Results tagged “oreilly” from Chad

Originally Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2008 8:29AM

I took some notes from http://webexny2008.crowdvine.com/talks/show/1020 - Apologies for spelling errors and typos...

Momentum - with out it you are going to trend toward mediocrity

Typically, people eventually lose interest and just want to finish it

Ideal situation is the bursting sound wave

We try to break all of our big projects into as many small projects as possible. Don't like to work on projects longer than 2 weeks.

NO Roadmaps Specifications or Projections "The problem with roadmaps is you're setting your future in stone."

Specification docs are basically a collection of Yeses, and there's little penalty for adding to it.

Get rid of abstractions - "What are we working on right now? That's the most important"

Decisions are temporary. "You should be optimizing for now."

Red Flag Words - We do a lot of collaboration by typing. The more we collaborate the more we use certain words.

Need - Instead, how "Might we try this?"
Can't - "The truth is you probably can."
Easy - A word you use to describe other people's jobs
Everyone & Nobody - "People use these words to justify decisions. You're really exaggerating and blurring the point."

Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity - "The closer you are with somebody, the less work you actually get done."

Taps on the shoulder
Required meegings
Calling someone's name
"Hey check this out"
Phones & Blackberries

That's why most people get work done in the morning and late at night

A fragmented day is not a productive day. "The only way we ever see each other is on a Thursday. We try to stay away from each other as much as possible. Maybe you can institute a policy where one day a week, noone talks to each other."

Use tools where people can put things to the side and come back to it later.

Focus on what doesn't change - "The tech and software biz seems to be obsessed with change. There's always new stuff coming around the corner.

Today and 10 years from now. "People aren't going to wake up one day and wish things are slower. Speed is always worthwhile. You're better off paying attention to things that aren't going to change in your business."

Avoid worrying about things that don't matter yet - "This is why a lot of projects are late."

"I found it's better to sketch with a big fat sharpie. With a sharpie, you can't create detail. Which is good, because you don't want to focus on detail early on. You want to spend minutes, not days, on a sketch."

**The longer it takes to develop something, the less likely you'll launch it**

Underdoing - "There's a cold war going on out there where everyone's trying to out-do each other. It's like the arms race. It's very expensive and very difficult to win the cold war. It's not something a small business can really do."

Target nonconsumption - (Quoting Clayton Christonson ?Ssp?) "There is this group of people who are not consumers who want to be consumers."

Pick things that are more downmarket, and solving the very very simple problems. the big guys won't even notice you because they've already moved away from that market.

Find the right size - "There's only two things whose sole purpose is to grow for ever: Business and Tumors. You don't have to set the goal of being Google or Facebook

Grow slow - if you go from 10 people to 100 in a year, you might miss a step.

Ricardo Semler (sp?) has a book called Maverick - Oxford University is one of the best university in the world, so why aren't there hundreds of them? Because they found the right size for them.

Follow the chefs - Lagasse, Batali, Flay, Child etc. - They out-teach out share out contribute. "I'm going to give you all of my secrets. They're not afraid to share all of their knowledge. ... So what's your cookbook? We wrote a book called "getting real?" It's not the idea, it's the execution at the end of the day.

"A company is lcuky if it has customers, more if it has fans and even more if it has an audience."

Always be asking questions
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful or is it just cool?
Are we adding value? - Addding something doesn't necessaryly add value. Everything you add, dilutes the product.
Will this change behavior? If not, you want to think about leaving it off
Is there an easier way? The easy is probably more than good enough.

**DOn't think out loud about this

Give up on hard problems. There are abundance of easy problems. I think focusing on the hard problems are better left to your competitors and often not worth it. If you solve 10 easy problems in a month, it's better than working on one hard problems in a month.

32 vs 40 - If you work less, they actually work better. We find that the work is just as good, and people are usually happier. The benefits we see with happier people is work that is better. People just cut out the shit that doesn't matter.

To start affecting the change you want in your company, find a small project that you can showcase, and get them to see how well it works.

Question: How do you be a great client? You need to figure out why you hired them and give them some leeway and more trust. You try to do the project yourself. There's kind of a big disconnect. We need to respect designers like we would if they were an electrican or a plummer.

For whatever reason during my life online, I've had the good fortune to be something of an early adopter. I also like to build stuff online. These traits came in pretty handy over the past year or so as Twitter came on the scene.

I had occasion to have no fewer than 10 conversations with a wide range of people about what I've done with Twitter and what its potential is to reach others. I thought, after the fifth conversation, that perhaps I should get some of this down in a post. So here goes. Without further ado, are 10 ways I've used Twitter, and without even directly touching the Twitter API.

Pub Crawls

In October 2007, I learned about Twitter, and I didn't really know what to do with it, like many people who are arriving to the scene right now. I did, however, talk a bunch of trash about how I was going to build a "kickass" web site for a pub crawl that my brother-in-law and some friends had been running for more than a decade.

Thus, my first twitter account @qpc. I added my cell phone number to the device, and pre-entered each tweet as a saved draft. When we moved from bar to bar, I only had to hit send. This came in handy later on in the day, as the potential for typos rose with each subsequent bar ;-)

inaug09.com and dctrip09.com

A couple weeks before the inauguration, I heard that NPR had established the hash tags #inaug09 for people to tweet on inauguraiton day and #dctrip09 for people making the trip to DC. I also noticed the .com addresses for these tags were still available. So I bought 'em. Then I had to figure out what to do with them.

What I ended up doing was a pretty lame hack, but it was very educational.

First, I went to search.twitter.com and did a search for inaug09.

I then took the RSS feed http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09 and added it to a new pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Because there were so many tweets coming through at once, I wanted the Pipe to pull in multiple pages of tweets, so I added http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=2 http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=3 and so on.

During one of my last weeks at O'Reilly Media, where I worked as a web producer, I had a chance to read a couple draft chapters of the upcoming book "Democratizing Data: Transforming Government, Healthcare, Education, the Environment, and Everyday Life". I found myself both excited for the future and furious at the past as I thought of the number of lost opportunities for journalists and others to uncover massive, systematic, publicly detectable wastefulness, malfeasance or even fraud.

I happened to have a Flip camera with me and the occasion to pull up to the bar next to co-author W. David Stephenson shortly after his keynote address last night at Ignite Boston 5. He talked about why journalists should be demanding real-time structured data to cover things like the stimulus package. He also talks about how wrong he thinks it is that the recent SEC rule change to require the top 500 firms to adopt the XBRL standard did not happen years ago.

Apologies if the audio is difficult to hear (we were in a bar with 250 or so other people). Just in case, the transcript is below.

These are my random notes from Gavin Bell's session: "The Long Tail Needs Community" I didn't include all of the book-centric stuff, and instead tried to keep it to the universal truth of web sites and online communities. Funny aside, the opening lyrics of the song that came on at the end of Gavin's presentation were "Wake up everyone" from the song "Make it mine" by Jason Mraz I am loving this irony! Well done Ollie the sound guy, who was the one who picked it. In my role as production coordinator for previous sessions, I lived for finding poingient and ironic songs to play at conferences.

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Music always gets listened to. Who has an unlistened to album? Who has an unread book?

You can't do the last.fm data modeling for books like you can do for music.

Digital is easier. It can be remembered, annotated and stored. Then we can process it. The tools in one area, however don't always work in other areas.

Making reading work harder. It changes them when they read a book. We need to get their opinions and reactions etc.

We can help our readers by scaffolding the experience and making it social. ... We can go more in-depth than book groups.

Will we be able to get the reading data from ebooks?

We're in danger of getting disintermediated with things like PDF. This post-sale data is really valuable.

I hope we can create an open-ended platform for book reading.

The clever data capture tools for ebooks will be slow to come to print books.

How do we know an out-of-print book will be in demand?

We can take a popular book and harvest the interest from the people who read it. People are keen on annotating the books they've already got.

By publishing books you're creating a community. The people who bought the first-hand run never get the errata back to them.

What can reader themselves bring?
Recommendations, but we need to build tools to facilitate their interactions.

How can we extend the interaction?

Putting content online is a good first step.

Put reviews on the site. For bad reviews, engage with them, like Kodak does.

If you're hoping for a deeper reaction than a 3 line review, you need to know what activities people are up to.

Look deeper into Flickr for example. There are long-term deep relationships there. The same thing with Twitter. On the inside there are connections to real people and their real lives.

There's not a single social model for all book interactions. All have different needs. Travel is different than photography etc.

The community creates other objects, which will be the basis for other applications, all connected to the content you originally published.

Understanding the interactions between fellow readers. Publishers don't need to be the focus of the conversation.

Analyze the things that come from conversations about your books.

It's important to think about the social life of each social object.

You need to look at the things people create that come from your books.

Every activity we do is social in nature. (Check out the Acting with technology series from MIT press)

The people who read your book are not all the same. Make sure you recognize them as individuals. They don't want to have to create new accounts for everything you create. Understand when they come from different devices, they are still the same person.

**The role of community manager will become vital** (Aside, you should hire my wife Erin Capellman ... end of plug - Chad ;-)

People don't come to a restaurant because the tables are yellow.

Building websites is like running a bar. They come to a bar to have a good interaction with other people who are there. As a community manager, you must ensure this environment and deal with issues quickly.

You shouldn't launch a site with no budget for maintaining it, just as you wouldn't do that with an actual restaurant launch.



Make your content discoverable and that's relevant to the user. Flickr calls it "interestingness"

You want to showcase the things people are creating when they create them on your site.

Building an API is fundamental when building a social web service.

Summize built a search based on Twitter's own API.

If you're not doing this, you're missing out on orders of magnitude of activity.

And if you do, make sure you support open standards and allow connectivity. We're not building islands anymore.


What we're moving to is a role where we're brokering relationships.

Many publisher brands are generally anonymous. What does MacMillan mean as a brand? I can't really tell you.

Create a brand that has a way of interacting with people.


TAKEAWAYS

Build meaningful relationships

Think about long-term projects not just book sales.

Engage with the activities of your community, not just the people in them.

Scott Berkun, author of the Myths of Innovation gave a talk titled How Progress Happens: Leading the Human Side of Change at O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference in New York.

"Tools of Change" is a weird phrase to me. I thought of parking meters, arcades etc.

The focus on tools to make change happen is not really the secret. The secret has everything to do with the people.

American Revolution - 1976 ... there was no major technical revolution that year. They used tools that had been around for years.

(Everyone was then asked to change seats. Scott was stunned at how willing the group was.)

People resist change because
- It creates work
- It requires thinking
- We have to talk and listen to each other
- It raises questions we'd prefer to avoid
- It puts us at risk of embarrassment

Gutenberg Bible - It's held up as a triumphant moment. Truth is, he had no intention of starting a revolution. His entire goal was to make money. He created the opportunity, but the Renaissance was well underway at that point.

The tool doesn't tell you what to put in the book. A person has to do it.

What technology did Gandhi use? None. It was about people taking risk.

At work, people try to find the right thing to buy. That's the wrong place to start from.

No change is possible until someone stakes their reputation on doing something different.

The correlation is power. You should focus on the things that are possible with the power you have.

Example - Why do people stay in flood planes? It's because of their resistance to change.

(Worst possible band name - Status Quo)

Doing something because it was done before is not really a good way to live in the rational world.

The answer "it's never been done" has no bearing on the merits of the idea.

He has a list of idea killers on his blog. A great way to prepare to deliver new ideas to your company.

When things are unpleasant, you will be motivated to change.

If you want to make change happen, you need to find the people who are not happy. Those people are potential allies and there's energy for change.

Max Plank - Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Change happens when people with old ideas die not when they are convinced (paraphrase)

"Revolution", "paradigm shift" etc. are words from people who are full of crap. The people who know talk about the problem they're trying to solve.

Autocracy is a much more effective way to make immediate change happen. So if you're trying to change something at work, you need to determine how much power it will take to make the change happen.

Grass roots - origins with the Progressive party - Progressive party is now gone.

The idea of disseminating ideas is a great idea. The thing is change doesn't come until someone with power takes the idea to implement the idea.

It still depends on the choice of an individual with power to make something change.

TACTICS

How Progress Happens

- Power: What change can you mandate?
- Persuasion: Whose support can you earn?
- Intuition: what can you anticipate?

- Case Study: Chester Carlson & Xerox


Playbook for Individuals

(If you have a big idea, it's probably not a good plan to try to implement it all at once)

- Pilot (remember, your idea could suck)
- Show success (I should show this to a smart person and they might get)
- Find allies
- Ask for more resources, Stake reputation
- Report
- (coup!)

Entrepreneurship is a similar process

Playbook for Managers

- Pavlov lives (We do what we're rewarded for)
- Hire for change (Age & Philosophy)
- Accept some ideas you do not like
- Encouraging interesting failures
Only you can provide cover fire

Your job becomes not being the star, but creating an environment where the individual playbook can thrive

You have to think very carefully about your behavior as a manager to determine what you're rewarding people for.


Agenda

People make change not tools - People who are motivated and rewarded will make changes despite the tools they have

We fear change! - The sooner you figure out how to get around that in your org, the more your ideas will fly

Facts: Revolution, Power, Grass roots is only idea dissemination

Tactics: Pilot and Repeat, Cover fire

Only a manager can provide cover fire. It's the number one thing a manager can do

Q: How do you go about making up the difference between the power you have and the power you need?
A: The first word you should know is Machiavelli  ... The 48 rules of power if your world is really bad, but if you have morals or a spine, you think about who your allies are.

Talk to the people with the ideas and find out whose power you can borrow ... Sometimes its about your network

A reasonable manager can accept that you have to drop something if they want you to something new.

As a good manager you should encourage push back from the people under you.

What a morning! I came to the first session of O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference with two goals: Learn stuff and get a job. Not necessarily in that order.

So I go to the tutorial by "Twitter-famous" author Chris Brogan (aka @chrisbrogan) and I do what I do at conferences and other events - I tweet.

So I see he's got a screen up behind him but he's not at the computer. So I type a tweet, but I wait.

Then, at exactly the right moment it turned out. I struck. I posted this tweet:

Wonder if @chrisbrogan will be psyched or annoyed at me for plugging "Hire thisguychad.com " ... seriously, I'm available ;-) #toc

Then he went to his computer and updated the #toc stream, and there I was, on the big screen, fourth down, for like a half an hour.

But that didn't feel like enough. So I whipped out my flip-cam and went closer up in the room so I could capture the moment on video.

Done. But now what?

YouTube!!

So I log in to my TubeMogul.com account, uploaded the video, tagged it, and "launched" it into my YouTube account.

So I then want to tell the world what I did, cause that's what you can do with YouTube and Twitter, so I used the Firefox is.gd URL shortener to fit the link into a tweet.

Then, to my amazement, I hear Chris mention how great a Flip video camera is and what you can do with it.

So, as someone who has attended my share of conferences and enjoyed enhancing the conversation with tips from my unique perspective, I chimed in with my YouTube link.

One problem though, the link was bad. D'OH!

So Chris tries to show off this very meta moment, and it goes to the wrong page. Then, my wireless goes down RIGHT THEN so I can't update.

Nightmare.

I take some well-deserved ribbing for "side-swiping" him during the workshop, but we eventually get back on track.

Meantime, @suzaxtell tries to re-tweet my tweet, but there were two problems, one she wrote @Chad Capellman which doesn't link to my twitter account, and she re-tweeted the broken link.

I think I'll be looking back at this exchange a lot. It highlighted a lot of elements of the immediacy of social media tools, what can be done with them, and how easily things can run off the side of the road without meaning to or even sometimes being aware that it happened until it's too late.

Click here for notes from this session. Like I said, what a morning!!

This is from the first half of Chris Brogan's Blogging and Social Networking tutorial UPDATED at Noon. You might also get a chuckle of my mis-adventure post Guerilla marketing at Tools of Change conference that occurred during the same session.


Should you be everywhere? I don't think so anymore. If you're going to be everywhere, you have to provide customer service everywhere.

Try it in the order of things you can pull away from if you need to pull it away.

You have to segregate your email lists. You can do this with some technology.

Batchbook.com is a good site for managing an email database. 


We can do so many things that go past the page if we think about it. They can augument and build better relationships
etc. there's way to monetize it.

Just because you think you're so speical doesn't mean you can't try sales approaches that others are doing. And not just your competitors.

Another word I'm not a fan of is wiki.

We wrote our entire book in Google docs right in real time.

A: to time issue - More hands lighten the load. Different people do it in different ways. There are customer service issues and sales issues that different people can use.

How do we get an American Idol for books? There's a lot to it. There's always going to be editorial knowledge, you know what you're going to do there.

There's a lot of social software tools for new authors coming up.

You could have three free chapters "fight to the death" and have people vote which one goes forward.

We want people to want our opinion, right?

I challenge you to tell me why a blog isn't a better place to refer to than a website.

(On his Facebook reservations) I want a relationship and most people try to sell me, and I'm not buying it.

Blogging to me is a way not to get on as many planes. If you can be there before the sale and help them make it ...

When you can curate to small group level, you have something meaningful, because then you can get those people to spread it out further.

Pay for people so you don't have to re learn how to invent the wheel.


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First half notes:

When my wife comes back from a bookclub meeting, I never hear a think about the book.

I have solved the book moving problem in my life - (throw them away to have people help you move, use the library, review books on blogs to get freebies)

We need to focus on ways for people to distribute my books.

You lose money every time you release a new book - it's called marketing.

Thinking of yourself as an information broker might change what we're doing.

Using settings is a form of product placement - I'm a little worried about it and pragmatic.

Community and pockets of sale - SM and blogging etc. Your communities are clumped into smaller groups. What's a success in books? 5,000? That's easier than going after the million. If you could find more of these systems of thousands ...

Cafe-shaped conversations. As opposed to McDonalds, WalMart etc. It's not that personalized.

Comic book store owners. They need to know what their audience wants to survive.

Now he's using twitter to push marketing of new comic books to @chrisbrogan ... he's cultivating my interest.

I am passionate about location-based services. Bought an iPhone because of Brightkite. (I leave a message as I'm LEAVING a place, just to be safe) "The secrets of the annotated world"

I could leave messages in the air. People who know to look can later see my annotation. Now think about that as a book. You could start leaving information to create an alternate reality like Nine Inch Nails did. It gives you an opportunity to access to more people.

"I find the comments in my blog are better than the post"

I walk away from you must login to post a comment.

Are you making it easier for me to do business with your blog? Or helping me understand the literature.

@chrisbrogan suggesta chipin.com to get people to donate money to get books to teachers.

It's not about your website, it's where the people are -

I don't try to control the message. I have a service to you.

I think of twitter as the new phone. It's a dashboard for me to do business.

If all markets are conversations, these are the tools ...

What I find out that works best to get an initiative is to point to another organization that's doing it and use it as a leverage tool.

I'm kind of back and forth on my value proposition for that particular platform (Facebook).

If I'm reaching out my hand to you, don't stick your tongue in my mouth. We're not there yet kids. Too many people are taking that approach online with social media tools.

I was lucky enough to attend a wonderful event called Foo Camp, which is hosted by my employer, O'Reilly Media. I'm convinced I would have called it wonderful even if I wasn't working for the host. Anyway, here is my roundup that I believe fits within the off-the-record nature of the event.

I helped organize and speak at two sessions: "The Future of News" and "Beyond Content: Managing Expectations with a new CMS" and both were very lively. The news one was very heated (and more "star" studded with the likes of Esther Dyson, Tim O'Reilly, Steven Levy among others). After the fact, a fellow attendee said to me "It seemed as if people were violently agreeing with each other. I, on the other hand, felt as if people were attempting to address four issues surrounding the death of newspapers:

:: The business of news

:: The demise / evaporation of investigative reporters and the impact on journalism

:: The tools needed to move newspapers forward (THANK YOU Nick Bilton) for an amazing tour of what The New York Times is up to)

:: Whether or not it's the reader's fault for the decline.

I regret not recognizing these classifications earlier and attempting to steer the discussion along one of these themes. Especially considering I've been hearing versions of this discussion for nearly 10 years now.

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The session on CMS systems was not as strongly attended, but I was grateful to hear from those who came.

Two thoughts popped into my head after the session that I wish I would have said in it:

 :: My favorite John Wooden quote: "Never let what you can't do interfere with what you can do."

 :: In a follow-up conversation about CMS, I posited that even if you were able to build the perfect CMS for an organization (The "impossible" task I listed on my short bio form), there is not another organization on the planet that your CMS would be perfect for without some tweaking.

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I found a title for a living person that I actually like better than the "Senior Editor, Obits and Fun" I once had: "Former Cult Leader." I didn't know such a title was possible while living.

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While I might like to experience the feeling of having a magnet in my finger to detect magnetic fields on surfaces, I would probably be as likely to embed that into me as I would be to swim on top of a pool of water that had a small nuclear reactor at the bottom of it.

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While it might be an expense, one way to bridge multiple geographic locations is to have couches and big-screen TVs with webcams pointing to the couch and showing what's in the other office. It can provide a "wormhole window" to the other office, and can make bride many divides and office cultures.

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Having former drama club members at your event can only raise the "interestingness" level of the environment, especially after the sun goes down over drinks.

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Printing names on both sides of a name tag is a simple, brilliant move that helps people connect. I regret not adding my twitter @chadrem to mine.

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According to the job descriptions bandied about in a session on the need for designers and engineers, I might actually be a designer. This worries me.

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When playing Werewolf, the healer can heal himself. Would have been really handy to know this ahead of time, but I'm not bitter.

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Hearing people who have become targeted Internet celebrities is a chilling, gripping experience. I thank them for their candor.

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To avoid public speaking disasters, it's a good idea to know your audience, including the country that audience is in/from. It's also very helpful to use a service like Slideshare BEFORE your talk so you can access your slides on any connected computer ... just in case.

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Camping is much more comfortable when you bring your favorite bed pillow. Perhaps it's a way to trick your head into thinking you might actually be on your mattress.

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Tony Stubblebine is a great guy and I wish him much success. Coming to Foo Camp after just one year at O'Reilly is a rather head-spinning experience, and hearing what he had to say about his experience was very, very re-assuring.