Awesome! Learn how to leverage the word of mouth passionate grass roots landscape of 2.0. I’ve registered. Have you!? This is from DamienH. Titter titter…. 🙂 Obviously this extends my previous Social Media Expert post.

Last week I miscounted my miles. I ran 14 miles and biked 9, not 19 run. This week I did run 19 miles and also biked 3. I know, I’ve got to get my bike out more.

The longest run I’ve done to date, in my life I believe, was this last Saturday when I ran 6 miles with West Coast Roadrunners along San Diego harbor. My pace was 9:28/miles. My last 5 miles were all right around 9:10. Basically, I’ve shaved 2 minutes off my pace in the last 4 weeks.

My training schedule this week:

Jan 31	Feb 1	Feb 2	Feb 3	Feb 4	Feb 5	Feb 6	Feb 7
6 miles	OFF	35 min	40 min	OFF	40 min	OFF	7 miles

I’ve been using Tara’s Garmin Forerunner 405 for tracking my pace, distance, splits, etc….  The hardware is excellent. The software is crap. I spent an hour and half trying to get the damn thing to sync my runs and maps to my computer before I gave up. 😦

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Damien Howley created this image in jest:

The proliferation of social media “experts” amuses me too. Evidently if a person has registered accounts at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, etc…, and records videos of oneself this makes them an expert in social media. Yay! Well, no. Actually, this makes you a software user. Gold star!

Are you really an expert in social media? How does one know? Here are some indicators:

1. You have successfully launched, at least, one product employing primarily, or entirely, Internet tools.
2. You created global appeal for this product.
3. You did this with little to no budget for advertising, marketing and PR.
4. You’ve launched and nurtured, at least, a few online communities to success. Success can come in a couple forms. Success doesn’t necessarily mean the community has upwards of thousand or tens of thousands in daily unique visits; although, this is a pretty clear indication you did well. An alternative indicator of success to the aforementioned site traffic metric is that the community captured a significant percentage of the overall population of given interest group. Basically, you’ve got to be in the top couple, which for some interest groups could be small.
5. If the previous metric you selected for success was traffic then it is the case the traffic is 75%+ organic. Store bought stumbles or huge ad budgets don’t count.

Bonus:

1. Traditional media and publishers consult you on product and site launches.
2. You know the meaning of hyperlocal and understand what’s meant by “faces and names”.
3. You are a regular listener of “On The Media” (I love plugging OTM 🙂

Factors that do not indicate you are an “expert” in social media:

1. Saying you are a social media expert.
2. Again, using social software tools doesn’t make you an expert any more than driving a car makes you an automotive expert.
3. Having hundreds or thousands of followers on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. This likely means you’re, at least,  a mildly attractive female or that you are someone others  want something from and it’s a near certainty it is not your wisdom of monetizing online social and media tools.

If you’re still wondering if you or someone you know is a social media expert watch this video:

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I authored a substantive article on the evolution of consumer social media tools into new enterprise software tools at the MindTouch blog. I put some sweat into this one. Give it a read.

There can be no doubt that one of the hottest spaces in enterprise software today is collaboration. It’s no surprise collaboration is getting a lot of interest. The old metaphors for capturing, authoring and sharing information are stale and inefficient. As such, there is a lot of room for achieving productivity improvements through improved user experience. This has been true for all software, but especially so in the enterprise software space where collaboration is essential to daily operation and where every ounce of productivity translates into big dollars.

In the last several years a software renaissance has been taking place in the consumer space that has begun seeping into, and benefiting, business and enterprise systems. The innovation in software during this renaissance, more commonly referred to as Web 2.0, has been almost entirely about improving user experience metaphors. AJAX, new social metaphors, lessening of the file/file system metaphor, making structure implicit rather than explicit and just generally simplifying user interfaces are all trends evidenced in this new wave of software. While most pundits think “Web 2.0” has been about making the Web participatory, enabling social connectedness and conversations these are but side effects of the improved ease of use and increased stickiness (fun of use) software has experienced.

via MindTouch, Inc Blog: Full Article.

I’m not sure how I missed this back in 2003.

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

* Fear and aggression

* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

* Uncertainty avoidance

* Need for cognitive closure

* Terror management

via 07.22.2003 – Researchers help define what makes a political conservative.

Full paper.

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I know, I know. I’ll stop tooting our horn, but I checked in at Sourceforge to look at the MindTouch project rank tonight and I noticed MindTouch Deki currently bests even Azureus, arguably the most popular torrent client. You know what this means? MindTouch is more popular than porn and piracy. 😉

It comes as no surprise to me that MindTouch is a topped rank open source project and a fast growing business. We have an amazing product. What is surprising to me how quickly we did this. In addition to the impressive expediency with which we’ve achieved our many impressive milestones it is also impressive how little resources that we’ve achieved this with. I look at the competitors we’ve surpassed, one in particular that has raised $16+ Million in tier one Venture Capital investment, had a three year head start on us, is stacked with weblebrities, is a darling of many A-list bloggers…and yet they don’t hold a candle to our community, our distribution and are likely barely beating us in revenue. I expect this year will change the last point. Anyway, I can’t help but smile and look to the next competitor to draft and surpass.

Next topic. I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer periodically to post to WordPress. Because I’ve consistently had problems with stability and buginess with Live Writer I’ve abandoned it. For the time being. Again. As such I needed a Flickr plugin. A Google search turned up “10 Amazing WordPress Plugins for Flickr“. I’ve installed a few of these. I can report the only plugin that’s worth installing is WordPress Flickr Manager. It works great. Makes embedding your Flickr photos a snap.

Need a free AVI player for Windows? I’ve plugged a couple players on the open source applications page here, and I finally got around to trying VLC Media Player. Superlative! I’m merrily watching ChiRunning.

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Some photos from a little Urban Exploring with PeteE in the Gaslamp between beverages during the pub crawl.

Photos from the pub crawl:

14 miles by foot and 9 on bike. That was my week. On Saturday I had a fantastic run from Mission Bay High School to Pacific Beach and then back along Mission Bay. I hit the beach and it was as if I ran through a curtain of air that washed my psyche clean. Exhilarating. I’ve shaved just over a minute off my pace time since beginning running with West Coast Roadrunners three weeks ago.

My running this week:

Update: I counted 8 days for this week. Had to update the numbers. 😦

Last Thursday, January 22, we (at MindTouch) helped launch a new Washington Post online property named WhoRunsGov. This launch was particularly satisfying for me both personally and professionally and causes me to reflect on the past.

I’ve rallied for transparency in government and for freedom of access to information since I was a child. Yes really, since I was a kid. I was bit of a radical and read a lot of political manifestos in addition to Huxley, Orwell, Machiavelli, etc… and I was a Lennon “wannabe”. All well before puberty. Case in point: I was eleven years old during the Iran-Contra scandal and I had a rehearsed satirical rant about Oliver North. Needless to say I was pretty well misunderstood by my peers.

For obvious reasons, WhoRunsGov caters to my desire for transparency in government. In addition to the superlatively authored profiles the site hosts I’ve also lobbied the smart people at the Washington Post to leverage open APIs; such as those provided by the Sunlight Foundation, an organization I’ve been tracking gleefully since its conception. Thankfully with MindTouch Deki querying web services is trivial. I’m optimistic the Washington Post will make the right decision in this matter and also in the matter of allowing others access to MindTouch Deki’s extensive APIs.

I’ve been a news junkie from a young age too. Indeed, I began reading the San Jose Mercury, my hometown newspaper, when I was nine or ten years old. The Mercury was then, and still is, one of the best newspapers in the country. I have always immersed myself in news and been keenly interested in media. The Post is breaking new ground with MindTouch technology. This will become even more clear as the property matures on the MindTouch platform. The opportunity to work with one of the most prominent news and media organization has been elating.

I’ve watched the Washington Post with interest as they’ve set a standard for quality and innovation in new media and continued their tradition of exceptional journalism.  As a result I’ve developed a great admiration for the company that reached a new height with the hiring of Rob Curley, who has since moved on to the Las Vegas Sun. While the Post has recently been refreshing their talent pool with a new generation (there have been several high level retirements) it’s exciting to have MindTouch play a significant role in launching and defining a new business unit.

Finally, well shit, I’m a founder and the CEO of MindTouch and we power a Washington Post property. That’s pretty exciting. Newt Gingrich thought so too. I got a call from his office on Friday. Turns out “Newt visited WhoRunsGov” and asked his technical lead to contact MindTouch about a project his office has been working on. More information about the platform and technology that powers WhoRunsGov.

MindTouch has many millions of users. Is ranked in the top ten open source projects in the World. Is the most popular open source collaboration product in the World. Strangely, has an Alexa rank of ~37,000, this is an indication of www.MindTouch.com popularity, which is remarkably high for a young enterprise software company. A massive community of many thousand developers. A large and growing ecosystem around the world of companies employing MindTouch technology to build businesses and new products including: Amazon, IBM Global Services and NEC. MindTouch has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and every technology publication there is. And a long list of marquee customers like: The Washington Post, Microsoft, Intel, US Army, USA Department of Defense, Mozilla, The United Nations, Harvard-Kennedy…. MindTouch Deki turns three years old this July, 25. Astounding. I think back to the early days of MindTouch. I worked from my basement in a rental condo in Maplewood, MN. Or even earlier when Steve and I held regular midnight Monday phone calls to discuss MindTouch while I was finishing my degree at UNC. We’ve come a very long way in a very short time and we’ve done so with remarkably low cost efficiency and without the influence and reputation of folks on Sand Hill Road. The team at MindTouch has a lot to be proud of and it’s already clear our achievements in 2009 will eclipse all years prior.

Oliver Young is the Forester researcher for Web 2.0. I saw his avatar and it struck me: I don’t have a suit like that. I would look great in that suit. As you can see, I was correct.

UPDATE: Michael Silva progresses the meme. 🙂