I was reading Whitney Hoffman’s article on the Difference Between Listening and Hearing and it got me to thinking about all the conversations I have had last week, last year and all my life where the conversation was frustrated by neither one of us listening.   I would say X and they would hear Y and then I react to Y and they start talking about Z.   Very frustrating.

I have played a lot of poker and chess in my lifetime.   I like to think several moves ahead and reading people is important to know how they react to such moves.   My father is a classic conversationalist.   He can steer a conversation and take you down a path without you knowing it.   As a teenager it was a bit unnerving because the topics would change to a subject I would rather not talk about and find myself in the middle of the conversation without knowing how I got there.

Conversations come in many forms today with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.   Filtering information has become specialized features of these sites and value-add software such as TweetDeck.    Tools make online conversations much easier and person to person it has become harder.    Especially when some folks solely rely on their email accounts.  You can tell a person something but if it isn’t in a email form then the conversation didn’t exist for them.      And what about a more flamboyant conversation online?   Well, Google Wave is about to wash upon us like a tsunami.  I think this problem is just going to get worse where personal communication becomes harder and harder.  Where the computer and email has just about put the death knell on writing letters to a friend and cursive writing, we now have instant conversations via email, Twitter and Facebook.

But what about in person?   I am in the middle of reading    Just Listen by Mark Goulston M.D. (no I do not get any referral fees from Amazon, I live in North Carolina) and he talks about the difficult conversations were people are not listening.    I find it an excellent book for anyone that finds themselves in difficult non-listening conversations be it your teenagers or your boss.   I won’t go through the techniques here since I am only half-way through the book and Mark does need to make a living so buy his book!

That brings me to Whitney’s article of a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about plagiarism and I had to laugh.   About a month ago I found a presentation with Seth Godin at a change conference where Seth talked got an advance book of The Tipping Point by Gladwell and it inspired him to write a book on the subject and give it away for free.   Of course he sent Gladwell a copy of the book and asked permission to publish it since it was on the same subject Gladwell was writing about.  Gladwell not only approved but wrote the forward to the book!  I recommend you check out Seth’s presentation. It is a great talk on is approach to publishing and marketing that is quite unique and I think can be applied to many businesses and not just publishing.

Organizing

It isn’t easy to clean up my internet mess!   All the social media sites, the blog, the email accounts, rss reader!    Here is a couple of tips to help you clean up!

Blog clean up

This blog has been updated with the latest WordPress.  I originally used an installer my hosting company provided but it was always out of date. I worried about migrating to a new installation of WordPress but found the export utility to run flawlessly on a test site I use.   I am happy to report it works perfectly!

Next I made sure I was signed up on WordPress’s site to receive an API key so I can integrate Akismet plugin to combat spam in the comments.   Everyday there is some bot trying to post about buying drugs online or linking some other phishing site.   Thank the heavens for this plugin!  Filters out the spam so I do not have to go through all the bogus posts myself.   Imagine if you didn’t have a spam filter on you email?   Yeah, it is the same problem with comment system on a blog!

I have also found a new template via WordPress Theme Review that reviews themes for search engine optimization (SEO).   This was highly rated so I figured to give it a try.   I do like the layout but may change the colors.   What do you think of it?

Next I tackled adding Feed Burner to the site.   I found out that Google has acquired Feed Burner and my account with GMail was an old business account.   Didn’t seem clean to have people subscribe to the blog and see an old business account.   So, I had to create a new gmail account and sign up for Feed Burner.   The problem was my WordPress plugin for Feed Burner was updated but I would not see the site use the new URL for my feed.   I found out it was the permalinks feature that wasn’t allowing the system to be updated.   I had to turn this off to get it updated correctly.  Once it was fixed I could turn permalinks back on for the site.

Next was adding Google Analytics to the website.   This was relatively easy by signing up for analytics and inserting a bit of code in the WordPress theme.  Google Analytics gives great detail on where people are finding my site, where they are coming from, what day and time they are coming as well as keywords used from search engines.   Invaluable to track the progress and success of the site.

RSS Reader

I read voraciously!   I found that Google Reader allows me to read many blog feeds in an easy to use interface.   Switching email accounts I was worried I would loose my list of blogs that I follow.  Google has setup The Data Liberation Front that shows how to import and export from any of Google’s applications to other applications.   It was pretty painless to move from my old account to the new account.

I periodically clean up the sites that I read if I find they are no longer active or their posts are no longer an interest to me.   I am back down to 81 feeds that I read (ok, skim) and you can see the ones that have interested me through my shared items.

Twitter

I have not been using Twitter very much because I found that when you have a lot of followers it is hard to keep up what is going on in the world.   Twitter recently updated their system to create lists.  I find that pretty useful, however I found an application that helps Twitter shine and that is Tweet Deck.   This little desktop gem will work on all OS’s that support Adobe Air.   You can setup columns based on users or even search terms.   They also have an iPhone app that is excellent.

Next for Twitter I changed my generic ho-hum background.   I found that Twit Backs can generate a custom background with all your information about you via a web interface.  You can see the results on my Twitter page.  Let me know what you think?

Bookmarking

I have been a long time user of Delicious but I had an account that was an old alias of mine.   Trying to be consistent I created a new account on Delicious with my name and was able to easilly export from my old account to the new account without any problems.   If you want to see what interests me you can see my links on my Delicious.com/geoffcorey

Anyone else have any internet cleanup tips?

So what do you think the goal of these websites are: Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, YouTube, etc?   Wouldn’t you love to read the original business plan vision, mission and strategy statments?   I bet it is full of B.S. and what they stated in there business plans was very specific and they became something else.    Facebook prolly had something like, “To recreate the high school/college yearbook online”.    Total crap, they became a lot more then that.

Why are some of these sites so successful and others not so successful?   Look at Twitter ridiculous growth curve.   Do you think they had some vision of becoming a tool for other companies/applications backbone?

I have been reading one my favorite authors, Seth Godin’s latest book.   And it hit me that all these websites basically should have the same vision and mission statement.   Why some are successfull and others are not is really a case of how close their statements are to the following or just dumb luck.

Vision – Create online community

Mission – To enable users to tell there story, connect with others, and promote discussion

Now you look at that and say, how do you get from that to Facebook?   Well, that is a long story but you can look at your Facebook account and the applications you use and look at the ones you passed on.   My bet is the ones you passed on add no value to your interaction with others or are just stupid marketing applications.

Speaking of marketing, look how bad companies are implementing it on social networks.   I get at least an invite a day to some twitter user that is following 55,000 users.   Like anyone is going to follow them and listen to their marketing BS.   Definately old school and pretty much completely worthless today.   I’m afaid Seth Godin is correct, old school marketing is dead.   Move on and use the social web as it is intended.   To tell a story, interact with others and garner discussion.

I was having a discussion over the Friend Feed Social-Media room if people thought there were any parallels to the Dot-Com (Bomb) days with Social Web companies.   Some great points were made that there is a much larger audience now versus then and one comment that software platforms are more accommodating and the barrier to market is a lot less.   Both excellent points and the last one dovetailed into one of my other questions stuck in my head, “Why would anyone develop on the Google Application Engine knowing that they could change pricing within 90 days?”  Why?  Low cost entry and instant scalability.

Now developing on GAE does not mean success for a business.  Let us suppose the favorite application architecture discussion going these days: Twitter.   Twitter has had quite a few outages in the last month.  Clearly as a result of hockey-stick growth they are enjoying.   So the argument and test applications on GAE have been developed, why don’t they just use GAE?   Well there is one problem: Money.  Twitter is a great application with no revenue stream.   So if they developed on GAE and they hit the hockey stick, how are they going to pay for all the bandwidth, CPU and disk?   The infrastructure is no longer a fixed cost but a variable one if you want to scale that number of users.   I assume Google will place some sort of limitations on billing and application usage.   But the problem all comes down to money.   Let’s assume  Google does limit resources your application can consume.  If you app is Twitter, then do you turn off the application when those limits are reached for the month?  Surely that will not work for the business, however you can not spend more then your cash reserves allow you to spend!

Once again money becomes the single problem to crack.  More importantly, cash flow.   If the business model does not a have a revenue model built into the business plan, your dead already.   If the business model is spend money and be popular and sell, you best go play poker in Vegas.   The business has to have a revenue model that works.   If you develop on GAE, the barrier to entry is small but you have to have a scalable revenue model such that you know the cost of each user addition.   So when your business does hit the hockey curve, you can increase the resources available without worries of running out of cash.

Writing a business plan is key to the success of the business, the underlying idea for the business does not ensure success.   In that regard, there are a lot of social web companies that look very similar to the dot-com days with VC money pouring in and very little revenue coming out.  Revenue must be around the corner according to this article on Information Week