Fri 18 Jul 2008
This is such a great use of Twitter for promotion at events. HP is running a Twitter-powered scavenger hunt here at BlogHer with product giveaways including webcams and even laptops.
At their booth is a small slip of paper with simple instructions on how to sign up for Twitter (and several live laptops people can use to do so) and how to follow their special account @HP_BlogHer2008 for the clues and challenges.
Very cool.
Wed 16 Jul 2008
Excited to be heading out to the Bay Area tomorrow for BlogHer, to meet some really amazing people around the area and to reconnect with friends. I’d really love the chance to meet you while I’m there. Here are some of the fun things going on. I hope you’ll consider saying hi.
(”Tweet-up” just means we’ll use Twitter to coordinate getting together for fun and networking. These are public events and all are welcome. RSVP at the links provided, or for HMB Ritz, just show up. Thanks!)
Friday & Saturday, July 18-19
San Francisco: BlogHer08 at the Westin St. Francis hotel. Very happy to meet this strong community of women bloggers to listen and learn.
Sunday, July 20
StartupDrinks SF 2-4 PM at the Medjool rooftop deck. Come support startup culture through this really fun decentralized networking phenom started by my buddy Andrew Hyde. RSVP and more information here.
Monday, July 21
Palo Alto Tweet-up: Breakfast in Palo Alto Joanie’s Cafe, 8 am. Yeah, it’s early but that will only make it more intimate. Please come wish Erica Douglass a HAPPY birthday. RSVP here
San Mateo Tweet-up: After Work Drinks at BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse. 5:30-7:30 pm. Sponsored in part by www.Qik.com (THANKS Bhaskar!) RSVP here
Tuesday, July 22
Half Moon Bay Tweet-up: Cocktails with Kathy Sierra, Robert Scoble, Francine Hardaway, JJ Toothman and YOU at the Half Moon Bay Ritz fire-ring by the ocean, 5:45 pm. (no RSVP link yet, just show up.)
Thursday, July 24
San Francisco Tweet-up: Coffee at Citizen Space, 9-11 am. I can’t wait to see Citizen Space, which is SF’s own entrant into the co-working revolution. Huge thanks to my friend and hero Tara Hunt for letting us all use the venue to meet and greet. RSVP here
Mon 14 Jul 2008
This was just one of those perfect moments on Twitter. You might like these tips for getting kids to eat salads. You might wonder why I posted this here and not on the more experimental www.Bransieve.com. It’s to demonstrate what a fast and powerful problem-solving tool microsharing can be when you have a unique business process question or need some really specific expertise — fast.
My daughters “S” and “Z” are nearly-3 and 20 months, in turn. I had some iceberg lettuce and the ambition to try them on their first salad. I wrote:
wankergirl Cover it in chocolate sauce! 
megfowler
do they like fruit? savoury-sweet salads work well with that age group. lots of juice in dressing, fruit in actual salad.
branchero just don’t use a dressing that’s really sour (like Italian)
TheJennTaFur my Mom put slices of fruit in my salad such as slices of apple or grapes. I loved it with French dressing. Hope this helps! 
rahafharfoush you can make it into a person. http://tinyurl.com/66f9xe
JamiInMiami I added craisins and they ate it. Now Girl likes salad & she’s a tween.
MikeG1 : Try offering ingredients separately; I’ve got a couple who love cucumber slices. It’s a start.
Penguin Make it sweet? Add some fruits, apples, mandarin oranges, pears.
akaMonty I just put it on the plate with the other food in smaller portions. I don’t think my daughter ever noticed the difference.
KevinEikenberry and pray… I think your steps are good ones for the salad - what about raisons too?
lalatina ~ cottage cheese, mandarin oranges?
akaMonty Only I didn’t chop it fine, I made it more of a “dipping” style & kept the dressing separate.
ericrank Emeril once said “If you want kids to eat vegs, you have to make them taste good” - For my toddler, that means sweet or cheesy.
The twurl.nl link let other Twitterers see my most recent replies at the time (the tweets you see in this post).
depapel and all of that in seven minutes: that is also incredible.
geekgiant I’d try making “fun salads.” Spinach, sliced strawberries, blueberries,
candied walnuts, feta and a balsamic vinagerette perhaps?
podcastmama Offer diff. bite size veg or fruit, and let *her* make the salad by
tossing in the things she likes. Let us know what she picks:)
hkremer not salad related but have you seen the “new” rice puffs by Pirate’s
Booty? look in the organic section - DS calls them popcorn
hkremer see previous tweet - white cheddar flavored yummy!
pauladrum Great question (toddlers and salads). Got a lot of ideas for my little one. Another thought… Let them help make it.
knackeredhack I hear that if you make a child try a small amount of the same thing 10 days in a row they’ll acquire the taste.
JamiInMiami finished it up with this Tweet…
JamiInMiami and people still question the power of the Twitter. Ha!
PS - We went with chopped iceberg lettuce, olive oil, salt & pepper, a dash of orange juice, and lots of pistachios and carrot bits. No dice, but at least they tried it. And mommy had a yummy crunchy dinner.
Mon 14 Jul 2008
There’s a WHOLE lot going on behind this here green curtain, and multiple announcements on the way in the next few weeks and months.
Sorry I’m not being very transparent about it at the moment. I promise all will be revealed, including this here blog in a whole new form that lets you choose whether you want to follow along on presentations stuff or on social media stuff as my work continues to shift going forward.
In the meanwhile, lavish thanks for your continued interest, and a promise to get back to more, and more consistent, content output in the near future…
Much love,
Pistachio
Mon 7 Jul 2008
Fascinated by the complexity captured in this map:
The circles represent political sites and blogs, color coded by category (political lean) and sized by authority (# of inbound links) or the magnitude of unrelated sites linking to it. This Map Key explains the methodology in detail.
The PresidentialWatch08 map is composed of the 533 most visible and influential websites and blogs - out of a complete dataset of over 4000 sites - using Linkfluence™’s proprietary crawl technology.
The map includes both social media and mainstream media outlets. The sites are divided into four different categories, or communities (manually labelled):
* Conservative
* Independent
* Infopit
* ProgressiveInfopit are conversation starters, they can set the agenda. Most of them are mainstream media but a growing part is composed by social media.
Good information design should immediately give you an overall impression — in this case the balance, alignment and complexity of the political blogosphere — at first glance. Otherwise, the mass of data with no organizing principles or trends emerging obscures the information you’re trying to display.
In this case the model is not wholly self-explanatory, but once you dig in and see what they’re representing, I think it’s worth the energy it takes to parse it. If you’re still scratching your head after reading the Map Key, try this “notice” as well.
Unfortunately, I lost track of whose blog I found this on. Sorry!
Mon 30 Jun 2008
Very excited, after years of hearing good things about it, to be attending BlogHer this year in San Francisco. I’ll be in town July 17-23. For a woman in social media, this conference is a big deal. It’s arguably the equivalent of SXSW for networking, empowerment, community and inspiration among all manner of women in social media.
Unfortunately PodCamp Boston is that same weekend.
PodCamps are among the most inspiring, fun and community-focused tech events I’ve ever attended. If you can go to one, you should. Though I can’t attend, I’m paying for “my” registration, to support the event and letting the organizers put that to use as they choose. Are you in Boston July 19-20? Register here.
It’s incredibly difficult for event planners to pick the best dates to suit venue, budget and attendees. That PodCamp organizers did not schedule to avoid conflict with BlogHer is a bummer, but really not that big of a deal. What made me sad was PodCamp’s response to the scheduling conflict.
When the PodCamp date was announced, I and other female PodCamp fans immediately pointed out the conflict. The response was a bit abrupt, but not unreasonable. PodCamp did not want to schedule in the fall or close to the Podcasting and New Media Expo, and the BlogHer dates had not been checked. Fair enough. But.
Once known, the conflict was not shared with other PodCamp organizers. There was no discussion or group decision made by the organizers to go ahead despite it. That sent a poor message. It implied that the organizer doesn’t “get” BlogHer’s significance or consider it important enough to merit discussion. PodCamp also never acknowledged publicly that while unfortunate, the choice had to be made not to avoid the conflict.
In our world of transparency, conversation and consensus-building, it’s important to at least listen to the concerns, decide as an organizing body, and acknowledge that a choice had to be made. An organization can address concerns like this quite easily if it chooses to. You can mention it in your blog and explain why. You can creatively embrace the conflict by encouraging remote collaboration during both events. BlogHer has a big Second Life component, why not reach out to that?
When I brought my concerns about this conflict up privately with the organizers many weeks ago, and mentioned I would blog it at some point, there was a second opportunity to creatively engage with the scheduling conflict. While my concerns were taken seriously and discussed fairly, there was still no public acknowledgement of the conflict. There was still no creative effort at outreach.
PodCamp is an awesome organization. I have close personal affection for all of the organizers, and adore what they have done for women (and men of course) in social media. They are an exemplary crew. But, gosh…
I post because I hope this can be discussed productively. I empathize with the organizing stress my friends are under. But it would be uncool of me not to raise this point merely because of my personal feelings about the team.
What are your thoughts? Does a scheduling conflict with the biggest women’s social media conference merit some public comment or creative outreach on the part of the organizers?
Fri 27 Jun 2008
As I jot this post my Gmail has outright coded (it’s unresponsive and throwing DNS errors. let’s call it “GFail,” shall we?), Twitter has been staggering for days, and today is the first day my “Remember the Milk” (task management) application has correctly integrated with my Gmail inbox all week. I’m re-starting Firefox to see if the Gmail problem is originating with me or going on outside of my system “in the cloud.”
Nothing to do with my MacBook and browser, but 15 hours worth of SMS Tweets sent last night have disappeared from my Twitter stream altogether (or never made it in), while at least one tweet posted at least 160 times in a friend’s stream.
So at the moment I’m frustrated by the downtime downside of all this “computing in the cloud” (conducting your daily work with online files, applications and services that you access through your browser). It’s a false frustration in some ways, because local applications and file storage go down too. And for a small business owner, it’s worse when they do because you’re the only one who can rally resources to fix them. But my experience this week reminds me how totally dependent my business is on a working browser. At least with the many glitches I’m experiencing I’m secure in the knowledge that 1) I am not alone and 2) someone is trying to fix them.
Tho come to think of it, I still don’t know whether this is a local connectivity problem with my new Time Capsule rig. Connectivity seems fine with certain applications, and falls to its knees with others. So, I am excited I can work from anywhere, but that also means that sometimes I can work from nowhere. Ipe.
Thu 26 Jun 2008
How to Change the World: Slideshare Announces “World’s Best Presentation Contest”
Calling a slide deck “a presentation” is a big pet peeve, but I REALLY enjoyed the results of this contest last year. It brought the excellent work of Scott Schwertly and Ethos3 to my attention.
Seen (or have) a deck you think absolutely rocks? Enter it before July 31st.
Sun 15 Jun 2008
Hit my review copy of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell today and went straight to (Chapter) 11: The Groundswell Inside Your Company.
Through nice storytelling, Li and Bernoff trace three case studies of internal social media rollouts: Best Buy’s Drupal-based Blue Shirt Nation, wikis at Avenue A/Razorfish, Organic and Intel and Bell Canada’s ID-ah idea exchange and voting marketplace. The value of such deployments is that:
they tap the power of the groundswell of ideas among the people who best how your business runs, your employees
Blue Shirt Nation surprised Best Buy in the degree to which it enabled “employees to help each other,” they write “they power and speed of the groundswell within companies (is) the ability for people to find what they need from each other.” Most of the value comes because it fosters management’s relationships with employees and employees relationships with each other.
Key objectives Blue Shirt Nation accomplishes:
An anecdote in the wiki case study quotes Clark Kokich on a post about his favorite guitar solo, “this post didn’t serve any specific business purpose, but it was an opportunity [for our employees] to be connected to the leadership. You can do this with a few people over a beer, but how do you accomplish that with a whole company?” Wikis as collaboration tools have also become communications channels, allowing a “virtual equivalent to management by walking around.” At Organic they learned that “people’s business process revolved around knowing each other and, more important, around the work that each person did.”
For Rex Lee, director of collaboration services at Bell Canada, a votable internal “ideas exchange” helped him prioritize and determine which ideas from his 40,000-strong employee base to act upon. Forrester’s workplace collaboration analyst Rob Koplowitz makes the point “don’t bring collaboration tools inside if your company’s not ready for it,” because management objectives were an important part of ID-ah’s success.
Bernoff and Li round out the chapter with some strategies for nurturing the internal groundswell. Archetypal roles like evangelists, Inactives and rebels play their parts, and it’s important that participation be made easy and desirable, not strong-armed. They point out that “companies need to be ready to fail often, fail early and most important, fail cheaply.” Culture, relationships and simple ground rules set the stage for the success or failure of internal initiatives, but also, “it sure helps if the social technologies have an executive or two behind them.”
Thu 5 Jun 2008
Ed. note: if you’re new to microblogging and Twitter, please feel free to just mark this post as read, ignore the email, move on to the next post, etc. It’s from a comment I left on a “Friendfeed and Twitter, where are we going with all this?” post on www.stoweboyd.com
Boy, I’d love to know some of the answers behind these questions. We’ve all talked for a long time about the relationships and “cast of characters” on Twitter being another reason “we” “won’t” leave (haven’t left).
But another thing I don’t hear a whole bunch about, when these FriendFeed-Twitter-Plurk(PLURK?!)-Pownce-Jaiku angst-a-thons come up, is the Twitter ecosystem. It seems to me that’s a big part of Twitter’s competitive edge and utility. No matter how cool the upstarts are, are they interoperable with Twitter’s “accessories” the many applications Twitter now feeds and is fed from?
On a regular basis on Twitter I use: Seesmic, Qik, Utterz, Summize, Tweetscan, Terraminds, TwitterBerry, Twhirl, is.gd, Tweetburner, Jott, TwitterFone, [Twittergram], Foxy/Twittytunes, Tweeterboard, Hashtags, Tweme, Rememberthemilk and Xpensr. Those last two are my favorite new use of Twitter: as a convenient, centralized “command line” to get data into my applications.
There are dozens and dozens of 3rd party applications that work with and through Twitter, not to mention the various bots (everything from mindfulness chimes to mainstream media news alerts to pr0n links) that have been created. I can think offhand of dozens of custom scripts, hacks, web and desktop and mobile clients, widgets and more that friends use. There are probably thousands of things “living” in Twitter world. There’s also a tremendous circulatory system of RSS feeds going into and out of Twitter streams and tying in other platforms like blogs and Facebook.
Can all this stuff be adapted to feed off of (and into) other APIs quickly and easily, should the momentum shift to another service? I’m not techie enough to answer that. But it seems to be a somewhat formidable barrier to entry, even at this embryonic stage.
Of course, Twhirl has been adapted to work with FriendFeed as well as Twitter, so perhaps it’s quite simple. Perhaps.
Seriously… PLURK?
