Anyhoo. history aside, I was struck the other day at a MHSMC meeting that social media is the new ‘internet’. Mainly this relates to my love of all things Cluetrain Manifesto. One of the  of the primary things I took away from Cluetrain in my first reading as a lowly Software developer at a mortgage company where marketing outnumbered IT (as well as my many subsequent readings), was that it’s important, and beneficial for enterprises to let their people be people. Lower the walls, don’t raise them. I thought we were making progress here.

It seems that social media is moving away from that if MHSMC is any indicator. The presentation this month was on Corporate use of Social Media.

One of the panelists, I don’t remember whom I’m afraid, made an example of what to her (and many in the audience it appeared) was a social media gaff. A call center employee somewhere in a state most of us don’t care about commented on a blog post. The post was critical of the complany and this person came to the defense saying not much more than ‘we’re working hard for you in Toledo Ohio’ (I don’t recall the city honestly).

I was in the back row cheering on Timmy from call center X in Toledo. I mean how lucky is that company that an employee at that level stood up for his employer with nothing more than “We’re working hard.” To the best of my recall the panelist didn’t say Timmy made promises or claims, or anything that could in any way be said to hurt his employer, just that he and his fellow employees were working hard. How awesome is that, every company should have passionate people speaking plainly without motive, on their behalf.

The panelists went on to relate similar stories, and reinforce that not just anyone could use twitter. That some people weren’t on the company twitter account, and wouldn’t be. That specific people followed specific guidelines in order to be the ‘voice of the company’. That without rules and regulations on what is and isn’t ok, social media was some sort of no man’s land of ROUSs.

I sat in the back row thinking, “wow, it’s like 1998 again”. Companies are back to being afraid of the internet, this time social media, and rather than embrace it, they’re locking it down, restricting who can say what, how.

it was sobering to see that as much as things change, some things stay the same. I wish I had had time to process what I was seeing then, I might have asked if anyone in that room had ever heard of or read the Cluetrain Manifesto. I wish I still had a box of them I’d bring them to the next meeting.

Decade first:

in 2000 I worked for a company that was basically an IT Staffing firm that decided to get into software. I worked internally on a web app that would (in their terms) revolutionize staffing. I bailed, they failed, it was 2000, that happened a lot to a lot of people and companies.

I spent most of the 2000’s as a programmer, first doing ColdFusion, then moving to Flex. It never occurred to me to try out M$ tools, or any other. I liked Macromedia (Now Adobe) offerings and stuck with them.

I was my own boss several times as an Indie contractor, and was a cube monkey several times. Each (except one) was a good experience, a ton of fun, and formed lasting personal and business friendships.

I bought my first house in Perris CA, and my second in Riverside CA. Both were awesome in their own ways, despite being an hour or more from where I worked.

Most importantly, I met my wife Nicole.

We met thru a mutual friend whom I used to work with years past, and she was currently working with (Props to Scott Dunn for the intr0)

We moved to Denver. We were supposed to move a few months after meeting. Before I proposed, even. She had an opportunity to come out to Denver, and I had no major ties to CA. That opportunity dried up, and re-emerged 6 months later, and here we are.

We bought a house in Highlands Ranch, before we realized what Highlands Ranch was. 2 years after that, we moved to downtown Denver.

I started a conference that was supposed to be a one off, just for kicks event. It’s grown to be 3 distinct events, a few one off events around the world here and there, and my full time job (more in 2009)

2009

I’ve gone full time, totally dependent on 360|Conferences for income, lost a business partner, brought Nicole into the business, learned how to use Quickbooks, stopped writing code, just to name the big ones.

Going full time with the conference business wasn’t part of the plan, not in 2009 anyway. I was at EffectiveUI as the Community Evangelist, sadly a position, not enough of the company was on board with. When i left, I decided, well if the conferences are going to support me ever, they might as well start now. Since taking the job at EUI, i had stopped writing code, well I wrote a little, building small apps for internal/sales use, but by and large, i had stopped being a full time developer.

So I jumped. Eyes wide open.

All in all it’s been what I expected, stressful, awesome, a struggle, the best decision (Next to marrying Nicole) I’ve ever made.

Tom leaving was a shock in many ways, though I suspected we wouldn’t stay partners thru 2010, I just wasn’t sure how it would come down.

Our approaches to business are too different. When we’re “on”, we’re “ON” a totally creative innovative powerhouse. When we’re “off”, we’re “OFF” sadly we were off more than on.

After dealing with the shock and other feelings associated with going from partnership to “just me” basically, i had to learn to use quickbooks. That ain’t fun. I’m fairly comfortable with book keeping but quickbooks is a kludge IMHO. But oh well it’s what we’ve got. I’ve paid a book keeper to clean the books up, then I’ll take 100% ownership of that.

What am I looking at for 2010?

360|iDev will over take 360|Flex as my biggest event. Short of Adobe being more supportive of it’s third party developer eco system that is. If they figure out how to make third party developers thrive on their platforms, 360|Flex will grow. 360|Flex will and does rock, but there’s a distinct lack of love for third party tools built on and around Flex. That will be HUGE.

Apple may not give them love, but they at least don’t hinder their third parties.

360|Mobile, which was the ill-fated InsideMobile will grow and become it’s own thing. I’ll keep it small, but the non apple mobile space is hot, and quite frankly exciting, I can’t wait to see what’s going on there.

360|Whisperings will reach critical mass. Of the small amount of content on the site right now, it all sells monthly. A few purchased only, but something. The day I write checks to the authors, will be a huge day for me!

I’ll have a reliable, livable income coming from conferences/events. The business will reach an as yet unattained level of stability.

I’ll spend more time with Nicole, we’ll do more fun things, travel more, and enjoy life and each other’s company even more than we already do.

I really want to see The Flex Show grow. jeff and I love doing the show, and I want to see more the Flex Community get involved.

i’d like to do some more Denver community stuff. Ignite Denver is going strong, and I hope 2010 sees it grow and become a staple of the community. I really want to see something eventwise around literacy. A Festival of Books, something.

But for lists there’s a bigger reason, and Chris Brogan hits the nail on the head, They’re exclusionary. They’re the new “hottest kid in school” list posted in the locker bay. Those on it feel more self important, and those not on it, feel like less than people, and in the end, they’re completely meaningless and 100% arbitrary.

There’s few things I hate more than internet popularity contests.

Lists aren’t opt in or opt out, they’re not merit based, or anything like that. They’re lists of people that some one else thinks are worth listing. You must ask to be on the list, you must be “approved”, and if the list maker decides you’re not worthy, that’s that.

Lists are are for clique making. “Hey I’m on 30 lists” as if that somehow indicates importance. I see the number of lists a person is on, being the new “follower count”, a metric few care about, and most deride as a sign of being some sort of twitter spammer, or twitter whore.

Will it become the same bad juju if you’re on 50 lists, and have made none?

Of all the things twitter could of released, it’s sad they chose lists. They’ve already got their “most influential user” list or whatever. I’d rather see twitter add more useful features than popularity contests. To name a few. Polls, photo/video/audio (sorry third parties), maybe a suggestion system like Netflix? “You should look at these guys, because they’re similar to this guy that you follow.” That’d be WAY more valuable than “Here’s my bestest friends, who are cooler than you, but you should follow” list, by someone whom I’m not sure I care about their opinion on such things.

Sorry list makers, and list whores. I won’t be making lists, nor will I care if I’m on yours. There’s more important things out there.

As always we started talking about technology, and in particular eBooks, and eReaders, and how the library of tomorrow won’t look like the one we were walking through.

Here’s the idea we came up with, looking at the crowd of people in the library.

Offer a Kindle (or a Nook, or whatever) to each library member. Of course they’d need to be subsidized somehow, and you could probably get away with charging something super small, $20 maybe? Just to put a value on it to holders. It’s Library property, so you could also enforce some “Lose it, buy it” deal, and give the $20 back if it’s returned in working order. Otherwise it’s a lifetime deal like a library card.

Of course it’s not a Kindle like you’d get on Amazon. It’s a library device. It’s useful to read content you’ve checked out of the library. Sort of like the way the Nook knows when you’re in a B&N, the Library Kindle would know you’re in the library. You’d browse the available titles, check out whatever the limit is, etc. following whatever rules exist. You wouldn’t be buying anything, nothing permanent would reside on the device.

The book would transfer to your device, with the appropriate DRM to enforce the check out period (as already exists and is in use at libraries), the patron would go home, and have a book to read on an eReader.

There wouldn’t be 3G, and you couldn’t connect to other Wifi hot spots. The connection is only for the Library. Outside the Library it’s an unconnected eBook reader, which all a library patron would need it to be.

Sidenote (You could get really jiggy, and allow patrons to have an account on the library server, to collect annotations, etc. That way you could make notes on the book you’ve checked out, and they wouldn’t go away when you checked the book back in, but you might have to check the book back out to read them? I dunno, it just popped into my head.)

As far as funding goes, well it doesn’t cost Amazon $259 to build the Kindle, so they could easily give libraries a massive price break on bulk orders. Additionally, what company wouldn’t want, say a screen saver image as advertising on each device? Sell a few (there’s no limit really) ads (600×800 images) that are displayed when the device is sleeping, to offset the cost of the device. That’s a lot of eyeballs on each ad, if you think of how many patrons your typical metro library has.

Once the devices are in the library (assuming someone like Amazon, etc builds the custom OS) the ownership is easy. Charge the devices in a closet somewhere. When someone signs up, give them the device, the charger, and an instruction manual. Heck charging could even be something only offered at the library, since without a wireless connection Kindles last about 2 weeks. But either way, there’s not much overhead in managing the Devices. Repair/replacement would obviously be thru the vendor, just like with library workstations.

The OS is simple (The existing Kindle OS ain’t exactly MacOS) so there’s little to no learning curve, you wouldn’t need to have full time support staff, etc either. Whatever existing staff, would easily handle issues, since worst case, it’s swap out the device, and RMA the bad one.

I think as libraries become more aware of the sun set approaching them, the smart ones, will get on board with this idea. The smart company (Amazon, Sony, B&N) will jump on the idea too and secure the market before anyone else sees the market forming.

This idea free to whomever can make it work, I want to see our libraries thrive in the future, and I want to see reading supported!

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/link-enhancer?tag=redomega-20&o=1″> </script> <noscript> <img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/noscript?tag=redomega-20″ alt=”" /> </noscript>

The quick turn around was largely due to new facts coming out, like this. Turns out, the lending feature is pretty much destined to be vaporware.

1. You can only lend 1 book, one time, ever. That’s it, lend it to a friend, and you can lend it no longer. And of course, while it’s lent out, you can’t read it. Sure a real book works like that, but this AREN’T REAL BOOKS. It’s an eBook, the “e” allows for things that the dead tree model can’t afford.
2. The lending feature, much like the Kindle’s now never turned on, Text-to-speach feature is at the mercy of publishers. Which to me, from experience, means, it’ll be turned off on 95% of all eBooks. Cuz of course, why would the publishers want us to use things we purchase, in ways we like?

Then while reading my KindleFeeder morning paper, I saw this on e-bookvine. If you’re curious about the Nook, read the whole thing. One of my absolutely biggest complaints about the Kindle is organization. I can’t organize books by … well anything. Out of the box I can sort by Title, Author and Date. Not Type, etc.

Apparently, while B&N was building the Nook, they chose to follow Palms footsteps, and not learn from the competition. It’s kinda straight forward, that if you’re coming late to the party, you should offer everything (or as much as possible) that the leader doesn’t offer, and of course, offer more too. The Nook doesn’t offer any better eBook organization than the Kindle. There’s no desktop library app (like iTunes), and no support for folders or tags. FAIL.

Why support your fans? I used to be a B&N Member. I love books, and love being in bookstores, so it made sense to save a little money. When i started buying books on Amazon, I let my membership lapse. Will the Nook offer B&N members, anything? Nope. No discount on the device (OK I can kinda get with that, kinda), and no discount on eBooks. FAIL. Why not offer your loyal members an extra incentive to buy eBooks. Especially when your eBooks, are more expensive than Amazon’s it entices members to buy your eBooks, it helps Nook adoption (I’d assume at least), and it might make you slightly price competitive.

The Nook is looking less and less like a device I’ll be buying. Which says a lot to me, I think B&N coulda stolen a lot of Kindle owners away from Amazon had they executed correctly. It looks like they’re hoping to entice a whole new group of people to buy the Nook, and let Amazon have the rest of us. I don’t see that working, not in the short or long term.

Simply offering something won’t create a market for it, and not enticing the early adopters, enthusiastic eBook supporters from Amazon means you have to hope you’ll find another million + eBook people, who don’t already own a Kindle. Good luck.

I’ll be a Kindle owner for a bit longer it looks like.

As if I or anyone else should need more reasons to hate big biz, corporate america.

Really? Any use of the word “Monster” now is off limits?! If you use English in your name, you can’t keep people from using the word, that’s just not cool.

Make up your own spelling if you want exclusivity.

I’m totally changing 360|Conferences to “Air, water, life, car, synergy” and fuck anyone who uses those words anywhere or in any combination!

360|iDev

This was our second iPhone developer conference and it was a HUGE hit! We saw a 30% increase in attendance, which was awesome! 6 months, 30%, that’s just great! Denver didn’t let us down at all! this city is a treasure trove of iPhone developers. I’m seriously thinking 360|iDev might have a perm home here.

We had a great time! Got lots of incredible feedback, met tons of interesting people. One of the most awesome blog posts (Of the many, many) written about the event, was from David Whatley, who volunteered to speak at the conference at the last minute, completely on his own dime. We also wrangled him into hosting a panel, which was mind blowing!

“To be blunt, the conference was not dominated by stuffed suits, not dominated by nonsense, not dominated by people hawking stuff… there wasn’t even a single prima donna in sight!  People were there to learn from each other, help each other, and band together to achieve their ambitions.  The sense of community, which I feel the whole game industry lost so long ago, was a constant at this conference.  It was, I realized by the second day, home.“

He captures, why I do events. David wasn’t the only person to say something along those lines.

I’m really excited to already be working on the next 360|iDev, in San Jose! Not to mention the next 360|Flex! I can’t wait to see all my new friends, as well as the new people who have heard about the conference and will attend next time.

360|MAX

Adobe MAX is the annual “geek out” for those of us doing anything with Adobe technologies. It’s a huge event, costs a metric buttload, and is usually pretty over the top. It’s also hugely fun, and a great way to see folks who don’t come out for other events typically. It’s also nice to attend an event that I’m not organizing, or at least not organizing much of.

360|Conferences does an unconference at MAX, to bring some community to the event. It’s always a good time, we get some great speakers to give us some time and share what they know. It was really cool this time that we had some more interesting topics; Arduino/Flex interaction, How a rock band uses Flex/AIR and even iPhone in their performances, etc.

It was a good time.

Next time, we’ll limit talks to 30 minutes. It’s about double the sessions, but I think 30 minutes is a good time slot, we can get more great topics going.

The funnest part of my job (If I can call it that) is doing different types of events. They’re not just always the same event over and over. Even 360|Flex and 360|iDev, while super similar, and based on the same ideals, are vastly different. Then throw in Ignite, 360|FlexPress, and hopefully a Festival of Books, and it’s just a great time bringing people together!

Yup, damn straight, National. Comic. Sans. Day.

Why? Because we really do take ourselves too seriously. Just look at this google search. Sure we all have our ‘thing’ but something in those results tells me, that there’s a lot of us that take fonts too seriously. Feel free to try and explain why font face is the single most important thing in marketing and delivers a message without actually saying anything etc, etc, Sorry it’s marketing claptrap, but you’re welcome to try and enlighten me.

Solution? As with any situation where people are taking something too seriously, we’ll go extreme opposite, and just bask in it, and enjoy making fun of ourselves. It’s simple enough to do, simply replace your style sheet font references to all Comic Sans.

It’s one day, and meant to be a fun poke at our selves and take a day off of obsessing over the existance of Comic Sans as a font. Hate it, love it, couldn’t care less about it, on October 1 let’s all enjoy a day of Comic Sans, just a day, it’s not gonna kill ya.

Spread the word! Leave a comment with your blog address so I can make sure to check your site out and enjoy a day not caring if there’s a serif or not.

I can remember very clearly walking into my office in Orange County, seeing some co-workers in the big conference room with one of those TV/VCR carts (didn’t even know we had any) watching TV. It went down hill from there.

These are a few screen captures that jumped out at me, but each number is significant, the app is free, if you ever find yourself forgetting, load it up.

• 
  It wasn’t just the poor souls in the planes :(
• 
  Longest 102 minutes of my life
• 
• 
  I’m lucky in that no one I (directly) knew was hurt or killed. My good friend Mindy Troutman was in the city, didn’t work in the towers. A member of the car forum I belonged to at the time was killed.
• 
• Thank you.

“Steve Jobs! Steve Jobs come over here!” SLAP!
“That’s for taking so damn long to get MMS on the iPhone”

Too. Funny