Links for the Week Ending 1/27/07

Some random interesting links I’ve come across this week…

Interesting studies show a trend towards two emerging groups of new entrepreneurs – 20-somethings and baby boomers.  The question is, where does that leave an aging Gen X-er like me?  Courtesy of Jeff Cornwall and his Entrepreneurial Mind blog

More blurring of the lines between Second Life and the “real life” of work, as IBM extends their real-world Lotus conference into the metaverse.  Courtesy of Second Life Insider

Help for budding entrepreneurs and start-up artists is here!  Pam Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation is collaborating with Startup Nation’s Jeff and Rich Sloan, and John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing to offer a coaching program for start-ups entitled “10 Steps to Open for Business”.  If I wasn’t already taking a class this semester, I’d be fighting for a spot in this one – hopefully this will be the first in a series of similar programs.

Staying in the start-up / small business vein, John Marrioti pens a fascinating look at anticipated trends facing small business in 2007 at Small Business Trends.  One of the most interesting notes is the very first point – that the exodus of talent away from corporate America to the world of small business or self-employment is expected to continue unabated in 2007.

Tara Hunt offers an interesting take on the meaning of economic progress and the metrics used to measure that progress on her HorsePigCow blog.  Tara and her PiC Chris Messina are the drivers behind Citizen Agency, a San Francisco consultancy that’s taking a refreshing approach to a hidebound business.

That’s it for now…enjoy the rest of the weekend, and here’s best wishes for a great week ahead!

Another Take on RSS Readers

After posting yesterday on the things that I like and dislike about the Google Reader, I remembered this post of Dave Winer’s from last week, taking an alternative view to the “Unread Items count” issue.  He makes a good point, and after all, he’s probably the leading thinker on this kind of stuff, but I would still rather see how many unread items I have.  Maybe my brain just doesn’t work right 

Google Reader, Part III

So after a full week using Google Reader, I have to say that I think I’m sold.  I don’t expect to be going back to Newsgator anytime soon.  I especially like the “river of news” style All Items view, which I think speeds reading and processing feeds by a significant margin over the folder-based structure of Newsgator.

However, there are a couple of things that I really don’t like about Google Reader.

The biggest problem is that the All Items view, which has a counter to display how many unread items you have, maxes out at 100, so if I have more than 100 unread posts, it simply shows “100+”.  Now, this may not seem like a big deal, but I like knowing that I’m making progress in reading my feeds.  With over 70 feeds that I subscribe to, it doesn’t take too long at all to accumulate more than 100 unread items.  And if I don’t get to pop onto the Reader for a day or more, I end up moving through post after post, without really knowing how close I am to getting my Unread posts down to a manageable number.  I finally was able to work down below 100 posts tonite, after 4 days of seeing the 100+ indicator every day.  Maybe it’s just me and my task-oriented, metrics-obsessed brain, but it really bothers me that I can’t gauge my progress as I move through my unread posts. 

The other issue I have with the Reader may not actually be a Reader issue – it could be an IE7 issue.  But, as I’m moving through the All Items view, the Reader seems to freeze or hang now and again.  It’s usually not for more than 3 or 4 seconds, but it’s enough to disrupt the “flow” if I’m really moving through posts.  In addition, if I leave the Reader open and Hibernate my PC, Reader has issues the next time I go to use it.  The unread items counter often doesn’t work at all, and remains stuck at whatever it was set at when I reawakened my PC, until I close my browser and reopen Reader.  I think I’ll try Reader on Firefox 2.0 for a couple of days and see if there’s any difference.

 All in all, though…I do like the product.  I think I’ll keep it for a while.

I think this will be my last post for a while on the Google Reader…I don’t want to be known as a One Trick Pony in the blogosphere (not that this has been a particularly good trick).

First Impressions Are Powerful…

But you already knew that, didn’t you?  Even though I’ve long realized how important first impressions really are, I had an experience Monday night that highlighted just how effective some people are at making first impressions.  It also made me think about how, as much as we talk about making a good first impression, it takes a little work to really make one.

 Monday was the first night of a class I’m taking this semester, that will occupy 2 nights a week for the next 12 weeks.  After just one night of the course, I walked away feeling pretty confident that I’m going to get my money’s worth in this class, and that the instructor is going to do right by us.  What made me feel this way?  Well, the instructor, and the way she presented herself:

Honest and Authentic

During the course of the class, she told a lot of stories to help make her points, and many of them were stories from her personal experiences.  But they weren’t all stories about shining successes; she told a number of stories about mistakes she had made in the past.  But every story was real, and the way she told them left no doubt that they were the truth.

Genuinely Interested

She started the class by asking each student to introduce themselves.  But she didn’t let us off the hook by simply explaining who we were and why we were taking the class.  She wanted to know something unique about every person in the class, and the thing is, she really took the time to dig a little and draw people out a little.  She showed real interest in the unique backgrounds of everyone in the class, and tried to make connections between individual members of the class, in an effort to draw us all closer together, since we’ll be spending the next 3 months together twice a week.

Authoritative

She clearly knew her stuff, period.  Having been practicing in her chosen field for over 20 years, maybe that comes as no surprise.  She demonstrated a very solid knowledge of the subject matter, but didn’t come across as superior to her students.  And, she made it clear that she saw it as her job to pass along her knowledge, to share it, and she seemed genuinely excited to get her students excited about the subject.  She also made it clear that she expected a serious commitment from her students – but she didn’t come across as harsh or overbearing.  She had a quiet confidence that we students would recognize that she was serious, and, as she put it, “act like adults”. 

Overall, it was an interesting evening, for some unexpected reasons.  As much as I dread the time commitment this course is going to require, given everything else going on, I do think I’m going to get a lot out of it.

Google Reader, Part II

OK, so after a rough start, I finally got going with the Google Reader, and so far, I’m impressed.  It took me a few minutes to get the “lay of the land”, and I’m quite sure that I’ve got a lot to learn about the advanced features, but the product is definitely a “Google product”.  I really like the Ajax-y feel to the product, the way that portions of the screen refresh without that annoying total white screen.  I also really like the “All Items” view, where you get all of your unread entries from all of your feeds in a single window, and the entries are automatically marked “Read” as you scroll past them. 

I also really like the “shortcut” keystrokes that Google has provided to help navigate the torrent of posts that come with subscribing to dozens and dozens of feeds.  The “j/k” combination that allows you to step forward or backward through posts one at a time, and the space bar allows you to page through multiple page posts. 

At this point, I’ve got about 70 feeds that I’m subscribed to, and on an average day I’ve got about 200 posts to review.  This evening, being a weekend, I browsed through about 70 posts in about 40 minutes, while watching the Patriots-Colts game.  While I don’t have any statistics on how long it would take me to do the same on Newsgator, perhaps I’ll try a few unscientific studies this week, and compare the performance of the two tools. 

There’s still a lot I need to learn about the Reader, but so far, I think that the tool definitely makes it easier to sift through the blogs that I’ve subscribed to.  I’ll be sure to report back as things develop.

Tales of Google Reader, Part 1

After almost a year relying on Newsgator for my daily fix of blogs, I decided it might be time to try something different.  Since I’ve been pretty happy with the other Google tools that I’ve used (I’m a Google Maps junkie), I thought that I’d give Google Reader a go.  And, given my other experiences with Google tools, I figured that getting set up and using the Reader would be a snap.

Well…not so much.  Which kind of surprises me, and I’m willing to stay open to the possibility that all of this is my fault, and that a more technically savvy individual wouldn’t have this kind of problem.

I started out by taking the tour of Reader on the site – the features looked pretty cool, and I know Robert Scoble raves about Reader’s shortcut features all the time.  So now I’m sold – let’s get feed reading!  The next step, I figured, was to import my blog subscriptions from Newsgator to Reader.  I was encouraged to see a link to directions for doing exactly that right on the Reader Import/Export tab.  All I had to do was create an OPML file from Newsgator, save it on my laptop, and upload it into Google Reader.  Sounds pretty darn easy, right?

Except it wasn’t.  I created the OPML file from Newsgator, and tried to upload it, but got an error message indicating that my OPML file wasn’t formatted properly.  Hmmmm.  OK, maybe I did something wrong, specified the wrong file extension or missed a check box I should have checked.  So I tried it again, paying careful attention to every step along the way.  Still got the same error message.  So I tried to find some help on the Google Reader site, but they directed any inquiries about OPML problems to the downloading feedreader.  So I looked on the Newsgator site, and didn’t find a lot of help there, either.  At this point, I decided maybe it was my old Firefox 1.0 browser that might be the culprit, so I switched over to IE7 and repeated the process.  Unfortunately, I repeated the error, too. 

At this point, I was getting more than a bit frustrated.  This operation didn’t seem like a real tough one when I started, and I’m sure thousands of people, probably even millions, have done this since Google Reader was released.  So, I started researching OPML itself, to see if I could find any problems in the OPML file that Newsgator generated.  After reading some pretty interesting articles for almost 45 minutes, I realized I was just dodging the problem, so I turned back to the problem at hand.  My last ditch idea was to upgrade my Firefox browser, and see if that made a difference.  So I upgraded to Firefox 2.0, and tried again.  This time, I noted that in the Newsgator help it did recommend choosing Save As “Web page, complete”, which was not an option in Firefox 1.0, but was an option in 2.0.  Presto!  The upgrade did the trick, and Google Reader rewarded me with a message indicating that my feeds had successfully been uploaded.  Excellent!  Success!!

 Except…

It’s been 30 minutes, and the only things that have showed up in my All Items folder are a couple of comments from months ago off of this blog, which I subscribed to.  Maybe it’s just going to take some time for all of the subscriptions to download, but we’ll see…this ain’t over yet, apparently. 

More to come

More iPhone Hype…or not

Well, after months of speculation and rumor, Steve Jobs and just-plain Apple (no Computer) have unveiled the iPhone.  There’s a pretty slick demo on the Apple site, and Apple has apparently done exactly what they are good at -they’ve delivered a smooth looking product, with some legitimate innovations, including (it appears) a feature that will automatically change the orientation of a photo based on how the phone is held.  Apple has also started to blur the lines between a phone and a computer, with a graphical voicemail tool that lets you choose which voicemails you want to listen to, in the order you choose. 

But outside of some really neat UI, is the iPhone really a radical departure for a cell phone?  At it’s core, it’s a phone, with email and photo capabilities, and while the interface is really smooth, is it all that much different that my Blackberry 7105 in terms of raw functionality?  And, at the end of the day, you’ve got one telecom choice if you buy an Apple – Cingular.  While I’ve heard good things about Cingular’s coverage, you’re still tied to one provider.  If you live in an area where Cingular’s coverage is spotty, your iPhone isn’t going to be all that useful.  All in all, this seems like a really good deal for Cingular, since there are tons of Apple-philes who are going to be lining up in June to plunk down $499 for an iPhone.  But how much of a deal is it for the customer, who’s going to be at Cingular’s mercy when it comes to pricing plans?

Maybe down the road, this will turn out to be a good deal for the average consumer, IF Apple uses their new relationship with Cingular to go beyond basic hardware/software design, and develop some innovations that push the envelope of what a mobile phone/computer is all about.  The iPhone is a start, and I think it’s going to be a slick product, but I’m not sure it’s going to move markets the way the iPod did.

(Price) Tag Memories

The title of this post doesn’t actually refer to metadata tags, but to good old-fashioned pricetags.  My wife gave me a nice new sport coat for Christmas, and I decided to wear it today.  Naturally, before I could wear it, I had to remove no fewer than 4 tags that were attached to the coat, in a variety of obscure locations.  I’m pretty anal about removing tags, mainly because of something that happened over 30 years ago…to someone I don’t really even know…

One Christmas, when I was about 10, my family and I went to Christmas Eve services at our church.  One of the gentlemen at the service obviously had just bought a new suit for the holiday.  How was it so obvious?  Well, under his arm, there still dangled a pricetag, a nice white one that stood out against the dark blue of his suit.  Thirty years later, my mother still recalls that story every Christmas, and as a result, every time I buy a new article of clothing, I spend a ton of time making sure that I’ve removed every tag from the article, because I don’t want to be remembered 30 years from now for having missed a tag.

 Which brings me to the real intent of this post – the design process behind collateral material like tags and packaging.  Why, for example, do companies need to put so many tags on a piece of clothing, and make them so hard to find sometimes?  Why do toy companies have to encase toys in so much plastic, and wrap them in wire ties that have to but unraveled or cut before the toy can be used?  I know there are “reasons” for all of this, but are they really friendly to the consumer, or are they in place for some assumed benefit to the manufacturer, or the retailer?

Having just survived another Christmas with 3 kids, I have to say that my least favorite part of the day is trying to remove all the unnecessary tags and wraps from items.  None of that does anything for me, except waste my time, and detract from the enjoyment of the item in question.  I just wonder when retailers and manufacturers are going to recognize that and do something about it.

Resolutions 2007

OK, maybe not a lot of people want to read about someone else’s resolutions, but this post is probably going to be more of a placeholder for me to look back on in 6 or 8 or 10 months to see if I’ve actually kept true to myself.  I don’t want to make real specific statements, because I’m not a fortune teller, and I don’t know exactly how this year is going to unfold.  But, I do want to try and make 2007 a year of change, of intentional growth, and of conscious focus on LIVING life.  So here goes…

*  I resolve to push myself into being more bold and fearless at work, by taking on at least one action every week that I would have shied away from or procrastinated in the past.

*  I resolve to find ways to be a better dad to my kids, and a better husband to my wife, by spending less time on “time wasters” and devoting a specific period on them every day, whether it’s for 10 minutes or 4 hours.

*  I resolve to do a better job keeping up with our family finances, both in terms of managing the day to day expenses, as well as focusing on the long term, and our investment picture.

*  I resolve to do a better job taking care of myself, from working on getting myself into better shape, to eating better, to managing my mental fitness.

*  I resolve to focus on DESIGNING the life I really want, deep down, from a family perspective, as well as a professional perspective. 

*  And then, I resolve to make it all happen.

New Year, New ???

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve posted, and I thought that perhaps a new year might be a good time to start again.  It’s interesting that the title of my last post was “Blogging is Hard”, since it just seems like one of my problems has been that I just haven’t wanted to take the time to create the kind of posts that I’d like, and so therefore, I simply haven’t posted.  But, I still WANT to blog, I still WANT to learn about how this whole thing works, and I still WANT to use this medium as a sounding board for a lot of day to day thoughts and ideas. 

 So, here I am, ready to try again.  One of the most fascinating things that I discovered as I refamiliarized myself with my WordPress account was that I’ve actually gotten a few pageviews over the last month, even though I haven’t posted anything.  Now, it’s entirely possible that the views were from bots, but it’s kind of nice to think that at least a few people may have stumbled across my ramblings recently. 

 Let’s see what the New Year brings…