Archive for March, 2005

Free media - Orb now free

by eleanor on 28 Mar 2005 @ 4:17 pm in Mobility | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’ve been playing with apps and javascript, and trying to tool up to commit to more immediacy and pertinence in blogging (and not go insane in the endeavor) . One find (thanks Tony Gentile) — SharpReader — has brought tangible progress already, in popping up to report that Ted Shelton just blogged that Orb is Now Free. Ted says:

Yes, there will be advertising in the future — but we know that this must be done the google way — advertising that is unobtrusive and adds value without inhibiting the core use of the service. And more importantly there will be content subscriptions coming soon — all kinds of new content that you can purchase through Orb…

But even if you never click on an advertisement and never purchase content, our core philosophy will guarantee you free access to your own TV, your own videos, your own audio, and your own photos… anytime, anyplace, any device.

This is a great move from Ted and the guys at Orb Networks, and should help drive adoption of mobile content - opening up new usecases and user communities. With my lagging-adopter experiments with Yahoo!’s Lauch music videos a couple weeks ago, I found that short advertisements did not mar the experience.

I’d love to use Orb to access my content (my Treo 650’s 1GB SD gives me an adequate daily soundtrack), but I still believe the killer hookup is between Orb and OurMedia (which launched last week to fanfare from all but me - belated congrats to JD and Marc!). Orb would make a fabulous engine to access OurMedia pieces - where the serendipity of boredom will drive user exploration of OurMedia’s quirky contents.

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Structured blogging: Silicon Valley/SF Tech Events blog

by eleanor on 22 Mar 2005 @ 4:18 pm in Geek | Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

Last night I implemented my experiment in structured blogging. I now have a current as of right-now events blog. The feed works. Comments work (maybe for a posse style shout out?). We’ll see how it gets used. Being able to suck those entries down as iCal would rock.

The plugin I’m using comes from the pubsub guys, out of a project called Structured Blogging. In addition to events, the plugin easily accomodates reviews.

I’ve known about this for a couple weeks, after Mike came home with the plugin one night (where does he get this stuff?). I’ve been working with structured data, wanting to leverage the WordPress engine (feeds, search engine, and cms - in that order), but we were approaching bolting on more fields. This comes as an elegant solution to all my needs for getting an event blog up and running. I’ve (we’ve) been screwing around with calendars and social networking ideas for a couple months now, and it was good to find something feed-ready. This approach also offers promise for my booknotes/repository project. I’ve favored lodging the details in fields (author, date, etc), but there’s really no reason to not just jam the metadata in the main body of the post.

I was happy to see that (even though it took a while) this is still fairly fresh. I see others like Rajesh at Emerjic have picked up the thread. Usually I lag (and it’s taken me forever to get to playing with it).

Thanks a lot guys - I may have a programmer in the house, but that doesn’t mean I get custom tools made. This has given a great foundation from which to hack and play.

What exactly is this calendar? This is my take on what’s interesting around here. I live in Menlo Park and hate to drive, so things are definitely skewed local. I’ve added in old events going back to August. I’ve linked into to a/v files from places like ITConversations or the event’s own site. I haven’t done much cross linking between this blog and those events, but that’ll come.

Here’s some feedback and things that tripped me up. Nothing is horrendous, the install went smooth.

• Time wasters: I initally thought the sb time fields drove the “display date” in WordPress, but that is still controlled by the WordPress Date field. Essentially what this package gets you is an nice interface for inputting text and validated xml out. I’ve pulled the feed through Bloglines already and it looks good.
• Customization nits: I will probably modify my sb time fields to display 30 minute increments, rather than the hour now (I’ve erred in favor of making you early rather than late). Another area that didn’t quite fit my application was the sb role field. For some of these events, I’m clearly planning on attending. Others I help run. But there are many more that, while interesting, aren’t ones I plan on making. For those I’ve generally left the field blank. Still, as I look through the feed - the phrase “role: attendee” seems pretty lame. I’m not sure where this is headed - can these be customized to suit the user (à la Evite’s infinite variations on ‘yea’ ‘nay’ and ‘maybe’), or are these planned for indexing as universal (haha) values?
• Random weirdness: this plugin conflicts apparently with the ThreeStrikes comment spam plugin from Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard). Before I disabled it, commenting sent me to fbi.gov. (I’ve even getting more rigourous about QA!)

I have more entries in the future to post, and more work to do in finding the proper organization. But tonight is Tony Perkins (I definitely have some work to do to bond with all the chick journalists, since I keep missing the boat) and the Wordpres party. I wonder if I get a hacker tiara?

So what’s next? I’m concerned about UI and if this info will make sense to people. I think I will pursue a “view by week”, calendar based approach similar to that used by WorkIT. That’ll evolve as I have the time and attention span to deal with such detailed work. :-)

Thanks guys for a well thought out solution to a irritating problem. Anyone who has a conduit, script or pointers for how to get my data between a calendar and blog more easily I’d love to hear from you. I’m on win, but using iCal’s ics in Mozilla (and Outlook too somewhat). There’s got to be a cheat for all this manual work. I’ll post if I find it.

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CSS con/destruction today

by eleanor on 20 Mar 2005 @ 3:29 pm in Geek   ++

I’ve left the css in a terrible state since my migration to WordPress 1.5, as I hadn’t smashed my templating system up against the Kubrick model. I’m fixing that today, in addition to placing other pages under a homebrew CMS that Mike cooked up for Protean back in the day, and adding some additional pages and resources.

Be prepared for things to break and change.

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Bloghercon - report from inside the petticoat

by eleanor on @ 1:02 am in Geek   ++

Bloghercon needs communication, spin control and expectations-setting.

Here are the current facts: Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort (wrong link intially) and I are co-organizing this event. We’re thinking July in the Bay Area. We have work to do, primarily in selecting the specific focus of the conference and then in communicating it. We are sharing leadership of the conference, which has already left some confused. We’re not planning on bringing in a CEO-type to run the thing for us, but we do have a hell of a board - women I respect for their contributions to blogging and journalism, some of whom are voices out there stirring controversy. They’re not announced or official yet, so I’ll not mention them by name here, but want to thank them for their encouragement, forebearance and efforts at bringing us into the loop of their offline discussions. If there’s a case for doing this otherwise, then make it to us.

To gain clarity on this, we’ve spent the week in thought and discussion internally, in addition to the personal discussions I’ve had (yes with men). We’re close on having a focus. We recognize that there are (too) many directions we can take, as we’ve found an astounding array of constituencies and voices seeking representation. Our thing, whatever forms it takes, however big or small, will never be the final, definitive word gender in blogging, nor do we seek it to be. Our challenge - remarkably - is not creating enthusisasm and finding interest, but rather finding the highest possible common denominator around which to coalesce. Both the volume of discussion and the diversity of voices make it clear there are issues to be explored here, as much as some might like to believe blogging is wholly incorporeal. This discussion has been both propelled in valuable directions and seized upon as proof of immaturity and unreasonableness (presumably ours, but it’s brought out the unflattering in others as well).

A look at our blogs tells you we’ve been busy this week doing what we do, in addition to pushing this conference along. And that’s why the larger world knows nothing; what of real detail have we shared? It’s all speculation, statements pro and con by others, as to what this conference will be. But that’s ok - we’re listening, even if it’s sometimes with irritation.

Of course, the sensational bits flow fastest. I certainly did argue for a women-only conference, and for what I still feel are very good reasons, given the particular focus at that time. (I then recanted, saying boys were ok if we moderated to prevent both whining and defensiveness). I daresay much of Elisa and Lisa’s original idea (as first outed by Sylvia Paull) came from their frustration with female representation and the way their particular voices were heard. That was never my view personally, but I can see how for those struggling to make it with their blog, gaining traction would be a frustrating experience, which is true for every fledgling blogger.

However, to question that this could be different because of sex is being challenged as treasonous and divisive - even by people I respect. Folks are outraged because we’re fundamentally challenging deep-seated beliefs (anyone who has deep-seated beliefs about such a new media is, in my view, a fool) on the equality and meritocracy of the blogosphere. It has merit-based mechanisms, but we are approaching a plane of development when audiences are settled and some of these structures begin to rigidify. That is precisely why we are interested in the apparent lack of prominent chick bloggers.

And as a consumer of blogs, I can see some reasons why chick blogs might not make it in the loop. They are cluster around different characteristics. Longer, and more rambling. More of the personal. Less linking outward. Less commenting. Fear of putting one’s self forward to open debate and criticism. Disinterest in competition. Less timely and scoop-driven. More of a “what do all these patterns mean in the aggregate?” Fewer soundbites, more stories. Lack of involvement (there sure as hell aren’t many other chicks at the tech events I go to), due to perhaps lack of interest, or lack of time given other committments.

What generalizations would you make? Don’t be put off - generalizations are the first, necessary step in building theories to understand the world. We just need to remember to reality-check them, swap them around and remix them. We see the world through our own experiences and act toward our own ends. Personally, I blog for “me” more than “you”, but at least I don’t run ads or peddle influence. I don’t approach blogging as a galactic performance review or to curry favor with an elite. As a strategist, I identify market failures/opportunities, question them and then work out how to do better. Take it or leave it.

I remain very skeptical about the lack of female bloggers — documented sensationally in news articles and endlessly debated — as being the result of evil men. The sad truth is I find most women bloggers uninteresting as a source of insight into technology and market development (feel free to pummel me with links). Women were almost entirely absent from my world until I started collecting them in a quest for understanding. And it’s empirically true that others think so too; few women appear in that statistically-sound popularity indicator we so longed for in high school, Technorati’s Top 100.

I see a market failure. The question I ask is: why? Is it a failure of demand? A failure of supply? What is equilibrium and what market structure will facilitate this cheerful interchange of ideas?

It’s not a wail, a whine or a whimper. They’re just questions. People say it shouldn’t matter, that blogging is ethereal and supremely democratic. I say sure, but we’ve got this interesting phenomenon here. Why? Where did it originate from? Is it ok? Would we want to change things if we could? Can we? Should we? Is there something important missing from a new media that seems to miss out on the voices of women, even though we all know they’re out there?

Curiousity about this phenomenon, wanting to begin discussion on this, is what brought me in and what keeps me here.

bloghercon

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Howard Rheingold at SDForum

by eleanor on 19 Mar 2005 @ 4:02 pm in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Howard Rheingold spoke on Thursday night at PARC as part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series. They’ll make the audio available on ITConversations, probably in a couple weeks. I was especially eager to hear this talk because I’ve been tracking Howard’s work at Stanford Humanities Lab, especially Towards a Literacy of Coorperation, the course he just completed. I wasn’t able to prioritize attending because it competed with the more work-relevant Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program (more online video!). But that’s why we document these things.

Howard’s course just concluded a couple weeks ago, so this was among the first public presentations of what they’ve been working on. They’re working on editing down video from the class, but for the time being there are some video and audio files on their site. I took notes primarily on things I wasn’t as familiar with, so if this is new to you I recommend tuning in directly (I recall the Peter Kollack session discussing more of the fundmentals of cooperation research).

Howard’s talk took us from the dawn of time til now, ending up at the question of whether our new tools can give us additional means to create even more robust cooperation. My background is in International Relations and Policial Economy, so I’ve spent a lot time on the theories underlying Howard’s work. He mentioned Robert Axelrod’s seminal quick-read, The Evolution of Cooperation which is great for anyone interested a more robust exploration the commonly cited maxim “tit for tat works”.

Howard discussed a new-to-me game called Ultimatum. It’s a single play game, where participant A is told they will be given $100 to divide between them and another player, who is faced with the choice of accepting the payout or ending the game with both players receiving $0. In developed countries, with higher standards of living, studies showed that there was a strong sense of fairness. Player A seemed to know that Player B would not accept a division that benefitted Player A too much more than Player B. Howard said the split happened below about 25%, and that by far most outcomes were between 50-50 and 75-25. Splits less fair than 75-25 were rejected as being unacceptable, despite the net-economic-gain that Player B would receive. Strikingly, this ratio did not extend to the devloping world: where subsistence was less certain, any gain was viewed as desirable, regardless of the equality of the division. (for my thinking, this is the mechanism at work in the bloghercon debates.)

This may sound of trivial interest, but for us econ fiends, this sort of outcome blows the central tenet of REMs (rational economomizing maximizers) out of the water - with tremendous implications in economic and social theory. See this paper by Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, for a thorough, though academic, overview. This line of research adds to findings of behavioral economists that there are strong social and personal motivations for actions beyond just the cash-value calculation, and is opening a new frontier of academic research which folks like Howard are mining. As a staunch libertarian, I see nothing but good coming from a more subtle understanding of what humans seek from economic activity.

Continuing this theme, Howard went on to discuss research on altruistic punishment (see here and here) , which is a tantalizing topic I read about several months ago, and then lost track of. The question of enforcement has long puzzled researchers: why do some people waste their time, money, personal capital etc in taking action to prevent negative behavior (free-riding, rules enforcement, cheating, inequality)? From a survival perspective, why aren’t they just concerned with their own welfare? Why are they going out on a limb, or patrolling the range at night when they could be in bed, or even wasting the breath to speak out? All of this begs the question of why we aren’t the savages that economic theory presumes.

This line of research looks at general human behavior to say why the general person seems to be biased toward cooperation, beyond the generally 20-30% who chronically pursue their own gain. Howard didn’t mention this research, but in the fall, I recall reading on PET-scan based research showing that, on an individual level, some people receive stimulation in an area of the brain associated with pleasure when they take actions enforcing actions “retribution”. This is satisfaction received from “doing the right thing” as they perceive it. And thus the mystery is solved: these people are getting a chemical benefit from their otherwise calorie- or capital-expending effort - even outside of just the “we need to keep this place from going insane” sense of collective action. I was keenly interested in this when I first ran across it (via the serendipity engine that is Google News), because I am unhesitatingly one of those people. Underdogs? Defended. Injustice? Pointed out. Hypocrisy? Mocked. Puffery? Deflated. Well-poisioning? Countered. It’s curious to see some basis for why I still like to defend the dork that gets beaten up in the schoolyard.

Howard cited further studies (that I haven’t yet found) show people will take action to punish those who fail to punish; that there is an additional layer of enforcement around regimes of cooperation. A system of nudging, rib-poking and hazing so we all hew to same behavior.

Back to the talk, Howard wrapped it up by stating his belief (hope?) that these “new forms of communication will create new forms of wealth”. This was an echo to how he started the talk, when he discussed how eons ago banding together to hunt large game created a new form of protein-wealth that both expanded communities (the weaker could be more easily supported from the excess as it was not an economic loss to share the new abundance) and stregthened their bonds (the best place to store food is in your neighbor’s stomach — not cannibalism — but the foundation of a system of reciprocity!!). A new form of wealth changes the game, and can hopefully take us another step up from savagery.

My final note from the evening might have come from Howard’s response to a question, but contains perhaps the most profound statement on the logic of the “corporate altruism” that I know had the folks at NEC baffled (and me lacking a coherent explanation). Howard said something along the lines of “corporate support of Linux is seeking to turn Prisoner’s Dilemma into Assurance/Stag Hunt” . Which means it’s moving the zero-sum game of platform-committted devlopment to a more open application environment. And it is a very elegant way of saying “Growing the Pie”.

Perhaps anticipating Howard’s talk, Christopher Allen blogged about altrusitic punishment on Thursday morning, connecting these otherwise-game-theoretic concerns to the blogosphere, with his continued focus on the fundmental characteristics of group interaction. From my view Dunbar’s number is an observation that’s tied to the current-state of cooperation - both our collective skill at cooperating and the state of our tools, rather than a core observation on human nature itself.

For another take on this, check out Elisa’s view on Howard’s talk…. her overview is different than mine (funny how she slacked on writing this until today as well).
There’s certainly a fertile discussion gaining mometum around these important concepts.

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New use-case for IE: Yahoo! Launch videos?

by eleanor on @ 3:20 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

In crusing past a catch-all email account, I found a note from a CTO I met on Caltrain last week (Navient Corp. offers hiring mgmt sw to help companies nail down what they need and then screens applicants to fit those needs; mostly in the call center space). He mentioned an Eleanor song (my name is more prominent in music than real life), by an indie-sounding band called Low Millions (indie -> just about anything featuring guitars).

Wanting to check it out (yet eschewing his iTunes recommendation), I googled and found Yahoo!’s Launch toy, which offered a video. Intrigued, I dug out my IE (it’s true - I had apparently removed all shortcuts to IE) to check it out.

The band was cool, but more interesting was that instead of just playing the one song, the system took me to another song directly - one I liked (Jem’s They). So it’s not only free, and on-demand, but it’s deterministic enough to have lead me to other appealing music.

In order to really use the tool, I had to login to my Yahoo! account. The system glitched on letting me rate Jem immediately, as the server transition from guest to ekrusew failed to handoff my viewing history. So as an apparent new user, I searched and played Jem and rated it highly. The system then played some more appealing stuff - including (new?) Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan - alternative artists I’ve liked through the years. A good experience, content I’m interested in, as I got to see what Sarah looks like now in her latest video. I’m even ok with the commercials that have been interspersed.

Mike, who pays way more attention to this stuff than I do, says this app isn’t new-new, that it’s among the things Anita Wilhelm (mobilegirl) worked on when she was at Yahoo! last year. He’s not sure how much traction it’s gotten out in the world. I certainly never saw it before now.

It’s been a good experience so far - better than tuning into an mp3 channel. It sounds roughly like music I’ve liked in the past (in discovery, variations on a theme is what I want). The video is, strangely enough for bare-bones me, a definite experience enhancer. Though the window remains in the background I’ll bring it forward to take a peek and learn more about a song I like. Then I learn the artist’s name within the context of sampling imagery the band’s provided - like extended cover art. The video is useful in understanding the band, as an extra channel of information. Nice, and worthwhile for even just the couple seconds I view the video.

My recommendation, as always, is that Yahoo! needs to make the investment in porting this to Moz. It’s a nice app, but if during working today I hit a patch of system drag, IE’s first in line for shutdown to free memory. And since I never use IE, IE becomes a de facto Yahoo!’s music videos app - which is exactly the tethering that web-based applications was supposed to eliminate.

And this one is for Russ, who will no doubt be happy that I’m plugging his team: what about mobilizing this for Yahoo!? In the world of MobiTV and Orb, you’ve got the content, the logic and the infrastructure already. Streaming to my Treo would be neat. I’ve got RealPlayer, with no apparent video capabilites, but with a gig of SD, I can stand to add an app. Arguably, I could stand to replace my gig of music files with (a subscription?) music service.

I’ve been slow to feel the need for mobile video, but in this “impression” context I could see it being useful.

Heh, just now it came up with a song by Coldplay “Yellow” that I’ve liked but (counter-culture isolated me) never knew name/artist. Good job Yahoo!.

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Surprisingly neat stuff going on in education… ETech2005

by eleanor on 16 Mar 2005 @ 11:53 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

I’m in the session on From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool, and it’s been far more relevant that I expected. I learned about a new tool that is totally pertinent for both my own projects and the wiki-hunt we’re doing for the bloghercon: Instiki is a personal, client-based wiki written in Ruby. *Have* to try this one (this is more for my projects that the bloghercon thing). Personal note: Ruby is cute.

For the bloghercon wiki, I thought of rolling our own via my Dreamhost account, but then (der, just after talking to Abe of JotSpot) thought that Socialtext or JotSpot would work perfectly for this. Our list of organizing and advising chicks (and it is all chicks, dudes - and I’ll declare that I’m not at all sure how I feel about that) is growing big fast and email got unweildy for me yesterday (the day it encompassed me). I’ve got a request in to Socialtext and will try to find Abe again to see we can get a trial there. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this space, so I’m not sure which of the tools will work best for us. Best to explore both.

Wow, and this school stuff keeps getting interesting. That’s a lesson to all of us to dismiss agenda topics outside of our normal high tech poweruser base.

There’s a new tool called SchoolBell 1.0 with a calendaring application (calendar servers/syndication is also something that I’ve been thinking and writing about).

Very good to see education is such a hotbed of useful development. The needs and resouces and tech-skills/familiarity index of most educators is an excellent model to generate applications that real users can pick up and use.

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Networked objects at ITP as art… Etech2005

by eleanor on @ 11:37 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

A few weeks ago, Mike and I bailed on the WordPress 1.5 release party and attended the Digital art thing at Future Salon where Steve Dietz spoke on the thinking going into San Jose’s hosting of Zero1 2006 big art/media fest next year. I apparently didn’t blog it as I thought, but Mike’s stuff is here. This presentation that Tom Igoe from ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU) gave is a fascinating parallel to the works discussed that night. Hopefully the presentations will be available so you can check out the …. projects (I almost said pieces).

I hope to find the presentation for this and link to it.

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Wed morning at ETech2005

by eleanor on @ 10:34 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

So we’re down here at ETEch - I paid for the day pass, since a few people asked. I was planning on SXSWi, and an Etech day pass was essentially the same price. It’s an expensive conference and since I’m untethered to corp entities, my evalutation is that of a private citizen. It’s interesting how a pragmatic and flexible approach can change the context: a quick flight down this am got us here in good order and we fly back tonight.

Cory’s talk was good but his is readable online (and was indeed read aloud). I like Cory better in print anyway - writing for speaking always has a different rhythm.

The swarming presentation is online now from SwarmStream - it’s funny to hear how this actually connects to work the US folks at NEC (with whom I sat rather than worked directly) are doing with their fault tolerant servers and approach to redundancy. I’m glad to see that some of my work on more boring enterprise software stacks, with areas like Content Delivery Networks, is still relevant to stuff going on here (of course it is, but it it’s different than what you see looking out the IDC libray window).

Now we have Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing with Jimmy Wales, President, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. They’ve got 499, 388 English language articles, German is third at 209K, and Japanese is third at 106,682 articles and just tied the NYT in page views (~500M pageviews monthly). Lots of other stuff.

Now folksonomies are on, with hey - the del.ico.us guy, Josh Schacter (who we were just chatting with out in the hall, but I didn’t connect him!). He’s apparently just a stockbroker type who scratched his own itch and created a great tool. He’s supposed to be very nonchalant about the fuss, and happy in his own vocation (and therefore del.ico.us tends to languish and go up and down). That’s just what people who know have told me. But here the man himself speaks: He said del.ico.us started just from a text file, just collecting to post on a website, 20k odd links. Somewhere there he started putting hashmarks and text to grep them out later, his wireless links etc. The web version came later, but still single user, for him. It was less cateogorization, but just grouping (which for me is the key issue - let the structure emerge). Then he made it massively multiplayer. What he found interesting was about the behavior around the tags with the users, as they triangulaed around both the quality of the url/doc and the context of the user combined. He said that people use tags for all sorts of things. Tags for groups working together, tags for workflow and rss to feed stuff around. Ah, most interestingly, Josh notes that wiki’s people fight for space, there is a limited namespace and taxononmy is much more rigorous (my edits), and that del.ico.us is much more individual - there’s no agreement necessary. That’s a good distinction to make.

Marc Canter asked if we could connect tags together, the tags we’ve left lying around in the various services. I’ve been looking at this as part of my side projects, drawing on the whiteboard and talking to folks like Michael Eakes of Rojo. Something like an exportable opml that I can own as my microcontent and bring into these different system. Stewart B says that Technorati has most of this now (they have it, but it’s my microcontent, and in Technorati it’s not well linked to me). Josh says we’re already starting to see this, different axes of what tagging, why tagging, and what happens. Flickr is mostly my stuff for my purposes. Technorati is tagging my stuff for other people’s purposes. Del.ico.us is tagging other people’s stuff for my use. Clay said that the api’s are there and that the answer (totally agree) is that it should be a local activity with an upload to servers. He also brought in the idea of the remix culture, which is a good connection. But for me this is all about my microcontent working for me along all the axes of use and the variable functionalities and supported use cases of the various tools.

Josh was talking and I was goofing off and now he’s talking about a sort of dashboard interface of my tags, commonly associated (popular?) tags (perhaps associated with the items (what other people would tag them) and then a third component. I’ll have to find Josh again, because I violently agree with all that he’s saying.

Anthony Eden (who wrote TagSurf just asked how we would tie in together all the tags. Technorati is searching thru 3 services, Flickr, Furl and blogging. Josh said are you tagging for your own purposes or for others? There’s nothing to keep people from misbehaving if not - the whole meta tag padding issue. (Defefinitely look online for other notes on this session - it is VERY interesting). I’ll post this, and add update links and possibly that third thing from Josh if I remember to ask him.

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ETech or bust

by eleanor on 15 Mar 2005 @ 7:36 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

So SXSWi didn’t work, so I’m heading down with some buddies to ETech for the day tomorrow. Ah, the Southwest commuter plan!

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WorldCom’s Ebbers conviction matters

by eleanor on @ 7:20 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

I get back online after the roundtable this morning and see that Bernie Ebbers has gone down on all charges, which I didn’t expect. We’ve gotten clear guidance: The jury (and by implication, shareholders large and small) hold the top guy responsible for running the ship. In a way, it’s a return to nautical mores, where the captain is responsible for all that took place during his watch. This code was so strong that it was the ship’s captain who was disciplined for a mutiny by the crew, a concept that I found murky until I examined it from a management perspective.

It is of course the responsibility of the leader (once they accept the responsibility) to keep things together. A mutiny is a failure of leadership. Between them, Sullivan and Ebbers did well here: they kept the crew together, as testimony of Troy Normand and Betty Vinson, reluctant accounting fraud particpants, showed. At the same time, it’s interesting to think that Ebbers was brought to trial not for where the ship ultimately headed, but as a question his level of direct involvement. That says something about our culture of corporate governanace, how we have evolved. As an investor (not as a leader or member of the board), it’s an obvious truth that the chief executive is to blame for failures of the corporation, and we see it in the periodic sackings. And that seems right and appropriate - “bring in the new team”.

However, looking at it from the point of view of the fallible humans at the helm (executives) or their advisors (board), you recognize that it’s the effort of the team that moves the business along. Ebbers’ defense that Sullivan masterminded the fraud is, at face value, plausible. Individuals can play that great of a role in times of change or crisis, and determined ones can methodically amass enough power to be able to control the course of the firm over the longer term. The case remains that Ebbers, as the boss, had the job to know what was going on, whatever its complexity.

Does it make me want to run a public company? No. Be on the board? Not with WorldCom’s board sweating that $12M (what in the hell was I thinking?) $55.25 M decision. And what it is doing to public companies themselves? As I left NEC, they were bringing in new accountant helpers to rigorously go over every small detail. But that scrutiny doesn’t mean that the business itself would behave with more fiduciary responsibility. It just means you know where they spent the money. It doesn’t invite bets on new innovations or even new business lines, just cost containment and papertrails. As a shareholder, I want to know not that expense reports are completely documented or chargebacks properly allocated, but rather that companies are paying attention to the important value-creating activities.

But that’s a daily grind of a different sort, and hard to quantify. How do you balance responsibility with the reckless necessary to get a jump on new markets?

As a part of my ongoing project (as yet unposted, slacker) to put online my strategy repository, I share this delightful peek into how crazed and misguided the pursuit of growth can be. In a vintage 1997 piece from the estimable Fortune, no greater authority than Gary Hamel, strategy guru and professor, wrote an article entitled “Killer Strategies that Make Shareholders Rich” (June 23, 1997 pp. 70-88) in which he praises the novel strategies of a scrappy energy trading firm, Enron (in a way reminiscent of other journalists discussing Google). The whole piece is piquant; all the more that it was handed out in a circa-1998 b-school strategy class. Hamel captures Kenneth Lay as remarking:

“I think the one lesson probably all CEOs need to learn — at least I certainly needed to learn — is, you have to be very reluctant to tell somebody they shouldn’t do something. Quite often someone will come up with an idea, and I have to keep myself from saying, ‘We just don’t want to go in that direction.’ By doing that, I’ve learned that a lot of the things that initially looked to me to be unrealistic, undoable, or maybe even unwise, turned out to be brilliant after a lot of work. And I think if you start shutting down some of those ideas early, well, then, of course, your employees won’t come to you at all.”

Now there’s fostering the creative impetus, and letting people lead, but as is obvious now, the people at Enron weren’t doing the right things — or rather the things they were doing ended up being precisely as Ken first assessed. Unwise.

So how do you incent positive change? That’s what we talked about this morning - incenting the salesforce to sell the right stuff. Because it was tangential to our topic, I agreed that it was “easy” to do, when the accurate statement is that it is “obvious”. What’s not easy is structuring the comp plan to account for the relentless comp-maximizing instincts of your salesforce. So you have to think, and rethink as you turn over whatever incentives you offer for positive change. You have to think like a rep, or a trader, or whatever agent we’re talking about so that you can understand what they are going to see as the easy/low risk routes to success in the game you’ve structured. Because what you’re doing is creating an environment that will foster the activities desired.

I’ve been mulling leadership over the last few days as we flock to gain direction on this chick conference thing. As we decide the important questions of culture, values, mores, and behavior that will drive the agenda, I’m struck by how unruly things are in the vacuum, how complex the issues are and how divisive the issues of entitlement are. We’re trying to figure out what kind of environment will be productive, looking forward to the future as we look at the now and choose our constituents. We’ll figure it out and the airing of comments helps, but today I’m left with the awareness that it’s not the idea that’s important and online chatter, but the execution. That the leaders must create a suitable environment and act to prevent things from going astray. All these voices on the web will inform, validate, criticize and moot the idea of a chick conference, but the thing that matters is the decisions must be made.

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BMA Product Mktng/Mgmt Roundtable - Chuck Henderson on Launch

by eleanor on @ 2:22 pm in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

This morning we had our monthly BMA Product Marketing/Mgmt roundtable, with Chuck Henderson of Breakthrough Product Marketing discussing “The Product Doesn’t Matter in New Product Introductions”.

I invited Chuck to speak based on insightful comments he made in response to a launch query on another weblist. The advice he shared some months ago (which he revealed as originating with Cathy Kitcho’s High Tech Product Launch) was that launch must do two things:

1. Create demand for your product or service (create pull)
2. Set up the company to be able to fulfill the demand (make money)

True, beautiful, succinct, and something - as I reflected - I realized that startups and new product teams often deprioritize in a world of limited funds and time. Too often the operational side of the house is neglected, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where companies fail to plan for success. As an example I ran across yesterday gives a nice snapshot of the problem. It comes from Joel Spolsky at FogDog software, now selling a project management book to support FogBugz, one of his software products, who wrote two weeks ago an account of how difficult it is to fulfill physical product vs. downloadable code. In a world where we just can’t do everything we want when we can see it in our strategic path, how do we account for the unexpected opportunities that emerge as we build our businesses out. Joel optimized for code, but now needs to kludge in shipping. How many examples can you think of where back-end processes are made deliberately unnecessary in the early stages of the business - workarounds adopted so this overhead can be eliminated - only to become critical later when you’re selling a more fully-developed product?

Another discussion surrounded the sales side of the house, where we thought through just why the internal aspect of launch (the sales rep training, the lining up of manufacturing, fulfillment, billing, customer service, etc.) are so often deprioritized. It’s incredibly ironic because, as the wiser sales guys in attendance reminded us, it’s far easier, cheaper and margin-pumping to sell to your current sales base. For that, you need to keep them happy. Customer happiness, once they’ve been sold by the flashy sales stuff, is determined primarily by the “boring” post-sales activities of fulfillment, service and support. I can think of a dozen startups that totally deemphasize their support functions. It’s just not seen as mission critical, as product development obviously is - because it is, well, both obvious and interesting. Support is the stealthy make-or-break function in customer retention, but it’s hard-to-quantify and unobvious ROI make it difficult for otherwise responsible folks to spend their limited dollars and time here. Another factor which occurs to me now is that building strong support infrastructure results in a lot of confusing, conflicting, and contradictory customer data. What startup, bravely going about executing their business plan, can afford to be distracted by this feedback? You know there’s value there, but it’s gotta be like comments on A-list bloggers: how can you tell what’s good and real?? Personally, I’m not sure what the answer is - I have a bias against it as well, one I need sessions like this to talk me out of.

Again, we drew in the thinking of Steve Blank from Haas/e.Piphany, who covers some great stuff in his Four Steps to the Epiphany. You should own and read this book. It’s samizdat-style, but getting a fancier cover (our copy has a map of the Tokyo subway which is amusing for its own reasons). $24.95 will unlock the secrets of the startup universe.

Chuck’s notes from the session are here (FYI - he’s going through a rebranding and Innovation Acceleration will be the new name as of 1-Apr-2005) .

This roundtable (which I ususally post about as FYI) occurs on the 3rd Tuesday of each month at Scott’s in Palo Alto from 7:30-9am. It’s always a great group of people, where experienced folks share their knowledge and we noodle through ideas to help improve the practice of the ambiguous world of product mtkng/mgmt.

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Bloghercon ho!

by eleanor on 14 Mar 2005 @ 10:02 am in Geek   ++

So we had a good meeting yesterday, where I got to meet Lisa and we hashed out a bunch of things. We spent quite a bit of time talking about whether to “allow” boys, with Lisa and Elisa strongly in favor of being as inclusive as possible. As we talked, I shared my concerns which could be allayed by having strong moderators, rules for exchanges, and creating a shared space for discourse (where anyone can be shut down for ranting or being off topic).

Lisa’s proposing a vote-in, and I’m fine with the outcome, as long as its recognized by all that the issue isn’t so much of male participation, but of preserving a cheerful chick culture and collegial environment — ie, that they keep the focus on chick issues. If we do allow guys (how lofty that sounds, what fun), the discussion will be very structured and our moderators will pay special attention to balancing the voices. We’re already planning on using chess timers to limit question and comment length. I believe my worries can be quelled by those steps.

If you’re a guy and want to come, think carefully about what you want, what your goals and purposes are. This is not going to be one person’s conference as was once famously declared at YANBC. If we allow men, it must be recognized by everyone that they are guests; they come as interested parties to discuss a well-specified topic. For this one conference it will be about women and this will be positive. No whining, non-confrontational/adversarial - we work together to think through these issues surrounded by pink hearts and flowers. Everyone should expect to see a nice kind of regimented equality, where one’s question just might get voted down as “off topic” by attendees.

Insofar as I can speak out among the group, there’s another point to consider. This conference will not be on the “conference circuit” per se. Those who are often brought in to speak (so often male, but that’s not the point here) will not likely be speakers here - given our limited time and unique take. If I had to pick a tag line for the conference today, it would be “Other Voices” - and that’s just the forum I hope to help foster. Personally I hope to use what money we have that might otherwise subsidize speakers to help form scholarships for our grrl attendees.

So yeah, it’s an experiment. A conference run by women for women. Guys might be able to come, but the point of this is that chicks will be setting the agenda and groundrules.

This morning, I see a comment from Nancy White of Seattle (who’s been blogging XX/XY ratios at SXSWinteractive) asking more about how we could connect guys in if we don’t invite them, and where this will be held. The second is easy, though we’re so insular here we hardly thought to say: somewhere in the Bay Area. Top candidates now are Berkeley or Palo Alto (maybe Stanford).

The first touches points that I forgot to mention in my original post, which might not be relevant now (since we might let the buggers in). I was thinking of using technology to bridge the gap - to allow the guys a window on what’s going on in the sessions before we could convene together. Let them peer in through a window, get a sampling of what’s taken place, and then join us - or they could just come.

Those ideas are still valid for a co-ed world. I’m hoping that we can get Doug Kaye of ITConversations to cover the event for posterity, but we should also webcast live to the wild, to allow participants (both boys and girls) to tune in. Then we’d have an IRC channel for backchannel conversations and to link the virtual participants in directly.

I still think we need to do this to effectively serve the community — documenting what we have learned, and allowing the virtual participation of those who (even if child care is offered, which I really hope is a joke - my liability sense is twitching) can’t make it because of schedule, cost, work or family reasons.

I see Elisa’s buzzing about the negativity out in the world, but that doesn’t bother me. We’ll do this thing, and do it positively. I tend to give critics slack as we have so little information out yet; I know I tend to react negatively to pure buzz. We have to acknowledge the (overly, in my view) proprietary view of some folks out there, who do like to maintain their de facto status as gatekeepers. Progress along a straight line is good; change off into a new vector is always scary. So from that view, I could see including guys to help them bridge into this new world. But I will not be happy with tail-chasing sessions to argue about how these issues aren’t relevant or important with some of the people who are best in the world at self-promotion (ie, one certainly doesn’t join the upper blogosphere by charm alone, as we have ample proof). I’m holding out on caring about this until we see boycotts (yes, a pun :-).

bloghercon

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Bloghercon pre-meeting thoughts

by eleanor on 13 Mar 2005 @ 12:28 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

So I’ve been talking with Elisa for a few weeks about Bloghercon, an idea she and Surfette (Lisa Stone) came up with (back in Novemeber). It was sort of hush-hush until I prompted Elisa to share her new idea with Sylvia at the SF Blogger first Tuesdays dinner a couple weeks ago. From there Sylvia took it viral and it’s out in the blogosphere.

I haven’t blogged on it, because most of my thought has gone into it during IM conversations with Elisa. We’re having a meeting today to discuss, and I thought I’d get my ideas down first.

Let me say first that my take is that it’s not an issue of why boys aren’t linking to girls. The absence of women from the Technorati100 is absolutely not, in my view, a problem that we can address by drawing attention to sexuality overtly. The issue isn’t causing boy bloggers to say “Have I linked to a chick in my post?”, but rather how women need to tool up to play better in the blogosphere. How we need to adapt our participation to penetrate the media, and once we have our foothold, we can start to impact its evolution more directly.

I’ll probably be one of the more “conservative” voices on the team, believing that our issue is skills-based rather than a matter of social justice. Above all I want to keep it positive and practically based, so that we all can come out of this more unified, not just as a band of blogger girls, but to unify the blogosphere itself.

All-girl or co-ed??

So in building out this thing, my favorite bug-bear is the “do we invite the boys?” issue. On that one I’m solidly convinced that we need the larger chunk of the conference as chick only. Why? It’s the classic girls–school argument. If this is going to be a chick blogging conference, it’d be great to have only women in the rooms. I’d like to focus on meeting and hearing from the women, and not just hobnob with the blogger boys I know. Personal failing, but it’s a fragmentation of attention and purpose. I have tremendous dread of panels where questions come up and the moderators face the choice, in the limited time available, of giving voice to the (inevitiably) outnumbered boys in the room or giving preference to the women. And those boys in the room, as chick-empowerment-minded as they might be, will still be interested in their own issues.

As an example, when I told MikeR of this question (sea also his take on Bloghercon), he said “I want to come, I want to learn better how I can source female speakers for MobileMonday. Right now that’s too hard, I want to make it easier.” Now, noble as that is, that’s still addressing a boy problem, from a boy perspective. The chick perspective is “How can I get empowered so that I’m comfortable speaking, comfortable putting myself forward, so that others end up wanting me to speak.?”

Surely we can see the differences in focus there, and how much the focus would drive what happens at the conference.

Let’s let the boys in around cocktail hour

But both sides of the coin are important, so the idea that I’m going to push for is a split session. The bulk of the day content should be by women and for women. And then later, maybe after 4 pm, we could bring in the guys for a joint session, to workshop issues after our ladies are all empowered. That would be my ideal, with a group dinner afterwards.

What would we talk about with just girls?

We can discuss topics that might be deemed irrelevant by guys (”Whuffie Whoring for Women” would be a great one) and do so with careful attention to how we need to change out tactics. I’m totally with Elisa in that we need to keep away from the conventional smarmy chick conference topic of work-life-balance, but I would like to see a session on tools that will increase efficiency and effectiveness of blogging: how can you effectively follow a thread and participate in a conversation. How do you determine what voices you need to listen to. How do you build a tight linked blog roll, so that you get references. I know those are all “core values” of the blogosphere that I tend to dismiss, but am currently exploring a tools-based approach to match my attention span better to what’s going on out in the wild.

Someone should also have a session on succinct posts, for meanderers like me. Yesterday Russ Beattie commented that the articles in O’Reilly’s Make were “blog length”, to which I laughed and said “Oh really?’ (thinking of my own) and he said, “Yeah, all 4-5 paragraphs.” Pretty funny, and there’s a lesson to be learned: short is good. I’d love a discussion there.

What’s the point again?

Chicks are different than guys. We tend to think differently, and bring our own group norms and sense of proper interaction. Some of that is, from my view, hampering to success in the very public, competitive and continuous grind that is the blogosphere. As chicks, we have things to teach each other. I, for one, would love to meet many of these chicks. Bay area events and conferences are so predominantly boy, that I’d be thrilled to see the opposite.

And we do need to get the guys to help out in building a more inclusive community. But that’s something I don’t think they can be guilted or harrassed into doing. The responsibility remains for women to get into the game. Now let’s think about how to make a playbook, start swapping techniques, and build connections among ourselves.

Oh, and here’s the tag: bloghercon

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Vacation

by eleanor on 11 Mar 2005 @ 11:08 am in Geek   ++

It’s true, I’ve been slacking on posting (and reading even), so I’ll just make it official: I’m on vacation.

I’ve been fighting the sinus infection of doom, leaving NEC, and noodling through what I want to work on next. Notice that’s not job hunting, per se. I’m feeling the need to set up a better info infrastructure before my next thing, and that’s going to take work and thought, aside even from the job hunt.

As far as the job, I’ll just clip out my comments from my farewell note, which stands as the most cogent encapsulation of the work I’d like to do next:

I’m scoping out what I want to do next, and who with, but I’m looking forward to the process. I’m focusing on the product side of the house, since after all this talking I’m craving concrete output, measurable results and bearing the risk.

The specific area is less important to me than company particulars, since I covered such a wide range of tech here. The theme I’ve found most interesting is something I’m calling ‘device independent data access’, where we are beginning to take for granted the constant availability of our data - whether for business, diversion or personal life. That space is bound up with mobility, info mgmt, multimodal UI and search.

I’m keen to build offerings aimed at an interesting emerging market, which Peter Vesterbacka (founder of HP’s e-Services Bazzaar) last night (at MobileMonday) called “the blur” — a space between consumer and enterprise. That’s a name I’m going to adopt. I’m seeing a lot of value created where products serve individuals as they seek greater productivity, better synergy between work and life. I see those offerings being drawn up into the enterprise via osmosis, and out to consumers via kids.

I’m the first to admit I’m a little unhinged. I like endings but I find the process of ending totally distracting. But the end, the prospect of the new, is funand galvanizing. Now that I have NEC behind me (in a thoroughly graceful way), I should be able to concentrate. Nope, not today. Maybe the theory works better when the weather is poor.

I still have to work on the events blog, which I delayed hoping to import it en-masse, but rather should have taken the time to import the current events. It’s a clear sign that I need a break when efficiency concerns overrule relevancy. And I have my strategy notes repository, which I’ve been working on, only to realize how totally useless some of the sage guidance is.

So I’m just going to take a hint from the purple parasol-toting lady I met on my run, and check out.

I was planning on heading to SXSW, but that got caught up in the rest of the chaos.

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