Taken on the way to San Jose airport. Check out the snowcaps…Barry says snow level was down to about 1000‘. Heh.
Off To Austin
The Perils Of The Professional Prognosticator
“Comedy Central’s series “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” are now available on the iTunes Music Store. The series are available at $1.99 per episode or via a new “Multi-Pass” feature on iTunes that lets fans buy the next month’s worth of 16 new episodes for $9.99.
“‘Multi-Pass’ gives fans the ability to purchase a block of 16 episodes of these hit programs during the current season and have them delivered automatically to their computer after they air on TV,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes.” (emphasis added)
Damn. ‘Twas off by about a month.
John T. Unger: Artist (& Global Microbrand)
John T. Unger is an artist with a penchant for playing with fire. (Literally. He makes cool metal fire sculptures and lots of other neat stuff.) John writes:
“I’ve been getting quite a lot of press and sales and commission inquiries this winter, from pretty much all over the country. Right now I’m working on drawings for 10-12 sculptures to adorn the courtyard of a 17 story Chelsea highrise in NYC. I’m waiting to hear back from an architect in Topeka, Kansas about three Great Bowls O Fire that he’d like to fit out with gas flames and install on stone pillars in a new restaurant. I just got off the phone with a client who bought a Great Bowl earlier this winter and now wants to surround his pool with some of my torches. Rock on.
I’ve done three interviews for magazines and websites this week. The Sprint Ambassador Program is sending me a free cell phone with six months of free service. School children write emails from overseas asking about my art for school reports they’re doing. HGTV contacted me a while back about possibly featuring my work on their show, Offbeat America (it doesn’t look like it will happen this time, but it’s still pretty cool to be asked). I’ve also met a lot of incredibly cool people this year that I consider to be good friends despite never having seen them in person.
Almost all of this has come about because of the time I’ve put in writing blogs.”
Go John! (And yes, Hugh, you’re right.)
Good Intentions
Why is this relevant now in March 2006? It’s starting to get some legs.
A few key quotes. The words are Doc’s. (The underlines are annotations that I’ve added for context. The links afterwords are things I have added as well, but didn’t want to change the original source, lest something be latter attributed incorrectly.)
Doc: “The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them.
The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don’t need marketing to make Intention Markets.
The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don’t have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that.
The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just “branded” by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.
The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.“
Links:
Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect.
The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.
A Few More Conference Thoughts
Continuing the conference conversation from here…
“Something has been bothering me about the format of the [Etech] conference. Each session is so rushed that there is little room for Q&A following each presentation. As a result, you don’t often get a chance to hear the audience’s point of view. The only way to get at this is if you force yourself on strangers in the hallway but, depending upon how you strike up a conversation, it can be hit or miss.” – Ian Kennedy
More:
“I’d be willing to bet that, if polled, 90% of etech attendees would tell you that they hear the most interesting and compelling ideas and thoughts in the hallways, around the coffee pots, and out on the deck… not in the presentations. This year’s etech is big, much bigger even than last year (my first time here), and there are a lot of first-timers. You can usually identify them pretty easily– they’re the ones standing awkwardly alone, sometimes on the peripheries of conversations.” – Chris Lott
One more, also from Chris Lott, on “The Name Badge Assessment”
Lott: “…you try to talk to one of the Conference All-Stars– perhaps someone you’ve interacted pleasantly with via email or IRC just minutes before– and they stare at your badge for a moment (you can almost hear the mental checklist preceding the shutdown: Google? Nope. Yahoo? Nope. Press? Nope. A-List blogger? Nope.) before their eyes glaze over. It doesn’t happen every time, but often enough to discourage input from just the people from whom interaction should be encouraged.”
On The Conference Thing: Etech, SXSW, Unconferences and Monocultures
It’s the idea that just keeps on giving. It’s been brought up before. It’ll be brought up again. And this week is going to be an interesting study in contrasts.
“I can’t think of a conference that is more insider, exclusive, obnoxiously rude, insidery (did I say they’re all insiders?) than Etech.” – Marc Canter
Over the weekend, was talking to one of the women who was speaking at Etech this week, and she said the following: “Yeah, when they added me to the list, I increased the number of women speakers by 25%.” No way, I thought. Then I checked the Etech speakers list. (The list is also repeated after the jump, for convenience.) Wow. It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. By my rough count, about a dozen female speakers out of about 113 total speakers. A 9:1 ratio. Zoiks.
Why does this matter? Because conferences in this image have no edges to them. They are monocultural.
“But…but…where do we find speakers/participants for our technical conference on x?”
Here are a few dozen speakers. (By the way, to set up this Haystack took all of a couple of hours. The conversation was on Saturday, started putting speakers in on Sunday, and we were ready to rock by mid-day Monday. This thing is fun.) Click on the link above. You want a speaker on Digital Identity? Click on the “Speaker Topics” tag category and choose Digital Identity; you’ll find a bunch. Want a speaker on Product Development? Remix technologies? New Media art? They’re in there. Not sure about the credentials of these folks? Go into their profile, if they have an RSS feed, you’ll see what they’ve been thinking about lately. Want to see where they’ve spoken before? Check the “Past Talks” tag category.
Not enough choice for you in that haystack above? Here are a couple of hundred more speakers. No excuses.
I also don’t think it’s just the monoculture thing in conferences that is broken. In fact, I agree with Dave Winer:
“My guess is that if you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting. In other words, putting someone on stage and telling them they’re boss probably makes them dumber. In any case it surely makes them more boring.” (This is from his unconference essay from earlier this week.)
Now, let’s compare the speakers list at Etech to the speakers list for SXSW. The ratio is utterly different, and improves from 9:1 to about 3:1. Not perfect, but hellaciously better.
Here’s what I propose: next time you choose to invest your time in going to a conference, think about what that investment of time is getting you on the following scales:
(There could be a number of other dimensions on here as well: geographic background, political beliefs, sexual orientation, art vs. tech vs. performance expertise, and so forth.)
Look for the un/conferences with edges. See you in Austin.
[Update]
“I found refuge in the hallways, since the ETech format is highly structured, and the sessions were all jammed.” – Stowe
“I was also surprised — it’s my first ETech — at the depressing ratio of women to men. Perhaps its inevitable that a conference that is constantly referring to its audience as the ‘alpha geeks’ would be so skewed, but it’s still annoying to me.” – Mo’ Stowe
Continue reading “On The Conference Thing: Etech, SXSW, Unconferences and Monocultures”
Right On, Miss Rogue
The Edges
“Really interesting things happen at the edges where two disciplines meet, or when they realize how much they already have in common.” – Mark Finnern
(photo credit: Dave Gray, also check the Two Worlds set )
When Dishwashers Go Bad
Let me rephrase that. I’ll start again.
Ethan needs our help.
A tale of woe has cast a pall over North Dallas. The story? A household appliance, gone horribly, horribly wrong. Was it because of its upbringing? An early abandonment by its parent, GE, at a young age? Those wild, unsupervised teenage years, huffing from 220V outlets, making runs to Gladewater every Saturday night with the Cuisinart and the Senseo? We may never know.
What we do know is this. We’re now in Day Two of a pending humanitarian crisis, the likes of which we’ve not seen since the dark days of The Mixmaster Incident (and related civil unrest) back in ’42.
Of course, this crisis could have been averted if Ethan had home warranty. It’s not like we haven’t told him a million times. All he had to do was search “home warranty texas” and that dark cloud over North Dallas could have vanished as quickly as it arrived. But now, here he is, desperate for help.
The Head Lemur has pledged his help. Dennis Howlett is doing what he can. Kent Newsome is on board.
Ethan’s dishwasher is too far gone to be negotiated with. But perhaps, mayhaps, someone out in Dallas (Jennifer?) knows someone who knows someone who can perform an intervention. Jake, is it possible to bring in reinforcements from your neck of the woods?
The timing of our collective response is critical. SXSW is this weekend, starting in less than 48 hours, putting many people in harm’s way. And, while Texas is a big state, this menace knows no bounds. Today, Dallas. Tomorrow, Austin. By the weekend, this crisis may hit pandemic status, requiring action by FEMA. And no-one wants that.
(Hey Ethan…the specs are good, but a better description of the problem would prolly help, too. And what’s the model # of your dishwasher?)
(dishwasher photo credit: emelin)
