The bit.ly Trick.. Personalize and Track Metrics Across the Boundaries

I mentioned this to a couple of entrepreneurs at the Unconference and was surprised they didn't use it..
I'm customer development metrics nut so I like to track how people get to my site, or how interested they are once they've met me. If you just put your website/blog link on your business card you'll get a bunch of "empty" direct hits on your home page.
Where did they really come from?

I have a pretty basic card that sums me.. "A Passionate Geek". It has my basics but a blank back which I personalize based on the focus of the event I'm attending and the people I want to engage.

Simple Advice for Entrepreneurs - A Next Steps Flow Chart

What's your background?
It's a very simple question but I bet the resulting advice is 95% accurate..

The Power of Intention vs Pitch: A Lesson from #MassTLC

Capture the passion and energy from MassTLC Innovation Unconference, feed it, grow it and keep it alive and we WILL change the world!!
Yesterday was an amazing event where 600+ entrepreneurs and experts gathered to share their passion for Innovation. It's an unconference so the sessions get built on the fly and organized into 35+ rooms with four time slots. There's also 100+ experts who volunteered to hold three One-on-One meetings with sponsored entrepreneurs..
Over 140+ sessions, 200+ expert meetings along with countless spontaneous discussions that exploded between 600 like minded innovators. It's a logistics nightmare and a mind-filling experience, don't drink coffee.. you won't need it!
The problem: Massive amounts of sessions, ideas and shared learning .. yet you can only be in a single place at one time

• Which session do I attend? How do I learn what happened in the other sessions I was interested in (but couldn't attend)?
• How to you capture the content and takeaways effectively, without wasting time searching/filtering though the noise in the webosphere?
• How do you grow the community, building the discussion beyond those physically present in each session?
• How do you continue the knowledge exchange of the unconference after the physical conference ends?

Next Step Labs - My Next Step

I find it ironic that I haven't taken my own advice.. For the past year I have been advising entrepreneurs and small to medium businesses in the fine art of customer development. Have an idea, prototype or question, get it out there and give interested people the opportunity to engage. Build-Measure-Learn then Iterate.
About Me
I turn dreamers into doers and help develop ideas into successful products or prototypes. My specialty, I help people get unstuck and determine optimized Next Steps towards their goals with a focus on customer and product development, building rapid prototypes, coaching and playing devil's advocate or QA etc etc. I have 13 years of experience running startup and advanced development groups that did just that (as a manager/individual contributor). Then I sailed around the world for Six Years and built a support community with utilties to share/discover content through social media.

Next Step Labs - Bookstore for Startup Related Topics

Here is a list of startup related books that I have been collecting. I certainly haven't read them all but they have been recommended and/or discussed in various startup related blogs/sites.
You can also visit Next Step Labs Bookstore directly directly (on Amazon).

Note: This is an affiliate program. A small percentage of each sale goes to Next Step Labs, the prices you pay are identical to Amazon direct.

What are your favorite, most helpful books? Anything missing from the list?

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

via youtube.com

A great video on what motivates people by Daniel Pink the author of Drive (hint: it's NOT money).

• Autonomy- the desire to direct our own lives
• Mastery- the urge to get better and better at something that matters 
• Purpose- the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

I really like the animation format from RSA, a UK organization (spelling differences) focused on 21st century enlightenment.

Anyone who knows me (and my unpaid re-integration work) knows money means almost nothing to me. I'm not sure autonomy is that important to me but mastery and purpose are. I also like to push myself into new uncharted territories where I can grow/learn quickly.
What motivates you?

Buzz's Activity Stream implementation seems rather self centered

 Activitystrea.ms is an extension to the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around the web, as Chris Messina was quoted in Louis Gray's "It aims to be the DNA of the Future Web",

We snack on information. It may feel like overload, but the tools haven't caught up. The solution to data overload is more metadata and we are at that point where can start generating that. We take the basic construct from 1999 and weave in some additional information - data about data.

It's based on a VERY simple concept of verbs, objects and types

• actor verb object (target)

and the extensions can be easily added to existing feeds to provide the extra meta data relevant to your actions around the web.. Chris posted an Article, Chris shared an Article etc.
Digging into Buzz
There's only one problem.. Buzz only talks about Buzz posts (Chris Posted a Buzz Note), when in reality I posted a blog on a connected site and shared it via Buzz. Ok verbs don't really matter but even the ActivityStream object points back to the Buzz post instead of the original post and the metadata for my actual activity and blog post is nowhere to be found. This connected site post appears as if I posted "Day 48 – Arrived! | Roz Savage, Ocean Rower" on Buzz (see feed). The full blog post text, a key feature within Buzz, is gone .. replaced by only the title, with no link, no summary and no attribution. Clicking on the syndicated link would bring users to Buzz instead of the original source.
So what is going on? As many of you know, I take more of a product manager/big picture point of view when I dig into (or develop) a new tool. I try to understand all the use cases (both user and developer) and analyze the options, inputs, and outputs to determine what data/resources are available to accomplish other goals (import, sharing, syndication, search, monitoring, etc). Specs, stated goals and visions are just words, implementation is what really matters to someone actually using the tool.

About Me

I'm a passionate geek, who loves software and technology. I like to dive deep, understand existing tools/APIs, data flows, customer use cases and issues to develop end-to-end solutions that will help the customer succeed.
I have an engineer's mind, a developer's background, and 16 years of experience juggling multiple hats in startup and advance development group environments as both a senior manager and hands on contributor. I recently returned from a six year, round the world, sailing adventure where my focus shifted from developer to consumer. I saw my friends struggle with technology and cringed as management of their website/blogs and photo updates became a chore instead of something fun to do. I couldn't help myself, so hacked together various APIs and RSS/JSON feeds to develop an integrated Blog/Photo/Mapping solution for our sailing blog.
The gap between technologists and main stream users has widened while I was gone and I would like to help close that gap. It kills me that the thing that brings so much joy to my life (and occasional frustration) is so misunderstood and underutilized by others. After my return I targeted my exploration at the large gap that exists between technologists and "mainstream users"  with respect to social media tools, APIs and methods. I've been engineering various solutions to help companies engage online that are targeted to their unique situation of products and customers. I understand the benefits of social media because I have experienced them (See World Traveling Sailors: The Most Bizarre Social Media Example?).
I enjoy the challenge of solving complicated problems: from developing software to integrate the electrical and mechanical design functions across Ford, their suppliers and manufacturing facilities which resulted in the world's first electro/mechanical design synthesis tools, to designing complex algorithms that model next generation device/processors for Intel used to analyze prototype designs for signal integrity, ground bounce and EMI effects, to planning an independent self-funded  6 year round-the-world sailing trip including the tools to communicate and share the experience. The latest challenge has been evaluating all the social media tools and flows to help clients and friends/family deal with the ever changing mess we seem to be creating for ourselves by attempting to become "more efficient".
I'm a self-motivated, enthusiastic and customer oriented product manager/design engineer who thrives in a fast-paced environment that encourages creativity and use of problem solving, design analysis, and interpersonal skills. I enjoy helping people and businesses solve the puzzles in their endless struggle to keep up with changes in technology.
If it doesn't exist, I'll build it .. If it exists, I'll try to make it better, easier, more accessible and useful to a broader customer base.

Are your hiring or looking for a great teammate? My Resume, a little more about me (other posts) and my LinkedIn profile are available online.
Feel free to contact me with questions, comments or ?. If you are in the Massachusetts area and want to connect, check out my tungle.me and plancast pages. My google profile contains all my webosphere links but I'm much more fun to meet in person because passion doesn't always translate online.

A perfect example of Google's backwards thought process

Find your favorite locations faster with personalized search.

"Now, if you're signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, personalized suggestions can make searching easier and faster by showing you suggestions based on past searches.

via google-latlong.blogspot.com

This seems like a pretty cool feature, but what happens if you don't have Web History enabled? When Google launched this feature they also removed an existing "Saved Locations" feature that long time Google customers had been using to build a database of saved locations to manage their business, driving direction etc. Needless to say those customers are pissed off that they received no notice or automatic option to migrate from old to new (update: six months later there is no improvement and the browser based form history is still broken).
A Google employee replied "We're looking at the Personalized Suggestions tool, and how we can update it to meet the needs that were filled with Saved Locations." Wait a minute, Google is just doing this now? They removed an old working feature and added a different one that is only enabled when web history without thinking about this first!! The good news is you can extract a saved locations KML file (after some serious prodding) which can be used elsewhere including Bing maps.

Passion is the secret but does it translate?

I'm in a unique situation where I don't have to work [1]. Ok, maybe at some point I need to do something so I can justify a couch for our little freecycle decorated apartment and I wouldn't mind upgrading our wine from two buck chuck to something in the $5 range. But I'm making a conscious choice to dig deep in my search to find something I can be passionate about and I want to take full advantage of this opportunity.
If you ask anyone who knows me or has met me in person, they will tell you that I am passionate. If asked to describe me in a single word I bet 95% would say passionate even without a picklist. Yet I think passion is very difficult to recognize in today's hectic real-time 140 character world. The subtle nuances of emotion visible during a face-to-face conversation are hard to detect through the web, especially if they've already scrolled off the bottom of the page or get stuck at the bottom of the inbox. Energy, excitement and passion seem to get lost in the digital conversion to 0s,1s and ABCs.
The last time I wrote a resume and interviewed for a job was 20 years ago and I'm struggling with ways to show my passion in this digital age. Bits and words fly before our eyes in record quantities, how do you make them stand out?

World Traveling Sailors: The Most Bizarre Social Media Example?

The other day I was invited to take part in a brainstorming session as the "social media expert" (notice the quotes). I was introduced by my friend as a past colleague who had just finished a 6 year, around the world, sailing adventure and no one laughed.. but I'm sure more than one team member was wondering how the two were related. If you take a newbie with a full inbox, an already overloaded schedule and stick them in front of the social media firehose I guarantee you will create a skeptic. I used social media throughout my trip to make life easier and free up valuable time and resources, not just because somebody told me I should.

A little background.. I'm an electrical engineer who switched to software after I realized the incredible leverage I could gain by developing it. I could create a library of components for CAE tools, typing them in by hand, or I could write an awk script with some csh pipes to accomplish the same result adding re-usability, creating flexibility, and increasing efficiency. I was hooked and I never turned back. My experience ranges from customer support to developer to VP of engineering services all within start-up or advanced development organizations where customer interaction is critical. As part of my reintegration I've spent a lot of time evaluating the tools and data flows used with social media, then it hit me.. it's really NOT new to me!

The Social Organization: Achieving Swing

The management lessons are particularly applicable for the networked world. Yes, skill is critical - you can't win without it. Strategy is also critical so that you all know what the goal is and how you're all going to get there. But ego, in-fighting, and people that want to win at all costs? That kills swing.
It is better to agree and execute a sup-optimal decision collectively than to have a team of rockstars that all want to convince people to do it their way - even if each one of them is a genius.  That reality has huge implications on hiring, performance management, and leadership. It changes our ideas about what it means to be competitive. However, swing is so powerful that it can overcome strength and natural advantages.

via thesocialorganization.com

Swing is an amazing feeling that really can't be described to someone who hasn't experienced it. Everything just clicks and effort/energy seems to be transferred without friction. Crew is an amazingly competitive sport. You push yourself to the limit, compete against each other for seats in the boat, and then get together as a seamless team to do battle. I still remember those cold early morning workouts and all the powerful lessons they taught me.