Alpha Mind Blog

One of the many things I’ve appreciated about Kathy Sierra is that she’s not the least bit interested in making “victim” part of her identity.

And so…

After I got tired of being frustrated that I can’t do anything for Kathy, I realized there’s something I can do, and I will.

I’m going to make it Kathy Sierra Week on the Alpha Mind blog.

Here’s the concept. Having spent more than two weeks miserable about Kathy’s recent trials, I’ve decided I’ve had enough of gnashing my teeth over them. I also feel they’ve gotten more than enough coverage on other people’s blogs. So, this week, I’m going to leave all that alone, and I’m going to celebrate Kathy for what I believe she wants to be celebrated for: providing a blog which offered knowledge, wisdom, and good whole-wheat substance. (And which I hope will offer it anew, before too long.)

The Genesis of Kathy Sierra Week

Last week it occurred to me that, since Kathy’s stopped blogging, at least for the time being, her blog is a completed product. So I have a chance, foolish as the idea is, of catching up.

I printed out all the posts on her blog. I formatted them in Word first, and made the graphics all uncommonly shrunk so I could get the whole thing under 600 pages. I finished out a toner cartridge and made a bit of a dent in another.

And now I have this unbound more-than-a-ream on my shelf, called Creating Passionate Users, which has become one of my favorite books.

I haven’t finished reading it, and in truth I probably won’t. It’s a boatload of pages, and was never intended to be a book. (I do hope Kathy will edit what’s there into a book, some day. Some day soon.)

One reason I won’t finish reading it soon is that the first quarter of it set off so many explosions in my brain that it’ll take me several weeks to act on the great wealth of ideas it generated.

KSW: a Preview

This week I hope to write about what Kathy has done for my thinking. It’s not exactly the same as saying why Kathy’s wonderful, which I can’t do without the standard caveat that “your mileage may vary.” I can’t say that Kathy is or can be wonderful for everybody, but I can say what she’s done for me. I also can and will invite others to share their own experiences of having grown by reading Kathy’s blog and using her ideas.

My topics are already lined up, and here they are–a short list of the most important things Kathy Sierra has contributed to my life:

• Tuesday: The Alpha Mind Map. Kathy got me to try mind mapping where several others had failed. I’m pretty sure it’ll mean an order-of-magnitude improvement in my blog.
• Wednesday: Getting Seth Godin. I’ve been a fan of Seth’s for years. In fact I’m rather in awe of the man. But KS helped me grasp Seth’s thought in a way that had previously eluded me.
• Thursday: Every Graphic Is a Rebus Only Better. Reading CPU, a light bulb went on about the relationships between–
  • words and pictures
  • the several minds we are of, all of us, and
  • teacher and learner when the teacher understands co-creation.
• Friday: Consultants Rock. Based on those last three lessons, I have a much clearer idea of what I’ll be offering my clients when my church unleashes me on the world in my consultant suit.
• Saturday: The Suck Threshold In Personal Relationships. Why I intimidate Rock Star Daughter and what I can do about it.
• Double-Dip Super Sunday:
  • The Gospel According to Kathy Sierra. I have five sermons left to give at church before I retire. One of them comes from KS. Did you catch her thing about how to read sacred texts? Even she might not be aware she wrote about that, but I, for one, caught the lesson, and I’ll try to convey it on Sunday. I’ll post the audio on my other blog.
  • What Kathy Did Right. I printed out that monster tome in order to study how a blogger succeeds. I’ll summarize what I found. (On this blog.)

Has Kathy Helped You Grow?

I’m hoping some of you will leave comments during the week about how reading Kathy’s blog has helped you grow (as bloggers, tech writers, programmers, teachers, communicators generally, human beings…)

And, BTW, I’ve done my best to fix some problems that have recently made it hard to leave comments. I’ve put in a captcha doohicky and have turned off moderation. (I do reserve the right to delete offensive comments.) Please let me know if you have any problems.

And please contribute!

They talked one of the world’s best violinists into playing in the DC metro at rush hour. A superb article. Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

I like to think that, if I’d been there, I would almost certainly have been among the few who’d have stopped and appreciated the music. Not because I know Joshua Bell, but because I always listen to street musicians, even when I’m late for work. I always give them a few seconds, at least, to prove to me that they’re so bad I should just walk by without a listen, without giving a dollar.

Next time a newpaper wants to pull a stunt like this, let it be at a station I’m passing through.

By the way, there’s an audio effect in the video that you might attribute to the poor quality of the camera mic, but which would have been nearly as apparent if you’d been there in person: the cacaphony of the place sometimes makes the music sound genuinely bad. There are times when the pitches collide, Bell’s and the crowd’s, and your ear wants to blame Bell for the horror of what you hear.

It’s a factor the article doesn’t mention. But not a very consequential one. Even in a Metro station, anyone with an ear for music should have known Bell was, not Bell, but at least very good.

Somebody has finally read and written about Unfashionably Late.

Ian Delaney in New Media Knowledge - Should You Blog? says:

Despite its alleged benefits, blogging costs time. And time is money. A new paper by Max Christian Hansen argues that new bloggers should count the cost before they enter the fray. Ian Delaney examines the arguments.

Thanks for paying attention, Ian!

Yikes! From Techdirt:

Apparently, the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, Maine ran a photo of a lottery winner which clearly showed the lottery paperwork, including the winner’s name, address, telephone number, date of birth and Social Security number.

At least the paper is trying to make amends.

Full story here.

Kathy Sierra: Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, etc.

She asks the rhetorical question (I paraphrase), “Why do we still go to conferences when there are so many media to bring them to us.”

Here’s my list of reasons:

• One-on one in crowds. Why is it more fun to see a movie with someone else? Because, even if you’re too polite to talk to each other loudly, you still hear, see, sense each other reacting, in real time. Your companion’s reaction shapes and informs yours, and enriches the whole experience. You’re seeing a different movie when you see it with someone else.
• One-on-a-few in crowds. Even the best video-conferencing tools can’t capture this. The few people sitting near you provide (decreasingly with increased distance) the same thing your one companion provides. We are made to do things in groups, and we are made to read each other.
• Giving what you get. What companions give us, we give them, and we get a kick out of it.

All in all, I think giving is the most important thing, even when it’s on the very subtle level. Here’s an example:

My friend Lee Hopkins is one of the most skilled appreciators I know. One of the many persons he appreciates is Kathy Sierra. Why would he want to be in the audience rather than sitting at home seeing live video of her speech? Because, even if he’s sitting 13 rows back, she just might see him, hanging on every word, contributing his wee mite to what a good audience does for a good speaker.

I admit this list is partial, and admit further that Kathy’s probably right that no list is likely to cover all the reasons face time matters. It’s just my wee mite.

Church of the Customer Blog

They’re no American Idol winners but as a tool to create momentum for a cause, it sure beats marching with a picket sign in 20-degree weather that no one cares about anyway.

Dave Winer on the future of Twitter:

I’m very reluctant to dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, aware that many people said that about blogging, and I was sure they were wrong, and they were.

I’ve been trying to avoid Twitter for some time now. Blogging eats time, and one of the ways I cope is that I studiously avoid testing every new social media tool that I learn about in the b-sphere.

But something happened yesterday that tells me I’m going to have to learn about Twitter. What happened?

I checked my stats and found I’d gotten almost as many referrals from Twitter as from Seth Godin’s blog.

I didn’t even know Twitter could link. That’s how careful I am to preserve my ignorance and husband my time.

I suspect it happened because of Scoble. Here’s Winer again:

…if I were a Scoble fanboy, I would love that he posts every event in his busy life to his Twitter channel.

Last week I left a trackback on Scobleizer, and I think Robert might have Twittered it, for whatever reason. At least I know that two of the referrers were

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer (etc).

If Robert was the originator, he certainly has some fanboys (and girls) out there, because I got referred by 8 Twitter URLs for a total of 55 requests. For my newish, scantily-read blog, this is a flood.

Since I need to know how readers get to my blog, I’m going to have to check out Twitter. At the prospect of which I sigh, even though the reason (increased traffic on my blog) makes me smile big-time.

I’m not sure I have the nerve to disagree with Seth Godin, but…

Nathan asks Seth how to get a marketing job with no marketing background. Seth says, in essence, forget the job, just market.

Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc.

Is this brilliant advice? Or only advice for the brilliant? In other words, has Seth forgotten that not everybody is Seth?

There are many kinds of marketers, but the ones who succeed at all fall into two classes. There are the capable marketers, and there are the brilliant marketers. The latter are precisely the ones Seth is speaking to. These are the entrepreneurial ones, who have no need for the comfort of a big company, who just market because they love it, and who take to it like fish to water.

They are also the ones who tend toward Seth’s brand of brilliance, who figure out the world around them by native ability, not by having it explained to them. They do, as Seth implies everybody can, learn far faster by unaided experience than by classes or apprenticeships. They will, as Seth promises, have folks beating down doors to hire them.

There is a vast need, though, for capable marketers. They aren’t out in the long skinny tail of the bell curve. They learn by being taught. They they aren’t necessarily consumed by the hankering to market. They need a job while they learn to market, and so they find marketing jobs, as Nathan was hoping to do.

And they have one advantage even over Seth: they can empathize with the non-brilliant, who make up the vast bulk of most markets.

Notice that Seth prefaces the advice to start an eBay store with “Even if you’re 12 years old.” Better to have said, “If you’re lucky enough to be 12 years old.” Because a twelve-year-old is far better placed to follow Seth’s advice than a twenty-something or beyond. At twelve years old, you don’t have school loans to pay, a spouse to please, kids underfoot or on the way. Some folks need a job, and if they want to market, it should be a marketing job.

So, aren’t I disagreeing with Seth?

Not really. Because for someone who has the potential to be one of the brilliant marketers, Seth’s path is the quicker way to demonstrate it. And of course, if you’re passionate and single-minded, you should get a marketing job and start your own business.

I know where Lee Hopkins is, but where is Technorati?

Yes, it’s time for a little whining. Or ranting. Or whatever.

In Unfash (I’ll be using this nickname for my e-book Unfashionably Late from now on. If we all live with a word as ugly as “blog”, surely we can handle “Unfash”.), I said

…here’s how famous I’m becoming:

After twenty-two posts in 4 weeks, nobody has linked to me. The feed for my main blog, “The Alpha Mind,” has two subscribers other than the four which are just me trying out different aggregators. And it appears my blog has been read by no more than twelve persons other than me.

Now, after wiping this egg from my face, I have to confess that the only fact in that quote that was true on the day I wrote it was that I only had two subscribers. (And I’m being awfully trusting of FeedBurner when I say even this.)

First I’ll deal with my small readership, so I can then get to the serious business of kicking Technorati around the block.

I had made a mistake in my .htaccess file, and I wasn’t seeing statistics for blog.alphamind.biz, where this blog lives. I was only seeing statistics (please don’t ask me to explain) for those parts of the alphamind.biz domain which contained no content of importance. I don’t even know why there were twelve discrete calls for pages there, but those calls weren’t for my blog.

When I fixed the .htaccess problem, I found that in fact there had been over thirty readers of my blog the week I wrote the above. Still not a large number, but more than I’d stated.

Now, as to links to me…

The very day I published the e-book, I found that one of my favorite blogs had linked to mine a few days earlier. I clicked the link, which took me to the appropriate page on Alpha Mind. I then clicked my shortcut button “Technorati This in a New Window”, and up came Technorati telling me there were no links to that page.

I haven’t counted the number of times the same thing has happened since then, but it’s been at least “several”. The link at the top of this post is to a post by Lee Hopkins that links to my blog. Again, I follow Lee’s link, and then confirm that Technorati doesn’t know Lee (or anybody else) is linking to my post.

Technorati, please listen, and I’ll talk real loud so you can hear:

I followed a link to the page you’re telling me nobody links to! And the link that I followed is five (5) days old! Are you awake?!

While Technorati checks its alarm clock (in my dreams), I am wondering what the cyber equivalent of sniffing one’s own armpits is, so I can do that.

What is going on? Why does Technorati not find pages that link to me?

By the way, Technorati indexes my own blog posts pretty quickly—I’ve never had to wait five days to find my own material on Technorati. It just never finds anybody who links to me.

(sniff.) I’m bummed.

Google, please listen, and I’ll talk real loud so you can hear:

Technorati is not getting the job done! You guys know from links and crawlers and everything Technorati is trying to do and failing. Will you kindly take over? Please?

Okay. I dry my eyes and get on with life. And assure anyone reading this that you’re not the only one at my party. Honest. Some people are even linking to me, and one day you’ll know about it.

Oh, and Lee… Have you checked your deodorant lately?

“I wonder what Robert (Scoble) would think of his name being used as a unit of currency…” (Shel Holtz on the For Immediate Release podcast, 3/1/07.)

Fear not. Now that Quaker Heritage Day is behind me, Robert will know. He may need to finish up at SXSW first.

Thanks to Neville and Shel for not one but two plugs for Unfashionably Late, in which the economic unit “the scoble” is introduced.