I love to travel. And I love to travel for business.

Last fall, my job took me to 11 different cities over the course of about 8 weeks.  I loved nearly every minute of it.  And now that there’s word of a similar project ramping up – I can’t wait to once again be let out of the starting gate.

Here (in no particular order) is what I love about business travel:

1)       Clean Hotel Rooms

Whenever possible I stay at a Hampton Inn.  They have that whole “faux homey” thing down pat – the free cookies and/or popcorn at night is just icing on the cake.  The great thing about traveling is that everything is clean (clean sheets, clean bathrooms, clean rooms) all without any effort on my part.

2)      No Worries About Shopping for Groceries

Eating at restaurants has its advantages. When you travel you don’t have to worry on your drive home if you have enough milk or ketchup or bread or noodles to make whatever it is you’re planning for dinner. You show up at the restaurant, look at the menu and the rest is taken care of for you.  The same is true of all of the other household items like paper towels, dish detergent and toilet paper.

3)      New Stimuli

Airport bookstores, in-flight magazines, out-of-town newspapers, new shopping centers/malls and restaurants, finding my way around a strange town – all of these things help keep the neural pathways open and stimulated. Nothing boosts my creativity quite like going out of town for a trip.

4)      New People

Restaurants, security lines, hotels, clients, etc. are all full of new people. As George Clooney said in Up in the Air: “Isolated? I’m surrounded!”. If I’m so inclined I can always find someone worthwhile to talk to when I’m on the road.

5)      It Forces You to Focus on the More Important Things

This is all about the power of less. You learn to get done what absolutely needs to be done during the short times that you’re home. If it’s not important, it won’t make it to your to-do list. You learn to appreciate the limits of time even more when you have even less of it from week to week.

6)      It Forces You to Live and Work More Virtually

This includes delegating. This is strongly related to #5. You learn to take on less when you know you can’t be there to get it done. So you’re left relying heavily on delegating most things out. I’m rarely more productive than I am when I have to delegate out all of the important stuff and reduce my own role in how things get done.  I’m at my best when I’m forced into the position of being the person to allocate resources and effort, while managing everything via e-mail, text and phone calls.  My sole job at that point is to remove any hurdles my team runs into.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_and_you/

Highest and Best Use (HABU) is a principle in real estate and business appraisals that means the true value of a property is whatever value the property would have if it was to be put to its highest and best use.

So for instance, your grandmother might be selling her old house.  As a house, the property is ok.  It’s a little run-down and dated and the bedrooms might be a little small.  As a house it’s probably worth slightly less than similar houses that are a little more modern.

But the house sits on 3 acres of land and this land is zoned for high density residential units (townhouses, apartments, condos).  As raw sub-dividable acreage the property could be worth many times what the house might otherwise sell for.

The actual value of the property isn’t the house itself.  It’s in the land.

In fact, the house itself might be in the way of the highest and best use of property.

Individuals aren’t any different.  You also  have a highest and best use.  It is the true value of your time if you were to work doing the activity that brings you the most money.

And just like Nana’s house, most likely there are activities that you are doing right now that get in the way of your highest and best use.

How to Find Your Highest and Best Use:

1.  Think of all of the activities you can do to make money.

If you work for someone else this would obviously include your day job – your full-time employment – yet, it could also include any freelance work you do on the side, or a part-time job.  It could be something you do right now as a hobby or as volunteer work that you could make money doing if you decided to charge people for your work.

If you’re self-employed it gets a little more fuzzy.

Let’s say you run a small e-publishing operation, or you’re a freelance web developer.  As part of this job you’re engaged in some activities where you make money (sales, delivering goods, providing services, etc.) and some activities where you aren’t making money (accounting, marketing, clerical duties, etc.).

Now, you might think that your highest and best use is the activities you do to make money.  But it’s actually probably only ONE of those activities.  Maybe you’re better at writing e-books than you are at sales.  Or maybe you’re better at sales than building websites. Maybe your having to build the websites gets in the way of you making the most money by selling the web development work in the first place.

You might also want to list all of the activities you are qualified to do, but aren’t yet doing at all.  You might be an accountant at a regional construction company, but you were once a teacher and you’re qualified to be the principle of a suburban high school.  For the purposes of this activity you should list the job of principal in your money making activities.

2.   After making a list of all of the money making activities you’re capable of doing, you need to assign an hourly dollar amount.

There are a few ways to figure this out if you don’t already have a figure in mind.  The best way is to take a look in the marketplace to figure out what people are paying.  Figure out what you’d pay for someone to do the particular activity, and then figure out how much money someone would pay you to do it for someone else.

If you make a product, just multiply the profit you make per product by the amount of products you can make in a day.

3.   Once you have an hourly wage, simply multiply it by your monthly or annual hours worked.

Even if you don’t currently work that many hours in a month for that particular activity, it’s ok.  The point of the exercise is to determine the most valuable use of your time.  We’re making a basic assumption that you are able to work at full capacity.  That the demand for your highest and best use is high enough and constant enough for you to work doing it full time – even if its not right now, or ever.

Whatever activity provides the highest amount of money is your highest and best use.

You might find that even though you make a good living working independently, you might be better put to use working as a sales manager for an international conglomerate.  Or, you could find the opposite to be true.

Passion is greater than Highest and Best Use

So what if you don’t like my highest and best use?

You might absolutely love working independently and the idea of working for a big conglomerate depresses you.

That’s ok.  This is an exercise in possibility – about exploring all options from every angle.

This is an exercise about figuring out if your current activities are in the way of your highest and best use.

If you don’t like your highest and best use activity, then don’t do it. Go down to the activity you absolutely love to do and use that as your highest and best use.  And work to get all of the other activities out of the way by elimination, automation or delegation.  Then figure out how to get to full capacity.

And don’t fret that you aren’t maximizing your working hours to making the most money you can make.  Do what you love.

There isn’t anything wrong with Nana’s house staying secluded on her 3 acres of land.

Photo above: My Nana’s house and the place of so many childhood and adult memories.  Currently for sale to the highest bidder.

If you’re prepared (good credit and an abundance of cash) a recession is a good time for some bargain hunting of investments (stock, land, real estate, talent, etc.).  And maybe even some refinancing of old debts.

Otherwise a recession is just about juggling your income and obligations and waiting for better times.

Because of a misjudgment a couple of years ago, compounded by a small run of bad luck in mid-2008 – I’ve been mostly doing the latter.

I had hoped to get in a good enough position to capitalize on the opportunities brought about by the reduced prices in real estate, but that hasn’t been the case.  And I think its too late.

Disclaimer: I’m not a trained economist, so everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt.  And none of this should be construed as investment advice.

So with all of those disclaimers out of the way, here I go:

We’ve hit the bottom of this recession.

First, let me say what I am not saying.  I am not saying that things will be “better” in 6, 9 or even 12 months from now.  I am not saying that unemployment won’t continue to be high.  And I am not saying that further stimulus isn’t needed to get us going again.

What I am saying is that things are not going to get much worse than they are right now.

We may bounce around the bottom for a while, and getting out of this hole may take a while.  But we’ve hit the bottom.

To back this up, here are a few observations I’ve made in the last few weeks:

• The past two weekends I’ve been to Annapolis Mall, it’s been packed.  The parking lots are full of cars and the mall is full of people.  And the people have been carrying around shopping bags.  Shopping bags from places like Macy’s and Nordstrom’s.  People are spending money again.

• A few Saturdays back I went to Best Buy and when I pulled up to the front of the store there were two pick-up trucks with two different sets of people loading up huge 52” flat-panel TVs.  As my brother might say, people are optimistic enough to spend money they don’t have.

• Following my trip to Best Buy I drove by a subdivision in my little town.  This particular subdivision is really nothing more than a cul-de-sac of 5 or 6 lots.  For most of the last three years this subdivision has been nothing more than a model home and the other finished lots.  I’ve rarely seen any more than just the salesperson’s car sitting out front of the model.  On this particular Saturday (a very nice weather day) there happened to be 9 cars parked out front.

Now, let me say that the greater DC-Baltimore metropolitan region is notoriously recession-resistant.  The biggest part of our local economy is the military and federal government (and associated contractors).  So we tend to be one of the last regions in the nation to feel the effects of a recession and we tend to be one of the first regions to recover from those effects when the recession is over.

So your mileage and observations may vary.

Finally, I also want to say I know there are a lot of individuals and families that are under a lot of financial stress right now.  Even if we have seen the bottom, I think there are going to be continued foreclosures, layoffs, etc.  I think it will be months, years or even a decade or more before some people have finally put their own individual worst behind them.

But be assured: the very faint light you see ahead – is the one at the end of the tunnel.

Now all we have to do is start restocking the cupboards for the next recession so we can take advantage of the opportunities.

View points from all sides (some subscriptions required):

Baltimore Sun: Sales of previously occupied homes rise unexpectedly in February by the largest percentage increase in nearly six years

Inman: California home-sales rate outpaces 2008 (paid subscription required)

WSJ: Foreclosure Rate Outpaces Bank Sales

USA Today Poll: Outlook Improving on the Economy

Yahoo News: Economy Shows Positive Signs But It May Not Last

Inman: New Home Sales Climb From Record Low

As I write this there is breaking news:

Washington Post: Consumer Spending Up for 2nd Straight Month (registration may be required)

Only somewhat related but interesting:

Americans are moving on up to smaller homes (I like this trend)

This might come as a shock to my 7 RSS subscribers, but I’m not a very prolific blogger.

Courtesy of PsychoFish (lou) via Flickr

My lack of blogging is not due to a shortage of ideas or an insurmountable level of effort in putting fingers to keyboard.  It is due to a relatively high – yet achievable – standard I’ve set for myself when it comes to writing.

I don’t consider myself a perfectionist, but I do take pride in how I craft ideas into words.

Unfortunately, this usually means I won’t post at all for one or more of the following reasons:

The Incomplete Blog Post

In real life I like to take both sides of most arguments. I like to be familiar with all the different nuances of an issue and I like to think my ideas are well thought-out and complete.

To this end, I’m reluctant to post something that I consider to be half-baked – or worse – half-assed.

I don’t know why this is since there is a small body of evidence that suggests these are my best blog posts.

For instance, inspired by an in flight magazine, I jotted out the basic idea of my blog post about editorial calendars while flying cross-country.  I polished up the draft a bit and submitted it to YOUmoz the next day.

Dosh Dosh later stumbled on the post and expounded on it and came up with something degrees better than my original idea.  And I think that’s exactly how the Internet (and the blogosphere) should work.

Adding to this, there was a recent post by someone about how we shouldn’t be afraid of an incomplete blog post (I can’t find it now).

Faced with this evidence, anecdotal though it may be, I clearly shouldn’t be concerned about posting an incomplete blog post.

The Too Short Blog Post

I have some ideas that are too long for a 140 character tweet, yet they are too short for a regular blog post.

When faced with these ideas I try to find a way to verbalize them so that they can be condensed into a tweet or they can be expounded into something a little meatier.

I don’t know what the right length of a blog post should be for a personal blog like this.

Looking back on some of my posts I’m usually in the 1000+ word range.

Would a 200 word or so blog post be too short?  100 words?

Unlike Goldilocks, I don’t know what size blog post would be just right.

The Too Long Blog Post

This is the corollary to the above.

A lot of things I want to write about are too involved and lengthy to be put into one blog post.  My intention when I have these topics is to write out a series of posts and to publish them one at a time over the span of a few weeks or days.

What usually ends up happening however is that I write enough to get about half-way through my topic (usually one or two posts) and then I get distracted – or I simply lose interest in my original idea.

So, the blog posts end up shelved on some section of my hard-drive (or web server) – never to see the light of day.

A better approach might be to just push out what I have, and allow it to be open-ended.  This fits perfectly with the solution outlined two sections above.

If the ideas have merit – then others can pick it up and do something with it, or I’ll be inspired to finish it out myself.  If the ideas don’t have merit – then there isn’t much reason for me to finish it out anyway.

The No-Applicable Graphic Blog Post

As much as I like words – I like pictures too.  And blog posts with pictures are always better than those without.

Sugarrae made the argument that if you can’t spend a little time and/or money to find a picture for your blog post – you probably shouldn’t post at all.  And I tend to agree with that.

The only problem is – sometimes I can’t find the right picture.  Even if I’m willing to pay for it, I’m not always able to find something I like.  And the time involved in searching through pictures is another hurdle on the way to pushing out a blog post.

My only solution in this case might be to just post some random picture completely unrelated to the topic – or to post no picture at all.

The Off-Topic Blog Post

This is one I struggle with all the time.  THIS blog is meant to serve a few functions – one of which is reputation management.

If someone is looking to hire me as a builder, a Realtor, or as an employee – it would be ideal if this was one of the first things that showed up in the search engines.

If a long lost former classmate, or someone I grew up with was to Google me someday (can you hear me Tammy Tressler?), it would be great if they came here first to see what I’ve been up to.

To that end, I try to limit what I post on here.

You wouldn’t know it from this blog but I actually write and publish a lot.

I tend to write a lot about things like dating, parenting, my crushes on TV stars (I’m looking at you – Summer Glau) and my complete lack of even a basic understanding of women – but I do all those things on MySpace.

I figure if you’re looking for me on MySpace – that’s pretty much what you might be expecting – so that’s a good place for it.  The fact that very few adults actually use MySpace is an added benefit!

On here I’m aiming to stick to things that would be acceptable at a business lunch: Internet marketing, entrepreneurship, public policy, etc.

However, sometimes I come up with topics that don’t really fit into either of those categories.

The ideas are too high-minded for MySpace and a little off-topic for this blog.

This was my motivation behind starting my BeingBatman blog.  I really had no outlet to discuss all things Batman related. I knew I had no outlet because my kids told me “Dad, you have no outlet”.  But even that little blog suffers from my reluctance to post an imperfect blog entry.

Alas, there might not be an easy solution to the off-topic blog post issue.

Resolution

Since this has now gone on for 1094 words, so its about time that I get to my point.

I’m going to start to embrace the imperfect blog post.

The incomplete off-topic post that is either too short, or too long that I can’t find a good graphic for – that will all come here.

For better or for worse.

And if it turns out I don’t like it, or it doesn’t quite fit this blog – then I can always weed it out later.

Right?

This post has been in a draft status for a while; since I am getting ready to write my SMX East review, I figured it was time to push it out.

This was my very first Pod Camp/SearchCamp Unconference.

I found out about this event a little bit at the last minute (maybe a few days before), but since it only cost $20 to attend and it was just a smidge over a 2 hour drive from Chez Vin – I figured it might be worthwhile to check it out.

The Good Parts
+ Very affordable, close and convenient
+ It was very well run
+ Held on the weekend (why aren’t more conferences like this)
+ Very diversified sessions
+ Setting – I love college campuses, so having this session at Temple University only enhanced my enjoyment.

What Is It?
From the official literature: An unconference is a meeting where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants. Since the quality of Pod Camp Philly is dependent on you, the participant, we encourage your active contribution. So, regardless of your level of experience, get up, ask questions, share your knowledge and live the spirit of PodCamp.

Who Attends?
I got the impression that most of the people in attendance at this unconference were independent bloggers and/or podcasters who had been doing it for a period of a few years. There were also a few representatives of search or social media agencies, as well as some small e-commerce businesses. The interaction between all of these groups was an added benefit to the sessions as a whole.

As I understand it The PodCamp portion had been a success in the past (in Philly and around the globe) and this year The Internet Marketers of the Delaware Valley decided to partner up with the PodCamp organizers and offer their own sessions under the name of Search Camp.

And while each group maintained their own event websites and organized their own sessions – once you got to the actual event, the two camps were indistinguishable from each other – and this was a good thing (as I’ll explain).

There were a total of 80 sessions offered in classroom sessions and the topics were diverse. A sampling included the following: Audio Production 101, SEO for Social Media, Usability 101, Taking your Podshow on the Road, Legal Pitfalls of Blogging and Website Architecture.

The sessions were held in The Tuttleman Learning Center (essentially the library) of Temple University. The camps had access to 7 classrooms as well as the auditorium.

According to the rules of the camp, if there was an empty classroom during one of the session times and you wanted to hold a class – you were more than welcome to schedule a session. A big grid was available to write in your session to let others know what would be going on.

Other rules of the camp included the following:

1) Everyone is encouraged to record EVERYTHING at PodCamp Philly, but all content must be released under a Creative Commons license. Please tag all posted content with “PodCamp Philly” and “PodCamp Philly 2008.” For SearchCamp specific material, we encourage you to tag it as both “PodCamp Philly 2008″ and SearchCamp Philly.

2) All attendees must be allowed to participate. (subject to space limitations).

3) Please allow other to express their views and do not monopolize the session.

4) The Law of Two Feet. If you’re not learning what you want to learn, you’re welcome to leave the session and go to a different one, or none at all. Take charge of your PodCamp experience – it will only be as good as you make it.

5) The Law of Null Space. You’ll find that most learning can come in between sessions, at lunch, etc… Be ready to get engaged by asking questions, exchanging business cards or even recording your conversation.

6) Make the Most of it – It’s Your PodCamp,. Hey, if you don’t find a session that covers a particular topic, create one yourself! Meeting rooms are freely available so schedule your session on the board at the Registration Desk; it may be what a lot of other people are looking for too.

I had planned out a few of the sessions I wanted to attend before I even left my house. On the web, the sessions were marked with experience levels (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) and I picked a few Search Camp sessions I thought would be worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I left my carefully planned agenda at home and when I got to the camp I had to scramble to find some sessions I wanted to attend. And while I had planned my day around Search Camp related sessions, once I arrived the available agenda didn’t distinguish between what was for bloggers/podcasters and what was for Internet marketers like me.

The end result were two days unlike the ones I had planned – which ended up far better than I could have intended.

My impressions from the sessions I joined:

What the heck is Blended Search? (Giovanni Galluci)

Gio was building search engines while Sergei and Larry were still in college. He talked a lot about blended search results and how the search engines are starting to understand that when people type in different search terms they may be looking for different content.

For instance when I type in the name of a celebrity, I could be looking for a picture of her, some recent news or gossip, or her IMDB entry.

Or when someone types in the word “apple” it could be the name of a company, the last name of a singer, a fruit or they may want a recipe.

Traditional search engines provide all of these different results on one page. But Gio is working with a company that is doing something a little bit different with a product they call Viewzi.

Viewzi is a new way to view blended search results. Viewzi isn’t a new search engine. It is a way to view the results of traditional search engines in a new way. The best way to understand Viewzi is just to go use it. A vanity search is what I did, and I have to tell you while Viewzi’s does have a nice “eye candy” interface, and that can distract you – the results returned were surprisingly well organized and unique.

At the end of the day though, Viewzi at this point is just a shinier version of a search engine. I guess you could call it the iPhone of search engines – only without all of the Apple mystique behind it.

Pay Per Click 101 (Greg Meyers):

My experience with PPC is limited, so nearly everything in this session was useful. Greg talked a lot about testing out different messages, upping your quality score, and the right way to become Google Adwords Certified (take the test at the end of the mandatory ad run and study hard). Overall a good session for a beginner like me, it probably would have been wasted on someone with a little more experience – which is exactly what a 101 session should be.

Starting out in Podcasting (The Handy Guys – Brian Peppel & Paul Shane)

This was a good session and a very good intro to podcasting, lots of great resources were presented and it was nice to hear the background story of how these two lifelong friends got into doing a weekly podcast.

The amazing thing to me was the amount of time, energy and effort that goes into producing even a very simple but high-quality once a week podcast. How anyone does this as a hobby is beyond me. I don’t think you can do it without having a passion for it.

B2B Site Clinic (Greg Meyers and Digital Alex Cohen)

This was the first site clinic I had ever attended. It was interesting, but I don’t know if there was a lot of take away for me. The sites presented were B2B, and when changes and recommendations were made the site owners said there might be some reluctance to make the changes back at the office. So I was left wondering what the whole point was.

Building Communities (Kim Krause Berg)

Kim Krause Berg was probably the most recognized name of any session and this presentation was standing room only. She walked the group through a number of community guideline best practices gleaned from her years of running the Cre8asite forums.

If you run a forum, it was probably extremely helpful. If you’re looking to build communities outside of forums it was probably a little less so.

SEO vs PPC vs Social Media (Greg Meyers, Wil Reynolds & Li Evans)

Due to traffic issues at the start of the second day I arrived about half-way through this session, but this looked to be a great session. The interaction between these three forces, and which one is more important, always gets a little bit of good debate going – this session was no different.

In the end the presenters showed how the three can and do supplement each other – and they did it in a very clear way. I think a lot of value could be delivered at the agency level if more account types could explain and sell these three initiatives to clients as well as this group did.

Is Email Marketing Dead? (Beth Harte)

There were some equally great sessions competing with Beth during this time slot, so the group for this session was probably no more than 8 people. Beth gave a lot of good pointers on steering clear of CAN-SPAM violations as well as initiating and managing a sustained e-mail program.

I think of all the sessions I attended this was the only one where I walked away with the most quantitative information (as measured in actionable content – rather than just some new concepts or ideas).

How Do Search Engines Work (Giovanni Galluci)

I’ll admit I was hoping this would be a little more (or even a lot more) advanced than what it was.

I wanted to know about things like whether the search engines have two or more spiders (one for link discovery, one for indexing, etc.), what criteria a spider uses to determine how deep into a site it needs to go, does it only pay attention to the first anchor text, etc.

What it ended up being was a very very basic introduction to search engines and SEO.

This wasn’t Gio’s fault. It was just the speed of the audience in attendance.

At one point the class became nearly derailed as Gio (and then I as an attendee) tried to explain to the mostly blogger audience the difference between the title of the web page as presented by the <title></title> tags and the title of the web page as presented by the <h1></h1> tags at the top of a post. For a lot of the people in the audience they had never even considered the two.

So yeah, it was that kind of session.

Considering Gio’s experience and knowledge – it could have been a lot more interesting.

Twitter & Plurk Microblogging to the Extreme (Geoff Livingston)

I’ll admit I had never heard of Geoff before. Considering he’s very involved in social media, lives right here in the DC area and runs his own agency with some big name clients – this is a bit surprising. But this says more about my knowledge of the local search and social industry than it does about Geoff.

I actually attended this session because Beth Harte had said it would be interesting.

And it was. Again, the audience drove large parts of the discussion (following the spirit of Podcamp).

At one point a lady asked “why is it important to use Twitter for business? I don’t really need to know what you had for dinner for me to decide if I want to do business with you, I care about things like price and service, etc”.

Geoff has an animated and energetic presence and when he was confronted with this he more or less explained by way of anecdote how we prefer to do business with people we like, we tend to like people we know, and the more we know a person the more we trust them. So if a potential client can get to know you as a person through your tweets – all the better.

The lady was unconvinced, and I believe half the audience was with her.

The group seemed to be divided into those who liked and “got” Twitter, those who didn’t get the whole Twitter thing, and Beth Harte who wanted everyone to use Plurk.

eConversion 101 (Alex Cohen)

I attended this session because I enjoyed Alex’s insights during the B2B Site Clinic. He certainly knows his way around driving the conversion process, and I was hoping this would be a good session for me. But it just wasn’t the right fit.

A lot of Alex’s examples were e-commerce driven and most of what I do with websites is lead generation for my own services.

I needed some better ideas on getting people to sign-up for an e-mail, or to get a report, or a follow-up phone call, etc. Some of Alex’s advice (streamline forms, ask for as little info as possible, work on your message, and get everything above the fold) was helpful.

But then he went into things like shipping address/options, credit card processing, registering on e-commerce sites, etc.

I think I left this session about 15 minutes early to catch some of the Battle Decks going on in the auditorium – but that ended up being a waste of time anyway.

The videos I had seen of Battle Decks were probably the cream of the crop. Most of us just get up there and wing it. And in many ways, that isn’t any different than a regular presentation in the corporate world.

Would I Go Again?

Absolutely. Not only to PodCamp Philly, but to any barcamp unconferences (Wordcamp is another popular one) around the country.

When I go next year I am going to get a hotel. For a few reasons I chose to drive up and back both days. Economically this probably ended up being a wash, and I got spend the night in my own bed. But the drive does take some out of you and I missed a few of the social events because I was busy driving home.

Based on some of the questions I heard from a few of the bloggers in attendance, I might even organize a few of my own sessions.