Crappy Crafter card at Wal*mart

What does this picture have to do with the topic of this post? I am not sure yet.
But I will tell you what I was thinking about. I just came back from Delaware, visiting Maya, one of the other founders of TwitterQueens. On the long car ride home, I had the same issue with my legs and ankles that I had on the flight back from California, and now I am lying in bed with my feet propped up hoping the swelling goes down.

What a drag it is getting old…

It has been interesting to observe the creep of middle age into what we used to consider over-the-hill territory. Baby boomers have this penchant for grasping tight to middle age until the undertaker pries it loose from their stiff cold fingers. And I get this. I am thinking about starting a society called the 39 Club. We don’t make bucket lists – we just have things that we are going to get to when we have a chance, when we aren’t so busy with other things.

So here is my 39 Club List:

1. Skydiving (before the bones get too brittle)

2. See “Chicago”- the musical.

3. Take more college coursework with utter disregard for how the knowledge works into a degree

4. Go skinnydipping (okay, okay. That one was a joke. You can uncover your eyes now.)

5. Write a book.

6. Create something useful and life-altering

7. See Florence Italy for the renaissance art

8. Take a couple of months and drive around the country. Maybe that would be the basis for the book.

Really, this is it. I have no drive to own a palatial estate, although you can invite me to one anytime. I have never needed a passport, although I should get one.

This might be like the movie thing, where all I can think of for my favorite movie is Pulp Fiction, mostly for the list scene- but then I read other people’s top 10 lists and think, “Oh, I like that. Oh, and that one too!” So there are probably things that I would like to do, but only a few things that really make the list.

But where do you find time? And that is probably why the Crappy Crafter thing amuses me so much. The baking aisle in the grocery store is literally half an aisle shorter than it was 5 years ago. I used to be a pretty good artist and costume-maker; Halloweens lately have been of the tape and bow looks-good-if-you-squint variety.

It’s one hell of a balancing act- working through the list before  you literally can’t any more. And if someone wants to give me an advance on that book, I can get started right away.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I had to share this, because I think the next new thing will not be more of the same. I think it will be a leap into a different way to interact through the online medium, something more satisfying to the participants.

There is no perfect online discourse. It reminds me of when you meet someone in a loud bar; eventually if you click, one of you says, “Let’s get out of here and grab a coffee.” Why is this? Because you want to see the other person in a richer environment; you want to see if, stripped of the background of noise and lights, what this person has to say still resonates with you.

I can’t tell you how many times on twitter I have moved from the constraints of 140 characters and a little lag into the real-time unlimited word usage of chat, and maybe from there to the phone. And had I had a teleportation device, my friend and I would have been sharing a coffee somewhere.

We are heading closer to where the noise of technology can recede into the background, unless you want it to be there- where you can reach over and switch on a video, for example, to share with a friend, and it will happen in an unobtrusive way.

What amazes me is how intense connections can be even with the noise. And I don’t want a Milo- I want more of you.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I really like this video. Swings things back into perspective for me when I am having one of those days.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Top Ten Ways you know you are addicted to social media:

10. You know what hashtag and retweet mean.

9. You know which side you are coming down on in the number-of-followers v. quality of followers debate.

8. You head home early from a party so you can tweet about it.

7. You no longer send kisses or throw sheep at your Facebook friends.

6. You know who Scobleizer is. You even follow him.

5. Some of the wildest nights of your life have happened on blip.

4. You understand the relative merits of TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and Streamy, and wonder if Co Tweet really is a better business solution.

3. A friend tells you that they just don’t get twitter, and you smile slightly and say, “Don’t worry. You will.”

2. The doctor put you on paxil at the beginning of 2009 because of frequent FailWhale sightings

and the Number 1 way to know that you are a social media addict:

1. You google yourself.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

It’s funny- just as I was settling in to write this, the Mashable squirrel scampered past, so of course I had to follow it to the Information is Beautiful blog.

These are the graphical depictions  (based on the data from previous surveys – InsideTwitter and the PearAnalyticsstudy, according to Mashable):

Information is Beautiful Twitter Stats

This is what struck me:

Only slightly more women than men are on twitter (55% v. 45%).

Only 5% of twitter users are loudmouths; couldn’t tell from the graph the gender split. I guess I would be categorized as a loudmouth.

Of that 5%, 32% are bots. And I guess thinking about botmerde was what had motivated this post to start out with. I try to review all new followers, although I am at the point where that is getting unwieldy; the first 1000 are slow in coming, but after that you get a snowball effect. Anyway, I got to one, and it looked like all botted tweets- no @responses, nothing engaged. I checked his website link, and that was exactly what it was- ads for TweetLater and tweetadder peppered the site.

I keep reading things like, “Make $1000 in your First 7 Days!” Dang! I could use the jing. But I also don’t have one second extra to invest in a smoke-and-mirrors machine. I read Mark Tosczak’s post What I Learned Experimenting with Automated Tweets, and, at least for driving blog traffic in his instance, he noted the inefficiency of the system.

What I am wondering is this. How effective is an advertising account in twitter? Is ANYONE making any money from this?

If you aren’t achieving your objective- making money- why persist in this practice?

The people who set up these accounts do not see me as a human being; I am seen as a member of their farm, someone to toss tweets to in the hopes that something sticks and they make money from me. I expect this from the television set; it annoys the hell out of me on twitter. In television, there is an implicit contract- give me entertainment, and I will (possibly) sit through your ads.

There is no contract with twitter spam- I am not receiving a thing. If there were some way that I could charge the people who run botmerde through their twitter accounts for my time I would. A pay-per-click aggravation charge for each unsolicited automated tweet received- is there an app for that?

If ANYONE really makes any money annoying the crap out of other people, please email me with the details. No, not really.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Willard Brook State Park

There are few times when you go back and everything is exactly the same.

Visit your old grade school, and the teachers are no longer (as) scary, the water fountains are way too low, and forget using the toilets. Even the walls are a more cheerful color.

This flux is so consistent that it is almost jarring when you go back and everything is identical. You expect Twilight Zone music. I took my daughter to Willard Brook today, a place to which we had gone  frequently ever since her oldest sister (now 24) was about 5. We haven’t been for the past few years, and Jenny didn’t remember it from its description.

We pulled in and I could almost feel the wheels turning in Jenny’s head. “I’m remembering one thing after another,” she said- the place was that unchanged. Same beach, same buoys stretched from a tree on one side to a tree on the other, same stand of cattails. The same babies are dragging a bucket of wet sand, Pullups peeping out the top of their swim tanks, crying when they tip over from the strain; same 4 mothers over on the rocks sharing smokes- not kidding- as if they had been supplied by a central casting somewhere, or kicked off the set of The Truman Show. Coolers, beach balls, Frisbies, ice cream truck…

It was absolutely jarring. Especially since I am acclimated to hunt for change in the online landscape, stasis in the physical one was a little unnerving.

But it is really pretty here. I can smell the charcoal fires that people are using to grill their hamburgers and hotdogs, and likely marshmallows for s’mores.  Worth the time it took to come here, and the $5 per car charge has not increased since we used to come a long time ago.

S’more side note: You can tell a lot about a person by the way they toast their marshmallows. In my family, the perfectionist toasted hers slowly and carefully, to the point of being able to describe it as “golden brown.” The one who had a few challenges with the old fine motor coordination skills always had hers drop off into the coals. Then there was my ADHD poster child. He always started off really well, got distracted, and the next thing you know had this huge ball of dripping fire at the end of the stick. I was always kept busy toasting replacement marshmallows and salving egos.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Buzz at Inman Connect centered on what would be the next Big Thing. Where is real estate moving? What brokerage models can we expect to see?

When you consider that not too long ago we were printing and handing out The Book of MLS listings, and how having that information online has created on its own incredible changes in the industry, I find myself interested in the tools that connect people in different ways. And that is all technology is- a tool. It will not make a bad salesperson or agent better, but it can create different ways for people who are good at their jobs to maximize their potential.
I wanted to talk about a couple of things I picked up. Some are iPhone or smartphone mobile apps; some are desktop applications, and will be the subject of another post.
For my iPhone: Bump is a really neat idea. I have a stack of cards that I received at the conference- and these are all from people who I am really interested in. I am trying to find the time to upload all of this information into my social media network. The idea behind Bump is simple: you key in your information, find someone else with an iPhone who has the app and has done the same thing, and touch hands. Elegant in its simplicity, but I wish it was available beyond the iPhone platform.

I have also found that I am drifting away from my always used iPhone twitter interface Tweetie to Tweetdeck. It seems to upload photos better. I can also save groups of friends within it.
The iPhone, in my opinion, is great at running apps, and only a so-so phone and camera. I have been trying to find ways to tweak its camera performance. One app that I found is CameraZoom- this is fantastic for changing the size of the pic while taking it, and framing the results right in the phone.
Another is FlashCamera by Sudobility. My old phone- a sad little thing that you had to text letters by pushing the 10 numbers many times- had a flash. There are several apps that you can use to create the effect of a fill flash and save your life in a pinch. This is one. I can see if you were taking drive-by BPO pics and were running late that this could work.
And this one: I could have used this countless times in my traveling life. Called Call A Taxi from Networking 2.0, it finds your location, and gives you a list of taxi companies and their phone numbers, arranged by location. Very useful, and comparing the list against what I knew was available, seemed accurate from my location.
The last app that I saw used frequently in San Francisco was foursquare. This is a cross-platform app, and you set it up through your computer, and it is billed as a game. What you do is log in when you are out at a point of interest in the city. The app counts the number of time a player visits the point of interest; the person with the highest number of visits over time becomes Mayor of that place. What I liked is that you can choose to post your updates on twitter, and I could keep track of my friends’ whereabouts just by watching the stream.

Mayors in my area, according to foursquare

But back to Bump. Use it, and you get a little charge from touching hands with the person with whom you want to exchange information. What more can you ask for?

Thanks for the Bump, @TonyLazz

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What does this picture have to do with this blog? Nothing.

Coming home from Inman Connect San Francisco, I had a lot to think about. We heard a lot of information that people brought in and shared. Even more importantly, when you get clusters of smart people together, you can almost feel the ideas fly off of them. The first day Rob Hahn challenged a group of us with the question, “What do you think the next big thing will be?”

Three years ago, there was no twitter. If I could have anticipated its impact, I would have orchestrated its creation myself, somehow. When I was speaking with him six months ago, my friend Alex (no, not @alex) suggested a whole different way of interfacing with computer intelligence, something more organic and less artificial. Maybe this new kind of interface will be combined with a different way of organizing our interactions with online information.

The thing is, who knows? The next big thing will sneak up on someone in the night, like love does. Either the person whom the idea finds will be smitten with it so his (or her) passion can carry him through days of doubt and wondering if the MasterCard will hold out, or not.

What do you think the next big thing will be?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I saw a great title for a post today. It was:

Social media measurement -- It's like being a great bartender

[from {grow}]

The post discusses, among other things, the difference in thinking about social media results as ROI or Impact.

It can be difficult to quantify exactly where business comes from  if you are active in social media. Say someone starts to follow you on twitter because they found your @name on your Facebook fan page, and 3 months later calls you to retain your services because your microposts imply your expertise. First of all, they may not even give you this information; second, at what point do you start tracking it? Where, exactly, did your involvement in social media become effective advertising? Judging effectiveness probably requires something more all-encompassing: a social media gestalt, I guess.

Gary Vaynerchuck says it very well, as he usually does:

But back to the bartender comparison. If we are all selling drinks, the ones doing the better job- and reaching the most people- will pour the most. If you are certain that you reach the most people by sending out postcards, sending out one card every two weeks will not cut it. Same thing with social media. It takes time to build up a group of friends or followers, and even more time to cultivate them. I try to engage my group of followers on twitter several times a day, and watch the stream for their comments because what they have to say is important to me. When I drink what my followers are pouring- well, as the old saying goes, “Candy is dandy…”

And sharing a drink or two is best of all.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I am in San Francisco, and it is just wonderful. I am here for RE BarCamp San Francisco and Inman Connect, and aside from some- well, let’s call it jet lag for want of a better word, I am excited and happy.

Yesterday was the first day of the two-pronged (un)/conference. At Trulia Headquarters, RE BarCamp began at 8:30. The entire day was filled with seminars given by one expert after another in the field of social media. My favorite part is learning about new technology. There is always something new coming out, and to me it is fascinating to see if the new apps address an issue that was found with a previous app, if the app combines the features of two or more preexisting apps, or if it is the result of an Einsteinian leap and is truly new. The taco truck came by at the end of the day.

Outside Trulia HQ with Hal Lublin as the Trulia Guy

Today was the first day of Inman. The morning was filled with workshops, which I did not attend, and the afternoon was conferences that touched on new technology and discussed where the market was trending (leveling off or improving, for the most part). The best part was just walking around talking  to everyone.

After the cocktail hour, I decided to walk home and take a break for a while. I walked for a bit, and decided to pop into a Burger King because I was hungry, and they were advertising Angry Burgers. That just seemed so funny I had to order one. I got my order and sat down at a bar facing the window. I notice restaurants doing that now for the advertisement value, and it seems to be effective.

As I was sitting there eating, a gentleman walked slowly by. He stopped at the trash can positioned in front of the window, reached his hand in, fished around for a bit, and came up with a closed box. He checked inside of it, found that there was something in it, took it out, and walked off eating.

A couple minutes later, a woman came up to the same trash can. She had a large pair of tongs, and proceeded to extract cans and bottles out of the receptacle. She left in a few minutes with her bounty, and was followed by another person- a man this time. He attempted to find himself something to eat but between the first man’s lucky find and the woman’s dumping the contents of the bottles back into the barrel, he came up empty handed.

What’s the point? I don’t know, other than it is an observation. Ginger Wilcox (@gingerw ) pointed out during R E BarCamp SF that 25% of the people in San Francisco did not have the money to meet their needs.

Can any one person fix this? Can ALL of us together with all of the resources possible at our disposal fix this? My guess is the answer is no, because you have addiction and mental illness tossed into the mix. I have dealt with both of these issues in family members- no, I take it back. I have not dealt with these issues. I have been forced to learn to accept these issues. I have been forced to learn to eat these issues for breakfast, lunch and supper, and trust me- that is the angriest sandwich I can imagine.

So when I see a person eating out of the trash can, the only thing that runs through my mind is, “That could be my son. That could be my daughter.” Because it could. And while I do not condone addiction or mental illness, I have to acknowledge it.

And I can’t help but buy my son or daughter lunch in spite of it.

Diane has too many children. If you choose, you may donate to the RE BarCamp Housing for Homeless initiative. The link is located in the right hand side bar.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites