Global Neighbourhoods

Confessions of an A-Lister

The Media Orchard has a thoughtful aggregation about all the comments showing hostility against A-listers, including some comments about me and reaction to my recent McDonald's postings. Media Orchard suggests that we so-called A-listers are a bit clubby and want to continue running the ever-expanding blogosphere show.

Media Orchard warns us to stop provoking anger,a piece of advice that I'll decline to follow.  I try to provoke thought and I have a long history of making people angry in the process  I'm not convinced that is such a bad thing.

The first time I heard myself called an A-lister was less than 60 days ago. My first instinct was to demand a recount, but still I felt myself puff up a bit with some artificial sense of achievement.  Two years ago my ranking was approximately 1.1 millionth on Technorati. When I started to collaborate on a book with Scoble, I was ranked in the low 20,000s. 

To write the book, I became immersed in blogging. I posted often and with passion. I joined other conversatios, leaving comments and linking from the Naked Convcersations blog on anything I saw on the subect of business and blogs.

I worked hard, not to be boosted onto some artificial list, but understand Robert's genius for blogging and to find useful and interesting examples of blogs applicable to business of all sizes. I interviewed nearly 200 people for the book and worked for over six months at a pace of about 18 hours daily, seven days weekly. I began the project as little more than a reporter on the blogging and ended up convinced that something transformational and imprtant was happening and it was going to change business communications.

I produced a lot of blogs and people for the most part seemed to appreciate the effort, s more people came to the blog, and I started getting asked to speak from time to time and have been interviewed by some press and podcasters. So oe da someone called me an A-Lister and it surprised me but it felt sort of good.  Not central to who I am, but it felt good.

I write today in the same voice I used 2 years ago, when there were 1.1 million bloggers better followed than me. Then I was called passionate. These days mre people are lisening to me and fr that, my same thoughts and words are being called arrogant. Go figure.

And here comes the confession: I like being called an A-Lister. I'm proud of it. I know the term is ultimately unimportant and that my time to hold this title is limited, but it's a kick right now. I worked real hard and now I'm getting some public strokes and life may not be this good tomorrow.

One many f you should consider is that each A-Lister may have meteric rankings, but in terms of the blogosphere's growth rate, we are each less influential every day. Every day more people in the blogosphere may read Robert Scoble.  But every day a smaller percentage of the total blogosphere reads him because it is growing faster than he possibly could.

And the really good news for some of you is that some day in the future, like Scoble and Doc and David and the rest, we will all be yesterday's news.

A-Listers are being called clicky.  I can see why. I hang out where bloggers hang out, and that means I know a good number prominent bloggers some of whom are prominent.  In general, we like each other.  We share common interests, values and beliefs about the blogosphere and its importance.  Other than that, you cannot get us--as a group--to agree on very much of anything. We are not a club. We do not set an agenda and we are almost universally open sorce in terms of interaction with other bloggers we admire whether they have one link or one million.

My advice to anyone is that if you don't like an A-Lister, then don't read him or her.  If enough people follow your lead, peple you don't like won't be A-Listers anymore and some list publisher will identify you as an emerging influencer.  My advise is to read and start conversations with the bloggers you like and appreciate and just ignore everyone else. Talk about what you want to talk about.  Pick subjects that you care about and attract others who are passionate on the same subject.

As for me, I am really digging this ride. I happen to have been on enough rides in my life to know this one will end.  Someday--sooner than I like--I will become "so yesterday." But that is as it should be.  You always have to make room for fresh blood and new ideas.

For those of you who will take our place, my cheap advice is you'd better develop a thick skin. If some calls you an A-Lister one day, someone else will be drawing a target on your back.

If you pre-ordered from Amazon...

... and have not yet received your books, chances are you were cancelled.  You will have to reorder. They sent letters requiring people to reconfirm and most people did not realize that.  We posted about this previously, but I've had a couple of inquiries today, and thought it should be repeated.

Believe me, I regret this inconvenience.

Microsoft: Complying with Unjust Laws

Earlier today, Microsoft issued a press release clarifying its position on filtering blog content.  It stated flatly that it would comply with the laws of each country and it will make that clear to its blog tools customers in each of those countries in advance.

This, on the surface, appears to be a reasonable and pragmatic stance. Even I would argue that it is not the business of business to meddle with local issues and politics. But that's only on the surface.

Once you get beneath the surface, you realize that people in business have the same moral obligations that they have when they are not representing commercial interests.  So when you are doing business in a country that imposes unjust law, you need to really think about the repercussions.

Let's look at a few extremes:

• What is the moral position of a businessman who sells machetes to Rwandans at a time when it was legal to behead your neighbor if he was from a rival tribe?
• Ford Motors in Germany in the late 30s and early 40s purchased teenage girls as slave laborers.  These girls were regularly beaten, raped and starved.  They were not liberated until Allied Troops took possession of the factory.  Ford was just complying with the laws of the country where they were doing business.
• Sea captains regularly tossed sick Africans, kidnapped to become slaves, overboard, because the laws of Britain and the US at the time said, they could only collect insurance on slave who drowned at sea. Scores of shipping lines just complied with the laws.

When laws are unjust, it seems to me, the right thing to do is to resist them, make them as difficult and costly to enforce. What would have happened if Martin Luther King had complied with segregation laws of the American South? How about Gandhi, if he just wore British cloth and used British table salt?  For that matter, what if China's Chairman Mao Tse Tsung had decided to obey the law and comply with the laws of his predecessor Chiang Ki Chek? For that matter, why didn't those kids in Tienanmen Square just do what they were told, go home and live long lives?

We do know why those rabble in Boston disobeyed the British laws imposed on them.  They saw certain self-evident truths, something to do with those inalienable rights.

I am of the opinion that the Chinese people are entitled to those same rights.

I have a great deal more sympathy for Microsoft's position in China. It is the world's most rapidly emerging talent pool as well as the fastest growing market.  Microsoft has a huge presence there and it has cultivated one of the world's most talented brain farms there, or so I am told. And after all, most people would argue that business is business and business is important and countries that do business with each other usually don't go to war against each other.

But some things are more important than business and in the long run compliance with the laws of that particular land may be a mistake. The irony is that this issue is steaming over blogging, of all things--something that s as conducive to free, open and yes naked conversations as anything that uses technology.

Pete Dawson's Naked Action Plan

Pete Dawson, whom you may know as /pd, was among the people who commented the most frequently on this blog while we were writing the book. I'm also pretty certain he was among the first ten people to actually order our book from Amazon, although Amazon was far from vigilant in getting his six books to his door.

He has them now and I think that what he is doing is just fantastic.  He has assembled five colleagues into a grad school style 10-month curriculum using Naked Conversations as the primer.  He has also taken the entire book and turned it into a PowerPoint presentation.

At the heart f the Naked Conversations project has been our shared desire to contribute something that will evangelize the blogosphere, to spread the word of the power of the conversation.

Thanks Pete, for devising an entirely innovative way of using our book and we whole-heartedly endorse what you are doing.

Kathy Sierra on Microsoft & Innovation

Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate users has a wonderful piece about how risk aversion is continuing to cause any innovation inside Microsoft to atrophy. This is not a subject that Robert and I talk about much, but this must be very hard for not only him, but so many of the brilliant people inside Microsoft.

The company has so much talent and I fear that they will all wake up some day and find themselves my age, looking at how comfortable their years of steady employment has made them and feel a dark sadness as they wonder what could have been had they taken another road.

JL Reid Asks: What's Wrong with Partial Feeds

JL over at Reidwrite takes issue with my disparaging of McDonald's teaser paragraphs and partial RSS feeds. He rightfully assumes that when I call them "newsletterish," I do not mean it in a complementary way. JL argues that summary graphs followed by a [more] link save readers time and let's them decide whether they want to click to read.

JL, it is not my hottest of buttons, but here's why I don't care much for partial feeds. If you give me a partial feed, you give me as your reader total decision-making control. I never have to take the time to click through to your blog. There is nothing faster and easier for me than using RSS so that I never need to leave my desktop. If you have ads, or are selling things, I do not need to see them.

You save me n time with a partial feed or a summary paragraph, which is often an enticing "teaser," written to make me so curious I cannot resist clicking through. The summary paragraphs you describe worked in the newsletter Era, because we did not yet have the miracle of RSS feeds and we did not yet have ubiquitous broadband.

But a summary paragraph serves me no purpose in blogging Trust me, if I see your entire posting in a feed, I won't need prodding to know when to stop reading it, whether that's the first, sentence, paragraph or after 48 comments that are posted below.

As  said, this s not my hottest button. I still read my share of partial feeds and visit sites that way, but increasing less often.  But I seem to know an increasing number of people who just won't subscribe to partial feeds, ad as the novelty of blogging wears off and the need for efficiency increases, I would argue that the numbers of people who will disdain partial feeds will increase, not decrease.

Broback on James Frey & Fact Checking

Steve Broback, who is working on a book with his partner DL Byron picks up on a Wall St. Journal article about how James Frey's publisher's simply trusted the ex-convict turned author and didn't have the budget to fact check. Robert and I have a different publisher, but that statement is very far from what happened for Robert and me.

Our publisher's Wiley's most annoying team member was their fact-checker, who pored over every statement in the book, who even checked out quotes we attributed in the book to ourselves on the blog. I swear if I had written that my mother loved me, he would have checked it out. The result was that several episodes were deleted from the book, because he challenged assertions we had made, that we did not feel we could back up with attribution. I don't even know the SOB's name, but Robert and I will be forever in his debt.

That being said, there are two catches: (1) Robert and I had the final say. If we thought the fact checker had pushed too hard, then we could overrule him. We did several times, but we did so prudently. (2) No fact checker can verify conversations that I held, with people I said I talked to. In these areas, the publisher had to go on blind faith. They had to trust that I was a truthful person.

Steve Broback is right in his post.  The blogosphere served as a whole new, and effective fact checking layer.  Dozens of facts were corrected by them.  Most were minor, some were spelling and date errors.  But a couple were significant and we are most thankful for those of you who caught them.

That being said, we have already learned of one factual error in Naked Conversations.  Adam Curry to not make the first podcast as he claimed to in an interview with me. At least according to other people. If we were wrong on that one fact, I consider it a wart on our faces.  f we end up with too many warts, then out book should be discredited.

I think the villain in Mr. Frey's case is him. The guy deliberately lied to make big ink and big bucks.

Blog Tools: Make Them Easier

I was just interviewed by a consultant doing a survey for a blog tools company.  Actually she wanted to hear my perceptions of the company she represented, but the advice that I wanted to give her was both broader and simpler than that:

Make the tools easier.  Make them easier to understand and use.  And when you get down to it, don't ask people like me, who spend most of our waking hours inside the blogosphere.  Ask real people, with real jobs about these tools, people who play around with blogs after dinner, or are scratching their heads struggling to figure out how to make them work for their businesses both large and small.

I have struggled with figuring out how to make these powerful tools work for me.  After long and arduous struggling, I finally think I grasp RSS.  actually know where to go to get what I want from Technorati.  The stats at PubSub are valuable to me.

But it was Hell learning them, and I have spent a large part of my time in the company of geeks, having the stuff explained to me. Most people do not, and will not. Blog tools need to come to them. They need to be simple enough for everyday people to grasp and use.

And none of them are.  Not one. 

It's not just everyday people  I spend a fair amount of time consulting companies, not just companies but tech companies, and not just tech companies but start ups.  These are folk who like technology. While I am supposed to be there discussing strategy the place where I see the light bulbs go off and the times when they seem to think what I know is most valuable is when I walk them through the tools. I have to take the time to do this, before we can discuss strategy.

This should not be. When Technorati tells an end users to copy some code and drop it into their Typepad blog, most folk are just clueless to what they are supposed to do.  These people are not going to come to Technorati for the most part, Technorati is going to have to come to them.

Or they will be replaced by another toolmaker who does.

Deb Schultz Wants Companies to Respect Her

Deb Schultz, former marketing director at Six Apart and now consulting on her own has an articulate piece about what she wants as a customer and it's what Rodney Dangerfield never got:

"...the companies that "win" with me, win because they RESPECT me and I can tell that they respect me in lots of little and big ways  - service, pricing, product design.  They don't take me for granted..."

Deb's right this is what the social media and the new Web 2.0 stuff is supposed to be all about, and frequently is.

Kate Doesn't Like My McDonald's Tone

Kate finds my postings on McDonald's new blog to be arrogant, and my desire for corporate bloggers to get it right to be unrealistic. Actually Kate, I'm sorry you feel that way.  You may not like my style, which you seem to consider caustic.   I would prefer to characterize it as a candid.  In fact, I tried to make both my postings to be constructive in the hope that someone at McDonald's would listen

I am confused about your charge that all A-Listers must know nothing about large corporations, while you single out Jeff Jarvis as a target of your scorn.  You should research his resume as well as the companies who listen to his advice these days. You are right about me. I have spent most of my career in the company of entrepreneurs. I guess the struggle to innovate inside a large organization has always felt suppressive to me, sort of like trying to push a glacier to move faster. But Kate, I'm just not sure why that should disqualify me from commenting on the quality--or lameness--of a blog.

Marketing Departments Without Walls

It has always disturbed me to some degree, that when we have addressed corporate and business blogging, most people immediately assume that the subject fits snugly into the domain of the marketing department, in some sort of organizational box next to PR, advertising and collaterals.  It does not.

It is sort of like trying to box in the organizational position of the telephone or email.  While marketing most certainly should embrace blogging as a superior conversational tool, it is the conversation and not the tool which is most important.  Blogs, in various organizations are helping human resources, biz dev and sooner or later customer support.  They are being used internally for collaboration.  At Intel, CEO Paul Otellini blogs confidentially to 86,000 employees as a former of an all-hands company meeting.

My point is this: blogging can contribute to a new, more interactive marketing department, but blogs will be damaged if they fall under the exclusive control of a marketing department.  They are bigger than that.

Much bigger. Marketing is about relationships.  Among the things most broken today in the enterprise is the ability for everyday employees to have direct, unfiltered relationships with evryday customers and prospects. Marketing has always been bigger than the marketing department, and blogging is a power tool, for marketing in general, not just the marketing department.

Edelman's 'Me2 Revolution'

The last time I posted here about Richard Edelman, I wrote,(perhaps with excessive harshness) his failure to link to other bloggers and to join the conversation. So it would be easy for me to pick up on that note here by pointing out that the only link in his recent post about the "Me2 Revolution" is to his own Edelman Trust Barometer . But, in fact, the Trust Barometer is relevant and important, and I link to it here, because I hope you will read what Edelman, head of the world's largest PR agency has to say on who the most powerful influencers in an organization are.

And yes, I could also complain, that his recent post reads a lot like brochure copy, except that it indeed is brochure copy and as such it is pretty good brochure copy, which you to get to see very often these days.

But what is important and bears note is that in his organization's annual examination of who and what people trust, he reports the increasing trend of people trusting people like themselves, or as he put it, "a person like me."  Edelman asserts that the corporate employee, is a more credible source than assorted and sundry official spokespeople, outside celebrities, the PR representative or even the CEO.

I think the best example I know is the remarkable phenomenon of Robert Scoble's popularity. He's just a guy doing his job and he talks about it to other people doing their jobs. He often makes mistakes, but most people recognize his passion and authority. There is an expanding number of mid-level bloggers like Scoble in other organizations. None have boardroom insights, few have been media trained and none have committees filtering and polishing what the write. the result is that collectively and indivisually these "people like me" bloggers have enormous credibility.  That credibility seems to be growing at precisely the time when other communicators and communication mechanisms are diminishing in trust.

Lots of bloggers can shrug and say they alreadyknew that. But Edelman's Barometer is not aimed at bloggers.  It's taget audience is decision makers and it reflects the views of people in general all ver the world.

I am not personally in love with Edelman's "Me2 Revolution" label.  To me it's just a bit PR-ish. On the other hand, it makes the point fast and well.  And if it carries the message forward, then I applaud its use.

Scoble & Redford Seperated at Birth?

Steve Sloan down at San Jose State University, where Scoble earned a degree in Journalism, somehow dredged up this shot of Scoble in 1991.  Looks a bit like Redford in "The Way We Were" don't you think? For a better look use the link on Sloan's Name.

So, Enough About Us...

Since Friday the 13th Robert and I have really been on a roll.  All sorts of landmarks and benchmarks, book sitings and shipping and coverage, podcasts, parties and stuff.  It's very heady and we have this urge to use this blog to personally thank every person who has helped build awareness and enthusiasm for Naked Conversations. We really can't say thank you enough time or in enough ways.

But this blog is not supposed to be about this kind of self-promotion.  It is supposed to be about business and blogging.  It's supposed to be focused on why business should blog and how blogging can improve marketing and PR. It's supposed to be more about things other than daily updates on the joys of being a new author.

If you write or podcast about us in the future, we appreciate it.  If something new or valuable to Naked Conversation blog readers occurs we will mention it for that reason.  But we are going to refrain from mentioning every interview and podcast.

If enough of you are interested and email me or comment here, we might to a simple, straightforward week end summary.  Otherwise, it is time for Naked Conversations to resume its regularly scheduled program.

McDonald's Post--5 Tips to Improving your Blog

Precisely seven days after the first post, at almost the same time, McDonald's Open for Discussion blog has posted a second time. I'm sorry to say, that the week since they dabbled their first corporate toe into the warm waters of the blogosphere, they seem to have adopted an even more corporate, more remote, more one-way tone.

I am genuinely sorry to see this.  A few people thought I should have been kinder in my first post about McDonald's.  After all, it's a big company trying this new channel and we bloggers should be honored by their presence, right? I think not.  I think it's a big company trying to figure out how they can exploit a new media channel to improve their fading corporate image.

The good news is that blogging can help them do that.  The bad news is that their current attempts need to change abruptly or they will hurt themselves rather than help.

Dear McDonald's: Here are a few tips for what you could do to make an interesting blog.

1. Start a conversation with your customers.  Tell them what you are doing to ct the fat and carbohydrate content in your foods.  The same contents that are contributing to a dramatic rise in adult diabetes sufferers.

2.  Talk  about a typical day in the life of a franchise owner, who gets up at some ungodly hour and goes to bed late at night. Talk about his or her pride in cleanliness.  Talk about exacting specifications.

3.  Ask your customers what they want of you. They will tell you in amazing candor. Not only will the blog make you smarter, but you will be perceived in a better light because you are listening.

4. Drop the language of corpspeak. No one likes. No one believes he words they are hearing.

5. Read other people's blogs.  Join their conversations. That's how you will get noticed and linked. It's not about you, McDonald's.  It's about us.  You are new to the blogosphere.  We are very egalitarian, but if you ignore the other 25 million bloggers, they will for the most part, continue to ignore you. You may not think we are your target demographic, but you are wrong. Cumulatively, we have a great deal of wisdom to share with you. Collectively, we can have a serious impact on your business--but only if you listen.

Oh by the way.  Welcome to the Blogosphere.  I know you have internal blog champions. I do hope you continue your blogging effort.  I hope you get blog smart enough to actually find these postings I, and others are doing but I suspect that has not yet happened. Don't just take us as negative voices.  Listen to what we are saying.Really listen.

I suppose, we'll hear from you again next week.

Rick Segal Wants to Reform the Venture Business

Canadian VC, and longterm acquaintance Rick Segal is going around talking to some of the blogosphere's smartest people lRobert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Hugh Macleod, and Doc Searls, to name a few. He's asking them how to make the venture capital business better.

Almost everyone I know, including a whole bunch of VCs I know agree that there's lots of reasons why the venture business needs reform, to benefit everyone from limited partners to eventual customers and everyone in between. I wrote about this, way back, during the deeply depressing trough after the bubble burst in everyone's face. I probably wouldn't be quite as harsh today, but I see many of the same problems escalating. They include:

• Love for boxes. VCs like to put their investments into neatly defined organizational boxes, such as "software" or "b 2 b" or whatever. We have entered an era when the real winners are companies now forming that will categories not yet seen on anyone's whiteboard.
• Too much money.  Too little time. VCs pay their own rent and car leases by taking a couple of percentage points from their venture funds. The bigger the funds, the bigger the fees. This makes it very difficult to make small investment--say under $5 million.  The economics of starting a company today are such that a great many companies only need $1-3 million to get started.  If you are managing a $200 million fund, that's chump change and for you to be a contributing member of a board, if you invest your money $1 million at a time, you'd need to sit on 200 boards. While angel investors, serve up smaller amounts of investment cash, their real interest s often to sell their investments to early round investors as fast as they can.  For that reason angels can be too pushy with a company that has promise but needs time to get its act together.
• No operational experience. Too many VCs have never been there and done that in terms of starting up a company.  If I were in a start up, I would be extremely wary of a VC who had no operational experience.

I saw Rick at our Seattle Naked Conversations launch party and he said some very kind words to me. He also said he'd like to talk with me. I hope its on this subject.  But I guess I'll ave to wait until he's done speaking with the smartest people in the blogosphere.

Blog Monitoring, an Emerging Business Service

My friend Brian Oberkirch over at WeblogsWork says that his firm is getting more and more requests for this sort of service and that this should be a given for any PR firm. Funny, I was just about to write about this as something PR services need to adopt.

As I've stated before, PR firms in this new Conversational Era need to focus their efforts from pushing messages out to facilitate conversations between clients and their constituencies. The hardest part for new business clients is understanding how the tools work, and how to use them to listen better to conversations they did not start themselves.

I'm still learning to master Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and Bloglines. I've abandoned a few others. For businesses just trying to get their arms around it all, these tools are as hard to master as they are important to understand. This is a place for a PR agency to jump in.  Use them to listen and learn for your clients. Serve as an early warning system for what is being said by both topic and company. Over time, these tools will get easier and an intermediary will not be used, but not in the near term.

Asian Language Versions of Naked Conversations

Nikkei Business Publications, Inc., JAPAN has signed a deal to publish Naked Conversations in Japanese, and while I didn't get the name of the publisher, there will be a version of our book in Orthodox Chinese. We understand there are deals being hammeted out to publish us in a coupe of European languages as well.

I have no idea what this means in terms of royalties and sales, but for Robert and I, this is an honor to be able to address people all over the world this way. We wrote the book with global audiences in mind.

BTW, global distribution of the English version continues to wend its way at a pace appropriate for the Era of covered wagons.  We understand that it will be in general distribution in the UK in early March.  This is the way it works and there really isn't much  Robert and I can do about it.

Mitch Ratcliffe Reviews Naked Party & Book

I've only met Mitch Ratcliffe a couple of times but I've enjoyed his writing for years.  I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to speak with him or even say hello at the party last Saturday night.  Mitch does a good job of reviewing the party and a kind job of reviewing our book in his Rational Rants blog.

Thanks, Mitch.

Is Tello Astroturfing Arrington?

Over at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington is getting hammered with nasty comments from people who disagree with his recent comments on Tello, a company and product getting lots of traditional ink, even though they have not yet launched.  Mike's criticism is twofold: (1) Tello seems to have turned about the PR spigot before the product launched, something that used to be called "vaporware," back when I was doing PR, and (2) ignoring some of the most influential Web 2.0 people in their press credential listings along with not blogging themselves.

I thought Mike's comments were moderate and constructive. Tello would be wise to participate in a commentary that indisputably can help early adoption of new and potentially controversial technology. I am more than a little surprised and the strength of criticism being hurled at Mike and I am also very suspicious of it.

I think, Mike is being astroturfed. Astroturfing.  Astroturfing is at least as old as vaporware launches.  We discuss it in Naked Conversations.  It was allegedly started by Charles Colson a hatchet man for former President Richard Nixon.  Whenever Nixon was criticized, even mildly, by the press or a public speaker.  The critic would be inundated by scores of scornful people defending Nixon.  It turned out that these scornful people were a small group of paid professionals sitting next to each other in a political boiler room, making calls, sending angry letters and doing it all anonymously.

Astroturfing lasted longer than Colson who went to jail for Watergate complicity.  It was pervasive when online forums and chatrooms came into being, create false perceptions that cold products were hot and that sincere critics were lunatics.

I notice that Mike's harshest critics all have first names only.  You can't click on any of them and find a blog yet they seem to fall blogs by topic with great vigilance. They also sound more than a little bit alike.

Mike, I think someone is astroturfing you and I'm sorry to see this lowlife tactic slithering its way into the blogosphere.

I can't wait to see what comments come in over here now that I have written this.

McDonald's New Blog--Slow Service for the Hungry

We sort of knew something was coming from McDonald's back in October when we saw Steve Wilson, senior director for global web communications speak at BlogOn in New York City as he described a ponderously slow, occasionally frustrating steady process of a blog strategy heading toward implementation. We were among the majority of attendees who liked Wilson and his candor and felt the pain of his mission.

We were pleased five days ago, when we came across this posting five days ago on a nicely named new McDonald's corporate blog called Open for Discussion. We decided not to blog about it, because there were a few flaws that we thought would soon clean themselves up.  For example the blog runs about a paragraph, then you have to click on "More" to read it in its entirety, kind of newsletterish for a blog and making us think of RSS partial feeds. Open for Discussion also has six categories that are, well supposed open for discussion.

But it's nearly a week now, and there's just this one post and the poor thing has only one comment and I'm growing earful the poor darling will soon die from loneliness.

The folks at McDonald's really should know that if you want the crowds to come in, you'd better serve them up faster and better than that.  You can't have a menu with six categories and then offer just one little morsel. I keep coming back for faster fare and it just isn't there.

So give me a break today. You've started nicely, but if you want this blog to succeed, you need post often.  You need to join other conversations.  You need to engage you customers and prospects in a conversations. You need to show a willingness to listen, really listen.

A weekly newsletter-type proclamation will do you no better than did the Lincoln Fry.

Amazon Now Shipping

This time we really, really mean it.  At least we think we do. I've received three reports that Amazon is now shipping Naked Conversations.  At least we think they are. Two people told us in the last few hours that they've received Amazon confirmations that their books are on their way.  I just went in and tried overnight shipping and Amazon said they could fulfill it.

At long last.

We had a Marshall McLuhan moment at our launch party Saturday night, where I got to spoke with two of our guests who happened to be part of Amazon and in position to do something about the problem.  It turns out that this was one of those Texas leaguer situations where the glitch fell between our publisher and Amazon, so it was not entirely their fault.

In any case, they obviously responded quickly and on this the first work day since the party, we are all systems go.  You can get us through Amazon.com or at the Barnes & Noble store near you.

Or so I hope. Let me know when you actually receive a copy.

B&N Seattle: My 1st Naked Sighting!

I'm just back from the Barnes & Noble store on the corner of 7th and Pine in Seattle. I walked into the store, and as they have designed it to happen, my eye immediately landed landed on the New Arrivals table.  There in all its mustard-colored splendor were four copies of Naked Conversations.

There have been Barnes & Noble sightings coming in from people all over the US over the last few days.  In Hingham, Mass and Bellingham Wash.; in Redwood City, CA, three miles from where I live.  Earlier I reported on sightings in Evanston, Ill., Peoria, and of course, Robert got to sign 28 of them in Pittsburgh a few days ago.

But this was a personal thrill.  I watched someone pick it up, thumb through it with passing curiosity. Examine the picture of Robert and me on the back flap. Put the book down and look straight at me with absolutely zero recognition that I was the guy in the photo.

I approached a really nice B&N clerk named Ton, and offered to sign the book.  He shook my hand and congratulated me and we chatted while I signed the four copies with: "I hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed writing it." He told me that Naked Conversations was on a national Barnes & Noble promotion list, meaning that the book will be in the front of all Barnes & Noble stores. "That means you'll probably sell a lot more books," Tom told me.  From his lips to God's ears, I thought, but kept it to myself.

Tom also told me something that I did not know. Barnes & Noble offers volume discounts for orders of 20 or more books. The more you order the cheaper it gets.

What A Great Party!

Robert has a great synposis of what happened at the Naked Conversations launch party in the Dillow home last night. And he listed all the people to whom we owe debts of gratitude. It dawned on me, as Robert and I signed books through most of the elegant event that it takes a village to write, publish and distribute a book and that Robert and I should be grateful for the strength and generosity of our village.

So many people said so manynice things about Naked Conversations last night, that I am humbled and gratfied.  I also heard about several book sightings, including one at the Barnes & Noble nearest my home in Redwood City, CA. I also heard that the Amazon glitch should be fixed on Monday and that the orders they have taken are much larger than the ones Robert and I are seeing on our affilliate pages.

God, life is good.

Chris Pirillo Bares All in Naked Conversation

The uber-gnome shows his stuff in this truly Naked Conversation. This seems to me to be a brave act in the name of literature.  It's chilly in Seattle.

Party Time

Paula and I are up early this morning to head for Seattle.  Tonight is the first of two Naked Conversations launch parties, this one, engineered and choreographed by Buzz Bruggeman and Maryam Scoble, is in the home of John and Alison Dillow. I understand it's a frop-your-jaw beautiful place, and these folks are just so very generous.  I understand this soiree will be attended by about 100 people and Robert and I will get to sign books, hopefully lots of them.

So many people are being so generous to us. So much support for us and our new baby.

Advice to New Co-Authors

It's been an interesting day. Among many surprises, was a lengthy conversation with with an acquaintance who is collaborating on a book.  He expressed that he and his co-author were frustrated in their repeated attempts to find a common voice.

He wanted to know how Robert and I had done it.

The short answer is we didn't.  We tried, we really tried, but finding a common voice is much, much harder than it seems at first. We love each other's writing.  We respect each other's thinking. We like each other's style.  But I cannot write like Scoble without sucking at it, and he won't even try to write like me.

In the beginning, we had thought that the book would morph into a common style, but it did not.  We brought in a blogging associate in the hope that he could impose some sort of law and order over us, but we learned the hard way, that an editor's job is not to find your voice.  It is to make your voice sing as well as it can.  After a few weeks, the editor left, I assume in frustration. Our publisher gave us a new editor, Faithe Wempen, who knew almost nothing about blogging, but a great deal about making copy tight and clear and accurate. She was great, but she was committed to do her job, not ours.

A month passed and we still had not completed the first of 14 chapters. We owed our publisher 80,000 words and had not yet agreed on the first 500 of them. We had five months left to get the book written and we had not yet gotten really started. It dawned on both of us that we had to resolve this ourselves--just the two of us.  Any third-party would just complicate it.

That, in fact, is how the book got written in my voice, for better or worse. From the beginning, we had agreed that I would be the principle writer. Robert was the fountain of blogging insight and experience.  But he had a day job.  I did not so the book was written in my style.  I'm sure there were times when Robert read sections, that he just hated, but he kept to his side of the bargain.  His contributions to Naked Conversations at least equal and probably surpass my own, so we are in all ways to evaluate it co-authors.

The process that worked for us is that each chapter began with my interviewing Robert.  We started having naked conversations. He would tell me what was important to him in that chapter and who he thought I should speak with. He would open the doors for me to access anyone in the blogosphere, who trusted Robert, but did not know me. Then I went off and conducted interviews and wrote it up and sent it to Robert for comments and reviews.

Once, he decided to rewrite me and I told him in very measured tones that I felt like he had sprayed my copy with graffiti.  It was a bit strong--but only a bit. The process limped forward very slowly at first. The chapter on Microsoft was the most difficult, and the least enjoyable.

But each chapter got a little easier. By about chapter 5, we knew we had found our process and we started having fun with it.  By Chapter 6, we were confident we had found our stride. We had become a team.

My advice this morning is that only one of the two collaborators write the book.  The other will have enough to do to make it a full collaboration. Maybe Woodward and Bernstein, controlled by the style regime of the Washington Post could finish each others paragraphs, but most collaborators cannot do it. The four Cluetrain authors did it, but the back channel story is that their agent locked them in a room in Colorado for a few days to force the collaboration out of them.

Each of us has our own voice. Singing in harmony is for but a very talented few.  Speaking with one voice for a corporation is hogwash and so it is for most authors in collaboration.

Scoblephone Envy

My Scoblephone envy began a couple of days after Christmas when Robert was visiting at my home.  He was touting this new Cingular 2125, that had just about every feature and doodad that brings cross-eyed glows into the faces of geeks everywhere.  But I am no geek and I take pride in my non-geekiness as some of you have come to realize.

What I envied was that Robert had a phone that had both the words "Cingular" and five bars showing on the front. I am a Cingular subscriber, have been for over two years and I have never had a successful conversation on my cell phone inside my house. I have lost weeks, perhaps months of time explaining to people that my cell phone doesn't work at home, and actually wasn't all that great outside of it either. I have listened to hours upon hours of people complaining about having to leave me two voice mails.

I would have dumped Cingular long ago, except that before that I had T-Mobile and before that ATT Wireless and they both sucked in my home as well.  I've asked every dealer there is if I could just take a phone home and try before I buy.  No dice.

So I sat there staring at the five bars, as Robert went through all these nifty features, not listening here was a Cingular phone that worked in my house and I just had to have one.

Robert had learned about the phone from Chris Pirillo and wrote about it back on Dec. 21 or so. I've met Chris only once and immediately liked him, but he's even geekier than Scoble and that is going some. But this time I embarked to join them.

I went to a Cingular store in Redwood City.  Robert had written that it was an Audiovox 2125, but he told me it was actually a Nokia.  I went to my local store, where they told me the Nokia 2125 was sold only on the Pacific Rim.  Scoble said he bought his in Seattle, which is sort of the Pacific Rim, but on the other side. I called Scoble.  The clerk was not interested and insisted I wanted a phone that didn't exist. I tried three other Cingular stores, and could not get a dial tone. I went home and using my landline, started calling Cingular stores. A nice woman in the Cingular Palo Alto store said, of course they had the phone--but they were going fast. She agreed to put one of the last two away for me and told me that by the way, it wasn't a Nokia or an Audiovox, but an HTC, which is a Japanese OEM company who made the phone for Cingular specs.

I sped down there and the first thing I realized is that there is a great unevenness in the quality of Cingular stores.  This one, at the intersection of El Camino and Page Mill Road had its act together.  A knowledgeable sales person seemed to know everything about the phone, and could even explain why the other stores didn't have it or even know about it The phone had not yet been launched. She also solved the baffling mystery of why Scoble's phone worked in my house and my Motorola flip had not. It had nothing to do with the antenna.  It had to do with next generation SIMM chips, which are apparently not only smaller but have a superior architecture for reception.

I took it home and learned that it was not as simple and intuitive as my old flip phone.  I've had it for a couple of weeks now and it has taken me three calls to the Cingular wireless tech support guys and now I have all the functionality I want functioning as I want.  Their tech support guys were sharp and patient and friendly.  In the incumbent carrier world this is news.  As a wholly owned subsidiary of SBC a company who could improve customer service by emulating Dell, this fact is monumental.

Short summary. I love this phone.  It is a life changing piece of technology.  The speaker phone is such high quality that people don't know I'm talking ands free.  The screen is, to quote my geek c-author, "awesome." If you want a tech review Russell Beattie just did one yesterday, when the 2125 actually launched. You can read about it here.

Meanwhile, if you need a new phone, I think those technologically more adept than I am, have found a real nugget.

Today Only: Our Book for $12.47

Todd at 1 800 CEO READ is selling Naked Conversations for half price but only until 5 pm today and I don't know what time zone he's in. Even though, he's mostly corporate sales, you can buy just one copy and he's shipping immediately.

Deliverers from Evil?

Through Scoble you may have heard about a Silicon Valley Billboard by ATT promising "Blogging Delivered." Through Tara, we see how they delivered it to Sean Coon.

The Lonely Store Checker

I regret the frustration some of you are having with Amazon availability issues.  There's little I can do about it and I still believe this will all sort out in a very short while.

But I wanted to share with you something I have been doing since Friday the 13th.  I have been driving this 25 mile radius that hits three Barnes & Noble stores, two Borders, and three independent booksellers.

I walk into each hoping to see a front-of-store display, like Scoble did in Pittsburgh, but so far I have not. I hope to see our mustard-colored baby on a business or marketing or even computer shelf, but I have not.   I go to the clerk and hope to hear as Steve Streight did in Peoria, that the book is in the backroom, but I still get told it has not arrived yet and I hear dates that sound eons away. I want to tell the staff that I'm the author and for them to drag out the Emergency Author Signing Kit that Scoble Flickred in Pittsburgh.

But it has not happened. I'm working on my new book proposal today. It is going well.  But in a few hours, I will hop in the car and make my lonely circle from bookstore-to-bookstore again. Franz Kafka could write about this, or Camus.

But one of these days, I'll find what I'm looking for.  And one of these days a package will arrive on your doorstep from Amazon as well.

Win a Day with Me

Todd Sattersten, whose 800-CEO-READ is a corporate bookseller expressing a great deal of enthusiasm for Naked Conversations is offering 20 free copies of the book and a free day of blog consulting with me over at inbubblewrap. I'm not certain whether the book or the time with me is considered the grand prize.  In any case, I'll be happy to give you my time in return for travel expenses.

Todd, what happens if no one wants the prize?

TechCrunch Throwing Naked Conversations Launch Party 2/17

Web 2.0 impresario Michael Arrington has just announced a TechCrunch champagne launch party for Naked Conversations at his Atherton home on Feb. 17. Details can be found here.  RSVPs are required so please register on Mike's wiki as soon as you can.

Is Web 2.0 Dead?

Between Steve Rubel and Publishing 2.0, the crash of Yahoo and the 30 point plus drop of Google's stock; the nastiness over Gather, and misgivings about Flock, you would think that the Web 2.0 bubble popped before it ever inflated enough for anyone to make an obscene fortune from it.

Like I was saying a year ago about blogging, I am convinced that it has all just begun.  Web 2.0 is a transformative thing and I say that on a day when I've lost more money in my holdings in Google, Yahoo and other stocks to be in any mood for gloating.

What has happened is what should have happened much more often during the dotcom era. Some air has been taken out of the tires.  That's the safe thing to do when you are speeding along a road that gets too hot.  Steve Rubel is right, there isn't enough advertising to go around for all the companies that want it.  Expectations for Yahoo were very high and they failed to make it despite reporting record revenues and healthy margins. This says more about expectations than it does the soundness of Yahoo and where it is going.

There aren't too many players in Web 2.0.  There are too few truly exceptional players, and there is a paucity of teams that are solid enough, stable enough, visionary enough and tough enough to go the long route. As Publishing 2.0 points out, it's time for some chafe to get separated. tech for the masses is being promised by technology enthusiasts who need to listen more closely about what the masses want and what levels of ease are necessary to get them to rapidly adopt.

What is happening is that the rules of the marketplace are setting in.  This is a good thing. I am holding my stock although a day that burst my personal balloon back in the year 2000 has flashed through my memory several times today.

But the stock is not what is important nor are the scores of companies that will jump on the stage, strut and fret then disappear.  What's important is that all the components are coming into position for a new surge in technology's relentless forward push.

And many companies will flourish.  And many people will prosper.  And the right number of advertising dollars will be invested at the right number of companies to support a world who will be better off for what Web 2.0 promises so many people in so many situations in so many places.

Web 2.0 isn't dead.  It is just barely being born.

Pittsburgh Barnes & Noble has Naked in Front of Store

David Tebbutt, please do us both a favor and go right past this post, which I am sure you will consider shameless self-promotion. But I simple cannot resist.  Robert and I slaved for a year for what's happening now.  This is our baby and and we are quite proud. So bare with us until we settle down a bit.

Robert walked into the Barnes & Noble in Pittsburgh, PA.  Right in the front of the store, on the New Arrivals table, just to the left of Dealing with Darwin. He took this picture.  You can see it better here. A clerk told him the store had 27 copies come in a day or so ago.

This is important for a great number of reasons, including the confirmation that Naked Conversations is winding its way into general distribution.

But more than that is that Barnes & Noble is the world's largest book seller, and the smartest merchandiser in the retail book trade. My wife and I still enjoy book date nights at Barnes & Noble and sprawl into their easy chairs to sample a few books before making final selections.

If Barnes & Noble places a first order of 27 books in Pittsburgh, essentially an industrial city, and they place the books in the front of the store, it isn't because they think Robert an Shel are nice guys. It's because they believe customer will like and but the books.

This is most heartening.  I still cannot wait to find the book in a Barnes & Noble near me.

An American in Paris

I knew Chris Keene when we were both pretty young and I did PR for startup companies.  His was Persistence Software, which had a pretty good run and as I recall, went public, before being acquired and I assume the result is that Chris did okay for himself from a financial standpoint.

I had nothing to do with that. My highpoint of working with Chris was to arrange an interview for him with Esther Dyson that was held in a health club on a Memorial Day a great many years ago.  Esther was dripping in a Spandex bathing suit and Chris was wearing a blue blazer.

Now Chris has taken the wife and kids and is spending a year in Europe, some of it was under the Tuscan sun, and just on the road.  Now the family is ensconced in Paris, the kids enrolled in French school. He should compare notes with Web 2.0 startup advisor Jeff Clavier who has moved from Paris to Silicon Valley, but found a French School for his children.

I met Chris's wife Yvonne at Les Blogs in December and she was charming.   regretted having been so swamped that I barely had time to speak with her. In any case, Chris has started a promising blog, which I discovered this morning via a delayed Christmas e-letter he sent out. I like the blog, but I liked the even more personal narrative tone he used in the e-letter.  I hope that this very human style emerges and takes over the blog.

Good luck Chris.

Evan Remembers Woodstock

Some people tell me I have too many blogs, and they have a point.  I get very confused sometimes on which blog  site to use to certain topics. I just posted at ItSeemstoMe about Evan Erwin's fine writing on Woodstock, because that blog covers culture.

But it also is about blogging and business, because I suspect what you see there is going to become a book.  It should become a book. Evan is clearly using a blog to develop a story-telling style that is definitely book-writing quality in my opinion. So just avoid the cheesy link to my own site in the above paragraph and go directly to his five-part blog here.

Bill Burnham Jokes About Blogging as a Waste of Time

Bill Burnham, a blogging VC we regularly follow, in part because he has a knack for sticking his foot into a bucket of occasional controversy, has posted a very funny column about his blogging profits soaring by over 150% to $168.

Unfortunately, Silicon Beat reporter Matt Marshall seems to have taken Burnham seriously.  My guess is that the prolific Marshall was reading a bit too fast.  I think Burnham's post is really quite funny.

Cringely Sees Dark Future for Trad Media

I missed Robert X. Cringely's December article that begins with a reminiscence of journalism in the days of Linotype and hot type.  That was the way it was when i started as a Boston Herald Copy Boy in 1963.

It's changed a bit and Cringely wonders--with good cause--how the traditional model can work in an online world where content is free and advertising cheap. If you missed it too, it's worth a read and thanks to my publisher Joe Wikert for pointing to it.

Stowe Joins Conferenza team

In the midst of all this Naked Conversational hoopla, Conferenza, an online tech conference review service started seven years ago by Gary Bolles among others, has been undergoing a significant transformation from a subscription-based e-newsletter into an ad-supported blog.

Yesterday, Stowe Boyd announced on his new blog that he will be joining Conferenza and plans to play a significant role with us, both on the editorial and advertising sides. Stowe is a newsletter veteran who has played a major role in the awesome growth of Corante, and Gary and I are both pleased and honored to have Stowe join our team.

Conferenza is still in its formative stages.  We will begin in earnest in a few weeks when I live blog at Demo. I'll be posting a conference preview in a day or two. If you are planning to blog about Demo, please email me or let me know at the conference.  We will link to you.

But meanwhile, welcome Stowe.  I am really juiced to have someone of your caliber in both the blogging and conference circuits join our team.

Kami's Reminder: Update Your Amazon Order

We've written about this quirk before, but Kami wrote in this morning to remind us how important it is for you to update your pre-orders at Amazon.com.

Kami reports:

"I was ordering something else at Amazon today and had my account open. There was an update button that I had to press to confirm I still wanted Naked Conversations, which is due to ship on Jan 28 and to arrive Feb 6-10 (by the way, many times I have gotten things sooner than estimated.

Shel, if your readers have a copy of Naked Conversations on back order at Amazon, I suggest that they visit their account and update their order. If you don't they will eventually remove it from the shopping cart."

Blog Business Summit Podcast & Plug

Over at Blog Business Summit, DL Byron talks about Naked Conversations and the experiences Robert and I share in writing our book with the ones he and Steve Broback are having in writing their book, due out in a few months. BBS is being very generous to us these days. Theresa Valdez Klein podcast interviewed me recently and that comes out soon, I am told.

We're #1 at Technorati Books!

We are currently ranked #1 on Technorati's list of most talked about books. This is a very dynamic list and we probably won't stay there for long, but the view sure is pretty at the top, while we are there.

Rich Segal Finds Naked Available in Canada

Ex-Microsoft executive Rick Segal, now an early phase investor reports that Naked Cnversations is now available in Canada, shipping through Indigo. Thanks, Rick. Robert and I can now claim we have an Internationally distributed book in publication.

It's amazing how many landmarks, we can make out of this thing.  Please let me know when we start overdoing it.

Vaspers Pulls Some Quotes

Steve Streight, who scored the first book from a retail shelf, has posted some quotes he likes from the book. I have to admit when I look at a few selected quotes extracted from the overall text, they read pretty well to me.

Thanks, Steve.  It was a good way to start the day.

Double hits for Scoble

Scoble answers a few questions about how he got into blogging and what he knows about it appears at shiwej and coolzOr.

I Accept Honorary SNCR Post

I have accepted an invitation to join the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), as an honorary Senior Fellow. Chaired by Jennifer McClure,SNCR is a think tank for the study of the tools and technologies of the social media. It's membership includes some very eminent members of both the academic and technology communities.

SNCR produces worthwhile events and an excellent Blogzine and is involved in a great number of other thoughtful and thought-provoking activities.

Although my role is honorary, I do plan to play as active a role in SNCR as I can.  Robert and I will be speaking at an upcoming event that will soon be announced. Mike Manuel and I will collaborate on a paper regarding the impact of PR in the Web 2.0 Era

Russ Beattie Gets Phished

Yahoo's Russell Beattie recently got phished.  Because he's more technology adept that many of us, he figured out what had happened and what to do about it faster than many of us might have. I'm linking to it, so that others may know what to avoid, and if failing in that, what to do once you get phished in.

Mercury Spotlights Arrington

Matt Marshall has done a wonderful San Jose Mercury News interview with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.  Matt is right to identify Michael as an individual of emerging importance in the rapidly emerging Web 2.0 marketplace.

In my view, Web 2.0 is underrated, not over-rated.  As the global tech community finally heals from the scars of dotcom, the ingredients are being mixed together for yet another explosion that changes the world once again. Michael is at the center of all that and I predict that he is going to become a lot more important than he already has become. A lot more.

I do take issue with just one of his comments, but I'm probably in the minority on it.  Michael claims the current explosion is different from the dotcom era because companies this time are getting acquired by the winners of the last explosion such as Google and Yahoo. Personally, I believe that a new period of dotcom IPOs is not that far into the future. Some of the tiny companies now forming are going to become very important and very central to people's lives.

Even better than being acquired by today's Google, is to become the next Google. Why not? Google is becoming the next Microsoft, just like in ts prime, Microsoft became the next IBM.

Ivan Challenge Ideas; Not People

My Rambling Librarian friend Ivan Chew in Singapore gets his first unpleasant taste of nasty comments and he wisely takes them down. While he contemplates establishing a comment policy.

But Ivan had this gem of an observation on the level in which disagreements are best addressed:

            Challenge the Idea; not the Individual.

It seems to me a wise statement and one that could make the blogosphere a more constructive place to debate thoughts.