overabundance of content, and today our attention is the truly scarce commodity.  And just as many attention-focused projects touched on the related issues of reputation and identity, Anderson sees links there as well.  He believes that "Facebook and Twitter are establishing the first quantifiable reputation markets," although I'd argue that groups like Rapleaf, Opinity and Trufina tried to do just that a few years ago, leveraging data from credit reports to eBay seller status.

Finally, one of Anderson's most interesting comments tonight was his assertion that "the key talent of the 21st century is self-promotion and creating celebrity...[and] the goal is to create celebrity, or reputation...and convert that into something that pays the rent." (On a cautionary note, he added, "And that business can be just as dirty as it sounds.")

Although one example of this is Paris Hilton and the "fame-for-being-famous" that she embodies, the openness of the Internet means that today anyone can at least get their ideas into the marketplace.  That's no guarantee of success, of course--you'll still need some luck, even with good ideas and a talent for self-promotion.  But as Anderson notes, we're now able to tap into "the long tail of talent... The Internet has lowered the transaction costs of finding talent...[and] talent will find a way."

This fascinates me as an executive coach, both on my own behalf and on behalf of my clients and students at Stanford Business School, because what Anderson is saying is that the rules are changing.  We used to rely solely on personal networks and resume credentials to locate and identify talent (and to be located and identified by others as talent.)  But in a more open marketplace of ideas, those filters are less and less useful as they screen out more "false negatives" (i.e. talented people unknown to us who lack traditional credentials) and allow through more "false positives" (i.e. people within our networks who possess traditional credentials but who aren't really all that talented.)

From a personal perspective, my writing on this site on coaching, leadership, change and related issues over the past few years has given me a reputation as someone with something of interest to say on these topics--a reputation that can be quantified in data such as my feed subscribers (932 today), my site visitors (192 so far today), even my Twitter followers (302 at the moment, enjoying all 105 of my tweets to date.)  These aren't big numbers in any absolute sense, but they're big enough (particularly given how infrequently I post) to give me a sense that what I'm saying is being heard, a sense of presence.

Calling this reputation "celebrity" would be a serious stretch, but that's a matter of degree.  And if you're interested in a topic such as "double-loop learning" or "ground rules for meetings" or the "definition of organizational effectiveness," you'll find me in Google's top 10 results for those terms (at least as of today), and that's certainly celebrity in a strange, narrow way.  (Hell, if you're just interested in "ed batista" I'm #1!)

What's the connection with "Free"?  Well, even though I don't post that often, the hours invested in my writing here over the past few years would add up to a substantial amount of unpaid time.  And I publish everything here under a Creative Commons license that gives anyone the right to share and remix my materials as long as they attribute it to me with a link and make any resulting work freely available under the same license.

So free work and free content have been the essential elements in developing a verifiable reputation and an identity as a trusted subject matter expert in my field, and I don't know how I could have done it any other way.  And seeing my own experience in this new light makes me wonder if I should be encouraging my clients and students to do more of the same.

Thanks to Chris Anderson for a thought-provoking and entertaining talk, and many thanks to Andrew Blau, Nancy Murphy and their colleagues at GBN for being such gracious hosts.

Social Network Tools (From AlertThingy to Zemanta)

One year after my last review of some social media tools and networks, here's the 2009 version.  Included are:

- UPDATES on the services I reviewed last year and how I've integrated them into my work (or not) as an executive coach and consultant: Tumblr, Twitter, Utterli and (on the lighter side) Don't Break the Chain.  (In this section I also reference a number of Twitter clients, but I don't discuss them in depth--more on that front later.)

- Reviews of a few NEW TOOLS I didn't discuss last year or am currently trying out: Tumblelog Facebook Application, FriendFeed, Tumblr Post Firefox Add-on, and Shareaholic Firefox Add-on.

- QUICK LOOKS at some tools I'm considering trying or have ruled out for various reasons.  This includes a number of "social network integrators" -- AlertThingy, HelloTxt, Ping.fm, Posty, and TarPipe -- as well as some assorted blog-related social tools: Blogrollr, BlogScrobbler, Lijit, Disqus, IntenseDebate, Psolenoid and Zemanta.

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UPDATES

Tumblr has become my tool of choice for sharing interesting links.  A "linkblog" like this occupies a perfect niche between my Delicious bookmarks and my blog posts here.  My bookmarks are publicly searchable, but they're intended primarily to help me keep track of resources I might otherwise forget about, and they're often related to topics that are unlikely to be of interest to others.  My posts here are original essays, and although I hope a personal voice comes through in my writing, I typically focus on topics related to executive coaching and change management consulting.  In contrast, the links I post to Tumblr are (hopefully) of interest to a wider audience, and they touch on a wide range of subjects, including a number that I'm unlikely to write about here, although they're still more tightly focused than my bookmarks.

I publish content from my linkblog in several different places.  First, I've configured Tumblr to send my posts to Twitter and to FriendFeed as updates--more on both of those services below.  I'm using script provided by Tumblr in yesterday's Interesting Links post as well as in the left-hand sidebar here (at least for now).  And I've added the Tumblelog Facebook Application, which creates a new "Tumblr" tab on my FB profile.

Two features on Tumblr I haven't yet done much with are the option to follow other people's Tumblr blogs, and the ability to customize your own blog's look-and-feel.  Tumblr generates an RSS feed for each blog, but I haven't yet bothered to find other blogs I want to keep up with, subscribe to their feeds, and integrate them into my regular reading--that seems like way too much work right now.  Tumblr allows you to aggregate blogs you're following on your Tumblr "dashboard," but I'm not inclined to work yet another web page into my routine.  And because I'm publishing my Tumblr links in so many other places, as noted above, I don't expect many people to actually visit my Tumblr page, so as long as it doesn't look too awful, I don't really care about it.

All in all, Tumblr's a great resource, and I expect to use it even more intensively in the future.  (I wouldn't mind having all my Tumblr posts tagged on Delicious as well to make it easier for me to access them in the future, but I haven't bothered to take that extra step.)

I'm sorry to say that I haven't yet come across any other executive coaches or change management consultants who are using Tumblr consistently (which isn't to say they're not out there--I haven't been looking all that hard.)  Mark McGuinness clued me in to Tumblr in the first place, but he hasn't posted there since June '08--given that he's the most web-savvy coach I know, I assume he's just channeling his energy elsewhere.

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Twitter didn't seem that compelling to me a year ago, but it's come to serve several useful purposes.  As noted above, I send any interesting links I post to Tumblr to my Twitter account.  My assumption is that if you're following me on Twitter, you're likely to be interested in links that I find interesting, and integrating with Tumblr in this way allows me to share them as easily as possible.  But I've also begun to make more use of Twitter as a social network.  I initially synched Twitter with Gmail, which allowed me to begin following nearly 200 people, but I've whittled that number down to about 50 (with the help of MyTweeple, because Twitter's admin features are pretty minimal), with an emphasis on people I know personally and/or people who share my focus on coaching and consulting.

Although you can lock your Twitter account, preventing people from following you without your approval, I allow anyone to follow me because Twitter's not reciprocal--unlike Facebook.  (One of the downsides of Facebook, particularly in the "new" FB, is the huge amount of stuff the system sends me that I'm not interested in, simply because I'm connected to people who haven't taken the time to "weed their feeds."  As a result, I'm much less likely to accept friend request on FB now and will probably begin culling that network as well.  But with Twitter, this isn't a problem because the system allows one-way relationships, so I can follow people who aren't necessarily interested in my tweets, and vice versa.  Fred Wilson recently described how he downsized his Facebook network while continuing to use Twitter and Tumblr to broadcast to a larger audience.)

I could conceivably send my Twitter updates to my Tumblr blog, but I've decided to make that a one-way channel.  The links I post to Tumblr are all (conceivably) of interest to anyone following me on Twitter, but tweets are likely to be more personal and ephemeral, and I don't really see the need to "archive" them on a linkblog.

All this said, I know I'm not using Twitter to its full potential.  We seem to be at an interesting juncture in Twitter's evolution--perhaps a classic chasm moment--when the true innovators (the Twitterati?) have become intensive users, and the early majority are just hearing about it for the first time.  Early adopters like me (who know just enough to get ourselves in trouble) are still figuring out precisely how it adds value to our lives.  I do realize I could make much more extensive use of Twitter if I found better interfaces--on the web and via my cell.

I've looked at a few web clients--TweetDeck and TweetGrid seem popular among the people I follow--but choosing one over another and getting up the learning curve hasn't been a priority.  I'm probably at a point where I need to just pick one and get on with things.

On my cell, I just realized that I can use Twitter's mobile site--the browser on my Treo 680 isn't great, but it works reasonably well (and the mobile site looks pretty good on a laptop, too.)  And I'm testing MoTwit, a Palm OS application that provides a slightly better interface to enter updates (it fills the screen, rather than limiting you to a tiny text box), as well as links to your primary Twitter pages (accessible via your mobile browser.)  If I was motivated to change my cellphone plan, I could text or SMS updates to Twitter, but they currently cost me a nickel each, which is just enough to hold down my usage.

Unfortunately, the best mobile channel for me is email--that's the main reason I've stuck with a Treo for so long--but Twitter doesn't currently allow updates via email.  There's an interesting work-around (involving a dummy Blogger account, TwitterFeed and OpenID--uh, no thanks) and some third-party apps like TwitterMail, EmailTwitter, and MessageDance (which offers more extensive social network integration as well), but I haven't tried any of them yet.  (Although my next post on the subject will probably be a review of all these options.)

There are few coaches and consultants I follow on Twitter who seem to have sorted it out, and Pam Fox Rollin is first among them--she seems to have a perfect feel for this new medium.  Eric Pennington, Kristen Beireis, and Mark McGuinness (that's where he's been!) are also well worth following.

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Utterli (formerly Utterz) is, among other things, an easy way to 1) record a conversation using your phone and generate an audio file on the web, 2) add a photo or other contextual data, and 3) share it as a podcast.  It works well for this purpose, but the admin and network controls leave something to be desired--for example, I'd like to have more control over who can view certain files.

But Utterli is more than just an auto-podcasting service--it's really a "social network integrator" (much more on those below) or even a "rich media cross-posting platform," if you like.  You can configure it to post photos, audio and video not only to different social networks but also to multiple private blogs.  I do think it's a useful service, but I've realized that I'm a writer, not a podcaster.  And while it's nice to know it's there if I need to record an interview, I'm not going to rely on it regularly until the admin controls are improved.

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Don't Break the Chain isn't really like any of the other tools I discuss here, but it's worth noting because it's probably had the biggest impact on my life over the past year.  You simply tick off days in a calendar to create a colorful "chain" that shows how many consecutive days "you've been getting things done."  In my case I use it to track my exercise, and it's been an incredibly powerful motivator.  I've configured Firefox to open up the site as a new tab each time it launches, and I can't help but want to extend the chain every day.

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NEW TOOLS

As noted above, the Tumblelog Facebook Application allows me to add a "Tumblr" tab to my FB profile.  Pretty simple, but what's not yet clear is how best to integrate it with FriendFeed (see below), which is currently also publishing my Tumblr links to FB.  I'm not sure what advantages, if any, the FB app offers over FriendFeed.

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FriendFeed is the first "social network integrator" I encountered (although I didn't call it that then).  I started using it just over a year ago, although for some reason I didn't think to include in the first version of this post I wrote at that time.  I'm currently using FF to integrate content from this blog's RSS feed and feeds from Last.fm, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.  In theory, the content from all these feeds is aggregated on my FriendFeed page (although no content from Last.fm or LinkedIn is appearing, and I'm not sure why.)  In turn, I use the FriendFeed Facebook Application to publish some of this content to FB.  As noted above, I have some redundant links on my FB profile, and I have to take a look at which apps are posting what content to whittle it down.  (I used to have FriendFeed configured to integrate my Delicious bookmarks and publish them on FB, but that was way too much unnecessary content.)

As you might expect, FriendFeed also allows you to subscribe to your...wait for it...friends' feeds.  But I really have no idea how my current network of friends on the service became established, and I just unsubscribed from most of their feeds, leaving only a handful to experiment with.

FriendFeed's been useful as a FB publishing app, operating in the background, but I'm certainly not using it to its full potential.  I'm getting enough content from my various networks via FB and Twitter at the moment, so I don't really want more--but given how much useless stuff I have to wade through on both of those networks, FriendFeed may offer some way to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

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The Tumblr Post Firefox Add-on is a great way to post interesting links to my Tumblr linkblog.  The official Tumblr bookmarklet relies on the URL that's in your navigation bar at that moment, so if you're scrolling through a blog and see a post you'd like to share on Tumblr, you have to find that post's unique link and click through to it before you can use the bookmarklet.  But with the Tumblr Post add-on, you can drag-and-drop any link on the page to a small icon at the bottom right corner of your browser window.  I've configured it to allow me to add text and tags as well before posting to Tumblr, but even with that additional step it's faster than the official bookmarklet, and I prefer the default formatting (although the bookmarklet does give you some more flexibility in determining what text will be displayed.)

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And the Shareaholic Firefox Add-on is another way to post to Tumblr, but it's also a more full-featured social network integrator that allows you to post to nearly 30 other services as well, from bit.ly to Y Combinator.  In my case I'm testing it with bit.ly, Delicious, FriendFeed, Tumblr, and Twitter.  I love the Firefox integration--a nice drop-down menu added in the navigation bar, as well as a listing in your right-click menu--BUT apparently Shareaholic relies on the basic Tumblr bookmarklet function, so you get the same (slow) pop-up and (worse) you still have to click through to the actual page you want to post, so that the URL is displayed in your navigation bar.  It's nice to be able to post to a range of services simultanously, but Shareaholic isn't nearly as helpful as the Tumblr Post add-on.  (There's also some unintrusive but unwanted integration with Bzzster, which apparently developed this add-on.)

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QUICK LOOKS

Below are some tools I've taken a quick look at but have either rejected or haven't yet tested.

First up is a list of social network integrators that allow you to post to to multiple networks and services (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.) simultaneously.  I'm only active on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and I'm connected with different people in those networks so I'm inclined to use them for different purposes (although I'm still in the process of discovering just how they differ and just what those purposes are), and--as noted above--I'm still exploring FriendFeed's capabilities, so I don't feel an urgent need to test these integrators.  That said, it's been interesting learning more about my alternatives:

AlertThingy allows you to post updates as well as to receive content from the services you select.  It also serves as an RSS reader, which is appealing.  However, it runs as a separate application, which make it a non-starter for me--I want as few apps open as possible.

HelloTxt allows you to post to over 40 services via your phone, email, IM and their Facebook app. 

Ping.fm allows you to post to over 30 services from another network, your phone, IM, or email.

Posty but it's unclear to me whether it's strictly web-based or provides access to your networks via other channels as well.

Tarpipe is another social network integrator, but with a very cool user interface (although it seems aimed at a user who's a bit more technical than I am.)

Finally, here are some assorted tools and services that I've taken a look at recently:

Blogrollr is a new service launched in the last few weeks as a result of Fred Wilson's wish for a better blogroll.  This tool supposedly* allows you to install a widget that tracks the blogs you visit and compiles a rolling list of the most popular sites and the most recent posts.  Thanks to an astounding response from Fred's commenters, Blogrollr launched just two days later.  Interestingly, this would have been a perfect application for the AttentionTrust recorder--and it's not surprising to see Stan James involved--see below.  *Unfortunately, the site crashed before I could even install the widget, so I haven't been able to try it out and don't know much other than that it looks good on Fred's site--currently just below his sidebar ads.  I'll keep trying. Their site's back up, and I was able to install their Firefox extension and set up a widget on another site. It's pretty slick and seems to be just what it's billed as: a Last.fm for blogs.

BlogScrobbler is another application developed on the fly in response to Fred's initial post--and this was created by Stan James, who developed the AttentionTrust recorder.  (The name derives from AudioScrobbler, the application that underlies Last.fm, because what Fred wanted to replace his static blogroll was "a Last.fm for blogs"--in other words, a dynamically generated "playlist" of the posts and sites he visited most often.)  BlogScrobbler is a Firefox extension that tracks your blog reading habits within certain parameters (recording a site only after you've been there for 15 seconds, for example), and then sends a list of "scrobbled" posts to a Twitter account.  You have to create a display of your scrobbled post data using one of the many Twitter widgets out there.  Very interesting stuff, and it was nice to learn a little about what Stan's been up to as a result, but it involves a bit more "bolting together" than I feel like dealing with at the moment.  (Which is why I'm an early adopter, not an innovator.)

Lijit is a social network search service that allows you to create a customized search box for your users that includes content from your site, your social networks, and any other sites you designate (such as your blogroll) in the results.  Lijit was founded several years ago by...Stan James!  (It's hard to believe that I haven't been in touch with him since my AttentionTrust days and then ran across his name on three projects in a single post.)  I created an account at that time but never actually set up a Lijit search box--I'm currently trying it out on a test site to see if it's worth including alongside my site's standard Google search box.

Disqus and IntenseDebate are blog comment services that offer a variety of features that improve upon the (very) basic functionality offered by, in my case, TypePad.  Both services improve the user experience for the commenters, but they also allow your commenters to interact as members of a social network, in a sense, and it seems to me that the service that succeeds in encouraging a critical mass of commenters to register will win.  This isn't a high priority for me right now, and I'm not ready to ask my commenters to choose one over the other--I'd rather follow the market on this one--but if TypePad doesn't make some improvements in this area, I'll take a closer look at implementing one of them.

Psolenoid allows you to reciprocally connect your blog posts to related posts by other bloggers.  I appreciate the potential value of a network of people writing on related topics, established through a series of direct connections between specific blog posts, but at this point it doesn't seem worth testing to me.  Both you and the other person need to have Psolenoid accounts activated on your site, you have to manually establish the connection between any two posts, and it looks like it'll add some clutter to the bottom of the post.

Zemanta is a browser extension (for Firefox, IE and others) that suggests "tags, links, photos and related articles" when you're composing a blog post and when you're using a web-based email service.  Their demo is fascinating, and I appreciate not only the potential time-savings but also (if true) the range of purported benefits, such as their claim that their suggested tags will improve your SEO.  That said, I haven't tried it out yet--it looks like it adds some clutter to your blog posts, and (at least at this point) I actually like taking the time to "hand-roll" my posts, without content that's automagically created for me.

Pre-Blogging as a Motivational Tool

My friend Agnes Le has come up with a great motivational technique: Write a blog post about an important accomplishment before you actually do it. For lack of a better term, I'm calling this "pre-blogging."

Last week Agnes ran the 50-kilometer (30+ miles) Villa de Madrid race, her first ultramarathon effort after several months of intensive training. She reflected back on the experience in a great blog post, and as she makes clear, the process was about much more than running a race:

I have a confession. The past 4 months, I have been focusing on ChiRunning and marathons (and talked non-stop about them, some people would say, hahaha). There is however, a "head fake", defined so beautifully by Randy Pausch in "The Last Lecture." If you have not seen his truly moving video (free on the internet) or read the book, you should not miss it. Randy describes a "head fake" as indirect learning, "when you teach somebody something by having them think they’re learning something else". In other words, key lessons people don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process.

Well, this hasn't been simply about ChiRunning and marathons, but much more. It’s about life and how to achieve your dreams.

Agnes goes on to talk eloquently about the most important lessons she learned along the way--well worth a read--and then she adds a twist:

I have another big confession to make. I wrote this entry blog three days before I ran the ultramarathon (I made some revisions today). Yes, I cheated hahaha. But who said that you could not trick your brain? See, it’s about visualizing success and acting as if it happened. I made it a reality. The professional athletes do it. These are powerful techniques to train your brain. Your brain does not like incoherence. It will find a way to bridge the gap between your imagination and reality, if you let it.

I love it. I'm reminded--yet again--of a paraphrase of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises: "Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come." And of recent neuroscience research that suggests that our performance is affected by emotions and internalized stereotypes that impact our faith in our own abilities. In other words, our beliefs about our likely success or failure can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Congratulations, Agnes, and thanks for the inspiration.

 

Photo by Morton Liebach.

Thank You to HRWorld and MBA Explorer

If you'll indulge me in a little self-promotion, I'd like to express my appreciation to HRWorld, which named this site as one of the Top 100 Management and Leadership Blogs, and to MBAExplorer, which named it as one of the Top 50 Business Professor Blogs.  (As the latter makes clear, I'm not a prof, but my work as an executive coach at Stanford certainly gives me a good perspective on how B-schools are addressing leadership development and experiential learning.)

I'm honored by the recognition, humbled to be listed with such brilliant thinkers...and inspired to end my leisurely summer blogging schedule and get back to work.

I encourage you to check out these lists, and I'd specifically like to direct you to Bob Sutton, one of the most thoughtful and inspiring writers on management out there.  He's a perfect example of an academic who uses every channel at his disposal--books, articles and his blog--to reach a popular audience and spread his ideas among the culture at large.

Photo by Discos Konfort.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Jeff Jarvis: Agent of Coalescence

Companies and organizations that continue to resist blogging often do so because they view bloggers as isolated individuals with hidden agendas and axes to grind.

Dell initially made that mistake with Jeff Jarvis, but as Jeff noted yesterday, they're taking a different approach now:

...I had a rather infamous run-in with Dell here at Buzzmachine when I complained about a bad machine and service. They ignored me, but thousands of similarly frustrated customers did not. Dell’s attitude toward blogs at the time was “look, don’t touch.”... But things began to turn around when Dell opened a company blog, which was off to a puffy start until Lionel [Menchaca], the chief blogger, entered, speaking with customers in an honest, direct, humble, and human voice. Next they put together a team to reach out to bloggers who had problems...

It is clear, through [Lionel and his colleagues], that at least at some levels, Dell has changed its culture and certainly its attitude toward bloggers. They now see value in reaching out. As they’ve said before, bloggers tend to state their problems clearly, which makes it easier (and, I assume, more efficient) to solve them. A problem solved is not only a customer likely to be saved, but also often leads to good PR and branding as the bloggers recount their happy endings. And the Dell guys say they get information and data from this; they hear about problems that may arise before others in the company do, because their customers are talking about it...

Lionel, who came from years of customer service and PR at the company, said the team working on the blog and with bloggers loves it. Aren’t there a few people out there who just can’t be satisfied, no matter what you do? Lost causes? Bozos? They agreed that there are a few and the outreach people don’t always say yes to their demands. But my drinking companions agreed that in an open forum, other folks tend to know who the bozos are. And the bozos tend to stand alone.

That, you see, was the real moral to my story. Whether or not I was a bozo, I did not stand alone. My story wasn’t about me but the people around me, the ones who said, “me, too.” I was merely the agent of coalescence. That’s what you have to watch for on the internet. That’s what the internet enables. [emphasis mine]

The "agent of coalescence"--I love that phrase.  It may have been easier for Jeff to step into that role because he's a big-name blogger with a sizeable readership, and because he tapped into frustrations shared by thousands of Dell customers, but any one of us can do the same, albeit on a smaller scale.

We blog because we care, passionately, about something.  And thanks to the live web, others who share that passion will find us.  If we're not bozos, they'll join us--they'll say "me, too," in any number of ways.  This is how movements and constituencies and networks of all sorts are built today--they form around agents of coalescence.

Which leads me to two questions: If you're blogging, how might you serve more effectively as an agent of coalescence on behalf of a cause you're passionate about?  And if you're a company or organization, how might you identify and engage those agents of coalescence who are passionate about what you do?

Photo of Jeff Jarvis by Doc Searls.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.