Sunshine Mugrabi

No longer at this address.

2010-10-15T11:15:00.000-07:00

This blog is now closed. Please go to my new site: http://www.twolongspoons.com.

10 More Underrated Pleasures

2010-06-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I wrote a post on underrated pleasures of life. These are the little things that help me slow down and appreciate life, no matter how fast paced it may get. Soon, I began noticing many more.

With that, here are 10 more underrated pleasures for your enjoyment:

1. Hand washing the dishes. I have a dishwasher, but there are times when I'd rather plunge my hands into warm, soapy water and do them myself. I don't rush through it. Instead, I focus on each dish and spend extra time ensuring that it's completely clean in a way that the dishwasher can't manage. There's something about holding up a wine glass and watching it catch the light that brings pleasure like nothing else.

2. Sitting with a cup of coffee. Mornings in general are an underrated pleasure. No matter what time we have to get to work, many of us cut it too close to be able enjoy a few moments of silent contemplation before plunging into the rush of the day. I once got a yoga tape that included a "coffee asana." This involved holding the cup in both hands, deeply inhaling the rich aromas. Now that's my kind of yoga!

3. Dinner conversation with family. I read a horrifying statistic recently that said that only 30% of families have a sit down dinner together more than once a week. When I was a kid, we had dinner (or actually "supper") as a family every single night without fail. I guess I'm in a time warp, as this is still how my husband and I do it. It's like a punctuation mark at the end of each day.

4. Grocery shopping. There's shopping--the one most of us know too well, involving rushing down the aisle of the local Safeway and grabbing all of our usual, tried-and-true items--and then there's shopping. This is the one where you stop and take note of what you are buying, testing the weight of a cantaloupe, chatting with the butcher about the best cut of beef, and taking the time to ensure you've found the freshest sourdough baguette in the basket. To me, the difference is like night and day.

5. Sorting the recycling. Another "chore" that gets short shrift. Where I live, there are raccoons about, which means we can't put the garbage out the night before the truck arrives. If we do, the next morning we see our entire week's worth of trash strewn along the pavement. Instead, we rise early on Monday mornings and put all of it out then. I used to hate it. The smelly, fishy cat food cans, the soggy papers, the dirty recycling bins. Then one day I noticed how incredibly crisp the air is at that early hour. Fog drifts onto the street and mingles with the first sun rays of sun, turning every tree branch and rooftop luminous.

6. Clicking "no" to an invite. If you're like me, you get invited to a lot of random events through Facebook. Flattered, I often click the "maybe" button in the hope that somehow I'll fit in that extra networking event, birthday party, product release, handcar regatta, wine tasting or other meetup that I know full well isn't going to fit into my already packed schedule. The word "no" seems so final. But that's exactly what's right about doing it. Taking this step requires bravery, but in doing so, our world settles down. No more penciled-in, half-assed dates on the calendar. The joy of simplicity.

7. Listening to stuff. It's so tempting to wrap oneself in a cocoon of "chosen" sounds. In the car, we blast music or news. As we walk down the street, Pandora pipes our favorite tunes through iPhone earphones. Steve Jobs hath bestowed upon us this magical ability. But once in awhile, I decide to go the opposite way and let it all in. There's something anarchic and wild in the cacophony of street sounds. So much of what we call "noise pollution" can be music if we listen without judgment: the motorcycle engine rev as it blasts past us in traffic, the baby crying in the airplane, the click-click of a turnstile, the vroom of the bus. Even the tinny sounds issuing from others' earphones can be an accompaniment to one's day.

8. Sour food. Why is it that everything we eat and drink nowadays is judged by its level of sweetness? Maybe because sugar is added to so many products. Or perhaps we're all stuck in a perpetual childhood. Whatever the reason, it's rare, in the U.S. at least, to hear someone extol the wondrous sourness of something they just ate. But sour is one of the most basic tastes; our taste buds were specially designed to recognize it. To me, there's almost nothing better than biting into a slice of Meyer lemon, eating a spoonful of homemade yogurt, sipping a lemony soup, or eating one of those salty, sour Umeboshi plums they sell in Asian markets.

9. Doing something you're bad at. There's all kinds of reasons to pursue activities we are good at doing. Oftentimes, this is the key to success. But I've found immense pleasure in attempting stuff I'm bad at. I can't draw. I'm not a good dancer. As much as I love doing them, I pretty much suck at New York Times crossword puzzles. If you know you're bad at something, this gives you freedom. You can fall on your face. Make an utter fool of yourself. And if anyone criticizes, you can just laugh it off--you knew you were bad at it in the first place!

10. Board games. OK OK I can hear you saying now that I'm turning this post into little more than a nostalgia trip into days gone by when the kids played Monopoly while the grownups drank cocktails, puffed on their pipes and played whist around a rickety, card table covered in cheap baize. But to me, there's something amazing about playing a game that requires absolutely no mobile phone, PC, Macbook or other electronic involvement. Picking up that metal car with one's hand and moving it around the squares without punching a single button. Heaven.

What are your underrated pleasures of life? I'd be very interested to hear, so please feel free to leave them in the comments field.

Pollsters miss the point on the economy (and everything else)

2010-06-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

This past weekend our household was contacted by Gallup for a poll they were conducting on the nation's sense of health and well being. At first, it was exciting. I'd never talked to a pollster before, and I happen to know that it's a small handful of Americans who are chosen to participate.

The young woman on the phone asked me a lot of questions. They were all about me and how I was feeling. Who wouldn't want that kind of call on a Sunday afternoon? It was like getting a free therapy session. The first question had an almost hypnotic effect on me.

"Imagine that your life is a stairway," she said, her tone low and melodious. "At the very top step is the best life you could be having, that's a 10. The bottom step is your worst life, a one. What step are you on?"

I didn't want to seem cocky, so I said "nine." I could see myself standing there, on the ninth step. One foot was already lifting and getting ready for the top of the stairs. As if reading my mind, the pollster asked me which step I saw myself headed towards.

"Ten!" I said, feeling the elation spread through me.

After that, things started to take a turn for the worse. It was like going back to elementary school. I was being quizzed. There were all sorts of questions designed to see if I felt squeezed financially. Then there were the rather intrusive health questions. How many days in the past week had I eaten five or more servings of fruits and vegetables? Had I exercised? How often? Was it for 30 minutes or longer?

I tried to explain that I hadn't expected to receive such a call, and so I had paid no attention to these details. She hid any disappointment she might have had. She asked a question that I could tell was considered a key indicator according to nice people at Gallup.

"Do you have enough time to get the things done that you need to do?"

A long pause ensued. This was, for me, an unanswerable question. If I said "yes," then that meant I had bought into the presupposition that somehow time was an external factor over which I had no control. If I said "no," then that implied the same thing--only now I was admitting that time had taken such a toll on me that I was failing to keep up with its demands.

Either way, I was trapped. I would be accepting the belief--widely held in this culture, of course--that time is our enemy. It takes away our ability to get things done. How does it do this? Why, it runs out, of course! Like the hourglass in The Wizard of Oz, it drops, one blood red grain of sand at a time, until we have none left. We couldn't do those things that we wanted to do, because time took them away from us. Sneaky bugger.

But of course, this is completely wrong. It's a subjective belief, not an external reality. In fact, the more we believe that time is our problem, the more of a problem it becomes. As Professor Philip Zimbardo explains in this video, people in different cultures experience time in all kinds of ways. In the U.S., we are more "time crunched" than ever. His research found that Americans were admitting that they sacrificed friends, family and sleep in order to get more things done.

Here's the mindblowing part. They then asked people, "suppose you had an eight day week? What would you do with that extra day?" The answer? They would spend that time achieving more. Working harder. Not spending time with friends and family. Not even sleeping more.

There's yet another unexamined assumption buried in that pollster's innocent sounding question. It is the idea that there are things that I "need" to do. Reasonable enough, on the surface. I'm a functioning member of society. I need to work, earn a living, take care of my home, take care of my family, and so on. But when you take a step back from it, there's a strong implication there that life is essentially made up of activities we just have to do. We're like walking lists, endlessly checking things off of ourselves and then adding more as we go.

Just as with the idea of time, this implies a victim mentality. I am robbed of choice. I don't choose to do things. I just do them, because I must. In fact, the question wouldn't work if they allowed for the presupposition that our lives are our own.

Imagine if she had asked: "do you have the time to do the things you choose to do?"

It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? If I choose to do things, then of course I'll make time to do them. Otherwise, I wouldn't be choosing them in the first place. Here's a radical thought. What if we chose to do everything we did? What if all these things we say we "need" to do were just stuff we convinced ourselves we had to do? As Deepak Chopra once noted--the goal of our lives should be to do less and achieve more. Ultimately, the goal is to do nothing and achieve everything.

I'm not saying that Gallup is biased. Bias implies a certain angle on a topic. This runs far deeper than that. It reflects a widely held set of beliefs--a sort of complete wrapper around our culture--that separates us from our own lives, turning us into automatons who do nothing but run around doing, buying and running around some more (this time to achieve our proscribed 30-minutes, three times a week exercise). It's the ultimate victim mentality--about as far from the original American ideal of independence as you can get!

This very headset is actually what got us into the economic mess we're in now. If you look deeply enough, what really caused the recent downturn was the pressure to ensure that the economy continually grew at all costs. Every company had (and still has) to show "growth." Not depth. Not that it served some larger purpose. Just that it got bigger. And so the engines that run the economy had to keep figuring out ways to keep inflating this balloon. The result was that eventually, there was nowhere left to go. The balloon could not get larger. Instead, it popped. And so, Gallup is measuring the little scattered pieces that fell to the ground, never noticing that the balloon isn't us. It isn't even necessary. We'll all be fine without it. We might even be better.

Oh, and by the way, I did finally answer the question. I just couldn't bear to disappoint the lady from Gallup. I said "yes."

A spirited aptonym

2010-06-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

By golly, I've found yet another brilliant aptonym--this in the world of wine and food blogging. I speak of Mr. Rick Bakas. Rick is the social media director at St. Supery Winery in the Napa Valley. He's been in branding and marketing for years, and recently he's become something of a social media celebrity. His book "Quick Bites: 75 Savory Tips for Social Media Success" is due out at the end of this month.

As some readers of this blog know, I'm particularly obsessed with the phenomenon of nominative determinism, also known as the "aptonym." This is when a person's name matches their personality or career choice. For example, Dennis Rodman's father, a known philanderer who married four times and had 27 children, is named Philander Rodman. (I don't know why, but that's still my favorite.) There are also many examples of doctors named Doctor, dentists named Tooth, attorneys called Sue, and so on.

Bacchus is the name of the Roman God of Wine. Rick notes on his blog that his family name was originally spelled that way, but his great-grandfather changed it to Bakas so that it would sound more American. The Greeks called this god Dionysus.

I've been following Rick on Twitter for some time now, enjoying his tweets about food, wine and social media commentary. For someone in a field known for its pleasure and relaxation, he seems to have the energy of ten people or more--continually posting videos, photos and other tidbits that pour out of him like an endless, bottomless jug. In Greek and Cretian myth, Dionysus (Bacchus) was half mortal and half god. The Greeks said he was fathered by none other than Zeus.

I got in touch with Rick on Twitter and asked him to comment. Did he get into wine because of his name? Had he ever thought of himself as a Roman god? He was surprised by the request but gamely responded with the following email:

"I didn’t get into the wine biz because of my name, it just happened. I was bit by the wine bug when I turned 21. That year, my parents opened a 1985 Stag’s Leap Cask 23 during the holidays. That was the first wine I had that had quality and age on it. The light bulb went off and I was hooked. Before that, any alcohol I drank came out of a hose connected to a keg in college.  So I subscribed to every wine publication I could get my hands on and started learning and tasting everything. That led to my wine collection, that led to getting a job as a wine sales rep. Eventually I became a wine broker.   If I had to recreate the path I’ve taken, I probably couldn’t reproduce it. It’s been a string of happy occurrences. As for my last name, it was actually spelled, 'Bacchus' but when my great-grandparents came to the U.S. In 1912 they Americanized the spelling (which is a bummer). They changed the spelling from Bacchus to Bakas."

He attached this--his version of the family crest:

Rick encouraged me to get in touch with Emily Wines, who is the Master Sommelier at Fifth Floor restaurant in San Francisco. That is truly the consummate definition of an aptonym par excellence. Emily Wines, and her job is to choose and serve... well, um... wines! ~~Unfortunately I didn't hear back from Emily by press time, but all we can do is marvel at the total aptness of her name from afar.~~

Update!! We have heard from Emily Wines. She sends the following missive about her truly apt-o-nym:

"My name always comes up in my business. My getting into wine was a coincidence rather than being influenced by my name. Sometimes I think it opened doors as people remembered it though. People always comment on my name. It would seem that my name is Emily 'yes that really is her name' Wines. I usually joke about how if my last name were 'Beers,' I would be in a different career. I first got interested in wine by working in restaurants. As a server, I felt that if I knew more about what I was selling I would be a better waitress. Which is true -- however, as I started reading and exploring I got really hooked on the stories and cultures that inform wine as well as the beverage itself. I began doing side work in the restaurant to learn more which eventually led me to become a sommelier. I am the only person in my family in the wine business. In fact, growing up, my family rarely even drank wine! That has changed now, thanks to me. Now I can't get them off the stuff."

We raise a glass to both Emily and Rick.

Facebook was right about the "like" button

2010-05-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

While the attention is still focused on Facebook and privacy, there has been far less talk about the change from "become a fan" to "like" for company and group pages. My first response to this was to "dislike" the whole idea. I know if I'm truly a fan. Liking is far more subjective and changeable. What if I'm sort of lukewarm? Is there a "meh" button? No, there is not.

There was also the torturous way that Facebook was treating the English language. Getting an email that reads something like, "John Major suggests you 'like' British Petroleum" is a skin-crawling experience for anyone who was raised to speak and write properly. He does? I do? This is nothing short of grammatical butchery--and who knows what new horror the folks at Facebook will present to us next.

There was also a certain creepiness factor. While I've been on the side of moderation on the whole Facebook privacy question, I'll admit I had a bad feeling about where this was going. It was clearly an attempt to gather more data for marketers--the larger plan being to spread the "like" button far and wide across the open Internets. This may benefit Facebook and its advertisers, but would it really help me?

In short, I was all ready to hate the whole "like" button idea.

Fast forward a few weeks. I am finding that when people suggest I "like" a company, product or group, I'm doing it. Click, click. I may not be a full-on fan of the thing, but I definitely like it. It's a lighter weight, less cumbersome option. This is exactly the reasoning behind the change, according to Facebook itself. And lo and behold, they were right. And while I'm still a lot less likely to "like" something outside of Facebook, every once in awhile, I do hit that button, and I do it gladly.

What do you think? Are you finding this option to be preferable, or do you miss becoming a "fan?" Or, are you so fed up with Facebook at this point that you don't even care?

Meanwhile, here is Betty White's view of Facebook, in case you haven't seen it (via B.L.Ochman):

Why I'm not leaving Facebook

2010-05-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

A lot of folks I know and respect are leaving Facebook right now. Their reasoning, as far as I can tell, is that Facebook has gone too far, and is violating their privacy in new and dangerous ways. And even among those who are staying put, there's a general feeling that Facebook is somehow controlling us and should be treated with suspicion.

At issue, chiefly, is the "Instant Personalization" update announced at the recent Facebook developer's conference, F8. This allows Facebook's partners to load your profile onto its sites automatically. I'm not sure why this is such a big deal, but apparently it is to a lot of people. Even Senator Chuck Schumer is getting into the act---he thinks that a good use of the public money is to complain about Facebook to the FTC.

I'm not completely unsympathetic. I do think that this really ought to have been an "opt in" rather than "opt out" feature-- especially considering how few Facebook users understand how to set privacy options. I probably would've opted into it if that had been the default. Instead, I opted out in protest.

Still and all, it's very similar to what a lot of us Facebook users have been doing all along with Facebook Connect. It's not clear exactly how (or even if) Facebook is actively sharing our data with its partners. If it were, I'm not sure I'd care much. Pandora already knows my musical preferences, because I deliberately told it what they were. That's the whole point of Pandora! I'm annoyed when it gets it wrong. And oh how I wish Yelp knew me better than it does. If it suggests one more time that I go to a crappy chain restaurant, I'm uninstalling the app. In short, if Facebook can help improve my experience, that's just dandy with me.

What we have on our hands here, then, is something psychological. We're hitting a dip in the hype cycle and getting panicky. Here is the tipoff--people are starting to talk about Mark Zuckerberg in emotional terms. The word "evil" is popping up. It reminds me of the way we used to talk about Bill Gates, before he got all warm and fuzzy. Over the past few months, the pressure has been building, especially in the media and among bloggers. Then, last week, Wired lost its mind, and went completely ballistic on Zuck's ass. Maybe this was a way to sell papers, but it sure seemed out of proportion to me.

My view, which parallels that of Robert Scoble and a handful of other brave souls who are trying to counteract the hype, is that I am not and never have been very concerned about privacy on Facebook. Why should I be? It's the Internet for goodness sakes. The public, open, free Internet that we all embraced with open arms--that we championed and cheered on for years and years.

And really, what am I sharing? A few pictures of my cats. A list of my previous jobs and education. Some nice family snaps. As a journalist, I've had a public online persona for 15 years. It's been a pain in the ass at times--like the time a pornbot got hold of my name (yes, first AND last), making every Google search for my name an exercise in porno linkbait. But overall, I've been very happy with these here Internets, and the ways they allow me to share who I am with the rest of the world. Like me or hate me, I "yam what I yam."

And, while I *wish* I could say that I'm special and unique in every way, I know that as far as anything Facebook could find out about me, I'm really not. I like certain types of music, enjoy some restaurants and not others ... big whoop. I don't share information that I wouldn't want the whole world to know. My address is kept private... although, remember the phone book? Remember how you could just look someone's name and address and phone number up? Well, it still exists. I do think that it's important to take sensible precautions. Don't announce that you're traveling, especially if you've left your house empty. Don't give too much information out about truly personal things in your life. And be careful about sharing when you're feeling vulnerable. It's fine to say you're having a bad day, but I do cringe when I see people talking about bad dates, or major relationship issues, or even serious problems they're having with housemates. This stuff is probably best left unsaid in a public forum.

And that is the point. Think of Facebook as a public place, not a private one. If you do, a lot of the fears about privacy disappear. Email should be private. Phone conversations should be private. Social networking, not so much.

Image: Pulled off Wired and messed with: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/

Remembering the coast's Santa

2010-05-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

I'm often the last to know when big news hits my local area, and so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to hear that it's been nearly a year since one of Half Moon Bay's most beloved residents, Rod Schoenlank, passed away. Rod, who died of congestive heart failure on June 26, 2009, just before his 88th birthday, was one of the first people to befriend me when I arrived on the coastside four years ago. I was confused, scared and lost. I had come here for a job that turned out to be nothing like I'd imagined. After eight excruciating months I quit. I had no plan in mind, and found myself spending my days in a local cafe, scribbling down everything I saw and heard.

Some of these notes, I began turning into short essays with a vague notion of collecting them into a book. Then life picked up again, and all of it was forgotten, except Rod himself. He continued to have his daily "coffee klatsch," and whenever I went to the local cafe I was sure to see him, sitting there surrounded by his amazing friends. He always invited me to join them, and the conversations were never dull. He was like a heavy star, holding people together through the sheer gravity of his personality.

As the pace of my life increased, I had less and less time. I rarely stopped by the cafe. A niggling feeling at the back of my mind told me he must have died--he was getting into his late eighties, after all--but I never bothered to check. Today, something told me to run a search online. Sure enough, there was an item in the Half Moon Bay Review, along with links to some remembrances.

The best is a slide show that an intern at the Half Moon Bay Review did of him a few years ago. He quotes "Hamlet" in the seamless, unconscious way of someone who knew long sections of it by heart. He is shown on his boat, the Lao Tzu, moored in Princeton Harbor for two decades. He doesn't seem old. He never did. Rather, he seemed ageless. We all knew that he'd have to walk off the stage at some point. Yet, it seems impossible that there is now a world that no longer contains him. I felt a wave of shame that I was so careless as to lose track of him, until there was no longer someone to track.

If you have the patience, below find one of the essays I wrote after an early meeting with Rod. It's not about him--he's just another local character woven into the narrative. I preserved his and everyone else's anonymity. I named him "Gary Eagle," based on a story he told me that I've since forgotten--something to do with meeting a member of the Eagle clan in his travels. The dialogue and situation were taken directly from real life, with hardly a detail changed, and I think the part that features him does him some justice. I hope so.

Locals

Princeton Harbor on Half Moon Bay is only a half hour south of San Francisco, but it might as well be on the other side of the world. Here, fishermen sell live crab from their boats, sending customers off with long plastic bags stuffed with these heavy, reddish claw-snapping delicacies. They lug the bags back to their Audis and Mazdas, and as they drive home, the interiors of their vehicles fill with the briny scent of the bay.

Just beyond the line of fish and chip shops lies a maze of narrow streets named after the Ivy League and Seven Sisters universities and colleges of the northeast. My own alma mater, Vassar, is a small, ill-paved street that unexpectedly dead ends near a pile of ancient, rotted fish netting. Harvard Avenue, Yale Way and Amherst Streets all meander here and there, taking you past vacant lots, or lots piled high with rusted hulks of various sizes, shapes, and providences. Abandoned wooden boats lie on the grass, moored among weeds that grow over them like the rivulets that once surrounded them during their useful lives. Wildflowers grow everywhere, impervious to rusty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and discarded styrofoam clam chowder bowls, left by careless visitors anxious to return to the warmth of Hayward or Redwood City, beyond the reach of the cold, cloying fog.

Much of the area is made up of warehouses. Many are signless, and when we first arrived I wondered if they were empty, until one weekend several put out sandwich boards on the highway, enticing us with promises of inexpensive records and brick-a-brac. When this happens, we discovered, crowds descend, snapping up flat screen televisions, children’s clothing, gold-plated platters, scented candles, plastic flowers and “Dora the Explorer” lunchboxes.

All through the summer, the air here is as thick and white as milk. It hangs in front of your eyes and clings to your clothing until everything you own is perpetually damp and cold. If you stand on the shore next to Princeton Harbor, the sea looks like a billowing sheet, white from top to bottom, completely merged with the sky. Flocks of brown pelicans move as one entity, silently skimming the water. They don't seem to mind the fog. I never hear them complaining of soggy feathers; never hear them pronounce, grouchily, to their pelican spouse, "This is our new home by the beach?"

The human residents don’t talk about the fog much either. They seem to have steeled themselves. About the only time they mention it is to laugh at tourists who come here in the summer dressed in shorts, slathering sunscreen on their shivering children.

Those who are determined to meet the locals will eventually find their way to a café across the street from the harbor, Cafe Classique. It is where everyone in the area goes, from the fisherman standing in their rubber boots to Mexican farm workers, to Silicon Valley engineers who live on the coast for their love of surfing or the sea. Standing in line, you move forward in fits and starts, feeling your way along as the ordered chaos dances around you. Mothers turn around and find the fathers of their children’s friends, stepping out of the line to greet them. There is talk of summer camp and carpools. Those on their way to work seem to forget themselves, stopping to chat for half an hour by the cream dispensers before glancing at their watches and making their reluctant way out, paper cup full of cooled coffee in hand.

Even on the coldest days, the locals swarm out to the deck, nursing warm mugs of coffee, or eating breakfast made from local eggs. One group of folks has been meeting here every morning at ten a.m. sharp for the past eighteen years. This is the "coffee klatsch," organized by Gary Eagle.

One morning I witnessed a conversation that I took to be fairly typical. Mr. John, a huge man wearing a battered leather cap and overalls was sitting at a small table by himself.

“Cats,” he announced, to no one in particular. “What’s wrong with them?”

“I got a few cats,” volunteered Sally, who sat at the coffee klatch table. “Sometimes, they tear up my sofa. But that’s okay because I hate my sofa. Reminds me of my ex-husband.”

“Which ex-husband?” asked Chip, who sat next to her.

“The fourth one,” she answered.

“Oh him,” said Chip, nodding.

Sally shared her raisin cake with Chip and the others at the table, who pounced on it like mice.

“Let me tell you something. I got a habit of keeping cats,” Mr. John went on. “Me and three Mexican guys. We call it our cat farm. It’s over by …” he paused, looking left and right, then continued, as if assured there were no spies, “…the yacht club. But it’s a totally secret place.”

“How many you got, Mr. John?” asked Doc.

“We’re up to twelve of them. So, let me ask you. Do you think it’s normal for a man to have that many cats?”

Doc didn’t eat the cake. He’s very careful about sugar. A retired oral surgeon, he is single and always on the lookout. The women he dates complain that he treats them like the mouths of his former patients. As soon as they meet, he begins to drill into their pasts. He is sure he can be the one to uproot the decay and make it disappear for good. This drives them off, he knows, but he can’t stop himself.

“I don’t know, Mr. John. What’s normal or not?” asked Chip.

Chip lives in a boat in the harbor, but you rarely find him there. He’s usually housesitting or paying a friend with a house on dry land an extended visit. He doesn’t like water. He’s still not sure how he ended up owning a boat.

“A man can pick up a lot of bad habits. He can drink alcohol. He can smoke cigarettes. Hell, he can smoke crack,” Mr. John continued. “You stack those things up against cats, and I think you have to agree things are pretty good for me.”

“I had a beautiful gray dog once,” said Gary Eagle. “Now that I live on a boat, a dog’s not such a good companion. Boating life’s hard for a dog.”

A youthful eighty-six, Gary has a long, flowing white beard that makes him look like a slimmed-down Santa. His eyes twinkle and shine no matter what he is doing or saying. His face looks like it was ironed over and over, until some of the creases stayed put. Gary told me he was once the vice president of a steel company in Muskegee, Wisconsin. He keeps his old business card in his wallet to remind himself of what might have become of his life. At the height of his career, he walked out of his office, never to return.

Now Gary’s home is the Lao Tzu. He bought it two decades ago, and has managed to keep it going, despite plumbing problems, and an aging hull. Buying that boat was the best decision of his life, he tells you. The Lao Tzu shelters him through the seasons. At Christmastime, friends bring children’s stuffed animal toys to him. He gathers them on the deck of the Lao Tzu. The children arrive and he tells them to come on board and find the toy that "chooses them." To the kids, there is no doubt who he is.

A couple sat down near the regular’s table, where the topic of dogs was now in full swing. The pair were clearly not locals. It’s possible they were not even from San Francisco. Their faces were pinched, their posture as stiff as wood. Gary’s gaze fell on them, seeking their faces for a smile. The woman turned away, her cheeks going scarlet.

“You must be a regular here,” the man said, letting out a nervous laugh.

Gary laughed so hard he had to wipe a tear away.

“Oh, yes, you could say that. You could definitely say that.”

The couple spotted another empty table as far from the others as possible. They dived for it, all the while explaining themselves, as if talking to a child or a lunatic.

“This one is larger, see?” said the man. “And more comfortable.”

Gary smiled again, his eyes twinkling even more intensely than before. Santa.

The fog began to burn off, revealing sky and trees that had been shrouded. Children played on the sidewalk. An old black dog with white feet and a white nose meandered down the street. It stopped before crossing, looking out for left turners and hot rodders. Finding a large tree, it stood next to it as if taking up a sentry post. The wind picked up. A heavy, green branch above the dog fluttered jaggedly, up and down, up and down. This is not a place for those who want the easy life, I decided. Nor, is it a place for those who want to blend in and be forgotten. Even this dog is a local. And somehow, I think he knows it.

What to do if you have blogging writer's block

2010-05-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

Don't blog.

10 Underrated Pleasures

2010-04-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

The go-go techy lifestyle means we often lose touch with the simpler pleasures of life. As someone who is in the midst of launching a new business, I speak for myself more than anyone here. Maybe it's the sunny weather we've had, but over the last few days I have noticed that many of the activities I often rush through or treat as chores are actually some of the most enjoyable. Here's the list I came up with:

1. Folding laundry. Lifting warm clothing and sheets out of the dryer. Spending time to fold them with care. The fresh scent from the detergent and dryer sheets. Way underrated.

2. Chopping vegetables. Slicing into a bright radish, with its ruby outer skin and streaked white and pink flesh. The pop of the spiciness as the scent rises up. The natural, rapid pace of the knife on wood. Just about every sense is involved in this task--a real break from staring at a two-dimensional screen.

3. Feeding the cats. I talk to my cats while I put the food in the can and place it on the floor. This seems to calm them down while they wait. It gives us all time to appreciate the bond we have as pets and pet owners.

4. Watering the plants. As with the cats, I have taken to talking to my plants while watering them. (So far, they haven't answered back. Still hoping for that.) I often use water that I've just used to wash vegetables or fruit. There's a good feeling that goes with the idea of not just pouring it down into the waste sewage line.

5. Listening to the birds in my yard. The other day, we sat in awe as a tiny roseate finch belted out some scat worthy of Ella Fitzgerald. I've heard that springtime is when bird songs become more complex. This is the time of year when they need to attract a potential mate. The rest of the year, they are basically singing, "stay off my branch, buddy."

6. Reading a novel. I'm not talking business books, biographies, or anything published by the "For Dummies" or O'Reilly people. I'm talking made up stories about people who never existed. To me, the delivery mechanism isn't important. Kindle, audio book, dead tree, whatever. I know I'm in the true reading zone when my husband says something to me and I don't answer for another 15 minutes.

7. Strolling around the neighborhood. Not power walking, or hiking, or anything involving high tech footwear or pedometers. Rather, one of those languishing, pointless, late afternoon or post-dinner meanders that involves noticing architectural details on houses or a neighbor's daffodils. The other day we took one of these types of walks and stopped in front of a yellow house to admire the small amount of jigsaw trim on the porch. The man who lived across the street spotted us and began telling us a great deal about the history of that house, and the entire neighborhood.

8. Listening to slightly boring stuff on the radio. NPR is great for this. I love to semi-tune out and half listen to Noah Adams, the Car Talk guys, or-- this is the best--that really badly done quiz show, "Says You." The trick, for me, is to not really pay attention, yet not go so far away that it turns into background noise. For some reason, this has a really pacifying effect on my brain. It doesn't work with shows I really like, such as "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me."

9. Writing postcards. For my birthday this year, a friend of mine sent me a huge, honking box of what looks to be about 1000 postcards. The series was put out by writer Dave Eggers' publishing company, McSweeney's and is labeled, mystifyingly enough, "Greetings from the Ocean's Sweaty Face." At first, I was intimidated. Who would want a postcard from me? Did I even know how to write one anymore? Slowly, however I've discovered a certain facility for writing these little missives. They're kind of like extended tweets.

10. Unplugging. Don't do enough of that. But I did start a new austerity program in which I no longer keep my iPhone by my bed. I can't believe how different my mornings are. Instead of immediately checking email and Twitter, I give myself a few minutes to awaken more slowly. My mind wanders a bit, which actually leads to more creative thinking. Highly recommended. And apparently, this is how I used to live.

Cruvee - get your social wine on

2010-04-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

It's a new day for wine enthusiasts. With the help of social networks, we oenophilic types can meet, greet and chat about our love of the grape with thousands of other like-minded (and paletted) folks. There are myriad ways to get into discussions online about all things related to wine--from social networks like CellarTracker and Cork'd to Tweetups to wine focused blogs, and beyond.

How are wineries dealing with this new onslaught of online discussion? Well... it varies. But overall, the impression I get is that they're a little overwhelmed. In the past, wine reviews were limited to a small, select group of VIPs like Robert Parker and the folks at Wine Spectator. These people perhaps wielded too much power, but at least there were ground rules. You knew when they were going to write their reviews, and there was an agreed upon system of points to rank the best wines. It was a simple, if limited world.

Contrast that with nowadays. Social media has unleashed a total free-for-all. Anyone with a Twitter account and a corkscrew can say anything they like about a bottle of wine. Not only that, but there's a good chance other people will listen and take heed, no matter what the so-called experts say.

Last week, I took a trip up to Napa and met some folks who are working to bridge the gap between this old world industry and the new media landscape. First stop, digital think tank for the wine industry, VinTank. Housed in a sleekly designed office with touches of both old and new, the company represents a fresh perspective on the intersection of wine and technology. I spoke at length on video with the company CEO, Paul Mabray, and will post the interview on our new site as part of the launch (look out for it). Meanwhile, also check out this great interview with Paul on the Vin65 blog.

Paul is a remarkable guy. A boyish 38, he has amassed an immense market knowledge and understanding about the wine industry. In addition to being a sought after advisor for wineries seeking to make the most of the new digital landscape, he's also turning his firm into something of a business incubator. I predict VinTank will do more to bring wine into the 21st century than any other single force in the Napa Valley. One of his investments is in social media monitoring service for the wine industry, Cruvee. I sat down with the two founders of that company, Evan Cover and James Jory and got the lowdown.

Cruvee (rhymes with "groovy") was originally envisioned as a social network for wine enthusiasts. When he met them, Paul recognized something much more useful in what Evan and James had built. What they had was a giant, living database that could be used to monitor online chatter about wine. The service as it now functions is comparable to Radian6, Meltwater, and other social media monitoring services, but with a big difference: it's completely focused on the wine industry.

As Evan and James explained, a laser focus on one market translates to much better quality results. Anyone who has run a social media program knows about the hours of fruitless searching, endless keyword tweaking and other time-wasting frustrations that often go with getting ramped up. One social media director I spoke to said that he was spending hours every day combing through bad results because the name of his winery had a common meaning in a foreign language.

Cruvee casts a wide net, then delivers a manageable chunk of quality results on a daily basis that reflect real conversations across the open web about specific vintages and wineries. They estimate that they take 250,000 conversations a day and boil that down to 10,000. "We find the needles in the haystack," said Evan.

The engine they have built can also understand wine lingo. It can tell that when someone is talking about a Cab Franc that they don't mean a taxi in Paris, and that in certain contexts, a post about a Chard isn't going to be a recipe for stir fry vegetables. Above and beyond that, their algorithms are designed to find wine references made in that new language we're all developing known as Twitterese. For example, what if someone tweets something like "Uncorking '08 Twisted Oak Cal Cty Viogner - neutral fr oak, 91 pts."? Chances are, this will be of interest to that winery, even if it sounds like gobblydegook to the average human.

The demo of Cruvee that I got was impressive. It has a clean, readable interface and seems intuitive and user friendly. Below find some screenshots for one of their clients (and one of my favorite Napa wineries) Cornerstone Cellars, below.

Here is the dashboard:

This shows a report on tasting notes from wine social networks. They have a partnership with CellarTracker, and Cruvee also delivers results pulled from over 20,000 online forums.

Here is the screenshot of one of their "campaign manager" pages, which tracks microblog results in near real time:

Evan and James also demonstrated some of the results that Cruvee can get that are on the fringes of wine social networks. For example, they found an obscure post on a forum for audiophiles about which wine the user planned to bring to an outdoor concert. This represents the kind of valuable customer data that takes place on random forums all over the worldwide web.

The price for a yearly subscription to Cruvee is very low (I'll leave it to you to find out just how low.) The reason for this, they said, is that they believe that ultimately the cost of all the social media monitoring services are working their way towards free. And in fact, they offer another service that is completely free to wineries, called OwnIT--or "Your Wine, Your Way" that aims to standardize wine information across the Web and mobile platforms. That might not seem like a big deal to you and me, but for winery owners, there is a huge problem with misinformation. For example, one winery owner told me that someone wrote a scathing review on an online wine forum of one of their offerings because he confusedly thought the bottle he was drinking was supposed to be a dry white, when in actuality it was a sweet dessert wine. For an industry that depends almost entirely on reputation, this service could make the difference.

I look forward to seeing where Cruvee goes next. They shared a few tidbits about their roadmap that sounded very exciting to me. I'd also like to see them (or someone else) build out a few more of these industry-focused monitoring services. There could be a major opportunity to fill in where the more generalized services can't be or get to. In sum, this is a company to watch in an industry that is going places.

Foursquare - are we missing the ball?

2010-04-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere has been all a-Twitter about location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla recently. Between the buzz of SXSW and a rumored $100 million Yahoo acquisition there's a whole playground-ful of questions about where the ball will bounce next, and onto whose square. Will Gowalla score big during the last few minutes of recess? Or maybe Facebook will pull a "big college kid" on their butts and steal the ball away entirely. Amid the speculation, I think there are some huge, obvious uses for these applications that most of us have overlooked.

Bloggers and industry observers Louis Gray and Robert Scoble both wrote some of the more interesting posts on the topic this past week, exploring the potential--and potential pitfalls--of these services. They point out that despite the hype, adoption is spotty and limited. It's still pretty darn easy to be named "mayor" of somewhere on Foursquare. Even in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, you rarely find a lot of simultaneous check-ins, unless it's at the Apple store on iPad release day. Louis raises a number of good questions, such as the one in his headline: "Should Boring Married People Check In On Location Apps?" (He has the good humor to include himself in this category.) I also liked Robert's ideas for how to make the services more appealing. He calls for a "malleable social graph" where we get tips and reviews from folks who share our tastes.

All well and good, but in some ways too subtle for where we are right now. We're so immersed in the social networking headset that we have failed to recognize that this is a case where more conventional marketing and sales techniques could be very effective. After all, it's all based around the idea of a game, with its rewards and competition. As Louis notes, game theory really does apply here. There is a lot of talk about the "tips" and other social elements of these games. But what about that amazingly prominent, hard to miss "Special Nearby" button? We don't hear much about it. But that's where companies are going to find immediate value. As Gary Vaynerchuk so succinctly put it, brands get this stuff because it's about moving people around.

There's a reason that Starbucks has signed a partnership deal with Foursquare. They see it. You can use these services to offer rewards and discounts to customers--the types of rewards that keep them coming back day after day. For all the talk about adoption, the smart brands realize this isn't such a huge barrier. If your customers aren't signed up with Foursquare now, give them a reason to do so.

There's nothing onerous here for the user. It's a free application for anyone who has a cell phone. Foursquare doesn't even require a smart phone--there's a text only version of the game. Just the way department stores get you to sign up for credit cards by offering you a 10% discount, your local clothing shop can get people to sign up for Foursquare for an instant cost break. What retailer isn't hurting right now? This trend doesn't need to be limited to big brands like Starbucks or Tasti D-Lite (another company that has leapt into Foursquare with both feet).What about your neighborhood coffee shop, Pilates studio, or wine bar? Or that really great car wash that Robert Scoble sung the praises of on Gowalla?

By creating a Foursquare or Gowalla game within a game, retailers could make shopping into a scavenger hunt. Or, they might creatively reward regular customers. It's great that lots of businesses are offering "mayor" discounts and specials. But really, how many people can be mayor? How about this: two check-ins a week for a month, and you get a free latte. And we all know how hard it is to win the "gym rat" badge on Foursquare. So what? Your neighborhood fitness center can decide to give a different reward every week for active members. Have a "check-in" at every weight station, elliptical machine and spinning class. Then give a free t-shirt to the person who tried a new routine every other week.

In short, this could be huge for businesses of all sizes. No wonder Yahoo wants to own it.

Image: Foursquare demo video (http://foursquare.com/)

Who was Ada Lovelace and why should I care?

2010-03-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

I was recently contacted on Facebook by a group asking me to participate in a worldwide event to celebrate the achievements of women in technology. It was hard to tell that much from the email, except that it was named after a female historical figure, Ada Lovelace. The group designated March 24 as Ada Lovelace day, and encouraged one and all to blog, tweet and generally spread the news about women in technology on that date.

I'd heard the name Ada Lovelace, though the only thing I could dredge up about her was a vague memory that the programming language Ada was named after her. As I discovered, her story was a tale of intrigue worthy of any Hollywood blockbuster. In fact, someone did make a movie about her--or kind of: "Conceiving Ada," a sci fi thriller with a historical twist. But her real story has yet to be told on the silver screen.

Here's the synopsis, based on my online research. Augusta Ada Byron was born in 1815, the only "legitimate" daughter of the famed poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbank. She never knew her father, who separated from her mother and who died when she was nine years old. Ada was often ill as a child.

Her mother, in an attempt to keep her safe from what she perceived could be inherited madness from her poet father, had her tutored in math. As it turned out, her talents in mathematics were immense. She eventually developed what is now considered the first algorithm, for Charles Babbage's analytical engine. There's even some speculation that she came up with the idea of using punch cards to program his machine. For that reason, she is credited with being the first computer programmer. According to the Wikipedia entry on her life: "She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities." She had a long and fruitful professional friendship with the mathemetician for the rest of her life.

Her social position meant that she had to make her way in English society. She was frequently seen at court as a young woman. It's amazing to imagine the young Ada spending her days poring over notebooks detailing Bernoulli sequences and sketches of the Babbage engine (which was never built in his lifetime). Then, somehow she tears herself away from these important musings in order to be stuffed into a massive hoop skirt, boned corset, and sheath by some maid or other, her hair primped, her face powdered in order to be "presented" at court and sized up by the eligible bachelors.

She married a man named Charles King, who later became the Earl of Lovelace. This earned her title of the Countess of Lovelace. They had three children. Meanwhile, she learned that her father's half-sister Augusta Leigh had also been his lover, and that her cousin Medora Leigh was the result of that union. Wikipedia says that she blamed Augusta, calling her "evil." From such a distance, how can we judge any of those involved? Still, one can only begin to guess at the heartbreak and family divisions that plagued those who were intertwined with Lord Byron. Ada died at 36 of uterine cancer, and, according to Wikipedia, the bloodletting she received from her physicians. She was buried next to the father she never knew.

Taste and Tweet

2010-03-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

While much of the social media world was in Austin crowding in to hear Ev wax philosophic on Twitter last week, a handful of us headed up to the Napa Valley to enjoy sun, wine and general good times. The first annual, or "inaugural" Napa Valley Tweetup" was held this past weekend and included such tasty activities as an evening of heavy sipping at Robert Mondavi Winery and a panel on social media. Driven by Silicon Valley Tweetup founder Gabriel Carrejo of Excite Social Media, the event drew over 100 participants and raised thousands of dollars for charity.

This seems to be the moment for social media and wine. The Facebook fan page for the event continues to drive all kinds of posting. A week down the road, the Twitter hashtags #NapaValleyTweetup and #NVTweetup are going strong. For an analysis of the buzz that was created during the event itself, go to this post on The Cork Board. For a rundown on the whole event, Hello Vino has a lovely post.

I was part of a an intrepid group of die-hards who toured some of the Valley's hidden wineries on the second day of the event. Among our group were such social media-ites as Rich Reader, who had much to say, ask, photograph and video, and photographer Laura Iriarte, known as @lauralovesart on Twitter. Here's a picture I snapped of her before we took off. She and I both made the mistake of thinking that a dress and heels would be the right garb for the event, with no idea that we'd be hiking through muddy vineyards. But she seemed to take it all in stride.

Our tour guide Steven took us to three boutique wineries: Hall, Krupp, and Chappellet, where we guzzled chardonnays and merlots, sauvignon blancs and cabs, learning about harvesting, mulling, mixing, and cooperage. We were quizzed on the five varietals of Bordeaux and lectured on the finer points of soil mineralization. We found out about must and bladders, malolactic fermentation and the benefits of French oak. At Krupp Brothers, we were unloaded from the bus and packed into four-wheel drives so as to climb an impossibly steep, rutted dirt road. Then stood shivering the wind while sipping wine made from rare varietals.

There's a lot of talk about the wine business in general--and Napa Valley in particular--being in trouble. A recent study predicted that in the coming year, as many as ten wineries in the Napa Valley could be sold under distressed circumstances. Yet, this is also a time of immense promise. Many are realizing that the traditional barriers between wineries and end customers are crumbling. Blogs and forums, Facebook and Twitter, the fame of Gary Vaynerchuk, all are conspiring to change the face of this ancient, traditional industry forever.

A handful of folks are leading the charge into social media in Napa. Among the notables are Rick Bakas, social media director of St. Supery Winery (who was at SXSW during the tweetup) and Paul Mabray, cofounder of tweetup sponsor Vintank, a "digital think tank" for the wine industry. Paul was one of the panelists at the event, along with social media heavies Jennifer Leggio and Michael Brito. Coming from a wine ecommerce background, Paul's built an impressive company so far in Vintank. His clients Stag's Leap and Opus One, along with some wine technology plays like social media monitoring service Cruvee and ecommerce solution Vin 65. After the event I reached Paul by phone.

He explained that wine is very much a "long tail" business. It's hard to think of any other product in which there are over 750,000 different labels for customers to choose from (yes, you read that number right). Compare that with the number of wine reviews that come out each year, and you realize how hard it is to get noticed. Even one blog post that reaches 10 people can serve as word of mouth, he said. In short, this is the place that wine and social media can be blended to create a full-bodied, toothsome creation with plenty of tones and structure.

Inspiring Teen Women to be Techy

2010-03-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday, Foothill College hosted a crowd of 250 female middle- to high schoolers for a day of learning about everything from game programming to how to lead a tech startup. Dare2BDigital was designed to give young women in the 7-10th grades a chance to learn about exciting possibilities in computer science and engineering. This was the first year for the conference, which I hope will become annual event. This seems to be the moment for girls in tech. Similar conferences and events are popping up around the world. (There's even one in Israel, organized by two Israeli Google engineers--if you read Hebrew, check out this article.)

Looking around the room at the end of the day, I flashed on the final dinner scene near the end of every "Harry Potter" movie. There they all were at long tables, packed into the cafeteria. There was the same sense of inspiration and celebration; a feeling that we had all come through the experience and as a result, something inside us had changed.

Then it hit me--the difference was that I was standing in the middle of a room full of Hermiones. If you want a good sense of the day, check out the Twitter hashtag #Dare2BDigital. One of our two live bloggers, Vania of Vabulus Media has posted a good chunk of the tweets on her blog. Our other live blogger, Liz Burr (known as @calinative on Twitter) was on the spot with plenty of interesting observations. This was one of my favorites--tweeted directly from a workshop on web site programming:

Why this age group? Studies show that this is the age when most of us start thinking about what kind of career we'll pursue. At the same time, the computer industry is hamstrung by outdated and inaccurate stereotypes. Many young women are just like I was at that age--they're good at math and science, but they can't picture themselves locked in a basement somewhere, slamming Jolt colas and coding till their eyes go funny.

As conference leader Anne Hardy of SAP explained to me on my weekly women in tech podcast, TechnoGirlTalk, many young women want to do something that gives back to the world. They want to help animals, or the environment. They're also interested in work that involves being artistic and creative. What they might not know is that computer science offers all of this in spades. The workshops and speakers at this conference gave the girls plenty of food for thought. Morning keynote speaker Fei Fei Li, assistant professor at Stanford University Computer Science Department, told the girls that she had a number of challenges as an immigrant to the U.S. from China--but found a home and many worthwhile challenges in computer science. Afternoon keynoter Karen Gundy-Burlet, research scientist at NASA-Ames talked about how her testing and designs enable astronauts to function better on missions. One of her designs was even adapted on a Star Trek movie!

Why an all-female conference? Honestly, this wasn't something that was discussed very much during the event. Maybe because the answer seemed obvious--when girls get together without boys they're more likely to speak up, take risks, and generally take in more learning. But I think there might be another, more subtle reason. Watching the young women interact throughout the day, I couldn't help but notice how much they had to say about what they were learning. They weren't talking about makeup or boys (or if they were, I didn't hear that). They were talking about the Zynga game they'd created, or the fun they had simulating the course of a bit of information as it travels through the pipes of the Internet. In other words, the participants were directly experiencing what it is like to be in a career in computers.

When they looked around at one another they saw a whole lot of other female faces looking back. There's little danger women will entirely take over the computer industry (and this is obviously no one's goal), but there was a sense of creating a new digital culture. It will have many different skin tones, a diversity of skills, and a rich mixture of thoughts and ideas. If this was a peek into the future of high tech, I want to be there.

Photos: Martin Stein, conference co-founder. The remainder are at this link. Also please look out for a video created by the students in my workshop on tech reporting, which will be posted soon.

Born to Brand – Adam Metz, Metz Consulting

2010-02-20T12:37:00.000-08:00

This is one of several in a series of interviews, all part of a larger book project tentatively titled “Social Media Success: What these Folks Know that You Don’t.” (Also see my interviews with Louis Gray, Francine Hardaway, and commentary.)

Adam Metz is the Principal of Metz Consulting, a San Francisco-based management consulting firm that works with brands to to acquire, monetize and retain what he terms the "social customer." I first met Adam when was the Social Media Director at LaunchSquad, an SF digital PR firm where I also worked. He stood out a mile with his crazy checked shirts and turbo-charged energy, even in that hyperactive environment.

At the time, he was one of the few people around who knew social media well enough to advise others about it. Turns out, he’s still ahead of the curve. Eighteen months later he’s running his own firm, working with an enviable list of clients that includes several California wineries, numerous apparel brands, Mighty Leaf Tea, SF Convention and Visitors Bureau and a handful of consumer service brands.

Our interview is slated to take place in person, but at the last minute he apologetically calls to say he’s sick (“something that never happens to me!”). I tap out our interview from a Tully’s on Van Ness, using a combination of my iPhone and AIM to communicate with him. Throughout our interview, he IMs me links and information without ever losing the flow of conversation.

When I ask him what he does for his clients, he answers that Metz Consulting is not unlike any other management consulting firm. They help clients better serve their customers. The difference? Well, for one thing, there are still only a handful of firms that exclusively offer social customer management consulting to mid-sized consumer brands. (His best known competitor is Altimeter Group.)

There are other distinctions. He uses a combination of strategy and customer relationship management (CRM) software that automates the complex and difficult tasks associated with brand management in today’s social media saturated world. We live in a time when like it or not, customers can (and do) say anything they like about a company on very public forums such as Twitter and Facebook. As their advisor, Adam’s number one priority is getting companies to a place where they can track and monitor and engage about everything that is being said about them. This means they can respond in ways that go way beyond crisis management.

Ultimately, they learn how to tap into consumer loyalty and enthusiasm.

“We don’t feel it’s enough to write a social web strategy,” he said. “All collateral has to go to one source. One dashboard. They need to prove a successful ROI. We’re the only shop getting certified by Salesforce Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics.”

An example: one of Metz’s clients’ customers (a thirty-something man) went out to a winery on a Friday night with his wife for their sixth anniversary. Despite a reservation, the couple had to wait an inordinate period of time. They were eventually seated and then all but ignored by the wait staff. Enraged, the man tweeted about his experience. Normally, that would’ve been the end of it, but instead, says Adam, “we immediately got it to them. The chef got through, texted and tweeted a response. The couple got a free tasting dinner. And that person came back as a paying customer.”

“But why the focus on consumer brands? Isn’t high tech still where it’s at?” I ask. “I mean, don’t you miss Silicon Valley?”

“I talk to Silicon Valley companies every day. They’re partners now. Take (cloud sales 2.0 intelligence provider) InsideView. They used to be one of my clients. Now I implement their technology. There’s nothing more fun than going to wine tasting –as I’m planning to do tomorrow--and realizing, this is my client. I’m writing strategy for these folks.”

He talks of fun, but later in our conversation it comes out how dedicated he is to understanding each industry he serves. His engagements substantiate multi-million dollar returns, and he takes his clients intensely seriously. As he admits, if you see him on Muni, he’ll probably have his nose buried in BevNet or Gourmet Retailer—trade publications for the wine and food industries.

There’s another reason he’s chosen to focus on consumer brands. The word “enthusiast” sums it up. Folks often get deeply personal about their favorite beverage or hotel. To illustrate, he had me search for his dad’s favorite brand of scotch on Twitter, Lagavulin. The query yielded hundreds of tweets from around the world.

“There are more reviews on the latest Mighty Leaf tea flavor than there are on the new Dan Brown book on Amazon,” he tells me.

This is beyond brand enthusiasm—it is outright passion. Metz has clearly hit on something. And he’s not keeping it to himself. He’s working on his second book: Dance on the Volcano due out early next year on how to do a million-dollar social customer management implementation.

He describes the book in the following terms: “If Groundswell was Sgt. Pepper, this is Born to Run.” Nice analogy. Think I’ll use it in my headline.

What SWA (and everyone else) can learn from my cats

2010-02-17T21:51:00.000-08:00

Until recently I didn't think much about my cats' behavior. After a busy day at the office, all I really noticed about them was that they were hungry. Now that I work at home, I watch them throughout the day. Today it hit me: they're great role models for social media! Here are some of the rules I've come up with.

1. Wait before you pounce. And when you pounce, don't hesitate. Getting social media right takes guts. Here's a perfect recent example: Director Kevin Smith got into a tiff with Southwest Airlines last week when they threw him off one of their planes for being, as he put it, "Too Fat to Fly." It's true that SWA seemed to snap into action--sending him an apology, offering him an (ahem) $100 voucher--what they really did was react, and rather ineffectually at that. Their attitude is summed up in the weak and painful post they later wrote with the snarky headline "Not So Silent Bob" defending their actions. What would my cat Mitzy suggest? Either jump on him right away and sink your teeth in with blood lust coursing through your veins, or stalk off in a huff. Nothing in between.

2. Move around the house a lot. One of the biggest dangers of social media is that it's actually pretty darn interesting a lot of the time. It's easy to become over-involved. We get into twitfights, retweet everything in sight, stay up nights worrying about whether Google has made too many changes to Buzz, read every Mashable post we can get our hands on... Then one fine morning in May we wake up screaming. Our spouse has to hold us back as we threaten to flush our iPhone down the toilet or toss our Macbook off the top of the Empire State Building. Try thinking of the social web as a sunny place by the window where you go to watch the world go by, talking to the birds and squirrels and (if things get dull) plants. After a bit, you jump off the sill and do something else, knowing it will all still be there when you return. And what better way to break up the day than to take a nice cat nap as my cat Clarence might?

3. Know when to sit in the shade, and when to sit in the sun. I've noticed that out on our back deck, there are definitely sunny spots, and then there are spots under the plastic lawn chair. More often than not, Clarence will have commandeered one of these spaces, while Mitzy or Shnitzy will have settled into one of the others. No one seems to mind who is where. Same goes for social networking. Sometimes you want to be in the center of a discussion. You want to be the one who starts a certain thread on Facebook, Twitter, your own blog, a community site because you've got something to say and you want to lead the discussion in certain ways. There are other times when it's more appropriate and useful to be a follower. Yet, what tends to happen is that people fall into one of these two categories habitually, based on their personality or level of influence. Don't be like that. Follow the flow of conversation, and know when to hang back or step up.

4. If you want attention, go and get it. My cats all seem to have been trained by the same assertiveness coach. If someone rebuffs you, ignore their rebuff and come pinging back up onto the sofa demanding a better attitude. Who among the humans does this? Ever heard of Gary Vaynerchuck? How about Guy Kawasaki? Timothy Ferriss? Seth Godin? Robert Scoble? These are not people who are known for being willing to take "no" for an answer. They plow ahead, ignoring the multiple knocks they get along the way and demand that the world notice them. Just like my cat Mitzy, who does not care how many times I throw her off my lap when she wants me to "groom" her. This is a rather unpleasant task as she likes to press her teeth against my hand while slobbering profusely. But nothing--and I mean nothing--will stop her trying to get me to do this when she sets her mind to it. That is, until she herself eventually decides to move on to another activity (see Rule 2).

5. Only meow when you really need help. When I started out in social media, I had so many questions. I wasn't sure how to go about jumping into the tweetstream, and became obsessed for a time with my analytics. I felt I needed someone--some guru--to help me every step of the way. Pretty soon, however, I became the person people turned to for this kind of advice. I now understood why I got so many brush-offs and blank stares. The problem is, social media is a complex arena. Anyone who claims to have it all figured out is kidding you, and probably themselves as well. So, before you call out for help, consider this--you probably just need to hang in there and figure most of this out as you go along. If you legitimately need some guidance, hire a professional.

6. Know when to use your claws. The online world has always had a bit of a rough and tumble element to it. Those of us who started out in forums, chat rooms and Yahoo! Groups remember the flaming that used to go on. That's settled down a bit, but there are still some pretty ugly smackdowns. Some of us are too sensitive and forget we even have claws. We let ourselves get walked all over. Others of us are just the opposite. We'll scratch you in the face before we recognize that it's all been a big misunderstanding. Know when to get involved, and when to back the hell off and retract those claws.

So you see, cats are amazing models of behavior that apply to myriad social media situations. Perhaps you have other rules to add to this list. If so, please feel free to use the comments field below. And Clarence, Mitzy and Shnitzy say they're also taking catnip donations.

Top picture: Mitzy and Shnitzy Mugrabi
Middle picture: Clarence Mugrabi
Photos: Leor Mugrabi

Barbie - OK so I'm a little obsessed

2010-02-16T12:50:00.000-08:00

I didn't have a Barbie doll as a kid. I found her mile-long legs and major boobage a bit too much to handle, and instead was content with a redheaded, slightly tomboyish pre-teen doll named "Angie." All my friends who did own Barbie ended up torturing her in various ways: taking scissors to her hair, thus transforming her into unintentially "punk rock" Barbie, poking holes in her boobs with pins, unscrewing her head and other body parts. It was not unusual, in my childhood, to sit around someone's bedroom surrounded by an array of severed limbs, headless torsos, and staring blue eyes under ratted hairdos.

Still, I couldn't help but be elated when I heard about "Computer Engineer Barbie" -- the newest, and most revolutionary version of the doll since gay leather guy Ken. Computer Engineer Barbie is outfitted with a pink laptop, a shirt with binary code stamped all over it, and a pair of designerey specs (also pink), among other accessories. True, it's a little nauseating to see her tossing her blond locks back so as to make way for a bluetooth. But when I think about a nine-year-old girl geek in training opening this gift and seeing her inner self reflected by such a glamourous, iconic doll, my heart soars.

The whole thing has caused a major stir among techies, who are raising all manner of interesting questions about her high plastickeyness and her new career move. Claire Cain Miller notes in the New York Times "Bits" blog that this is a major step forward from the days when Teen Talk Barbie infamously declared "Math class is tough." And Infosmack's Greg Knieriemen blogs that it could make geeky women in the real world "self-conscious" to see the blonde bombshell take on such a techy career.

As the BBC wonders, are Barbie's wedge shoes practical for someone who will be crawling under desks in order to hook up cables? To which tech journalist Beth Pariseau retorts, "since when has Barbie been about reality?"

Exactly! And therein lies I suppose my new obsession with Computer Engineer Barbie. She is and always has been the stuff of fantasy. When I was little, I liked to play out all manner of daily lives with my dolls. Well, here's a new story for this new Barbie:

Barbie sets her alarm for 7:30 a.m. and leaps out of bed to beat the early morning rush at her local Starbucks. Ken, who works part-time as a male model these days, rolls over and goes back to sleep. Fine with her. She jumps in her Barbie Dream Prius and zooms off onto the Hot Wheels highway to the office park.

She arrives at work just in time to be called in to intervene in a major meltdown at the data center. Someone was up late and now the VMs are waaay overprovisioned. Silly overzealous Lego boys. She'll put things right. Grabs one of their leftover helmets and dives into the virtual zone headfirst, ensuring that there are no more bottlenecks between servers and storage.

She starts by swimming between each zero and one and making all the changes in the living ether of binary code inside the toyland server. It's like sorting out a bowl of spaghetti-O's, she thinks to herself. Her earlier years as a spoiled teenager in Malibu have well prepared her for such tasks. She used to get so bored she would pile up her soup noodles in all kinds of patterns. Partly an attempt to delve into the potential for a unified field theory, and partly a way to pass the time before Skipper got home and they could continue their ongoing chess game.

Now she swims to the surface, and enters the monitor from the inside. The code is all in mirror language, as she's on the other side of it. She enjoys the challenge of interpreting it from this point of view. But wait, could it be lunchtime? Time to have a cheeseburger with extra fries. Sure, this could mean that her waist will grow to an entire inch in circumference, but what's Ken going to do about it? He needs that shared health insurance plan.

Good luck, Computer Engineer Barbie! Or, put another way: 01010111011001010010000001101100011011110111
011001100101001000000111100101101111011101010
010000001000010011000010111001001100010011010
010110010100100001!!!

How to overcome social media phobia

2010-02-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

Social media means a lot of things to a lot of companies. One thing it means more than anything else is loss of control. Marketing folks will put on a good face about social media in public, but when they sit down with me, their fears start to spill out.

When I first began consulting with companies about social media, I had a simple, standard answer to this. You have already lost control. Your message is no longer in your hands. It's out there being tossed around like a hacky sack by anyone with an iPhone or a PC. The horse has left the barn. The train, the station. Pick your hackneyed metaphor--you get the point. As someone recently noted: dissatisfied customers were always there, but now they have the platforms on which to complain publicly. Ignore them at your peril.

As accurate as this response is, I'm beginning to realize it's not always that sympathetic or useful. We all know intellectually that the online world has invaded the bubblelike atmosphere of the corporate one. Folks in marketing aren't stupid. They see the writing on the wall. But human nature is to respond in one of three ways when threatened: fight, flight or freeze. And to be honest, freezing is the most common response. Unfortunately, in the real world, this is the least preferable of all three.

Creativity is the antidote. Once you start thinking about what you would like to see--your ideal outcome--the fears are put into their proper place. Here's an example: EMC, a company that very well might have as many detractors as it does fans due to its size and influence. Rather than shying away from controversy, the company grabbed hold of the social media trend and ran with it in ways that few other companies have. Recent evidence of this: their blogs swept through and took the top four slots in a recent poll of storage vendor blogs.

The strategy is simple. Get out of the way and let those inside the company evangelize, argue, and otherwise engage with anyone and everyone who might be trash talking about them. Some have even given themselves names to underline their controversial attitudes, "Storagezilla," "The Storage Anarchist." EMC also made a shrewd move when it allowed employees to generate their own blogs, rather than keeping them in a playpen under the company banner. This sets them apart from competitor NetApp, which has had significantly less success with its blogging efforts.

They're also building networks from within, as this recent slideshow illustrates. All of which adds up to an energetic community that is engaged in social media on multiple fronts in a way that few companies can boast. This is just one example, but one I've been watching closely in order to model it for the smaller operations I tend to work with. There is a certain bullheadedness in they're approach that goes against the grain for most of us. There's also a sense of play and creativity. In short, this is the opposite of how most of us respond to scary situations.

What are you doing to combat your fears about losing control of your message? If it's not something that goes against your first impulse, it might not be enough.

A New World

2010-01-31T12:58:00.000-08:00

This past week I attended two events that stretched and twisted by my idea of what makes a "conference" beyond any previous imagining. First, I was a featured speaker on Social Media at The BD Event, a storage industry gathering in Palo Alto. The name of the event was cause for snickering in some circles--the letters didn't stand, as some suggested, for "bondage and domination" but rather "business development." So get your minds out of the dungeon.

The second event, She's Geeky, was an "unconference" for women in tech and other geeky pursuits. I recorded two podcasts for my weekly women in tech series, TechnoGirlTalk while on site at the event and got to know a whole lot of really interesting women. The podcast was also a proud "community sponsor" of the event.

Both events were a departure from the traditional. The BD Event was, as my copanelist Stephen Foskett put it, a deconstruction of the trade show concept. It kept all of the good stuff, which involves meeting and talking with others with whom one might do business, while dispensing with the clutter--booths, vendors hawking new products, and so on. There's a nice video of Stephen explaining this on analyst David Vellante's Wikibon blog.

Here is the video:

As Stephen says in this video clip, this is what the future of what we're currently calling "social media." It's about "democratizing and personalizing communication." And as I learned later this past week, She's Geeky is part of a larger "unconference" movement, in which folks are thinking about how to tap into human ways of relating that yield new and energizing results. This is related to the way that neurons are interconnected in the brain, and all kinds of other exciting research areas. Man, is this my kind of thinking!

At She's Geeky, there were no preplanned panels or talks--the participants themselves determined this at the start of each day. The organizer, Kaliya, who is known across the interwebs as IdentityWoman described the structure to me as "more organized than a cocktail party but less than a panel of talking heads."

What struck me about this was how similar this "offline" event was to the way that my online life now functions. I went to a meeting or panel, and then if I met someone with whom I clicked in some way, we took our conversation over to a table, sat down and chatted further. Then we stood up and joined the larger stream. It worked beautifully, and it made me wonder if our culture's obsession with structure, leadership, and climbing the ladder may be crumbling in the face of these more natural and creative ways of connecting with others.

So, with all this in mind, I have to admit that I was less impressed by another gathering that took place this past week. This was one in which a charismatic leader stood up and pronounced from on high that there would be a new product sent down to the masses, and that it would be good. And speaking of snickering, this one had a name that caused much mirth among the female population. According to Gizmodo, the #2 trending topic on Twitter is not the actual "iPad," but the parody word "iTampon" -- ahead of "Apple," "Steve Jobs" and other relevant words.

Perhaps even the famously social-media-paranoid Apple might want to consider some sort of crowdsourcing before making another mega high profile gaffe like this one. Or, barring that, they could at least remember to include a woman or two on their product naming committee.

The Next Steve Jobs ... a Sarah?

2010-01-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Thomas Friedman, the moustachioed New York Times columnist has a piece out this week that's making the rounds of the tweetosphere. And no wonder--it's all about a subject near and dear to the hearts of techy crowd that make up the Twitterati. Tom's headline tells it all, "More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs." Considering that this week the entire tech world is slavering like a pack of hungry hounds about the forthcoming announcement of the Apple Tablet-- which TechCrunch hears Steve Jobs is calling "the most important thing I've ever done"--this was a well-timed headline.

But Tom doesn't so much talk about Steve Jobs as evoke him. He offers some pointed advice to President Obama: "What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again."

He cites two programs for youth, NationalLabDay.org and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship--and instructs the President to show the documentary about NFTE, www.ten9eight.com in every classroom in America. All well and good, but I notice that neither of these programs is focused on something that might well be the key to America's success in the coming decades: encouraging young women to learn more about careers in high tech.

This is on my mind, as I'm on the committee for a conference for young women to be held next month in Los Altos, Dare2BDigital. The one-day event is sponsored by an A List of tech companies, including IBM, SAP, HP, Microsoft, Cisco and Symantec. It offers young women aged 13-16 a chance to learn more about the exciting and creative careers that await them in engineering and computer science. If I'd gone to something like this when I was a teenager, my life might well have gone very differently. The workshops demonstrate just how much fun and creativity there is in a career in tech these days--from virtual worlds to art and animation to tech journalism. I myself will work with a select group of five participants to chronicle the event in pictures and sounds, which will go live on my podcasting site, TechnoGirlTalk.

At a time when everyone's concerned about the lessons that adolescent young women are learning from movies like the Twilight series, this event seems like a breath of fresh air. This generation has unique opportunities. They are entering a world in which women are not only allowed to pursue careers of their own--but expected to. They're also living at a time when technology is offering previously undreamt of ways to communicate and change the world. I can't help but wonder if, as my headline suggests, the next big thing--the Apple of the 2020s--will be led by one of these young women. Tom and other watchers, take note.

How do I get more followers? Step one: forget about it!

2010-01-15T23:45:00.000-08:00

Seems that lately, everyone I meet wants to know the secret to getting more followers. Some of the most commonly clicked links are those that offer the top ten tips to getting more Twitter followers, readers or blog subscribers. There's a vague sense that somehow all of this will lead to fame, riches, and a book deal. Hey, if it worked for "Shit My Dad Says," it should work for you and me, right?

Well... hmm. Let's take a step back and think about this for a moment. True, there are some tricks you can use to drive more traffic to your blog or to garner more Twitter followers. I'm happy to share some of these, and I certainly don't see the harm in trying them. (For example, write a blog post offering ten tips on how to get more Twitter followers, and then tweet about it!) But this whole thing can be a huge trap. Page metrics aren't the be all and end all. Think about it -- if you have 1500 porn spammers following you on Twitter, what is this doing for you or your reputation?

Look, if your main reason for seeking out more followers is because you're still wishing you had been elected class president in the seventh grade--and figure getting 10,000 followers on Twitter will redeem you, then you're probably wasting your own and a lot of other people's time. Or, perhaps you're trying to raise money for charity, and have made it your goal to beat Ashton Kutcher at his own game? No? Well, then what is your reasoning?

Most people, when I press them on this question, don't really have much of an answer. They just know that they're supposed to "drive traffic" to their blog or "expand their social media footprint." They've heard this, or perhaps assumed it based on the fact that there are so many posts out there about how to do it. But when we get talking, it soon becomes apparent than they're unclear why, or how this is going to benefit them.

Usually the best way to get to the bottom of things is to find out what their overall goal was in starting a blog. A new job? Meeting new people? Finding a mate? Getting a book deal? Once in awhile, the answer is something like, "I had a passion for goldfish mating habits/World War II history/spelunking equipment and decided I had to blog about it." But that's rare--and those folks tend to be the ones who aren't so concerned about analytics. They're doing what they love, and don't much care whether anyone else is going to join them on the ride.

In fact, all the social media experts and consultants I know are wary of putting too much emphasis on metrics. Louis Gray says so--just watch this video of him on this blog. He says, "Often people get excited because they started a controversy." They rush to their analytics and count the hits. But that, he warns, is not necessarily going to have the long-term effect you're looking for. He also says that the number of Twitter followers isn't important to him -- "I just need the right people, whoever they are."

Meanwhile, Francine Hardaway, another of my video guests says that she herself doesn't even look at her Google Analytics to find out how much traffic her blog is garnering. It's not important to her. She also warns against the so-called "TechCrunch 50 buzz." That is, the huge spike in traffic you get if you're one of those chosen by TechCrunch. As she says, "After that if you don't know what to do with it, or if it's the wrong kind of traffic it goes away."

I know a company that got a whopping half million hits when a project they did went viral--it hit all the front pages many people can only dream about, Techmeme, Digg, and so on. Did this change everything for them? No. The hits dropped back to normal soon enough, and they had to go on with the difficult task of building a startup. That doesn't mean it was necessarily a negative thing, but it wasn't going to be the determining factor in their success either.

But what about "Shit My Dad Says?" with its million + Twitter followers, TV and book deal? That's gotta be a sign that getting followers has a purpose. No, not really. In fact to me this is an example of the reverse. That is, this is a funny Twitter feed, and therefore people are going to follow it. It's a great platform for these folks and their twisted sense of humor, but it's just that. If you have something that funny to say, you won't be asking anyone how to get more followers--you'll be getting them.

All this is to say that rather than focusing on how many (clicks, followers, subscribers) you have, why not look at the quality of the following? Are these the potential employers, customers, mates, friends and so on that you were hoping to attract when you planted a flag on some piece of social media terrain? If so, great. Keep doing whatever you're doing. If not, well, then you may need to do some strategic thinking in order to get there. But forget the numbers. And while you're at it, forget that scheme you had for writing down everything your grandma says.

Francine Hardaway Video

2010-01-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

If you want to hang around blogger and businessperson Francine Hardaway, you better be on your toes. Part teacher, part tech evangelist and zero BS, she has a presence that draws attention whether she's holding court at the coastside Tech Tuesday event she organized--where folks like her friend Robert Scoble and his buddy Jesse Stay might show up--or just relaxing in her second home near Half Moon Bay, Calif.

While you might not have heard of Francine or her Phoenix, Ariz.-based business incubator Stealthmode Partners, you've probably read or heard about opinions she's expressed on her own blog, or on her blogs on the Huffington Post or Fast Company. I'm guessing you also know some of the Silicon Valley personalities she knows and interacts with regularly on Twitter and other social networks. Follow her and you'll see what I mean.

I had the privilege of interviewing Francine on video. I wanted to know her secret--how has she been so successful at social media? She seems to know--and very naturally interact--with a veritable who's who of social media, from Seesmic's Loic Le Meur to Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang--who put her on his "thought-leaders" list on Twitter along with Chris Brogan, Louis Gray and other big names. When I asked her how she does it, she claimed no special knowledge of social media, except that she herself is a social person, and an early tech adopter. Her approach is one that seems more about service than about her own ego. Apparently she doesn't even track her own analytics or followers.

So without further ado, here's the video--I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it:

10 Trends I Hope Won't Continue in 2010

2010-01-02T17:12:00.000-08:00

So many things went wrong in 2009 that it's difficult to boil them down to such a short list. As one of my Facebook friends put it -- "Bye-bye '09, happy to scrape your dust off my shoes." But such is the format we all use, and so here for your viewing pleasure are the ten trends I sincerely wish would just dry up and blow away as we enter a new decade.

10. Facebook privacy alert rumors. Facebook already took our privacy away, back in 2006. What are you so alarmed about? At least read Snopes before putting out an all-caps update that Mark Zuckerberg will be selling your children's photos to white slavers. Just sayin...

9. Celebrities jumping on, and then abruptly off, Twitter. You've already got more money than God. Is it so difficult to pretend to be offering us a window into your private life by paying someone to ghost-tweet on your behalf? It's good for the global economy, and it's good for you. Plus, it makes you look dweebie to be so half-assed about it. (Chris and Miley, you know who you are...) And I for one don't want to be there when Oprah's fans lose their minds and start stampeding America's malls in search of her lost tweets.

8. Somali pirate attacks. Not only are these stories terrifying to read while eating my corn flakes, but they've taken all of the humor value out of the word "pirate." How can we laugh along with "talk like a pirate" day anymore? We can't. It's all too sick and real now.

7. Handing out $1 million bonuses to the very people who took down the global economy. First you bleed us all dry with those mortgage-backed-subprime-derivative-manipulations you dreamed up. Then you stand around with your hands out demanding cash. You know what? You folks actually belong in category number 8 above. Pirates, blackmailers, whatever you want to call yourselves... My wish for 2010 is that you all must take minimum wage jobs calculating exactly how much retirement, savings and investments you lost the rest of us.

6. Replacing beloved sci fi TV characters with actors who are barely old enough to drive a car, much less a TARDIS. It's just so unfair. And wrong. Especially for those of us who were thrilled and delighted to find a good-looking, mature hero for whom the answer to every problem--no matter how cosmically huge or dangerous--is to put on his glasses and start tinkering around with a computer. And think about it. If this trend isn't reversed, by 2020 we'll be tuning in to watch the Doctor take his first steps.

5. Pulitzer-winning journalists getting the sack. I understand that the media must change--in fact, in many ways I welcome the seismic shifts that are shaking up that industry. Check out Dan Gillmor's Mediactive book-in-progress for views that I wholeheartedly support. But this story of Pulitzer winners being laid off made me woozy with anger. The news surfaced in April, right after the year's winners had been announced, among them my fellow Red Herring alum Ali Berzon, who gutsily delved into a story of fatalities on Las Vegas construction sites. This is the kind of journalism we actually need. Meanwhile, we still have to put up with David Pogue calling these things the best tech ideas of 2009. Life, it seems, is not fair.

4. Silicon Valley panic/pullback. This trend began in Fall 2008 when Sequoia Capital announced "RIP Good Times." The venture firm known for its savvy and prescient bets on YouTube, Google, and other megahits was suddenly running for cover--demanding that startups cut costs and get cash flow positive or be cut off. The much-discussed PowerPoint, which TechCrunch dubbed the "Slide Presentation of Doom" featured such images as a gravestone, and a piece of very dead meat with a knife stuck in it to illustrate the new economic reality. (No, I'm not exaggerating. I wish I were.) As a result of this kind of thing, some say VCs are in danger of getting a "Dubya" level approval rating.The Sequoia folks weren't entirely wrong to predict that this recession could be deep and painful, but let's hope they and other backers wake up in 2010 to a new attitude--one that recognizes our Valley's special energy and innovation as our best hope for the long-term. Some VCs are already moving in that direction, seeing the potential in clean tech, green IT/storage, virtualization, social media tools and other hot segments. (And if you need help guys, see above, number 6, a geek "hero" for some guidance.)

3. Underwear bombers. Or, really any bombers carrying explosives in any of their intimate or not-so-intimate clothing. Let's hope this trend does not continue. For obvious reasons.

2. Freaking out about technology. The sky is falling ... I mean the cloud is failing! Someone might follow my movements on Gowalla and rob me. Help, I'm addicted to Twitter. Social media snake oil salesmen are out to get me. Help, I'm addicted to Facebook ... For 2010, I would love to see these and other such sentiments become like quaint fears of the past--not unlike the fears some once had that the telephone would lead to the breakdown of civility and that widespread use of electricity would encourage immoral behavior. And, dare I dream, we'll recognize the difference between reacting and overreacting. Hey, I'm an optimist.

1. And the number one trend I hope won't continue in 2010... Drunk tagging on Facebook. And with that, I raise my glass and wish you all a happy, healthy New Year.

Is it time to panic yet? Five reality checks on social media

2009-12-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

Today, we got a new reason to panic about social media. According to sources, the snake oil salesmen are swarming like locusts. As Mashable reported, there are now a whopping 15,740 people on Twitter calling themselves a social media expert, guru, consultant, or other such title. The post cites broadstuff, which claims to have calculated that Twitter will be made up almost entirely of social media experts by 2012. The number is derived from a growth rate of 3.5x every six months--thus, 30 million in the next three years. Attention getting stuff, and I have no doubt this post will be retweeted hundreds of times.

OK, enough of that. Let's get real.

Reality check #1: The geometrical progression model is not the proper one to use in this case. Any statistician worth her or his salt will tell you that. This is because we're in a particularly intense time in which social media is spreading like wildfire. As I've pointed out in an earlier post, we are in the center of what Gartner calls the "hype cycle." The hype will die down well before we get to 30 million, believe me.

Reality check #2: There is a real demand, and need for social media expertise. Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang writes in Forbes that companies tightening their belts in the recession began to recognize the power of social media. "Social marketing promises lower costs and bigger returns."

As social media observer and consultant Louis Gray points out in his recent look-back post on 2009: "In 2009, the majority of businesses woke up to social media. While there are no doubt many holdouts, and even a bigger number doing a poor job, 2009 was the year that companies realized you could get business done on Facebook, Twitter and other networks." (Italics added for emphasis.)

Another way of looking at this--social media will be integrated into overall marketing and PR strategies in the coming year for a number of businesses. This is simply the new reality we're in, and some companies are legitimately concerned their approach may not be working. They are possibly getting slammed by customer complaints that spread out of control across the web. Or, they may not able to rise above the noise due to a lack of understanding of how to get noticed in the socially-networked community. This is a radical departure from traditional, "push" marketing, and many are realizing they could use an insider to show them the ropes for some period of time.

Reality check #3: Most companies aren't going to find their social media consultants by searching Twitter. Those consultants who have a real and valuable service to offer will (for the most part) float to the top--in fact, this is already happening. Their reputations will precede them; satisfied clients will refer them. Those who are all hot air will soon flutter off into the distance, in search of the next big thing. It was like this during the dot com boom in the late 1990s. Every company knew it needed a web site, and so for a period of time, everyone was calling themselves a web designer--even those whose "skills" consisted of an afternoon of training in MS FrontPage. This too shall pass.

Reality check #4: We're just getting started with this social media thing. In that sense, no one is an expert... yet. And as you might notice, those who have the most to offer are usually the ones who shy away from titles like "expert" and "guru." After all, it's only been in the past year that its true power and potential has become apparent. How could anyone have gained true expertise in such a short period of time?

Twitter became a part of mainstream conversation really just in the last year, with celebs like Oprah and Ellen jumping on the bandwagon, and major news sources setting up accounts. And as Louis Gray points out in the above-referenced post, "real-time ended up being the word of the year in 2009." Google and Bing are now offering real-time search, and for the most part, it's improving the quality of the results. But it's really just the beginning--and anyone who claims to know for certain what's next is NOT the person you want to hire as your consultant.

Reality check #5: Because we're all learning, there is fun and adventure to be had. Rapid change can be unsettling. Frightening, even. But the truth is that there is immense potential in social media--for making more money, doing more creative work, and (best of all) being oneself in a way that was never possible. Social media is a place where dreams really can come true. No need to worship a guru--false or not. Find your own path.

OK folks, back to your regularly scheduled fear-mongering programming...

Avatar - A Review

2009-12-26T17:05:00.000-08:00

This blog is mainly focused on social media. In that sense, a movie review is something of a departure. Then again, the new James Cameron filmstravanganza Avatar is by far the most talked-about flick on social networks. Proof of this: just about every one of my Twitter friends had already seen it by the time I checked in on Gowalla at the Metreon IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco Christmas Day. It could be argued, however, that this movie would be a hit no matter what. It was that spectacular.

Having said that, I came away from the movie with mixed feelings. What was right about it: it was Hollywood entertainment in the best sense of the word. I was carried away by the special effects, which, on the giant IMAX screen in 3-D were so masterful that there were times I forgot myself entirely. I can't recall being so absorbed in a movie since I saw Star Wars as a ten-year-old. The flying scenes were particularly wondrous.

Avatar presents us with a complete world--a feat that few if any moviemakers can claim. Or really, two different worlds within the same planet. The aptly-named planet of Pandora is a treasure trove of natural wonders--a box that once opened, continues to marvel and entrance. Nature thrums with animal and plant life, shining a light on the often ignored beauty that surrounds us here on earth. It also contains secrets and danger that explode onto the screen in terrifying ways--monstrous animals with claws and teeth, plants that spiral down into nothingness. My suspension of disbelief held even when I encountered a few cliches, such as the flying, saurian beasts that were reminiscent of many a Hollywood blockbuster--a combo of Potterian Hippogriff and a pterodactyl.

The army base inhabited by the earthlings is so familiar and realistic I could smell the dust that rose up in the heat. The technology the humans use for daily life--from the tanks of fluid where the avatars are grown to the computer screens to the walking robots and warships--is just far enough ahead of our own time to feel futuristic, but not enough to feel alien or overly fanciful.

Here's the irony: the movie itself is clearly a triumph of 21st Century movie-making. Cameron has taken 3-D CGI effects to the next level, and truly the rest of the industry had better figure out how to keep up with him. A mind bending 11 special effects studios were employed to make this movie. However, the story itself paints technology in an intensely negative light. The people of earth have devolved, in this scenario, into war-mongering capitalists who have so completely destroyed their own planet that they must plunder others in order to keep going. As the main character clearly states, they have nothing to offer the Pandorans. They can only take.

This desolate view made me depressed and not a little frustrated. Boiled down to its essence, the message of the movie is that there's absolutely nothing in our culture worth salvaging. This is what Cameron has to say to our children? All of our progress is for naught--and our only hope is to somehow recapture a lost Eden such as the indigenous people have? This isn't just a downer--it seems an odd point of view from someone who has so successfully used high technology in order to further his own creative vision.

As I watched the action unfold, I found myself wishing someone would walk onstage and offer the two opposing cultures a third, and sane middle option. Someone to point out that they really don't need to set at each other with all the weapons in their respective arsenals. Having watched quite a lot of "Doctor Who" recently, I began to fervently wish for David Tennant to land his TARDIS in the sacred tree and come stumbling out, pushing up his glasses and offering a completely different vision than the one being served up by the folks on the screen.

"What all of you need," I can hear him say in his sweet, reasonable voice, "Is to realize that in fact you do have quite a lot to offer one another. If you lay down your weapons, you'll start to see what that could look like. Pandorans, these earth people need you, because their planet is dying. And you need them to help you learn how to fly out into the stars and come into contact with other people--to expand your world and your vision."

Why not? There's something patronizing about the idea that there is nothing--absolutely nothing--that the Pandorans might want to know, see, do or have that's different from what they have now. There's also something bizarrely oversimplistic to say that the people of earth have not created anything worthwhile with their technology. They can create avatars of other beings, for chrissakes. Imagine the possiblities for medicine, for diplomacy, not to mention fun and adventure.

The Doctor always gives us earth folks due respect for our endless optimism and curiosity--even when it's clear that these qualities are getting us into trouble. The earthlings in Avatar are nothing if not survivors. Their planet has been laid to waste, but they don't give up. They get out there and try to find something that will work. You can call them colonial plunderers, and clearly they have a lot to learn from others about how to act humanely and fairly. But they're also doing their darndest to take care of those back on earth who are in trouble. Why paint them in such a terrible light?

Podcast Rising

2009-12-24T12:22:00.000-08:00

My three panelists:

What would drive a woman blogger to pretend to be a man? Do men in tech make better mentors than women? These and many other questions were hashed out in the first ever TechnoGirlTalk podcast, which is now posted for your listening enjoyment.

What blew me away--not one of my guests said anything predictable. I kept waiting for the stereotypical responses to come out--the bitching and complaining about sexism in the workplace, the disgust at the concept of booth babes at shows... in short, the litany of gripes that many of my male friends assume must be on every woman in tech's list. But it never came.

I even tried prodding them into it. For example, the latest Motorola Droid "princess" ad, which quite frankly offended me with its macho imagery and suggestion that technology is a man's game and that anything feminine in a phone should be crushed like so many tiny worms under the feet of a Cyberman. But my guests weren't willing to go where I was pointing them. Instead, they raised much more interesting questions. In true girl geek style, the discussion morphed into a debate about what makes a robot beautiful--or even date-able.

But lest I give too much away, I leave it to you to decide what you think of the discussion. Here's hoping you enjoy the podcast. We want to hear your responses. And if you have suggestions for guests for upcoming shows, please do not hesitate to let me know in the comments field here, or via Twitter, @TechnoGirlTalk. And please do follow us there! We promise to follow you back if you're not a pornspambot or other such offensive Twitter leech.

Happy holidays!

Louis Gray Video - Part 2

2009-12-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

The more social media becomes a buzz phrase, the more overwhelming and confusing it can become--particularly for businesses. Should they set up a Facebook fan page? Go on Twitter? Blog? All of the above? And what about communities?

In this video, social media consultant Louis Gray breaks it down to a simple, three-stage process for rising above the noise and reaching customers through social media. He offers an antidote to the panic-mongering and hype that some so-called social media experts are peddling--instead offering clear, down-to-earth advice for real businesses in the real world.

Louis Gray on Participating in Social Media from Sunshine Mugrabi on Vimeo.

Louis Gray Interview, Part 1

2009-12-10T10:24:00.000-08:00

If you're interested in Macs, RSS, or really anything to do with the social Web, you should know and read Louis Gray. He blogs daily at his site LouisGray.com, offering a continual drip of commentary and information on all the latest and greatest tools of our social media age. What intrigued me about Louis is that he isn't a typical social media star. He has none of the brashness of a Scoble or an Arrington, nor is he a smooth operator like Kevin Rose or Pete Cashmore. Instead, he's a good-natured, even-tempered, shy and retiring type. He is as well known for his reliable takes on the latest Twitter app as he for his warm, friendly interactions on FriendFeed and his videos of his twins.

Louis is also a geek, in the best sense of the word. He never tires of testing out the tools and apps that litter the online/smartphone landscape these days--which means the rest of us don't have to. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Louis and ask him about what has made him so successful in social media. I also wanted to know what's up with his own "stealth" startup, Paladin Advisors Group, and some of the clients he serves--such as My6Sense, Emulex, and Kosmix.

Here are is the first of the two videos I made of our interview. Watching it, I was amazed at the amount of insight he packed into our relatively short conversation. I hope you enjoy it too.

Louis Gray on Advertising from Sunshine Mugrabi on Vimeo.

Media - Is it an industry, or a sinkhole?

2009-12-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to a party sponsored by Media Bistro at 111 Minna St. in downtown San Francisco. The experience reminded me of that old joke series, that always started with the following question, "What's the definition of confusion?"

In this case, the punchline would be, "Going to a media party and asking people 'what do you do?'"

A few brave souls actually wrote "unemployed" on their name tags. Most did not. When I talked to them, they said things like, "I used to be at (name of major news organization or magazine), but now I'm freelancing." For whom? "Well, I have a blog..."

Some have found a (temporary) safe haven in corporate America. I met a woman who used to be at a leading business magazine located in Silicon Valley. As we know, most of those titles are gone. Replaced by the Gigaoms and Mashables and Techcrunches of the world we now inhabit.

She now contracts for ... get this... Walmart doing packaging. She has been scooping up friends and bringing them on board. These folks had all been top editors at other magazines. I admit it. This chilled me to the bone. The former editors of major mags are now working at, of all places, Walmart? And not even as staffers, but just on a contract basis. What could be more of a sign that the industry is headed for the discount bin?

Interesting side note -- she seemed happy.

"Walmart's a good employer," she confided.

And of course there were plenty of party goers who had taken the obvious route. That old safety zone, PR. For now, there are jobs in that realm that are reasonably easy to get. But how safe is it, really? How long will that last as a haven from the storm? This morning, I put the following tweet out:

This was retweeted by several, and a good discussion ensued. Most of us who are already on Twitter are aware that we need to get on the clue train and start manifesting some new business models. So I'm not surprised at the level of dialogue we created around this.

But I wonder about the rest. Many of the folks I met at the party were nervous about giving out their Twitter name so I could tweet about meeting them there. "I prefer Facebook," said one. "Twitter seems too techy to me."

"You want to put my picture on Twitter? Like, right now?"

"Oh, Twitter. I don't have an account. Do you think I need one?" Well, no, not unless you want people to find your blog...

Folks, we need to stop clinging to small pieces of the wreckage of the media world. Let's just admit it. The ship isn't going to come bobbing back up to the surface. It is going down.

And just like the guys in the movie Time Bandits, I would urge one and all to let go of that little scrap of wood that seems to be keeping you afloat. Give in to reality. We're headed somewhere new. Somewhere that might be quite magical and exciting, but not the same place we were before.

If we can't turn back, where are we going? And what are you doing to join the ride?

Twitter and Facebook - How Scared Should You Be?

2009-12-05T12:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a frightening thought: for many companies and people, social media is no longer optional. It's a requirement of business and everyday life.

Meanwhile, there's more and more scary stuff out there about what will happen if you make a mistake on Twitter, Facebook, or some other social media platform. It's no coincidence that the most popular post on my blog has been the one that lists Ten Twitter mistakes you don't want to make. We're all terrified of making a move that will plummet us to the bottom of the social networking heap.

Fine, you say. I'll get help. I'll hire a consultant or advisor who will offer me a path through the social media wilderness. But wait! Fire up Twitter and you'll be sure to find yourself clicking on articles offering dire warnings about "snake oil salesmen"--so-called social media "gurus" who do nothing but send you into social media FAIL hell. Who wants to go there? What if you're involved in the social media strategy for your company? You've got customers, board members, VCs and--even more spine chillingly awful--stockholders to please!

Take a deep breath. Yes, there are horror stories. But they aren't anywhere near as common as the success stories. Something to keep in mind: we're descending into the so-called "trough of disillusionment" in the Gartner "hype cycle" for the newer social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. What this means is that we're all, as a group heading into a state of anxiety. We fear demons lurking around every corner. Social media hucksters. Blood suckers. Sharks, circling around looking for fresh meat... But how realistic is all this fear-mongering?

My basic assumption when I work with companies is that they have not taken leave of their senses. In my experience, social media does not turn otherwise smart marketing and PR people into raving lunatics. Sure, there are stupid ideas, or ideas that seemed good at the time but in retrospect were unwise. But this kind of thing predates social media by decades. So Toyota laid an egg when it sent (ahem) harrassing emails to a customer recently. But don't forget that in 2007, a very low-tech attempt at publicity by the Cartoon Network led to a city-wide bomb scare in Boston. And does anyone remember the nightmare that was New Coke?

Even those who have been pilloried for their Twit-faux-pas, like former Ketchum consultant James Andrews, are finding that notoriety is working in their favor rather than against it. Andrews recently told Businessweek, "'It helps me today ... I use it as a case study. It creates authenticity.'" I agree. The more mistakes you make, the bolder you become--the more willing to stretch out and risk falling on your face. This is the only way to get better at anything.

I would much rather work with companies that have an open, curious, creative outlook than those who are hiring me because they are seeking ways to run for cover. One reason is that it's a lot more interesting for me. But another reason is that a proactive attitude leads to better results overall. Social media is just one part of a larger marketing and PR strategy, after all. So relax. Take heart. You'll probably live longer, and therefore live to see the day when someone tries to scare us about the next big thing.

Girls Gone Tech Wild

2009-12-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend the Girls in Tech holiday party. Held at the bar at 5A5 Steak Lounge (yes, that's what it's called, a "steak lounge") in downtown San Fran, the event was packed with folks who were there to flog their latest projects, see and be seen, and generally shmooz as only the SF tech crowd can.

Not to be left out, I was there talking up my latest venture, TechnoGirlTalk. Seemed like the perfect party to find potential interviewees for the podcast, which will feature women movers and shakers in high tech.

It was, and it wasn't. I did meet some women who had all manner of new and potentially successful startups. For example, I snapped this rather badly lit pic of Eileen Conway, co-founder of a new site, GroopSwoop, which offers coupons and special offers to local Bay Area merchant offerings such as massages, mani-pedis, and today's special, cupcakes. Yumm!

As is becoming increasingly common, this was an occasion for an offline meeting with someone I already felt I knew. I'd previously connected with Anna Anisin on Twitter, where we had chats about my new haircut and other such topics. We were also now Facebook friends. Sadly, when we met face to face, it quickly became clear that she had no idea who I was. But she was friendly enough, telling me all about her startup Baseball Beauties, which merges girly-girl stuff like fashion with a love of baseball. A novel concept and one that apparently pays her bills, as she told me that she is doing this full-time. Wow. I'm impressed. I also met a woman named Krystyl, who is known for her tech events calendar at http://www.krystyl.net/ and her frequently re-dyed blonde and purple locks. Here's the even blurrier and more badly lit pic I took of her:

Sadly, the folks I was hoping to meet--the developers and IT admininstrators and other hard-core geek girls who would make the best subjects for my podcast--were rather thin on the ground at the party. Understandable, of course, and the crowd was still a rockin' one. And overall, I was impressed by Girls in Tech as an organization. In addition to its own series of talks, it has its arms around a number of related events. For example, they're a sponsor of She's Geeky, a tech "unconference" that I am seriously looking forward to attending when it arrives in the Bay Area in late January 2010. Also, they were very helpful when I told them my hopes and dreams for the TechnoGirlTalk podcast. Especially Cass Phillipps, who gave me lots of advice about who I should talk to, and who even got in touch with me today to follow up with more thoughts and ideas!

Okay that's your tech gossip download for the day. Be good, provision or dev well as is your wont, and remember, whatever they dish out to you, rock on, dudettes.

Techno Girl Talk - A New Podcast

2009-11-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

Watch this space for more news about Techno Girl Talk, a new podcast featuring female movers and shakers in high tech. Please also follow us on Twitter at @technogirltalk. The name "Techno Girl Talk" is thanks to my half-brother Sasha, a fellow geek and one cool 8-year-old. I'll be bringing onto the show women from all levels and positions across high tech--from sys admins to executives and beyond. We'll hear how they navigated their way through this exciting, innovative, yet male-dominated world--and get their views on the latest industry news.

Meanwhile, eat and drink well today. Give thanks. I know I do.

Would You Tune into a Bitch Session?

2009-11-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

Soon, this blog will be much more than a bunch of words. It will be a multimedia extravanganza of sound and fury, signifying everything there is to say about tech, social media and other such important concerns. Today, I head to San Jose to do a video interview with mystery man number one, whose name will be revealed at a later date. Film at 11. (Or, actually, more likely, film at noon in a couple days as I work on editing the video...)

And watch out for a NEW podcast series featuring women in technology. The idea was inspired by an interview I did on Infosmack, a weekly podcast focused on storage and related tech on cool community site Storage Monkeys. In it, we dissected the question of "booth babes" at VMWorld and other tech trade shows. Greg Knieriemen brought me on along with two guys who were, at the time, jousting over the question, Stephen Foskett of Nirvanix and Kirby Wadsworth of F5. (Here are their respective posts on the topic: http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/09/10/dont-make-your-startup-look-stupid-with-booth-babes-and-chotchkies/ and http://storagesanity.blogspot.com/2009/09/ahwhippersnapper.html.)

At the time, I pointed out what to me should be obvious--there are plenty of intelligent, interesting and yes, beautiful women in tech. What do we need to hire models for? My argument was further bolstered at a show just a few weeks later when Jay Livens of Sepaton tweeted that he went to Kirby's F5 booth at a storage conference and asked the booth babe who the head of marketing is for the company. Surprise, surprise, she didn't know the answer. Well, perhaps the problem was that her head was so full of debates about data migration and file virtualization that she didn't have the bandwidth for such unimportant questions.

Anyhow, the upshot is that I've had it with the stereotype of the unattractive geek woman who lacks social skills. And I'm out to prove it wrong, week after week. Here's the question, what should I call it?

My first thought was to call it "Bitch Session." Funny, irreverent, and... um, maybe a little too irreverent? When I bounced the name off my husband, his first reaction was to laugh, but his second reaction was to say, "who would go on a show with that name?" So I ask you, dear readers. What would be a better way to sum up a podcast featuring some of the smartest and most engaging women in technology today? The name needs to be still hip and fun, but perhaps oughtn't invoke the oh-so-politically incorrect word above? Or, are you okay with it? Inquiring bitchy minds want to know....

A Twitprosal at Tech The Halls

2009-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

The holiday season kicked off with a bang this past week as tech mag Technologizer threw a major bash, "Tech The Halls," at Varnish Gallery in San Fran's hip SoMa district. It being the first party of its kind of the season, the goodwill was flowing and the energy high. There was nary a "bah humbug" heard.

The highlight of the evening? A surprise proposal. We had all quieted down for the raffle pick when a guy named Dale stepped up, taking his girlfriend Laura by the hand. To everyone's surprise and amazement, he read her the following tweet:

@dalelarson Dearest @lauralagassa, will you marry me?

Here's the pic I tried to take while it was happening:

OK, so this shot won't win the photo of the year award, but can't you feel the excitement in the room? We held our collective breath as Dale got on one knee, and looked up hopefully at the utterly flabbergasted Laura. Would she accept? What if she ... gasp... turned him down in front of 600 of SF's most media- and tech-savvy? To everyone's relief, she said "yes." The room exploded with applause. Wonder what their wedding will be like. Guess I'll have to look out for #DaleLauraGetHitched on Twitter.

The party rollicked on. Have fun reading the hashtag #TechTheHalls while it lasts. A guy with a Yahoo blog hung up my coat for me, because he was tall and I wasn't. He friended me the next day but I think that was out of guilt because he wasn't there at the end of the evening to get it down for me. Note to the folks at Varnish--think you might want to lower your coat rack to accommodate those under 6'2"? Or is this just one more way to weed out the less than perfectly beautiful?

But really, it was a fantastic, buzzy, crowded bash. The hosts, Harry McCracken and Marie Domingo warmly welcomed all and sundry. Don Clark, SF deputy bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal was clad in a very fetching beret and mobbed by PR folks the whole evening. He sent me an email the next day, but I got the sense it was a form letter he was sending out to everyone who put a card in his hand. Not sure how to respond. Suggestions welcome--how about "Hey Don, can you stop Murdoch from killing the Journal more dead than it already is?" Or would that be too harsh?

Also in attendance, A list blogger Robert Scoble, who did NOT have a video camera with him, and instead mingled smilingly in the crowd. As I took his picture, a couple guys muscled in, saying "We LOVE Scoble and his tweets! We want people to think we know him!" Now that's celebrity. Los Angeles, eat your heart out.

Social Media Club founder Chris Heuer -- who seems to be able to be in several places at one time -- introduced me to guy named Todd Tate. This guy had chops like Sha Na Na and is running some kind of tech music extravaganza thingy. Who else was there? Adam Helweh, who I recently met at Louis Gray's social media breakfast and who knew more about my name than I did (see my earlier post). Sam and Christy Whitmore of Media Survey. With the wine flowing freely (did I mention the open bar?!! Nice touch!) I found myself saying some rather ill-advised things to Christy about my prior employer, Red Herring, which I will not repeat here. Besides, what could possibly be said about that once-great pub that hasn't already been spewed on Valleywag?

OK folks, that's your gossip download for the day. Feel free to add your own tidbits from the event to the comments field below.

Party Time! A Tech Gossip Column

2009-11-17T19:33:00.000-08:00

I've been having way too much fun lately. And by that I mean going to parties and calling that "work." Wednesday and Thursday of last week were taken up with many a drink- and talk-fest for Tech Field Day. I was on the organizing committee for that event, which brought together bloggers and other influencers from around the world for two days of tech deep dives at Silicon Valley companies. (See my earlier post for background.)

Here's a pic I took when first arriving Wednesday evening of two of the Tech Field Day attendees, Devang Panchigar ("StorageNerve") and Chris Evans ("The Storage Architect") in the lobby of the San Jose Airport Doubletree. In the background, Tech Field Day organizer and Gestalt IT publisher Stephen Foskett is getting help from the desk about his lost luggage--just one of the many snafus that threatened to derail things (but which somehow never did).

The Field Day itself was a blast, but much has already been written about that, so I'll leave that to the experts. Suffice it to say, this was a group of smart people. In fact, they were so smart that I found it hard to keep up with the conversation, even when it wasn't about tech! That's just sad if you think about it. (Starting to consider going back to school in order to prep for future Field Days...) Here's the list of all the attendees--which is also posted on Flickr with face mapping here:

Greg Knieriemen (Storage Monkeys/Infosmack), John Obeto (Absolutely Windows), Carlo Costanzo (VMWare Info), Rod Haywood (Musings of Rodos), Rick Vanover (Virtualization Review, TechRepublic, Rick Vanover's blog), Stephen Foskett (Gestalt IT, Packrat, Enterprise Storage Strategies), Nigel Poulton (Ruptured Monkey), Bas Raayman (Renegade's Technical Diatribe), Ed Saipetch (Breathing Data, Gestalt IT), Simon Seagrave (TechHead), Chris Evans (The Storage Architect), Devang Panchigar (StorageNerve, Gestalt IT), Greg Ferro (Ethereal Mind, Gestalt IT), John Hickson (Studio Sysadmins), Robin Harris (Storage Mojo), Rich Brambley (VM/ETC/Gestalt IT).

Luckily for me, Field Day event planner Claire Chaplais and I got to have a little girl time to balance out the XY intensity of the thing. I'm just gonna spill it--while the boys were over at 3Par learning everything there is to know about thin provisioning, chunklets and Symantec storage, Claire and I were getting pedicures at a place on Santana Row. A much needed little break!

Thursday night was Tech Field Day's big bash at the Computer History Museum. True, there were a few other tech-related parties that night, which posed some competition. I was tasked with sending out last-minute invites, and I have to admit I began to panic as person after person told me they were already booked. But as it turned out, our party had just the right mix of folks. So for those who instead headed to the annual Ubergizmo awards night, Uber10, or the Outcast CEO bash in Menlo Park, all I can say to you is, what could possibly compete with a party that included a video of storage rapper 3P and me shopping for computer junk at Weird Stuff?

http://www.storagerap.com/2009/11/boy-the-gestalt-it-tech-field-day-yesterday-sure-was-fun.html

The party was quite the who's who of the storage/virtualization/networking industry of Silicon Valley: TechValidate CEO Brad O'Neill (who also sponsored the party); from 3Par: raptastic blogger Marc Farley and marketing guy Craig Nunes; Bhava Communications folks Liz Zaborowska (founder and principal), Aaron Quinones and Dana Loberg; John Mark Troyer, the social media guy at VMware; Jim Sherhart of Data Robotics; Karriem Adams from MDS Micro; Jon Toor from Xsigo; a guy from Intel wearing a vintage black leather jacket, Georgiana Comsa of Silicon Valley PR, two people from HP--one of whom was Erin Collopy, who accepted an award for creating the whole "Field Day" concept--and many others. A crew from my client Ocarina Networks were there as well, including Mike Davis and CEO Murli Thirumale, who seemed to be getting along great with the participants--chatting amiably with Gestalt writers Edsai (Ed Saipetch) and StorageNerve (Devang Panchigar).

By Monday morning, I had recovered sufficiently from the craziness of Tech Field Day to attend a breakfast sponsored by Louis Gray (if you don't know who this is, you might want to find out) for a startup he's working with, My6Sense. Louis has a new consulting company that is shaping up to be very interesting looking, Paladin Advisors. It was quite an honor to be invited, and I couldn't help but look around the room at all the social media heavies in attendance, like Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and Adam Helweh of Secret Sushi, and wonder just what in the heck I was doing there.

But Louis, Adam and Chris were all very friendly. Turned out Adam even knew more about my last name than I do. Apparently, Mugrabi can mean "from Morocco." I was wrong and you were right, Adam, wherever you are. The my6sense guys were really cool, as well. They were both Israeli and so I was able to throw around the fact that as a spouse of an Israeli, I've actually been there and stuff. I've even hit the Tel Aviv club scene.

I got chatting afterwards with the CEO, a serial entrepreneur named Avinoam Rubinstein. He was suprisingly down-to-earth, and bore a striking resemblance to the singer Lyle Lovett. He didn't like that I referred to his company as a "filter" -- with an infrastructure based on artificial intelligence, this app is far more than just a content cheesecloth. Yet in essence that is what it does, taking the firehose of information and serving up a trickle of content that suits one's own reading habits. The difference: It has the eerie ability to figure out your interests before you know you have them. As Louis put it while introducing the company, "my6sense knows me better than I know myself."

The founder, Barak Hachamov was extremely articulate about the potential of the service they offer. His vision--to offer something as useful to a mobile audience as Google has been for search. Here's the pic I snapped of him:

Notice that big basket of toast? No one touched a single slice. Oh, and did I mention that the breakfast took place at the Ritz Carlton SF? Yes, a fancy spot, but one that required I climb a hill and some steps in order to get there from BART. Good thing I didn't wear heels.

And... as I just discovered today, Stephen Foskett and I will be speaking about social media and what we learned from Tech Field Day at an upcoming storage industry conference, The BD Event in San Francisco January 26-28. VaNessa Duplessie, the event organizer will also be part of that panel. If you're in any way connected to the storage industry, I suggest you attend this event. They had an extremely successful one in Boston, and now we're lucky enough to have one in Bay Area.

That's the tech gossip update for today. Be well, do good work, and party on, dude.

Traveling at the Speed of Social Media

2009-11-07T20:43:00.000-08:00

I expect to have a lot more to say about what to do--and what not to do--as a blogger after next week. That's because this Thursday and Friday are Tech Field Day, a new experiment in social media organizing. Sponsored by online publication Gestalt IT, the event brings together influential tech bloggers from around the world for two days of talking, blogging, tweeting and hands-on demonstrations at storage, networking and virtualization companies in Silicon Valley.

The event has been the talk of town among storage and virtualization bloggers. On Twitter, the hashtag #TechFieldDay has been active for weeks. In many ways, it's looking to be a model for how to do a viral campaign. Let the participants themselves talk about it, adding in their own thoughts and questions in whatever ways they see fit. And this is exactly how it's been going. Everyone involved is talking about it on Twitter--not to mention their own blogs. This in turn leads to even more chatter and interest. It's a positive upward spiral.

Perhaps most astounding: the event took just over five weeks' time to plan and execute--a lesson in how fast-moving the social web can allow one to operate. But boy has this been an intense month.

The powerhouse behind this is Stephen Foskett, publisher of Gestalt IT. In early October, he had recently returned from HP Tech Day in Colorado Springs and was determined to do something about it. The event in Colorado had electrified the storage blogging community--a select group of whom were brought in for a day and half of demos, tours, and talks about the company's latest and greatest storage offerings.

Until then, many of them thought HP was all over the place when it came to storage. As one skeptical invitee, Nigel Poulton of Ruptured Monkey put it, he arrived believing that HP just didn't "get" storage. He viewed their storage portfolio as "bloated" and "chaotic."

It could've been a disaster, but then again HP really had nowhere to go but up with these guys. And HP had its act together. It recognized that generating a whole lot of marketing "buzz" with slick presentations and PR wasn't going to wash with these hard-nosed, skeptical bloggers. So instead, the participants were given what looked to be carte blanche to poke around the HP site. They gathered around terminals and tried out HP LeftHand, setting up the cluster and getting a chance to see what happened if a cable was pulled out. In short, the crew at HP let them to do what geeks love to do--mess around with stuff in an attempt to break it.

They were allowed to video whatever they liked, including a tour through the data center, where there was much drooling over the newest EVAs. These videos then popped up on their blogs. Great advertising for HP. All through the two days, many of us were glued to the #HPTechDay hashtag on Twitter, watching the photos and comments pop up in real time. In the end, even the curmudgeonly Nigel wrote that he'd decided HP "do get storage." High cotton.

A week or so later, Stephen was effusing on the phone to me about the potential of such an event for all manner of tech companies. He suggested I talk to some of my clients about bringing bloggers in and hosting them for something similar. "Hey," he suddenly asked. "What about having one single event, where several smaller companies could pool their resources and bring the bloggers into town together? What do you think?"

What did I think? I thought it was one of the best ideas I'd ever heard. At that moment, we both realized he had hit on a winner. If he could pull it off--and from what I knew of him, I was certain he could--it could be a chance for a whole lot of smaller companies to get the kind of exposure and understanding of their technology that I as a blogger and social media consultant was yearning for them to achieve. We both began to hoot and holler at once. "Yes. You really ought to do this!" I shouted. "I think I will. This really could work!" he answered. After we got off the phone, I half wondered if he would really make it happen. So many great brainstorming conversations go nowhere.

I found out just a few days later when tuning into the weekly VMWorld community podcast. The host, John Troyer said he had Stephen on the line with an announcement to make. Gestalt IT would be sponsoring and hosting something Stephen had dubbed Tech Field Day-- an "open blogger day" where influential people would come to San Francisco and learn about new products in storage, virtualization, security and networking. The date of the event? November 12-13. This was just over a month away. I gulped. Had it been me, I would've picked, I dunno, December. Maybe even January. Hell, February. Was he sure about that? I asked him when I got him on the phone. He was. "I work best on tight deadlines. And everyone can make it on those dates."

This was one heck of a chance to take, because at the time he announced it, he didn't actually have any companies signed up to sponsor the event. Without sponsors, there would be nothing to show the attendees. And the presenting companies were also going to have to foot the bill for the bloggers' travel expenses--costs that would run into the tens of thousands in all.

I knew that if anyone could pull the rabbit out of the hat on this, he could. What for most of us would be a recipe for ulcers and sleepless nights seems to have the opposite effect on Stephen Foskett. Ideas were pouring out of him. It would be a "field day" like they have in schools. Three-legged races. Prizes. Contests. A sense of fun.

But would it come together? As a member of what had now become an ad hoc volunteer committee for the event, I was feeling the stress. He had commitments from three companies. But we needed at least five and ideally more like seven or eight to make it work. He confessed that he was experiencing a roller coaster of emotions. One moment he was sure there would be no problem getting the sponsors. The next he was panicked that the whole thing would fall through.

The event was less than a month away, and despite immense interest from several more potential sponsors, only a handful had signed on the dotted line. I reassured him as best I could that it would all work out, but in the back of my mind, I couldn't help but fear the worst. What if, when push came to shove, not enough companies were willing to pony up the money? This is a recession, after all.

In the end, he signed up seven sponsors: Xsigo, MDS Micro, Ocarina, Data Robotics, 3Par, Nirvanix and Symantec Storage. The beauty was that most of these companies were already in some kind of partnership, and so there were natural pairings that allowed companies to share sessions. In practical terms, this means that the bloggers will only have to be taken around to four locations--a morning and afternoon session on each of the two days.

As we were to find out, there would be many more ups and downs in the ensuing weeks. As of this writing, many details are still in process. We need name plate holders. Who will pick up the attendees from the airport as they arrive from Australia, London, Boston, Ohio and the many other far-flung locations this Wednesday? Two of my clients are presenting sponsors, Xsigo and Ocarina. Next week I'll be there to watch each one do a dry run of their tech demo--the success of which will make or break them in the eyes of the participants.

Still, it's hard not to be caught up in the euphoria as the day nears. Whatever happens, this is going to be a social media experiment for the history books. Throughout what has been something of an ordeal, Stephen has kept up the energy in all kinds of creative ways.

For the past week, Gestalt IT has been running a contest, "Do You Know..." that tests people's knowledge of the companies that are presenting at the event. The winner will receive an iPod nano with video. (How I wish I could enter that contest!)

The time between our first conversation about it and the actual event date? A mere 35 days. This, my friends, is the speed of our new social world. To me, this shows that there is a world of opportunity out there, recession or no recession. What will you do with it?

Schoolyard Rules of Social Media

2009-10-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

Ever found yourself wondering why some folks seem to rise to the top of the social media heap? These are the people who have no trouble garnering thousands of high quality Twitter followers, and consistently get invited to speak at the hottest industry conferences. They don't even seem to have look for a job--their stature ensures that offers roll in! But what if such success weren't as far out of reach as it looks?

Looked at in a certain way, the social media world is one big schoolyard. To crack the code, all you really have to do is close your eyes, lean back, and travel back to your elementary school days. Who got noticed? What did they do that no one else did? Below are a few I've identified. Feel free to add more in the comments field.

1. Pick fights. If there is one thing that makes everyone drop their jump ropes and tether balls to come running, it's a fight. At my elementary school, the fighters almost never got beyond a few half-assed punches before some teacher rushed in and broke it up, but by then there was a circle of 50 kids, all yelling "Fight, Fight, Fight!" at the top of their lungs.

Both of the kids involved with the brawl were treated as heroes for at least a day after that. If they were boys, girls would start leaving candy bracelets and cootie-catchers on their desks. If girls, the boys would stand around in awe, and then make sure to pick them first for dodgeball at PE.

So it is with social media. The trick here is to choose the right kinds of fights to start. You can try arguing politics or religion if you like. Most likely, you'll be ignored. But those who bait some other high profile social media maven about, say, whether Google Reader is dead and should properly be replaced by Twitter search get plenty of clicks and comments.

2. Be brash and opinionated. It worked for my arch-nemesis David Brooks when I was in the fifth grade, and it's working now too for a whole lot of folks, from TechCrunch titan Michael Arrington to EMC blogger Storagezilla. These are the types who get noticed because they're not afraid to speak their minds, even though it sometimes gets them in deep shit. Just as David Brooks used to tell our teacher things like, "I think all Jane Austen really needed was to find a real man," so too can you say the type of stuff that's sure to piss someone else off--or maybe a whole lot of people.

3. Get everyone under the big tent. Okay, so by now you might be getting alarmed. I don't have the kind of personality to pick fights or be brash, you're saying to yourself. In fact, the whole idea of controversy makes me break out in a cold sweat. Well, remember that student who was voted Class President every damn year? This was also the same kid who invited each and every classmate to his swim party at the end of the year--even Ivan Ackerman, the guy with the wandering eye that no one would sit next to in the cafeteria at lunch.

Those with a sense of community are some of the best known and successful bloggers/tweeters out there. I'm not talking about mindless retweeting or "helpful" links that are actually just plugs for you or your clients' product or service. That kind of thing is perfectly fine, but it's not the same.

What I'm talking about is a real and consistent effort to bring people together. These are the folks like Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT and Peter Shankman of HARO. They're the ones who you know will organize a Tweetup, and who are always on the lookout for a great new blog so they can talk it up online. In short, they're the people you look to for advice and connections--in fact, they fit the term coined by Malcolm Gladwell, "connectors" to a tee.

4. Be the class clown. What is the most talked about social media phenomenon right now? How about "ShitMyDadSays"--the Twitter feed with 616,000 dedicated, enthusiastic followers. This guy's even got a book deal. It's irreverent, hilarious, and very much like that kid at the back of the classroom who made all those fart sounds with his armpit.

5. Be a motor mouth. Remember that freckly-haired girl in the third grade whose hand shot up every time the teacher asked a question? You do? Well, you remember her because she made herself known again and again. Sure, she could be annoying sometimes (especially if she always had the wrong answer). But on the days she was out sick, the classroom seemed eerily quiet.

Again, this is not a recommendation to turn into a link-spewing machine on Twitter. I'm talking about conversations--the real kind, that involve more than one person, and some semblance of listening and interaction. Or be a provider of consistently amusing and useful links that people want to read and retweet. Social media star Guy Kawasaki has raised this to an art form. If you're already a bit of a chatty Cathy, why not use this to your advantage? I have.

So there you have it. All the tools you need to start rising above the babble. See you on the playground!

Ten Mistakes You Don't Want to Make on Twitter

2009-10-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this post on the top 10 Twitter mistakes because I have made almost all of them at one time or another. Social media is one big learning experience at this point, so if you see yourself in these, it's probably a sign you're out there falling on your face like the rest of the pioneers. Nothing to be ashamed of. However, here's hoping that you can use this list to prevent yourself from having to curl up in a ball and hide under your desk in a state of Twitter-induced shame and agony. Plus, you'll save time on having to hit the "trash" button on those ill-advised tweets.

Mistake 1: Sending canned DMs. Autofollow DMs are getting to be an annoyance. Stop them now before someone blocks you for being a spammer. Use DM to communicate with real friends, or to authentically thank a new follower. Other than that, say it all in public. That's what Twitter is all about anyway.

Mistake 2: Posting Twitpics of others without their explicit consent. You see a cute girl at your local java joint. You snap a pic of her with your iPhone, and post it to the world with a map link and the tweet "Hottie at table next to me." The next thing you know, it turns out that (lo and behold!) she herself is on Twitter and is using your @ to tell everyone she knows what a sleazo you are. Watch your follower count drop like a block of cement in Lake Michigan.

Mistake 3: Talking out of turn on a company Twitter account. If you work at a company, or act as a PR or other consultant for them and have permission to tweet on their behalf, it's only too tempting to forget that this is the voice of the entire company. Would the CEO really have retweeted that link to a Balloon Boy cartoon? If so, great. But if not, don't do it. Keep it light and professional, and think more in terms of offering an inside look into the goings on of your company (in whatever way is appropriate) than a chance to put out your personal style. Also, if you're an outsider and you don't know something about a company, don't try to fake it. Just leave it alone.

Mistake 4: Overtweeting. I don't mean tweeting too often. If you're in the flow and there's plenty of conversation bopping around you, tweet away. You do risk being dubbed Twittus Maximus, but apparently this is a title that can be taken away. No, what I'm talking about is tweeting too much. Link after link with no context. Bragging so badly you're a candidate for "Tweeting Too Hard." In short, acting like you're on a stage and speaking to a captive audience. No they're not. That's what the "block" option is for.

Mistake 5: Thinking that people might be interested in ways to make money from Twitter. Probably there are plenty of people that would like to transform their biggest time waster into some kind of cash machine. But here's the thing--you don't want to tell your Twitter followers about that. Just keep it a secret. If you're really making all that money, why share? Because you're actually pushing some stupid ponzi scheme, perhaps?

Mistake 6: Sending out a public tweet that you meant to be a DM. I'm happy to say that almost everyone I know on Twitter has done this at least once--happy, of course, because this means I'm not the only one. There are all kinds of reasons for this, and I think it happens most often when people are using a Blackberry or iPhone to send out their DMs. Too often, it's hard to tell. It is a most horrific experience for the tweeter. Here's one rule I've found useful: don't say anything in a DM that would be seriously compromising for yourself or your business. It's just too risky.

Mistake 7: Being an unpleasant bore. The truth about Twitter is that it's a chance to be funny in front of large groups of people. Just check out Favrd. But way too often, people think it's just the opposite. In the past, your long-suffering spouse and cowering kids were the only ones who had to listen to you blow smoke about what's wrong with Congress or why no one understands that HAM radio isn't just about old guys chatting to one another but rather is an important network that can be used in emergency situations blah blah blah. Now, with Twitter you can bore the entire world. But guess what? If you keep doing it, pretty soon the only people who will follow you are a bunch of boring old farts like yourself.

Mistake 8: Retweeting something that has already come and gone. Nothing says "out of the conversation" like tweeting to the world that Marge Simpson dropped trou in Playboy or that the Balloon Boy was a hoax. We already know, okay. Check those trending topics before posting a stale update. Just a helpful hint to prevent you from looking like a doof.

Mistake 9: Arguing religion on Twitter. Free speech is all well and good, but we are a community with diverse views, which to me means practicing tolerance wherever and however possible. Not long ago, a brave soul within the tech community admitted that he believes in intelligent design. The pile-on was not fun to watch. It's fine to link to your favorite site on Darwin, but do you need to go on the offense if someone says they're of a different belief system? Kinda cringeworthy IMHO.

Mistake 10: And the tenth mistake on Twitter is... Tweeting from one handle when you meant to tweet from another. Can you say "busted"?

Mistake 11: Okay, I lied. These go to 11. The final mistake is to use Twitter as a place to offer inspirational quotes. "What?" You say! "I love the inspirational quotes. They pick up my day." Let me ask you this: do you like reading those quotes as they choke up your tweetstream, or do you like tracking them down online and then tweeting them so the whole world will know how deep and literate you are? Yeah, I thought so.

Pumpkins and Geeks

2009-10-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

I've lived on the coastside of the Bay Area for over three years now, but only recently have I begun to connect with the many Silicon Valley types that have snuck off and started living the good life by the sea. Turns out there are a whole lot of us here. Perhaps our most famous resident--from a geek perspective--is Robert Scoble, who makes Half Moon Bay his home.

It's pumpkin season--a bigger holiday out here than Christmas. In a few weeks, the highway that connects us to our beloved valley, Route 92, will be clogged with SUVs bringing the kiddies to pick out future jack-o-lanterns, get lost in hay mazes, and stuff themselves with too much cider and doughnuts. In advance of the expected deluge, the aforementioned Scobleizer organized a photo walk among the pumpkin farms along Route 92. I took a few snaps with my iPhone, and my husband took a whole lot of much better ones with his Canon EOS 20D.

Here is a small sampling. See if you can guess which goes with which photographer and camera! (This should NOT be a challenge.)

How I Flunked Blogging 101

2009-09-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

My first foray into social media was about as inauspicious as you can get. It still amazes me that I went from there to making it the basis of my livelihood. The year was 2005, and I was one of a small handful of Columbia journalism students who sat in on a 3-hour session about "new media" with Dean Sree Sreenivasan. (That seminar is now a full-on, semester-long course.) Dean Sree covered a number of topics, but none caught my attention so much as the one about how to start your own blog.

He showed us the Blogger template on his laptop, going over the features and then pointing with his mouse at the rather conspicuous, orange button that read "PUBLISH POST."

"You see, it's really easy. You write your post, then press the 'Preview' button to look it over," he said, his brown eyes twinkling with upbeat humor. "After that, you hit 'Publish' and there it is, live on the Internet. It's that simple. The real trick with blogging is to stop thinking in the old way, with a long cycle of edits and fact-checking. Just jump right in."

That's the trick? Write something and publish it, just like that? No editors? No copy desk? No... deadlines? It made my mouth go dry just thinking about it. Yet a little voice in my head whispered that this could be something akin to freedom.

Later that afternoon my classmate Adrienne and I made a bold plan. We would start a blog together about life in J school. The thought of doing it all by myself was too terrifying to contemplate. But with her joining me I sensed I could handle it.

She and I had heard that some bloggers -- in their crusade against the "MSM" (mainstream media) -- had dubbed Columbia Journalism School "the cathedral." This meant that it was the central training ground "priests" of the media who went out and pronounced mightily on the goings-on of the world. We decided to name our blog "Inside the Cathedral" as a way of thumbing our noses at this whole thing. But the sarcastic retorts I imagined I'd be putting up on this blog of ours never happened. In fact, nothing at all happened. I was unable to bring myself to write a single word.

I did try. On several evenings I sat in my tiny dorm room, sweating over the possible posts I could write. I was housed in the Theological Seminary building--a giant stone behemoth which while majestic from the outside, was a maze of tiny winding corridors and parapet-like windows on the inside. The interior courtyard and hallways were used frequently by the show "Law and Order." The atmosphere clearly lent itself to a sense of mystery and death. My room was the size and character of a monk's cell. The room was so small that if I lay down on the floor, my feet would hit the bed and my head, the door.

There I'd sit at my fake wood desk, which was covered in scratches and ballpoint ink stains left by previous grad students. I'd fire up my HP laptop and logon to the InsideTheCathedral.blogspot.com page. For several minutes, I'd sit in a state of intense concentration, staring at the screen in the hopes it would give me some idea as to what I was supposed to write. But it uncooperatively stared right back at me. The ridiculous irony of this is that I was writing upwards of 1,200 words a week for various freelance projects and grad school papers. Yet the idea of plunking out 150 for this little blog made me freeze up like nothing else.

I asked Adrienne to contribute. At first, she agreed, saying she would "get us started" by putting up a few posts when she "had a few spare minutes." I secretly wished I had her confidence and resolve. Time went by and no posts every appeared. We were both busy, I told myself. Still, it seemed to me that between the two of us, one of us should be able to clear out 20 minutes to write a few lines.

Pretty soon, she wasn't even trying to pretend she was still interested. "Yeah, well, if I do find the time I'll let you know," she'd say, and then vanish into the crowd of backpack-laden students who were heading for the monthly wine and cheese hour in the lobby.

The semester came and went. Then winter break. Still the blog sat, postless, unfindable on Google or anywhere else. By the time of graduation, I took one last stab. I opened the screen, looking at the now familiar orange and blue interface. I knew a little HTML and so told myself it might be more amusing and challenging to work from that screen. Perhaps I would get the nerve and gumption to write one long post that summarized all I'd done and learned at my year at Columbia Journalism School.

I began to type.

Well, it's been quite a ...

That's as far as I got. I never did hit the "PUBLISH POST" button.

How To Blog Without Fear

2009-09-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

In my last post, "The Top Five Ways to Succeed in Social Media," I addressed the members of the population who are hungry for more ways to make social media work to their best advantage. These are the folks who are already "out there." You know who you are. The phrase "Weekend Update" makes you think of Facebook (not television), and you have two different Twitter apps on your iPhone--one that's not too CPU intensive and one that enables retweets and twitpic uploads.

Today I'd like to talk to the rest of you, who might put on a brave face at times, but deep down are still pretty spooked by this whole trend. Sure, you're a fan of a couple of the more ironic Facebook pages, and technically you have a Twitter account--though you're pretty sure that one follower of yours isn't pretty as her picture (and you're even starting to suspect that "Peaches" might not be her real name). You may have even been known to put an (anonymous) comment on a particularly vexing TechCrunch Zune review. But there's a part of you that wants to run and hide at the mere mention of a coordinated social media plan, especially if it relates to your career or business.

In my work, I meet people like this all the time. They are certainly smart and savvy enough to make a social media program work. But something in them isn't allowing them to take full advantage of it. In short, they're suffering from a new syndrome that I will now dub social media phobia. There may need to be a new scientific term for this: something along the lines of "blogotweetoupdateophobia" perhaps? (Not as good as my personal all-time favorite, coulrophobia, but I digress...)

So you've dipped a toe into social media, but something stops you from diving into the deep end and splashing around. Maybe you're afraid of making a mistake, and so hide in the shadows. Or maybe you're so overwhelmed by all of the possibilities that you find yourself paralyzed. Or hey, perhaps you're remembering that time in the seventh grade when Dougie Marcus told everyone to aim their spitballs at the back of your head, and all you want to do is duck out of the way.

Whatever the reason, your response is to play it safe. You keep your involvement to a minimum. And, what's wrong with that? You ask. There's no rule that says I've got to be some kind of web 2.0 maven. True, but the sad thing is that you're missing out on a rare opportunity at a remarkable time in history. Whatever you are trying to achieve in this life--meet new friends, get a better job, promote your home jewelry making business--chances are social media can help make it easier.

And I'm here to tell you that you can make it into a game that you can enjoy playing. Step one is to take a step. Lean out into the unknown. Start a blog. That's right, just go ahead and start one. You'll be surprised at how much it motivates you once you see the traffic start to build. Before you know it, your devious mind will start to wonder, how can I get more people interested in reading this brilliant, witty, wonderful blog of mine?

At which point, you'll suddenly remember Twitter. You laughed at it before--maybe even made a few "it's all about what people had for breakfast" quips. But now you're seeing it in a new light. You're noticing that a lot of people use it as a way to talk about blog posts they've read that they've enjoyed. That means they might talk about your blog post. But first you have to get to know these people--get into the flow of conversation. As you take each of the next steps that naturally lead from one to the other, you'll see results.

But wait, you say. I'm a busy person. How much time and energy will I really have to expend in order to have an effective presence online? Isn't this for slackers or people who blog for a living? (And what's really the difference?) Actually, you can put in as little as two hours a week and still see rewards for your social media efforts. Part of how to do this is to learn how to get people's attention, find a niche or target audience, and a few other tricks of the trade that I'll save for a later post.

The main thing is to break through your resistance and start experimenting. Let go of your need to do it perfectly the first time. Take note of the fact that everyone around you is also figuring this out as they go along. You may even enjoy yourself. And if nothing else, you finally got back at that Dougie Marcus guy--you've got 200 more Twitter followers than he does!

The Top Five Ways to Succeed in Social Media

2009-09-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

There have been so many posts that claim to teach you how to be a social media "star," gaining thousands of Twitter followers, becoming the next Scoble overnight, and so on and so forth. I prefer to think of Twitter followers the way I think of any other aspect of my business. I don't want 10,000 clients. I want a handful that I feel a real connection with, and who I can serve in meaningful ways.

With that, here are the top 5 ways of approaching social media that I believe will lead to success in it. By success, I mean that you are able to enrich your business and personal life, getting a greater sense of meaning and purpose, having interesting new experiences, and meeting folks you might never have been able to before the advent of social media. The icing on the cake--you'll probably end up making more money and expanding your career options.

1. Approach social media as a way of being of service. I've discovered something interesting about how to be a savvy social media user. You need to take yourself out of the equation, and put your focus on others. In an odd way, more of your personality will come through if you stop trying to have one. Thus, I find that I want to read the tweets from those who use it as a way to promote others (not themselves), to provide useful information, and to ask for and/or provide advice.

2. Interact. The joy of platforms like Twitter is that they provide a unique opportunity to have multiple conversations with others. Why have only a small percentage of the people who use these tools (particularly Twitter) learned this? Connecting involves more than just you--that's the whole "social" part of the equation. All of this is obvious, of course, but it's strange how difficult it seems to be for so many. Try this exercise: after typing a tweet, read it out loud, all the while imagining that you're at a cocktail party surrounded by a bunch of people you'd really like to get to know better. Still want to hit the "update" button?

3. Cultivate an attitude of curiosity. You're learning as you go through life, and now you have a whole crowd that's sourcing information on your behalf. Isn't that exciting and amazing? It is to me. I can hardly believe that all I have to do is turn on my iPhone or open my laptop and I'm sure to learn something new about business, technology ... and of course the latest celebrity gossip. This is one of the greatest secrets of success: treat everything in life as a learning experience.

4. Don't be boring. Before hitting the publish button on a blog post (or comment on FriendFeed/Facebook), ask yourself these questions,"Why would anyone care about this?" "What's the point?" "Does this add to (or detract from) the sum of human knowledge?" These are questions I've learned from editors over the years, and they have served me in all kinds of ways. It also doesn't hurt to have a sense of humor.

5. Stick with it. Those who are really successful in the realm of blogging, tagging, Tweeting and the like are the ones who fire up their machines and dive into the conversation all day, every day. I recently got a tweet from one of the people I follow that said "off for 3 days, see you all when I get back." Think about the level of engagement this represents. And I honestly would've noticed he was gone if he hadn't sent that out. While this may be too much of a time commitment for the average person, it's something to aim for. And of course this is someone who lives by all the rules above.

VMWorld Wrap-Up

2009-09-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

I don't know who I thought I was kidding when I wrote in my last post that I'd be blogging live from VMWorld. It was a nonstop experience. And while there's been much talk about the number of "booth babes" in nurses' uniforms, catsuits, and the like (and debates as to whether they were cute or scary), in fact there was plenty to be excited about on a purely technological level.

As I wrote on my client blog, Online Storage Optimization, one thing that struck me about the conference was that this wasn't just for industry heavyweights like EMC. There were a number of start-ups there, and walking the expo floor was an amazing way to get to know many of these niche players.

Many--indeed I'd even go so far as to say most-- of the offerings could be described as a clean-up crew running along behind the giant VMWare garbage truck. For all its immense power, one obvious effect of virtualization is that it has made IT immensely more complicated. Many companies and consultancies have sprung up to deal with this--offering myriad ways to "simplify" what has become a nightmare of "server sprawl."

Storage companies have also benefited from virtualization in a number of ways, as Marc Farley's cartoon so astutely summarizes on his StorageRap blog.

The fact remains that no matter how many virtual servers you have in place, there's still gotta be some spinning rust to hold the actual data that's there. Although players like my client Ocarina greatly reduce the amount of space needed to store that data, data growth remains a real and pressing issue.

The other key problem is that virtualization creates complexity on an as yet unheard of scale. The so-called server sprawl that many companies discussed is no small issue. Combine that with the fact that all these virtual servers need to talk to the storage--understanding how best to allocate space and so on--and you can imagine the tangle this can create. Indeed, there was a lot of buzz at this year's show at the launch party for EvoStor, which is storage designed from the ground up to integrate with VMWare. Paul Maritz even made an appearance--a sign they're taking this seriously and recognize the need for software that integrates.

So, this is my very top level, birds-eye view of the thing. I'll leave it to others to get down in the trenches and start sorting out the exact wheat kernals from the particular chaff that each company is providing.

Off to VMWorld

2009-08-31T19:45:00.000-07:00

This week, I'll be blogging live from VMWorld. The conference, which kicked off today and runs through Thursday at the Moscone Center in downtown San Fran, has gone from a niche offering to a major event that draws folks from all corners of the IT and storage industries. And no wonder, considering the transformative power of virtualization. Stay tuned for updates throughout the week. You might also want to follow me on Twitter. (Please do!) Or watch the endless scrolling #VMWorld hashtag on Twitter for everyone's take on this year's conference.

And if you're wondering where to go and mingle in the evening, there will be a Tweetup for storage folks Tuesday (Sept. 1) at B Restaurant and Bar in downtown San Francisco. To attend, RSVP here. There will also of course be plenty of other events--including, of course, some virtual ones. Stay tuned.

Frankly My Dear ... Another Aptonym!

2009-08-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

A video clip of a certain congressman has been making the rounds today that is a perfect illustration of an aptonym. An aptonym is a name that is all too appropriate for its holder. As readers of this blog know, I am a particular aficionado of this phenomenon, which is also known as "nominative determinism." I have posted on it several times, offering such examples as New York Times reporter Louise Story and Bernard Madoff who "made off" with billions in others' money.

But today's coverage of U.S. Representative Barney Frank being, well, completely frank with a member of the audience really takes the biscuit as far as I'm concerned.

Vacation for Success

2009-08-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times science section has an article reporting that the brain, when stressed, gets into a vicious circle that leads to repetitive behavior. That in turn leads to ... yes, you guessed it, more stress!

The study was performed on rats, which--as anyone who has ever worked in a corporate setting can tell you--have brains that are almost identical to those of humans. As the researchers discovered, stressed rats lose their ability to be creative and thoughtful in their actions, and instead begin repeating the same useless behavior over and over and over again. Sound familiar?

The good news is that the brain is highly suggestible and can turn on a dime. Once the rats were put on a "vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate..."

If you stop and think about it, this is really, really good news. We all know that stress takes a toll on the body and the mind, and has been said to contribute to just about every known disease, from the flu to cancer. Yet if this study is correct--and my money says it is--what it's really saying is that we can change our lives and our health right away. Not only that, but we can put ourselves on track to be the kind of creative, flexible thinkers that are well placed for taking advantage of new opportunities in life. In other words, if you want to really succeed, relax.

Here are a few related discoveries that shed even more light on the potential to unleash success through relaxation and enjoyment of life:

A study at Yale University found that regular meditation didn't just reduce stress. It actually reshaped the brain in such a way that it was less likely to experience it in the future, by physically building up gray matter.

Our response to fear or stress could very well be strongly influenced by what we say to ourselves, according to new research on the regions of the brain that control the mind's "cross talk" and its connection with the emotional centers of the brain.

A study published in the Journal of Advancement in Medicine showed that feelings of compassion increased the body's production of disease fighting antibodies, while feelings of anger suppressed the production of those same antibodies.

What this all points to is the immense power that we all have within ourselves to change our lives on just about every level. Whatever you may think about the new age concepts around creating your own reality, there is no question that we create our responses to our own reality. And that, it seems, is what makes all the difference.

***Update: my friend Jake McGowan of Rolling Orange sent this site his company created: Stress: Portrait of a Killer, which covers research by Stanford's Robert Sapolsky. Very interesting stuff.

It's All About You

2009-08-16T16:49:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some thinking about the Facebook-FriendFeed acquisition, and I think just about everyone has missed the point. The tech press has been going ga-ga over the news of the $50 million acqui, announced last Monday and quickly picked up on Twitter, FriendFeed and across the blogosphere. We're seeing a slew of opinion pieces pop up in daily newspapers, tech rags, and just about everywhere else. Probably not surprising since August is a slow news month, but really, it's starting to get ridiculous.

Commentators--perhaps in an effort to outhype one another--are getting more and more het up about what this could all mean. Some say the deal is Facebook's bid to become a kind of killer app--the platform that replaces Google as most people's home page. Others take it to an even greater extreme, as for example this Washington Post contributor whose view is that this is Facebook's way of taking over the ENTIRE SOCIAL WEB (cue eerie music...).

Here's what I think is missing from the discussion. We can wear ourselves out wondering whether Facebook is going to become our de facto site of choice (which I very much doubt it will). But more interesting to me is what it says about how central social media is becoming to our working and personal lives--not to mention breaking down the barriers between the two.

What Facebook is attempting to do, I think, is to incorporate functionality that will feed our growing fascination with the social web. This seems like a good thing. Certainly, for those who enjoy social networking for its purely social elements, it could be a nice way to bring more cool stuff under one roof. Beyond that, I think it could be a positive boon for those of us who recognize its potential for creating a far richer and more rewarding work and business life for ourselves.

And now for some perspective. Mashable reported last March that social networking is now more popular than email as an online activity. In fact, it's been almost a year now that social networking has surpassed porn as one of the top online activities. So to me the question is, how can the enhancement of these tools help people build what branding expert Dan Schwabel has so astutely termed "Me 2.0"? And for the answers to that, I plan to sit back, relax, and enjoy the future as it arrives.

FriendBook? FaceFeed?

2009-08-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

Some news broke today that was like the shattering of a thousand teacups in the hands of a legion of grandmas across the globe: Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. What to make of this? Will we FriendFeed-ers lose our beloved insider's social network forever? Will Louis Gray end up dating Paul Buchheit? It's such a complicated situation.

The really worst thing about this, in my view is that the FriendFeed team ~~is moving out of~~ has already abandoned its Mountain View digs and is moving to the Facebook offices in Palo Alto.

It's been hard enough to find a table at the Starbucks on University Avenue as it is. Now with all those FriendFeed people in town, it will be that much tougher to find a place for me to sit down and sip a chai latte while staring blankly at my Macbook. OK so maybe I'm being a bit selfish.

Surely there are other downsides. Such as the fact that FriendFeed will probably cease to exist, and instead will be rolled into Facebook's functionality. Still, if I know the pace of these things, it will be another four years before this happens. Witness the fact that Google Video still provisionally exists, three and half years after the much ballyhooed YouTube acquisition. But mainly, I'm worried about the chai.

The Beauty Economy

2009-07-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

I recently was alerted to a new group in town calling itself "Slow Money." I was interested, at first, by their philosophy, and the people behind it--a San Francisco restauranteur, the founder of Terra Chips, etc. gave it legitimacy in my mind.

The economy, they say, has gotten too big. Too complicated. Too fast, and out of scale with humans. The antidote, in their view, is to slow it down, turning towards the old way of life which involved knowing your neighbor and buying your corn or peaches from the family farm down the road.

All well and good I suppose--and in many ways an understandable backlash against the economic mess we're in right now. I love farmer's markets. And living on the California coast, we have access to wonderful fruits and vegetables. One of my favorite local farms on the coast is run by an Italian family that has been in the Half Moon Bay area for generations. They don't spray most of their crops, but they do use some chemical fertilizers, and therefore don't qualify for the vaunted title of organic. But they farm with love, something you can see in every potato and head of broccoli. Visiting their stand off Hwy. One is a treat.

What I didn't like about this Slow Money group, or their philosophy, is the implication that the economy must be reshaped in some whole new image in order to be beneficial, or in their words, "beautiful."

As they put it:

"We must bring money back down to earth. ... We must bring our money home. We must put money back into local economies and carbon back into the soil. ... there is something beautiful about a diversified organic farm. There is something beautiful about a CSA. There is something beautiful about Terra Madre. There is nothing beautiful about bovine growth hormone or Red Dye #4 or high fructose corn syrup. We must invest as if beauty mattered."

For me, this was when the alarm bells began to ring.

Some of what we humans do is beautiful, by the definition above. Some of it just isn't. Doctors perform ugly surgery and save lives. Teachers slog away in depressing classrooms. Some people sell things that have no real social value -- gadgets that break way too soon, sites that hawk stupid pet videos, search technology for the above sites, storage to ensure that all of the videos are kept online, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. None of this is particularly pretty. Would I suggest that we make any of that go away? Definitely not! In fact, I would even go so far as to say that I wouldn't make bovine growth hormones or red dyes go away. I would try to keep them out of my personal food supply, and I would expect and be rewarded as to find that many others will feel the same, until the company that has introduced them realizes that they're fighting a losing battle, and slowly takes them off the market. (This is in fact what is happening in both these cases.)

And this, my friends, is the messy wonderful world we call the money economy. I don't particularly like the word "capitalism" because to me it is a very limiting terms. Nowadays, many of the most exciting innovations are running on little to no capital. In fact, when you're in the midst of a place like Silicon Valley that seems to be where we are heading. And that, to me, is a beautiful thing.

A Tribute

2009-07-23T09:32:00.001-07:00

The title of this post reminds me of the Tenacious D song of the same name. I want to offer a tribute to someone who mattered a great deal to me, and who left me with the most valuable legacy--a sense of my place in the world, an abiding belief that I am a writer, and that this isn't a crazy career choice. But when I try to come up with the right way to express all this, it seems that the real words are already gone.

Just as it happened for the guys in Tenacious D, who while playing for a demon that was threatening to eat their souls:

And we played the first thing that came to our heads,
Just so happened to be,
The Best Song in the World, it was The Best Song in the World.

But later, when they tried to remember it, they couldn't. And so they wrote another song, which was a tribute to the first song, which they had forgotten.

So it is with me. The picture above is of my grandmother, Madlyn DeWitt, who died one week ago, on July 16 at the age of 91. She was much more than just a grandmother to me. She and my grandfather raised my sister and me from the time we were very small. This was the result of a number of forces, not least the fact that it was the late 1960s and my parents were pretty far gone into the boho world of the hippies and beatniks of the Lower East Side.

My grandparents turned out to be pretty darn good parents, all things considered. Madlyn was my first--and my best--editor. She managed to simultaneously support my creativity, while giving me heavy duty lessons in grammar and sentence structure. Later, I knew the rules so well I was able to play with them. Turn them into games for my mind. She also taught me that great writers are usually great readers as well. She didn't have to tell me this. The evidence was all around me. In the evenings, rather than turning on the TV, we generally all settled down to read. There were books of course, but also many mysteriously erudite magazines to choose from--The New Yorker, something from England called "Punch," and many others. For years, all I could really read were the cartoons, but eventually I found myself delving into those long articles--the ones that went on in tiny black print for page after page--and was amazed to discover that there were other people who wrote like my grandmother spoke.

She wasn't a known writer, but she had her moments in the sun. For four years, from 1972-6, she was the editor of a tiny literary journal that became something of an insider's secret among what my uncle has termed the "literati" of our local area, called The Barrytown Explorer. She contributed many of the articles, and her style--a combination of witty bon mots and sincere appreciation--captivated the audience, which ballooned during her tenure. She managed to wangle contributions out of any and all good writers in the Hudson Valley, including the celebrated writer Saul Bellow, who was spending some time there, and New Yorker contributors of the time who maintained homes there.

Many of my recollections of those early years of my life involve the sound of my grandmother click-clacking away on her Underwood manual typewriter--she couldn't think, she said, when using an electric, because there wasn't enough time between each key stroke. To this day, anything that sounds like that keyboard sends me back to age five. I sometimes hovered outside the door of her office, playing with my toys in the hallway, and listening to something that sounded like what I knew would be my sound when I was a grownup.

I wrote my first book at age six, when I was confident enough in my writing abilities that I figured it was time to start publishing. Madlyn never treated me like a little kid when I was involved in such serious matters. She helped me staple the pages together, and gave me a few suggested edits to the text of the story, which was called "The Big Gum Chewing Boy." I was, at the time, obsessed with bubble gum, because Madlyn didn't allow it in her house under any circumstance. It was both a forbidden fruit and something I could stand in judgment on others. And so the book told the story of a boy who partook of this sinful item, and was punished with the loss of his mother. (Yes, I now see the significance.) In the end, the gum actually saved him. He used it to fly away and get home.

Madlyn was of a time and place that doesn't exist anymore. She made jokes that required you had a provisional grasp on at least three languages. Mealtimes were for serious conversation. Either you kept up with the adults, or you stayed quiet. When you were done, you had to ask, "May I be excused?" My sister and I honed the phrase until it was uttered so quickly it became one word, "MayIbexcused?"

Madlyn was passionate about politics. She expressed this through an intense and vocal opposition to the Vietnam war. But there were other more subtle ways that she revealed her political views. For example, if we had soup, we were all allowed to pick it up and drink it directly from our bowls, because "Mrs. Roosevelt" did that. Later, she was actually hired by the Roosevelt Library to write books commemorating the centennials of both Franklin and Eleanor (Mrs. Roosevelt)--a chance to express her gratitude and respect for a presidency that was as personal to her as the Kennedy administration was for a later generation. I wonder if I'm inheriting this, as I find myself feeling a personal connection with the Obamas in a way I wouldn't have expected.

Her passing is a personal loss to me. And, as so many of her friends are saying, it also feels like the end of an era.

Corporate Anarchy?

2009-06-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

In the last few posts I've been developing an idea that has been rattling around my brain for some time now. It can be summed up in the following questions: Is the social media revolution we're experiencing right now a result of new technology, or is it the other way around? In other words, is the quiet revolution sweeping through our society in response to new technology -- or, this new way of communicating something that we have called into existence? Could it be that the rise of Twitter and Facebook and Friendfeed are a reflection of people's desire to break down the old barriers and speak directly to one another? Are we seeing the end of the "expert" era, in which all knowledge and understanding is filtered to us through a select few?

It seems to me that this is a generational thing. My parents generation, the children of the 1960s, started some kind of revolution. It was in many ways a flawed attempt. As the writer Ken Wilbur has pointed out, for all its good intentions, the boomer generation was immensely narcissistic. It had (and still has) a tendency to blow its accomplishments up out of proportion. And it was very much still stuck in an "us/them" paradigm. In fact, the whole idea of a generation gap is based on that! However, there's no denying that our parents generation -- with their anti-war protests, long hair, and rebellion -- shook up the old order for good and all.

Then came my generation - Generation X. We were a bit lost for a time. They called us slackers, because we tended to be introspective. We couldn't exactly rebel, because our parents had already done that, so we kind of came up with our own way. When I was in college, I took to calling myself an anarchist. This was partly to annoy my parents and professors. But it was also my way of showing my dissatisfaction with the dual options that were being served up as my only choices -- Democratic v. Republican, Left vs. Right, Women vs. Men, etc.

Now, there's a new generation--I believe they're calling it Generation Y. They seem to evolved a whole new stance. It's as if they have taken the best of the boomer generation and my generation, and melded them into something entirely new.

They're not rebelling. They're talking. And, lo and behold, no one is left out. It may have started on the campus of Harvard University, but now Facebook is open to all. Even Walmart has a page (though many of the wall comments aren't terribly kind).

The new generation seems to intuitively understand something that for all its free love, the hippies never completely got. That is, we are a human family -- all of us connected to one another. When we try to deny it, we experience the opposite. Alienation. Loneliness. Anger. All of the things that seem to ail our society today.

The great marketing guru Seth Godin (who I generally like and agree with) showed himself to be stuck in the old paradigm with a recent post, "You Matter." In it, he lists all of the situations that show that you matter. They were all very heartfelt. For example:

"When you love the work you do and the people you do it with, you matter ... When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter."

The list goes on. However, the new paradigm is as follows: "Everyone matters. Period." You could be having the crappiest day ever, and feeling no love whatsoever for your fellow man. You could be a protestor on the streets Tehran. You could be a tech startup struggling to get noticed. Or, you could be Apple.

No one is left out of this. Everyone matters.

(To be continued...)

The People Factor - What you Must Know to Succeed

2009-06-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

In my last post I talked about two stories making the tech news rounds that both suggested that human interaction is hugely important to business. This may seem obvious. Businesses are, after all just collections of people when you come right down to it.

However, what I really think we're seeing is a massive consciousness shift. This is happening at the same moment that social networking is taking hold worldwide, connecting people in ways we never could have imagined. It may be that social networking brought all of this on -- or it could be that it is a by product of a societal change. Either way, it is here, and it's going to make or break your business.

I've started calling this the people factor. I'm somewhat borrowing from marketing guru Robert Middleton on this phrasing--he talks about the "contribution factor," which is an important personal barometer for business success. So, how does the people factor play out?

Here are some examples.

James Andrews, an executive at Ketchum flew to Memphis to meet with a big big client, FedEx. When he arrived, he tweeted the following on Twitter: "True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” An executive at FedEx happened to be following his Twitter feed. He was about to pay someone to come up with a brand strategy for FedEx who was insulting its headquarters. And Memphis isn't just any city as far as FedEx is concerned. It's the place that has nurtured and supported FedEx from its humble beginnings in 1973, when it supported a fleet of 14 small aircrafts, to its position today as a market leader in shipping.

Had some newbie to Twitter made this mistake, we could call it ignorance, but this was a man whose job is to usher people into the digital age. His moniker on Twitter is "key influencer" and his new venture (he has left Ketchum) is as a social media strategist. Let's hope he learned his lesson well -- and it's not a bad idea to heed it ourselves.

Another example -- this one on the positive end of the spectrum -- is my client Ocarina Networks. A Silicon Valley startup, they are a brand new entrant in an industry that is, by high tech standards, fairly entrenched and traditional. They were going to have to make a splash, or they'd be in trouble. Their product is truly innovative and useful -- they shrink down files to a fraction of their former size, thus saving on storage costs -- but that's not enough anymore.

Our approach was to make social media a significant portion of the overall marketing and PR strategy--and the client was completely on board with this idea from the start. A little over a year later, there is immense buzz around the company. When people talk about data deduplication -- a major news item recently in light of the battle between EMC and NetApp to acquire deduplication pioneer Data Domain -- they almost always mention Ocarina as well. It is on the map, as they say. How did we do this? We didn't just broadcast or blare out the story. We talked to others about it. We made Ocarina part of the conversation by conversing -- and this includes that key activity known as listening. The results speak for themselves.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself. Am I listening? Am I part of the conversation, or just sitting on the sidelines? Am I patient enough to use social media as a way to connect with others, or am I rushing ahead to try to get the "pay off" by treating it as a way to trumpet my company's offerings?

Culture Clash

2009-06-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Here are two stories that are getting a lot of ink this week. They appear unrelated on the surface, but in fact they have a lot in common and could be a sign of a larger trend.

First: the open letter that EMC CEO Joe Tucci sent to the employees of Data Domain, which it is bidding with its rival NetApp to acquire. In it, Tucci reassures them that their new parent company would respect their company culture:

"We are very mindful of culture—respecting and preserving the various cultures that made the companies we acquired successful in the first place. In nearly every instance, after joining EMC, these businesses have grown faster, advanced the development of their technologies more rapidly, reached more customers, and provided greater career opportunities for their people than they had been able to do on their own."

However, some observers can't help but position the battle between EMC and NetApp for ownership of Data Domain as a battle of east coast vs. west coast culture, such as in this article on Enterprise Storage Forum.

Second: Another topic that is making the rounds this week is a new study showing that the top 10% of Twitter users are creating 90% of the content. In addition, as TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld reports, a greater number of followers correlates to a larger number of tweets on a daily and weekly basis.

What this really means, says Schonfeld, is that the types of people who are actively involved with Twitter are also the ones that others want to follow and pay attention to--not a huge surprise if you think about it. However, the numbers are starker than one would originally suspect.

While many have taken these statistics to mean that Twitter is mainly about "broadcasting" rather than "interacting," in fact, the numbers don't really tell this story at all. If you look at some of the most active Twitter participants -- Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, and many members of the storage community -- what you find is that they themselves are very interactive with their followers.

What's the connection between these two stories? They both show that business is really about people more than anything else. Whatever you choose to describe as "culture," it's clearly very important to us, and will sometimes even take precedence over considerations such as revenues and per share price. With the rise of social networking, this may be becoming more true--and it may be more democratic and transparent than ever.

Note: this post appeared in a slightly different form on my client blog, Online Storage Optimization.

The NYT Gets ... Happy?

2009-05-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

How many of you have noticed that there is a new section in the online edition of the venerable old New York Times? It's called "Happy Days." The reference isn't so much to 70s TV but to a decision by the paper's editorial staff to explore the question of happiness during these dark economic times.

Here's the description:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.

Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

OK I admit it - my first reaction to this was to snicker. The economy takes a little dip, and suddenly these otherwise blinkered, east coast elitists wake up to the fact that money isn't all there is in life? And what will happen when the banks regain their footing? Will everyone trash any thoughts of happiness and just jump back on the hamster wheel and start running after coin once again? I also wondered, cynically, if perhaps this was the newspaper of record attempting to hang on to an audience by any means necessary in light of the meltdown the media industry is experiencing.

I was also just a tad annoyed by the list of writers. Not that I'd heard of most of them, but they were so obviously gleaned from a list of "experts" in the most western sense of the word. Had it escaped the notice of the NYT that there is a 5000 year-old tradition that was built on understanding the question of human happiness? That tradition (or religion, if you like) is called Buddhism, and as it happens one of the greatest thinkers on happiness from that tradition is alive today. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has written a number of (New York Times) bestselling books on this very topic. Now, perhaps they couldn't get him, but perhaps a scholar of his works would be in order? They could've even gone with a solid, New York intellectual such as Robert Thurman, Columbia professor and author.

However, as I read through the posts, I started to melt. These are pretty heartfelt and insightful. Yesterday's, for example, gives a beautiful description of what it felt like for Rousseau as he sank into the moment while rowing a small boat on a lake in Switzerland. In the comments field, many pour out their own stories of what it is like to snatch moments of bliss, joy, contentment and the like.

And under my own cynical reaction, I realized, there is a yearning to see just this kind of thing reflected in our news media. So much of it is caught up in the worst elements of our existence as humans. In fact, the spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle tells us that if we want to understand the kind of damage that the ego wreaks on our society, we need only watch or read the news to find out. And so, with that, I've decided it's not such a silly thing for the New York Times to try something a little bit different--to write about life from the perspective of our highest selves for a change, rather than continually aiming low.

What do you think?

Credit Crisis Confessional

2009-05-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

One of the most talked about articles of the week is from the NYT Magazine. In "My Personal Credit Crisis" economics writer Edmund L. Andrews unravels his tale of financial woe. It's a poignant and well-written piece that mirrors the trap so many Americans fell into during the housing bubble.

There are a number of odd things about the story, as some have already noted. One is that the writer claims to have a yearly income of $120K, plus NYT stock to cash out for a down payment, yet for some reason was bringing in less than $3K/month. This just doesn't add up.

True, he was on the hook for $4K a month in alimony and child support payments. However, it's still amazing that he was only left with $2777/month, as he claims in the story. Alimony expenses come out pre-tax, and so he should've been left with $6K/month. With so many dependents and two mortgages he ought to have qualified for plenty of tax breaks. So let's say worst case he is out 30% in taxes. That should've left him with at least 4,200/month, and probably more. Maybe not enough to afford a half million dollar house, but his second wife also had full-time work most of the time--some of it quite well paid.

Then there were the fights and recriminations with his wife over her spending. Yet, when he enumerated the types of expenses they had, they hardly seemed excessive. Contrary to his own self-flagelating description of it, the beach house expense wasn't all that over the top--it was $1,600 total for him and the kids. Other than that, they bought some clothes and food. They didn't refurnish their house--in fact, they brought in all their old stuff. And from the way he describes it, they didn't do much to renovate the place, either--just the opposite. They let it go to seed.

So, what was really going on with Mr. Andrews? Part of it, I'm going to guess, is that there were other expenses involved that he is not copping to in this article. Perhaps they will be more fully explained in the book. Or maybe he'll continue to gloss over them, in which case my trust in this narrative will slip even lower.

Of course, what makes the story juicy and ironic is that we're not just talking about a common shlub. This is an economics reporter for the venerable New York Times. In other words, if anyone should've known better, it was this guy.

But wait ... wasn't everyone reporting that housing prices were likely to keep on rising? Aside from a few notable naysayers, this sunny outlook was the norm. If anything, an economics reporter would be even more prone to subscribing to this point of view. Not that it should be this way, but human nature being what it is, this is hardly a shocker. Not only that, but he probably got used to thinking in very big numbers--billions and trillions. In my own small way, I experienced this as well. Reporting on Silicon Valley for Red Herring, I began to talk about "millions" as if they had very little value.

"Oh, they were only funded at $5 million," I would say, not really hearing myself.

Another angle on the story is that much as it is written in a highly confessional style, the author has done a good job avoiding some of the obvious questions about what kind of person he was, and is. What was his attitude towards money over the course of his life? What drew him to dedicate his life to writing and thinking about money? Perhaps he had oh, I don't know, a few small hangups about it? Just a thought...

When he described his cold sweat panic attack over money, I couldn't help thinking that maybe what he needed to do first was to take a step back and examine his responses. Panic attacks are their own type of affliction--and they often hit us in situations that others might not consider worthy of panic. His wife's reaction seems to support this. Of course, we can now step back and judge her to be the one who was in denial, but was it really that healthy for him to torment her about every little expense? Was it spending that took them down, or an overall unhealthy relationship to money on both their parts--his especially?

Anxiety tends to pursue us through our lives. If we dispense with one trigger, we find (or create) a new one. In short, this was a very psychological journey that he was experiencing--maybe even a spiritual one.

Again, perhaps more will be revealed in the book length version of the story. Considering the strong response this feature got, I'm sure it will sell well. I'll probably pick up a copy--though to save money I'll just check it out of the library.

Justifying Fearmongering

2009-05-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

This has been some pandemic. First there were the headlines--splashed across the tops of newspapers across the USA. "Pandemic!" they screamed. "Hide your children!" "Paint your walls with Pine-Sol." "Pre-emptively kill yourself so you don't have to live through Armaggedon."

Then, there was a general shuffling of feet and clearing of throats as the reality sank in that this was not exactly a threat to life as we know it. Turns out that most of the "confirmed" cases of pig flu were now reconfirmed as being unconfirmed. Or, put another way, Mexico had it all wrong. There was a paltry 45 deaths from the so-called swine flu, not the 150 that was originally reported. Other than that, most cases have been mild, and the spread of the virus has significantly slowed just a few weeks into the "epidemic." Only one non-Mexican has died of the flu, and this was someone who for some reason we didn't get a whole lot of info. about, except that the CDC seemed to be saying that her case wasn't cause for alarm.

The next phase was the finger pointing. With the press already being hammered for its failure to report on the economy in any meaningful way, now it was going to have to explain itself for once again buying into--and heavily inflating--the hype. Let's face it, fear sells papers like nothing else. I was in the news business. I know how this works. You're going to keep reading, watching, etc-ing if a story might turn you personally into a statistic. Now the press was caught red-handed doing just this.

Here's where it got really weird. There is now a spate of articles (here's one example from Reuters) coming out which are taking the following position: "Yes, we did overplay the threat. But the effects of all this fear-mongering were positive. People now know to be afraid of viruses, and are taking far more precautions. So, it actually was a good thing we totally screwed this one up."

This is the point at which science, economics, and, really, any study of human behavior goes completely out the window. First of all, as I pointed out in an earlier post, stress takes a toll on human health. Fear is perhaps the hardest on our systems of all the stressors. This is good for our health? I don't think so.

Second, what exactly were the precautions that people took? More frequent handwashing (no doubt with anti-bacterial soap), greater usage of anti-bacterial sprays and hand sanitizers, and staying home from work/school. Well, call me crazy, but the last I checked, there was a rising fear that all of these anti-bacterials could lead to the creation of "superbugs"--in other words, viruses that no one had the natural defenses to fight anymore. Is this sensible caution, or germ-phobic overreaction that could actually cause a real pandemic in the future? You decide.

Finally, I would ask this: does crying wolf every time someone gets the flu keep the public well-informed? Or, is the more likely effect that we'll start discounting these potential health emergencies in the future--even when an actual threat appears?

I have been disappointed and frustrated with the state of health and science journalism for years, but to me this is a new low. Would be nice if someone would show just a tiny bit of remorse and promise to do better next time. Guess I'll keep dreaming.

Pandemic Madness - Not Again?!

2009-04-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

It's 2009, just three years since we were warned of a worldwide Avian flu pandemic that would wipe out vast swaths of the population. Birds were slaughtered by the millions, causing immense harm to farmers across Asia. Any American foolish enough to travel to Asia during this outbreak was subsequently quarantined when they returned, just as they were during the previous non-event known as SARS, which also was supposed to bring on pandemic-style Armaggedon. How many have died from Avian flu so far? The terrifyingly vast number of 257.

OK so, phew. Somehow we made it through both of those scares alive--though who knows how many weeks or years of our lives we each lost as a result of the stress hormones we secreted in response to the panicmongering the media handed out to us.

Now, there's a whole panic-demic on our hands. This time the culprits are innocent little piggies. Already, there are reports of mass slaughter of these animals. And of course, we can only begin to imagine the lost revenues to Mexican tourism that are piling up as cruise lines change their routes, flights are canceled, and so on. Great timing for Mexico, which is also getting hammered for its drug violence.

Meanwhile, the good people at Novartis, makers of TheraFlu and various vaccines are no doubt jumping for joy right now, as are other flu vaccine manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur and MedImmune. Buy stock in those companies if you know what's good for you.

So, not to rain on everyone's parade all at once, but let's take a look at the facts for a brief moment before returning to our regularly scheduled all-fear all-the-time programming:

The swine flu death toll so far includes: 159 people, all of them Mexican citizens.
This is approximately 0.00014% of Mexico's total population of 109,955,400.

No one else has died, even though there are confirmed cases in the U.S. and around the world. Maybe I should repeat that. No one else, that is, no non-Mexicans, have died from this. Not only that, but among the 2,500 cases of swine flu in Mexico, only 6.3% have died.

In California, there have been 19 cases of swine flu, all nonfatal. That is .000035% of our state's population. Yet, apparently the Governator has seen fit to declare a "state of emergency" over it. (Thanks @jameane for doing that calculation.)

So can we all just take a breath and calm down, please? Ask yourself, how many people have died of run of the mill, regular flu this year? I don't know the exact number, but I'm guessing it's in the thousands. How many generally die each year of, I don't know, bubonic plague. I looked that one up, it's 15-20 per year in the US alone.

Look, fear is a hard one for the human system to endure, so what about saving it up for some stuff that is actually scary? Like, for example, the fact that despite Obama's stimulus efforts, our economy is still in the pits? Or, I don't know, the extremely high likelihood that poor children around the world could die at any moment due to poor nutrition and sanitation? In fact, that's happening right now as we speak--a poverty pandemic is causing infants and children to die in many, many undeveloped nations, and even in some very wealthy countries.

OK I have said my piece. Go back to your regularly scheduled programming folks.

The weird and the wacky this week

2009-03-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

If that alliterative headline didn't catch your eye, I don't know what's wrong with you. In any case, here are my picks for the weirdest and most surprising headlines of the past week (or so):

Fact, not fiction, rules the brain (except for gamers). A new study shows that in general, the human brain places more importance on real people than on fictional ones, according to PhysOrg.com. Thus, we know that Cinderella isn't as real as George Bush, who in turn is not as real to us as our mother. (Their example.) However, the article states that: "personal relevance is not unequivocally related to what is real, since some individuals may experience personal relevance in certain fictional realms, such as in religion or chronic computer gaming. For instance, for a chronic gamer, a World of Warcraft character could yield greater activation in the amPFC and PCC [reality-oriented regions of the brain] than a real person of low personal relevance would." (Emphasis added--and gamers, please do take heed.)

Totally tubular. From Boing Boing--Audiophiles, and folks who want to risk electrocuting themselves can follow the steps laid out at Instructables.com on how to build their very own stereo tube amp from spare parts. The post starts out with this tantalizing line: "Ever wanted to build a highly dangerous, inefficient, and essentially obsolete piece of electronics?" Oh, well, in that case, what are we waiting for?

Terminator beware. And speaking of tubes, contributor Brandon Keim reports in Wired on the development of carbon nanotubes--structures that are incredibly strong, lightweight and flexible. These tubes can be used for everything from artificial limbs with "smart" muscles to solar cells. Perhaps the Governator can make use of them to save future generations of the world from the high cost of electricity.

Robofish to the rescue. As long as we're on the subject of '80s sci fi movie references, there's a new robocop on the block, and this one is sniffing out pollution. According to Britain's Daily Mail, schools of robotic fish may be released into the Thames to pick up signs of pollution. Reports the Mail: "Each fish ... will be packed with pollution sensors that can electronically 'sniff' harmful chemicals in the water." The robofish will travel in schools and alert each other via wifi when pollution is detected. (Thanks @bcaulfield for that tip.) Let's just hope no one decides to tempt them with a PCB-packed fly and cook them up for dinner.

Snow men behaving badly. Finally, two separate snow-bites-man-related stories caught our attention this past week. First, take a look at this series of videos depicting grown men riding around in the snow on retooled on children's toy cars--and clearly having the time of their lives. (Thanks @davegraham for tweeting that tip.) And in a second, related story, a Canadian man was ordered to tear down his backyard snow fort because it posed a fire hazard. (From NPR's "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me quiz.) Talk about having WAY too much fun.

And speaking of which, shouldn't you be getting back to work?

A similar version of this post appeared on my client blog, OnlineStorageOptimization.com

Game Break!

2009-03-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

Life in tech can be tough, and for the bright minds within it, a mini-vacation from reality can be good therapy. Today's post will take a look at some of the more intriguing and futuristic distractions available right now. That way, you can at least read about the idea of having fun, even if you don't have time to have any.

Virtual gunplay. First up, the newest from LEGO - "Augmented Reality" glasses enhance game play with computer generated images allows kids to shoot each other's real toys, releasing aggression and maybe giving the toymaker a leg up on the encroaching competition posted by Nintendo, et al. Thanks Gizmodo for that tip.

Bruce Wayne Yourself. What looks to be the first truly great Batman video game is due out in June--or May 31 for the XBox collector's edition. The preview alone for "Batman: Arkham Asylum" could make you reserve a copy for yourself, and this review would probably clinch it. (Thanks @Storagezilla for the heads up on this one.)

Fun with a Mac Mini. Call this a project rather than pure entertainment, but Stephen Foskett today detailed on his Packrat blog how he took the new 2009 Mac Mini base model and souped it up into a cherry speed demon for a total cost of $701. For those with the chops, this looks like fun.

What's next on iPhone. Today's Apple iPhone OS 3.0 preview event offered some games that will be upcoming on the new iPhone. So far, none look mindblowing, but this live feed from Engadget may yield a few more as the day wears on. The multiplayer game "LiveFire" sounds like it has some potential.

Colbert Goes to the Graveyard: If you only have a few moments, you can take time out to watch this interview on the Colbert Report with Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book, Coraline, the Sandman comic series, and so on and so forth. Die hard fanboys/girls can also follow him on Twitter and find out what he's having for breakfast.

OK, end of break. Get back to work!

Photo: Gizmodo

Note: this post is also on my client blog: Online Storage Optimization.

Tweet You Very Much

2009-03-12T16:31:00.000-07:00

Twitter is a powerful tool, not to mention a great distraction ... er, method of connecting with others. If a show biz personality who is just learning email can get 70K followers in 24 hours, then clearly anyone can dive in and have fun. Yet, Twitter can also be a headache-inducing, information-spewing overload machine, especially for those of us who use it to keep up with the latest tech trends.

To deal with this, Twitter has made some updates, such as home page search, which can be helpful. Yet, it's still hard to keep one's head above water with all the noise out there (insert continued mixed metaphor here). Heck, it can even be overwhelming to figure out which tools to use to manage one's Twitter accounts and usage.

For all of this, the TwiTip blog is a solid source for advice on how to keep the info deluge under control. Today's post dealt with the many Twitter-based tools and honed it down, offering 10 MORE Must Have Twitter Tools. One item on the list that's already generating some discussion is TwitterSnooze. This service puts some of your more, shall we say, prolific followers on a pause button so you don't have to receive their tweets for a period of time--something that's less cruel and final than unfollowing someone. The downside is that the person you've snoozed will be alerted on the day you "unsnooze" them. Therefore, the folks at TwitterSnooze suggest you send the following card:

Tasteful, don't you agree?

Another way to keep your head from exploding due to overload is to get into a hash tag room of interest, such as this one. These are becoming more popular and keep your follows under control to some extent. A variation on this is the Retweetist, which aggregates the most popular retweets going around the twit-o-sphere at any given moment.

And speaking of retweets, here--in case you live under a rock and haven't yet seen this--is Ellen talking about Twitter:

Note: this post also appears in a slightly different form on my client blog, Online Storage Optimization.

Is This You?

2009-03-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

Marketing guru Robert Middleton makes a number of extremely helpful suggestions on how to build a web site that works. I've invested in his web site toolkit, and I recommend it for anyone who is writing and/or developing their own site. Perhaps his best suggestion--and I suppose I'm giving away a bit by mentioning this--is to speak directly to one's ideal clients, asking them whether they see themselves in what you have to offer.

I still don't have my site built, but I see no reason to ask the question "Is This You?" in a blog post, where there's room for comments and responses.

1. Do you have the feeling that there's all this social media stuff you're supposed to know about, but somehow you're not onto it?
2. Does the word "Twitter" make you break out in hives?
3. Do you spend half your day Tweeting, updating your Facebook page, blogging, and revising your web site, and yet have made little or no progress meeting your business goals such as attracting the right customers or increasing revenues?
4. Are you breaking new ground in some way with your business, and therefore having trouble getting anyone to understand where you fit in the overall context of your industry?

OK, I'll leave these for starters, but would love to hear whether any of these questions ring true for you. Feel free to Tweet me @sunshinemug about this, or leave a comment right here. Looking forward to your responses!

That's not writing. That's typing.

2009-02-27T18:53:00.000-08:00

I sweat over these posts, I really do. So much to say, and all this room to say it in. But this time, I won't. This time, you see, I have nothing of importance to say. Somewhat like this panel on cloud computing I attempted to watch today. So much talking, and so little said.

I have to agree with Robert Scoble, who put it this way: "I hate panels ... They have the most well-known cloud experts. But we aren't learning all that much. And this is one of the most entertaining and knowledgeable set of people you will see on a single stage."

Yet, the Twitter hash on the thing was pretty amusing, as were the comments on the Ustream feed. Which leads me to this perhaps non-techy observation--the reason that cloud computing is exciting is not really anything to do with computing. The hardware--and even the applications themselves--are only of interest to a select group of people with a direct stake in them. For the vast majority, what's exciting about cloud computing is something else. Something to do with community. Or something.

Update even later in this late and lazy night: Christopher Kusek has written something quite intelligent on the topic, with promises to start a cloud blog.

Jumped the shark

2009-02-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I talked at (perhaps too much) length about the end of Starbucks, and came to the conclusion that the brand jumped the shark the day they started offering those breakfast sandwiches. Which got me onto a new train of thought. What else has jumped the shark of late?

For those who don't know, the term "jumping the shark" comes from an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie straps on water skis and literally jumps over a shark. That was the day, many say, the show lost its mojo and began to slide into the dark waters of oblivion. It is an accepted phrase among TV buffs, but I don't see why it can't be extended to other aspects of life.

With that, here is my list of Silicon Valley shark jumpers:

1. Email. Now that we have Twitter, why exactly are we forced to communicate via this clunky and overly permissive medium? As we now know, if you can't say it in 140 characters, maybe you just need to shut up. Or start a blog.

2. Web 2.0. What was that going to be, exactly?

3. PCs. Can't we all just admit that Mac has won and get on with it?

4. Facebook. Our parents are on there. Our grandparents are on there. Nuff said.

5. Google. I know people still use it all the time for search, docs, and what have you. Some of us still believe in Blogger. But do we think about the fact that we use it? No. It's just not interesting anymore.

6. Scoble.

7. The "killer app." Someday, we were once told, there would be this like, unifying app that would bring together everything--everything!--on the web. Umm. No, there won't. And I for one am tired of worrying about it.

8. VC funding. (See above, Web 2.0)

9. YouTube. (See above, Google)

10. Vlogging. I don't know where that went, but it is definitely gone now.

The end of the (Starbucks) era?

2009-02-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

Is it me, or is Starbucks in the news more lately than ever? A recent Bloomberg article on coffee prices seems a perfect example of this. The article is not just about Starbucks--in fact in many ways it's not really about Starbucks at all--but you'd never know that unless you read the whole thing carefully through.

The Starbucks name is emblazoned in our consciousness in a way that almost no other brand is today. And right now, I think what's happening is the death of that brand. It has become too closely linked to what we have come to see as the excesses of the last decade. Our love affair with the comfy chairs, the jazz and the sipping of a latte while typing away on a Macbook might just be coming to an abrupt and ugly end.

Starbucks as a coffee chain has actually been around since the late 80s, but most people associate it with its rise to prominence in the mid-90s, when those big green signs started popping up on every street corner. Remember when its ubiquity was lampooned by Christopher Guest in "Best in Show"?

Starbucks had a starring role in the dot com era. The shine of that time stayed on the company long after the bubble burst. When I went to work at Red Herring, I was told that if you wanted to know what VCs were up to, the best thing to do was to hang around the Starbucks on Sand Hill Road. After the crash, Starbucks was there to soothe our frazzled nerves and remind us that a little luxury could still be had. The housing refi bubble, of course, meant we still had the cash for a $5 a day coffee habit.

It's hard to say when Starbucks started to flame out. Several commentators pointed out that the brand basically jumped the shark the day they started introducing breakfast sandwiches. And today's news that they're planning to introduce instant coffee is obviously the nail in the coffin. (Or should I say the nail in the coffee?) But whenever the exact date was, the little green mermaid is now starting to look like a symbol of times gone by--times, in fact, that many of us would like to forget.

The irony, of course, is that Starbucks is not just a symbol. It's a real company that is struggling to stay afloat in a down economy. It must cut costs and seek new revenue sources. The fall has probably been coming for many years now, and even Howard Schultz's hasty return as CEO a year ago can't change the course it's on. And so sadly, it must come up with new gimmicks and innovations, it must automate its processes, and introduce all kinds of other measures to remain solvent. (Amazingly enough, it is still offering its employees health insurance, despite the fact that this is one cost that is helping sink the company.)

So, who knows? Maybe Starbucks the company will live on, gradually becoming associated with something as mundane as the supermarket coffee aisle, where its instant packets will compete for market share with Maxwell House and Folgers Crystals. But the Starbucks that was--the brand that I might actually say defined my generation in many ways--seems to be fading away with each blast of steam from the automatic espresso maker.

When Good Aptonyms Go Bad

2009-02-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

Walking through my neighborhood yesterday, my husband and I saw a house for sale. The name on the sign was such a perfect example of what The New Scientist has dubbed "nominative determinism" that I was tempted to stop and take a photo. The name? Cashin and Company. This is really the name of a real estate company. Cashin. Yes, say it slowly out loud. Not a difficult one to notice. This is a classic in what has now become a series I seem to be writing on "aptonyms" -- or, names that are all too appropriate to their owners. The last few being Bernie Madoff, Philander Rodman, Gary Gygax, and Louise Story.

Now, of course this is the name of a company, not a person. But my curiosity was piqued the minute I saw the sign. Was this a family name? If so, who were these original Cashins? And did they, so to speak, cash in on the real estate boom before cashing out and saddling this name with a new generation of realtors? When I got home I started doing some research. It wasn't easy, mind you, because when you enter the word "Cashin" along with the word "Realtor" on Google you get over 2 million hits, almost all of which are instructional pages on how to cash in on the real estate bubble.

After much blood, sweat and tears, I did manage to track down a page that gave a history of the Cashin company, and I couldn't have been better rewarded. According to the site, the story goes as follows:
"Our Roots: For over half a century, the name Cashin has been synonymous with exceptional quality, integrity and service in peninsula real estate. Cashin Company’s roots on the peninsula date back more than 50 years to when Emmet J. Cashin, Jr. began selling homes for Fox & Carskadon in Burlingame. By personally helping to develop neighborhoods like Sharon Heights, Sky Farm, Tobin Clark and Hillsdale, Emmet helped build the local communities we all know today. Later, Emmet’s son, Skip, took over Fox & Carskadon and grew it into one of the most successful independent real estate companies in the country." (Italics mine.)

I don't know why any businessman who was already saddled with the overly obviously name Cashin would choose to name his son Skip, but this is just what Emmet Cashin did. I have to admit that while researching this, a part of me hoped to find that the son had left town and was now on the run, but sadly this was not the case. If he's living out his name at all, however, it could be that as the real estate industry slides into oblivion, Skip Cashin may in fact not be earning the same level of revenues as he once did, in which case the name would have an unfortunate ring of truth to it--no doubt he must forego the usual bonuses for himself and his employees until this real estate mess gets sorted out.

Events on Facebook - How to Promote without Annoying

2009-02-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of advice going around about how to use tools like Twitter or blogging appropriately to promote your business or service. But what about Facebook? I've noticed that a large number of the emails in my FB inbox these days are from people who have invited me to events that I'm not interested in attending, giving me endless details about said events until I am ready to de-friend without another thought. So, how do you use Facebook to promote yourself without alienating the very people who are in your trusted network? Here are my suggested rules for using Facebook as a promo tool--comments welcome, as I'm still thinking this one through.

1. Limit emails around an event to two per event--one when you first invite, and one right beforehand to remind people. I am shocked at how many reminder emails I sometimes get for just one event. Not to pick on someone who will remain nameless, but I received five such reminders for one company's New Year's party. How well thought out was that strategy?

2. Follow-ups should go to attendees only. Once you've set the event, I think it's right and appropriate to send emails to all those who are invited. Following that, wait a considerable period of time, and then ONLY send reminders to people who have either indicated they are attending, or might attend. Imagine how annoying it is to have done the polite thing and indicated that you are not going to make it, only to receive several more emails reminding you of the event!

3. The event page itself should include the ability to RSVP, or it's worse than useless. I'm surprised how often I get an invite and then when I reach the Facebook page I'm told I have to RSVP at evite or somewhere else. This is a misunderstanding of the power of social networks, which is that you can have people post their attendance on their profile, thus increasing the virality of the event. And why should I be forced into an extra step? It's an automatic turnoff.

4. OK this should be obvious but is not always--remember to always put in all the key details onto the event page, as well as in the invite and reminder emails.

Thoughts? Comments? I'm open.

Top 5 Blogging Mistakes

2009-02-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

Everyone has a blog these days--doesn't matter if you're a multinational corporation or a dairy farmer. This is a good thing, in theory. I love hearing about people lives--especially people who have created a business out of something they're passionate about. If I see a blog I like, I'll almost always go and check out their home page as well. What most bloggers don't realize is that it's easier than they think to drive traffic--and a lot of it has to do with how the posts themselves are written. Here is my list of the top 5 most common mistakes people make when writing blog posts.
1. Length--Either people microblog (so, why did I click from Twitter?) or they write a novel. Ideal blog post length: 150-350 words. That's enough to express one idea, and not to go on too long about it.
2. Never getting to the point. Every time you post, ask yourself the following questions: What is the point? What am I trying to say? Why should anyone care?
3. Oversharing. I love to read tell-all memoirs and the like, but there's something about people putting intimate details of their personal lives on their blogs that is just ... creepy and wrong.
4. Being moderate or milquetoast in one's position. The corollary to this is that the best blogs are controversial. The most popular bloggers--think Perez Hilton, Ariana Huffington--are the ones with a very strong point of view.
5. Passive voice. Forget those term papers with the "It seems the author is trying to imply that Ulysses was attempting to be rescued..." lingo. Get active with the nouns and verbs, and all of a sudden the words leap off the page.

For more stuff like this, check out this interview on Robert Middleton's blog with someone named Daphne Gray-Grant.

Shameless Plug - I'm so proud of Ocarina Networks

2009-01-27T15:46:00.000-08:00

My client Ocarina Networks has been named a finalist for Storage Magazine's 2008 Storage Products of the Year list. The company came out of stealth just two years ago, and its meteoric rise has been stunning to watch. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital, and other top tier investors, Ocarina is filling a niche in way that could not be more timely--it shrinks down the size of the types of files that are proliferating across the web, such as photos, video, Windows files, and so on. Its customers are major photo sharing sites, social networks, bioscience firms, and many others that need to reduce their overall storage footprint, which in many cases is growing by the terabyte week after week, month after month. I've written about them before on this blog, because I think they're a great example of a green business, reducing tenfold the immense power and cooling usage that is associated with our web-based lifestyles.Congrats, guys! I'm so proud to be working with you.

Aptonym Alert!

2009-01-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

I could post on the latest updates on Steve Jobs' health, in which he admits that actually it is a little more complex than he originally thought. But instead, I thought, hey! More name fun! Especially since I just found out from that unassailable news source, NPR's "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" that Dennis Rodman's dad, a man who disappeared from his life when he was three, has been married four times and fathered 27 children. His name was ... Philander Rodman. Philander, who now runs a bar in the Phillipines, boasted of his "extracurricular activities" to the Washington Post. In other words, this Philander was one hell of a philanderer. Anyone out there about to name your baby? My advice to you is take some time making this all important decision.

Why is Steve Jobs Losing Weight?

2009-01-09T15:18:00.001-08:00

Mystery solved. Steve Jobs has been looking more and more gaunt and unhealthy because of a "hormone imbalance" that has been robbing his system of vital nutrients. The full text of his letter to employees was reprinted in Forbes. But despite his candor, many journalists and bloggers found this explanation vague and unconvincing. What's wrong, people? Isn't it obvious that all the Apple chief needs are a few sophisticated blood tests and a special diet and he'll be fine by springtime. Why, think of the timing--he'll be able to greet the Easter Bunny looking just as robust as he did in 2005. What really surprised me is that with all the chatter about this on Twitter, no one once mentioned that Jobs has tried special diets before. This, NYT columnist Joe Nocera reported in a widely-cited piece in the NY Times last July (although mostly what people noted is that Jobs called Nocera and bawled him out). So, what's actually eating Jobs? I'm not a doctor, but I would hazard a guess that if this really is a hormone imbalance, it is linked to his vegetarian diet, which as Brian Caulfield reported in Forbes last summer, many think he took to an extreme, "...eating dark green vegetables such as broccoli and asparagus, grilled or steamed." Much as we would love to believe that a diet that entirely consists of vegetables is healthy, it is not. It is dangerous. And if Jobs is like most vegetarians, he is supplementing his diet with plenty of helpings of soy, which is a known hormone disruptor.

Here is the diet that I think will help him on the road to health: plenty of Grandma's chicken soup, made from a homemade broth that uses, yes, actual bones. Sally Fallon's recipe for broth on the Weston Price Foundation site is one of the best. Here you go, all--this is as low tech as you can get, in fact it's ancient. But sometimes even the most cutting edge of us need a little kitchen table wisdom:

Chicken Stock

1 whole free-range chicken or 2 to 3 pounds of bony chicken parts, such as necks, backs, breastbones and wings*
gizzards from one chicken (optional)
2-4 chicken feet (optional)
4 quarts cold filtered water
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
2 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
1 bunch parsley

*Note: Farm-raised, free-range chickens give the best results. Many battery-raised chickens will not produce stock that gels.

If you are using a whole chicken, cut off the wings and remove the neck, fat glands and the gizzards from the cavity. Cut chicken parts into several pieces. (If you are using a whole chicken, remove the neck and wings and cut them into several pieces.) Place chicken or chicken pieces in a large stainless steel pot with water, vinegar and all vegetables except parsley. Let stand 30 minutes to 1 hour. Bring to a boil, and remove scum that rises to the top. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 6 to 8 hours. The longer you cook the stock, the richer and more flavorful it will be. About 10 minutes before finishing the stock, add parsley. This will impart additional mineral ions to the broth.

Remove whole chicken or pieces with a slotted spoon. If you are using a whole chicken, let cool and remove chicken meat from the carcass. Reserve for other uses, such as chicken salads, enchiladas, sandwiches or curries. Strain the stock into a large bowl and reserve in your refrigerator until the fat rises to the top and congeals. Skim off this fat and reserve the stock in covered containers in your refrigerator or freezer.

The unbelievably accurately named Madoff

2008-12-29T16:26:00.001-08:00

I have posted several times on the eerie syndrome the New Scientist has dubbed "nominative determinism," in which a person's name matches their profession or personality. With the name Sunshine, I can't help but be interested in this. I've seen so many of these so-called "aptonyms" that I've become rather used to them, but even I was floored by the news that a man named Madoff, which is pronounced "made off," was arrested for a giant Ponzi scheme in which he, yes, made off with $50 billion of other people's money. What can I say? I wish that my sunny, upbeat personality was all my own doing, just as Bernard Madoff must wish that he can throw all the guilt off himself by pleading nominative insanity. Whatever the answer to all this, it has already proven wonderful fodder for late night comedians. I think Jay Leno said it best: "Shouldn't the first clue have been the guy's name? Madoff, you know, as in 'made off with the money,' you know? I mean, who were his partners, Pilfered and Swindled?"

Crestor Study - What does it really mean?

2008-11-10T08:50:00.000-08:00

The headlines are screaming that Crestor is the best when it comes to reducing heart disease. But before we all start buying AstraZeneca stock (not that this is a bad idea), maybe we should take a look at what the news actually is here. The study, named JUPITER, was designed to test Crestor's effect on those who have elevated levels of C-reactive proteins--or actually high sensitivity, or hsCRPs to be perfectly accurate. Researchers have begun to suspect that heart disease is not caused by a gunky build-up of cholesterol in the arteries, but rather is a far more dynamic process. Yet, when one reads the coverage of this study, it's clear that no one is actually getting this key point. And here's another issue--the results trumpeted from the rooftops are simply not as good as they first appear. One issue to consider is that the trial was stopped early, because of its favorable results. Thus, a trial that was expected to measure heart disease results over several years was stopped after less than two years. How much can we really garner from such a short term study? And, despite the impressive sounding reduction--50% overall, and 38 percent for those with normal cholesterol, the actual numbers are a lot less exciting.

As pointed out in a nice BusinessWeek story on the topic:

"Dr. Andrew Tonkin, head of cardiovascular research at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, cautioned that the actual number of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events was low, even in the study participants that were taking placebos. There were 83 cardiac events of all types in the Crestor group, an 0.9% actual risk, compared with 157, or 1.8%, in the placebo group. 'You would have to treat 180 people for two years to prevent one death," he said.'"

Ummm. Okay, sorry to be a party pooper here but ... are you telling me that they stopped the study based on a 74-person, .9% difference? What if the results were reversed in the second two years? There's no reason that couldn't happen, is there?

Believe me, I'm glad this study was done, because first of all it could save some lives, which is the most important thing. Secondly, it is yet another nail in the coffin of the cholesterol theory--though of course few people recognize this. And finally, it's important that statins be tested on wider populations. This was the first study that included a signficant number of women. But for pete's sake, can you at least finish a study before you declare victory? On such a short term, there's a good chance these were spurious. Don't you agree?

My Ironic Name

2008-10-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

Back in January 2007, writer Nicholas Carr described me on his "Rough Type" blog as the "ironically named" Sunshine Mugrabi because, according to him, I was just one of several reporters falling into a trap he was calling "The Cassandra Meme." The silly idea I was floating back then? In light of early evidence that there were not enough exits to justify the mass investment in Web 2.0, there was a good chance that we could be heading for another fall--one not all that dissimilar to the dot com bubble.

As my Red Herring article at the time read: "Layoffs and debt-ridden companies abound in a dire sign of another dot-com bust." Well, here's hoping he was right to mock me, and further, here's hoping that I was wrong. Unfortunately, I don't think I was. TechCrunch has been posting a Layoff Tracker, with companies being added each day. Yahoo's 10 percent cut is the least of it--a lot of the companies that are hitting this list are the ones we were assured had rock solid business plans. In any case, Carr was wrong about my name being ironic--I'm as sunny and optimistic as you can get. The difference is, I don't see a correction as a bad thing. The dot com meltdown didn't hurt Amazon and it positively made Google. I have no doubt that this time around, the companies that will make it will be the ones that have something truly innovative to offer. I personally gained a great deal during the dot com crash--I got out of tech for a while and went to work for a daily paper in a small town. That was the best education I could've imagined, as I had editors who had been doing the same thing for decades. They'd seen enough stuff come and go that they were rarely if ever fooled by something that looked too good to be true.

Green IT - high tech greenwashing?

2008-09-14T11:23:00.001-07:00

Now that my job is to help companies get the word out about what they have to offer, I'm finding that it's not as easy to dismiss them with a snarky line or two. Such is the case with a word that I used to let roll off my tongue on a regular basis: greenwashing. I still use it in regards to, say, BP's claims of ecosensitivity. But the latest eco-efforts in the information technology space are trickier to debunk. Some are highly suspect, of course--I've seen far too many broad claims from companies that, say, spin storage disks down, about how much they're doing for the planet. But the fact is that the IT sector needs to take steps to reduce its energy and materials usage, and there are some legitimate efforts in that arena, particularly among companies in the UK.

In representing a storage company with a green and cost-saving agenda, Ocarina Networks, I have gotten to know Doug Washburn, an analyst at Forrester Research who specializes in greening IT departments. Ocarina, we both agree, is a legitimate green business, in that its technology reduces the amount of space that's needed to store all the millions of photos, documents, videos and other data-intensive files being shared around the internet. And in talking to him, I've started taking a much closer look at the emerging category of Green IT. What I'm finding is that - first and foremost - there is a huge and growing need to take energy and materials usage into account when it comes to determining the resources allocated to IT for companies of all sizes. Cloud computing -- which for some looks like a panacea--actually raises even more questions. Just because someone else is handling some or all of your IT needs doesn't mean they're doing it in a way that is less wasteful. In looking into this emerging Green IT space, I've found some interesting sites:

Energy Matters - Green Storage Blog
Sustainable IT
Greener Computing

All food for thought, I'd say.

RIP Bell Labs Physics Research Lab

2008-08-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

Like so many people, I was saddened and shocked to read on Wired.com that Bell Labs is shuttering its fundamental physics research lab. As a little kid, I learned the name "Shockley" before I'd heard of Abe Lincoln. (This is what happens when you're raised by an IBM Fellow.) It's just weird to think that the place that yielded the transistor and six Nobel prize-winning innovations could roll over and die. Yet, for all the uproar over it, I wonder if anyone has considered that perhaps it's time to pass the torch. Maybe this country needs to become a follower in the global race for innovation, instead of the leader as it once was. Patriotism aside, it seems to me that it's too late to bemoan the fact that the U.S. has fallen behind. Take our automobile industry. Other than the strange and elitist Tesla Motors, when was the last time we heard that anyone from our shores had made a leap forward in that arena? So there you go. And if you're not quite ready to dry your eyes, check out this multimedia presentation, also on Wired.

Statins for 8-year-olds: can it get any worse?

2008-07-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much lately, but today's news story that the world has gone mad ... I mean, that the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending statins for children as young as eight with high LDL cholesterol spurred me to action. This is truly a chilling story, worth of the most terrifying of Stephen King horror novels. Why? Because of the way that statins work on the body. In adults, they can wreak quite a bit of havoc (see Space Doc for lots of stories on this), but in developing bodies, we're talking about a whole 'nother level. Statins, derived from poisonous mushrooms, do a whole lot more than just lower cholesterol. They act on what is known as the mevalonate pathway, which is key in the development of the basic building blocks of the body, such as proteins and hormone regulators. The idea of inhibiting this pathway in a person who is still growing goes so completely against anything resembling the Hippocratic oath that I am frankly shocked and appalled that any pediatrician, much less the national representative body of these physicians, could possibly advocate this, especially in children who are largely healthy except for their cholesterol and weight levels. It's as if they're suggesting cutting out a child's eyes in case they may some day go blind in old age. Usually I try to put a note dry humor into my blog posts, but today I can't even bring myself to do that. This is just too depressing for words, witty or otherwise.

Twitter--the "huh?"-mobile

2008-05-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

I like Twitter. I love that there is a now a place where I can "follow" someone I once met at a party or saw on a webcast from some random social networking conference. It all taps into the deepest, darkest part of my psyche. To whit, my inner stalker is sooo excited about this site. And yet, I must ask this question: what the heck is everyone talking about? A few random examples of Twitter tweets I've seen recently are....

LuisRivera all the geeks were inside the cafeteria. Free food too at WhereCamp. (Robert Scoble).

at dan huards bday party dinner, dan just ordered the 05 stags leap artemis cab, soo good (Kevin Rose),

and finally the most eloquently indecipherable of all:

I never listen to branding police. :-) But Bwana points out it's Blu-ray. Heheh. (Two-time winner Robert Scoble)

Gary Gygax - A true aptonym

2008-03-06T14:56:00.000-08:00

In all the writing about this week's sad passing of the great Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, no one seems to have mentioned the eeriness of his name. If I was ever to come up with a name for a dragon--or even, for that matter, a dungeon master--I couldn't have invented a better one than "Gygax." In other words, Gary Gygax was a perfect example of the syndrome known as "nominative determinism." Another term for this effect, which makes men named Postman become postal carriers and people named Teeth become dentists--coined by the New Scientist--is aptonym, a very apt descriptor, I'd say. I have posted on this before. In honor of Mr. Gygax, savior of many a geek over the past two-and-a-half-or-so decades, I offer a special salute. You couldn't have been better named, and your name will live on. Keep on rolling those 8-sided dice, wherever you are.

M&A Law Humor (yes, really)

2008-02-19T15:27:00.000-08:00

I didn't think there would be such thing as this, but that was before a friend sent me this link: http://poison-pill.blogspot.com/. This is a humor blog about Marty Lipton, inventor of the famous "poison pill." All you corporate M&A fanboys and girls out there, knock yourselves out.

Forget Microhoo merger: sneaky squirrels!

2008-02-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

At the risk of turning this blog into a Boing Boing imitator, this piece of science news just can't be ignored. Turns out that squirrels are even smarter than anyone believed. They stage fake burials of nuts in order to fool thieves. This incredible piece of news was picked up by one of my favorite blogs, 60 Second Science. Those rascally critters!

According to a study conducted by Dr. Michael Steele of Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, a fifth of all nut burials by gray squirrels were fakes. And if their store of nuts and acorns is under threat, they'll do even more faux burying to put their adversaries off the scent. But anyone who's ever tried to put up a bird feeder will find this evidence of squirrel intelligence unsurprising.

Microhoo merger: what's it all about Stevie?

2008-02-03T07:58:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's $44B bid for Yahoo is a recipe intended to put a dent in Google's armor, right? That's what all the headlines are about. But what doesn't sell papers is this: there's enough business out there to build ten Google-sized companies over the next decade or so. The potential in pay per click advertising is that huge. So, why do we need a merger between these two behemoths? Because Microsoft doesn't have Yahoo's search and ad capabilities. As my wise business professor Bruce Greenwald once explained it to me, the smartest companies are the ones that take their attention away from hammering away at their competitors in head-to-head combat, and instead figure out how to grow and keep their customer base. And this is exactly what Microsoft and Yahoo are doing. By joining forces, they can carve out a large and profitable swath for themselves in the space that has made Google wealthy: online advertising.

Merck and Schering Plough, scapegoats

2008-01-27T14:47:00.000-08:00

By now the whole world has heard the story of the Vytorin trial, Enhance, which showed that the drug, a combination of Zocor and Zetia, was a failure. What this trial did--or should have done--is lay to rest the spurious cholesterol hypothesis for once and for all. But here's where I think the drug companies are getting an inappropriate amount of undeserved flack.

What's going on is that a cherished hypothesis is heading for the trash heap, and people are looking around for someone to blame.

So now we have NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo investigating whether the two pharma companies that were collaborating on the drug, Merck and Schering-Plough deliberately buried the results of the Enhance trial.

Who knows whether or not they did this. But as damning as it sounds, the whole drama around the results is just a distraction. The real news here is that the trial failed, as did the Torcetrapib trial before it, which had the same results. And as long as we're assigning blame, why don't we consider some of the other, more obvious culprits? Maybe Mr. Cuomo should look in his own backyard.

For starters, there's the FDA. This government agency was so enamored of the idea that LDL is bad, it decided to approve any drug that lowered it, without requiring that the drugmaker show that the pill had any effect on heart disease. Then there's NHBLI, which has doggedly pushed the cholesterol theory. And what about university and government backed medical researchers? Shouldn't one of them have taken note of the mounting evidence against the hypothesis and done something about it?

And why, I might ask, is no blame placed at the feet of doctors--the men and women who routinely prescribe such treatments at Zetia and Vytorin and Tocetrapib without considering their worth. As any citizen knows, it's impossible to get through an appointment with one of these folks--no matter his or her specialty--without a lecture about the dangers of high cholesterol and saturated fat.

With all this in mind, I think we should cut these companies a little slack. Clearly, they were sincere in their belief that the drug would work. Otherwise, why would they conduct the trial? So instead of shooting the messenger, I suggest everyone stop and look at the message. Because when it comes down to it, we're all going to be looking to these evil, terrible drug companies for the next panacea.

The strangest job ad I've ever seen on Craigslist

2008-01-25T15:34:00.000-08:00

As a writer, I'm aware we can be called upon to do some strange jobs. But today's ad on Craigslist takes the cake. The listing reads, in part: "Writer needed to work as Private Investigator," with the following job description: "Private investigations firm is seeking a writer willing to work as a private investigator. The concept behind this position is to provide the writer with the foundation to create a magazine or newspaper column dedicated to investigating infidelity, fraud, and computer crimes." Whaa??? But then it really gets weird.

In the job description, there are several qualities listed that the "writer should possess." They are:
• The ability to perform the job of private investigator
• The ability to perform as a team player
• The ability to retain critical investigative procedures
• The ability to elicit behavior from the investigative subjects
• The ability to ask pertinent questions of the investigative subjects
• The ability to act
• The ability to perform the above tasks while wearing a bodywire or a hidden camera
• The ability to meet a deadline
• The ability to search for and gather information
• The ability to respond to reader inquiries and situations with varying degrees of intelligent humor, wit, sarcasm, and common sense.
• A passion for helping those who are victims

Varying degrees of intelligent humor, wit, and saracasm, eh? Could this be the kind of intelligence that sniffs out phony job listings? Or, is this for real and they're just hoping for some kind of free publicity? Pretty likely, especially considering the salary for the position will "be negotiated upon experience and media contacts."