I have recently made a change to how I use facebook. I think it is a good change that I needed to do but I feel bad about it. I get friended all the time on facebook by people I don’t know but who I am sure I would love to get to know. Many of these are listeners of one of my podcasts. But what I am finding is that facebook is not the place for me to connect to new people. I look at my updates on some days and only the faces of stranger stare back at me. Sure I can hide the updates of anyone that I don’t want to hear about (and anyone who is telling me about their farm game, I mean seriously folks) but then why did I friend them. So the time has come for me to admit that I have fewer friends than facebook says and pay better attention to the ones that I have.


I think that also means I need to pay attention to my listeners but had decided to do that in the way that Facebook recommends using “fan” pages (yes I hate that term).

So if you friend me these days don’t be too surprised if I say:

I don’t think we have met, but please let me know if that is just because my brain is made of swiss cheese.

I am making a change to how I use facebook to change my profile to be just family and friends. I am hearing a lot of smart people I know tell me I was using facebook wrong and I see the wisdom of what they are saying. So please don’t be upset if I don’t accept your friend invitation but if I get your updates I might miss pictures of my new grand niece and I don’t want to accept you and a friend but ignore your updates.

The Amateur Traveler page on facebook is at http://facebook.com/amateurtraveler

Of course, since my 30 year high school reunion is this week, that swiss cheese brain is a really good possibility.

Originally posted at Inside Chris's Head

I just got back from dropping Andrew and Friedel Grant from the TravellingTwo.com website back at the train station so that they could head back to San Francisco. If you are not aware of their story, Andrew and Friedel have been biking around the world for two and one half years. On Tuesday they should bike at least 90 more km which will bring their cumulative total to enough kms to circumnavigate the globe.

Since my day job for LiveWorld is creating online communities and social networks, I read a lot of articles about how social networking is causing people to interact less in real life and causing the downfall of western civilization. I was thinking of this as I was visiting with Andrew and Friedel because although we had invited them down to stay with us, and it felt like meeting up with old friends, we had never met.

I first stumbled upon the Grants when I was looking at new blog posts on travel through the Tecnorati site. They were heading into Gaziantep Turkey the next day. My family had hosted a Turkish exchange student from Gaziantep for a year and I have been to that city to visit him and his family. Gaziantep is not a popular tourist destination so I have not read about someone traveling there before or since. So I commented on their blog post and told them a few things to see in Gaziantep while they were there.

As it turns out they had already heard of the Amateur Traveler podcast and were listening to the show in their tent at night. We stayed in touch and Friedel has been on the show twice:

Bike Travel in Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) - Episode 172
Travel to Iran by Bike - Episode 134

By the time they were coming to California we had spent a couple of hours talking about their adventures, travel blogging and travel in general. So of course we invited them to stay with us, that’s what you do when friends are in town. So my experience is that social networking builds real relationships. Some of those relationships turn into face to face friendships over time. And to put more punctuation on that thought Andrew and Friedel are returning to San Francisco to stay with another friend and fellow biker who first met them through the Amateur Traveler.

This post was originally published at Amateur Traveler - Friends I Had never Met

David, the LiveWorld CFO, told me a story recently of calling tech support for a company. The tech support specialist introduced himself as "Tim" and politely asked how he could help. Of course, Tim had a very noticeable Indian accent so during a part of the conversation while they were waiting for the machine to reboot David asked, "so... your name is not really Tim is it?". As suspected Tim's actual name was a very respectable multi-syllabic Indian name but the company told him to pick a more common U.S. name for when he answered calls from the U.S. When he answered calls from England he was "Collin".

Seriously, are we fooling anyone? I wonder if the call would go any worse even if the support answered with "my name is Nandakumar but you can call me Tim".

As we come out of a presidential election season the topic of authenticity is near and dear to me. The classic joke is "how can you tell when a politician is lying... his lips are moving". In many ways the election became referendum against an unpopular president, a war and a financial meltdown. But I also wonder if authenticity played a part. Sometimes when I listen to a candidate I am not even convinced that he or she believes what they are saying. My young college age kids are particularly cynical to what they see and hear. They heard in Obama someone who they could believe. In part, because they believed he at least believed what he was saying.

Authenticity is unfortunately and unnecessarily rare both in politics and corporate messages. Who do you believe?

originally posted at Inside Chris's Head

In my day job I build online communities for the likes of HBO, Mini Cooper, TV Guide, the NBA, etc. In my off hours I occasionally participate in a very different type of community building. 13 times in the last 15 years I have made a trip down to Tijuana Mexico to work with a group from my church and a Mexican organization called Esperanza International to build houses out of concrete. Esperanza means "hope" in Spanish.

Esperanza says that what they are actually trying to build is community, houses are just the byproduct. They put in credit unions and teach people how to save money, help people help their neighbors as they build sweat equity in the program, and teach people how to build cement bricks. The family and their neighbors must construct every brick for their house before a volunteer crew like ours will help dig trenches, pour a foundation, pour a floor, stack walls or pour a roof.

In our last trip we moved 85 cement mixers full of concrete (about 500 pounds per load) by hand using a bucket brigade. We also moved 3 dump trucks full of dirt. You end up with very sore muscles a few scrapes and very very dirty. You also end up with friends South of the border. One of the neighbors who we worked along side on this trip was a woman whose house we had helped build on a previous trip. Nothing cements a friendship like... well like cement.

Oh yeah, and the food is great also.

Originally posted at http://chris2x.com/2008/10/13/building-offline-communities-in-mexico/

Who cares who becomes president. I am ready to vote for Warren Buffet for Secretary of the Treasury. Buffet has been warning for some time about some of the problems that we are now dealing with in the financial sector. He will make money in this crisis because he is a smart guy. This is kind of guy we need to listen to.

I visited my daughter at her college this weekend and one of the activities we attended was a recital of her voice teacher Dr Margaret Hanegraaf. Her teacher and accompanist were performing a series of short operatic pieces predominantly written in Spanish. Dr Hanegraaf has a beautiful full operatic Soprano voice and the songs were very well performed. Now I personally am not an opera fan and I had been up to between 2-3 AM trying to stay up with a college sophomore so I was very tired. In my effort to stay focused I pulled out the translation of the very dramatic piece I was hearing. The translation went something like:

This was a beautiful piece of cloth but now it has a spot on it.

Are you kidding? I was listening to a song about laundry. I set aside the translation sheet because I decided that giggling might be considered rude. Of course when one of the later songs was very sad I could only think “wow, she really liked that cloth”. When another song became fierce I was convinced “she is really mad that someone sold her cloth with a spot”.

I was reminded by this experience that perhaps we sometimes put more effort into promoting a message than the message deserves. Perhaps when you get a spot on your clothes a short note to your dry cleaner would be a more appropriate mechanism for communicating your displeasure than an opera. I wonder what sort of an opus would have been created if the waiter forgot to serve the salad dressing on the side.

I think as companies or individuals we should evaluate the message we have before we determine the means of communication. Sometimes when people are not responding it is not the communication mechanism that is the problem.

As a footnote i thought is somehow cruel that one of only three pieces in English was a lullaby. Now that’s just mean.

LiveWorld (where I am the EVP of Engineering and Operations) announced a new product called LiveBar today. LiveBar provides a simple way to add community to a content page, but we have talked about the functionality of LiveBar elsewhere.

The funny thing about LiveBar we wanted to show this to everyone months ago but we liked it too much. LiveBar did not start as a product, it started as a demo for our new LiveAPI Suite which we announced last month. To sell the LiveAPI suite we wanted to have a demo application that would show off what we could create with it. So we had one of our clever engineers start working on a demo. Our problem was that when he showed it to us we liked it so much that we did not want to show it to anyone, which as you may have figured out is OK for an application but really bad for a demo.

I was just trying out the script debugging in Safari version 4 developer preview tonight and got more than I bargained for. I was trying to find out if I had a script error in my tags for Google’s new AdManager on the Amateur Traveler discussion boards pages (http://AmateurTraveler.com/board). I turned on the web inspector by using the “Show Web Inspector” menu in the Developer Menu. Instead of getting just script errors on my page the web inspector showed me errors in my HTML as well in a very clear and helpful way. In the example below I was missing tags in my HTML and the inspector tells me where it is assuming I meant to have these tags. This is very helpful.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C Clarke

Watching this video of trick pool shots left me saying things like “I can’t believe it” and “how did he do that?”. We all learned in the Empire Strikes back with Luke Skywalker that if we don’t believe that something can be accomplished then we won’t be able to do it. I wonder how many times I let my imperfect understanding of what can be accomplished limit what I will accomplish.

I have changed the slogan for the Amateur Traveler to:

“Amateur Traveler - The Amateur Traveler is a travel show that helps you find the best places to travel to. It includes both a weekly audio podcast and a twice monthly video podcast. It also includes travel news and resources.”

This is an ongoing effort to refine the description of the site.

When I created the Amateur Traveler site I made what I think is a classic error. The tag line I used at the time was “travel for the love of it”. I was trying to explain why I had chosen the name Amateur Traveler. But what I did not do is explain to someone why they would want to come to this site at all. It is difficult when you are familiar with a website to see if with the same eyes as someone who has never been there.

How many seconds do you have before someone forms an impression of your site?

Try showing your site to someone who has not seen it before and ask them what this site is about and why someone would want to go there. If they can’t tell you, you have a problem.

What is a visitors first impression?

Since a visitor may not stay long on your site their first impression may be their only impression.

What draws the eye of a new visitor?

Show your site to someone and ask them before you show it to point to the first thing that gets their attention. It may not be as accurate as eye tracking software but it is a lot cheaper.

Like so many others I have been meaning to write up my thoughts on last week’s New Media Expo. One thing that is interesting as i read about the conference on other people’s blogs is that there are three different conferences that are being described.

1. The first conference that I have read about is the hypothetical conference described by people who did not go this year. Let’s set that aside as an echo of shows past.


2. The second conference I read about is from people who attended for free so they only attended the keynotes and the expo floor. I did this at the first expo in 2005 because i registered too late to attend the conference sessions. There are various good reasons why people attend the conference in this fashion.
   Leo Laporte and to a lesser extent the Orange County podcasters spend the show broadcasting live from the expo floor.
   
   Some people attend the expo only for cost reasons because even though the conference is inexpensive for a conference, it is still too expensive for some. I appreciate that Tim and Emil Bourquin have added the free session to the expo floor for new podcasters who may not be able to afford the conference.
   
   Some people only attend the expo because they have been podcasting for years now and have less to learn from the conference or at least perceive they do.
   


3. The third conference is the five tracks of the conference itself. This is the third year that I have attended the conference sessions. There were quite a few podcasters I ran into who were just getting started or who were just hoping to get started. The conference sessions target the practical aspects of podcasting and are well suited for someone who are still learning. I attend the conference because even though I have been podcasting for 3 years I love to learn and am constantly taking notes or mailing myself emails of new ideas I should try. I also like to support the Bourquin brothers and there effort which is one of the reasons I pay to attend.
   

My thoughts on the New Media Expo:

Las Vegas

I was one of the people who was afraid that it would be easier for a smaller conference like the NME to get lost in such a huge city like Las Vegas. We have friends in Las vegas who have a guest house where I could have stayed for free, but I specifically stayed in the conference hotel (the Hilton) because I knew it would take more effort to connect with people. Vegas is expensive, when you are buying a Rueben sandwich and a coke for $16 it feels a bit like the exchange rate in London.

Parties

The cost of doing business in Vegas seemed to be a big reason why there were no hospitality suites or big free parties. For people like me who were already connected this was a bit of a barrier for meeting new people but I would think it was a greater barrier for the first time attendee who might not know anyone else. They could not just stand in the lobby of the Hilton as I did on a few occasions to see who I would run into.

Brian Ibbot’s Coverville 500 was a wonderful exception. The music was great, the acoustics much better than last year’s concert and everyone I talked to seemed to be having a particularly wonderful time.

Expo Floor

I have heard it reported that the show floor was smaller this year. It wasn’t, but it was not really any larger either. I have heard it said that the show floor had less interesting vendors but I would say that over the years there has been an improvement in the quality of the vendors. Remember 2-3 years ago the expo floor had no microphone manufacturers and more than a few people just selling iPod cases. People like Rob Walsh of Wizzard Media did tell me they thought the foot traffic was down from last year. I only spent a couple of hours on the expo floor so i would not claim to be able to judge.

The biggest crowds were gathered by the live broadcasts which are always fun and I do wish I had more time to sit down and enjoy them. I would love it if the expo could stay open for another hour after the end of the conferences but i can understand if those who have been on their feet all day by that time might not agree.

The most useless booth in my opinion was Podcast Tuneup which had a great booth but could not explain to me in 5 minutes just what they were offering or at least could not make me care. Others who had been podcasting even longer then I have walked away with a similar impression.

Keynotes

I attended the first two keynotes by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and George Wright, VP of Marketing for Will It Blend, Blendtec. I thought both gave engaging and interesting talks.

I won’t say I agreed with everything Vaynerchuk presented (I personally heavily edit my shows) and yes his language was a bit coarser than I tend to employ (I know one person who walked out) but I appreciated that he knows what he wants (to own the New York Jets). My DNA and his are very different in our personalities but his talk gave me plenty of food for thought on what are my strengths and how I can leverage them.

Wright not only blended a cell phone and a rake but more amazingly described a marketing program that actually makes money and multiplied his companies sales by 7x. I find myself repeating his company’s story to others wondering how I can apply some of his lessons. Anyone got a blender?

Conference Sessions

A number of the speakers were doing return engagements but my overall impression was that the material being offered at the sessions was better than in years past. I did not miss the panel sessions which there had been in previous years. I often found myself listening to someone I have heard before like Tim Street, Tom Merritt or Don MacAllister but as the show went on I started ignoring some talks that I knew would be good to listen to people I have never heard of. I was trying to decide between a session with Rob Walsh, Shel Holtz or Paul Colligan only to have Melanie Van Orden run by excited about a session I had dismissed with Andrew Lock of Help My Business Sucks!. Andrew, who is new to podcasting, described an approach for putting together a video podcast that again was thought provoking.

One of my favorite sessions was Tom Webster from Edison Research who went through some of their research on podcast listeners/viewers.

Podcast listeners/viewers:

• Are significantly more educated than the general public


• Spend more money than the general public


• Are much more likely to buy online than the general public


• listen to 7.5 hours of audio a week vs 6 for the general public


• Are less likely watch TV, listen to radio, play video games, click on banners

Podcasters

It was again a blast to hang out with other podcasters. I did not get to spend as much time with as many podcasters as i would have liked because of that whole pesky sleep thing. I was unable to attend Paul Colligan’s profitable podcasting meetup for the first time because of a conflict with the worship service hosted by Steve Webb. I still have not had a chance to meet Leo Laporte or Amber Mac which makes me sad. I missed all of those who have been there in previous years who did not make it but I also enjoyed encouraging new podcasters.

My Favorite Moments

Chris Marquart, Alex Lindsay and I were talking when someone came up and pointed at me and said “you were my first audio podcaster” and then at Chris and said “and you were my first video one”. He is now looking at creating a podcast about Philadelphia.

I talked to some podcasters who had never recorded a show last year but who now have done 200 episodes. I am afraid that some of the people who left with the impression that podcasting may be fading did not see Tom Webster’s statistics or get a chance to look in the eyes of some of the new members of the podcast community.

Thanks

My thanks again to Tim and Emil Bourquin. I know Tim has written that he is so frustrated with the conference business that he may quit. Whatever is ahead for the podcast brothers I appreciate the effort that has gone into each of the 4 conferences now called the New Media Expo.

Hampton Inn has published a clever video to YouTube that shows that they are one company that has some understanding of this business of new media. It is a “Ballad of a Traveler” who stayed at a lesser and more suspect establishment. It is not clear from the video that it is an ad until about half way in and frankly by then I was entertained so that fact did not bother me. The entire video is a dramatic poetry reading that at 3 minutes in length would not fit as a TV commercial.

It is quite possible that the cashier actually meant it, but her demeanor seemed to say “my boss makes me say this to everyone”. Granted I was no longer a cheery person myself by that time. I had walked over to Stevens Creek Chrysler to pick up my car which was having a new part installed. They had called me to say my car was ready. Ready did not mean, apparently, that all the paperwork was done because I had to wait 10-15 minutes for someone to walk over my paperwork from the service group.

The curious thing to me is that I have purchased 3 of my last four cars from this dealership. So I have spent over $40,000 in this spot. Now perhaps to them that is not a lot of money (certainly less than one Viper) but to me it is the third largest purchase behind my house and my kids college tuition. Yet every time I come here I get the distinct impression that my time is not valuable. I pre-purchased a service plan for one of my cars so I always take it here. But even thought it would cost me more money I consider if it would be worth going down the street to Jiffy Lube where they seem to understand I am in a hurry.

I still get a Sunset magazine every month from the realtor we bought our house from 21 years ago. It arrives “complements of Enis Hall” as a gentle reminder of what a great jobs she did for us. It is probably not surprising that we have referred her to a number of friends. She is “our realtor” even though we have not bought a house in over two decades.

Last weekend my wife ran into a fellow starting a car hand washing business at a nearby service station. She learned he was an out of work construction worker who had moved here from Texas. She came home knowing his name and some of his history which she learned while she was pumping gas. As she went to wash her windshield he jumped in and did that for her. She came home and told me his story and I suspect has mentioned him to others as well. Here was someone that understands that his business was based on repeat business and repeat business would be helped by having a relationship. He wanted to be “our car wash guy”.

I think the car dealership could learn a bit from the car wash guy. When I get my car back it always still has the trash in it, plastic on the floor, the service numbers on the mirror. That always strikes me as “we could not be bothered to throw these out because you are not that important to us”. I don’t think of them as “my car dealership”. They won’t be the first place I go when I want to buy a new car.

Have a nice day.

It is almost too late to catch the last performance of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “All the Great Books (abridged)” at the San Jose Rep. The play has only two more performances as of this writing. If you have a love of or even a grudging respect for great literature and physical comedy then you should run right out and catch this performance.

The premise of this play is that you the audience member are a high school student who needs to pass a remedial class in English Literature before you can graduate at the ceremony which will be held in 1 hour and 45 minutes. Since the regular English teacher was killed in a tragic incident at a Harry Potter book signing the coach, drama professor and young (and not so bright) substitute teacher must take charge of this class.

I saw this performance on Thursday evening and the audience for the most part had never heard of the RSC but almost immediately took to their comic stylings.

SPOILER:

As a fan of the RSC podcast I knew that in the first act one of the actors seems to break character. Even as someone who was in on that little secret it was hard for me to believe that the moment was not real. The actor even seem to flush with embarrassment. My daughter and wife who saw an earlier performance were completely taken in as I think was most of the audience. What a strange group of gentlemen that write plays that setup this kind of comedy. It was though, to their credit, one of the funniest moments of the show.

At the end of June I had the opportunity to spend 3 days at the Socrates Society at the Aspen Institute discussing “Media and Our Conflicting Values” with a group of 25 smart people (CEOs, VCs, Entrepreneurs, etc). Our moderator was Michael Powell the former head of the FCC. Before we attended we had homework readings on the founding of the FCC when the Navy and later Herbert Hoover seized the airwaves after the Titanic disaster because signals from the stricken ship were blocked by amateur radio operators. We read cases from the Supreme Court and speeches about the “vast wasteland” that was and perhaps still is television.

We learned about obscene speach like pornography which is not protected vs indecent speech which is protected. Broadcast TV has (local) standards of decency imposed on it by the FCC because it uses the public airwaves. Cable and satellite TV have no such restrictions.

The media landscape has changed dramatically in my lifetime.

Regulation Obsolescence

What regulations are placed on broadcast television are increasingly irrelevant. Frankly I like TV better without people dropping the “F” bomb on me but in my household like so many others I don’t know that my college age kids could even tell me which stations are broadcast TV and which are not. In reality, none of the channels we receive is received via broadcast and therefore not subject to regulation. 95% of the households in the U.S. are in the same situation as they are receiving the signal via satellite or cable.

Audience Aging

According to a recent study the audience for television is continuing to age.

According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets’ median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo.

What this means is that even though you may sit down tonight before a television with hundreds of channels, half the people who are watching are old enough to remember when there were 3 major networks and stations signed off at midnight by playing the Star Spangled Banner.

Audience Fragmentation

When I was a young child we watched the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday night. In 1962 Ed Sullivan had an audience share of 36. That made it only the 20th most watched show. Today many television executives would probably sell their soul for a 36 share. A share of 6 (6% of households) could easily be the number one rated show. The growth of cable in particular has shattered the hold of the big 3 networks on the audience.

Media Consolidation

Although people are watching more and more channels, most of these channels are owned by a small number of companies. Six media giants: GE, Time Warner, Disney, Fox, CBS, Viacom own a combined 169 channels by my count.

Internet Wildcard

What is television? Is it still television if I watch it on hulu.com? Is it still television if I buy it on iTunes? Is it still television if I get it as a podcast? Watch it on YouTube? Does it matter any more?

It increasingly does not matter to a growing set of consumers. It also matters less then who the creator is. User generated content and new media producers are creating content that can easily be better than the content on major networks. The Internet has given a voice to bloggers and podcasters that can’t and won’t be taken back any time soon.

Probably the best part of spending a few days debating the value of media is that this story is not finished. May you live in interesting times.