Alpha Mind Blog

By way of Execupundit, I discovered the Damn Interesting blog today. The article about the Nazi spies (follow my link to find Execupundit’s link) is interesting indeed.

But just now I’d like to mention that Damn Interesting did a piece earlier this month on The Extraordinary Astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff. I love the story, and I covered it on my 2nd episode of Build a Better Podcast, the short-lived experimental podcast I did in 2005.

In that episode, I also mentioned the somewhat mysterious relationship between Jonathan Swift and his great and good friend Stella. And I did a reading of Swift’s exquisitely ridiculous love poem “On Stella’s Birthday,” which might leave one wondering why, if Stella was capable of shooting a man to death (which she did), she didn’t choose Swift himself for her bullet.

Check out the podcast here

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I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

I started a new blog yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before; blogging does that to my sense of time.

I’ve decided to convince restaurateurs in greater Sacramento how easy and valuable it is to blog. I’ve started a pretty bare-bones site, Eats4Sacramento, which I intend to invite others to participate in. We’ll see how it goes…

… because his time would be better spent writing books.

Somebody, wish I could remember who, once said something to the effect that

Writing is a faucet in the attic. Talking is a fire hydrant on the street. Open the latter and the former goes dry.

Sounds like Hugh’s discovered Twitter is a lot like talking.

del.icio.us Tags: gapingvoid twitter hugh macleod hughmacleod writing

Seth says forget the resume. Heather Hamilton says Seth is leading people astray. Neville Hobson, on the For Immediate Release podcast, says “Seth has a point, but we’re not there yet.”

I agree with all of them, but mostly with Neville.

I had a bit of a controversy with Seth on this blog once before. Twice, actually; here’s the second part.

Why is Neville the one I agree with most? Because…

The simple fact is that Seth Godin is all about the future. He writes for the bleeding-edge denizens of that brave world into which all of us, will we-nill we, are being carried by the Internet.

It’s a world in which monolithic companies and monopolistic brands are playing an ever-shrinking role. In which, as a direct result, there is more and more work to be done that won’t be done by people in jobs, as conventionally defined. And even less work being done by the kinds of jobs Seth refers to as being “a cog in a giant machine.”

So, my nutshell observations about all this:

1. Seth is right. If you’re outstanding, a resume will only serve as an excuse to reject you. “Look, it doesn’t matter that you learned Perl in a two-day weekend well enough that you were teaching it on Monday. We need somebody who knows Python.”
2. Heather is right. The vast majority of jobs, even some world-changing jobs, jobs people kill for, still require a resume. Heather’s company, Microsoft, is still changing the world in some wonderful ways. (Although I once scorched the inexcusable Word 2007 in this blog, I’m writing this post on Windows Live Writer, which MS executed brilliantly.) Most jobs at her company are still choice morsels, and if she says you need a resume to get ‘em, well, I trust her.
3. Neville is right, in that Seth will be more and more right, for more and more people, as time goes on. The world is moving Godin-ward.

Now, a bit of my own experience.

The most interesting job I’ve ever held, by far, I got without a resume. (It was also the best-paying.) A friend told me she’d given my name to someone who was creating a new position, and a few hours later, he called. It was 1997, when web sites were too new for most companies, and I had the nerve to walk into my interview without a resume, but with a web site for this prospective employer’s company. I’d created it the night before based on what I learned from a few phone calls.

A twist, though: I was asked for a resume, after the hiring decision had been made. “I just need to show the management team you’re a real person,” was how the owner and president put it. And that, I believe, is how many job seekers should be thinking during this period of transition to a more Godin world. Have a resume. But offer it last, and give it a lower priority than any of the items Seth suggests. Have it to meet the compliance requirements after you’ve already won the job. But, if you’re to stand out from the crowd, it’ll be by doing everything you can to win the job before you have to hand over a resume.

It used to be that “references available on request” was the last line on the resume, and checking them was a late step in the hiring process. Let’s turn that around. Let’s lead off with a blazingly enthusiastic reference that ends with the postscript, “In addition to the incredible talents I’ve mentioned, I hear Heidi has a good-looking resume.”

del.icio.us Tags: Godin,Seth,Microsoft,resume,jobs,Nevile,Hobson,forimmediaterelease,sethgodin

My last post included 2 YouTube videos. I created the post using Live Writer and Wordpress.

Since it was a nightmare, and…

since I spent an extra hour on the post, figuring out how to do it, and…

since ShandyKing’s post (which comes up first on when you Google “wordpress embed youtube videos”) doesn’t solve the problem, at least for me, and…

since I love Wordpress, and…

since I love my fellow bloggers and want them all to succeed…

… I’m going to tell how I did it.

1. Create the post you want, absent the videos. If you are using a posting tools other than WordPress itself, do all you want in that tool and then send it to WP as a draft.
2. In WP’s post editing page, click “Save and Continue Editing”
3. Click “Preview”
4. On the preview, make a note of exactly what words you put last in your post.
5. With the preview window open, get the page source.- In FireFox, that’s ctl-U (or alt-V, O).
   - IE7 it’s alt-V,C.
   - In Opera it’s ctl-F3.
   - In anything else you’re on your own.
6. Paste the entire page source into a text editor (Notepad or something better), unless your browser already put it into an editor for you. (Opera has its very own editor, how cool is that?)
7. Go to YouTube and get the source code to embed the video.
8. In the editor, paste the code exactly where you want the video to be. (I always put it between a <p> </p> pair, having intentionally left a blank line in my post to insert it in.)
9. Now, (still in the text editor, NOT in WordPress) select all the code from
   - just after <div class=”entrytext”> to
   - after the last closing tag that encloses the last words
   of your post. (Sorry that’s vague, but for example, if your
   last words were part of a link, the “last closing tag” may
   be </a>, while if you ended with plain text, the last closing
   tag is probably </p>.)
10. Copy this text.
11. Go back to the edit-post window in WordPress. Switch from Visual to Code.
12. Select everything in the editing window. Delete it and paste the code you copied from the editor.
13. Click Save and Continue Editing.
14. If it looks right, go on to the next step. If it doesn’t look right, you have something to figure out that I can’t help you with. But my 1st guess would be that you copied too much or too little code from the text editor. 2nd guess: you didn’t get the WP edit window completely empty before pasting.
15. Back in the WP edit window, again select and delete everything. Again paste (your paste buffer should still contain the correct code, right?)
16. Now Publish.

The key was making sure you re-paste the code into the edit window immediately before publishing. Because when you previewed, WP made a hash of the code, and what it put there must be eliminated.

I didn’t say it was easy, right? You have to be comfortable enough with HTML tags to know just how much code to copy from the text editor. But with that caveat, it’s really not all that hard. And it works, at least for me. Whereas WP messes it up pretty much every time I try to do it differently.

WordPress is updating fairly often. I imagine WP will have this problem figured out in another version or 2 or 3. Meantime, this is what works for me.

BTW, I’m using WP 2.3.1. My browser is FireFox 2.0.0.11, running on Windows Vista

del.icio.us Tags: WordPress,YouTube,embed,videos,how

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Andrew Cline’s post title is wonderful. Captures the absurdity of what David Gregory said.

Even Andrew, sharp as he is, mentioned nothing about how politicians contribute to polarization. At least not the first time around. As I was starting to blog this, though, I went back & found he’d updated the post and made nearly the point I was going to make.

For him, though, the press is even responsible for how politicos polarize:

Various of the structural biases of journalism encourage them to view the actions of political actors as mere tactics aimed at winning rather than as possibly also sincere efforts to solve problems.

One way that polarization occurs: Political actors begin to believe this master narrative. So the actions of political opponents become mere tactics and the motives of political opponents become evil attempts to ruin rather than to build (or fix).

To give him credit, Cline also mentions our political system as a contributor to the problem. He could go farther, and mention how [$2 word alert!] adversarialism is built into most aspects of our culture.

For instance, the legal system isn’t usually what’s meant when people mention the political system. But it’s fully adversarial. Two sides lawyer up and duke it out in court.

Andrew is part of a wave of awareness that there are alternatives. His blog does a tremendous service in analyzing how we are taught to think, (an issue I deal with too). But the awareness progresses on other fronts. Take, for example, the innovation of family courts assigning a law guardian to look after the interests of children when their parents are facing off in a divorce.

As Andrew says, "Are there two sides to every story? Yes, if you stop counting at two."

There’s no need to stop counting.

Heidi Miller is an ace. I’ve been a fan of her Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter podcast for a long time.

Today she posts about Getting your passion up. Passion is the product of energy, and she’s talking about how to stay energetic in a high-demand, long-haul situation like a multi-day trade show. Well, it’s been some years since I “boothed,” but I remember some of what I learned. After you go read Heidi’s five tips, come back here for mine.

Back already? Great.

Before I give you my list, I’ll just say that my tips, unlike Heidi’s, are mostly about what not to do. Because for me, one of the secrets of being up is avoiding what gets me down.

Ok, here are my 5:

1. Live a normal life. Keep as close to your normal routines as you can. If you don’t normally stay up all night, don’t try it at trade shows. (Yes, there are important schmoozing ops, but most of these are high-value only while folks are still sober, which means you can skip the rest and get to bed on time). And if you’re a person who exercises (which should be a normal part of everybody’s brain care), keep as close as you can to your normal workout routine.
2. Take care of your feet. Remember Forrest Gump? Remember Gump’s platoon commander telling him about the importance of clean socks? Well, in a trade show environment, support matters even more than cleanliness. If you can get away with wearing support hose, do it. If you need more arch support in your shoes, get it.
3. Use sugar wisely. Some of us are more sensitive to this than others, but nearly everyone has a bit of a slump after getting a sugar high. Best to let your high come from tricks like Heidi’s and not try to jolt yourself with sugar, which lots of booths will offer. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
4. Use stimulants wisely. As with sugar, so with stimulants. If you have to stay really-up for a long time, you have to pace yourself. A strong dose of coffee early may give you a great morning but a less lovely afternoon. For many of us, the typical Chinese approach is better: cups of mild green tea several times a day, or half-cups of half-caf.
5. Know thyself. These tips are the things that have been most important to me. It took me years to learn them. (And I’d be vastly wealthier if I’d learned about my sugar sensitivity decades earlier.) Learn what works for you, and apply it. Start with lists like Heidi’s and mine, and customize for yourself.

And I have a special bonus trade show tip for those who, like me, are night persons:

• 5.5. Save your energy for after hours, and hire a pro like Heidi to be passionate on your behalf during the day.

Of course, the first 5 tips aren’t only for trade shows, but for any kind of mini-marathon you’re faced with in your business life. Any situation where it’s day & night, for multiple days in a row. And where, when you have to be up, you have to be really up.

del.icio.us Tags: trade,shows,tradeshows,boothmanship,energy,brain,care,braincare,exercise,showmanship

So, Alex Iskold is a dude that gets it. Today he writes much the same thesis as formed the core of Unfashionably Late: That late entry into the blogosphere (or any other social media space) decreases one’s chances of getting noticed. In Alex’s case, he focuses on monetization, which I wasn’t concerned with. The fact is, that whatever one’s motivation for blogging (or facebooking or YouTubeing, etc.), the later one gets in the worse are one’s odds of success.

Alex poses a question: Is the long tail of the blogosphere solid? Or is it in danger of falling apart?

And I answer:

In Unfashionably Late, I liken the blogosphere to a multi-level marketing scheme. It always pays more if you get in early. Most MLMs eventually become very unattractive, because it’s easy to see the market is saturated.

But, “falling apart”? I don’t think so. Reasons:

1. Many Markets: The blogosphere isn’t one MLM. It’s a multitude of them; 1 for every topic times 1 for every slant on the topic times 1 for every intended audience times…. (you get it.) Even if 30 MLM companies die this year, the MLM as a business model will stay healthy as long as there’s a single product category whose market isn’t fully saturated.
2. Saturation Doesn’t Kill Markets: Even MLMs that have pretty well saturated their markets are still going concerns. (Amway & Shaklee come to mind.)
3. Many Motivations: Even if it could be shown conclusively that there is no money to be made from a new blog, people will keep blogging because not all their motivations are monetary.
4. All Is Never Lost: It can never be shown conclusively that there is no money to be made from a new blog. There are ways of succeeding even in a mature market (think of how Japan entered machine tools, farm equipment, etc.). Just as there are ways of breaking into Hollywood even though the odds are very long.
5. Always Somebody Showing the Ass the Carrot: As with MLMs, there are those who make their money by selling the long tail, and they will continue to provide incentives (however bogus) to get people to live in the long tail.

What I fear most is that the quality of the blogosphere will continue to deteriorate, because eventually the long odds will deter anybody who’s smart enough to notice them.

Talk about superb use of a symbol: Scoble was given a gift of a Webvan pen. He says Paul Lindner “handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype.”

Bravo.

I was deep into launching companies when the bubble burst in 2000. There were some voices then calling it a bubble, but not very many, and most of them outside the dotcom mainstream.

This time around it’s different. People who have played key roles in making Web 2.0 happen are sounding notes of caution. Like Scoble and Steve Rubel. It’s a healthy thing.

I’ve been a little acid toward those who first started throwing around the term Kool-Aid as applied to social media. But now, with the coupling of shaky business models and astronomical valuations, what’s being called Kool-Aid isn’t social media or its evangelism, but such truly scary stuff as the last bubble was made on.

But back to communications, which is what this blog is about (even if I sometimes forget). The Webvan pen is such a potent symbol I’m going to ask Scoble to get a really good still shot of it. Then we can all post it over our monitors and on our blogs. To remind us not only to look beyond today’s hype. But also as a reminder of what makes for a powerful message.