I am glad you have changed your robots.txt file on whitehouse.gov to be open (though it seems like it used to be as open in the Clinton days).  The new whitehouse.gov looks great and it will be exciting to see how it promotes transparency + participation.

One little request: could you modify your RSS blog feed to include the full text of all posts?  Publishing the first few lines is just plain sucky.

Whitehouse RSS feed screencap

Thanks for your consideration!

Respectfully,

-Bubba Murarka

Also, 11 out of 34 countries had “facebook” as one of their most popular search queries (they don’t list most popular in US).  Wow.  Most of the other social networks had less than 5 slots in total.

Note: I recently became a facebook employee.  Thus all thoughts / words / feelings on this blog are mine and do not reflect the opinions of my employer.  I will add this to the sidebar soon and may even blog more often in 2009!

Google pays a lot of money to be the default homepage / toolbar / desktop search tool to folks like Dell.  Too bad the first thing the proud new Dell owner will do is visit facebook and decide to check both of these boxes since she visits facebook 20 times a day.  Poof, there goes all that search revenue from the google homepage search box!

I wonder how long facebook’s been testing shipping this feature.  BTW, it only shows up in IE for me so can’t tell if this is flight or IE only feature. 

This is going to be fun to watch, especially as crazy cool new ways to make money on the internet are invented. 

Where do the Pages I’ve added show up on my profile? Can I be a fan of a Page without it displaying on my profile?

The Pages that you become a fan of will show up in your profile in the “I am a Fan of…” box. The “I am a Fan of…” box is divided up by Page categories so you can easily distinguish between the different Pages that you have added. You cannot be a fan of a Page without it displaying in the box on your profile. In addition, you cannot hide this box from your profile.

This might just something that is missing in the new profile beta, or perhaps facebook is phasing out pages.  

Guess we’ll know next week!

http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html

 Via the one and only…Guy!

“quit your googling, facebooking, etcer-ing, and twittering…“ 

Lofty company! 

Granted I live in SF so this is not quite mainstream, but this is the first sign I’ve seen that clearly points to twitter breaking through.  I won’t even link to all the chatter about twitter being life changing (for a small set of people I think it is…jury’s still out for mainstream), or to the latest meme about friendfeed eating twitter’s lunch.  Why?  Well, I haven’t heard anyone say “friendfeeding” on the radio (yet). 

As much as twitter’s growth could suffer from their technical challenges they look to have a chance to become a verb.  I’ve had a mixed experience wrt twitter as I only follow a few close friends and have been occasionally pleasantly surprised by the assisted serendipity.  But not nearly enough to become an evangelist or hardcore believer. 

Update: Reading feeds right now and saw Dare has posted about about chasm crossing. 

I covered three points and shared stories from my personal experiences as well as stories / observations about my friends.  Phil dropped me a wonderful note today letting me know that my points really connected with the students as they were shared after the sessions.  I learned a ton through the experience as I got to refine my thinking, connect with folks with a different view point, and even got a bit of market research on how high schoolers use social networks! 

Oh, yeah, the three points were:

• Find a mentor - for your professional and personal development areas or biggest challenges.  Equally important is to become a mentor as it will help you grow just as much as it helps the other person.  Mentors can even be historical figures…read all about them to learn how they were effective.  Some of the kids asked for my email address and I really hope to hear from them. 
• Be persistent - that word is part of the blog masthead, and something that can never be underestimated.  You must persist through failures and obstacles to reach your goals.  If you can’t reach your goal immediately, come up with a plan to get there over time through incremental steps and experiences (e.g. you don’t run a marathon on the first day you start to train for one). 
• Find your passion & team - figure out what you do so well that time disappears for you and then figure out how to get others around with complimentary skills / passions.  If you have a team in place, make sure you have people doing what they are great at. 

As I’m writing these up I realize I could have cited books that helped me learn each of  these over the years.  Next time I guess.  The questions were great…I can’t wait to see the guy how said his goal was to be the CEO of Starbucks run that place some day.  I hope he hooks me up with a free latte!

What lessons would you share with a room full of high school students to help them be as successful as possible? 

update: grammar edits, minor content addition (darn post button instead of save and continue to edit)

“we are redefining the concept of a treehouse resort”

Turns out there is a market to redefine!