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Archive for August, 2009

Summary of What I Wish I knew When I was Twenty.

Important: In writing this short critique (and summary) I am merely engaging in my own thought process. Truly would I never be so arrogant as to suggest that my ideas are better than people far more highly educated and experienced than I.

The title of this book is interesting because had it been called “What I wish I Knew When I was Thirty”, it still would have been applicable to me because I am over thirty.

However, the philosophy of the book is something that I am strongly against. Hindsight is always 20/20, one can never go back and change things. You are who you are today because you are the sum of all your experiences, both good and bad. This book requires a summary, so here it is:

Seelig begins her book by describing the “five dollar challenge”. In this challenge students at Stanford were required to innovate in order to get the highest ROI. Some students came up with unethical ideas, such as scalping tickets, but others sold their presentation time and made over $600. Now, this was a five minute window at Stanford, where a five minute ad shown to the world’s brightest minds is worth $600. Could this have happened at your garden variety university? Probably not, or probably for not near as much. Although this exercise had good intentions, innovation simply doesn’t happen in a two hour window in the real world. Real entrepreneurs with bold intentions are innovative, but it requires a lot of time to become introspective, which is a requirement in order to innovate. As an example, some shady inventor might develop the “slap chopper” in two hours or the ginzu knife (I actually bought a set), but these are niche products.

It’s just my personal opinion, but proper innovation takes time, and the type of innovation one engages in a two hour window will be far different than say, developing a plan to sell inexpensive shoes to the underprivileged for a few pennies over cost (and still retain a small profit).

Seelig then suggests that “attitude” is perhaps the biggest determinant of what we can accomplish. I suppose she really means that if we “think we can’t, we can’t”. She follows this with an anecdote about Jeff Hawkins, the developer of the Palm Pilot. He had problems since the very beginning of developing this revolutionary hand-held computer. One innovation that Jeff developed was handwriting recognition software, which allowed the palm pilot to become much more consumer friendly. Jeff is an example of someone with a good attitude, because he faced his problems directly and turned traditional assumptions on their head. Seelig later admits that Jeff possesses a one of kind mind and stresses that few are capable of such feats. Considering that this is true, what purpose does it serve to a mainstream audience to use a statistical outlier as an example?

That logic reminds me of those who always claim that you don’t need a college degree; after all, just look at Bill Gates! My reply is always to say: “well, you aren’t bill gates.” I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s true. Bill Gates is also a statistical outlier, and like Jeff, the inventor of the palm pilot, is not a good example to use for a mainstream audience.

In contrast, though, her section on “Do-Bands” was well played. The Do-Bands was a project where people started to trade rubber bands. It was designed to create positive social change through self-empowerment. The goal of the project was to be innovative, to convince others to support your cause by accepting a do-band. They then passed the do-band around to their friends, and apparently tracked them through the internet (each band had its own ID). The do-band project was a success, some people even ended up contacting long lost relatives, which was probably an unpredicted side effect of the project. But again, this was at Stanford, which is a school that caters to statistical outliers. You are at Stanford not because you are mediocre, if you know what I mean.

Another part of the book that I did like was her analysis of the types of risks. She describes five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. Some people are more comfortable taking physical risks while others are uncomfortable taking emotional risks. She asks her readers to map their own risk profile, to gauge exactly where their risks lie according to this risk spectrum. Personally, I am not a physical risk taker – you’ll never see me skiing unless it’s on the Xbox 360. The other areas I tend to take big risks, especially intellectual risks.

Seelig then mentions her colleague at Stanford (surprise!) who is an expert in the field of risk management. This expert suggests that when you analyze a risky situation, you should define all of the possible outcomes, and guess the odds of each one. You then need to create a plan for each eventuality. I strongly disagree with this. I would never advise another to take a foolish risk, but you can’t ever unravel uncertainty. An entrepreneur / innovator is constantly faced with uncertainty, and it is his quick analysis of the battlefield and his ability to quickly innovate a solution is what separates him apart from his competition. One must constantly surmise the risks that lie ahead but to think too deeply about them might motivate one to take no risk at all.

Most of the book is filled with similar anecdotes which don’t resonate with a mainstream audience. One has to be realistic. I hate to sound negative but it is unlikely that most of us will ever develop a cadre PhD friends at Stanford, like Tina Seelig. We aren’t going to be invited over for tea at Jeff Bezo’s house, nor will Obama call us up and sit us down to share a beer over a perceived racial injustice incidence. The majority of us will need to innovate; certainly, and innovation is the thesis of the book. But in reality we will create strong niches and develop our own social networks, but these are unlikely to include statistical outliers. I am not going to say that it can’t happen, it is unrealistic to expect or even to desire for it to happen. Surely you might one day get on Oprah and receive the Oprah hug, but you don’t require such extreme social climbing to market your personal brand, your zephyr, and your niche.

Unfortunately, Tina’s book just doesn’t connect with a mainstream audience. Well, it simply didn’t connect with me.

I prefer ME 2.0 by Dan Schwabel, who was a regular guy who worked his way to stardom. He wasn’t a professor at Stanford when he wrote the book, he was struggling to find his way just like the rest of us.

The good news about posterous is that it allows you to mass post your “personal” blog posts to several different sites. The bad news: so what? There are plenty of other tools that can do the same thing and are far more efficient. Posterous is good for those who are very short on time and who wish to spam their various social media accounts. Thus, that begs a question: why are there so many social media channels? When the economy shifts or enters into a recession, usually there is a lull in activity. There is fear. People hoard precious metals.

In every business cycle for the last two hundred years there has always been a technological innovation on the horizon that draws people like moths to a flame. A great example of this phenomenon was during the late 1990’s, when the web was exploding; thousands of companies formed to exploit its potential. How many survive to this day? Very few.

With every great technological innovation (radio, television, railroad, airplane, etc) there is a mass of capital investment, much of which goes to waste. Through the process of natural selection only a few survive, and those that do end up cornering a market, or forming an oligopoly. Amazon comes to mind, does it not?

The next wave is social media. Social marketing, social media, social networking — none of this is new. These days existed back in the 1970’s, when scientists and only scientists used the internet, and particularly usenet, to broadcast networking opportunities. At a speed of around 150 baud. How fast is 150 baud compared to a modern broadband modem? Let’s not Go There.

 At any rate, posterous is one social spice resting upon a shoddy shelf filled with social media ingredients. This is but one of many applications swirling and congealing within a tepid stew of other similar automated social media contraptions.

At the moment posterous doesn’t seem to offer much besides automation; a personal blog it is not. One of many spices it is, several of which internet social media cooks are quick to adopt but just as ready to toss aside. I’ve been around the block, I’ve seen this before.

This is my first post on posterous, perhaps there will be more. Writing this gives me an excuse to copypasta this doggerel to my own blog, located at seanfindley.com, a spot on the internet that so far out of the reach of the empire even the stormtroopers don’t take vacations there.

(originally posted on posterous.com)

One can judge how many tweets are posted based on twitter logs kept locally. Locally, as on your server. Logs ready to be analyzed.

With every new tweet a tweet id (TID) is entered into their database. The tweet IDS are sequential. If one posts one tweet and another posts a tweet right after, the two tweets will have sequential IDS.

Recently, I advertised my blog, promoting some Zephyrness, and the twitter posts spanned an interval of one minute and twenty four seconds.

I analyzed my tweet IDS in order to ascertain the number of tweets posted, per second.

Based on this logic:

The number for my first Tweet id (TID) was 3260889338.

My next tweet, which was one minute and 24 seconds after my last, had the TID of 3260905890.

These were my own tweets; remember, they were one minute and twenty four seconds apart.

Assuming that each tweet creates an incremental TID (tweet++?),  subtract these two numbers to determine how many tweets were posted in one minute and twenty four seconds.

3260889338 – 3260905890 = 16552.

My posts were composed late at night. Nevertheless, during the span of 1 minute and 24 seconds, 16552 tweets were posted.

Translated: this was 197 tweets per second.

god damn.

Currently, I am employed at a non-profit just outside of Reno. The non-profit has been in business for quite a few years and serves many niches within its community. Its message of purpose contains strong currents of desire for social justice. They desire to bring together volunteerism and personal responsibility to help local social problems.

I support their cause, that’s why I am there.

Interestingly, this summer I am taking a course in evolutionary psychology. One focus within the course is to understand and to implement a wide variety of social media techniques. These techniques include twitter, facebook, blogging, and a litany of other web applications designed to smooth our transition into Entrepreneurship 2.0

As luck would have it, or as the fates would desire it, the non-profit I mentioned could benefit from a similar transition. They currently have a Web 1.0 presence containing almost no interaction.

So, a few days ago I came up with a social media plan of sorts, which integrates all of the other employees into various social media functions. Each of them will have to contribute to a central blog at least once every couple of weeks, and they will be required to tweet a couple of times a day. The investment of time is minimal, but the benefits could be exponential. Connections will be made.

As they develop their social media presence they will undoubtedly connect with other like minded individuals. This could bring in new revenue in the form of increased donations, grants, or even clients. A non-profit is a lot like a regular business in that they need to expand, even if at a slower pace, in order to survive. So, by teaching the staff of this non-profit various social media techniques that I have learned in this ultra fast paced summer class, their web presence will grow wider and will deepen.

The plan was recently submitted so we shall see what they decide to adopt. If they do adopt this plan or some of the more important elements of it, then I’ll be able to see my knowledge being applied right away. That’s an exciting concept, and that’s a Zephyr in action.

This post justly fits into the category of web development.

Here is an analysis of the twitter tool I created, from a programmer’s perspective.

First, I really didn’t want to make my own tool. I’d rather get one for free and manipulate it to do my bidding. I searched for quite awhile for the correct tool and the only one I found created a cron job which dumped data into a database. Good enough. However, this was only 25% of the esoteric equation of information manipulation. I needed more. I had to create my own tool

I understand that making tools can get Innovators and Real Entrepreneurs to take notice. This was an element of my motive.

Some history (snooze):

Back in the mid 90’s I ran a series of websites. These websites contained news about topics both popular and obscure. I created a tool that scanned a thousand websites for the latest updates. As a result, I was able to borrow the latest news far before anyone else. Eventually I sold these tools to Innovators for a reasonable sum. My tools created a competitive advantage. On my own server (which was pricey at the time) I hosted others and earned a few bucks based on their traffic. A princely wage it was not, but paying the cost of doing business it did.

The tool I borrowed dumps data into the database in a timely fashion. The tool I created uses php, mysql, some javascript, and other blinking lights. My tool goes into this other database and retrieves tweets. It uses SELECT and retrieves a row of about 70 tweets. It displays HTML in the form of a FORM which displays the tweets. It also takes URLS within the tweets and makes them clickable. This includes any HTTP, #, or USERNAME type of reference. This is for the benefit of blog readers interested in clicking on value-added information located at the top of every category of the site. My tool also makes the tweets searchable. At present there are three thousand tweets to search through and it has only been a couple of days. Thus I use search terms to search through the tweets of tweeters I follow.

I then generate lists of content-rich tweets that I hand-pick for each category of my blog.

There are a couple of sections of the program I built. One generates the list, the other searches the list select, and the other processes the information selected.

Even though this blog has yet to be launched there are already people clicking on the tweets that I have hand selected. This is good news, as this is evidence that the tweets I select provide value-added information.

Twitter moves ultra-fast, It creates a steady stream of information far too wide for any one human to digest. Thus the web development motive for creating this tool is to intercept the very best from this vast stream of tweets and provide value-added content for my readers.

 There are other areas I can go with this, just so you know.