Two Birds, One Stone

Access the twitter bootstrap popover node

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:42:59 -0500

I’ve been struggling to find a way to reference the actual node that twitter’s bootstrap popover creates. Just do this:

https://gist.github.com/1512332

Run your functional tests with ACLs

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:17:06 -0500

For whatever reason, we started getting the following errors when we moved our functional tests (using LiipFunctionalTestBundle) from MySQL to sqlite:

General error: 17 database schema has changed

To get around this, you can simply specify an alternate sqlite database to hold your ACL tables.

https://gist.github.com/1407065

Company's mojo stems from culture

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:02:00 -0400

I attended a great Webinar the other day, thanks to the fine folks at Rypple, by Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre hotels. He provided a great framework for thinking about motivation based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, arguing that once the basic human needs (job) and the sense of belonging (career) are met, an individual can then ascend to the “PEAK” of self-actualization (calling). The groundwork to allow this to happen is corporate culture and not just simple tactical things like “casual Fridays” or “social clubs”. It requires a deeper grain of culture that every person in the organization embodies and can be drawn out an nurtured to encourage a connection with purpose… a “calling” as Chip calls it. A lot of what Chip talked about reflects my own beliefs and goals of creating a strong culture here at MemoryLeaf. It’s tough to do though, and I think that it can be impossible to try and “engineer”. And it shouldn’t really be engineered… the best I can hope is to help shape the organic growth of our team. A broader snapshop of the webinar is here: http://blog.rypple.com/2011/03/top-tips-from-chip-conley/ or you can watch the whole thing below.

What is my company worth?

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:12:00 -0500

Valuation seems to be one of the tougher questions to answer when starting up a new venture - especially if it is your first time. I understand (for the most part) how many of the various models work, having learned many of them during my MBA. Now that I’m nearly finished school and out trying to get my company, MemoryLeaf, off and running, I’m finding the question of valuation a bit daunting. Helpfully, Jordan Cooper just posted a seed stage valuation guide which helps answer some of the questions. Am I valuing my planned funding rounds high enough to not dilute myself out of the picture in future rounds, but low enough that I can attract investors and not have down rounds of future funding? Is my pricing attractive enough for employees receiving stock options? It’s all a bit scary and seems ridiculously error prone… and ultimately, subject to the whim of “he with the money”. Essentially it all boils down to making a whole bunch of assumptions and making an educated guess. I’ve used two models: The VC Method where you estimate an exit valuation (likely based on some multiple of revenues or earnings or a mix of the two) for some time horizon, then discount that back through your various funding events with a (fairly high) discount rate (50%+). In this case, the investor’s risk is incorporated into the high discount rate with the aim to yield desired returns over several parallel investments. I find this to be the easiest to use as it requires few inputs but feel a bit awkward making 7-10 year projections with multiples that could change. I also use my instructor Thomas Hellman’s PROFEX model (scroll to the “Teaching Materials” section). PROFEX stands for PRobability OF EXit. In PROFEX you estimate the probability of exit, failure, and subsequent funding for each round and corresponding valuations for each scenario. This allows you to model the risk separately so you can use a more meaningful discount rate giving a true rate of return. It also allows for valuation of failure (fire sale of assets, etc). I like this model a lot as it makes you think more critically about each round and seems to be less forgiving than the VC model. However, it requires a lot of inputs and because it uses a whole different set of assumptions, your outputs will likely be vastly different than the VC model. Also, no one really uses this - yet. Being a first-time startup, it’s difficult to know if these valuations are in the realm of reasonable or not. It’s best to try and proxy against other similar events happening around you, which, in itself, can be difficult to know. Having a good, connected lawyer helps and keeping up with the news. It’s also great when someone in the industry blogs about what is going on and gives some ranges to compare yourself against. Thanks to Jordan Cooper for posting his seed stage valuation guide. Now I feel validated a bit more in my assumptions.

Real estate agents, dying breed

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 18:36:00 -0500

I’ve finally sold my condo! In a down market, less than a month before Christmas, and without a real estate agent. What are my secrets to success? I’ve blogged about selling my condo once before, and most everyone who know me knows the crazy story of my building catching on fire the day I moved all my stuff out. Bad luck and crazy good luck all in one neat little water damaged package. Since I’ve just finished everything and my condo is now sold and money is in the bank (granted I took a bit of a hit since the last time I sold the thing, but all-in-all I’m still happy). So now I can reflect on the process with out worry that I will jinx it and the building will catch fire again. I didn’t like it, but I had the unique opportunity of selling my condo twice! I’ve learned a great deal about the process and I can tell you that I will almost certainly never use a real estate agent again. I’ve said this before, but as far as I’m concerned for a person like myself a realtor ads no value other than the MLS listing. And this is not worth the $15,000-$20,000 in commissions I would have had to pay. Local classifieds, Kijiji, frequent open houses, and proper staging helped me sell my condo is less than 2 months in a down market. I now believe that the real estate profession will begin dying and is in serious need of a change now that their monopoly over MLS has ended. You can now get your property listed on MLS for flat rates through places like PropertyGuys.com and SnapListings.ca. I’m seeing more and more PropertyGuys lawn signs these days and with their new MLS listing feature, I expect to see their numbers start to take off. Agents need to move to a flat rate structure and start adding value to differentiate themselves somehow. How can they do this? Get out of those national companies and start up a smaller company, get some value add services (decorators/stagers, photographers), figure out how to automate as much as you can, understand online metrics, and ultimately evolve quickly. My apologies to any real estate agents who take offence, but I think your industry is a bit like the newspaper industry now. Evolve or die.

Dealing deals like a dealer

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:55:00 -0500

Rumours are floating around today that Groupon has been bought by Google pegging a valuation around $2.5B. Not bad for a company that didn’t exist a few years ago. Groupon is interesting, in that it presents ridiculous deals that people and companies are clamouring to get involved with. I have yet to buy a Groupon deal (mainly because they aren’t yet available in my small town, and I’m not in Vancouver enough to hit that scene). I like the idea though. My problem with it from a business point of view is how can I use Groupon to encourage new customers while keeping existing customers coming. What’s to stop my best customers from buying the Groupons and cutting into my margins? Some reports indicate some “not so hot” satisfaction among participating businesses. How can I make deals only for new customers? Enter, AppSumo.com. Now AppSumo doesn’t compete with Groupon and doesn’t even serve the same audience. It’s a deal site for web applications geared more towards startups and web users looking for deals on web services that they want to start using. Here’s why AppSumo makes sense:

You can limit usage to new users only. Since it’s the web and we can control who uses our software, we can make the offers legit only for new users (or users upgrading to higher tiers). This doesn’t cut into margins on current customers.
It’s a targeted audience. These are typically business apps for business users. We aren’t trying to sell steaks and jewelry and massages day after day.
It’s habit forming. Web apps are usually structured on a pay-per-use or subscription system. You don’t just buy it once and use it forever. So the deal is like the old adage “the first one is free”, but then you are hooked (for one reason or another) and you now represent a recurring revenue stream with very little overhead. It also usually means that you are using a higher tier of the app with better/more features that you will become accustomed to and less likely to cancel.

For me, this has meant hundreds of dollars in savings and gives me a much more useful “try-before-you-buy” experience than the usual 30-day free trial or free account. Now, I don’t know how this could be applied to the offline world easily in a site like Groupon, but online AppSumo is killing it. Disclaimer: The link to AppSumo is a referral link giving me $10 credit if you buy one of their deals. This doesn’t affect my opinion of them.

Make me look good

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 11:11:00 -0500

Want to earn some serious brand loyalty and advocacy? Make me look awesome to my friends. This US Thanksgiving, Agile Web Solutions gave customers some licenses of their products to give away to their friends. I use 1Password on a daily basis and have essentially given up all my credential management to it. So when I had the chance to give the software away to some friends, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Bonus was that my friend Max was interested in the software and was asking about it… timing = perfect. So I had 3 licenses valued at $30+ each to give away earning some favours with my friends, Agile Web Solutions got some new customers who might buy the iOS version of the software, and I’m now a devote customer who will vocalize my opinion about them. EVERYBODY wins! This just goes to show, that you don’t have to go far to go far in your customer’s minds.

Foursquare isn't dead, its niche

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:24:00 -0500

A class mate blogged about why he thinks Foursquare is dead. I agree with much of what he says, that the “check-in” space is becoming exceptionally competitive and the big guys like Facebook and even Twitter could threaten their user base. However, I think Foursquare’s power is it’s niche usage and merit badge system. Maybe I’m just a geek, but I often prefer the simple concise application over the complicated do-everything application, akin to the Unix/Linux command-line tool mindset of “do one thing, but do it well”. Foursquare essentially only does one thing, let people know when you’re at some location. Simple. Easy to understand. Use if you wish. Add to this it’s interoperability with other applications via it’s API (granted Facebook’s places API is similar) I don’t even have to use Foursquare to use Foursquare. I can use Instagram to check into Foursquare. The merit/badge system is another aspect that I think will drive more usage. The few people in my circle who use Foursquare makes the badge system more engaging. Someone unlocks an interesting badge, I want it too, and vice versa. Exclusive badges adds to the game. RunKeeper (my run tracking iPhone app) has 5k, 10k, and marathon badges that you can unlock on Foursquare by running the requisite distance. This collection of badges is what keeps me from easily moving to another check-in app. As a marketer, this needs to play into the your strategy just like any other social media platform. Who are these niche users? What are your goals for these users? Can you implement?

How much engagement is too much?

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:29:00 -0500

Twitter is fun for me. Certainly more interesting and useful than Facebook (and I’m eagerly looking forward to the ability to remove myself from those damn mass Facebook messages that I didn’t opt-in to). I like the casual, random, and brief conversations you can have with strangers and brands. Recently I was replying to a twitter friend (someone I randomly met on TinyChat) about her scientific experiments in web hacking she was conducting in the safety of her own home. I suggested that she add a bit of Fireball into the mix as another variable to her experiment. To my pleasant surprise, @FireballWhiskey, replied asking what kind of debacle I was dragging him into. It was a friendly, humorous exchange that did not involve pushing some brand message down my throat. It was a brief conversation that was timely and just the right amount of engaging. Did I go out and buy some Fireball? No. But I did visit their Facebook page, and give them about 1 minute of my time. And I reference the experience to people in conversation. I probably won’t buy a bottle anytime soon, but I haven’t written them off yet either. Contrast this with a local company that follows me on Twitter (who I shall not name). They occasionally reply to my tweets with a comment like “great photo” or some barely relevant question about something-or-rather. It feels like he’s trying to be my friend, and it feels a bit disingenuous and a tad icky. In general though, I’ve had some pretty decent experiences with brands on Twitter. A free poster from @CraigslistTV (you should be watching this on youtube, it’s great!), some free software, lots of “thank you“‘s and retweets from brands and even semi-famous actors. What works?

If you want a conversation, be genuine, interesting, and timely
Thank you’s are an easy way to let me know that you heard me
Random free stuff with out me having to jump through hoops
Awesome free stuff and I might jump through hoops
Following me after I tweet good things about you

What doesn’t?

Appearing needy
Generic-ness
Plain ol’ uninterestingness.

Vital Stats for B2B

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:00:00 -0500

After my interview with Andrew Spoeth earlier this week I started poking around for some interesting B2B marketing tidbits and didn’t have to go far. Andrew posted a link to a great video showing some stats for B2B marketing. Some of the stats were quite unexpected for me. The most interesting stats for me after the video:

Of B2B companies, 82% maintain a social media presence and 75% utilize microblogging. B2C: 67% are in social media, and 49% in microblogging
54% of CIOs prohibit social networking at work while 93% of B2B buyers believe companies should have a social media presence
90% marketers say it would be unwise to ignore social media, but 63% don’t have a social media strategy

All the stats are listed here: http://earnestagency.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/vital-statistics-for-every-b2b-marketer/

An Interview with Andrew Spoeth on Thought Leadership

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:30:00 -0500

Last year, Gartner published a short release proclaiming that thought leadership was no longer the exclusive domain of large consulting firms and that is was a growing marketing field. In this release, they define thought leadership as:

… the giving — for free or at a nominal charge — of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.

In a response to this release Chris Koch argued that this definition is too narrow and would result in a “brochure on steroids” interpretation. Rather, that we should discard traditional “thought leadership marketing” and instead pursue “idea marketing” placing higher value on the conversation. In the world of social media, this makes the most sense. Being part of the conversation and responding to real needs are what make you a thought leader. And as Andrew points out below, you’re not a thought leader unless other people consider you to be. Andrew Spoeth is the Senior Manager of Marketing Programs at Marketo. Andrew blogs regularly at the Modern B2B Marketing Blog at blog.marketo.com and at www.MarketingFinger.com. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions from me on the topic of thought leadership: Briefly, what is your definition of Thought Leadership? Thought leadership means:

Being seen as a knowledge leader in a given area
Someone who is turned to for advice and is recognized in industry
Being regularly cited and quoted by others

Do you have some examples of outstanding Thought Leadership? I typically attribute thought leadership to individuals. Since I work in tech and marketing, names I follow include Seth Godin, Avinash Kaushik, and Guy Kawasaki. Where is Thought Leadership most effective? B2C, B2B, specific industry, personal brand? How would you measure its success? Thought leadership is particularly effective in B2B, where education can play a big role in defining a brand and building trust with an audience of prospective customers. Most of the time, we see corporate thought leadership being propelled by a personal brand. People look up to individuals. It isn’t easy to measure the effectiveness of thought leadership. It takes a long time to build up and is intangible. To start, you can try to count sales referrals from, e.g. speaking at a given conference. But in reality, the effect of brand and trust is difficult to measure. Something you may want to consider is having a blog to produce thought leadership content and then measure traffic, opportunities and sales from individuals that have interacted with the blog. What are some tactics to consider when developing a Thought Leadership strategy? Depth vs Breadth? Depth over breadth. Become *the* expert in one specific field. Don’t push your products or services. Share insights freely and be generous with your ideas. Know the pains and challenges of your audience, be able to verbalize them. Speak passionately about your subject. Be accessible. Do you have any advice for pitfalls to avoid? Don’t call yourself a thought leader. Or a guru for that matter. You can only be a thought leader if others see you as one. Finally, how can someone like yourself or Marketo help an organization with Thought Leadership Marketing? Marketo sells software which marketers use to measure and drastically improve the performance of their online marketing efforts, e.g. through email marketing, lead management and revenue cycle analytics. Thought leadership content is often found online, in blogs, in newsletters, in social media. With Marketo’s software, we are able to deliver and measure interaction with this content and help prospective buyers move forward from general interest in your subject matter, to becoming a new customer. I want to thank Andrew for taking the time to answer my questions. If you want to start developing your brand as a thought leader, this slide deck has some questions that can get you started.

Thought Leadership Marketing

View more presentations from Jim Pennypacker.

Website evaluations should include accessibility

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 13:00:00 -0400

In our digital marketing class we talked about usability as a dimension for evaluating a website. Our generated list included things like: cleanliness of design, ease of navigation, forms that don’t act hostilely towards the user, etc (on a related note, one thing that irritates me is when a mailing address form asks me for my state/province before my country, but requires that I set my country in order to get the Canadian provinces to populate the list). One aspect of websites that is often overlooked is its accessibility. Accessibility addresses how accessible your website is to users of various abilities, or more clearly, of various disabilities. For example, users with color-blindness will have great difficulty accessing information in certain color combinations. A common “brick and mortar” analogy is increasing wheelchair accessibility to your place of business with the installation of wheelchair ramps. Why is this important? It’s not an insignificant demographic. A 2006 Stats Canada study found that over 800,000 Canadians identify themselves as having a visual disability (more stats on other disabilities can be found here: http://bit.ly/9yZgh7). This equates to just over 3% of the population. Certain industries and government websites are legislated to meet specific accessibility requirements. Additionally, adherence to accessibility guidelines such as those set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium tend to result in more standards based HTML which can improve cross browser/device usability. Proper accessibility techniques can result in better search placing by search engines like Google. Accessibility should be undertaken for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do as a compassionate human being, but it also has some beneficial side effects. So when you are conducting a website evaluation for your next project, don’t ignore accessibility.

Crowdsource Your Market Research in Canada

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:33:00 -0400

In September, a short article made the rounds in the twitterverse. It described an entrepreneur’s use of Amazon’s mechanical turk to “crowdsource” some of her market research.

For $27.50 she was able to survey 200 people and generate some validation about her business idea (to help you with the math that works out to approx. $0.14 per respondent). Great idea! Let’s do it! ….. Wait. I live in Canada, and we sometimes seem to get the raw end of the deal when it comes to technology availability (Hulu and 1st Gen iPhone come to mind). This “embargo” also exists for mechanical turk. I.e, Canadians can opt to complete crowdsource tasks, but we are not permitted to create our own tasks for others to complete. So as a Canadian, I am unable to create a survey on MTurk. There are ways around this (using a US mailing address, or a broker service - which seem to be of questionable quality) but they all seem a bit underhanded. So what are our options? You could use a panel service, where you will get pre-screened respondents that match your target demographic. For example, iTracks.com specializes in Canadian consumers with their CanadaTalkNow.ca service. The cost for their panels are around $3.50 per completed survey with a minimum of $500. A bit on the pricey side for a startup or a student. However, I expect that the quality of answers will be quite high. I ended up using a crowd sourcing service called MicroWorkers.com. It functions similarly to mechanical turk allowing you to create all sorts of tasks for people to do. I created my task asking people to fill out my 12 question survey (less than 4 min to complete) and offered $0.30 per respondent. After two weeks in the system, I had 1 response. After increasing the pay to $0.55 per respondent I now average about 1 response every day. Not exactly the performance I was hoping for, but I’m not in a huge hurry so I will just let it run its course. I’m quite confident that I would be able to generate 50 responses over two weeks if I bumped the pay to $1 per response. In looking at the other tasks posted to the MicroWorkers.com website (riddled with tasks like “retweet this” or “write a review about this” or “like this page on facebook”) it seems as the quality of my responses may be suspect. As a precaution, I’ve identified these responses in my survey software so I can segment them appropriately. An interesting service that I am watching is AskYourTargetMarket.com which is a crowd sourcing services geared specifically to market research. Again, the respondents are strictly US based but they do plan to add other countries in the future. (The also offer a pro-bono service to non-profits). In short, crowdsourcing your market research is approaching “utility” like prices (if you live in the US) but quality can start to become a concern. Despite the quality, it can be a cheap way to validate a few ideas.

The success of home selling... and failure

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:30:00 -0400

So my little experiment with for-sale-by-owner home selling was a great success. In May I had an accepted offer with all subjects removed and a closing date coming up soon. I rented a moving truck, convinced a buddy to help with the heavy stuff and proceeded to move all my things out. That afternoon, my building caught fire which resulted in some minor water damage to my unit. My flooring needed to be replaced and pushed back any possibility of being able to move things into my place. Needless to say the deal fell through. But I had a sale locked and loaded. How much did this cost me? $50 in google adwords (which did not perform very well and ultimately a waste of money), $40 in Kijiji.ca sponsorship, $50 in local classifieds ads, and roughly $600 in notary fees that I would have incurred had the deal gone through. So, all told, it cost me less than $1000 to sell my condo. Compare this with the roughly 6-8% that I would have paid to a realtor in commission and you can quickly see the value here. I have a really nice condo and it shows very well, thus my strategy was to get people in to see it and let it sell itself. So I hosted 3 open houses, which attracted roughly 20 interested parties and received two offers (one offer leading to the sale). Granted, this cost me time, but not much. I spent roughly 30 hours in total on everything (photos, website, ads, showings, etc). So unless you value your time at over $1000/hr, you can afford to spend the extra time on this (or hire some kid to do it for you). In summary, here are my take-aways and advice for selling yourself in a flat market:

Run frequent open houses yourself. Run them for 2 hours on the weekends and maybe through in the odd weekday open house. People want to see and walk through the place and who knows it better than you. It also gives prospective buyers a chance to come back without having to phone you and book a private showing.
Stage, stage, stage. People claim to be able to see past the clutter, but they are wrong. If you have nasty furniture, get rid of it. If have cluttered space, get rid of the clutter.
Spend ad money on local ads. Half the people coming to my open houses were retirees who found the open house in the local paper. The other half found out through Kijiji or Craigslist. Be sure to tell your facebook friends about your house, you never know who knows someone who’s looking. Google ads drove some traffic to my website, but they didn’t convert.
Take great photos. If your a photographer, great. If not, find a friend who is. Certainly you know someone who is interested in photography. Fill the room with as much natural light as you can and don’t shoot so they look like a realtor took them from shoulder height using a cheap point-and-shoot. Shoot from above head height, it makes the rooms look bigger and it’s a more interesting angle.
Use a notary to write up the sale. Notaries do this all the time and know how it works. You’ll likely save $500 over a lawyer. But when you are the seller, you don’t have to do anything. Just tell your buyer to go get a notary to write up the offer. You should have a notary in mind for your end of the offer though.

That’s pretty much it. I also had a website with a custom domain thinking that google adwords and SEO might be come into play, but it didn’t really. So if you have the skill or time to make a website, it’s handy to tell people a URL, but I’m not convinced it’s necessary. It’s not that expensive and it’s not that hard. I would also argue that using a realtor for these things actually erodes value as they are likely not going to be as effective as doing things yourself. The ONLY value I see that a realtor brings is access to the monopoly that is MLS (but that might be changing soon). So now that my condo is fixed and ready to sell again, I’m giving it another go. I have some different strategies this time given the slight market changes and my timing before Christmas. Wish me luck.

For sale, by owner experimentation

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:09:08 -0500

So, I’m experimenting with the sale of my home by trying to do it myself sans realtor. There are many reason why, which I won’t go into detail about right now.

I’m trying this out and will write about the success/failure I experience.

For now, go visit http://BuyMyKamloopsCondo.ca and make me an offer :)

Twitter matters, even if you don't

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:01:00 -0400

I’ve only been using twitter regularly for a few months now, prior to which I didn’t see the value in all that noise and inconsequential nothing that seemed to clutter the twitterverse. I didn’t really care what you ate for breakfast, or that you just took your dog for a walk, or any of the million other boring things you do in life that you feel the need to broadcast to the world. It was only after a month (or so) of disciplined use that the value became clearer to me. It comes down to a few things really:

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. Trends give twitter value)
What people say in your network are probably more valueable than what you say, so retweet what matters
It’s so easy, even a celebrity can do it

Trending shows significance

British Columbia recently finished it’s provincial elections and voters turned out to exert their opinion in the democratic process we call voting. Individually my opinion doesn’t matter and makes no difference to the outcome, but collectively the vote effects change. So everyone should feel compelled to vote. Except that unlike voting, we actually get to hear your opinion. It makes no difference if you tweet that you “Just got back from Mexico and feel a flu coming on.” But if thousands of people tweet this we may start to see a trend and can possibly enact some action (Note: ignore your opinion on the validity of reacting specifically to H1N1 and just think in a more general sense). This trending is what is valuable. The real-time aggregate trend provides value to society (for social issues) and to corporations (for brand/product issues) and to consumers (by providing an open and public channel for discussion). Therein lies the beauty of the social web. If you have a problem with something, you let it be known. As consumers, we are exerting more voice and control over products simply because it’s incredibly easy to do so.

Real time pulse on the world

We recently took a trip to the Okanagan and the Naramata Wineries, on the trip we heard news on the radio about the fire in West Kelowna (Westbank). The news didn’t seem to be coming fast enough or up-to-date enough for my liking so I fired up Tweetie on my iPhone and searched for #kelownafire. There was a lot of useful info that people were tweeting.

Your network is valuable to me

I follow you because I feel that you have something important to say and I value what you say. There is an implicit trust there. So when you choose to retweet what someone says I give the value of that tweet more weight than the random noise I see. If I find it interesting, I may make a connection or at the very least find a new source of valuable information to begin following. Likewise, when you retweet what I say, you expose your followers to my thoughts. This connects my message with them at a deeper level and, again, helps me make connections. I can also view a conversation between people which often offers two sides to an opinion which adds even more value for me and enables me to better formulate my own thoughts on the matter. However, twitter is not chat.

Ease of entry

Despite it’s memes and oddities, twitter is possibly the easiest tool of public self expression their is. Blogging takes too damn long, lots of setup, and requires that the reader spend more energy searching the content out. Twitter is quick, takes practically nothing to get going, and you are instantly viewable by the twitterverse. Granted, what you have to say is probably of insignificant importance and will likely just get lost in the noise anyways. But if you twitter about something of value to someone, they are likely watching/searching for that key word and will start following you quickly.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t get it, just that you use it

So it doesn’t really matter that you don’t understand what a hashtag is, or how to retweet, or any of it. Just tweet what matters to you and it will create value for someone else.

Time to start blogging

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:51:00 -0400

I’ve been meaning to start blogging again for a while now. Though I never really had any useful blog in the past I feel as though I have things to say now but never a proper venue to say them. So what’s been holding me up?

Procrastination for one. I’ve always wanted to design the theme and look myself using the blog as a test bed for some usability ideas. Of course, that takes time I never seem to have, so I never got started. Some of the free Wordpress themes are pretty nice looking now and there are a ton of premium themes on various premium sites (e.g. woothemes) so I decided to just suck it up, take a canned theme and just get started on the content. I can build up my own theme later. Another holdup, time. I really don’t have time to do any of this, and I still don’t really. With full time work and part time MBA, any free time I have is usually devoted to trying to spend time with the people I don’t have time to see. However, I feel that the opportunity cost of not blogging is substantial. Ideally I want to increase my visibility in the community at large (both as a career objective and for glory!) but, more importantly, I want to expand my network of contacts and learn from them. I feel that blogging will help me achieve those goals. With that said, I’m ready to go. I have a few house keeping things I want to do first around the setup of the blog, but hopefully I’ll be posting some useful (to someone) content very shortly. I learn stuff every day and try things out so I might as well share those experiences.