Marshall's blog and shared items

Live Mesh Scenarios Directory (Tutorials)

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:16 GMT

Curious about what Live Mesh lets users do? Here are 4 tutorials to start off, more apparently on the way.

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Tags: toshare, mesh, microsoft, tutorials

Globalizatoin at AboutUs: It's Cooler Than You Might Think

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:43 GMT

Interesting discussion of AboutUs and their office in Pakistan. AboutUs is a past consulting client of mine and this situation is one worth reading about.

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Tags: toshare, globalization, wikis

Do Startups Need Community Managers?

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:34 GMT

One of the things I've been advising clients to do a lot lately is consider hiring a full or part-time community manager to communicate closely with their users online. I thought I'd write a post about why community managers are good to have, but then I thought that instead I'd ask it as a question. Do startups need community managers? If not, I'll stop suggesting that so many of them make that type of hire!

That's how I phrased a deliberately vague question on Twitter, and it got some great replies by email and on FriendFeed! Twenty people replied, many of whom are community managers, others of whom have hired community managers and a couple of others are cautionary or cynical. It's a great discussion!

Most of these thoughts are unique and very worth considering - even if they don't all agree. I'm going to turn these replies into a coherent (and weighty) post on ReadWriteWeb in the morning but I thought I would post them online first and let people knock them around a bit more first. Would you like to respond to any of these arguments in the finished post? If so, please leave a comment here and make sure you tell me where to link your name to.

IF for some reason you were under the mistaken impression you would not be quoted in responding to this question, or would like to change what I've got you down for saying - email me at marshall@marshallk.com. I'll be cutting the text here way, way down to just the heart of what everyone's saying.

I was planning on putting these up on a wiki first and encouraging people to go over there and make edits for replies - I've done that before - but then I thought that sounded like a missed opportunity. So here's a discussion that will turn into a blog post - your thoughts are formally requested...big thanks to the people who have already joined in. I'll include my own thoughts in the final post.

PS. Big congrats to Drew Olanoff, who was just named Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.com today!

. . .

I do think that startups need community managers, but that being said it depends on the community and what needs to be managed. A lot of what I do at CubeSpace is function as a startup community management, but that is very different than the work that Dawn does. I think it depends on the style and distractability of the folks in the startup and how they like to collaborate with peers as well as how they define their peers. I am not trying to be cryptic, I have just worked with a range of startups who need different kind of support and community management.

I would be happy to have a longer conversation with you about this if you are interested. It might also be a good session for http://www.sideprojecttostartup.com/.

-Eva

Eva Sari Schweber
Chief Cat Herder
CubeSpace, Your WorkSpace Community

Read on for the rest of the discussion

Hutch Carpenter points to a blog post about how a good community manager saves money on PR and has other benefits.
http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/smart-social-media-marketing-caleb-elston-and-toluu/
interacting with bloggers saves money on PR

I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires - right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corp. marketing people. I have my reasons and am happy to get into details.

--
John Mark Walker
Community Manager, CollabNet
http://www.collab.net/

Just saw your Twitter post about community managers. Pandora just created this position about 4 months ago and it’s been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time!

We are very active on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. I’d be happy to have you speak to our Community Manager if you’d like. It’s opened a whole new world of communications for us!
Lucia Willow—she’s great and has a great, fun online voice.

With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exicitng.. that we even posted a haiku contest for some free Pandora swag to the Twitters!

Kim Bardakian

Sr. Communications Manager
Pandora

Someone else sent in a link to a slide deck regarding The Costs of community managers
http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/06/my-slideshow-fr.html

Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us. It doesn't have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you're in business, you're doing community management whether you like it or not.
Peat Bakke peat.org

If by "community managers" you mean someone that keeps track of what is happening in a certain community, then yes, startups need a community manager. Especially if that company pays attention to social media. Social media is so important for many companies these days, but the sheer volume of information that is shared can be a problem for them. I think it takes at least one person in a startup to "keep an ear to the ground". That person should be reading feeds all day and paying attention for appropriate information and content. That person should be writing a blog and listening to their other networks. A social network community manager should learn about what is happening in that company's field every day and report it to their team.
Doug Coleman

I think it's an important *function* to be filled, but it's not necessary to have a position dedicated to it. I think it's a matter of resources - I know some firms that have a full time head very early and some keep it to an intern after they're 100+ people. But it is important to *do*.

I fill it in between the other things I do - vendor relationships, inbound inquiries, sales calls, balancing the books, etc. I do wish I had more time/resources to it, however - I'm much more reactive than I am proactive. dawdledotcom is our username on a variety of sites, from Twitter to CheapAssGamer to all sorts of sites in between.

I use Summize and Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, and we have a board on GetSatisfaction (empty for now, but ready to be used). Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us - we're happy to help, but I'd wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Sachin

--
Sachin Agarwal

I put down a lot of thoughts about community building last week on Rick’s blog: http://siliconflorist.com/2008/07/08/community-the-secret-sauce-of-a-successful-internet-startup/

My opinion on community managers is that they are OK when you’ve established a community. Not for just launched startups. You need to be in the thick of it managing your own community in the early days.

Cheers,

-D

Darius A Monsef IV

Executive Editor & Creator

www.COLOURlovers.com

It depends on the startup. For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service (Twitter, open source product, etc.), I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Having someone in place and responsible for managing the community helps make sure that the company is responding to the needs of the community. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical. In many startups, the community manager can wear another hat, too. I worked at one startup where I was the Director of Community and Partner Programs, since partners were a big part of the community. Other logical combinations include some marketing roles, social media (blogging / podcasting), developer relations (for developer communities) or website development depending on the skills of the person in the role.

I think that each startup needs to decide exactly how critical the community is to their particular business and use that information to decide when to hire a community manager.

My 2 cents.

Take care,
Dawn

--
Visit my blog at http://fastwonderblog.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Marshall, that's a story I'd like to read! Great benefits could be gained by establishing links between a startup and it's followers, early. However, the community voice needs to be free The community manager would need the suport of the community. There is a danger that a community voice in management would have split loyalties. Maybe even tied by NDA's. This would make him/her more of a hostage (worse case). If these fears, as well as the benefits, can be voiced and talked about there is great merit to your idea.

Best wishes

Jonas Anderson

Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position. We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give "social media" to someone that already has 10 other roles.

As a "start up" ourselves, or at least always in our minds as one, we watch and participate in the online communities a lot. We have someone on our team in the marketing dept that gathers all of the mentions and
conversations RE eROI and reacts to some as well. This of course is also beneficial to us as an agency to know and understand how to listen, measure, and use this service to helping our clients get the word out on campaigns that launch.

At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire it.

So yes if a start up wants to gain traction they either need to hire someone or dedicate someone to the tasks.

two cent rant over

Dylan T. Boyd | VP Sales & Strategy
www.eROI.com | Inc. 500 Company

There are certain startups needing community managers - those addressing consumer bases with products that need their constant engagement, feedback and course correction.

This role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen. Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents
and offers (that's why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and knows how to rely that to developers
and managers. And vice versa.

Andraz Tori, CTO
Zemanta Ltd, London, Ljubljana
www.zemanta.com

A startup community manager would probably have the title Marketing Manager
or VP Marketing...or maybe they raised a little bit too much money.
N: Mark Grimes
W: http://www.ned.com/

an internet company these days should have three legs:

1.) the money backers + revenue focus
2.) the rockstar tech devs
3.) the community advocate + social media expert

It's my opinion that the money backers alone want build old-skool products not suited for the new web (b/c they see it as too much risk). The tech guys want to build all this fun stuff, but tend to allow feature creep, don't think of revenue front-of-mind and often don't actively participate in the mediascape. I couldn't do anything without the former two, but I feel as though my input is highly valuable as to user interface, industry trends and community feedback.

I've got more if you want it.

Best,
Mark* (@povertyjetset)

Mark Schoneveld
Community Manager
www.xlntads.com

From FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/e/f8ae0b05-6dd9-1ea1-b19a-5220ad810f3d/Thinking-of-writing-a-story-about-whether/

I think it depends on the launch strategy, either to open it up and build community from the start (in which case you definitely would need one) or if you're going for the super secret beta aspect (in which case you would still need one but would probably call them something else). - Matt Dickman via twhirl

We're building an Independent Business Platform with a community element, but we're not sure how that piece will take off. So, for now, each person on the team owns a piece of the product and we're essentially the community manager for that piece. So far I love it - it's a great way to get the honest feedback I need on BizUnite. - Sonciary Honnoll

Can someone provide a link to an explanation RE how "community management" is different than "customer service" if the latter is done properly? Or are we talking about the same thing? If so, then yes, every company--no matter the size--needs a community manager/customer service manager/customer advocate of some sort. - Ken Sheppardson

Marshall -- We thought it about for a while at Twine and definitely had the need in the beginning stages, but ultimately decided to hold off. Why? It's actually pretty amazing, but the community started self-regulating, in a very mature and consistent way that we were pleasantly surprised by. We still check in constantly and our team is obviously very active in Twine, but I am curious what other startups are doing. The community is running smoothly now, but we have to see what the future holds… - candice nobles

I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a "community manager". Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want. - Rob Diana

NPR cancel Bryant Park Project - Can a hybrid work?: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:22 GMT

A good discussion of the now late NPR show that mixed radio and social media. I was a guest on this show once.

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Tags: toshare, radio, social media, mixed models

5 Minute Intro to Yahoo Pipes

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:10 GMT

I'm in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes, one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn't really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer's head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Just seeing some one do the simplest things there makes it a lot less scary. In that same spirit, I offer the following 5 minute screencast demonstrating 3 simple things you can do with Pipes. I hope it emboldens you to learn how to do even more with the service, but even if you only feel comfortable doing this much - I believe it will still prove very, very useful. Plus it will keep your toes safe (you'll know what I mean after watching the video below.

Female CEOs at top Silicon Valley tech firms down to zero - San Jose Mercury News

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:23 GMT

Just one more data point concerning gender and tech.

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Tags: toshare, gender, tech, women

NxE's Fifty Most Influential ‘Female' Bloggers

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:41 GMT

Interesting list of women power-bloggers. Do you know these writers? You should. There were several here that I had never heard of or didn't know much about. Worth a look.

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Tags: toshare, women, bloggers, blogher

“Blogging Is Easy, Anyone Can Do It” Actually, It’s Not So Simple

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:00 GMT

If you're looking to engage in online conversations with a wide variety of people in different circumstances, it's important to recognize that the playing field is not level. Though blogging software lowered the technical barriers to participation, there remain substantial political and cultural issues that complicate adoption of these kinds of technologies by people with particular life experiences.

Two important opportunities to learn about these issues are in the news right now. Please check out this article on Silicon Alley Insider (and follow the links) and check out the Blogher conference, which just kicked off today.

Racism and sexism are two of the issues that many people face online. On a strategic level, to draw the lowest kind of analogy, failure to recognize the race and gender realities different people face on and offline is like trying to design a web page without recognizing that different browsers render HTML differently. (Forgive me for the clumsy analogy.) Though users may have free choice between browsers, and people have some choice about their response to race and gender politics, people who are not white and male don't have much choice about those circumstances. And being "other" than white and male is not "a problem" like using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox - it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that. Enough with that analogy then.

I bring this up just to say that no matter what your political views may be, trying humbly to understand where other people are coming from will make you a more effective communicator. There are millions of people on the web with millions of different experiences, but the types of experiences we can learn about by paying attention to this conversation and this conference are ones that a large number of people have had. Even if you don't think it's a matter of justice, fairness and human goodness (I do), consider learning respectfully how people in different circumstances understand their own lives so that you can be more effective in communicating with them. That will make you more effective at working online.

Mobile 2.0 Tagcloud at mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends - m-trends.org

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:00 GMT

Interesting visual representation of the concepts in the mobile 2.0 space.

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Tags: mobile, toshare

GeoSpatial Semantic Web Blog

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:42 GMT

This looks fascinating!

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Tags: toshare, tosub, geo, geospatial, semantic web, APIs

Extracting Data From Otherwise Unused Applications: The Case of the Facebook Birthdays

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:21 GMT

I hardly ever log in to Facebook but each time I do, I find that there are friends whose birthdays I'm glad to find out about. In order not to miss them, I've extracted that information from my Facebook account in to an RSS feed that I can subscribe to elsewhere. I used the wonderful tool Dapper.net to do it. Below are screenshots demonstrating how to do the same thing yourself.

Of course this is just one example of a general principle. I hope you can imagine all kinds of other applications that you would like to get limited access to without visiting them, but from inside your RSS reader.

You have a Facebook (or other) account that you never log in to.

But it does a remarkable job of notifying you when it's someone's birthday!

Dapper Will Extract The Data in That Field For You

Select the "create a new Dapp" link. I love Dapper.

Just Enter The URL of the Page You Want to Extract From

Copy and paste in the URL, select RSS feed, then click the "next step" button.

Go Ahead and Log In Through Dapper

Then click on the login button on Facebook, or whatever app you want to enable access to.

Voila, You Are Logged In.

Now click the "add to basket" button and then "next step". You will be warned that Dapper works best with more than one URL in the basket, but you can just say that's ok and move on with your life.

Now click to define the field you want to extract data from.

1. I clicked on my friends' names whose birthdays are today. 2. You can see in the preview field below that Dapper properly understood which field I was trying to define and didn't capture any extra data. 3. Save that field.

Now tell Dapper what that field you selected is and where in an RSS feed you want it to live.

In some cases you might make this the item text, but in this case the title is what we're looking for. If you wanted to define another field, you will be given that opportunity once you save this one - but in this case we'll just say "next step."

Preview that baby...

Looks good! Click "next step."

Now you've got some fields to fill out...

I probably didn't need to mark this as private, but I did. Then hit save.

Now tell Dapper what your username and password are so it can login for you.

Hit "fix dates" if there's no date field already determined (this is a mystery but it works) . Finally, copy and paste that orange RSS link into your favorite feed reader! It may need to be one that supports authentication (log in) and in those cases if it's high enough priority these days I add it to Netvibes.com

500 Friendfeed Rooms

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:44 GMT

A list of 500 "rooms" in FriendFeed.com, some of them very active sharing spaces regarding particular topics.

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Tags: FriendFeed, rooms, lists, toshare

Etsy :: The Storque :: Search: getting started in v

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:19 GMT

Bre is doing a great series for Etsy on how to get started in producing video for the web. Looks very useful and interesting.

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Tags: video, tutorials, toshare

Voices.com Launches An API for Voice Talent

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:53 GMT

Fascinating niche case for an API - read write access to voice over talent database, which btw is stored on S3. An API on an API!

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Tags: APIs, toshare

Screen Shots: How I Use RSS to Track Thousands of News Sources Easily

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:06 GMT

The most common topic I give training presentations on is the use of RSS for tracking issues important to various organizations. This has been the heart of what I've focused on since I first got involved in this industry, that hasn't changed. My methodology has changed a lot over the years. It's a happy day when I can add something new to my personal RSS strategy, and thus to the strategy I share with others.

Below is a series of screen shots illustrating the current state of my basic RSS workflow. There are lots of little details, feed discovery and creation techniques and other advanced steps that can be taken - but I'm often asked about the basics. So here they are. I hope you find this useful and feel free to pass it along to a friend. I'll do my best to answer any questions in comments below. If you'd like a personalized research system like this set up and populated with the most useful feeds for your work, let me know. I'm also working with some other people on a giant post coming soon describing all the things I know how to do with a pile of RSS feeds - I have a consulting project that's totally open ended so I thought I'd make a list.

Note that I made this post almost entirely with the application ScreenSteps. It was easy and fun, I wanted to try it and it didn't take too long for me to think of a good topic to try it on.

Netvibes.com

I put a link to Netvibes in my browser toolbar and click it about once an hour. These are high priority feeds that I want to keep an eye on throughout the day. They include things like 1.) Competitors 2.) Manually created feeds for special circomstances and 3.) Groups of feeds spliced together. Netvibes also has a very good mobile version, m.netvibes.com, so I can check these same feeds on my phone.

Google Reader

Once or twice a day I load up my Google Reader app, which I set up as a standalone "single app browser" using FluidApp.com. I try to always read every new item in my "vendors" folder and then I scan what I can from everything else. I oversubscribe, prioritize, read what I can and believe that subscription means there is some chance I'll see things - not subscribing means there is dramatically less opportunity for me to see the news in a particular feed.

GMail Web Clips

I've loaded 5 or 10 feeds into the Gmail "web clips" feature so I can increase the chance that I might see some of the items that come through those feeds.

Snackr.net

For the same reason, I also put the feeds in my Netvibes page into Snackr.net - an Adobe AIR based RSS ticker. It runs at the bottom of my page throughout the day, giving me something to scan while pages load, etc. I regularly find important news stories here.

Zaptxt

The highest priority feeds are run through an RSS to IM/SMS alert system. I use Zaptxt and it gets me lots of stories - before other people get to them. No matter what field you work in, I believe that being among the first to know about key information can provide a huge competitive advantage. There are many services that provide this kind of funtionality - you should give some thought to what you would benefit from getting this kind of notification about.

That's how it goes! There are of course all kinds of ways to drill down - but this is the big picture. It's a whole lot of fun to build these kinds of workflows for people working in particular niches. Once that's done there are any number of other advanced things you can do with the information you're consuming like this. (See this case study, for example, or this one.)

Thanks for stopping by, if you've got tips on how you process large amounts of information online I'm sure readers here and I would love to know what they are!

OAuth Support at SmugMug

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:56 GMT

Score one more win for oAuth! The list of supporting sites is small - but this is a good one to ad to it!

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Tags: oAuth, toshare, photos, APIs

NICAR

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:36 GMT

National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting - hot damn! I can't wait to dig into this organization!

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Tags: toshare, toread, tosub, reporting, media

Boy Genius Report

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:03 GMT

A good blog about mobile, new to me but Corvida from SheGeeks.net recommends it.

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Tags: tosub, toshare, mobile, blogs

Open Symbian: good news for content providers - news - www.mobile-ent.biz

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:15 GMT

Less fragmentation going forward, but it'll take two years for the 'Open Symbian' to mature. Content providers have reacted positively to news that No...

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Tags: toshare, mobile, symbian

Linux kernel developers: Say no to closed-source modules | InfoWorld | News | 2008-06-23 | By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:02 GMT

More than 135 Linux kernel developers are protesting vendors that create closed-source code modules for the kernel

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Tags: toshare, mobile, linux, FOSS

Submit Your Entry Now for Extend Firefox 3!

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:09 GMT

Great chance to get some distribution in the Firefox plug-in community.

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Tags: toshare

Thoughts on How to Be a New Media Consultant

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:12 GMT

I just got a very nice email from someone who found my blog and is interested in moving into consulting as well. I sent them the following thoughts that I think could be of interest to more people than just that one aspiring consultant.

The keys in my mind to being a good and employed new media consultant are:

1. Learn how to do cool new things and blog (well) about them.
2. Let people know that you are a consultant.
3. Make sure you deliver clear value to clients that extends beyond your time with them. Search engine optimization and pageviews are the most common things that consultants try to deliver to clients, but I prefer aiming for education, excitement, comfort with new tools and a sense that they can now be full fledged actors in the social media market themselves. My past clients are now happily reading OPML files I built for them, they see the value of and aren't afraid of Twitter and they have more skills to use in their own work than they did before we worked together. (They are also doing more complicated things like this, in some cases.) I always aim to over-deliver and I don't worry about giving clients almost everything I know - this market is too new and too big to worry about teaching yourself out of a job.
4. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people. I don't do that so much on my personal blog these days, but I do it on Twitter, on ReadWriteWeb.com and in face to face conversations.

That's what's worked well for me so far. Do other consultants reading here have other high-level points that they think are important to communicate?

I didn't mention it in that conversation - but I do provide training and advising to other consultants sometimes. (As well as working on projects with clients together.) If you're a consultant interested in some training on the particular things that I'm good at teaching - feel free to drop me a line.

One of my fantasies for awhile has been to hire other consultants for an hour of their training in whatever they do best. I think it would be awesome to do that once a month. Maybe a trade would be good. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless. It's an exciting time to be learning about the internet.

Twitter for Nonprofits

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:25 GMT

I'm participating as a guide in an online event tomorrow where we'll discuss how nonprofit organizations can rock Twitter. Hosted by the great nonprofit technology assistance project TechSoup, the event will go on through an asynchronous but scheduled day of forum postings. I'll be joined by Michaela Hackner, Director of Online Strategy at the very cool looking organization World Learning (check them out, looks great!).

What will be discussing?

Much of the discussion will concern things that came up in a webinar that Michaela Hackner lead this afternoon (sorry I'm late blogging about this!) and I'm sure there will be a lot of other general questions.

Specifics that I'll want to bring into the discussion will include:

*Using Twitter for news, opinion and information gathering.
*Using Twitter for technical help.
*Using Twitter to publicize your events and other work.
*Finding the best people to follow on Twitter.
*Building your network and status on Twitter.

A couple of relevant links that participants may appreciate:

Twitter is Paying My Rent
Using Social Media In Realtime for Crowdsourced Research
How We Use Twitter for Journalism
Fundraising on Twitter - Just one of many Beth Kanter posts on the topic

Feel free to share more links in comments to posts around the web that you'd advise nonprofit participants to check out.

Interview: How Cloud Computing Changes Trion's Game

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:01 GMT

Trion CEO Lars Buttler promises that platforms like his company's will evolve the way we play online The company recently

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Tags: cloud computing, gaming, MMO, toshare

Startup Tips: How I grew a waiting list of 20,000+ at Mint.com Part I | Noah Kagan's Okdork.com

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:52 GMT

Recently I got a question asking i was curious what methods you used to build a 20k pre-beta email list, and what were the conversion rates for those

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Tags: tips, launching, toshare, mint, kagan

Frequently Asked Questions About Web App Consulting

Wed, 28 May 2008 09:10 GMT

I just replied to a great email from a prospective consulting client who asked some questions I think many prospective clients could benefit from reading my replies to. They are posted below as an FAQ of sorts. Readers here in general are more than welcome to provide feedback in comments, any discussion of these strategies is great. None of it is about the content of my consulting, it's about the structure of a typical engagement. If that's not of interest to you then stop reading this post right now!

Otherwise, here are some details about how a typical consulting engagement has been going for me lately. For more details on my consulting services, see this link. If you're interested in working together, I'm not in a position to take on any new large engagements but am always happy to schedule small engagements of the sort discussed below.

If I hire you as a consultant, will that prevent you from writing about our company on Read Write Web?

No, though it will greatly increase the likelihood that another writer would need to cover your company instead of me. If, and it is unlikely, I did write about you on RWW then I would be very open about disclosing our financial relationship and would probably be especially critical of your shortcomings so as to compensate for any perception of bias.

Will you consider working or advising in exchange for equity?

If after a short term engagement we both were interested in arranging equity for a long term engagement, I would consider that. Thanks for asking.

What does a 1 hour consulting session include?

That one hour can consist of whatever you like, it usually ends up like this: 30% of the time is you talking, 65% of the time is me offering feedback based on what you show, tell and ask me. 5% of the hour is spent on assorted magical moments and the hour usually goes a bit beyond 60 minutes. It's a fast paced, action packed session that leaves everyone with a lot to think about and act on. If you'd like to send me some background materials prior to that hour I can spend a few minutes looking at them, too.

How many hours should I hire you for, if I want your help planning a product launch?

There are 3 ways I do this with my clients. A one hour session focusing on launch planning can provide a basic outline of what I suggest you do, questions answered and some product/market positioning feedback. A 3 to 5 hour engagement consists of the first hour as detailed above, some time spent by me coming up with a list of people you should reach out to regarding your launch if you would like that list, then time spent walking you through implementing that plan up to and including launch day. Finally, a 10 to 15 hour engagement can include time spent by me writing and/or editing outreach materials for you and providing detailed, real-time advising on launch plan implementation. I can also spend some of that time building a world-class OPML file of RSS feeds for you to subscribe to in order to stay on top of your field.

I do launch consulting work in all 3 of these formats and clients are always happy about how it helps them advance towards their strategic goals. I have limited availability for 10 to 15 hour engagements, whereas 1 and 3 to 5 hour engagements are easy to schedule.

How many hours should I hire you for, if I wanted to do product development and roadmap planning work together?

The same time formats as above can apply to product roadmap discussion, with 10 to 15 hour engagements including website copy editing instead of launch material editing. 10 to 15 hours of product development consulting can be scheduled in regular sessions over a period of several months. This is easier to schedule that 10 to 15 hours on launch planning as the time frame is usually far more truncated.

An hour doesn't seem like very long to work together? Can I really get value out of such a short work session?

If you don't mind my saying so, you should be able to provide a relatively full explanation of what you are doing in far less than an hour and users are unlikely to give you that much time before they decide whether to return to your application or not. That said, if you are looking for a deeper engagement than a fast paced hour can provide, I'm more than happy to schedule a 3 to 5 hour engagement to provide that level of in-depth discussion.

That's it! Those really are Frequently Asked Questions. I hope you found them helpeful and I hope you'll get in touch if you think that we could work well together.

Using Social Media in Real Time for Crowdsourced Research

Thu, 22 May 2008 21:45 GMT

How useful can social media be for work? This afternoon I had a wonderful time writing a post over at ReadWriteWeb called Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy with the help of probably 15 people around the world, in real time. I started up a live video broadcast on UStream over EVDO from a cafe in downtown Portland, started writing the post on a publicly available wiki and then Twittered both URLs inviting people to join me. Over the next two hours a got all kinds of help, feedback and semi-related conversation to help round out what I think became a very good post. At one point I sent out a message over Twitter requesting that anyone with a background in the philosophy of economics call me to discuss a question I had. Two qualified and helpful new friends called me on the phone and are quoted in the post. Here's the last 10 minutes of putting the post live.

It's true that these tools were as valuable to me in this case as they were because I've already built up a network of friends on Twitter and ReadWriteWeb - but I think there is a lot of potential for other people to use these tools in similar ways.

Indie Startups - Covering bootstrapped, independent, self-funded, and ambitious start-ups

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:41 GMT

Good looking blog covering startups.

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Tags: toshare, startups, reviews

Mobile Ads Cost More, But Have Higher Recall Rates Than TV | mocoNews.net

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:31 GMT

Interesting if non-transparent study.

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Tags: mobile, advertising, toshare

Android Developers Blog: A Challenge in More than One Way

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:36 GMT

Really interesting description of how Google crowdsourced the judging for its huge Android mobile app contest.

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Tags: toshare, mobile, android, contests, crowdsourcing

Women and Technology: The Ugly Truth - Harvard Business Online's Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:34 GMT

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Birthing pains in the colonization of the social Web | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

Fri, 16 May 2008 09:22 GMT

All the major social-networking players recognize that the walls separating them are crumbling, but they haven't agreed on how to implement global openness. Read this blog post by Dan Farber on Outside the Lines.

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Dreaming of the Perfect Friend Adder, MyBlogLog Came Close Today

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:21 GMT

Super-cookie service MyBlogLog just emailed users to let us know about a new "friend finder" the site is offering. The feature is remarkable because it makes it really easy to add your friends from around the web - without asking you for any passwords! With just a few clicks your friends on services from Flickr to FriendFeed can become your friends on MyBlogLog. I wish everyone did that. Here's a few bullet points on the implementation that could be helpful for other application developers to consider.

This doesn't just work with early adopters. Most services have you "add friends" by asking for your email password because that's where most of the online world has most of its friends. It's creepy though and a bad practice to do that. MyBlogLog can grab the "Friend of a Friend" (FOAF) data from your public profiles at services like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace - hardly a tiny set of bleeding edge users. Your application could consider doing the same. Think also about using the new GMail contacts API.
There's still no "add all" link. In what I assume was a silly oversight, there's no link to "add all" when you pull up your friends from these networks. You have to add them one at a time. It would be nice to be able to select all and then deselect a few. That's no small thing, it would make a big difference in growing the service and I assume they will fix that soon. As it is, the list of 20 friends at a time gets mixed up a bit like FriendFeed recommendations. Implementation of both are clunky though and could scale much better by presenting more options at once and displaying more information about users you are prompted to add as friends.
Service discovery could be faster. MyBlogLog is "discovering friends" via the public profile pages you filled out in your MBL profile. That process presents you with a long list of services from around the web and asks you to fill in the part of profile URLs where your username goes. Everyone should check out how Lijit discovers new accounts from other sites. It asks you "what is your most common username" and then searches to see where it can find an account with that username. You then confirm or deny each one and can enter exceptions to your standard username on any particular service. It's really smooth and smart. I wish MyBlogLog and everyone else did it that way.

Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or "viral introductions." There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy's recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I'd also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You'll like it, I promise.

Copy As Interface » SlideShare

Thu, 01 May 2008 16:44 GMT

130 frame PPT on text and web 2.0

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College Student Twitters Arrest in Egypt | chrisbrogan.com

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:41 GMT

Arrested. That's what 29 year old James Karl Buck sent from his phone out to the world via Twitter the other day. It seems Buck was snapping photos of a

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