Marshall's blog and shared items

Using Apps and Checklists to Learn More, Faster, Deeper

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:47 GMT

After years working as a journalist, I've now got a new job as a startup CEO and there's a lot to learn. I've been using a number of new apps, all together, to speed and deepen that learning and I thought I'd share my new routine here in case of interest.

First, I use our own service Little Bird in order to view the hottest news among leaders in fields like Human Computer Interaction, Neuroscience, Sales and Marketing. I've got Hot News pages bookmarked for a variety of topics and I visit them regularly on my phone or iPad.

Then, when I find something that looks valuable – I save it in my beloved Pocket for later reading, generally on my iPad.
When I read the articles, if there's something worth sharing I publish it out over Buffer.
Later, if I read those articles and find that there are in fact valuable insights – I want to make sure they don't just dribble out my ears but that they stay inside my head. Mind mapping expert Chuck Frey says that learning consists of 4 steps: gathering, discerning, assimilating and utilizing. What I do is add any important lessons I learn to a mind map in Mindjet.
When I get around to processing updates to that mind map, what I do is put those lessons into a flash card app on my iPhone.
I flip through those flashcards daily as one of many different habbits supported by a routine building app called Lift.
One additional step I'm trying to add is to fill out this Evernote template to further explore the new lessons I'm adding.

It's kind of a crazy detailed process, but just like I did when I was working as a journalist – I tell myself that if pilots on airplanes can run down a huge checklist of buttons and dials, I should be able to do something as simple as the process above. I probably need to turn it into a checklist – perhaps even in paper.

Above, my most recent lessons learned mind map, now featuring pictures of the people I learn the lessons from.

“Success is something you attract, not pursue,” argued personal development guru Jim Rohn. “Work hard on your job and you'll make a living – work hard on your self and you can make a fortune.” I found that via a video that showed up in Hot News in a Little Bird report on Personal Development; I've put it on my mind map of lessons learned and in my flashcard app too. I'm not only focused on making a fortune, of course, but you get the idea: opportunity comes to those who have made themselves attractive to it through hard work on the self. That seems to be the idea, anyway.

As they've found at Khan Academy, explicit recognition of the plasticity of the brain – for example putting the words “the more you learn today, the smarter you'll be tomorrow” on the top of a web page – leads to an appreciable improvement in learning. Metacognition.

I thought others might find that useful and interesting! May our learning help us all rock!

Dear friends, let’s get small talk out of the way before SXSW

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:36 GMT

I'm going to see a lot of friends over the next week in Austin that I'd like to catch up with, but imagine if we got the small talk taken care of ahead of time and could start our brief conversations from a different place. Scott Beale, Violet Blue, Rachel Weidinger, I'm picturing you in my mind.

It's in that spirit that I offer below 7 quick bullet points summarizing the most relevant parts of the last year of my work life and what I'm doing at SXSW this year. My personal life is mostly another matter, but know that my health is pretty good and my wife Mikalina and I are very much in love. Above: two of the many facial expressions available from Mikalina and I at SXSW, in this case in 2012. Photo by classic SX' photographer Kris Krug.

I would love it if you'd return the favor and post some updates from the last year of your life in comments below or email me a note at marshall@getlittlebird.com if you want, I'll read it on the plane! Imagine what we'll be able to talk about together in Austin once we've got a common foundation of knowing the basics!

* This past year, I left ReadWriteWeb after starting a company called Plexus Engine, which has since changed its name to Little Bird. It's a suite of tools that helps you find and engage with the leading minds online in any topic. It's awesome & unlike anything else on the market. I'd love to show it to you sometime, but probably right now because we're drinking beer on a crowded patio. (Just pretend!) The company was co-founded by my wife Mikalina Kirkpatrick and our technical co-founder Tyler Gillies.

* Little Bird closed a $1m round of funding, lead by Mark Cuban. We're still in private beta but have sold subscription access to the service to a bunch of companies (mostly marketing, advertising & PR) we have 7 full time team members so far and are opening to General Availability this Spring.

* At SXSW we'll be unveiling the first app built on top of our API. I guarantee you'll hear about it because we have a massive promotional partner. I'll be posting about it here and elsewhere tomorrow morning.

* I am having an incredible time being a startup CEO. Sometimes I miss tech blogging, but not very often and not that much – because I'm having too much fun having new adventures.

* Our biggest challenge at Little Bird is building the capacity to convert inbound interest into paying customers – right now my #1 priority is hiring more sales people.

* Here at SXSW I am not speaking on any official panels, but my very smart wife Mikalina is speaking at a Sunday AM workshop titled
Startup Operations: The Lone Ranger of Tech. Also attending the event are our hard working marketing and sales guy Nate Angel and one of our data hackers, the fabulous Devin Gafney.

* The technology that's changed my life the most over the past year, other than our own and its ability to bring the world's finest knowledge on any subject to me with the snap of my fingers, is the iOS mobile app Lift. It's a daily habit check-in app, with social and analytics features. I have never been a person with a structured or goal oriented life before, but I've been trying it via Lift and I'm happy to say that I am now a guy who does pushups, flosses, thinks about my own mortality and drinks more water as often as I could have ever imagined myself doing those things. Check it out!

That's what I've been doing, now you know! How about you? Imagine if a bunch of us wrote out bullet points like this, we could start conversation all the further ahead of the basics. Feel free to let me know what you've been up to since the last SXSW in comments below.

How I trained a robot neuroscientist to walk my dog

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 07:26 GMT

I need to go walk my dog. I could listen to music, to a podcast or to my own fabulously fascinating thoughts – but I'm not going to. I'm going to have a robot neuroscientist make the whole experience a time to learn.

Ok, what I'm actually going to do is use two robots (or automated technologies) to do the following: find me the hottest article of the week among the world's leading neuroscientists online and then read it outloud on my phone while I walk the dog.

Here's how I did it:

First I visited the Hot News page in a Little Bird report I ran awhile ago on Neuroscience. On that page, I find the 5 links that are hottest among the most respected neuroscience specialists on Twitter, today and this week. It's like Techmeme for neuroscience. (If you're curious, it turns out that the most influential neuroscience on Twitter, in the eyes of his peers, is Mo Costandi.)

I grabbed the hottest link of the week, this one about a new federal project to fund a map of the human brain, and I emailed it to myself. I then opened the link on my phone, copied the text of the article and pasted it into this $1.99 app called Speak It! The app does a great job of reading text out loud in a robotic voice. I've listened to a lot of information that way while walking the dog.

And there you go, that's how I trained a robot neuroscientist to walk my dog…kind of. The last few steps are a little hacky but it works! The first part of the hack, using a robot to find the 500 most peer-respected neuroscience specialists on Twitter and blogs, was not trivial at all, of course. That's something we've now got a whole team perfecting. Even though it's usually for serious business, late at night it can be a lot of good for fun, too.

Could personal blogs be like the bullpen, to warm-up in for the big league game?

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:26 GMT

As social network publishing platforms get bigger and better, it gets harder to stay focused on publishing on your own piddly little blog. Could there be a symbiotic relationship between the two, though?

It's hard not to be impressed by the major publishing outlet that LinkedIn is becoming. Entrepreneur Lewis Howes wrote an instructive guest post on the blog of a startup called Clarity today that offers some smart step-by-step instructions to get yourself in good shape for consideration as an author on LinkedIn's official Thought Leaders channel. You'd be among great company if you could pull that off.

Likewise, when Google+ launched 18 months ago, several high-profile bloggers were announcing that they were moving all their blogging activities off their own sites and onto Google's social network. People were doing that because the commenting, sharing and engagement that they were experiencing on Plus was incredible. It just blew on-site blog comments out of the water – and isn't that a major part of blogging, to get feedback and engagement from readers? All that engagement is a proxy for distribution, too.

Perhaps bloggers should go to the most high-profile venue they can publish from, or the most popular place where they can get lots of engagement, but I've always wanted to stay here and do most of my publishing on my own site. That's hard to do on a regular basis, but I own the site and it follows my rules. As I wrote in July 2011, I'll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus.

Maybe there's something to be said about using a personal blog as a scratch-pad to solicit initial discussion on a draft idea, though, and then taking the polished end-result out to a corporate hosted forum with lots more audience. I wrote a post on our company's blog yesterday about ways to leverage the experts in your community to collaborate on blog posts and in that post referenced a saying from Google exec Hunter Walk: that you should post to a blog not to show how smart you are, but to solicit feedback from smart people, because that's a great way to learn.

I love writing in public, but it tends not to get as much engagement as asking people one at a time for feedback and contributions to drafts. Would it work to treat a personal blog as a warm-up zone before publishing an article elsewhere? Would you feel comfortable publishing less than your best work on your personal blog? I may try to see if I can make that work. I'd love to know your thoughts on it though; might this be a way to have our cake and eat it too? Maybe a reference to your personal blog on a bigger site would serve too as a place to find all of your writing, across many different platforms.

Something I'm thinking about, if you've got recent thoughts on blog vs social network publishing, please do share them.

The Surprising Power & Challenge of Saying Obvious Things

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 18:03 GMT

You'd be surprised what uses of social media seem so obvious to some of us with just a few years of experience that they don't seem worth articulating – but that aren't intuitive to other people. Maybe they just aren't obvious at all and it's a sign of immature communication skills when we (I) think they are.

For example, our fabulous mentor Vidya Spandana asked me last week why one of our customers ran reports in Little Bird on their target markets and I said, “well, because when the most influential people in an industry are thinking about you and talking about you, they are more likely to spend money with you or recommend that other people do!” I thought that was obvious but she said it was not and that I should write it down and use it like marketing gold. Many other people I've mentioned it to since then have agreed. Vidya guided me through a number of use cases of our software, articulating the ultimate goal of the customer even if it seemed obvious to me, then making it more and more simple, general, comprehensible and easy for our next customers to relate to. It was a fascinating revalation.

It turns out that when working to help people adopt technologies that are new to them but not to you, an inability to describe the forest but for the trees comes at a real cost in terms of effectiveness. Articulating the fundamentals isn't always easy, though. I suspect like many things, it takes practice and experience.

Readers, if you have other examples of qualities of social software that seemed to go without saying to you, but that you found out weren't obvious to other people, I'd love to read about them in comments below.

The value of listening vs broadcast in social media

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:14 GMT

I finally wrote my first post on our company's new blog yesterday, The true value of online influencers: It’s not about parroting your messages. I hope you'll check it out, find it valuable, share it and join us for discussion in comments.

The post is a response to my frustration about the limited imaginations I see too often with regard to so-called “online influencers.” What do you do with them? Not just spam them and hope they'll retweet you! But learn from them, build relationships and capture value over the long term. I know that in agency life, it's hard to do that though. Clients pay the bills and they don't pay for the long-term. Hopefully agencies can invest in the long term in a way that drives more business value in each short-term engagement. For example, you can charge more and land more business because you've developed long-term knowledge and connections in a field. That sounds more viable than charging a client for you to build those long-term assets.

One counterpoint that I think is really useful though is this, from Enterprise collaboration thought leader Greg Lowe on Google+

I think it all comes down to the industry to define the measurements that translate into $$$. Marketing has been promoting for 75+ years, these behaviors won't change without incentive.

Something to ponder!

I'm concerned that it's going to be very hard to define the measurements that translate value captured from learning and relationship building into money, though. Please, someone, tell me I'm wrong about that!

Introducing Little Bird, the Best Way to Find the Key People Online

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:10 GMT

I'm excited to announce this morning the unveiling of the startup I co-founded, left journalism to do and have spent the last year working with my team to build. It's called Little Bird.

Little Bird automates the discovery of community-trusted topic influencers and experts on any topic. You can find the best sources of information online in minutes using Little Bird. Once you find them, we've got a whole bunch of very cool tools you can use to leverage their collective knowledge.

Yesterday my co-founders Mikalina Kirkpatrick, Tyler Gillies and I closed a $1 million round of funding, with the participation of an All Star team of social media innovators, engineers and practitioners. The round was led by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who been a great lead investor to work with through our private beta period. Our other investors are Howard Lindzon's Social Leverage, Wieden + Kennedy, Hubspot and OnStartups.com founder Dharmesh Shah, leading marketing consultant Jay Baer, Henry Copeland, Jonathan Siegel, Matt Haughey and Blaine Cook. If you're familiar with the last 10 years of social media history, you'll probably recognize these as some incredibly experienced and innovative people.

Introducing Little BIrd from Little Bird on Vimeo.

If you spend time online doing research to figure out who the best people to connect with are on Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Google+ or elsewhere – you're going to love Little Bird. If you believe, as we do, that connecting with the right sources of information and engaging with them using the right tools can move mountains for your career, business and worldview – then I really hope you'll dig in to what we're building.

Sometimes I describe it as a robot librarian, swooping down out of the sky with arms full of power tools to augment human perception and memory.

I'll write more later, but I've got to focus on getting ready to pitch the company at the demo day for the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). PIE has been a great experience and there are five other companies pitching today. You can check out the live streaming video at 2:00 PM PST today at http://livestream.com/piepdx

You can read more at the following coverage: AdWeek, Techcrunch, The Next Web, All Things D, Venturebeat, Betakit, Digital Trends and GigaOm and Wired! That's most of the coverage, but my favorite so far has been Lora Kolodny's write-up on the WSJ. (Yay!)

5 Unique Ways to Win Friends & Influence People Online

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 01:39 GMT

I keep reading articles about how to build influence online, because they get a lot of traction on social networks. Most recently, 35 experts weigh-in: How we create influence on Facebook, an article I thought I'd read just to see if there was anything unique about the Facebook angle. There didn't seem to be.

Most of these articles can be summed up like this: be consistently useful, generous and interesting. That's good advice!

I think it's possible to discuss some more tactical methods, though. Here's what I've thought for some time are some good ways to add value and thus strengthen your position, make new things possible, win friends, influence people etc.

Be first – If you're the first place that someone finds out about something, they'll likely notice that. Do it again and they'll start paying attention to almost everything you do in the future. Everybody likes the feeling of learning new things early – the sources of that kind of learning are highly valued.

Be the best at articulating common things – If you ever look at the tech news aggregation site Techmeme, you know for example that there are often developments in the tech news world that everyone writes about – but some people write about them much better than others. That's a great way to build influence, to create more compelling content than other people about issues of general interest. Maybe the things I'm writing here are really no different than what everyone else is saying – but some of you will like the way I say them, you'll find them uniquely clear, compelling, inspiring, intelligent, funny, charming, whatever the case may be. Perhaps then you'll follow me on Twitter so you can read more like this in the future. (Or use aarh-ess-ess)

Aggregate – Compiling high quality content well from other sources, curation, is a skill and a good way to build influence and add value yourself. It's easier said than done though! Robots can be very good at it – are you smarter and more creative than a robot? You probably know about Brainpickings and BoingBoing, but how about OpenCulture.com, Dan Cohen and Kate Theimer?

Find a unique perspective – Have you read Monday Note? A good example of a site that creates high quality content from a unique perspective and thus has made itself influential. In order to pull this off, you've got to have a genuinely unique perspective on things and it's got to be interesting to other people.

Be funny – If you're funny, people will come back for more.

See, it's not so hard. You just have to be consistently useful, articulate, generous, uniquely interesting, smart, fast and funny! In reality, any single one of these is likely to be enough to take you far.

Finally, if you really want to rock the social web, you should sign up to get more info about the startup we're going to be unveiling very, very soon.

Meeting Prep, on Your Own Time: A Template Google Doc

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:03 GMT

After feeling frustrated that I wasn't prepped as much as I wanted before a meeting called by one of my co-workers at Plexus Engine, I came up with the following Google Doc template to capture all the info we needed before meeting with someone from outside our company. I really like this system and thought I'd share it.

The procedure we're experimenting with is to create a copy of this Google Doc, edit it to fill it out, then paste the URL to view it inside our company calendar listing for said meeting. I've been experimenting with changes; just tonight I added the field for “confirmed within 36 prior hours” because I try to email people the day before a meeting to confirm and set the stage.

This system helps us communicate explicitly about meetings, but on our own time. It doesn't take too much time to fill one of these out – generally less than 5 minutes. We'll see how it works, we've only just begun doing it. If you'd like a copy of that same template, I posted one here. I have a link to that master template doc bookmarked in my browser toolbar. If you can think of any other ways this could be made more useful, please let me know.

The Google+ Power-Up Button

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:24 GMT

I'll confess, I'm a regular user of Google+ but I haven't played around with a lot of the features to really figure it out that much yet. This week I've been experimenting with a paradigm I've used with RSS and with Twitter, but in Google+ and I'm seeing some awesome results. It's this: set yourself up to be disproportionately likely to see content from the most high-priority people in your network so that you're more likely to engage with them.

I didn't know you could do this with Google+, but if you look at the screenshot below – I've got a Circle I call “Key Peeps” – which is made up of a select few high-priority contacts on Google+. People like O'Reilly's Julie Steele and Abraham Williams, now building Addvocate with Marcus Nelson, and probably the web's leading Human Computer Interaction specialist (according to our company Plexus), Ed Chi of Google. These are all super-smart, really awesome people who happen to use Google+ a lot. Now that I get an email and a red square notification whenever they post anything, I jump right on their high quality content, engage with it and them, reshare it with others, etc. If I can do so in a way that adds value to them, well then that helps me move from wannabe to friend of Heavy Hitters to a Heavy Hitter myself.

So that's the Google+ Power-Up Button, “send alerts for this circle.” It's pretty awesome.

Think “nobody's using Google Plus?” This alert system is making it sing to me like crazy. In the interest of full disclosure, Google put me on the Suggested User List of Google+ so I have 2m followers there and see plenty of activity, but I know not everyone does. Check out the big, deep thread of comments on a post I put up about Occam's Razor the other day though. That kind of conversation may not be available to everyone without loads of followers, but you Google+'s Circle Alerts feature means you can develop a solid online relationship with just a handful of Heavy Hitters yourself too, no matter how many followers you have on the network.

Blogging is alive, well and very inspiring

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 21:52 GMT

Above, WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg speaks to a full house at WordCamp Portland. I posted this photo on Instagram along with a note about how publishing used to be the exclusive domain of those who could afford to own a printing press.

I'm attending WordPress Portland for the first time in years today and it's really inspiring to be here. The room is full of self publishers, new voices online, and more than 70% of them identify as developers. So they create in words, images and code. Mullenweg says that WordPress will soon see more than 100 billion pageviews every month.

Blogging is beautiful, it elevates the human spirit and enriches public life. In my work on Plexus Engine I see a lot of blogs on niche topics and there's a whole lot more blogging going on than you might think. Geneticist Daniel Swan blogs about moving from academia to the private genetics industry. Ana Lilian and Roxana A. Soto blog together about raising bilingual kids. Jeff Rothe blogs about his collection of classic arcade game machines. And I think the world is a much better place for it.

I remember discovering how easy it was to blog, not so many years ago, and I really hope that lots of people are still discovering how easy and how rewarding it is every day today. Yes, Facebook and Twitter are even easier – but there's nothing like a good blog post.

A List of Checklists for Startups

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:19 GMT

tl;dr: Checklists for Startups

I'm falling in love with checklists. Specifically, a new service called Checkmarkable, which makes it easy to create re-usable checklists for any purpose. My Daily AM Checklist is proving super effective in helping me change my habits and maximize my productivity. I fill it out every day before jumping into the unique tasks of the day.

Checklists mean you don't have to spend mental energy remembering the details of a complex workflow, they are all just right there in front of you. They also mean that people who do complex jobs in high stress environments (pilots, surgeons) are less likely to forget to do important things. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

Checklists are themselves like technology, aren't they? They do work (the work of coming up with a plan), through automation, which saves time and lets the user start their work from a higher level of abstraction. Once you've got a good checklist, you're no longer a person figuring it out cold – you're someone who's just taking care of business, getting it done, and then moving on to more creative work.

At Plexus we're realizing there were some basic things we should have done before starting the company, or as we started it, and we wish someone had told us about those things. So we're working on a checklist to share with others, particularly our class-mates in the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE).

One of the things we did in the meantime though was survey (using our own automated technology) all the top tech startup incubators we could find for checklists they had made or shared already. A first iteration of that list of checklists is here: Checklists for Startups. Included are checklists for CEOs, for salespeople, developers and designers.

Checklists for Startups

Can you point us to some other good startup checklists? Please do and I'll add them to the list!

Related: this 40 minute video from Joe Stump about things to do when starting your startup. Joe told me a few days ago when he came into PIE that was probably his favorite presentation he ever gave.

If you want to track the incubator community day in and day out, PIE's Rick Turoczy has a list of 400+ Twitter accounts associated with the leaders in the field.

Enjoy!

We’re entering a golden age of news geekery

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:25 GMT

Jason Calacanis announced a new proof-of-concept site called Launchticker today. At first glance it's just an overloaded Google Doc with a bunch of tech news summaries and links streaming down the page. Look at the blog post explaining the site though and you'll see there's a lot more going on here. It's an attempt to improve on the fabulous half-human/half-machine edited tech news site Techmeme. Specifically, by limiting the areas of editorial coverage to startups, technology and features – excluding a lot of financial news, hardware and maybe enterprise stuff. It's the tech news Jason Calacanis cares about and his taste is probably reflected in a lot of other peoples' tastes too.

Just like Calacanis's tech news site Launch helps pull in traffic that converts to promotion of his startup conference Launch, so too will this new tech aggregator serve as content marketing for other money-making business concerns.

In the meantime…what a lot of fun! The Google Docs delivery is just a stop-gap until Calacanis can hire an engineer to build a Content Management System for the site, but the basic idea is awesome. He's hired two really experienced, worldly looking women to do the story discovery, curation and summarization: Megan Rose Dickey and Kirin Kalia. (Incidentally, I think it's a little distasteful that neither of these women are named but their salaries are made explicit in the announcement blog post in order to prove a point that an experiment like this doesn't have to be expensive.)

Kalia and Dickey will apparently work around the clock racing to find the best news originally reported elsewhere, to summarize it on the web and then also deliver it each day at 3:00 in an email. How many of us have fantasized about building and running a system like this? Original reporting is of course essential, and maybe some of that will come through the Launch Ticker as well – via the Launch blog at least – but the adrenaline of competing to get one step ahead of other aggregators to find and then pack as much added-value as possible into an alert about the news is a different, if related, experience.

European news editor Robin Good used to write all the time about a concept he called Newsmastering. He imagined it becoming an essential role inside of every company. A little like what we call Content Marketing, but focused on curation and pointed inward, not outward to the public. I still think it's an awesome idea, it may prove ahead of its time, it may be right around the corner, I don't know. Below, from Good, to be read aloud in his captivating accent.

Newsmastering is the ability to identify, select, aggregate, filter and distribute/publish news and informatiom streams on very tight, specific themes/topics.

Newsmastering is a new emerging and much needed network function allowing the huge news flow to be categorized, filtered, de-spammed and re-routed and contextualized in one one thousand and more ways.

The output generated by a skilled and qualified newsmaster enables a great number of individual to avoid needing to subscribe to tens of RSS feeds or to having to visit multiple sites daily to keep themselves on top of the latest relevant news to their specific field of interest. The newsmaster aggregates and compiles very high-quality news feeds which completely replace the need to visit or subscribe to large number of RSS feeds, suddenly providing those same individuals with much greater time available to them and much higher quality up-to-date news available to them at all times.

People are doing a lot of this publicly now, not inward facing. It's not just Huffington Post aggregating and advertising. Some examples to check out:

Evening Edition, just announced by Mule Design, a single human editor summarizes the day's political news each evening. Thanks Todd Barnard for finding this, as he finds so many things I've never seen before.
Reuters now curates and comments on financial news at Counterparties.com, edited by the fabulous Felix Salmon and powered by content discovery startup Percolate.
Remember real-time search engine Collecta? Serial smart-guy Gerry Campbell is now working on a high-end financial news curation as a service startup called VitalBriefing.
Laughing Squid has been capturing news of the weird and wonderful for years. Traffic gets converted to web hosting customers!

How many of these can prove as awesome as Techmeme? Gabe Rivera's site has been using machines melded with human minds for more than 3 years and is going to be tough to beat. He's got such a consistent format though that I think there is room for other startups to come in and challenge that site, or co-exist, with very different methods and presentations. See, for example, the incredible story of the 19 year old who created Breaking News Online.

It's an incredible time to be a news geek. Who can be fastest, smartest, best, add the most value, exercise the most compelling editorial judgement, capture social experiences and build a loyal audience? The game is on!

How do we at Plexus Engine relate to this? Besides jealousy that all these people have actually launched their products, someday they'll all be our customers.

What a tech blog post about a startup should include, according to me

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:33 GMT

I just read a really good post about a startup that felt unfinished, because there was no mention of critiques of the company's product or business. I'm not blogging about startups these days, I'm building one, but in the bloggers' spirit of telling other people how to do their jobs, here are some things I believe every post about a startup should include, if possible.

Info about the founding team's relevant background. This is something Michael Arrington taught me was an important part of every startup's story. Reading Roger Ehrenberg's thoughts years later about how a founding team's background illustrates what skills they won't have to spend the time to learn from scratch helped me understand why all the better.
Mention of the company's business model. They say business is the ultimate sport, would you report on a game pitched full of curveballs without mentioning that?
Discussion of the market and competitors. Who else is in this space? It's one thing for a blogger to make an assessment of a company's viability, but I think it's important to point the reader towards enough information about competitors that they can make their own informed decision, too. Many people have said over the years that tech blogs are so poorly written their only value add is in discovery of cool companies to follow the links to – in that case let's link to more than one per article!
Thoughts on a company's meaning, its place in larger trends and what it points to in the future. Richard MacManus taught me about adding that kind of value.
Links to previous coverage, on your blog and on other blogs. It's a good value add for readers and it's fair play to recognize those who wrote before you. I always use a Custom Search Engine made up of the archives of the top tech blogs to search for previous coverage of a company I'm covering, as well as to learn about competitors.
Critiques. Every product and company has its critics. If you've used the product yourself and can talk about it from personal experience, all the better. I don't think blogging/journalism has to be objective or balanced but if there's not some inclusion of critical perspective, I don't think the post is finished.

That's my list, off the top of my head, of near essentials. Some blogs do better than others at including this kind of information – and I certainly haven't included it all in all the posts I've written either. Sometimes you just run out of time and have to press that publish button.

Is Google Glass Bolder Than the iPhone?

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:31 GMT

Google Glass could be understood as a new form of search, but the most important part of the tech – its information consumption capabilities – have not yet been demonstrated.

Tim O'Reilly said on Twitter yesterday that he suspects that Google Glass could be a tech milestone that surpasses the iPhone. What do you think?

The main objection seems to be that mainstream people won't wear something so bulky. I actually think they are pretty unobtrusive and maybe they'll grow even more so. So far we've really only seen the Write capabilities (broadcast of media) but I'm very excited to see the Read capabilities demonstrated. They say it's not for regular browsing but for rapid access to information. It looks great. Will that information be contextually tailored to what you're looking at? That's the next question, whether it will deliver what some people call Augmented Reality. That could also be understood as automatic search, searching for information about what's in front of you and what you're doing – without your having to ask – because that's what you're most likely to want to know about. That fits within the things Google has said it would do.

I think the Read capabilities are going to have to be pretty well executed, because most people don't need eyeglass video and image cameras. Live video is high pressure and out of sync with our usually silent and mundane lives. The power curve says that a much smaller number of people will create content than consume it – and I expect that will be true of Glass as well. But do I want to be able to look things up faster and less obtrusively with glasses than I do with a phone? Yeah, I do. Perhaps then Google Glass is really just more Search from Google. Search with a side of blogging.

Look out Responsive Web designers though, huh? Your job may have just gotten a lot harder. Perhaps the output will be text-only though.

The iPhone packed a whole lot of computing power into a wonderful interface. Presumably Glass will cary less computing power due to size and the requirements of the ways people will use them. Is the interface going to be that much more fabulous than the iPhone's? It seems it would have to be to change the world as much.

They say that kids growing up now will have jobs as adults that don't even exist today. I can imagine editing and annotating the long, chaotic and often boring video broadcast from the eyes of celebrities as one of those jobs.

Apple’s new Podcasts app – my review

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:40 GMT

Apple's promised stand-alone app for Podcasts went live in the iTunes store today. I thought I'd post a quick review of it, because I love podcasts. They are an incredible example of the opportunity for new voices to self-publish and distribute multi-media content; they are a core part of the Web 2.0/social media revolution. Podcasts were also my introduction to this world, years ago.

I'll never forget the day I was at my University work study job, reading Newsweek and came across a profile of The Dawn and Drew Show. I had no idea there was technology available that made it easy for anyone to publish and distribute serialized audio content. It was like the clouds opened up, beams of sunlight shone down into my eyes and Dawn Miceli was riding on one of them. I was in love, with the technology and its potential. That was how I started learning about all this social media stuff: blogging, wikis, RSS, etc.

Apple's App

Now Apple has an app dedicated to helping other people discover and enjoy this beautiful world of podcasting. Have they risen to the occasion? It's a visually attractive app on most but not all pages, no surprise there. That's what I think, apparently not everyone agrees. UK Mac developer Dan Counsell says, “Not sure why people are hating on the new Apple Podcast App so much, it actually has some rather lovely UI and UX in it.” I agree but can see why some parts of the app are being criticized, too. The live streaming page is cool but weird to use. Maybe I just need to get used to it.

Functionally, there are two things I hoped for. The first is discovery. The app has a cool Top Stations interface that appears to use your existing subscriptions to come up with suggested categories and shows inside of them. I have no idea how it works and I haven't gotten used to it yet, but it seems ok. Better than nothing, but not as good as HuffDuffer, the social network for podcast bookmarking and discovery.

The other thing I was hoping for in the new Podcasting app is episode-level text visible that describes each audio file. Apple did it! On at least some episodes of the shows you're looking at, there's now a little i button that opens up a full page of info. That way you can learn about, for example, the guests on an interview show, their backgrounds and the topics they discussed. That makes it much easier to peruse a new series and pick out just the episodes you want to listen to. This was my biggest complaint about the iTunes podcast interface and now it's resolved!

The podcasting world doesn't seem to have had a lot to say about the app yet. As Daniel J Lewis said today, “Hopefully this is preinstalled with iOS 6!”

There's a lot more that could have been done, but this is simple, utilitarian and supports some discovery. Works for me.

Long live podcasting! If you're interested in plugging-in to the community of podcasters online, here's 500 of them on Twitter.

Great Designers vs Data Specialists: Which is Harder to Hire?

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:38 GMT

Data geek Soren Macbeth (now at Yieldbot) and I met over tea several months ago and he said something to me that I have thought of many times since. He said that though data science is getting all the hype, great designers might be even harder to hire. I was just thinking about that again this morning and thought I'd ask on the Twitter. Below you'll find the interesting conversation that emerged in response. I'd love to know what your thoughts on this are.

Of course the best of both worlds are those magical people who are strong in both. People like Nathan Yau, Andrew Vande Moere, Benjamin Wiederkehr, Ben Fry, Jer Thorp and Martin Wattenberg. Then there's emergent voices online like Cole Nussbaumer, Enrico Bertini and Bryan Connor. See also the new podcast Data Stories. I don't know all of these people personally, I just discovered them as part of the output of our startup Plexus Engine. Speaking of Plexus, if you're into data and design – and if you'd like to live in beautiful Portland, Oregon – you should send me an email so we can talk. If you don't want to move but are interested in rocking the future of the internet with us, you should still get in touch. We're building something incredible and we're looking for people who want to build it with us.

Things I wish were easier to do with RSS

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:28 GMT

I'm having a rough day with RSS feeds today, but there's SO much potential there still. We should all give thanks every day to Dave Winer and the other geeks who helped build RSS into what it is today. I just wish I could do more with it. I met with one of the biggest tech companies in the world last week and they too said they live on RSS feeds and love them. These are the things that I'm crying about today and have found myself upset about again and again.

Programatically look at a list of hundreds of webpage URLs and determine what their RSS feed URLs are. All the methods we've tried break or miss feeds.
Send a feed to a feed publishing service like Feedburner and have it cache non-live items in the feed it publishes.
Build spaghetti-ball messes of ornate processes with lots of RSS feeds without the apps using them timing out.

Anybody know good, scalable solutions to any of these problems?

Let’s Talk Tech on Facebook

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:11 GMT

After years of resistance, I have decided to take the time to create a Facebook Page. It's here. If you are interested in all things about the future of the Internet, and you use Facebook, I hope you'll join me for conversation there.

I've had a lot of issues with Facebook over the years, I wrote a big critique of the company's data sharing partnerships last week, but I also have a lot of admiration for Facebook. I can't go into great detail about that now because I've got a lot of work to do, but I hope you'll join me there if that's what you're into.

The Next Era of Tech Blogging: 3 Things That Could Make it Better

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:13 GMT

Leading tech and marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote a blog post today that has inspired some interesting conversation; he argues that with the recent departure of a number of the key big names in tech blogging from their posts, the Golden Age of Tech Blogging has passed and it's a new era. He cites my leaving RWW among others, though I haven't entirely left. (I'm just focused on building killer research mega-tool PlexusEngine.)

Many people believe that no such change is happening, either. There's a continuum of constant change, but tech blogging has never really been about just TechCrunch, Mushable and ReadWriteWeb. There are many other important tech blogs, always have been and always will be. ReadWriteWeb 2.0 is going to rock, too, by the way.

Either way, things are certainly changing. There are opportunities for new blogs and bloggers to rise into leadership positions. I thought I'd take a few minutes and offer three bits of advice about things I think could help make the new era of tech blogging even better than the last one. I just think these things would be nice.

Outbound Links

It's sad that so few tech blog posts add the kind of value that can be added by including links to high quality off-site resources. It's ok to send readers away, they'll appreciate the pointers and they'll come back. Some of the biggest sites on the web just aggregate links to other sites – why not combine that form of value with original content on blogs? Not only are the links valuable for readers, the research required to assemble those links is a big value add as well. Compiling research and links to other sites is a fine art. I know everybody wants to see more of this. Who on earth would believe that a single blog post's author knows everything a reader wants to know about a topic?

This isn't just a matter of principle, either. Outbound links can be good for search engine traction, though that's not 100% clear and it's not clear how much weight they carry relative to inbound links. As Google's Maile Ohye said several years ago, “Thoughtful outbound links also help your credibility because it shows that you've done your research and have expertise in the subject manner. You visitors may therefore want to come back for more analysis on future topics.”

Research, Including on Company Founders

One of the things I learned from Michael Arrington when at TechCrunch is that it's always important to look at the backgrounds of founders of companies you're writing about. Almost no one does that anymore though, I too often forget myself, but it's so often a missing part of the whole story!

As VC Roger Ehrenberg once wrote, “There can be tremendous inefficiencies as founders ascend the learning curve, especially in areas that are not necessarily related to or interesting given the founders' backgrounds.” Conversely, a founder's background experience indicates the ways in which they are most likely to be particularly efficient.

The time and pageview pressure these days leads to short blog posts based on little more than the first impression of the blogger was left with after looking at a website themselves. It's like the what, the why and the when of a news story gets adressed but the who gets too little attention.

Platform Implications

One of the things I have learned from Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is that news is always more interesting when you adress the long-term platform implications of anything. When might a certain app, trend or news development make possible in the future? That's one of the most exciting parts of the story.

A contrary perspective is that, as investor Rob Go has written, the word Platform could be “the most meaningless and overused phrase that entrepreneurs and investors try to use to make companies seem more important than they are.” Maybe, but from a journalistic and analytical perspective, thinking about companies as parts of trends, which will hopefully lead to future opportunities, seems like something that can never be a bad idea.

Maybe all of this is just a way to say “I think tech blogging should be more like the way I like to do tech blogging. But these three ideas sure would help make the next era of tech blogging even better, I think. Maybe no more listicles, too. (Blog posts with numbered lists! Ha!)

For what it's worth, I should mention that all the outbound links in this post were added lickety-split with the help of Plexus Engine. Sign up now for beta notification – it's coming along really well!

www.josschuurmans.com: "Rebooting the news" | Dave Winer's and Jay Rosen's podcasts

Mon, 11 May 2009 16:33 GMT

50 most influential Twitter users in India « Gautam’s Net

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:31 GMT

Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:26 GMT

A great collection of Amit's best advice regarding PDF hacks. If you're not reading Digital Inspiration, you're missing out!

The significance of Google’s Android

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:31 GMT

Looks like a good article on Android, 33 comments, consultancy blog. Marked toread.

Media Bullseye

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:00 GMT

Interesting new site for PR and marketing news regarding social media. Chris Brogan an early contributor.

Thoughts on Seth Godin's keynote at SES [SearchEngineWatch]

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:00 GMT

Seth Godin is probably someone I should read a lot more of. He's a marketer, but interesting.

Massive Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Video Recap

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:00 GMT

Can't wait to spend some time with this one.

The Identity Corner » The problem(s) with OpenID

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:00 GMT

A long collection of links to critiques of OpenID. Looks real good.

A hunger for books | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:00 GMT

Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech where she brings up critiques of the web's cultural impacts, among other things. An important read.

Top Spots in Organic & Paid Search = Branding

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:00 GMT

Great write up of an interesting study on the perceptual impact of good search placement. This one's a keeper.