Global Neighbourhoods

Happy Birthday Naked Conversations

[Child of the Marriage. Israel & Scoble with 1st Copy of Naked Conversations, Jan. 5 2006, Las Vegas. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

Naked Conversations celebrated it's second birthday this past Saturday.  Robert and I both seem to have missed it. We touched our first copy of the book at CES at a presentation to Booksellers meeting arranged by our publisher John Wiley in the New York, New York Hotel.

The day was among the best of my life. It was a highlight of what has been the best phase of my life. Working with Scobe was the best collaboration of my life.

It's hard to believe it has only been two years since the book was introduced.  Sometimes it seems the writing of Naked Conversations happened a very long time ago.  Sometimes I think the stories we told are ancient. Yet the book is still selling moderately well, which please me almost as much as it surprises me.

Then I realize that the stories are old only if you have already heard them.  Blogging has, of course, become only a single tool in an enormous social media tool shed. It has also become fruitful and multiplied.  We wrote when there were about 14 million bloggers.  Now there are more than 100 million. There may be as many as a half-billion people involved in social media worldwide.

What has remained intact, I think, is our key point.  There is a revolution going on that is transforming the way businesses talk with customers. That revolution has a key attribute. It's about the conversation, not any one tool.

To all of you who have bought the book, recommended the book, or just heard about it and in some way, what we had to say, impacted you, thanks so much.

Naked Conversations at Age 2

[Israel & Scoble with 1st Copy. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

We are just a few days short of Naked Conversations 2nd birthday, not from the date of publication, but from the date when Robert and I sent the final manuscript to our publisher for publication. It seems like yesterday to me. Simultaneously it feels like a million years ago.

So much has happened since then in terms of social  I won't event mention how the numbers we used in the book have dwarfed over two years ago. I think my favorite paragraph for irony is at te beginning of Chapter 14.

"Twenty years from now, people will look back at the blogging tools we use today and smile at how quaint they were. What will have replaced them?  We haven't a clue."

We went on to talk about the promise of RSS and something just starting up called podcasting,and we  speculated that something called "tagging" showed promise. Forget the 20 years.  We were pretty clueless about FaceBook and YouTube and online video and Twitter and so many things that have exploded on the internet in the past 24 months.

All ths came to mind this morning over on Facebook this morning when Scott Sykes, a PR practitioner for Weber Shandwick in China sent me a message asking me if I had any thoughts to share on changes since the book was published. I have quite a few, but here are a couple of to level thoughts:

• Naked Conversations was essentially about conversations replacing messages because of the internet.  We called that part a revolution and we still do. We talked almost exclusively about blogs because they were the only power tool of the conversational revolution at the time. What has changed is that there are now a great many tools and anyone can use any combination of them.  So the book is still correct on a philosophic view, but it's data has aged faster than Dorian Gray on steroids.
• Kids grow up. The younger generation is an online generation and it has started replacing my generation in the workplace.  Any company that is still not adapting to the social media revolution may discover it is too late to adapt and that some new company is going to disrupt their status quo by hijacking all its young customers.
• Two years from now, everything that is amazing now will be normal. Robert and I once again, don't have a clue as to what new and exciting and different tools will be introduced between now and then.

Scoble on Sabbatical

Of the many things that makes Robert Scoble among the most remarkable people I have ever met is his sheer output of social media work.  He is a pioneer in blogging, online video, Twitter and whatever tool has come to market.  He got Facebook's importance while I was still ignoring it. Few people in few areas have ever been as productive as Scoble has been.

Yesterday he wrote an amazing post, in announcing he would take a sabbatical from posting. He said his blogging has gotten shallow and argumentative and it has. He gets like this from time to time, the same way, Barry Bonds gets for weeks at a time when he too cannot connect to get a hit.

An expectant father, he wrote a powerful truth "holding a 19-day-old baby in your arms is a cathartic experience."  This is true in so many ways. Essentially, it makes a point that sometimes is hard for Robert to remember:

Real life is more important than virtual life. The lives we are immediately responsible for need more attention than the audiences that expect us to entertain or educate them.

Robert is taking some time off and reflecting. I spoke with him last night.  His voice is hoarse.  Gnomedex has burned his candle down.

At the same time, he is on fire.  Robert is playing with a new concept, an idea that ties together the shred and bits that are social media. Robert is not just resting, he's reflecting and when he comes back, I am pretty sure he will have a really good, fresh idea to share with the world. And it is a really good idea that the rest of us will embrace and debate.  We willflatter and insult him as we always do.

I just hope he keeps in perspective that the idea and the contribution will not exceed the importance of one new, little life form named Milan.

Executive Summaries of Cluetrain & Naked Conversations

Steve Sloan, a New Media in Journalism instructor at San Jose State University has posted a series of synopses of both Cluetrain Manifest and Naked Conversations.  For those of you who would like free executive summaries, these are the "go to" posts.

This link brings you to the beginning of naked Conversations and the end of Cluetrain. Read up and click forward to follow Naked.  Click back a few times to get to the beginning of Cluetrain.

Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers

UK Microsoftie Darren Strange reports that Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers among its 71,000 employees.  Both numbers show significant growth.  As irecall, when Robert and I were writing our first chapter of naked Conversations there were 2500 bloggers among 56,000 employees.  By the time we finished the book in October 2005, the bloggers were topping the 3,000 mark. This would mean that the number of Microsoft bloggers has grown by over 50 percent in about a year and a half.

By percentage, I'm not sure whether Sun Microsystems or Microsoft has more bloggers, but both companies continue to grow and continue to extol the virtues of doing it.

One interesting aspect in Darren's report is that there is no longer any controversy about it. When Joshua Allen, became Microsoft's first blogger, the first call to fire him for blogging came just a few hours later, as we reported in Naked Conversations.

Now it is seems to me, blogging is normalizing at Microsoft and that is what should happen.


Technorati Tags: darrenstrange, joshallen

Ernie the Attorney walks me down Memory Lane. It turns out to be a Perpetual Loop

I had almost lost track of my good friend, Ernie, [the Attorney] Swenson, who today reminds me of how my path into the Blogosphere had first been carved. It was at PopTech. It was at PopTech in Camden, Me, one of my favorite conferences. Buzz Bruggeman, invited me to join him at a table, where he was sitting with several people I had never met before. I immediately got into a passionate argument with some overly caffinated guy named David.

That was how I met David Weinberger, JD Lasica and Ernie. Ernie and I immediately hit it off.  Ernie encouraged me to read the book of the guy I was arguing with, something called Cluetrain Manifesto. You never know when you are having a watershed moment in your life and it turned out I was having one.

David's book would inspire me more than any other I have read. Cluetrain, Buzz and Ernie would all be covered in Naked Conversations. Buzz would eventually introduce me to another guy named Scoble, and his friend Andy Ruff would suggest at that dinner meeting that Robert and I collaborate on a book.

To make it all go full circle, Ernie was writing about me today to help promote the  upcoming WOMMA Conference being held in New Orleans Apr. 17-18. The last annual WOMMA Conference was held in San Francisco.  Scoble and I were the co-keynotes at it.

I thought it was a fabulous conference, and if you should attend if you can.  David is the best of us on the presentation circuit. Trust me on this.

 


Technorati Tags: WOMMA, ernietheattorney, jdlasica, davidweinberger, cluetrain, scoble, nakedconversations

Techdirt: Publisher Attempts to compete with Google book scan plan are lame. I agree

One of the many Mikes at Techdirt has an interesting post about how traditional bo publishers, uncomfortable with Google scanning and making searchable the content of all books have started to try to compete by offering excerpts of their own books--with a high level of restrictions on usage attached.

Techdirt thinks these efforts are pretty lame and I have to agree. Naked Conversations was not the first effort to use blogs in support of an authoring effort but it was the most comprehensive until that time.  Our publisher John Wiley wisely went along with Scoble's plan (it scared Hell out of me at the start) to publish early drafts of the entire book on this blog. While there has been some scraping, by the bad guys, there has not been a single case that we know of involving the plagiarism that publisher's so dread. More important, while no one knows any precise figures of who influenced people to buy our book, my guess is well over 90 percent of sales have resulted from some connection with the blogging experience and sales have been pretty good.

While rumors that Scoble and I have become wealthy from naked Conversations are greatly exaggerated, Cory Doctorow, one of blogging's most brilliant bloggers told Forbes Magazine, "I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money."

It seems to me, that Google's scan will not hurt book sales, but will help them. Reading books on computer screens, or in Bubble Jet output form, is just not as good as in the book. One of our dirty little secrets about the Naked Conversations experience is that the actual chapters we published, were not as well read as the interviews or the daily banter on the topics we were covering. The chapters ran from 3,000 words to 10,000 words, and that is just too long for people to read on a computer.

Technorati Tags: techdirt, corydoctorow, googlebookscan

Montreal Blogger Dinner

I think Scoble invented what has become the blogger dinners. He, of course, called them "Geek dinners." I'm not a geek, so when I came along, I refused to attend unless the name got changed. But the idea is very similar to tactics used by evangelists of other categories such as religion or politics.

The idea is to get a group of people with shared interest together.  A visitor from out of town is a great excuse, but the event is really for the benefit of the local community.  Blogging is great, but there is still nothing quite like a face-to-face meeting to strengthen bonds.

I had an absolute ball at the Montreal bloggers dinner, set up by Marc Snyder, attended by about 30 bloggers, many of whom already knew each other through YUL a local networking system.  I didn't get to talk with everybody, but I just met and enjoyed so many people, enjoyed great wine, food but mostly conversation.  did not speak to anyone who did not give me something useful or interesting that I had not yet heard.

I enjoy the friendly bicultural aspect of Montreal bloggers. Half of them may have posted terrible things about me, but I would not know because my French is so poor and the quality of computer translatirs is even worse.

I hesitate to name anyone by name or link, because I will  unavoidably omit some people I should include, so I will just say thanks to all for the fun, the passionate and well-informed conversation, the humor and good times.

I was just supposed to be an excuse  for getting bloggers to have a dinner together but I had a ball. I also understand there were some very promising first meetings for people who may do business together. That is always a good thing and I hope I get the chance to be an excuse to get together in Montreal again. It's a wonderful city, even if it was colder than a witches left nostril.  The people were warm and that is what rally mattered.

Thank you, Montreal.

JetBlue may not blog, but it is transparent

First off, I'm extremely happy that my horrendous travel schedule did not deliver me to the Northeast last week. Second, I'm a JetBlue fan, even if most routes I'm taking condemn me to United and American Air most of the time.

JetBlue is a young company, who just revealed the first blemish on the face of its seven-year history, and it was a pretty ugly one that left people locked on unventilated planes on the JFK tarmac for up to 10 hours. My wife is claustrophobic.  Had we been on that flight it would have been extremely hardon her.

Still, I had to wince when through Personal Bee, I was directed to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, where Paul says that the airline company's lack of information to the public could easily have been a case study for Naked Conversation's. If the book were being written now, I'm sure we would be all over this case. Paul might see it going into "Blogging in a Crisis," or perhaps "Doing it Wrong," but he would be surprised to see us put this one into "Doing it Right."

Paul, you may have missed the startling Page One interview in the New York Times with David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, who described himself as "humiliated and mortified," with how JetBlue customers were treated and how his organization melted down.He admitted that part of the problem, was the low-cost model upon which JetBlue is built and he publicly aired additional problems, such as flight attendants being unable to reach the company to find out if a flight was on or off.

This is transparency and it is a case study for how a CEO can use it. Using a blog would have been a better communications tool, but I think it's important to remember that like a hammer, a blog is just a tool.

JetBlue has sinned, it has suffered and it has repented.  The guy at the top probably ignored a whole bevy of lawyers telling him not to admit any kind of culpability. He says they'll do better and next time the suffering passengers will be compensated.

Naked Conversations began with the statement that we live in a time when most people don't trust corporations.  Personally, I trust this one because of Neeleman's comments.  I will be surprised if they do not do better next time.

And, by the way, when the communications officer at JetBlue, reads ths post, they should pay heed that a blog woiuld be a most efficient commnications tool when your next crisis takes place.




Technorati Tags: jetblue, nakedconversations, infectiousgreed, paulkedrosky

Happy Anniversary, Robert Scoble

[Israel & Scoble with Naked baby. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

I can't believe it has only been two years. It feels like so much longer.

Two Valentine Days ago, Robert Scoble and I were at DEMO.  We had an ouline for a book we were calling The Red Couch.  It was about why blogging was good for business. Robert had surprised me with this stunt, proclaiming to the world that we were going to blog the book and get publishers to bid for it on eBay.

I hated the book blog idea. I knew publisher's would never compete on eBay, but on the blog Robert started, over at MSN Spaces, a lot of people were saying a bunch of encouraging things to us.  Some were giving us leads for the book, others were helping us find the right tone.

Plus four publishers had popped up, expressing interest in the book.  None were going to bid on eBay.  Two had made serious bids.  To be honest, they were bidding well above what we had expected to get as an advance to two first time authors.

One of the publishers, John Wiley and Son sent a team of three down to DEMO to to persuade us that they were the right team. We found ourselves at a circular table in the middle of Morton's Steakhouse surrounded by Valentine couples intent on uttering sweet words in loud tones.  It was perhaps the noisiest table I would know until I attended my first blogging dinner.

The Wiley folk were terrific.  They tolerated Scoble's penchant of ordering wine by price instead of bottle (Scoble Rule #1: When publisher is paying, select only wines costing three three digits amounts). Somewhere into the second bottle, the surrounding couples had their food arrive. As the focusedon devouring pieces of steer, the noise level got tolerable and the Wiley guys, made an incredibly nice offer.  They talked about partnerships and marketing dollars and something called a "Big Book" deal at Amazon.

Like so many of the guests at surrounding tables, we were being swept off our feet. I was ready to do whatever these guys wanted to do. Scoble wasn't.  He was staying way back.

Finally, he laid out his concern with Wiley.  It seemed the competing publisher blogged and Wiley didn't.  Robert felt it important that we have a publisher that had a blog.  I was just happy finding a publisher that was offering this amount of money and tossed in a sumptuous steak as a bonus.

That's when Wiley's Joe Wikert offered to start this blog and our acquisition editor Jim Minatel started this one. They are both damn good blogs that they tell me have served Wiley very well. Robert agreed to do the deal and said he would help them with their blogs. That help would turn out to be a single event,  when Robert posted at Naked Conversations telling Joe everything he was doing wrong.

But we had a deal and it was the most monumental one I've made so far in my life. We had a deal and the Wiley folk left us, as did all the couples at the surrounding Morton's table.  Robert and I found ourselves sitting at the steakhouse bar, drinking XO Cognac at $50 a glass.

We went outside into the desert night to discover a torrential rain, the kind you expect in the tropics. I called my wife to tell her the good news and I heard tears of joy.  I later found out that was in part because she had learned that day that she was about to be laid off from her job at a time when I was at just about zero revenue.

In the end, it all worked out pretty well as I look back two years later  The book went through as many name changes as Murphy Brown went through secretaries, but as Naked Conversations, it has done pretty well. Paula and I seem to be living happily ever after.

Scoble has moved on to become a new age TV star and I'm at least talking a lot about starting a second book. The blog has changed names and colors, but if you are reading this, it is still doing pretty well.

Thanks Robert.  It has been my favorite two years.

Blogging between the books

I received an email from Beth Campbell, an acquisition editor for Informa Healthcare a publisher of surgical and physician books. As I understand it, this is an imprint of Charter Publishing an old and global text publisher.

Beth wrote: "">I wonder how we can use blogging to replace/supplement current medical texts? I've been in this position for almost  20 years, and other than the fact that chapters and illustrations are now submitted electronically, NOTHING has changed in the way we deliver content, even though EVERYTHING seems to be changing about the way people read, learn and communicate."

Good question, Beth, and one that I thought might generate some thinking from you readers, so I got Beth's permission to write my response here, rather than in email. As an author, who is between books, her question hits several of my personal nerves. Among them:

• Portions of Naked Conversations were current, when we completed Naked Conversations in August 2005, but out-of-date, when the book went into distribution in January 2006. Five months is a huge chunk of time in blogging and medical practices, but is pretty fast in publishing.
• New information worthy of comment comes up all the time in a great many fields. Publishers cannot possibly keep up with the Future Shock pace of change.  Revised editions simply are not fast enough.
• The best--and most challenging questions--only come up from readers after you have published and you cannot respond to them for years, and for medical practitioners, that may be way too late.

My solution, of course, is to use social media to keep the conversation current between books.  These may be in the form of a blog or a wiki. A blog can allow an author or the publisher, to keep information  current, and to respond to questions that come up post publication of a book.

A wiki could be used by medical practitioners to collaborate with others in the same profession, examining new research on a subject.  Likewise, audio or video broadcasts can also add to the shareing f new information.

It seems to me that all sorts of old media, newspapers, magazine and books can keep conversations current by braiding a book with blogs and other social media. Social media can become a living appendix, which may be a bad metaphor when one is discussing surgeon's journals.

Beth, I hope this helps.  Does anyone else have an idea?

More on Humanity in Corporate Blogs

I'm glad my recent post on new corporate blogging tips was so well received. I wanted to add something about the balance of personal and business content in a corporate blog.  t seems to me that this is an area where people get fairly confused.

The purpose of a business blog is primarily to talk about what you do at work.  Your audience is probably comprised of customers, prospects, co-workers, competitors and a few family members. What they want most from you is information and insight into your job.

But, by adding some personal information, it helps me as one of those customers, prospects, co-workers, etc. see a real human inside that labyrinth of organization where you work. I really have no desire to swim in a pool of your puppy pictures and lawn fertilizing Saturdays.

One the other hand, I want enough of that stuff to see you are a real person. Corny as they are, pictures of a newborn make most of us smile. If you had a problem with a surly waiter who ruined a special night, if you sailed at sunset in the Carri bean, I may want a glimpse of that.  I may want to know enough of your personal life to understand that you are a human.

What's in it for the corporation that employees you?  A good deal.  As we wrote in naked Conversations, "We live in an age when most people don't trust large organizations." But blogging lets us break down the large organizations into real human units of energy and it makes a great deal of difference in how the overall company is perceived.

This happens all the time in business.  You sit down for a business meal, where you and your dining partner are about to discuss some monumental deal.  How does it start? "So how was your weekend," one asks the other. Then they discuss spouses and children, golf and snow shoveling. Somehow the business part finds its way in, hopefully getting to the next steps part, with the after-dinner beverage

NC is Now in Eight Versions

[From left, Korean, Indian, American and Japanese versions of Naked Conversations. Photo by Shel]

Robert and I really love the international reach that our book has found. So far, our publisher has sent us the four version shown above. The Korean version comes bundled under shrink wrap with a small handful of post cards.  I don't know why.  The Japanese version has unquestionably the raciest cover.

Wiley also informs us that versions have been printed also in Turkish, Russian, Korean and for India. We don't currently know how sales are going.  Nor do we know much about Turkish blogging. We are also told that deals have been cut for both French and Italian versions, which would bring the total to 10.

If you happen to come across one of these editions, please send us a photo of it.

We'd love to see it.

Call me on the Orchard's blogtalkradio show tomorrow night

I am Scott Baradell's guest at 6 pm Pacific tomorrow night on Media Orchard's BlogTalkRadio. This is a neat podcast-like approach that does two things I like.  First, it's live and second, listeners can call in.  This is about as close to talk radio as we've been able to get and much more interactive than the usual podcast format.

Give us a call at 646 915 8556. Details for tuning in can be found here.   An operator will be sitting by.

BTW, I am in Miami, consulting with my old client Scrapblog again.  They are getting close to going live.  They called me in because it's hard getting decent help these days. The first thing I'm going to do is get CEO Carlos Garcia to post more often.

Call me tomorrow night.  Your questions can liven up an otherwise drab case study in shameless self promotion.


Technorati Tags: scottbaradell, blogtalkradio, mediaorchard

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NC on India Bookstore Shelves

My friend Pete Dawson, just back from a few weeks in India and the Middle East, sent me this photo of Naked Conversations on the shelf of a Bangalore Crossroads. Crossroads is India's only national bookseller chain.

Two things are particularly interesting to me here.  First the book is in the Communications section, while in the US it is usually in the business section.  But second, and more significant is that this show an apparent soft cover edition of the book that I have never seen before. I was not aware that we had a localized Indian version of the book out and it is interesting to note.

Thanks, Pete.  I appreciate the photo and the timing could not have been better.

Happy Birthday Naked Conversations

[Israel & Scoble with 1st copy of Naked Conversations--Photo By Buzz Bruggeman]

On Jan. 4, 2006, Scoble and I addressed a group of retail booksellers at CES.  The evnt, sponsored by our publisher John Wiley & Sons would be our first of well over 50 talks and media interviews the two of us did together over the last year.

I got to the event earlier than anyone else.  When one of the Wiley folk opened the first crate of our books--drop shipped the night before from the printer, I was handed the first book.

It was a far bigger thrill than I had anticipated. Only two groups of people can relate--other authors and new parents. It is really quite overwhelming. I wandered around the downstairs at New York, New York Hotel and just walked into Scoble. I didn't say a word.  I just handed him the book.  He stared at it for a long moment with a great deal of reverence.  He looked at our names on the cover, at our pictures on the back flap.  He thumbed through the pages, randomly reading a graph here and there.  He sort of hugged it, then handed it back to me.

It was one of the best moments of a great many best moments over the last year. Later, our pal Buzz Bruggeman, who played a key role in bringing Scoble and I together caught up with us and took this photo. It remains one of my favorites, although it doesn't quite caych the joy that was in our hearts.

 

 

Naked Conversations Named to Soundview Best of Year List

In a Businesswire announcement this morning, Soundview, the executive book summary organization has named Naked Conversations to its list of 30 best books of 2007. We were selected, the release says, from 1200 business books.

 Soundview offers newsletter summaries of books to busy executives.

They also provided professional studio time for Robert and me to read excerpts from our book for a CD that they are also marketing. I was impressed at how adept Robert is as a voice narrator. If the video podcasting thing doesn't work out, maybe he can get a job as studio talent.

This is our second citation.  Earlier, Amazon named us #6 on its list of best 2006 books in its technology and internet category.


Technorati Tags: soundview, nakedconversations

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Naked Presentations

I've been reading Presentation Zen, lately, Garr Reynolds blog on presentation and the language and look of it. He is a veteran of the world of corpspseak. He sees the elegance I see in  simple presentation and articulation. It's a good read.  Give him a glance, when you get the chance.


Technorati Tags: presentationzen, garrreynolds

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Michael Hyatt to post his publishing book in a blog

Michael Hyatt, president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the world leader in Christian publishing s writing a book called "The Thomas Nelson Way." He has announced that he will write it chiefly in a blog and that Scoble and I inspired him to do this through the Naked Conversations experience.

This reiterates what Robert and I already knew. Michael Hyatt is a real gentleman. He personally got involved in Thomas Nelson's bidding to become our publisher.  He almost did.  Nelson and Wiley competed for rights to our book and in the end Wiley made the higher bid in terms of an advance.

I'll be watching his project closely, even as I continue along with my second book being written his way. If you are an author, understanding publishers is really vital.  You may start with a dream and a need to tell your story. But, this authoring stuff is indeed a business, and what Michael is doing is generous and valuable to anyone even contemplating authoring a book.
Technorati Tags: thomasnelson, michaelhyatt

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Gartner says blogging to peak in 2007. I bet they're wrong.

According to the BBC, crystal ballers at Gartner Group predict blogging will reach its apex in 2007 at 100 million, because just about everyone who wants to blog will have tried it.  The respected research group also estimates that some 200 million blogs have been abandoned.

My guess is that they are wrong, but I can see why they are saying it. I think there will be tens of millions of blogs and that many people who wish to blog do not yet have computers or if they do--internet access. I think their are millions of people living in countries where it is dangerous to blog, whose children will be able to do so.  I think there are thousands upon thousands of company employees whose bosses will not allow them to blog.  Those bosses, over time will be replaced by a new generation of executives who will encourage employees to blog because it will have evolved into a more efficient way to communicate with customers and prospects.

In education, i think in 2007, we will see increased numbers of teachers using social media, including blogs, to teach and communicate with students. In politics, I believe 2007 will see a fire hose of elective aspirants chasing voters through blogs. Nonprofits, likewise, are just now stepping into the blogosphere because they are learning they can interact with far more people than through the physical rigors of grassroots campaigns.


What I do think will happen next year is that blogging will normalize, that a blog will be just another tool that employees are entrusted to use in the course of their job, and counting who blogs will be about as relevant as counting who uses email or the telephone.

Of course, if I am right and Gartner is wrong, they'll just pubish and market a new thick expensive report on how unpredictable this social media market really is.

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Rubel thinks blogging and Naked may have peaked

"The Flack" Peter Himler posts an interview with my friend Steve Rubel who comments that books such as Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations may be old hat and that blogging itself may have peaked in terms of numbers.

Maybe so. Maybe so, but I think not.

In fact, Naked has surprised everyone by the steadiness of it's sales.  The book is just short of its first birthday and sales, we strut to say, are still pretty solid. I ave noticed that sales have moved geographically away from American urban centers while taking off in English speaking communities of Asia, Europe and Canada. This trend seems to overlap with many historic technology adoption routes.

Steve and I tend to hang out in the front of a comet that has a Long Tail to it and he just might have been blinded by the light in his comments to Peter.

In our neighborhood world he's absolutely right. Blogging is an over-discussed topic. If you talk about Kryptonite bike locks in our neighborhood, people will roll their eyes heavenward or point to their throats and make gagging noises. But ours is a small neighborhood and this is a very big world despite current levels of connectedness.

I will be better persuaded that it has peaked when my wife's employer tells her a blog would be useful in her marketing efforts to attract more foster parents in Santa Clara County, California, or when shoppers at Edelman's most famous client stores know about great or shoddy deals because of what they read on a customers blog or YouTube clip.

What I do see and have written previously about is the normalization of blogging. Like movies, telephones, recorded music, television, PCs, trains and so on the real impoact comes after the mania, when everyday people start adopt technology to do everyday things.  Blogging will pass its peak only after it becomes an everyday tool worldwide and  we have some road to travel before that happens.

Not me. I can quit whenever I want.

 How to know when you are addicted to blogging. Idiot's confessions.

Mitch Calls Naked One of Year's Best Reads

Naked Conversations is making a good number of blogger "Best of 2006" lists and this means a good deal to us.  I'm not going to cite each time it happens, because it gets pretty self serving, even though every time I see us named, it pretty much tickles me.

But this morning Mitch Ratcliffe named us over at CNET.  To me, this is a big honor because in my years of being a "PR-guy-who-would-really-rather-be-a-writer," Mitch was one of the guys I wanted to emulate.most.  He still is. 

Over the years, he has contributed to Forbes, Fortune, the old mighty PC Week and other publications and as my friend Richard Brandt has said, Mitch is a writer's writer.

Thanks, Mitch.

The importance of cheap talk.

Pat Phelan has been over from Cork for a couple of days, as I've mentioned, and we have been on a whistlestop schedule talking business with a bunch of next-generation telephony companies-- Jangl, Jajah, Talkplus and by phone with GrandCentral. This completes for me a crash course in what I'll call the new telephony companies that has also included face time with Sten Tamkivi COO of Skype and Greg Spector of Rebtel, the Swedish company.  In addition, Pat has filled me in on meetings and talks with at least another half-dozen players in this rapidly emerging category.

No matter that Pat arrived wearing shoes that might have previously been owned by some service vendor who owned a pink Cadillac who could find you companionship on a lonely night, the guy has vision about where it's all going and what's important.

I would say that my crash course puts me in the outer perimeter of the inner circle of this new telephony services category. I'm impressed by who and what I have scene during this survey course. I have no doubt that I recently met a future billionaire who's currently at the helm of the winner of a new race for a new era of telephone services.  The fact I don't know which pilot will end up looking over his shoulder from which helm is not at the center of where I'm looking.

I'm looking at what happens to, for and by people, and from that perspective, I just love what I'm seeing. happier days are on their way.

Here are a few key points that I've come to after a half-morning's reflection.

1. Voice services are getting cheaper - a lot cheaper.

New technologies and companies are going to reduce the cost of calling internationally from dollars and Euros per minute to just a few cents. This will result in more people in more places talking with each other and this is a good thing from a business and social perspective.

2. Cheap talk is getting easier.

There's something clunky about a great many of these services.  We don't want to dial two numbers because it costs time to save money.  We don't want to swap out our SIMM cards and we don't want to be tethered to computers.  Decision-makers at each company understands this and they also understand that their competition is working on simpler solutions. History shows that in such situations, simplicity for users evolves rapidly. In the case of the new telephony, the evolution is going to be very rapid.

3. Incumbents can't win.

The Mafia-like stranglehold big carriers have around our throats is being  unpried at the same brisk pace that their other hand is being loosened from our wallets. Because these giants have so many financial, political and regulatory advantages their demises may be slower and uglier than I would like to see, but their aging command and control business models simply cannot adapt to the user-enforceable requirements of modern times.  As historically has almost always happened disruption comes from new companies, not from the R&D sections of old companies who are very happy with the way things are.

4. Cheap talk will speed emerging markets.

This thought is really at Pat Phelan's soul. Expensive phone calls are inconvenient and annoying to us road warrior types. When I pay a buck a minute to speak by mobile phone to overseas friends, we flare when we see the bill. Often time and place make using Skype too inconvenient and only a fly speck of road warriors have ever tried the new stuff from TalkPlus, Jajah or Rebtel but we get by.

But in emerging populations and for people who left home so they could feed their families, cheap talk is critical for their evolution in the economic food chain. A great many Polish people in Chicago, Asians in Vancouver, Bangladeshis in Ireland live for that one calla week.  These are the world's "unbanked" as Pat calls them and there are 100s of millions of them.  Cheap talk allows them more discretionary income and that income creates markets to emerge more rapidly.

This all becomes very important to me in Global Neighborhoods. Voice-to-voice touch is a fundamental element in making geography less relevant to people and markets.

 

The Sexiest Naked Conversationalists

Have I mentioned that Kathy Sierra is consistently among my favorite bloggers? This post right here is one of my reasons. She has a way to pull out stuff that I find fascinating and I never would have found on my own.

In this case, she shows a,well provocative photo of a pretty naked woman whose most private areas are veiled by a shower curtain baring only a bit of leg, arm and face while the rest is left to imagination.

She says scientists argue that this sort of photo, leaving key points to the beholder's cognitive imagination, turns on people of the male persuasion more than a full frontal nude would.

I am not going to er... reveal if this is true of me, but I do wonder how scientists researched the matter and how they drew the conclusion.

The marketing point, however, is irrefutable. We all hate total brain dumps. We like being fed information in little spoonfuls taking more if we wish after we've digested what we've receive so far.  There are no business stories that I recall hearing, where I could not fill in the unrevealed parts and felt, well satisfied.

As far as Kathy's photo goes, well I have to admit that i really love the shower curtain.









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Amazon Lists Naked among year's 10 Best

Amazon.com has named Naked Conversations as #6 on its list of the 10 Best Computer & Internet books of 2006.  This is indeed an honor and my thumbs are tugging at my suspenders as I strut about the office.

NOTE:  I have replaced a previous comment with this input from our editor Jim Minatel, who contributed significantly to the quality of the book. Jim tells me that Naked was selected from between 1200 and 1500 books in the category.

That's not so bad for two rookie authors.

Happy Anniversary Scoble

Scoble leaves a comment on Jeremiah's very kind post  lamenting that he cannot join me for a glass of red wine and some company.  The poor guy has to fly off to London on this fine Thanksgiving morning, therefore he has declined our invitation to join us for dinner (as has Jeremiah). Meanwhile on Scoble's blog, he seems to have provoked a rematch with Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, with whom we had a solid bump, back when we visited the Amazon home court during the Naked Conversations book tour.

My recollection of the Vogels incident is different than either of them recount.  We may have spiked sales for a few days, but it was not our finest moment together and as for Werner, I will not nominate him for Host of the Year.

But I digress.

On this day, our house will be filled with company, and as is our tradition we will go around the table, talking about what each of us has to be thankful for. When it comes my turn, I will toast Scoble, on this the eve of our second anniversary.

On the day after Thanksgiving, 2004 I flew to Seattle to pitch Robert Scoble about co-authoring a book about why business should blog. He said yes, but it was a most inauspicious start.  The guy did not become engaged in the project for another month, when he told the world and me at the same time that we would blog the book right out in public, where everyone could see it.

As I have written, at the time I though the guy was Loony Tunes. I though publishers would walk away.  I thought our intellectual property would be ripped off.

In fact, blogging the book was pure genius.  The blog built a modest community of Naked Conversations champions.  Their word of mouth contributed most significantly to the book becoming the success it has become. Bloggers also made Naked Conversations a much better book, by adding cases, telling us what did and did not work, by fact checking and even by catching the typos.

This was Scoble's genius.  It not only changed our book and contributed to its success. By my last count there have been at least a dozen additional books that are being first blogged in one case or another and the authors as well as their publishers are enthusiastic about the results.

Meanwhile, I'm just thankful to Scoble for having partnered on the book with me. I greatly changed my life for the better. Robert, enjoy the UK.  This is a great day to land in London.  Thank those Brits for the country.  Overall, we've done okay with it so far.

Bloggers and wise old asses

I found Liam Cassidy's blog because I use search tools to feed my own ego. He said the magic words know  "Naked Conversations," and there he was in all my  RSS feeds. Once I got to Liam's site, I not only liked what he said about the book, I  discovered someone new who shared my interest on a variety of subjects.

He mentions, for example, the ability of bloggers to shout back at big branded companies and to tell others about shoddy support. I care about this and have been known to climb a soapbax with megaphone in hand on this issue. He writes how bloggers seem to champion fair play. I have some religion on this issue as well. In fact, Liam's post got me to do what I assume he wants me to do. I followed my ego feed to his post.  I liked it. I looked around the whole blog and liked other stuff, so I subscribed and now I am attempting to send some traffic his way by pointing you to check out his blog as well.

If patterns prevail, Liam will get a few more hits, and then a smaller percentage will subscribe, and maybe point others his way if he keeps writing on matters that are useful or interesting to his new subscribers. This is how the network works.  the power is not really in the rank, but in the network of blogging.  The topic determines the neighborhood of that network.

This brings me to the one key point where I am not joined at Liam's hip. He and I do not precisely agree on how influence works.

"I'm not complaining," Liam says, but "rather, commenting on what I think is an interesting emerging condition, or state, in the blogosphere. When it comes to influence, some bloggers, to paraphrase, Benjamin, the wise old ass an Orwell's Animal Farm, "some bloggers are more equal than others," then goes on to offer a few good pointers on how bloggers can make themselves better noticed.

There is undeniable truth in what he says. If I write something, it may have some degree of greater influence than Liam, because, according to Technorati, I have more readers and links than he does--at least at this moment, and if Robert Scoble writes about it, Technorati says he's ten times more influential than I am.

But that perspective overlooks the real power of the blogosphere, which is in the network, not in us nodes, some of whom are old asses, even if the wisdom part remains in doubt.

The nodes are highly dynamic. Eighteen months ago, Michael Arrington was virtually unknown. Now he's the top blogging influencer if you happen to be a Web 2.0 company. If Michael pisses off too many people over too long a period of time, or if people display more brilliance, provide better information or write with greater prolifically, than Michael will get pushed off the rankings mountain. This will be difficult, because along with pissing off lots of people, Michal is extremely good at what he does.

But he's only relevant in an increasingly slender slice of the blogosphere pie. He's worthless to you, if your passion is hummingbirds or sports or politics or cooking.

Liam mentions the influence of Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus regarding product support issues. In that category, Paul has great influence today. That is because Paul continues to contribute on that topic. Other people like Jeff Jarvis and others come and go.

What gets your rankings up is by writing about things that are relevant to others on a shared topic.  What keeps you climbing in the ranks is to keep contributing to the relevant community.  I'm told the alleged "Top 100" blogger list has a 60% year-to-year turnover rate.

I've written too many times about the list of unknown bloggers rising to the top by: revealing Dan Rather's sloppiness; photo blogging punctures in an Alaskan Airlines jet in flight; exposing rotten working conditions; the horror of being in a London tube when a bomb goes off; the wrath of a tsunami hitting Phuket's shores; the need to connect with loved ones after a hurricane wallops a small town and so on. Some of these blog authors rose to the top for a day then disappeared.  Others have remained prominent.

For business people, the day to day contribution on a specific topic have brought them to prominence. Arrington is a shining example. My friend and client Pat Phelan has risen up several hundred thousand ranking places, not by writing on spectacular topics, but writing prolifically and with relevance just by writing about what is interesting and valuable in the area of low-cost phone calling. The same goes for another friend, Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang, who has become prominent by showing how corporations can either build communities or become influential over existing ones. In fact, he has followed all the pieces of advice that Liam offers at the end of his column.

The way all this happens is not by watching the rankings and determining your position with it.  It is by watching the network and determining how you can benefit those in closest proximity to your position in it. We are all nodes on the social network. We are all connected.

Liam, who says he has relatively low ranking has addressed issues that are proximate to me and I enjoy decent rankings.  I amplify what he has to say. Some people follow my link and check out Liam's post.  If they like it, they check out what else Liam has written about recently. If they like that, they click on an icon and subscribe. If Liam keeps posting things that are relevant to a particular network neighborhood, than he rises in popularity. In that popularity there is influence. To become even more influential he has to remain generous with thoughts and information that are valuable, and hen the other nodes keep pointing to him.

This is a very long way of saying that it's not about the rankings which are temporary. Michael Arrington is considered on top of the influence pile for Web 2.0 start up companies. Eighteen months ago, very few people ever heard of him. If over the next 18 months, he may become the leopard frozen at the top of the mountain, or he may disappear. Sooner or later we all disappear, making room for Liam and the multitude of new bloggers coming in every day.

Or may these are just the mutterings of an old ass.  Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. This happens to be my favorite of American holidays. We should all remember once a year, all the things we have to be thankful for, don't you think?

Marketing's Two Little Words

The passionate Kathy Sierra, one of my favorite bloggers cites Seattleduck's Kevin Briody as having figured out the two words that should be most coveted by every marketer. I think they're right, unless of course you are trying to sell to Mr. Spock.

I've been Dugg!

Less than two hours after I posted why I don't dig Digg, I got dugg. So far I have seven votes. Okay, there's a little cuteness going on.  Mark Harrison posted my comments to Digg after leaving a comment speculating about that irony, on my original post.

Naked Conversations Supports Sun Microsystems Projection

I was over at Sun Microsystems today to talk with a small group about blogging and social media. I'm always pleased when I walk into a room such as this one was and see our book on the table.  In this case there was but a single copy--being used to prop up the projector. I guess we can argue that we support Sun's projections.

Naked Conversations Japanese Version

Our publisher, John Wiley & Sons, sent me four copies of the Japanese version of Naked Conversations which is apparently just out. This version, published by Nikkei Business Publications, Inc., Japan is interesting, to me, in that it is in paperback with cover around it reads from right to left and from top to bottom on each page.

The only words I can understand are the title and our names.

This is our first translation book.  There will be at least two more and seeing it is yet another thrill in what has been a very thrilling path.

[NOTE--Photo added in response to Gabe's comment below. I'll post a professional shot when the publisher sends it.]

Lunch with Scoble

I had lunch today with Scoble.  It was the first time in a very long time that the two of us could just sit down without some business at hand or without the need to discuss some upcoming gig.

For more than a year our lives have been closely intertwined.  Co-authoring this book was in some ways very like a marriage.  It took a while to find our rhythm.  Each of us nearly walked out the door at one point or another. We learned the silliest little things about each other and a few personal things that not even Scoble would post.  But, in time, we learned how to work and write and speak together in ways that became a joy for us and people have seemed to appreciate.

It's been a great relationship, but times are rapidly changing. We are both getting enmeshed in new "Post-Naked" projects. He's figuring out just what a vice president of video blogging is supposed to do, and I'm trying to figure out just what the hell a global neighborhood is and why anyone should care about it.

Our relationship just might drift like a boat whose rope has slipped the dock. We don't really know.

Yet, for two hours, we just talked and talked about all sorts of stuff.  We had a really great time.  And we know that we will both have been changed for the better from the experience we've shared.

Scoble, That's Not what Naked Conversations Said...

Scoble gets into more blogging tussles than I do.  He's also a lot more gracious about it than I am in most cases. The current one is about the definition of a blog began here and seemingly will end here.

While it may be resolved in the blog battles, I think I should clear up what Naked Conversations did or did not say regarding the definition of a blog.

In Chapter 2, we said a blog is

"...nothing more than a website with content displayed in reverse-chronological order. New items, or “posts” are at the top of the page. Except for team-written corporate and collaborative blogs, site visitors can identify the actual person or persons writing them. Blogs are loosely joined to each other by linking. Find one blog, and you can probably spend hours clicking links from blog to blog to blog – many of which talk about ideas and theories and rants on other blogs or on mainstream media (MSM) sites like the New York Times or USA Today."

There is a presumption, but not a requirement in what we wrote, that blogs are public. A few pages later, we got to Blogging's Pillars, to which Scoble made reference in his recent definition wars. He wrote these prior to the book and their were five.  In the book they grew to six and now he has reduced them back to five. In any case, we used them to explain why blogging matters, not to define blogging itself.  I think they do a pretty good job of explaining relevance.

However, in numerous places throughout the book, we recognized private blogs and internal blogs. In our interview with Mena Trott, she told us that a majority of Six Apart blogs were private and password protected. We also talked about nearly interviewing Intel CEO Paul Otellini who has an internal blog that goes to 86,000 employees about once weekly.  When he declined, we accepted as valid his defense that, "after all a private blog is private. We also commented that IBM may have the most internal blogs of any company--which has its own irony since the second option for such kinds of communications would be IBM's Lotusnotes.

In fact, our original Table of Contents had planned an entire chapter on Internal Blogs, until we realized internal bloggers had no desire to cooperate with us.

At no point, do I recall Robert or I ever debating whether non-public blogs were not really blogs.  We didn't even consider it.

Sorry, partner, I just can't join you at the hip on this one.

I've been holding my breath since he used Naked Conversations as a reference to make a point on defining what a blog is. He turned to blogging's five pillars, which for the book he had turned into six pillars.

Naked in Sports Illustrated

No, the headline has nothing to do with swimsuit models. Our book is favorably mentioned in the Sports Illustrated, at least the online version. This is a particular honor for me, because as a kid I was usually among the last to be chosen for a pick up game in any sport.  I have a hunch this is also true for Scoble.

So, for all those kids who got picked before we did.  Who hit and jumped and blocked and caught and shot better than we did, to all of you who never got mentioned in Sports Illustrated, heh.  Come uppance takes a long time. 

Thanks for the birthday present, Sports Illustrated.

Blogging a Book on the New PR

David Meerman Scott announces on one blog that he will be writing a book on the new marketing and PR on his personal blog. He says his publisher will be Wiley, who was our publisher, and the first publisher to ever allow and encourage authors to write a book by blogging it.

This is a subject that needs a book on it. So many marketers have lost there way, and can be helped by a new guide.  While Naked Conversations had a chapter on PR and the problems it faced, we left lots of room for consructive advice n how to be effective and credible in the new Conversational Era.

For Scoble and I, the experience was terrific.  With the blogosphere as our collaborator, we wrote a much better book than we would have done without it.

Good luck, David.

2 New Blogs Credit NC. One Makes Us Proud

Something very gratifying has started to happen.  Several times in the past few weeks people have emailed me to say that they read Naked Conversations, then started a blog. I've received two in the past 24 hours and one of them makes me proud to have played a role in getting it going.

The Liverpool National Museums blog is a wonderful, friendly thing that shows you the breadth and humanity that blogging can communicate.  A most recent post shows a musical instrument that merges a wind instrument with a prettily enameled toilet--not something you see everywhere.  One down shows kids marching in a band and so on. You read a few of them and you get the idea that the Liverpool museum folk have a lot of things going that are interesting. My thanks to Billy Fallows, the museum editorial director who gave me the heads up and said our book helped him to get started.

I wish I could say the same about the new Yahoo Corporate Blog, which author Nicki Dugan wrote me about yesterday.  She too, said NC played a role in shaping the blog.  But I think, it must have played a very small role because the blog ignores much of the advice we give. 

It is called Yodel, which seems appropriate. Yodelers play with echos, and this blog links only to other Yahoo blogs, at least so far.  I went to the About page to see who Nicki was and found myself on the static website About page that told me all about Yahoo's founders. Nicki, writes in the voice of a corporate "we," rather than in the first person voice we so strongly advocate. Another site blogger has written that she is a senior corporate communications person and I have no trouble believing it. I don't have a problem with that, so long as she makes it transparent who she is and where she's coming from. There is also a video clip on the site, which didn't work for me--but i seem to be having trouble with tech ever where these days, so someone else needs to verify whether it works or not.

What Yodel needs to do is to join other people's conversations if it wants other people to join theirs. This blog is about corporate blogging as much as any blog site is.  It also is about communities, a subject that should be very dear to Yahoo. So it surprised me that, in my dialog with Nicki, it became obvious that she does not read it.  She explained she has been too busy starting Yodel.

Perhaps she'll catch this one. She should also check out the Liverpool Museum blog to see how it's done properly.

I've said this before. Large organizations will mostly start blogs in a lame and cautious fashion.  People like me should not be overly harsh because some of these blogs will get better over time. Its just that Yahoo should know better and be better, if their desire to be the center of Internet communities is to use the miracle of conversations in a bidirectional sort of way that benefits the community.

Scoble Finds the Answer

After all my pontification and speculation on why Naked has suddenly gone from tepid to red hot, Robert noticed something that I missed.  Under the very clever headline of "Long Tail Wags Naked" he reported that Amazon.com is co-marketing our book with The Long Tail as a "better together" package. The Long Tail is currently #2 at Amazon and we are riding on its very popular coat tails. We are up to # 318, by far, our best ranking ever.

Amazon... I always loved those guys.

Naked Conversations: A Long Tail Case Study?

Our book is ranked #575 on Amazon.com this morning. This is the highest it has ever been.  A closer look at the publisher's retail numbers over the last 90 days, shows the book is doing what our publisher tells us-- books do not usually do--come back from an oblivion trendline.

Before the direction reversal, we had experienced out first day closing at over 10,000, followed by a spot ranking at 14,000 before Naked Conversations reversed direction.

So what happened?  Scoble leaving got us some new publicity in a whole lot of places.  That certainly helped. And at the time the he was getting lauded by major magazines like the Economist and broadcast like BBC, we enjoyed a very nice spike.

But I don't think that explains, the prolonged, steady upward trend that we are experiencing.  After the ads, the 30 radio interviews, the endless speaking engagements, the podcasts, what is happening now?

I think corporate adoption is happening now much more than it was back in January when our book came out. I think that corporate folk are trying to figure out what to read and they are looking to the blogosphere where well over 200 people have spoken in praise of Naked Conversations.

Back in January, our publisher, Robert and I were hearing a phenomenal amount of praise and we thought we had hit it out of the park. In fact, we were hearing the amplification of an echo chamber that we had warned about in Naked Conversations and we had merely made it to first base.

What's happening now is that the word of mouth engine has motored past blogging's inner circle. And that is helping us tremendously. What I also think is impacting us is a Long Tail factor, a book who's strong takeoff is anything but long ail behavior.

But our appears to be a good case study for his inevitable revised Edition.

Back in January, many blogging celebrities reviewed our book. This help inflate both sales and our egos. We are getting a lot of reviews again, but most of them from bloggers I have not met.  Nor have I heard of them, until I found them through blog searching. The new reviewers and recommenders have many fewer links, perhaps an average of about 30.

But they are influencing people, that our entire effort had never directly reached. Collectively they are influencing a great many people in a great many organizations.

I'm sharing all this, while I'm in Maui and committed to family that I will not spend my five days here under this tree blogging. But along with being here and the chemistry of salt water, I am really buoyed.

Thank you Long Tail. Thank yo new purchasers.  Thank you word of mouth and thank you, whatever the Hell is causing so many people to now be buying our book.

In the Recording Studio with Robert

Scoble and I had a new experience a couple of days ago, when we went into a professional recording studio in Menlo Park, CA, called The Annex.  It's the same place where George Winston had done all his New Age recording stuff back in the 70s.

We were there as part of an agreement between our publisher and Soundview Executive Book Summaries who creates sort of a trot version of our book in both print and on a CD Disk.  We wanted to do it, in part, because some of publishing's home run hitters also do these summaries--Stephen Covey, Seth Godin and Louis Gertner.  Also, we get some money credited to our royalty revenues, although we are clueless how much.

But both Robert and I were dazzled as we stepped into the recording room to do an interview and read the summary into the recording equipment.  Okay, I had an urge to belt out my rendition of "Louis, Louis," but what was cool was the quality of the sound.

Through our pro-quality headphones, we could hear ourselves and each other and the audio was just so are above what we hear all the time on podcasts, call-ins to commercial radio or when a mike is stuck in front of us in a live venue.

The same thought struck us both at about the same time.  Why don't podcasters use studios for the best interviews? Of course, Robert is transitioning into that very business. While I searched for my sun glasses, following the session, Robert had started haggling about price for renting the rooms and maybe their fine engineers for Podtech, his new employer.

3rd Thursday's Corporate Blogging Panel

Jeremy Pepper and Mike Manuel co-hosted that spotlighted a panel of three charming corporate communications specialists from Cisco, NetAppliances and Ingres. I did not take notes.  Nor did I catch all three of their names, so I have to give a vague report based on my recollection of what was said after I had consumed a beer and was really focused on not freezing to death in the Palo Alto Fanny & Alexander Patio where the heat lamps were not turned on as the temperature plummeted.

Each of the companies are taking different views of corporate blogging. Ingres, a recent spinoff, is acting with the freedom and speed of a startup because it is still a private company. NetApps has only one official blogger and he is on the C-level.  Several employees blog on their own time and identify themselves as NetApp employees. Cisco seemed to me to have the most open blog policy, sounding very much like any employee can start a blog and is trusted to say what they want. One official blog, faces off on one of the most controversial of all issues, Cisco's involvement in China where internet freedom of speech is under the thumb of a government command and control policy.

The two public companies moved at a glacial pace to implement blogging.  Ingres moved with speed.

I got a special kick out of the fact that two of them said they used Naked Conversations to persuade their company decision-makers to facilitate blogging.  Jeremy pointed out t me and identified me as co-author.  I felt like I was in a remake of the Marshall MacLuhan moment in Annie Hall.

In fact, this is precisely what Robert and I hope will happen with Naked Conversations.  It is a book written with Corporate evangelism in mind.

Each see them increasing

Toby Starts Blogger Stories

Blogging Diva Toby Bloomberg has started Blogger Stories, which begins with a slice of my life that had not previously written about. Please read it if you'd like to know why I am not selling shoes at Nordstrom's

I'm the evangelist on Page 68

I’m in seat 7A on a Southwest Flight from Oakland to Boise. I’m reading Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, the third of an outstanding trilogy of memoirs that is helping to set my mood for my upcoming talk at Cork IT in a couple of weeks.

The guy sitting next to me is reading Spirit the inflight magazine. He’s on page 68.  I know that page because I’m interviewed by Chris Tucker on that page.  Tucker calls me a “business blog evangelist,” which is accurate and feels pretty good. I’m tempted to tell the guy next to me that he’s reading my quotes, but decide against it.

Still, it’s a pretty cool moment.

After all, I’m heading to Boise for no other purpose than to evangelize business blogging. Wish me luck.

Eureka! We have found our Blogging Plumber

For those of you who have read Naked Conversations, you may recall Robert and I searched unsuccessfully for one to write about.  Well, Retired Geezer, has pointed us to one in Boise, Idaho.

Sprinkler Doc, our blogging plumber, writes that he was inspired by our book in his first post, which coincidentally went up just in time tonight's first-ever Boise Blogger Dinner. Doc and Geezer will be meeting me tonight at the Flying Pie Pizzeria, where we will gather around Flora, the 167-pound blogging tin foil ball that have her.

Garrison Keeler, this sounds like one of your stories.

I have the feeling that the Boise blogger dinner will be an event that I won't soon forget.

Waxxing Toward Global Conversations

I first met Tracy Sheridan at Michael Arrington's TechCrunch Party launching Naked Conversations. She had presented me with these really neat Naked Conversations bookmarks, which I loved and have been passing out ever since.  They are close to gone now.

I met with Tracy a few weeks later and she talked about producing this global audio podcast featuring Robert and me.  She had a vision for starting a global conversation kicked off by Robert and me. She had done something like this a couple of years back for Seth Godin with Purple Cow before the technology had become what it is today and before their were audiences that there are today.

We set a time/date of Saturday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday May 20 and she went off to do her thing, keeping us updated ever couple of weeks. Last week was a crazy one for me.  I was a bit under the weather and using much of my energy to post a few thought pieces and to get my brain around Global Neighborhoods, my new book.

Meanwhile, Tracy was announcing Waxxi, her new form of integrated website-based podcast, where Robert and I will have the honor of making history by being her first guests.

While I wasn't looking this weekend Tracy announced the project on her blog, Michael Arrington picked it up, Blogger's blog was among several to follow, including Robert and TechMeme. The result is astounding to me.

Tracy tells me that over 500 people from 30 countries have registered so far. Thanks to Tracy, we are about to participate in a global conversation. This is exhilarating and humbling.

Thanks so much, Tracy. I had no idea that this would become such a significant, watershed event.

Naked Conversations Most Frequent Words

Amazon.com has this feature that I had neither heard about nor noticed until just a few minutes ago.  It's calledConcordance and it tells you the 100 most frequently used in a book.  It lists them alphabetically and sizes them like words in a Tag cloud.

Here's the ones for Naked Conversations:

2005  ad  another  best  better  blog  bloggers  blogging  blogosphere  book  business  change  com  comments  communications  company  conversations  corporate  culture  customers  day  employees  even  example  executive  fact  few  find  first  get  good  google  great  help  ideas  information  ing  internet  issues  know  let  link  market  marketing  may  media  microsoft  might  million  need  new  now  number  often  own  part  people  perhaps  point  post  posting  pr  press  product  public  read  real  rss  say  scoble  search  see  services  should  site  something  start  started  still  story  take  team  technology  things  think  thought  time  told  tool  two  use  used  users  want  web  word  work  world  write  years 

There are no surprises here, but I do find it fascinating.

Thinkpad and Me--Together Again

The computer came back on Friday.  While the Thinkpad people were fast and professional, I got tripped up by DHL who picked up my computer one day late and returned it one day late as well forcing me to sit and wait for them to ring my doorbell, sort of like waiting for DH Godot.

But as I booted up, I heard the joy of the Windows theme medley.  The new motherboard had done the trick.  All my stuff was where it used to be and I was at all stations go. Thanks to so much now being online, I was not as hamstrung without the Thinkpad as I would have been a couple of years ago.

Plus, I had access to my wife's Mac and to a (heh) Dell latitude loaned to me by my client Sharpcast. Still, I found it surprisingly traumatic  to not have my computer as my appendage for a whole week. It reminded me of how attached I've grown to having it always by my side, always connecting.  It will take me some reflection to determine if this device dependency is a bad or good thing.

In any case, I found it a reason to not blog much for the most part. If I had posted any thought pieces, there would have been a certain whining attached to what I wrote and in such cases, it is usually wiser to kick back.

In any case, I've made some decisions on this blog and my other, and I have a ton of things to write about, and this being a day observed by many as a symbol of new beginnings, I thought it would be a good day to start getting back into blogging.

It's good to be back at it again.

Thanks for Affiliating

I've been noticing a whole bunch of blogs with a Naked Conversations Amazon Affiliate link on them.  This was not something we ever suggested, but we are very grateful to those of you who are doing it.

Getting an icon up on a whole bunch of sites was a primary reason for the astounding success of ICQ and Firefox. It is another example of word of mouth engines and we appreciate it. If you affiliates make a few dollars while you are at it we are ecstatic about it.

While I'm expressing thank, we are also heartened by the many favorable reviews we have received, particularly by those of you who have put comments on the Amazon site, where it influences non-bloggers.  We have 25 favorable reviews and one guy who was disappointed not to find anyone nude in the book.  He still ave us fur stars.

Toronto Trip Report

I just loved my 3-night, 2-day whirlwind book-promoting visit to Toronto. I met so many quality people I can't start singling them out for fear of offense through omission. But here are some thoughts and anecdotes that pop into my mind as I fly home.

• The thing you should never leave home without is your passport. I talked my way into Canada with relative ease, but was heavily warned the hard part would be getting back into the country where I was born and reside. If I were an Arab terrorist, my name would have been a clever subliminal message. In any case, my wife must love me, because she sent it by overnight mail. It got int my hands more than four hours after FedEx guaranteed it would.  Does that mean I get a refund? How about an apology or nearly freaking out.
• I spoke at two events sponsored by the Association of Internet Marketing and Sales (AIMS) and batted .500 in terms of audience reception.  I was relatively well-received by about 50 marketing professionals in one talk.  A similar presentation to C-level executives on the prior day was more tepidly received. I could blame them, except Jim Estill, the blogging CEO of Synnex Canada, followed me and was more warmly received. He gave a simple, straight-talking, highly personalized talk.  Even I enjoyed his more than mine.

Personal lesson #1: If I want to have a naked conversation know your audience. Know what they want of you. Sometimes I think, it would be smart to start with a Q&A, then deliver the talk. Personal Lesson #2: If your first joke fails, quit trying to be funny.

Thank god for the paucity of ripe fruit during Canadian Winters.

• Amber Mac is Canada's most popular video and audio podcaster (and TV personality).  She much prettier than Microsoft's most popular video podcaster, and it turns out she used to work for then as well  Amber tried to co-interview me with the venerable podcast giant Leo LaPorte. We should do a sitcom on this one.  Amber and I tried to set up in the stodgy hallway's of some sort of exclusive "club," where we had both just spoken to AIMS marketing folk.  As we tried to get audio connected with Leo, a troupe of white coated staff started moving the furniture around. We couldn't get wifi set up. The Club engineer gave us an antenna.  Every time we tried to get going another parade of people passed by.  Finally we moved into the club's Internet room where two people were checking email and trying desperately to ignore us.  When we finally got Leo plugged in, Amber and I were getting feedback from our microphones, o we had to sit back-to-back.  I would hear her speak about ten seconds after she had spoken. Technically, it was a fiasco and we had to reschedule.

Lesson: Sometimes the technology sucks and you just can't blame it on Microsoft.

• I was interviewed on ROB TV's SqueezePlay, a national TV news segment. It went well, except I kept calling the host, whose name is Amanda--Heather. It was not my first TV appearance for Naked, but it was the first time, I was ever required to wear makeup. It was a trip to watch the right side of my face get younger, followed by my left side. A few dabs of something on my skull and my bald spot covered up nicely. A quick powder on the forehead and poof--that unsightly shine disappears. After my seven minutes of fame, my regained youth washed off rather easily.

Lesson: Plastic Surgery may be longer-lasting, but makeup is cheaper and faster.

• Most Canadians with whom I talked tech, told me two things repeatedly: (1) Canadians are very polite, and (2) Canada lag far behind the US in blogging despite the fact it leads the US in broadband availability. I found the former statement to be entirely true, although I watch part of a hockey game that indicated there were limits to how widespread the courtesy goes.  The latter is also true.  Yet, this object in Silicon Valley's mirror is closer than it realizes.  They have an increasing number of internationally admired bloggers.  They have a growing community and you can see wells of passion for it getting deeper. I am very optimistic about what will happen in the Toronto-Ottawa area over the next year.

It seems to me they are in for a Hell of a ride.

Lance Armstrong, Cancer, Foldera and Amazon Reviews

I don't know Donald Spencer and the way we touched had nothing to do with this book really. I do know Oliver Starr as a project client at Foldera and knew he was a former professional cyclist. He's not much of a name dropper, so I didn't know he personally connected with Lance Armstrong. I saw him today, and he mentioned nothing about a circle of blog enabled touch has progressed.  All these pieces came together when I read this review by Donald Spencer who blogs about his cancer.

Donald, I don't pray, but if I did, I'd deliver the best one I had for you.