Missed Connections

Um, it kindof makes sense to connect with people while you still can.

Um, it kindof makes sense to connect with people while you still can.

On this website, I usually talk about making connections and keeping them. Leveraging smart, sassy social network tools like Facebook or LinkedIn to ensure you and that person can reach out and keep in touch if the need arises (for them or for you)

Well, three times this week, I realized I had NOT connected with some key people that have meant a lot to me in my professional life, but we don’t work together on a regular basis, and that have suddenly (well, I wasn’t paying attention) moved on to other opportunities.

What happens if something suddenly changes in your (or their) employment and suddenly you don’t know their email address and can’t send them an easy-peasy “lets be online buddies” invitation?

I think you’ve got three options:

Retweet This Post

Twitter = Conversations

Overhearing a few conversations yesterday drove home the point to me that Twitter (or identi.ca or pownce, plurk or even email) is really simply a way to have conversations.

Kumbaya, and all that :)

This screenshot from my twitter feed shows @cachedout bumming about his speeding ticket (bottom image). Seconds later, @littleidea replies in-kind (see top image). Misery loves company. Speeding ticket recipients are not immune from this most-basic human desire.

What you say is irrelevant.

Who you say it to is highly relevant.

And, the network will pwn you if you say things too far out of context, or without consideration of who you are talking to.

Yet, the network will <3 you if you show up real, human, and relevant. Using twitter for business? That’s a lot different than just using it to catch up with friends on Friday night, or to keep tabs on your family.

Crossover posts? No problem sometimes, but beware the implications. Sharing a great insight from a book to your friends isn’t dangerous. But, joking with your friends about how out of control Friday night got, and your co-workers are listening in… might come back to get you.

Retweet This Post

Corporate Alliance — Utah County HUB

If you are a business decision maker in Utah County, the Corporate Alliance team is a group of people you need to know.

The Utah County “HUB” is the original, though the company has recently expanded to Salt Lake and possibly to other markets as well.

Corporate Alliance Provo Hub (src: Google Maps)


Rated 5.0 out of 5.0 Excellent Business, Excellent Service, Excellent Location

Corporate Alliance is in the business of helping business people succeed by helping them get to know the decision-makers and service providers in their community.

Their (original) Utah County “HUB” is a premium location to meet clients, to take your staff for getaways or staff meetings, and to attend their excellent pools, trainings, and JumpStarts to rejuvenate yourself and meet other incredible business people in your town.

Strongly recommended!

Directions to Corporate Alliance Provo

746 E 1910 S
Provo, UT 84606
(801) 434-8326
corporatealliance.net

View Larger Map

Retweet This Post

Error!

cat
more cat pictures

Retweet This Post

All A Twitter

Yeah, twitter is addictive. It’s fun. It’s compelling.  Here’s a few tips to help newbies to twitter get the feel of it a little faster:

Retweet This Post

Using Google Docs for Live Blogging

This is a test of using Google Docs to Liveblog…

7/22/08 10:07 AM
On The Google Docs Blog, I found an interesting guest blog post by Amit Agarwal, “a professional technology blogger at Digital Inspiration and an exceptionally creative Docs user” who wrote about using Google Docs to liveblog and event.I don’t find myself liveblogging very much… mostly, twitter is where I keep short/simple updates, but I thought I would try this out.

7/22/08 10:15 AM
My very first realization of how this is working is that, apparently, the Movable Type API that Wordpress uses doesn’t seem to support having a TITLE for the post. I even added a title in Wordpress, hoping it would just *keep* the title… but it doesn’t :(

7/22/08 10:19 AM
I can enter images, though…

… and tables!

First Name
Favorite Color
Favorite Food
John
Blue
Tofu
Mary
Red
Steak



7/22/08 10:24 AM
As Amit says in his post, “Control M” gets you current date and time. Clicking on the comment text allows you the option of “insert comment text into document”, so it it visible. That’s how I am getting the timestamps here.

7/22/08 10:25 AM
Finally, I am uploading images of this document as it has been evolving:







Retweet This Post

Social Media Scandals

Tamar Weinberg writes a detailed and extensive blog post over at Techipedia titled: “Quantum Entanglements: The Social Media Scandals” where she discusses a recent scandalous social meltdown.

What can you say about a beautiful girl who died?

I can tell you that when I read this news, I cried off and on the rest of the day. I can also tell you that Kaycee Nicole did not, technically, exist. She was created and portrayed entirely by her “mother”, Debbie Swenson, a middle-aged Midwestern housewife with some serious issues. For nearly two years, thousands followed and supported this fictional construct as she fought a deadly disease, an astonishing run when you consider the challenges involved.

Social media, by definition, pulls at you and draws you in. You *want* to trust, you want to believe, you want to participate… and when someone needs something that you might have (money), you want to give.

The old rule still applies to Social Networks, as well as the Internet at-large… and ANY PUBLIC COMMUNITY (even your neighborhood): “Trust… but verify!”

Be safe out there.

Retweet This Post

Why Location Matters

Bear Lake Beach Location

If you follow me on Twitter, the ultra-easy status-update app would have told you that I’ve been camping at Bear Lake last week… but you wouldn’t have known exactly where. That part of the picture is left out.

But more important than you trying to find me, it is still very difficult is to find out what is around you when you are at a place unfamiliar to you–to access the world of knowledge about a place–in a easily digestible map-based, easily transportable format.

For example: Two things I wanted to do this week included getting to the beach, and going for some hikes. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money for access to the beach, and at least one of the hikes I wanted to be enjoyable for some of the people with me who can’t hike treacherous terrain.

To accomplish this, I did the usual–but had to do it all from my Blackberry because my laptop was unavailable–I googled it. I searched phrases like “Hikes near Bear Lake, Utah” and “Good Beach Bear Lake, Utah“. Both turned up promising results, but I had to DIG for them:

Beach Access at Bear Lake:

The bottom-line is, we were able to find things after searching, but there was no clear way to search one place and say:

And have it provide results.

You’d think we would have figured this out by now!

Retweet This Post

Free Hugs

I had never seen this before until I spotted it on Chad Bennett’s blog. Take a minute and watch. I am amazed at how emotional this little video is.

Free Hugs

Just another reminder to be human in all that you do, and don’t forget to feel and care.

Retweet This Post

Twitter Boycott? Meh.

Paul Chaney thinks we should all boycott Twitter tomorrow on the 4th of July.

But, I don’t really think this will do anything about the real CORE ISSUE with twitter reliability: Scalability of a push framework around self-forming groups. It has to do with the number of processes needed to send one message to someone with, say 20 followers:

  1. Who are each of the followers?
  2. For each follower, are they listening?
  3. If they are listening, how do they want updates?
  4. If they want updates, send the update to them.
  5. Make sure, if they ever come online, this message gets shown in their personal timeline… in the right order.
  6. Make sure, if an API ever requests this user’s messages that this one is included in the reply.
  7. Check to see if this tweet was a reply to someone/anyone.
  8. For each person it was a reply to, repeat steps 2-6 to send each of them the reply.
  9. … but don’t send them the reply if we already sent it!
  10. For. each. word. in. the. tweet, see if anybody on the entire earth was tracking that word.
  11. Repeat steps 1-6 and 9 for each of those people.
  12. Get ready for the very next tweet, since you’ve had so much downtime :)

More than all of that tech-speak, twitter is just cooler than the others:

End of the day, I think my friend Matt Reinbold said it best amid the furor and uproar (on twitter, of course) about identi.ca’s launch yesterday:

“I am wearied by the supposed “twitter-killers” that have no mobile support. the any-input/any-output beyond-a-browser IS the killer feature.”

The twitter-wanna-bes will come and go, but none of them will match twitter because:

So, boycott twitter if you want.  Or not.

Retweet This Post