I’m quoted in this LA Times article on Twitter. I still think Twitter is awesome.
18th Dec, 2006
Monthly Archives: December 2006
16th Dec, 2006
Rule #1 for podcasts…
Be interesting.
I’m totally digging The MBA Podcast from the University of San Francisco and it’s changing the way I think about that school. I grew up in San Francisco and every indication I’ve had was that USF stopped being relevant in 1956 when Bill Russell graduated. Guess I was wrong. Check out the William Quigley interview for a taste (backer of Paypal).
The Berkeley HAAS MBA program on the other hand has such interesting podcasts as “tips for the application process” and “help with the financial aid options and process.” They’ve taken what should be a two-page pamphlet and turned it into a 30-minute program.
Which reminds me of this suddenly in vogue quote:
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Berkeley is podcasting for people who want to be led. USF is podcasting for people who want to be leaders.
15th Dec, 2006
What do my Friendster friendships mean?
This quote from danah boyd’s excellent Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites got me thinking:
While Friending is a social act, the actual collection of Friends and the display of Top Friends provides space for people to engage in identity performance.
Sorry friends, I’m only acting like the person I wish I was when I mark you as a friend. But is anyone measuring my actual friendships? I think Digg and Bloglines have the data, they’re just not doing anything with it. I’ve noticed that I keep Digging the stories of the same few people. Are they my “real” friends? On Bloglines I always read posts from Biz and Ev as soon as I see them. Then there’s another fifty blogs that I haven’t read in months. Bloglines knows the people that I actually like and the people that I’m just pretending to like.
4th Dec, 2006
Comments are off for this post
Using the Salesforce API
Just posted my Using the Saleforce API article on the O’Reilly Network:
In this article I’m going to turn a blog into a Salesforce lead generator by integrating the blog comments with Salesforce Leads using the Salesforce API, SOQL (a Salesforce-specific, SQL-like query language), and some Salesforce object customization.
If you hear the phrase “lead generation” and picture a car salesman, then you should probably step back and think about what you do when someone posts a comment to your blog. Do you try to find their blog? Google them? Go as far as emailing them? If you comment on my blog, you can be assured that I’m going to email you back.
Lead generation and tracking is a big part of any sales process and a major concept inside the Salesforce CRM. Many businesses are adding blogs to their sales and marketing activities and will want to integrate these into their existing sales process.
3rd Dec, 2006
Engineering Management Hacks
The best way to get developers to build something great is to make them believe your goal is worthwhile. If you do, control from the top will not only be unnecessary; it will be impossible. That’s the best situation you can hope to create, and frankly I love that so many people don’t believe that, since it makes things so much easier for those of us who do.
1st Dec, 2006
Changelog: Strongest Man, Thoughts, and Secret Projects
Updated Strongest Man with news and a product list. Also gave it a cleaner design.
I ended up doing a comparison of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft News searches in order to pull the Strong Man news. Yahoo’s results were terrible, 1/3 as many and lots that were totally irrelevant. Microsoft’s was more complete than Google but included some exact matches from the world of cycling that I didn’t want to deal with. So I went with Google.
Google News Search RSS feeds are horrible. The item descriptions contain Google specific HTML, the first tag being BR. It’s like somebody ran a split() on the actual News page.
Salesforce Article #2 officially pubs on Monday. This one is about how to turn your blog into a lead generating machine with the Salesforce API.
I did a quick design iteration on I Heart Quotes in order to make the Random Quote feature more prominent. Traffics up 25% as a result.
I’m working on a social networking project and bought two domains but can’t decide which to go with, crowdvine or membermojo. Sarah likes crowdvine because it’s more gender neutral, likes the growth visual, and the CV play on words. I like membermojo because it’s more fun to say. Any opinions?
I claimed all my sites in Google’s Webmaster tools. This gives you a bunch of stats on your site like what your rank is for various search terms.
Wired had a great writeup and explanation of Wesabe. Way better than I’ve ever managed to do.