A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

That’s how the process of coming to be the newest author for Wiley Publishing seems to have gone, even though the initial contact was only in late April.

Back then, I received a mysterious email in my inbox asking if I would be interested in writing The WordPress Bible. Fascinated, I immediately responded back and the conversation began.

We have had an agreement in principle for several weeks and now that the contract is official, I feel comfortable talking publicly about the deal – though the details of the deal will remain undisclosed.

I’m excited about writing this book. As many of you who have been with me for these more than five years know, I began the process of writing a book with my friend and colleague Jeremy Wright back in 2005. Honestly, I don’t think either of our hearts were in that book and we amicably agreed with the publisher that we wouldn’t complete that project. Sort of a shame in itself, but all for the better.

That project gave me a little window into the life of an author. Overcoming writers block. Roadmapping chapters. Communication at all time with project editors. Stylesheets. Deadlines. All that jazz.

At that time, I was much less mature as a writer so it was a huge challenge to write effectively and for an audience. At that time, I was a much more free-spirited author writing often elaborate (and possibly poetic) prose which might not have been the right fit for a book of that nature. Today, I still am the best damned writer around (kidding) but know when to turn it on and off and how to write an effective 4000 word article or a 140 character tweet.

Today, I approach The WordPress Bible with some fear and trepidation. Currently, the book is marked at around a cool 700 pages. And oh yes, it has to be done in October. Yikes!

What this effectively means is that for the next four months, I will be spending monumental amounts of time doing nothing but writing. I’m considering disappearing to the mountains once a month for 3-4 days just to write.

During the process, I am going to continue to work with my clients to deliver valuable WordPress solutions for their businesses. In the past week, I have secured 3 more clients that I will be able to work with over the next few months.

I want to thank Stephanie McComb at Wiley for believing in me and reaching out to me in April. This will be a great addition to the Bible series. I also want to thank Lynn Haller from Studio B for helping me through the process and running valuable interference during the negotiations. Anyone looking to write a book should reach out to her to represent you. Authors should usually have agents and she’s a great agent.

I can’t wait for this book to hit the shelf. It’s going to be an invaluable resource for WordPress users, themers and developers of all range of skills and will be a “must order”.

During the run up to last years landmark election, then-candidate Barack Obama made a promise to appoint a federal Chief Technology Officer to oversee the federal IT infrastructure and data. In our primary endorsement of Obama, we said:

In the wake of 9/11, a glaring weakness was revealed in the FBI’s technology infrastructure. That has not been addressed. As one with first hand experience working for both the Department of the Navy and Health and Human Services, I can attest to technology tone-deafness. One candidate is proposing the creation of a CTO position to ensure that all government agencies are moving forward into the 21st century with modern technology at their fingertips. As a sidenote, how is it we don’t have a CTO already??

At the time, and throughout the campaign, we were not clear that such a position would actually become two positions – Chief Information Officer, a position held by former District of Columbia CTO Vivek Kundra and responsible for the policy and strategic planning of technology efforts by the administration and the executive agencies, and Chief Technology Officer, held by Aneesh Chopra.

In a nod to government bureaucracy, Mr. Chopras actual title is Chief Technology Officer and Director for Technology in the White House Office of Science and Technology. Fit that on a business card.

Mr. Chopra, who is a geeked out geek all by himself, was at the Personal Democracy Forum, a tech heavy conference with an emphasis on technology play within government, political action and open government, where he unveiled USASpending.gov. The new site provide a new dashboard for overview of spending across the federal agencies.

It’s an interesting website, for sure, from an administration who appears to have done its’ level best to open up the windows and the doors of government with projects like Data.Gov, designed to provide raw data sources to developers and those interested in digging inside the raw numbers, and Recovery.gov, designed to aid and assist in the economic recovery.

Certainly, the new IT Dashboard is incomplete and it seems they know that. Notably, it’s easy to get 50,000 foot snapshots in the form of a pie chart, but the data should be something that can be drilled into more than it already is.

Here’s a video demonstrating the use of the new dashboard.

Also, take a look at other articles about it.

• techPresident – PdF ‘09: Kundra Unveils IT Spending Dashboard
• TechCrunch – Can Open Government Be Gamed?
• Tim O’Reilly – Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard

Over the past year or so, I’ve fiddled around on Friendfeed. Sometimes actively, sometimes passively. The notion of aggregating all social content into a single place is an enticing value add to anyone who spends time on multiple services across the internet.

As I’ve thought about the value of Friendfeed and it’s potential to be a market disruptor, I’ve come to realize it’s not. I operate much like other “non personal” brands do. I monitor reputation, mentions, links and traffic. I make decisions based on what will help me get more business for my company and increase key metrics of success. As a result, the value I find in Friendfeed, as a technology platform, is limited.

Twitter is a highly valuable tool for me, mostly because the mobile integration is highly important and integral to the service. Twitter was built to be a mobile tool. While there are services that will allow Friendfeed to be used via mobile (and by mobile, I do not mean iPhone), it was not built with mobile as a key cornerstone. As such, it does not behave in a way that is friendly to me as a mobile professional.

As a measure of mentions, however, Friendfeed shines beyond other aspects of it. Though there is not a significant marketshare of people using Friendfeed, thus making even it’s shiningest feature somewhat dim, it is built on the concept of aggregation and so having search feeds and other monitoring mechanisms on Friendfeed is hugely valuable for businesses.

Where Friendfeed breaks down is its community. Though many (perhaps most) of Friendfeed users who are active are okay, there has been a much larger proportion of people, as compared to other platforms, that use the platform for nothing more than troll behavior. They disagree just to disagree. They argue just to argue. They call names just to call names. Hardly something that is productive for a business to be involved in and as an early adopter of technologies, I decided to call it quits.

Comedy ensued.

In fact, not only did comedy ensue, but my point of trollish behavior was demonstrated on numerous occasions in the epic length thread.

Robert Scoble, perhaps the most vocal critic of me, accurately figured that I was giving a big middle finger to the community. He is correct in that I was sending a message to Friendfeed that, “If you want to be valuable outside of a very small early adopter, tech-heavy community, you need to find a way to be valuable to those people on the outside of “the group”. Right now, that value is missing.

At this time, I cannot suggest to a major media organization that they should use Friendfeed for anything other than monitoring. I cannot suggest that a small business can have productive dialogue with customers via Friendfeed. I just can’t.

Certainly, Friendfeed has done a lot in recent months to enhance the experience with a new look and feel, real time commenting, etc. But they haven’t done enough. At some point, Friendfeed needs to show community value to businesses if they are going to be successful.

I am tremendously grateful for the kind words and the pleas to not leave Friendfeed. Truly, I did not know I had the kind of impact that some have suggested. Thus, I’ll give it a week. I’ll decide next week if I want to kill Friendfeed or not. If I have to make the decision today, I’ll leave. But if it’s truly valuable for all those people to keep me around, then prove it. If you’re okay with the community being the way it is, then that’s fine. Best of luck to you and I’ll see you around the web. However, if my presence is that important, then show me value. Don’t make me find value. Show it to me. I’m willing to be wooed back.

But right now, I don’t see the benefit of investing time and energy in a platform that has little ROI for me and my business.

Late last night, I came across an AP article that indicated a long awaited smackdown was coming from the FTC regarding paid reviews on blogs. Digging deeper into the article, it seems that the issue is not so much paid reviews as it is proper disclosure and verifiable claims.

In the blog world, we are subject to increasing amounts of “freebies”, particularly as our individual or demographic influence grows stronger. Companies want to get involved and get bloggers on their side, spouting their reviews and influencing opinion. As a disclosure, I participated in a Sears promotion, have been provided VMWare software on a “view” basis and was given a pair of Joe’s Jeans. Early on, I was also provided a cell phone from Sprint. That’s about the extent of the freebies I received. In terms of reviews, my policy has already been defined.

In some sections of the blogosphere, it’s reached a tipping point.

Meanwhile, some readers of Outside the Beltway see the move as indicative of future malfeasance by the federal government.

The problem is, this enforcement measure is just that – enforcement. There already are fair trade regulations on the books that dictate appropriate ways for businesses to engage in commerce – whether marketing, communications, disclosures, advertising, etc. These regulations already exist to protect the consumer. As with many industries, new media was a disruptive introduction and businesses are left trying to figure out how to compete in a new landscape.

The medium changes, but the business does not.

Businesses are still subject to FTC regulations that protect the consumer from the overrun of over-capitalistic companies trying to beat the competition at the expense of the consumer. This new regulation will simply update existing regulations to more specifically clarify that, hey, yes, companies have to play by the same rules when it comes to bloggers too. Companies should be enforcing their legal requirements on anyone peddling their goods in a quid pro quo or financial exchange. This is fair trade.

Deeper in, we see the same kind of attention and connection to affiliate marketing – the online business tool that allows a blogger to sell a product or service on behalf of someone else, and make a commission on it. While I don’t endorse eliminating affiliate marketing, I do find it borderline seditious and would not mind stiffer requirements on it’s use. For example, there should probably be an LLC or other legitimate business entity behind the use of affiliate marketing to ensure that paper trails and accountability can be traced.

Either way, this sort of thing requires some kind of enforcement, I think. It doesn’t feel right. On the flipside, this feels completely right from an ethical standpoint.

Update: Caroline McCarthy of CNET has more. Everyone keeps talking about the freebies. I want to know more about the affiliate crap.

Sitting here in Automattic offices in San Francisco, I find myself lovingly caressing my Blackberry which, for a short time yesterday, I believed was separated from me for good. Turns out I lost it the night before and was having phantom spasms over not having it in my pocket to check email, twitter or do other activities I would normally engage in with my long-time partner and friend.

As I arose from my grogginess yesterday morning, my first instinct was to reach for my Blackberry to ascertain important overnight occurrences. You know, such as what drunken text messages I might have sent or had sent to me, what the final score was on the Red Sox game or who was talking about me on Twitter. It’s a hard habit to break so when I realized my phone was nowhere to be found, I panicked.

Then I remembered Google Latitude, the new mostly useless location based service announced earlier this year. Google Latitude has a small piece of software that can be installed on [supported] phones. It uses GPS or cell tower triangulation to pinpoint the location of a person. As I’m a Verizon Wireless customer, the only option I have is cell tower triangulation. So I can be pinpointed to an area.

In a stroke of brilliant genius, I logged onto Google Latitude from my computer in the hotel. There were only so many places the phone could be. The last place I wanted to see it was in the back seat of the cab that had given me a ride home the previous night.

Fortunately, I was pinpointed (inaccurately because it was more my phone was pinpointed in Fisherman’s Wharf at the In n Out Burger that I had enjoyed a west coast delicacy the night before. I thought.

Fortunately, upon arrival at the In n Out Burger, the store manager did indeed have my Blackberry and I was able to carry on with my life.

This is a great example of how location based services can actually be useful. Instead of simply inviting the stalkerati or providing an unnecessary window into the life of the user, it is a good way for employees or assets to be tracked inexpensively. If you run a courier service, company-issued phones with Google Latitude might be a handy way to streamline your business operations.

Google Latitude is not the only “homing beacon” service out there. Tomorrow, with the launch of the iPhone 3G S, Apple is also introducing “Find my iPhone” with MobileMe which will pinpoint the location of a lost or stolen iPhone. Clearly a different benefit to the argument of value surrounding location based services

An interesting thing happened a few months back. Geoff Livingston, the organizer of BlogPotomac, asked me to be on a panel about personal branding at the BlogPotomac event. The irony of the whole thing is that I have a personal brand of sorts, but also resent the idea as a whole. I accepted the invite wondering how the heck I’d shape the conversation to be productive.

The problem is that personal branding tends to be self serving. The people who you can identify as “personal brands” also tend to be the same people that require the love and attention of others. Even if they don’t recognize that fact, the heart and soul of the problem is a need to be needed. In psychology, that’s an illness called codependency. In social media, we call it personal branding.

See the problem?

Single women generally will tell you that the guys they are attracted to are the ones who are confident. They don’t like cockiness. It’s a turn off. Confidence, however, is a turn on.

When an individual has a codependency syndrome, they tend to be cocky. It’s an unhealthy adoration of themselves and what they do. However, people like Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions carry themselve in a much more confident way. Something that immensely benefits his employer.

Don’t be cocky. Be confident. Understand your strengths, weaknesses and roles but avoid the pedestal that is sexy for just about every human to want to be on.

Food for thought

In the world of social media, there has been a dramatic shift in how business ideas and implementations get done. David Armano touches on it today where he suggests that knowing the influencers will get you much farther in your effort.

In that case, it’s up to all of us to find them. Perhaps take a look at something like the Power 150 and start the list backwards (or maybe get out of the marketing echo chamber all together).  If you yourself have become the new breed of “gatekeeper”—ask yourself “is it who I know, or what they know?”. Ideally, its both—but up to us individually to strike the right balance.

Armano and I proceeded to have a lively discussion on Twitter over this idea. I agreed with his assessment  that the current landscape of the social web does cater to the idea of knowing people being more important than having a good idea. I disagreed on his conclusion that people should seek to extend their influence by knowing more of the top people on the web.

On principle, the “top people on the web” is a bit elitist and self serving. Both Armano and I enjoy being “top people on the web”, yet, I know my ability to scale is small compared to the ideas and conversations being pushed around. The web is bigger than me. It’s bigger than Armano. We both enjoy large networks of people that we know, and I don’t mean six degree of separation type stuff. We both can show you 10,000 or more collected business cards from over the years. At least I can. I presume it is the same for him.

I can brag about knowing over half of the Technorati Top 100 bloggers personally. I can point to the multitude of networking events that I attend (at least one major one every month) where I have a difficult time talking to everyone who wants to share their ideas and thoughts with me.

The problem is scale. The web is bigger than we are. You can put a gallon or five gallons or ten gallons of water in a sink, but if the drain is only an inch thick, you won’t be able to process more water out of that bin. You need a bigger drain to do that. In fact, it will take longer to drain that bin with increasingly more water. It’s physics.

Unlike Armano’s assessment that communicators, entrepreneurs, and brands should exploit the current landscape that values the personal connection over the business process (that is, good ideas can thrive on their own if they have merit), I see it as a hybrid. You must have a one-to-one network and you must have a one-to-many network, but your many-to-many network (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th degree of separation) becomes fairly useless fairly quick. Good ideas cannot thrive in a vacuum.  However, simply knowing influencers aren’t going to make it fly either.

I can’t tell you the number of people who are friends, not just business network contacts, who have talked to me with great gusto and passion about an idea and I simply look at them blankly. They know me personally, but realistically, they have a sucky idea. It’s not going to fly and no amount of knowing the right people is going to make it fly.

On the flip side, having a great idea and knowing the right people can make all the difference in the world. This is a reflection of the truth that many of the worlds greatest idea people don’t have the communication prowess to “sell” that idea and make it work. Likewise some of the greatest communicators in the world have great bullhorns, but suck at innovating themselves. So we end up in a world where we all need each other for something.

This blend of traditional (networking) and innovation is really where we need to be. We’re getting there, but we ain’t there yet. Reinforcing an unscalable paradigm of who you know as the primary enforcer of innovation is a dangerous trend that really does need to be changed. Sometime. Hopefully soon.

Update: Armano chimes in in comments and corrects the record. He is recommending a balance, as am I. Different slants on the same issue.

At Technosailor.com, we rarely do product or software reviews. Instead, it’s all about the actual benefit that comes to the business owner or entrepreneur from the product or service. Usually, it takes time for benefits or problems to come out. Though I am personally an early adopter of many technologies, I limit the number of reviews I actually do to the technologies that are going to significantly positively affect a company. Rarely do I go out of the way to get a review copy of anything.

Last week, I was invited by Sprint to attend the Washington, D.C. pre-launch event for the Palm Prē, the new smartphone that is supposed to be an iPhone killer. In advance, I asked for a review unit. It is difficult to know what the significance of a product is in the store. I need to use it for a period of time. I was not allowed to take a Prē home and that is fine. I am on a list and may get an opportunity down the road.

The conversation that night was around what kind of review I’d provide of the unit. Sprint never asked for a positive review but assumed I would provide a review and only wanted fairness out of me. I explained that in my role as a “signal filter”, I would not guarantee a review but I wouldn’t write a negative review. If it’s not a good product, then my audience does not need to even hear about it. The only reason they need to hear about a product is if the product is going to help them run their businesses better. For instance, if I agree to review Peet’s Coffee and they send me 6 half pound bags of different beans, I’m going to love the product. Big fan of Peets. But I’m not posting a review, positive or negative, on this site.

However, as a product that seems to perfectly straddle the world between the iPhone, the best consumer phone, and BlackBerry, the best business phone – the Prē is likely to get airtime somehow. It’s relevant. Reviews should always be relevant and not simply required.

Tangentially, the Prē and the “review copy” problem reared it’s ugly head between Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington and TWiT.tv’s Leo Laporte over the weekend.

I think it’s important for anyone who does product reviews of any kind to aggressively protect their ethical priorities. Make your disclosure policy overt and out there (as I am doing here). Let there be no opportunity for question. Reviews can be productive when they are disclosed, relevant to the audience (not simply relevant to your wallet if you do paid reviews) and handled with the utmost of caution. Failure to protect your integrity on this delicate issue can cause you to lose all credibility.

Keep it in mind.

Without a doubt, I am a data whore. I love raw data. I love APIs. I love finding interesting ways to mashup data. With the new found craze in government for openness, led in no small part from the Federal level and work endorsed by the Obama Administration to work pushed forward by Sunlight Labs, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and others, I’d expect the openness to trickle down to state and local levels. And it is.

On one level, you have Washington, DC (where I live) who has been making impressive strides through OCTO (Office of the Chief Technology Officer) with the assistance of iStrategyLabs and the Apps for Democracy competition.

Washington, DC is in production of it’s Open 311 API, a RESTful data API that they are careful to note is in development. (We will be building a PHP library around this API shortly, so keep an eye for that announcement over at Emmense.com).

In using a REST API, DC is opening up the service sector of the DC City government for developers of all sorts to tap into and build applications around. All to meet the needs of city residents.

San Francisco, on the other hand, just announced that they are utilizing Twitter to allow residents to submit issues directly from their favorite web application. Simply by following @sf311 (and being refollowed), citizens are able to DM requests.

Personally, I am partial to DC’s approach but I applaud both cities for pushing the boundaries to bring city government closer to the people. Frankly, I’m a little concerned about San Francisco utilizing Twitter for this purpose, for the same reason that I am hesitant about any business making their business model about Twitter. Twitter has not proved, at least in my mind, that they have the business savvy to keep their service from going out of business. Likewise, they have not proved their technical ability to make a fail-less system. It’s a game of Russian roulette to base a business (or government service) around this application. San Francisco probably has failover plans and this is just another approach though, so arguably it’s not a significant risk.

However, the solution to the 311 problem becomes infinitely more scalable when utilizing a pure API and allowing the pure submission and retrieval of data. And the use of an API keeps responsibility in-house. Twitter is not paid for by taxpayer money, so there is no expectation of quality control. A government owned and maintained API, on the other hand, provides safeguards that make sense.

There is no doubt that Google is the king of search but how did they become that way? In the old days (you know, before PageRank was dubbed irrelevant), the idea was that the number of links to a site, particularly by more “powerful” sites increased the relevance of an indexed page in the Google index. To this day, that philosophy holds, tho clearly the weight has shifted from “links of powerful sites” to “internal links”.

Google has not significantly adjusted how they determine the importance of an article, site or keyword in some time, tho they claim some 70+ algorithmic tweaks last year. And that’s fine. Google’s index is Google’s index. It has trained us how to search and what we expect when we search. It has taught us silently and we compare all other results to the Google results, despite the fact that Google results are in themselves arbitrary and based on their own determination via algorithm.

But I digress.

It’s interesting when new search engines or tools come out. It’s interesting to see the innovation as it takes place. One such tool that I discovered, almost by accident, does a good great job of building an index around links and pages passed around Twitter. This tool is Topsy, which combines Twitter Search with Google like results (in other words, the results are not tweets themselves).

For those of you not occupying your every waking moment on Twitter, it is by most objective measures, the new information aggregator – like RSS readers were supposed to be or portal sites try to be.

The currency of influence on Twitter can be summarized in two letters: RT (short for Retweet). Many bloggers are including the ability for stories to be “retweeted”, or redistributed on Twitter, and that is precisely what Topsy is measuring. (An example of retweeting capability on a blog can be seen on this blog – see that Retweet button at the end of the article?)

Much like Google set the currency of relevance based on links, an assumption that was valid at the time and still carries some level of validity today, Topsy has recognized that more influence is being distributed via Twitter and thus, a relevancy algorithm around this currency must be built.

I don’t know if Topsy is a “Google killer” or even if they strive to be one. My guess is, it will never supplant Google in our lives. However, an ambitious approach to this new distribution of influence is an important, and enjoyable, thing to watch.