elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

- Choose a hosting company whose rights you agree with. Revver is popular, YouTube has redistribution rights to your material.
- Make sure if your product shows up on a video at least incidentally, that you join in the conversation. Dabble.com is one place where the conversation is happening. OK,go with the treadmills - lifecycle missed an opportunity here.
- check out freevlog.org
- [EG] this is a very advanced topic. Yes it's "easy" meaning you can set up a vlog quicker than, say, climbing mt everest. But wow, text is so nice.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 12:33 PM | Permalink

* [EG] It's really nice to give a talk with a partner or spouse because they can bail you out when you clinch.
* Be as social online as you are in real life. If you don't turn your head when people say your name in real life, there is a diagnosis for that. If you don't engage in the conversation online, unfortunately that's still considered corporate discretion.
* [EG] Rant: When people type www.google.com in yahoo's search bar, or vice versa, this is not because they are confused between the search bar and the URL bar. It is a focus problem between browsers and home pages. You launch a browser which is an application. The application by rights should have focus, and that focus should be in the URL bar. However. The web is not a passive place. There are these things called web applications which the user knows nothing about. The home page that the browser automatically brings up has a search bar in it, usually, and THAT deserves focus in the new world. This leads to a design problem between the old world (applications, URL bar gets focus) and new world (web apps, search bar gets focus). The rule of design is to behave as customers would expect in order to execute the task at hand. The fact is, there is no correct answer to this. Convention has the search bar taking the focus. That's fine, but WE SHOULD NOT MAKE FUN OF CUSTOMERS. This is our fault, the technology people, with our fancy applications and web apps. It is not their fault. Let's not make fun of them anymore.
* [EG] Sense people are getting tired of talking about the A list, if it exists, if it does not exist. If we did still care, which we don't, we should figure out an appropriate sampling rate to determine qualification for the list. One hit wonders deserve to be on the list on that day, week, month, and should not be resented etc. Similarly, niche bloggers with lots of juice on certain topics are also heroes for playing so well in a specific space.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:56 AM | Permalink

OK - now onto what is happening on Friday the second day of the conference.

Ben showed a funny video about mainframes. As usual, Halley brings up the comment that "this video tells people who you're not - what are you doing to tell people who you ARE?"

Interesting comment about suits. Be OK with who you are. If you're a stodgy old company where everyone uses power point and wears suits, be OK with that. And blog.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:43 AM | Permalink

OK. I love conferences. At least ones where you get to sit and type. But I wiped out yesterday around 3pm and ran off to get a pedicure. And go to my evening Solutions group. Here is what wiping out involved. Note that it involved a higher expenditure of energy than, say, staying put.

* Changing back into my bike gear
* Packing my bag so my enourmous heavy laptop wasn't kicking my butt while ready
* Realize, while packing, I had lost my bus pass in the restroom
* Ask for the pass at the lost and found and find it! (Jory they have your business cards which they tried to foist off on me too. Nice case!)
* Bike on some scary streets with my chain falling off from Bell Harbour to U Village. In flip flops (because why bring 3 pairs of shoes. Surely 2 is plenty).
* Get there strangely early. Choose a color everyone chooses. This is the "I'm not really a waitress" color from Opi. Now everyone knows I have common tastes.
* Eat dinner - white stuff - at the cafe while filling in the blanks in my new blogroll (described earlier)
* A great session about the holidays
* Biking home at 9pm, also combined with a bus ride.

In general it felt like a very full day!

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:41 AM | Permalink

Jory: "TMI" I had to look this one up. The world has gone SMS. WTF.

What can I say. I love these guys. The women with unpronounceable maiden names. The men they chose to sit next to. Their occasional quibbles and famous tiffs. Much of the information presented was also in Robert's book. Some highlights:

Continuums
1) Regarding the content you put on your blog. One one hand, you have safe. On the other hand, you have interesting. Then there's the middle.
2) Also regarding the content you put on your blog. On one hand, you can pimp your product. On the other hand, you can add value to the community. Then there's the middle.

The membrane. You can push it (head towards the interesting / value zone of the continuums above) and it snaps back at you. Practically all the time. More than you would like. Time for that thick skin you're keeping in the closet.

[EG] Idea: Tag some of my posts with "oh shit." Have that be a special feed just for posts that I say this about after posting.

New metric (from a session I didn't attend): the "engagement" metric. Good story about USA today audience not being engaged, does not result in downloads.

What personal information should you divulge on your site (for your business?)
[EG] What about, just enough so people feel comfortable making small talk?
- Enough to make you sound human
- Personal information is the seasoning and not a main course.

[EG] I have been far too restrained here. In this blog. Nobody reading this knows anything about what I do for a living at the moment, other than I am happy. And I have divulged hardly anything regarding the personal transformation thing, despite promises. WTF?

And what happens if you are not restrained enough? If you start getting hatemail?
"Shut the fuck up. You don't know anything about this guy. It's just one guy."
(What Chris heard to cheer him up when getting a piece of hate mail)

[EG] Another idea. For this blog. What is an angle that I have privvy to? (I love that word privvy because it denotes both unique personal view into something and also an outhouse.) Let's try on some angles and see if they stick. How about answering the question "what is the world really like" and how to answer it... external travel... internal travel.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:28 AM | Permalink

Here is what I am doing as a record of the ideas and people I could be meeting at the blog business summit, but instead am typing on my computer.

1) Picked a new newsreader - why not - this time I chose google reader.
2) Sign up for blogs for all the conference presenters. This takes a surprisingly long time. And it's a shame some more illustrious people do not have blogs.
3) Look at the conference presenter's blogs and follow the links to the people they link to. Sign up for those blogs too.
4) When adding a subscription, right away rename the subscription to preface that sub with the person's name.

Firstname Lastname: cute name automatically discovered

5) When adding a subscription that I found through someone, keep track of that by adding the original referrer in the front of the name. This keeps the sort order kinda nice, and forces me to to learn who people are.

Firstname Lastname Ref: NewpersonFirstname NewpersonLastname: cute name automatically discovered

6) Follow the rules for #5 even if learning about someone via word of mouth.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:10 AM | Permalink

* Here's a cool idea. When creating a blog, reward your "customers." These are your readers. For example, I know I have posts on my blog that I should take down. Or, nominate for a special "oh shit" tag. Can my readers find them for me? Perhaps get a free CD?
* Blogs can be a neat cushion from things not yet being ready. For a long time Betsy Aoki's work on QnA was scooped before it was released. There was nothing to do yet but sign up for the private beta and read the blog. When the product was finally released, people were fans. They actually stood up for the code of conduct. It can let you hold the fort down until the ship comes in to fix the problem.
* QnA has a way of giving back - of taking home a goody bag from the party as it were - by the product allowing specific RSS feeds from your own answers. This is your content! That's cool.
* On communal happy-happy consensus based organizations. Don't set the expectation that that there is more democracy than there really is. So if you want to make arbitrary decisions as, like, the leader, don't set expectations that this is a community driven thing.
* I wanted to ask a question about stump blogs but did not have time. Then I lost interest in the question. Which was, how do you handle if you show up in an organization with a completely superficial blog run by a marketing company that your CEO has hired. What do you do if this happens many many times and you, yourself, are a shy person and devoted to the conversation. And you just work there. Often the CEO just wants to cross this off the todo list to "build community." It seems people are frightened about blogging, even when asked to do it. And there is another side of the coin, where lots more people should be taking risks and getting fired, statistically, than are. Innocent until proven guilty. I would love to see more people getting fired because that would mean less stump "hello world" blogs out there, and more interesting blogs coming out of companies. Of course that is an aggregate request. Specifically, of course, one should play safe.
* Another nudge to talk with people 1:1 about what would bring them back here (here?) to your blog every day. Not a mass e-mail, not an e-mail. In person.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:55 AM | Permalink

I think my computer is the oldest one here.

At least I am not the oldest one here.

I have 4 browser windows open, which is not a lot, and they are all confounded.

At least I look nice. Meaning, I look like a nice person. Apparently. People are so nice here.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 01:47 PM | Permalink

Via Halley Suitt:
Regarding transparency: Read Carly Fiorina's new book
Also: Arianna Huffington's book On Being Fearless

And a good technical comment from the audience
* You can create a myspace and have it mirror your existing posts. You will get a completely different audience.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:28 AM | Permalink

"The second you edit the bloggers it's over."

"We're all outsiders in this. That's what drew us to blogging."

On blogging for the company you work for: "Our bloggers give them the sauce." [EG] I love the idea of criticism being the same as ladling fat on top of someone else's plate.

"If your blog isn't working - look inside yourself - you could write intelligent comments on people's blogs and do 1 post a week - everyone would know who you are." [EG] Again, I hang my head in shame at the comment situation having decayed so badly in my own blog.

The good news "We created a beautiful place where integrity and authenticity matters." Then the bad news on pay per post and not disclosing the relationship "That's not innovative - that's lying." And then the resulting debate "You can be intellectually dishonest when you debate..." because pay per post claims in their own defense they are a marketplace where people are asked to lie regarding requiring only good reviews.

On podcasting working "I'm listening to more radio now than I ever have - without turning on a radio."

On what Napster attempted and failed, and what YouTube pulled off "I give them credit for threading the needle." [EG] What a great term! Is it a new one? Synopsis on how to thread the needle (in this context):
- Place a bunch of content up there
- Worry about how to make money about it later
- At the earliest opportunity, remedy the fact that your content may not have been legit. YouTube remedied this by including license holders (content folks) in the purchase of their company.

blog business summit

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:45 AM | Permalink

Hey - if you're watchng my Plazes window over on the left, it shows Bell Harbour Conference Center. I biked down here. Listening to Jason now. I'm just so happy to be here. I feel like just showing up is like getting a prize.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:56 AM | Permalink

In Solutions work there is the concept of the nurturing inner voice. There is also the harsh critical voice, also presumably inner. The nurturing inner voice (or NIV) is very useful. It helps to make you an adult. What happens usually is the world sets the expectation that we must be adults. So we set high standards and bully ourselves into performing. We are quick to judge ourselves and cannot even take a compliment. We pretend we are not really made out of physical bodies, that we can "handle" it, and separate from our primitive drives. We treat ourselves like astronauts, eating prepackaged food with a quota. The NIV is what allows you to recognize that you are flawed, human, primitive, evolving, that it's OK to fail, and that it's OK in general. Because being an adult is really having much more skill at being a child.

Blogging is cute that way because each of us must imaging an external benevolent listener to our work. I especially rely on this because my comments are still broken so I must imagine you all (hey, file not found, now that's progress!)

I am still sifting through my ideas from going to the Moth storytelling event last week. I hope to go to more events in general. But the one thing that hits home is, these people are not about the medium at all. The storytellers. It's all about content, not to sound to 1991 or anything. But it matters, and each of us has some good ones tucked away. One of my wishes is that we are not so harsh with ourselves being pretend-grownup, with the high expectations and the drives both suppressed and blown out of proportion, and instead we can get closer to what really happens. It takes a level of security to let those stories fly, though.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 07:24 PM | Permalink

This is a poem about a road painter. That wasn't the title. This is all part of an ongoing experiment to find out if really the old creative spark is just as sparky as it used to be. Are you afraid to check? I am.

The road painter
takes yellow on a wide brush
and pours - mercurial - on the city floor -
swoops an arc that for now, and for seemingly forever,
guides traffic to one lane from two, and back again.

Kids spit out gum.
Gravel falls from trucks.
Potholes sink lower.
All daring fate.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 07:11 PM | Permalink

Sat Oct 7: It is my aunt's birthday. Show up at my folks' house to celebrate, then leave as promised to go to dh's workmate's housewarming as a previous commitment. At the housewarming, we park, let everyone out, and then dh decides to get back in the car to re-park. 2 year old goes bonkers thinking dad is driving off, runs for the back of the car to pound on it etc. Dad puts the car in reverse. Mom (that's me) assumes the worst and throws purse at the car which contained the wine bottle, because that would impact the car faster. Everyone is fine except for nerves. The house is gorgeous. Kids proceed to be scolded the entire time to not mess with the cute stuff. Back to my folks's house, eat yet some more and yet again, then despite exhausted and shattered nerves, get teased about "getting" to have a night alone in our house.

Mon Oct 9: Spend all day willing myself to not go get my paycheck in the mailbox. Little do I know it's columbus day and the paycheck is not there anyway. But hey, I have it together.

Tues Oct 10: Realize that I am bouncing checks and freak out. Also that yesterday was columbus day and no paycheck until tomorrow.

Wed Oct 11: Think it's OK to deposit paycheck after business hours to avoid yet more checks bouncing. Think wrong. Find out too late.

Thurs Oct 12: Get scary letter from IRS. Take afternoon off work to open mail I should have opened sometime during the summer. I still have mail from INSP I have not opened. But I love you guys.

Fri Oct 13: Superlong day at work. Completely in balance about money finally. Perfectly happy with no social events planned all weekend except one quickie. Glad to have my boring life back.

Sun Oct 15: What a boring weekend filled with chores! At last minute on Sunday, ill-advisedly go out to the Moth storytelling fest and love every minute. Hits the spot. More on that later. Cute gift basket, though.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

This weekend was very hard for me, mostly because at the point where I am at with my solution training I am questioning everything. This is just my own evolution, I think I was supposed to already be over the questioning phase back in kit 2 or something.

Anyway, seeing lots of friends and family, and having them ask "how is the new job?" They are braced for an answer, it seems, because while I always have a good story it is not always one that is happy or joyful. I say "great - the new job is great!" And it is. And I realize I have a lot to do regarding becoming more convincing in that regard.

Last night, mostly because of this overarching sense of questioning, I dealt with my issues by roasting 2 ducks. I marinated them / defrosted them in trader joe's ginger soy broth, some aloha sauce from grocery outlet, the last of the teriaki, and whatever was left of the vinegar. That was Saturday morning for Sunday evening roasting. They needed a mid-roast draining of the fat pan via baster/injector thingy. Once I had siphoned off the fat I was able to lift the pan without spilling it on myself, test the ducks, flip them, replace the tinfoil so the oven wouldn't get too smoky, and go down for a final round. They came out exquisite. Dinner was roast duck mystery part (think it was a back or something), and chips with guacamole. Also 2 glasses of discount grocery outlet wine (that buyer can sure pick em!)

After this dinner I watched TV. Extreme home makeover. Alias reruns. Desperate housewives. But back to the first show. It occured to me that is how I am with my job right now. You know, the family who had godzilla hit their house and half of them were special needs in the first place, then there was a plague and a financial crisis? Ok pretend that is me. Then the network swoops in and creates a house from which one can gather hope... from which one can feel there is hope in the world... a platform for success tailored specific to them? That each person in the family will be asked to do what they do best, and then come together later to celebrate? Ok pretend that is me too. This is what I mean when I say my new job is great. I feel like they just moved the bus over so I could see. So when I say I'm back to temping at Microsoft... and I see your face with sympathy... just to let you know I am thrilled and still working to explain that. Yet still braced for impact anyway. Godzilla lives.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 07:37 AM | Permalink

I don't know how much networking could possibly be going on while my lovely and endearing and earth shatteringly talented cousin is releasing her CD. I will be there with rapt attention and wishing people would hush.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)