New tack - coolwhat

I've decided to try a new format. From here on out (or until I demonstrate to myself that this won't work) I'm going to post cool things I find online and dig a little into what I think they mean for the business, culture, and practical use of the Web.

I'm calling this new format "so cool! so what?" and tagging it "coolwhat".

Making a point to a friend

Man, I just heard that famous internet writer Helen Popkin is a robot. Could this be true?

Or is this part of a not-so-elaborate hoax that's being perpetrated to illustrate a point? I'll let you be the judge (the answer's probably "robot").

Liveblogging at OCS2007

Hey there, this is my first, and probably last go at liveblogging. I'm out in Sonoma at ForumOne's Online Community Summit, a historically kickass conference on online community.

Jim Cashel has just started welcoming us. People are smart and the side conversations are fascinating as usual.

I'm a little dispirited about online community this year, not because it's not important, but because I no longer really think there's much point in separating "online community" from "online" in general. I worry that those of us who remain "online community" gurus will find ourselves outmoded. We'll continue talking earnestly about our topic while other folks shoot off and do interesting things without worrying too much about it. I hope the rest of the conference perks me up a bit.

Okay back to paying attention.

I'm back

It's been a godawful long time since I blogged in this venue. I may not be cut out for blogging. My excuse is that I've been working 7 day weeks and 14 hour days at a new company, and not on community stuff.
I've just managed to get all that work tidied away to the point where I'm no longer scrambling, so now I'm on to devising a community plan.

General guidelines for devising a community plan:

• Don't overthink - instead, keep production costs low and avoid the time-suck of market research
  
• Plan to be wrong the first time you build anything (i.e. build flexibility into your code and your plan
• Ignore most best practices, since your community will be comprised of different people than Yahoo's
• For Godsakes, try not to use the term community in outward facing text.

I may or may not be speaking on these topics elsewhere. I'll post about the seminar if I get invited.

Oh, in the shameless self-promotion area of this site, I'm featured as a "Face of eContent" this month. Astute readers may recognize the picture they're using.

SIIA brownbag

I recently spoke on a panel for an SIIA brownbag in Manhattan. The topic was "Tapping into User-generated Content".

The video is here.

I'm the goofy looking guy on the left. Somewhere along the line I seem to have developed facial expressions that make me look like I have a misaligned jaw.

Despite how uncomfortable I might look, I really enjoyed this speaking engagament. The other panelists were really sharp and I enjoyed chatting with them. I particularly like when we bounded off on a discussion of development and market research. I'll probably dedicate some lines of text to that in a later blog post.

In case you don't want to watch the video, our main message about that is "don't do so much market research".

SIIA was great. Ed Keating and Laura Davis were great hosts, and Heidi Cohen was a very capable moderator.

Buying a car . . . is not my idea of a good time.

So, until recently, I worked at ConsumerReports.org. Now that I'm moving to Reston, VA, just outside D.C., I have to have a car.

Although I built the autos user reviews for Consumer Reports, I've never owned a car before and I don't like them. I'm very unlike my recent coworkers at CR in this regard. When I asked for help buying a car I saw their eyes light up. When I told them I wanted one under $15K that I would use as little as possible, I got the distinct feeling that I was talking Greek.

The help they gave me was great - since the car writers there do actually care about the needs of all layers of consumer. Still, if someone comes to me with questions about what computer to buy, I'm much more interested in putting together a screaming fast multimedia Ono Sendai than something sensible and utilitarian.

Anyway, I'm now the proud owner of a terrifically macho light blue tiny car (2007 Honda Fit). Shut up, lots of tough guys have light blue cars.

Awesome. Or awesome if not for the NYS DMV. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the DMV could be more efficient.

It's hard for even a reasonably bright person like me to navigate the obscure rules of the system. I think they should get really knowledgeable people to staff the phones and deal with questions well before people show up. Anytime you create an essentially artificial system for people to navigate, you're going to have to explain the rules to them. I called ahead and got one set of instructions for my admittedly arcane circumstances.

Then I showed up and got another set of directions (actually, the first guy I saw - kind of the traffic cop of the DMV - suggested I just cross my fingers and hope the desk clerk would let me get away with what I had to do). Finally, I got booted to a manager who actually knew what I needed to do. I'm still not certain I had all the right paperwork. I think he might have just taken pity on me.

Anyhow, I have a car now, and I hope to park it for the better part of a year under my new apartment building.

Here and gone

(pic by: smthng on flickr)

So, I've been doing a simply miserable job of keeping this blog updated. Apologies to my Largely Imaginary Audience.

Since the last time I posted, some things have popped up:

• I got a new job
• started moving to the D.C. area (my sister's boyfriend who lives with her in D.C. proper won't allow me to use "D.C." to refer to Reston, VA)
• bought a car
• and spoke at an SIIA brownbag in New York.

I'll post separately on all those things, probably, but I'll just use this space to say that being unemployed has been exhausting. I should have asked for another week off.