Global Neighbourhoods

Ernie Safe and Somber in Jennings, LA

Ernie the Attorney has finally managed to get out of New Orleans, with friends and a dog. He's in Jennings, wherever that is.  And he sounds like the experience has been an ordeal, even though he isn't saying so. There is something about having someone you care about enmeshed in a disaster that makes your day-to-day work feel less relevant.

Loic Poses in the Nude

Those French are so daring.  I had no idea he was so hairy.

In Search of Google

It was with mixed feelings that Naked Conversations singled out Google on several times as one of the worst companies when it comes to blogging. You can find their corporate blog easily enough but I don't want to flatter it with a blog.

I was talking about Google with my friend Richard Brandt who is writing a book about Google.  Richard knows more about Google than I do.  He believes that they are doing better than I do.  He believes more in their integrity than I do and he feels more comfortable as an individual investor than I do.

But he agrees  with my contention: "They just won't talk to anyone.  They keep their investors in the dark.  They keep everyone in the dark and it is hurting them terribly.

You bet it is.  I was just reading John Battelle's blog and he was covering Google Print, where he commented: "I've asked to speak to someone at Google about this, because this sure sounds like a lawsuit is the next step, if Google does not do more to appease them." Battelle is also writing a book primarily about Google and overall is a great admirer of the company.

But all too often, I'm seeing comments about people wanting to talk to the company and getting nada in return.  Google can have all sorts of great reasons to remain mum on why it is getting cozier with advertisers and China, but it's demise may come from the sheer arrogance of acting as though it need not be accountable for its actions.

Ernie, Katrina & Reya Sunshine

Ernie the Attorney is alive and dry in Katrina's wake down in New Orleans. In an area without electrocity, he's using SMS on his cellphone to a "trusted friend," who is posting Ernie's first person reports.  Although, she gives her real name away to the close observer, the relayer, is using the pseudonym of "Reya Sunshine," a nice touch in a hurricane aftermath.

I've read a couple of complaints today that bloggers in New Orleans have not been as prolific as bloggers in other recent crises, even though Technorati lists over 50,000 postings so far. Let me give a hint as to why.  No electricity.  No phones.  No goats to run on treadmills to kick up the generators.

technorati tag: Katrina

Last Chance to be Acknowledged

I am about to wrap up acknowledgements and send them off to our editor so we can make the Aug. 31 hard deadline.  If you have sent me an email or posted here, we have your names and they will be added.  If you feel you should be included, pleaser let me know within the next hour or forever hold your peace.

Blogging Church Book by Storch and Bailey

We interviewed Brian Bailey of the Fellowship Church in Dallas for Naked Conversations, and posted the full interview on this blog. This brought it to the attantion of our publisher who thought a book about a blogging church would be a good idea. So Brian and his boss, Terry Storch are writing the book and Wiley will publish it.  Storch and Bailey have podcast about it here. They will soon be text posting as well.

Robert and I are happy to have been a small part of making this happen. Good luck to you both.  I hope writing a book brings you as much joy as it has Robert and me.

Blog-Centered Marketing

Chris Shipley, executive producer for the prestigious DEMO conferences called me on the day, that I was doing final edits to the final Chapter of Naked Conversations.  It was slowly dawning on me that I would soon be unemployed. Chris asked me if I could help, this start up--Ojos get ready to presented at the upcoming DemoFall.  It was the sort of work that I have been doing for years.  I've had my share of successes helping start ups get ready to tell the world their story.  But after writing a book, helping a client prepare and rehearse for a six-minute Demo demonstration, might pay the bills, but it didn't not fill me with joy, the way writing the book had done.

The client was Munjal Shah.  I immediately liked him.  I enjoy determined, smart, passionate people who are trying to implement visions with technology, making both themselves and the world just a little richer.   For 25 years, I've been working with tech entrepreneurs and remain in amazement of how technology keeps tweaking the way things are. In the case of Ojos it automates finding the photos you want.  It recognizes every shot I have of my wife Paula, once I show it Paula in one picture. So, I began this project with ambivalence.  For me, presentation trainings have become old old hat but  promising startups remain my passion.

After two weeks, it became clear that all the passion in the world would not make this product ready to shine on the dais on Sept. 19 at Demo.  The company was trying to beat its own development schedule to be ready for a conference, a tactic that proves to be a mistake more often than not. Munjal proved himself to be a pragmatist.  He backed out of the conference, forfeiting a very substantial financial penalty.

This is where my story with Ojos probably should have ended, but instead, it's where it actually began.  A pivotal moment came on our last Demo meeting, when Munjal told me how important the blogging community was to his success status.  He told me that he considered favorable comments by Robert Scoble to be more important to Ojos than a favorable column by Walt Mossberg. This left me with my mouth agape.  It took me another day to realize that blogging had come this far, at least when it comes to end user technology.  A cool way to search for and find your photos was more important than a column in the Wall Street Journal.

So, when I went over to see Munjal for what is generally called the "exit interview," he asked me to stay on.  Instead of helping him with a traditional launch, there would be no traditional launch. Instead, there would be a conversation that he would start, and other would join.  And in that conversation, marketing would happen.

I recently learned that the blogosphere could help me write a better book.  I believe Ojos is about to learn how the blogosphere can help them build a better product. Hopefully, the blogosphere will help them find the kind of user evangelists that have proven so powerful for the FireFox guys.

Munjal has started to blog.  He calls it "Recognizing Deven." Deven is his son and the title is exactly what Ojos does in the pictures. He also has hired Rogue Marketing's awesome Tara Hunt who found out about the position on a blog I posted here earlier. Hopefully other members of the Ojos team will also join this conversation as it moves along.

What Ojos has started is a blog-centered marketing program.  It will be forced to comply with the authenticity and transparency that the blogosphere demands. Munjal is new to blogging but, like most bloggers, he figures that he will figure it out as he goes along and the blogosphere will help him.  I think the reverse is also true.  Businesses are struggling with how to use blogging in a way that benefits their company, and doesn't simultaneously piss off the blogosphere. It will be fun to see how this develops.  It will be fun to be a part of it.

Ernie in the Eye of the Storm

Last year, my friend Buzz Bruggeman got hit hit four times by hurricanes hitting his home base of Winter Park, Fla. Last night, he called me to tell me that now our mutual friend Ernie the Attorney Svenson is weathering out the siege of New Orleans in his father's condo which is in a seemingly solid building. Ernie is featured in Naked Conversations Chapter 6--Consultants Who Get it. Buzz says Ernie was trading SMS with Ernie all Last night. Ernie, I look forward to reading your report on how you survived it, with your usual touch of humor.

Acknowledgements--Any Omissions?

So far, we have had two suggested additions--Halley Suitt who played a key role in Tom Peters writing our very brief forward, and David Parmet who helped us reconstruct the incredible story of English Cut.

We will be turning the acknowledgments over to the publisher tomorrow.  Are there any other people we omitted.  Please let me know.  It is fine to self-nominate yourself.

Acknowledgement--Thanks to You All

We would like to thank all of the people who gave us constructive input through the blogosphere in the last six months. It is logitically a daunting task and below is draft #1. It includes most of you who left us comments.  As we completed it, we realized that we had not followed track backs.

Also, we eliminated any Comments that were not clearly from real humans.  If you left an email and no URL, we eliminated the email address, but will restore it upon your request. If we overlooked you, please let us know.  There is still time to add names. If you gave us a link and missed you, please also tell us and we will add you in.

Also, this chapter needs to be edited into hardcopy so the links are to the right of your name, rather than hyperlinked.

Acknowledgements

The authors give special thanks and undying gratitude to:

• Howard Israel, for teaching his baby brother a passion for books.
• Charlie O’Brien, an eternal friend and mentor.
• Andy Ruff for having the idea that became Naked Conversations.
• Buzz Bruggeman http://buzzmodo.typepad.com/buzznovation , the Connection King for bringing Scoble and Israel together.
• Dave Winer http://www.scripting.com and Dori Smith http://www.backupbrain.com for getting Scoble interested in blogging to begin with.
• Vic Gundotra http://www.vicgundotra.com for taking a deep business risk on hiring Scoble into Microsoft.
• Loic LeMeur http://www.loiclemeur.com/english, for opening Europe to us, and giving us some of our favorite business stories.
• Six Apart for extraordinary cooperation throughout this project.
• Cluetrain Manifesto’s authors Doc Searles, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and Christopher Lock for inspiring this book long before we dreamed of writing it.
• Ernie Svenson, http://www.ernietheattorney.net/ernie_the_attorney for giving us our funniest moment. As he told us how he loved technology, the phone line went dead.
• Jill Fallon http://www.estatelegacyvaults.com/legacy for contributing the most interesting story that did not fit into our book.
• Brewster, Shel’s loyal companion and Kinko, who shared his workdesk.
• Jim Minatel http://wroxblog.typepad.com/minatelfor being a friend as well as an editor.
• Joe Wikert http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe for being right about publishers and authors being partners and for picking up the Valentine's dinner tab
• Faithe Wempen http://wempen.typepad.com/sycamore_notes our copy editor who proved she is well-named.
• Steven Streight http://www.vaspersthegrate.blogspot.com who posted nearly as many words to our blog as we did.
• To the denizens of the blogosphere of you who left intelligent, constructive and useful comments:

Pete Dawson, http://peterdawson.typepad.com; Adam Barr, http://www.proudlyserving.com ; Al Cannistraro, http://www.happinessgym.com; Alek Komarnitsky http://www.komar.org , Alex Bishop, http://www.mozillazine.org ; Allan Jenkins http://allanjenkins.typepad.com ; Amy Bellinger, http://www.learnandteachonline.com/pmach/weblog.php ; Austin White, http://austinwhite.typepad.com ; DL Byron, http://clip-n-seal.com ; BL Ochman http://whatsnextonline.com ; Bill Riski, http://radio.weblogs.com/0108035 ; Bill Lazar, http://www.billsaysthis.com.

Blaine Moore http://www.runtowin.com ; Brian Bailey http://www.leaveitbehind.com ; Bruce DeBoer http://www.synthesiscreative.com/blog.php ; Christopher Carfi http://socialcustomer.typepad.com ; Constantin Basturea, http://blog.basturea.com ; Curt Hopkins, http://morphemetales.blogspot.com ; Darren Rowse, http://www.problogger.net ; Dave Briggs http://davebriggs.net ;

Dave Copithorne, http://www.hearingmojo.com ; David Tebbutt, http://teblog.typepad.com ; Dick Kusleika, http://www.dicks-blog.com ; DJ Coffman, http://yirmumah.net ; Dossy, http://dossy.org ; Elisa Camahort, http://workerbeesblog.blogspot.com ; Elizabeth Grigg, http://www.egrigg9000.com/mtpub ; Ephraim Cohen, ; Eric Eggertson http://www.mutually-inclusive.typepad.com/weblog ; Eric Schmenk.

Evan Erwin, http://www.misterorange.com ; Gautam Ghosh, http://gauteg.blogspot.com ; Geoff Jones http://www.geoffjones.com ; Hugh Macleod, http://www.gapingvoid.com ; Jack Nork, http://www.mason23.com/jack ; James Cherkoff, http://www.collaboratemarketing.com ; James Governor, http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor ; Jeaneane Sessum, http://allied.blogspot.com ; Jeremy C. Wright http://www.ensight.org ; Jim McGee, http://www.mcgeesmusings.net ; Joel Schultz http://www.joelschultz.com ;

Johan van Rooyen http://www.spanishpodcasting.com ; johnmoore http://brandautopsy.typepad.com ; Johnnie Moore http://www.johnniemoore.com/blog ; Jory Des Jardins http://www.jorydesjardins.com ; Josh Hallett http://hyku.com/blog ; Joshua Allen http://www.netcrucible.com/blog.

Jozef Imrich http://amediadragon.blogspot.com ; Justin Gardner http://www.kozoru.com; Kathy Sierra, http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users ; Ken Dyck, http://www.kendyck.com ; Larry Borsato. http://larryborsato.com ; Larry Hendrick http://www.sanleon.net/blog ; Laura Blaugra http://blaugra.typepad.com ; Lisa Williams, http://www.cadence90.com/wp ; Marc Orchant http://office.weblogsinc.com ; Marc Snyder, http://emm-ess.blogspot.com.

Marcus M. Sommer, http://marcussommer.blogspot.com ; Markus Pirchner, http://www.futurebytes.at ; Michael Kaplan, http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap ; Mike Torres, http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/PersonalSpace.aspx ; Nancy White, http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/onfacblog.htm ; Nick Toop ; Niti Bahn, http://nitibhan.typepad.com/perspective . Dennis E. Hamilton, http://orcmid.com/blog ; Paul Hanson ; Paul Morriss http://little-bits.blogspot.com ; Paul Woodhouse http://butlersheetmetal.com/tinbasherblog.

Phil Jones http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia ; Phil Weber http://www.philweber.com ; Randy Charles Morin http://www.kbcafe.com ; Rich Westerfield, http://tsmi.blogs.com ; Roy Blumenthal, http://schmucknews.blogspot.com ; Russell Beattie, http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook ; Sam Katz; Sarah,http://theeditroom.blogspot.com; Shannon Clark, http://searchingforthemoon.blogspot.com/; Shelley Powers, http://weblog.burningbird.net ; Shital Shah,http://www.shitalshah.com/blog.

Simon Harriyott, http://www.harriyott.com ; Sriram Krishnan, http://blogs.msdn.com/sriram ; Steve Garfield, http://stevegarfield.com ; Steve Newson, http://stevenewson.blogspot.com ; Steve Shu, http://www.steveshu.typepad.com.

Tara Hunt http://www.horsepigcow.com ; Thomas Hawk, http://thomashawk.com ; Tim Aldrich, http://firstdraft.blogs.com/altfunction ; Toby Bloomberg, http://www.bloombergmarketing.blogs.com ; Tom Guarriello, http://truetalk.typepad.com , Tom Raftery, http://tomrafteryit.net/views ; Trevor Cook, http://trevorcook.typepad.com ; Wilson Ng, http://www.bizdrivenlife.net .

Thank you one and all

BL Makes me a Star

Wow. BL Ochman just published a lengthy and very flattering report on her interview with me. I feel it is the longest and most accurate interview of me sonce this project began.

Thanks, BL

DC Mayor Starts Blog-Advised to Read Naked Conversations

Toby "the Diva" Bloomberg pointed us to a new blog by DC Mayor Anthony Williams, who commendably seems to be using it to talk candidly with his constituency.  He may be the only blogger to use a photo with a bow tie, but we like what has to say.

Even more than that, we just love the fact that Bill Riski posted a comment advising him to read our book when it comes out. Bill wrote:

"...I know your busy, but would suggest a new book for your reading list (coming out soon). "Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers" by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Excellent read about blogging and its impacts. "

Thanks so much, Bill we are honored by your recommendation.

Google Names RSS Feeds "Web Clips"

I'll let the geeks among you argue the virtues and vices of the new Google Desktop and it's sidebar.  Personally I thought it was kind of cool during my brief introductory play period last night.

What I thought was extremely cool and useful and will move new technology faster into the mainstream was Google's renaming of RSS Feeds into "Web Clips."  The very last struggle in the book was explaining RSS, and aggregators and feeds; syndication and subscriptions.  It was a real challenge and I kept feeling like there had to be a better way to say it.

Web clips does just that.

Naked Conversations--It's a Wrap!

About one minute ago our editor Faithe Wempen approved our final chapter.  The book is now officially accepted by the publisher. Hey Minatel--get those checks processed. I feel like dancing.

BTW--don't tell Scoble.  I want to surprise him. 

Dell Hell or an attempt to fool Shel?

A while ago, I posted my reasons for deciding to stop buying Dell products.  Recently I received a comment that linkedme to a very clever Michael Moore parody from someone whose Dell Hell story is up there with Jarvis and Ochman. I posted about it over at ItSeemstoMe.  But there is a question of is it real--or am I being duped?

I really don't know the answer because I can't determine who posted the great video blog that you'll see if you click through.

The Diva Reviews Life in the Blog Lane

Toby Bloomberg, our favorite proponent of character blogs, has a great brief history of her life so far in the blogosphere.  It's a good read.

Is Blogging Anti-marketing?

My mind is still filled with conversations I heard at the Blog Business Summit.  Some comments overflow with one of those periodic inward searches we all go through. My current (late) midlife crisis is this:  I spent half a lifetime as a marketing consultant.  I am now completing a book that a few people at BBS called anti-marketing.

I joke about being a "recovering publicist," and it usually gets a smile.  But I still believe in marketing as I perceived it to be when I first went into the field.  It was about relationships with people.  When Cluetrain came along and etched blogging's anthem of "Markets are conversations," my lightbulb was that you could not have a relationship without having a simple conversation and marketing had somehow or other lost sight of this self-evident truth.

So am I now a recovered sinner, evangelizing a new anti-business, anti-corporate Reformation Church? I stuggle with this. But Evelyn Rodriquez helped me resolve it with her BBS talk that should have been the keynote:

"You may be surprised that I chose a public marketplace as the metaphor for the blogosphere. With everything you might have heard you’d think the blogosphere is anti-business. And it’s scary for businesses.

That’s not exactly true. But, yes, it is a response to the depersonalization - the dehumanization - of commerce. "

Thanks Evelyn. It helps me resolve the issue.  I am pro-marketing.  I am pro-business. I am even pro-profits.  But I oppose corporate dehumaizanization.  When companies, marketers, lawyers, PR operatives and voice automation customer response systems get in the way of personal relationships, I oppose it.

This may be a boring blog.  But it was useful to me.  Thanks, Evelyn.

Are Google and Apple Bullies?

David Kirkpatrick in Fortune Magazine asks, "Google and Apple: Are They Media Bullies?"

"These tech darlings are acting as though they don’t understand how the Internet has changed journalism—and our lives. Maybe they should take PR lessons from Microsoft. "

I just came accross this thoughtful article, a couple hours after posting "5 Reasons to Worry about Google" in my personal blog.  I think we're going to be seeeing a lot more articles of this nature about these two historic tech company darlings who lately are showing tendencies to show their warts in public.

How we count to 100

Andrew at Changing Way raised an interesting point in an earlier comment about our 100 autograph plates. We will autograph bookplates for all the books the first 100 people who order from us.  That's 100 people, not 100 books. Also you have to notify us to be on the list. We only see the orders that go to Amazon via this blogsite.  We don't see the names and if you pre-order directly from Amazon we won't even see that count until we get the quarterly returns.

So we will have to get your addresses and numerical counts from you by email.  Please wait a few weeks until we finish certain book details like ARs (author reviews) and fact checking challenges which come later.

We're kind of making up this process as we go along, so please bear with us.

How We Can Sign Your Naked Conversations

A while ago, I promised to sign the first 100 copies of Naked Conversations. After making the promise, we realized that this commitment was a logistical nightmare and that shipping 100 books one at a time, would probably cost more than what we get in royalties.

Our Acquisition Editor Jim Minatel, our main contact at Wiley, who has been a prince through this entire relationship, came up with a solution that I think will work just fine.  Wiley will provide a special sticker.  Robert and i will sign each one with a personal message, ten mail to you.  The sticker will be insertable to the front leaf of the book.

How does this sound to you? 

A Great Day at Blog Business Summit

Blog Business Summit today.  It was my first business socializing in six months since I started writing the book and I was fortunate to pick such a winner.

I used a BIC pen this morning to unshackle myself from my desk, where my publisher had staked me until I finished the sometimes tedious author revisions (ARs) and snuck up to San Francisco where I enjoyed remarkable shmoozing and speakers at the

Evelyn Rodriquez, was eloquent as the lead-off speaker extending the Cluetrain metaphor of markets as conversations by visually sketching the sights and feel of ancient marketplaces in Greece and Mexico as well as Santa Fe, likening blogs today as the new marketplaces. Click on her name to enjoy the full text. PubSub's Bob Wyman nailed a Kryptonite point that I've been struggling to articulate during my ARs and kept missing. He said, " You can’t really criticize them for not listening to the blogosphere at the time the incident occurred. Kryptonite got blindsided and by not knowing what to do, they showed others who would come after them what to do." He's earned the dubious distinction of being quoted in our Chapter called, "Doing it Wrong."

My friend Buzz Bruggeman, was at the top of his presentation game in presenting his case study which explained how Activewords has leveraged the blogosphere to thrive after having spent about $600 on marketing in three years.  Up to 70 percent of the company's downloads are connected to blogging in some way, and my partner Scoble was just awesome in multiple performances. He shared the dais with Textura Design's DL Byron an event co-producer and the guy behind ClipNSeal. I interviewed DL for the book by phone and email, but we had not met previously and I loved having the chance to chat with him.  We discovered we were both raised middle class and shared an early love for libraries.

Blogging has clearly changed the way people interact. What happened with DL and me was happening all over the place.  People who never met were treating each other like old friends. It made the experience one of the best networking experiences I've seen at a conference in a very long time.

Blogging itself has changed. Last year, I saw a great number of geeks, pounding the chest of the beast talking about how great it's going to be.  This year , at least at this conference, the audience was filled with serious mid-level representatives of a wide variety companies struggling with how to use blogging effectively to the interests of their businesses.

Technorati Link: BBS05, blogbusinesssummit

Blog Business Summit

I'll be at the Blog Business Summit tomorrow.   I understand some guy named Scoble (like he needs this link) is speaking there and I never know what he's going to say next, so I have to go. If you're going to be there, let me know, so we can meet. I'll be the old guy in the second or third row.

Amazon Affilliation

If you look way down on our right hand column, you will find our little Amazon Affiliate icon.  Perhaps some day, we'll figure out how to get it to display more prominently. In any case, if you wish to pre-order a copy of Naked Conversations, please click through on the icon.  Robert and I do slightly better financially that way. Thanks all for a most supportive first day.

We're on Amazon. People are Ordering!

Raanan Avidar over at Murphy's Law left a comment this morning and it was the first I knew that you could pre-order Naked Conversations on Amazon.com. What a thrill.  We haven't finished ARs (Author Revisions) yet, and their is no jacket design, but

And people are ordering, I understand.Amazon already ranks us at 934, 760, so we have some room for improvement I guess.  But nevertheless what a thrill. Robert and will both autograph the first 100 copies of the book as I said previously, but we still need to work out the logistics on that one.If you are interested in pre-ordering, please wait a day or so while Robert and I figure out how to make this site an Amazon affilliate.  We make out a little better that way.

Now a correction--and a bunch of thanks.

Pete Dawson, sorry you were not the first. Jeremy Wright ordered three books before you did and I flaked on it because I was still finishing up the final chapter.  And Jeremy is also going to be first with a book. His Blog Marketing can also be pre-ordered at Amazon and is available in October. Both Pete and Jeremy are Canadians and they are our first two customers.  Let's hear for hands accross that Northern border. Mike Saint, a personal friend of 35 years--we were both reporters at the Quincy (MA) Patriot Ledger is our first American customer and he's buying 20 copies. Let's hear it for American-sized volume purchases. So we are on the way.

Oh what a beautiful morning.

Can Anyone Recommend a Good Speaker's Agent?

I was about to sign a contract with a speaker's agent who had come highly recommend from someone I trusted. At the last minute I got cold feet, for no good reason other than it just didn't feel right. Maybe I'll sign with him in the end, but I'd like to look around.

Does anyone know a good speaker's agent? From everything I hear, this is at least half of the business of being an author, and it is something new to me. I want someone who understands why blogging is a hot topic and "Naked" is not necessarily a dirty word.

And, if in the meantime, you know of a venue that seems appropriate, I've learned a great deal about an important topic and I would like to share some of it with live audiences.

Pete Dawson Was the First

Pete Dawson of "slash PD" and Thought Flickr's fame has just ordered 10 copies of Naked Conversations for shipment when available in January. We have promised to autograph them, which Robert and I will be thrilled to do. In fact, we like the idea so much that Robert and I will autograph the first 100 books requested.

We don't yet know the price, but it should be somewhere around $25 each plus shipping.

Thanks Pete! You will always be the first.

$100m VC Fund for RSS companies started

Silicon Valley Reporter's Tom Foremski reports:Jim Moore and John Palfrey have launched RSS Investors with $100m of capital. It is the first VC fund with a focus on Really Simple Syndication, (RSS), the syndication technology at the heart of media technologies such as blogging and corporate news communication.

This shows that at least in some sectors, venture money is getting smarter after several years of demonstrating it had less vision than Ray Charles.

I also heard from a pretty reliable source that Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, an esteemed VC firm that has always had the smartest of teams, will soon start podcasting. To my way of thinking, that would be more valuable than an hour with Dawn and Drew.

Encouraging Words from the Publisher

Joe Wikert heads the group that will be publishing Naked Conversations. He led the group that flew to Scottsdale to talk Robert and me into going with John Wiley & Sons as our publisher. Into their hands we've commended our book and our dream. Joe started a blog at Robert's urging and it has been quite successful.  Joe's good at blogging. It's very nice to read that the publisher is as high on the book as we finish it as they sounded before we actually started it. And so are the sale folk.

Chapter 15: The Conversational Era

I can't believe we wrote the whole thing.  Here is our final chapter, and, I might add, a whole day ahead of deadline.

The Conversational Era

“It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.”       —New York Times editorial Aug. 5, 2005

Sometimes, a tool is just a tool.  During our lifetime, hammers have changed very little. If we wrote a book about them, and took years to write it, not much would have changed. Most tools are like that, but not so blogs. In the space of the six months it took to write Naked Conversations, innovations to blogs and the blogosphere were relentless. The number of bloggers more than doubled from under 7.5 million users to over 15 million. Someone started a blog once every second today and about every two seconds someone else abandoned one. We were constantly aware that we were writing about a moving target. We had to delay completing a chapter on blogging in a crisis, because a crisis occurred.  A few weeks later, we had to delay completing our emerging technology chapter, because new social media enhancements emerged.

Naked Conversations tried to keep focused on business and how blogging and social media are changing the relationships between companies and their constituencies. We offered a great number of tips and case studies that would should remain relevant despite the constant changes.  Our sense is that the business community’s attitude toward blogging has changed from when we started. Back in February, business people dismissed blogging as just a passing fad. This was the denial phase. Then we detected a certain level of anger about blogs as a distraction, about them interrupting systems in place that were allegedly best practices. We even had an enraged CEO tell us that blogs were a scam used to cheat on search engine results. Now, business people understand that blogs are here to stay and companies need to figure out how to incorporate them into the way they communicate. We hope Naked Conversations will help people make the right decisions for their companies.

We argued in our Introduction that blogs are part of a revolution, something bigger than the blogosphere and a great number of people disagreed, positioning the phenomenon as an evolutionary nicety. We believe it is something more fundamental then that, something that shifts the balance of relationships of companies and the communities in which they operate.  Like the dotcom area, a few companies will emerge from the blogosphere to become giants and others will fade. Businesses will shift where they invest resources both financial and human as a matter of cost effectiveness.  Marketing budgets will be cut and perhaps more money will be redirected to both product development and customer support, not to mention better return for investors.  We have already witnessed the meteoric shifts in who influences markets and why they do it.  We have continued to struggle with what to call this thing bigger than blogging and we’ll get to that in a minute.

Naked Conversations has not been an objective report. We as blog champions—evangelists convinced that all businesses should blog and to warn that many businesses that don’t might perish. This, we learned along our way, was slightly overstated. We had underestimated the influence of culture, both in businesses and countries.  Quite simply, some are open and others are closed. Some leaders trust those under their watch. Others don’t. And that becomes increasingly important as more people realize that corporate blog policy—written or implied—tell outsiders a great deal about how a company sees its employees as well as its customers.

Culture cannot be overestimated in discussing social media. And as technologies continue to emerge, we will find some companies will be heard in one area and remain silent in another. Adam Curry, who works with Apple Computer, told us Steve Jobs will soon podcast, even as he continues to discourage his own employees from blogging about their jobs. “Blogging is just not in the company DNA,” he shrugged, “but Jobs, likes podcasts. Some entities, we are certain, just won’t be a part of this revolution. Those with the power to change a particular culture, will keep their heels dug into the status quo. Not all prominent non-blogging companies decline or fall. But most will perceived in the public eye as less interesting or relevant.

Companies that discourage blogging, such as Google, are starting to lose talented people and are revealing other cracks in their veneers. When we began this project, the foremost search company was undeniably the most admired in personal technology. Perhaps it still is, but we sense to a diminished degree. We think a contributing factor is its consistently mediocre corporate blog. Discouraging employees to blog does not build internal morale or attract talented people. Russell Beattie a luminary blogger, walked out of Google while waiting for an interview because, he said, the culture felt closed to him and the people he met felt arrogant. He subsequently joined Yahoo a company that encourages him and other employees to blog. More recently Google announced it would banish CNET over what seemed to be a petty matter. Either of the incidents alone would be of little interest.  But add to it, the perception that Google’s company blog is among the most mundane, the perception starts building that Google is a less open culture than most people presumed. It will be a long time before this darling of investors and Internet searchers will be in trouble, and before it happens the company has ample time to wisely change its course. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

But if blogging is truly part of a revolution, will it be bloodless? We see a clear and present danger for practitioners of traditional, one-direction advertising, marketing. We see its champions in a change or die situation. Blogging and the social media are steadily pounding a silver spike into the heart of it.  In its place is this new phenomenon in which customers and companies settle in on a more even plain, where they use the casual language of the simple unadorned conversation. Most people trust such voices more than the ones broadcast in a 60-second spot.

This fundamental change repositions customers from the edge of the corporation to their rightful place in the center.  This new customer-centric positioning is a refreshing contrast to company’s seeing customers as no more than pairs of sticky eyeballs.

Yes, there is a leap of faith required in buying our argument. The customer, in fact is not always right. Sometimes their demands are unreasonable. Sometimes they are rude in tone and most companies we spoke with voiced concerns with being verbally assaulted in public. Both Israel and Scoble have recently experienced this in blog comments and neither of us enjoyed it.  But we’ve learned, that even when customers are dead wrong, listening will make a company smarter. And demonstrating that you are listening politely will put the majority of observers on your side.  It’s human nature, and blogging seems to be shaped by human nature.

We are not preaching wide-eyed altruism, here. This is about business, efficiency and profit. Blogging is smart business. Blogging is cheaper and more effective than most marketing programs in use today. Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz told us he could reach more people through his blog than would a full page ad in a trade magazine—and they could reach him as well. Customers loved Firefox so much they chipped in to a two-page ad in the New York Times, and consequently learned that blogging was a more effective way to get more customers, and it cost a whole lot less.  British tailor Thomas Mahon used a blog to increase his business by 300 percent in a few months and make him the best-known member of his profession. Andrew Carton has more visitors to his Treo blog than the companies who make the device and its software combined and he has become more influential to Treo products than executives in either company.

Blogging is unquestionably less expensive than traditional ad and PR campaigns and keeps proving—as it did to the Firefox team, to be more effective. Perhaps we overstated when we speculated that some marketing practitioners will wind up in the restaurant service industry, but some who cling too long and too hard to methods that are clearly in atrophy just might.  More will adapt.  We have little doubt many will figure out how to make their crafts, more affordable, more credible and more interactive as Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and others have done.

While we see a cultural divide forming, we also see signs of convergence and healing in the often vitriolic culture clash between the media and the blogosphere.  Less than a year ago John Markoff  the New York Times leading tech journalist was voiced skepticism about bloggers as conveyors of news. While bloggers and journalists still bump on important issues, they are both being used increasingly as information sources and technologies like Memeorandum are physically merging the two to benefit the consumers of information.

Not all our pre-suppositions panned out. We never found our blogging plumber.  Perhaps it’s a cultural matter.  Plumbers are a tight-lipped lot for the most part. . We thought we’d find a great deal of evidence of blogging to support micro markets— what Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine calls “The Long Tail,” comprised of millions of markets containing from one to a few hundred or less customers in each of them. We didn’t find them, but then in dawned on us that the tail goes on the back end of the creature, and blogging right now remains on the leading edge. The long tail will get there in time.

Small, independent merchants are part of what makes every community unique and blogging is proving to be an enormously useful tool in the hands of the independent shops and artisan. Some of the smaller enterprises we covered gave us the most inspiration. Pierre Cassard, the French T-shirt started a blog-based business that profits and grows simply by letting customers decide almost everything. The team of friendly practitioners at Yokohama’s Isshin Dental Clinic shows what a blog can do for a neighborhood business. , Ben Williams owner of Horsefeathers Restaurant-where the locals send you, uses a blog to stave off the branded chains that have encroached his turf. Grace Bonney may have been an underemployed consultant without her blog.  Instead she is a rising influence on the design industry. We are convinced that blogging offers enormous opportunities for small businesses whether they want to reach the immediate neighborhood or around the world.

A blog is an impressive tool but most people we talked with insisted that it was more than just that. People called blogs “a new communications channel,” a “credible marketing conduit,” a “disrupter of the status quo”, a “mainstream media murderer,”  and a “miracle” among other things. Textura Design’s DL Byron offered a gem of a summary at the Seattle Blog Business Summit in July 2005: “You blog, other blogs link to your blog, you link back, and Google loves that.” And while this is a good mechanical simplification, there is clearly more going on in the blogosphere.

We had thought the most appropriate term for this bigger picture was “Conversational Marketing,” but we learned it is more than that. Blogging impacts marketing, but it transcends it. It is vital not just to outbound communications, but inbound as well.  It is a crisis firefighter, a superior research aggregator, a tool for recruiting, product building, customer service and support, executive access, employee relations, customer evangelism and most interaction between companies and their constituencies. It will accomplish things of which we have not yet dreamed.

We recalled our conversation with Yossi Vardi, the adult supervisor of ICQ’s founders. He cited research that showed story telling and conversations are at the essence of human culture, are part of the continuity of it. In that light, blogging is a point on a cultural continuum that goes back all the way to when we sat in caves shivering around fires and doodling on the walls. To paraphrase Vardi, blogging is story telling and conversations on steroids.

Ultimately, blogging has ended one era and ignited another. In this new era, companies don’t win just by talking to people. Now people get to talk back. We call it the Conversational Era. It doesn’t change everything because as John Naisbitt told us, everything never changes. But something has changed and it is impacting businesses of all sizes in most parts of the developed world. It has made it a smaller faster place.

And business is the better for it.

Chapter 14--Emerging Technologies

Chapter 14 – Emerging Technology

“The future ain't what it used to be.” 
                                                  —Yogi Berra

Twenty years from now, people will look back at the blogging tools we used today and smile at how quaint they were. What will have replaced them? We haven’t a clue. Technology’s future is always filled with too many surprises. Twenty years back we saw prototypes of telephone headsets that looked like band-aids we would attach beneath our ears, letting us speak and hear through vibrations. We remember VRML technology, which was going to enable holographic versions of the people we were talking with to climb out of our computer screens and chat with us in our living rooms. These of course never happened, while so much of what we use everyday was undreamed about by most people two decades ago, including a ubiquitous Internet, WiFi camera cell phones and, of course, the iPod.

During just the six months of 2005 when we were writing Naked Conversations, applicable technologies, such as RSS and podcasting were exploding. Some have already changed our story and will change it more by the time this book becomes available. Others show great promise but are still awaiting final assembly. We’ll get to all of them in a moment, but first let’s make a brief visit to the Internet Continuum.

From Surf to Search into Syndication

In a little over 10 years, the Internet has blown through its first two phases of mass use. In late 1994, we entered the Age of Surf. Web browsers let us visit multiple Internet content sites. People were fascinated as they bopped around from one place to another. The more people surfed, the more businesses built sites to visit. Like Godin’s purple cows, the first site of nearly every category seemed remarkable at first, but in a few short years, most of them felt pretty much alike. The Internet had promised interactivity, but it turned out that it was difficult and expensive to keep updating sites, so once built it remained unchanged for long periods of time, perhaps forever. Many served as nothing more than static online brochures and were as remarkable to read as a train schedule.

During the Age of Surf, search engines were generally useless. You would request a needle and receive a haystack. Then a couple of Stanford kids came up with Google and the Age of Search arrived. Modern search engines are indeed remarkable, usually delivering the information people want to the top of the results pile. Still, there remain inefficiencies, particularly when you are trying to find the most current information. Also, the current generation of engines are good at finding what companies have to say about themselves, but not what people have to say about the companies. Looking for updated information has been tedious, requiring you to scan page-by-page to see if each page has been updated since your last visit. The average person can visit and examine about a dozen sites in this way in an hour and it is not joyful labor.

Blogs and social media are now fueling a new Age of Subscription. Instead of you going to the information, it comes to you. Instead of just having access to what the company has to say about itself, you can see what people have to say about the company. When the occur, updates are fed to you as news breaks. Blogging has fueled this change, but the enabler is RSS, the syndication technology and its full significant implications are just being realized.

Most people already know about RSS and blogs. Briefly, RSS lets you subscribe—and unsubscribe— to or from almost all blogs. When something new is posted to one of the blogs you track, the label on your subscription folder turns bold, so you clearly see there’s an update, saving you from having to go to a website and scan it. When you open a folder, you see a series of headlines, with the new ones also in bold.  Some don’t interest you and you skip right past those to the ones that do. You never leave your email client during this process, another time saver.

All this time saving adds up. If previously, you could visit and tediously scan a dozen websites, now RSS lets you power scan perhaps 100-200 in an hour, increasing what you can monitor by at least tenfold. The blogging-obsessed, like Scoble, who tracks more than 1300 RSS folders regularly,  aggregate an enormous amount of information.

Searching with RSS

The full promise of RSS becomes clearest when you see what the new RSS search engines like IceRocket, Bloglines, Technorati, PubSub and Feedster can do. If web search engines of today extract needles from haystacks of information, then the new RSS search engines deliver diamonds from coal mines and lots of them.

For example, let’s suppose you are just edging your way into the market for a new car. Twenty years ago, you started reading ads and asking friends about what they drove and liked and whether they got good deals and service. You could read 2-3 magazine reviews and maybe a consumer report. Web search engines increased your options. You could find more research than ever before. You could buy from new alternative online sites and even find the Kelly Blue Book value of your trade in vehicle. Let’s suppose, what with environmental considerations and the price of gas, you want to get a new hybrid car. But you don’t know anyone who owns one. The RSS search engines will let you see what people all over the world have to say about the cars you’re considering. You might see comments on the dealers near you. And you no longer have to treat the information you harvest from the Internet as a frame frozen in history. You get updates delivered every time someone has something new to say on any topic that you’ve told the search engine to watch on your behalf. In many ways, this is like having the personal online agent that 20 years ago, forecasters said we would all be using today.

RSS search is an area where there is great competition. In addition to the five we mentioned there are numerous new ones emerging and considerable speculation that Yahoo!, MSN and Google will soon join the fracas. When you have that level of competition, innovation abounds. In RSS search there seem to be new features add almost daily. While these companies continue to duke it out, end users keep on winning.

Spilling out of the Blogosphere

But RSS capability is not limited to the blogosphere. Almost any content page on the web can be RSS-enabled and more of them are doing so every day. BBC and the New York Times have RSS on news pages, allowing you to subscribe for home delivery into an RSS folder. The next generation of web browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Apple Safari will sense where RSS “feeds” are on web pages and allow you to subscribe with a single click, giving you all updates from that page, from that point forward and ending when you are no longer interested. These facts are significant as to how people and the entire Internet are likely to interact in the near future.

Likewise, there are numerous handy little applications becoming available all the time, each of which makes the Internet a faster, easier place to get what you need. RSS Auction notifies you when a particular product is being auctioned at a particular price on eBay. At Yaywastaken.com, Sean Nolan offers RSS feeds to notify you about  books that interest you when Amazon.com offers either new or used copies. The site performs similar services for Overstock.com bargain hunters. At Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent, you can use his free RSS code string. Add it to your FedEx tracking number and receive updates as your FedEx parcel winds its way toward its destination. Such new efficiencies are emerging fast and we assume a great deal more are on their way.

Sharks Circling the Syndicate

Unfortunately, where there is innovation, you will inevitably find direct marketers circling around until they can bite into that two percent that seem so consistently susceptible to their “amazing offers.” Direct marketers are salivating over RSS because ads can be sent out using it directly or can be embedded it into other people’s content. Such attempts have already started and we do not know how effective they have been to date, but we are certain such attempts will become increasingly aggressive and more sophisticated.

The good news is that you can just say no to direct marketing and the senders can’t do much about it. Unlike email, RSS lets the receiver, not the sender, to decide when subscriptions will terminate. The sender, at least so far, has no way to uncover who has subscribed. You never register. The sender does not capture your email address, and when you decide to unsubscribe, the sender has no way to send you something new and unwanted as direct marketers relentlessly do with email. He or she has no information on you to sell to other database marketers.

In fact, what we like best about RSS is that it recalibrates the playing field, changing the tilt from the company to the user. The customer chooses when and if to start a relationship. Through RSS, the customer gets to watch you and decide if he trusts you. The customer can make the company go away at any point and for any reason. In our hybrid car search, the customer knows more about how the car dealer operates before he or she ever steps foot into the showroom.

This new equation doesn’t mean a company loses.  If a company elects to trust prospects to make the right decisions, more are likely to become customers.  If a company is transparent on how it operates, and shows its trust of employees by letting them blog or otherwise directly converse with customers, more people will trust it.  More will become, not just new customers, but company evangelists as well. 

Into the ‘Podosphere’

After Dave Winer and Netscape compromised to give the world RSS 2.0, Winer created an additional feature that lets people subscribe to audio blogs, or podcasts. This was partially a result of collaboration with Adam Curry, the former MTV celebrity VJ, who simultaneously developed a software application downloader called iPodder to work with the new Apple device. With the two new enhancements, Curry produced the Daily Source Code , the first podcast on Aug. 13, 2004. No one knows how many people were listening at the time. Less than a year later, he had nearly 100,000 subscribers, according to Citizen Spin . In the same timeframe, C/Net estimated seven million podcasts were transmitted. This is a rate of emergence considerably faster than text blogs.

A watershed innovation was found  in an upgrade to Apple Computer’s iTunes that allowed iPod users to directly subscribe to RSS feeds. The result was that many podcasters saw their traffic quadruple overnight. By summer 2005, iTunes was offering over 3,000 programs and had become “podcast central.” Podcasting’s growth is spawned also by integration with text blogs that tell you when a new podcast is available and where you can find specific audio content.

There are business implications in two directions: (1) Curry is among several producers who are proving you can make a business of podcasting, by building networks of them. (2) Businesses have a new medium for reaching mass audiences and have several options of how to approach it.

Curry has created the Podcast Show Network. Along with the Daily Source Code, he produces 35 programs, reaching a collective audience of several hundred thousand listeners daily. He said he has been profitable from day one using a traditional media network advertising model but has taken in $8.5 million in venture capital to finance rapid growth. He will also tinker with how sponsorship works. Why? “Because ads suck. The stuff is boring and people are tuning out,” he told us. He said commercial and radio ads work on two factors: human emotions and redundancy. For example, when you're watching TV and the program reaches its climax, you can be certain that the program will segue into a commercial before you get to see the exciting conclusion. Ad redundancy is even worse. “I hate this fact, but the guy who gets elected president is the one whose campaign broadcasts the most ads and repeats them the most often,” he told us.

Curry is working on ways to use advertising less intrusively. For example, when we talked with him he was preparing to do a “back scenes” podcast on a new Spike Lee movie, in which the film producer would compensate Curry for the promotional benefits while Apple Computer would compensate Podcast Show Network for making the podcast available exclusively through iTunes downloads. There will be no direct advertising in the podcast itself and Curry is certain listeners will appreciate the eliminated intrusions.

Curry has first mover benefits in podcasting, but he is far from alone. There are numerous pioneers attempting to aggregate programs and grow. Along with at least a dozen blogosphere denizens, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR are all early players. Why all this early excitement? Because those who make forecasts are outdoing themselves predicting just how big podcasting will soon be. The BBC, which is experimenting with about 20 podcasts of their own, estimates there will be 56 million Americans listening to them by the end of 2010. Forrester Research  predicts there will be 12.3 million households listening to podcasts in 2010. These numbers don’t exactly match up, but they indicate a consensus that there will be a whole lot of people listening to podcasts over the next few years.

Just Give it Away

But does advertising have to be the support spine? There are other options and for companies wishing to reach out to either narrow specialized audiences or broad general consumer listeners, these may prove the wiser course. Doug Kaye, a successful serial entrepreneur argues that businesses may be wiser and ultimately profit more if they just give podcast content away.

When he was authoring “Loosely Coupled, the Missing Pieces of Web Services,” in 2002-3, Kaye realized the people he was interviewing knew a great deal more about web services than he did, and he would write a better book if he could stay out of the way of what his subjects had to say to his audience. That’s hard to do as a writer, and he soon realized it would be easier and more effective if you record and somehow transmit the voices of these experts. After Curry made the first podcast, Kaye soon followed by podcasting his Loosely Coupled interviews. The experiment gave birth to IT Conversations which grew into a network of tech-related podcasts. By August 2005 he also was producing about 35 programs, all addressing technology community audiences.

When we interviewed him in early August 2005, IT Conversations was using sponsorships as well as Kaye’s pockets to survive. But our sense was that his heart and mind were already pumping on his vision for “IT Conversations 2.0” a concept in which citizen-podcasters would record what people had to say from the dais of public gatherings everywhere, on all topics. Then IT Conversations would produce the audio record of what people in the front of the room told live audiences on a given day and in a given place. Program moderators would be severely limited and there would be no interviews—sort of open source podcasting—not because anyone could add or alter it—but because anyone could participate. And the podcast would be open to anyone who searched by topic, place, speaker conference, or whatever. It would be available tomorrow morning or a hundred— or thousand— years from now.

But why should business care about open source podcasting at all? Well they already do, but in a way that Kaye thinks narrowcasts their focus. He told us that most enterprise efforts treat podcasting as just a new iteration of streaming media, an Internet broadcast system that has been in use for years. The corporate ROI is found in database marketing. A distinguished speaker is hired to speak at a company-sponsored gathering. The talk is recorded and distributed over the Internet for free—with a catch. You must register, by giving your name, email and perhaps a demographic fact or two, before you can download the stream. Usually the registration form also includes a pre-checked little box, often unnoticed, that gives the company permission to send you additional information, which will be used for direct marketing purposes. A company determines the success of the broadcast in pure ROI terms— you deduct speaker and production costs from subsequent sales to determine ROI. From Kaye’s extensive experience, he estimates that at best an enterprise might entice 10,000 people to register to listen, garnering perhaps 200 actual transactions plus some resale value to the registered user database—making inadvertent participants susceptible  to receiving email they never requested, promoting products they don’t want for the remainder of the time they use that email address.

Make it up in Volume

Kaye thinks that this is short sighted, costing companies in both goodwill and sales. By replacing registration requirements with  free RSS subscriptions, a company will increase the number of listeners by as much as tenfold. If a much smaller percentage of listeners elect to purchase something from the company, the sales are still likely to be greater than the 200 that the previous model offered. If just one percent voluntarily purchased something, the result would be as much as 500 percent over the forced registration model. According to Kaye, companies have started to come around to this way of thinking. He didn’t have any case studies, yet. After all, his thinking was still a work in progress, when we spoke with him, but he told us he had recently helped BMC Software to start BMCTalk, a hosted RSS-enabled podcast that covers subjects ranging from the finer strokes of golfing to human integration problems that follow a corporate acquisition. More recently, he advised Salesforce.com on how develop a similar program that was under development when we talked to him.

An example of how it would work for the enterprise that indicated how open source podcasting might work involves his recording of speakers at PopTech, a popular conference that blends technology and sociological thinking. IT Conversations recorded Blink author Malcolm Gladwell’s talk Gladwell was well-received by 500 mostly paying attendees. Over the next 10 months, 67,000 people listened to the podcast version. Gladwell spoke for free at PopTech, even though elsewhere at the time he was receiving as much as  $40,000 per speech. By August 2005, his asking price had gone up to $60,000 and he was among the most sought after speakers on the circuit. His new book is significantly outpacing his earlier earlier book in sales. Meanwhile, even though PopTech has raised its registration rates for it 2005 conference, advance registration was running ahead of schedule. Is there a measurable quid pro quo here? It’s not provable. But one can assume that both Gladwell and the conference producers have not been hurt by just giving it away.

Large companies often host distinguished speaker series at which luminaries on Gladwell’s level are often invited to speak. Would a free unregistered podcasts help people’s perceptions of the company? Might they influence a potential employee, unaware that this quality perk was part of the employment package? We think so. A podcast lasts virtually forever and the older it gets, the more prominent web search engines might make it. There’s another way a company can use a podcast to its benefit: broadcast the voices and words of its best and brightest employees. Not only is a company-sponsored spotlight a great internal morale booster, it would reveal to the world the quality of your team and that you’re proud of them. It would make clear that real people work for your enterprise and they have passion and authority about what they are doing. That just might be more valuable than 200 direct marketing sales.

Now, See It

Text and audio blogs have enormous implications and can be produced and enjoyed in mobile situations. But there is nothing quite like seeing a speaker. And if you cannot be there when a particular event happens, the power of video is not subject to debate. Video has been slower to emerge than the former two forms of social media, in part because it is more expensive and difficult to produce. Watchers need to be static. People may listen to podcasts while driving and jogging, but we just wouldn’t encourage people to do that with video blogs or vlogs as they are starting to be called.

Undisputedly, Scoble’s day job as Microsoft’s Channel 9 puts him in the center of what is currently the world’s most popular business video blog, with 1.9 million unique visitors per month. While Channel 9 incorporates wikis, forums and considerable text content, Scoble interviewing the company’s most accomplished developers is statistically the main attraction. Some of Scoble’s videos have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Other companies have started to inch toward video blogs. A global media company has told Scoble they are planning to launch a video blog that emulates the Channel 9 model. Amanda Congdon produces RocketBoom, an ad-backed, highly creative and unpredictable video blog that is drawing 60,000 daily visitors, with no market effort behind it except the word of mouth evangelism of exuberant fans.

But to really take off, the high cost of producing vblogs,has to come down, and the issue of storage needs to be resolved. Vlogs are both storage space hogs and bandwidth stranglers. But one company promises an inexpensive solution to the former problem, and another claims a free resolution to the latter.

Serious Magic , a Folsom California software startup company has a whole suite of low cost video communications tools in use by about half the Fortune 500 according to marketing director Michelle Gallina. USA Today uses their products for training and Hyatt Regency incorporates the technology to produce videos that entice companies to use Hyatt meeting facilities. But we’re more excited by the promise of things to come.  CEO Mark Randall told us, in February 2005, his company has technology that “enables everyday people to produce professional quality videos.” We met Randall at Demo, a prestigious conference where start ups get six minutes to launch their products live on stage. Randall gave a great, fast-talking demonstration of VlogIt!, the company’s $100 video blogging software. The product was scheduled to ship in Fall 2005. Another new organization, OurMedia, is a nonprofit that offers “free forever” online video storage space, apparently eliminating storage and bandwidth barriers for users. Together we see a new, low-cost business channel of communication getting into position for rapid emergence.

News and Blog Views

The number of emerging innovative software and service offerings to enhance text blogging are too numerous to mention, but one with potential watershed implications is Memeorandum, a service that is still operating from a server in the bedroom of former Intel developer Gabe Riviera. Memeorandum, as far as we can tell, is the first technology to link together old and new media, offering single screen views of prominent headlines from a traditional media merged with commentary from popular bloggers, thus ending the ongoing, often petty, feud between the two, to the benefit of the end user.

So far, Riviera has only pumped out a version for mainstream news. But he has shown us previews of a great deal more to come, including political and technology versions. His possibilities are almost limitless.

Memeorandum may spell the end for “link blogs,” currently prominent in the blogosphere. These, quite simply, are blogs that link to other blogs, adding sparse new content of their own and intended to make the linker both influential and popular. Because Memeorandum, uses algorithms to provide results, just like Google does, it automates linking and puts it all onto a single page infinitely faster than a human could possibly do it. While this may bode badly for currently prominent blogger ratings, it has potentially great end user benefits, perhaps as significant as Google was to search. We see personal Memeorandums somewhere down the line, in which you’ll be able to hand-select a few thousand of your favorite blogs, stick them in the Memeorandum engine, and get one page of the hot stuff in those blogs. Talk about personalized news services.

Find it Fast

Mobile Blogs are simply blogs posted from handheld devices. Most are no more than a snapshot taken by a camera phone with a few words in the caption, usually incorporating instant messaging shorthand. But location-based data laid over mobile blogs have very significant implications and mapping has become an area where giant players like Amazon.com, MSN, and Google have been racing to outdo each other with innovations being served up every few months. Amazon’s A9, for instance, took a car with several cameras installed on it up and down streets in many major cities in the U.S., a technique long in use by desktop cartographers. But Amazon linked it into A9’s Yellow Pages feature to let you see just what the sushi restaurant looks like inside. You may be thinking of eating there tonight or you may be passing by it just as you are getting hungry. At some point, you can expect that previous diners will be able to post blogged reviews of their experiences, to encourage or warn off future customers.

Google, is currently in the lead with maps that are incredibly easy to scroll in a web browser, and they indicate the location of restaurants, movie theaters or shops in the area you requested.  As frosting on the cake, they also provide satellite photo views of the map area, and have opened up their technology to allow non-Google developers to add in new applications of their own. There are some working on how to insert live data on traffic, for example. This would be more current than the AM radio helicopter report that often reports on areas bigger than your topographical interests and reports on accidents that have already been cleared, The Google traffic map would be personalized to where you are, and advise you on alternative routes.

Maps also can also be populated with location-based ads that are actually useful to travelers looking for the local Starbucks or movie theater. News can also be attached, according to Larry Larsen, a technologist at Florida-based Poynter Institute, the R&D arm for the American journalism industry. He has shown us a prototype of how blogs and news might overlay onto maps, so you can avoid traffic snarls, fires, crime scenes or terrorist attack sites.

MSN’s Virtual Earth team includes Chandu Thota, who developed BlogMap, which lets bloggers see where you are blogging from and the location of bloggers nearby. Virtual Earth is MSN’s mapping service. In the first week the service was available, 100,000 people downloaded BlogMaps, Thota told us. He added that near-term innovations will include the ability for bloggers to post directly onto maps.

Having blogs on maps portends a whole raft of changes. You could subscribe to blogs in your neighborhood, for example. Or, you could write a review about your favorite sushi restaurant and leave that right on a map for others to find.

Tag, You’re Found!

Tagging is one of those simple little innovations that has begun to make big improvements in finding what you want faster and easier. It’s about the same as putting a label on a file folder or sewing your kid’s name into her clothing before she goes off to camp for the summer.

Let’s say you’re attending the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and you want to watch other blog reports that are coming out of the show. You can use an RSS search engine, requesting results for “CES” and get back a haystack of stuff, including websites and newspaper reports from years past—probably more than you wanted. But, if everyone who was blogging at the one you were attending, tagged their posts with the same label, say “CES 2006,” your search result would be much more satisfying.

Tagging has particular relevance for photos and other multimedia posts that are sparse on text, making it difficult for search engines to find them without tags. Neither Google nor Technorati for that matter, can look at a photo of a lighthouse and know it’s a lighthouse—unless the creator tagged it accordingly.

Technorati’s tag page was tracking 1.9 million tags by August 2005 a few months after it started. The RSS search engine company was collaborating with Flickr and Buzznet , to online photo services as well as Delicious and Furl , two linking services. We spoke with a companies in pre-launch mode, planning to join this tag sharing network. One planned to launch a service in late 2005 that would allow people to use tags to find themselves, friends and places they were looking for anywhere that was connected to the Internet, including in PCs where their owners were willing to participate.

But the implications go still further.  Let’s integrate tagging with mobile blogs on cell phones and mapping. The combination would fulfill the promise of “geo-tagging,” allowing companies and people to tag objects on a map and mobile blog the information, eventually making it easy to find people, places, products, hospitals or gas stations anywhere, and read the reviews of people who were there before you. There are numerous companies of all sizes working on final assembly of the myriad pieces to this puzzle.

Your Whole Life Before You

Perhaps the most ambitious project that we saw, during our research for this chapter was in Microsoft’s San Francisco labs where Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell , father of the DEC VAX computer, were working on MyLifeBits, a system that allows you to keep your whole life stored in one place – video, photos, blogs, and other digital detritus go into MyLifeBits. Optionally, another Microsoft  research team, this one in Cambridge, England, is working on SenseCam, a small, motion-activated digital camera that you hang around your neck. When something of note happens, it starts clicking away, so that entire lives can be photographed, tagged, or geo-tagged and posted or stored in your own computer. You keep the moments that matter. You share with people who care. But MyLifeBits has more pragmatic implications. Research with stroke victims seems to indicate that photos help them reconnect with memories that the stroke seemingly erased. The two teams are also studying to determine if such life blogging tools actually help the rest of us learn as well. But what is most relevent we think is that a simple PC can now store your entire life in video. MyLifeBits is already available.

The Big Picture

From the time of the legendary dotcom bomb, through the ensuing years, it appeared to many observers that not much was happening in technology, but in fact it has. Blogs and other social media have exploded.  Once again, technocal innovations are relentless and significant for huge numbers of people and commercial enterprises.

The technologies we discuss here are the tip of the iceberg of what is emerging and what will emerge.  What is relevant is that these technologies will once again how change how businesses communicate as well as how information is found and shared. The next technical innovation may surprise us, but the directions of social media are no longer in question, or so it seems to us.

The big picture is clearer than it has been in many years. We have entered into a new era of communications.

New Kryptonite Charges Were False

It turns out that  Bruce Schneier's charges that the Kryptonite replace locks were also unsafe was dead wrong. I am sorry to have pointed to something that turned out to be be stone cold wrong.  I apologize to Kryptonite for any bried embarrassment I may have caused. As someone wrote recently, we all need to think about the risks we take on trusting single sources of information.

Hill & Knowlton Issues Blog Policy

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BuzzMarketingWithBlogs?m=252

Through Buzz Marketing I learned of H&K's blog policy. I was pleasantly surprised in that it is about the best I've seen.  It's nice and short, uet seems to cover everything and takes the right positions.

BL Ochman Hears Technorati to be Sold

BL Ochman heard from a VC that Technorati is about to be sold.  She's betting the buyer will be Yahoo! What I love most about Technorati is its innovation.  What I like least about Yahoo is that it doesn't seem to show a whole lot of it. But this certainly makes search, already the most competitive category on the Internet a bit more interesting.

I'm Speaking at BlogOn

Chris Shipley invited me today to speak on a panel moderated by Steve Rubel at BlogOn, at the Copacabana in New York City. The talk is on "Markets are Conversations." Hmm.  Where have I heard that before? In any case I am more than slightly thrilled. Please let me know if you'll be there.  One nice think about finishing the book up, is it will be nice to get out and about a little more.

Oh No! Kryptonite May Have Gaffed Again.

ATTENTION: THE FOLLOWING CHARGE AGAINST KRYPTONITE HAS PROVEN FALSE. I HAVE POSTED AN APOLOGY AND RETRACTION ABOVE.--SHEL

Security Maven Bruce Schneier says that Kryptonite's solution to its overly discuss Bic-picking problems is "amusing." I'm almost grateful that Dennis Hamilton sent this to us too late to get into the book, which has now been completed except for editing of the last two chapters.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/news.html

Is Starbucks the New Library?

I was racing today to finish the close-to-final drafts of our two final chapters.  My wife had company and so did my dogs. Women and canines were running throughout the house.  A handyman started power washing places that needed it.  And the next door neighbor began using what sounded like either a jack hammer or a Harley without a muffler. I sought shelter and found myself in the nearest Starbucks, a source of my two addictions--caffeine and broadband.

I grew up in a home that was often too noisy for me to do homework.  I used to find solace in the public library. I became addicted to reading there and amazed at the things I could look up in an outdated encyclopedia.

Times change. So do addictions and safe havens.

Einstein Said It

I came accross this quote from www.thinkexist.com, one of a few sites we've used looking for book quotes. I couldn't figure out how to put it into Naked Conversations, but I really liked it:

If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

--Albert Einstein

Boy does that ever apply to writing a book.

Market Consultant Needed

I'm going to be helping a really cool start up called Ojos get ready to introduce some new and unique technology at Fall Demo.  This not the sort of thing I usually write about on our book blog, but the company has an immediate need for a marketing person to help them get ready.  Among the unruly consultants you would have to manage is me. If it works out, it could end up being a fulltime position for the whoever gets it. Here's the Craig's list link .  Please let them know Shel sent you.  It impresses the Hell out the clients.

The End is Near

I have just completed the first draft of the last chapter of my first book. It is a bittersweet feeling. I have wanted to write a book since I was a teenager and now, I have some dusting and cleaning to do, but I have pretty much completed my longest personal dream.

YAHOO!

On the other hand.  The joy I felt almost every day, when I started writing, no later than 6 a.m. will pass.  For the near future, I go back to consulting and writing for businesses, just like I used to do--until I come up with an idea for my next book and I hope that will happen soon. In that area, thanks for so many good suggestions, but none so far have made my heart go lubdub as this saga has done.

My god.  What happens next?

Oops That Last one was mine

Robert has given me his keys to this site so I can manage spam and make a few other minor changes. I just forgot that I have to log out as Robert and log back in as me. The post on 27 auto club bloggers being fired was mine, not his.

Sorry, I'll get the hang of it soon.  We've asked Siz Apart how we can make me the primary author and Robert the guest, without changing our URL.  Laura at their guest support has been very nice, so far, but we have not yet been able to fix was seems to us to be a relatively simple problem.  I hope she fixes it soon.

More on Fired Bloggers

I was interviewed this morning by KFWB Radio in Los Angeles regarding 27 employees of a San Diego auto club being fired for blogging at Myspace.com, according to an Associated Press report. The opening question was: "What is your opinion of 27 people being fired just for blogging and on their own time?"

My opinion is that that is not what happened at the Automobile Club of Southern California. What happened was 27 employees thought it would be cool to publish some nasty comments about the obesity and sexual preferences of co-workers.  They also discussed how they could slow down roadside repair services for their customers.

The on catch is that I'm not certain that MySpace is a blog so much as a community bulletin board and I'm not certain, by the way it works, if it is really a public space.  But the AP and KFWB Radio seem to be carrying it as another chapter in the  exciting "Fired for Blogging" series.

In the case of attacking a co-worker, that co-worker had gone to management and said she felt harassed.  Candidly, I don't blame her one bit.  Twenty-Seven people ridiculing her repeatedly like a pack of schoolyard bullies sounds like harassment to me. In the second case, employees plotting to abuse customers and publishing it online sounds like a company crisis in the making.

It seems to me that the Auto Club did the right thing.  To me either of these offenses should be punished by terminations--provided one warning is given first. I have a hunch the Auto Club just improved life for both their remaining employees as well as their customers.

I have still never heard of a case of people being fired "just for blogging." I have now heard of more than 100 people getting dooced for doing on blogs (if you count myspace as a blog) the sort of things that people have been getting fired for throughout history. There is a cry now for companies to issue blogging policies, which would be a good thing, and lawyers and HR departments really love to write new policy and procedure documents.

I maintain that a simple policy is perhaps best: "Don't say anything stupid on a blog, whether it is on your own time or company time. Even when you are off-the-clock, you represent your company and taking actions that will embarrass them is always unwise and will not be treated kindly in the workplace.

Scoble's Baaack!

A week without Scobleizer has been like a months without sunshine, but he just logged back in and you can almost feel the strength of his recharged battery.  He's decided to allow comments to remain wide open.  He just not going to eat bad strawberries anymore. Personally, now and then it feels good to squich one of them against the pavement, but I was raised a city kid...

Which Naked Conversations Do You Read?

I've been pouring over our link and posting stats and have noticed that we seem to get fewer links on our actual chapter postings than we do on other entries.  The same goes for comments.

In fact, a few friends have confided that the chapters themselves are just too cumbersome to read. At first they look uncomfortable telling me this, then they promise to buy the book and read it in book form, which is just fine with Robert and me.

But I am curious, and I imagine other people considering book blogs are as well. Do the early version chapters, work on blogsas we have used them? Are they just too much to read on a computer? Do you all secretly hate the book?

As you probably know, I hope Naked Conversations is the first of many books for me. I plan to use book blogs again.  It is a lot of work to post the chapters and I'm wondering if it is worthwhile, to people who visit the site.

Which leads me to the other question: If you folk are not reading the chapters, what are you finding here that appeals to you?

Kryptonite's Nosedive Mapped

I missed Stephen Spencer's post of Fortune magazine's graphic representation of how blogging skewered Kryptonite--for better or worse, but it's definitely worth a look. This came out about ten days ago, just about simultaneously with Naked Conversations dialog with Kryptonite's spokesperson Donna Tocci.

Loic is Writing a Book!

Other than Scoble, Loic LeMeur has been more helpful to me in writing Naked Conversations than any other single person.  Although I have ever met him face-to-face, through skype and email, he has become my friend. He announced a few hours ago that he is writing a book. Its title is "Blog pour les pros", means "blog for pros" will be out Oct. 6 and you can already pre-order it on the French Amazon.com. He says he's writing it in his native French, but I cannot wait to see the English translation. He knows as much on this subject and has more fascinating stories to tell than anyone I know.

It's funny, because I heard about the book a couple hours before Loic posted his announcement in English. I met Jeff Clavier, for the first time, over lunch today. He is another remarkable French thinker who has awesome insider perspectives on social media.  It turns out Loic and Jeff are good friends and have been for several years.

The world is becoming a smaller, faster place.

Interview: Adam Curry

Our interview with Adam Curry is we will have to conduct for Naked Conversations.  It was also among the best. He committed to speaking with us for 30 minutes and we went over an hour.  It only ended then because Patricia, his wife of 18 years, was calling him to dinner at the legendary "Curry Cottage" in Guildford, England.

Curry came to prominence during his stint as an MTV VJ (video Jockey)”from 1987 to 1994 where he became a teeny bopper's idol as host of the "Top 20 Countdown" and other programs. He recalled that he often got into trouble with management and sponsors for injecting little personal vignettes, such as smoking hashish with Madonna. But it was also during his MTV stint that he became a pioneer in Internet-transmitted audio broadcast. We'll get to that in a moment.

Even as a child, growing up in a New Jersey suburb, Curry was fascinated with the magic of audio, because it projected images inside the listener’s head, rather than a TV or movie screen.  Later, when radio characters like the Green Hornet and The Shadow became TV or movie characters, people who had known them from radio were usually disappointed with the mismatch.  Something was lost in the translation. As a kid, he was enthralled by Peter and the Wolf recordings, and his geeky side began to emerge. At 14, he built and operated his own “homecast” radio station, dispatching his mother to drive the neighborhood to testing the signal’s range.

Audio tinkering stayed with him.  While employed at MTV, he began, operated and owned mtv.com where he bacame the first celebrity webcaster before there was a Worldwide Web and with the blessings of the rock television channel who most likely did not yet understand the potential of the Internet as an entertainment channel. One day, a young developer named Marc Andreessen, contacted Curry in an attempt to interest Curry in a new piece of software Andreessen had developed called Mosaic--the first browser software, which would become Netscape. After MTVV, there were a couple of successful start ups, one of which Curry served as CTO.  MTV retracted its blessing and and in 1995 sued Curry over the mtv.com name.

A few years later, Curry met Dave Winer, at a New York City conference and, according to Curry, they shared “one of those  epiphanies about using RSS feeds for the last yard of Internet radio. This was at a time when broadband still sucked and streaming wasn’t satisfying anyone.”  The two “started messing around” with technology and the result was Winer’s development of the audio enclosure portion of RSS, and Curry's development of the iPodder software that made downloading audio from computers to iPods a snap.

On Aug. 13, 2004, an experiment with iPodder, led to the first podcast, dubbed,Daily Source Code. which remains among the most popular programs, despite the fact there have been seven million podcasts in the ensuing year. But dailysourcecode for him has been just a starting point. He has built the Podcast Show Network that produces 35 other podshows, reaaching hundreds of thousands of listeners.. Now companies and has one of the most popular networks in podcasting, a franchise that is likely to become more lucrative moving forward. He also continues a four-hour weekly, "Adam Curry Podshow" on Sirius Satelite Radio / and had several active blogs including http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014. All this has earned him the nickname of “Podfather,” which he argues is inaccurate. “It was Winer’s DNA,” he told us.

Curry's podcasting network's business model depends for about 80 percent of its revenues on advertising, and , according to Curry, “it has been profitable from day one.” But he sees a need to change how advertising works on podcasting. Why? “Because ads suck. The stuff is boring and people are tuning out.” Currently, he told us broadcast ads are geared toward human emotions and redundancy.  For example, when you're watching TV and the program reaches its emotional crisis, you can be certain that the program will cut to an add, leaving you glued to your seat and before reaching resolution.  But ad redundancy is worse, he maintained. “I hate this fact, but the guy who gets elected president is the one who has the most ads repeated the most often,” he told us.

As an example of just how podacst ads will become less intrusive,  he cited a project he has undertaken with Apple Computer and movie maestro Spike Lee who is making a big budget movie starring Denzel Washington and Christopher Plummer as an example how advertising is starting to become less intrusive while remaining lucrative.  Curry is producing a Lee podcast behind the scenes, with a “shadow caster” narrator following Lee around, describing what's happening on the movie scene, sort of like the whispering announcer of a televised golf tournament. The podcast is available exclusively through iTunes.  Curry is compensated by the film producers who want to promote the film and by Apple who wants to promote iTunes. Curry gets compensated on two ends.

Hitting on a central Naked Conversations theme, he noted that culture may allow some companies to podacst, even where blogging is discouraged.“Apple doesn’t blog and its not in the company’s DNA to blog. [Steve] Jobs speaks for the company and he doesn’t blog and I'm sure you won’t ever see him blogging. But he just might podcast," he told us.

"Apple has completely bypassed blogging, but it jumped right into podcasting and they did it early.  When they launch there’s pandemonium because it doesn’t work right.  But now they are in position and when it really happens they have the positionCurry believes that blogs and podcasting, won’t just enhance businesses, "they will become the next businesses."

Curry also sees a “long-tail,” (micro channel) component. There can be thousands of podacast programs, some of which have severely limited, but highly dedicated audiences. Now advertisers can conduct unprecedented targeting spending ad dollars to reach audiences so specialized that the listeners actually wish to listen to the ads.

That sounds pretty watershed to us.

When Businesses Shoudn't Blog

Dave Taylor made me smile with this. Maybe he should do the sequel to Naked Conversations

A Naked Conversation--Literally

The Union Jack, "America's only national newspaper" reports: "A woman applying for a job in Glasgow went into near shock when the interviewer entered the room naked except for a clipboard..."

Revised Comment Policy

Perhaps it was naivite all along that let me think we could leave our comments wide open.  It seemed to be in the spirit of the blogosphere and was something we were going to endorse in the book.  But, look around the prominent blogsites.  You start seeing some really ugly stuff, more often than not, from people who refuse to identify themselves accurately before they slither back under the rocks from which they came. Scoble has been particularly hard hit recently and it is no secret that it has taken the joy of blogging away from him, and even his most loyal supporters hope that his self-imposed sabbatical will help him to lighten up. I don't know what he will decide to do about Scobleizer. That's all his choice.

Over here, we have not been that hard hit.  But two incidents have left me thinking.  First, were the comments of someone who has started to boycott us, somewhat to our relief.  He prided himself in being harsh on other commenters who took views he did not like.  He often wrote more on this site about his views than either Robert or me. His comments were so abrasive that people started email their thoughts to us, because they did not want to be subjected to his abuses. After thinking it over, those incidents have led me to the first change in our Comment policy:

If you came into my home and were rude to another guest, I would ask you to stop.  If you continued to be rude, I would ask you to leave.  From this point forward, this is what I will do.  If I feel you are being abusive, hogging the conversation or otherwise discouraging the open exchange of legitimate points of view.  I will ask you to be more polite.  If you ignore the request, I will ban you from further Comments. I call the the Living Room rule and I will enforce it subjectively.

Secondly, I am increasingly bothered by Anonymous Comments. If I don't know who you are, I don't know where you are coming from.  Anonymous comments have always bothered me, but they got increasingly disturbing, when we turned this space over to the family and friends of David Koch who was missing on a Vancouver mountainside. An anonymous blogger diverted the conversation to attack the search and rescue teams who were working themselves into exhaustion trying to find the missing editor, who would eventually be found dead. Since that time, I have had little tolerance for drive-by cheap shot artists, who show up on this site.  They are dwarfed by the behavior of a creep named Arnold, who among others, have been attacking Scoble like a pack of Chihuahuas at the buttocks of a blogosphere giant.

From this point forward, I am banning all anonymous comments. If you have something to say, and you want to be credible, you will need to identify yourself, and I encourage you also to identify where you are coming from, so that others may assess how strongly they wish to value your opinions.

If you disagree with this policy, please post a reply--but just a reminder, sign it with a url, so that I can see who you are--or you will just be wasting both of our times.

Got an Idea for My Next Book?

I have just loved writing Naked Conversations. I had planned to start writing my next book almost immediately after completion of this one and had an idea that had me just champing at the bit to begin.  Unfortunately, the central character has decided that he would like to write about it himself, and it seems to me that a biographer would be unwise to compete with an autobiographer.

So I'm looking for an idea for a new book and I would love your help in coming up with a new idea.  There are more than a few qualifiers to make me the right person to write it, many of which I have learned from this experience:

• My interest is in technology's impact on culture.  I don't want to preach on the subject, just report on it. For example, I believe firmly that blogging will change business culture.  This was the most interesting aspect of the story to me. So I am looking for a story that causes someform of disruption.
• Mass appeal.  Book writing is not my intendend sideline.  I want to be commercially successful.  I want to write books that a great many people will buy, provided I do a good job of writing it.
• Story-telling.  There are a great many ways to write a book.  I do my best when I speak to a whole lot of people, accurately relate what they told me and then tell readers why it was intersting and what I think it means.  I want a subject that can be the core to a simple story, well-told.
• Positive.  It is my nature to be an optimist.  I would rather write about subject that excite me and people that I learn from.  I am a bad choice to write a hard-hitting, deep-digging expose.
• Blog-suitable. The people who told me that it would be Hell to write this book out here in the blogosphere.  They were write.  But blogging made this book better.  It made me smarter and it helped me become a better writer.  I want to blog my next book as well.

Got an idea? Please let me know. I'm going to miss doing this every day.