Betsy Aoki's WebLog

Giving a 5 minute talk at the Kodak Theater (140 Characters Conference)

2009-11-06T19:29:00Z

Doing the Ignite presentation and chatting a little bit with Scott Berkun (who has a book coming out on public speaking) I figured I'd do a followup on another 5 minute talk and some things I learned from doing a non-Ignite, 5 minute talk. For 140 Characters Conference in LA, they started playing the music - the dreaded music - when you need to start closing down your talk. I wasn't the only speaker caught short, but since nowhere else in my world did they ever start playing music to shut me up before:) , I figure I'd share what I learned.

You can see how the talk came out here. For those who wanted to know how it was meant to close down, summary of the slides you missed..

Stefan's Expression upon seeing me in his office the next day at 6 am
Twitter Stats from the overall launch period
Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void cartoon about purists being the ones with no skin in the game (be relentless for your customers, it doesn't have to be perfect at all times, and after being up all night, how can it be?)

I figured from the fact I was giving the talk people would figure out that the Bing team actually supported everything I did that evening, but next time I'll front load some of the closing message up higher. I gave this talk again as a part of an hour-long NW Entrepreneur University presentation this past week (www.nwen.org) and it was nice to be able to give Hugh his due as well as credit to the twitter-friendly nature of our PR team.

All photos here taken by http://twitter.com/adventuregirl, otherwise known as Stef Michaels. :)

Timing and pace

First, don't let Ignite presentations, hard as they are, make you overconfident. I had less than 20 slides for my 5 minute talk but what I really should have had, was 5. Maybe 10. The fact I went over 10, set me up for danger.

I also did not auto-advance the slides, as I did with the Ignite talk, which would have forced me to complete on time (I was a couple slides short)

Instead, I drilled the talk at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. This was good for keeping me brief and moving off the slides without a timer, and I believe was the reason I finished with my story intact (though my kicker slides not exposed).

Expect what happened to me, will happen to you. They will start the 5 minute clock but your slide deck won't be up. Keep talking even as you fuss with it.

Content

For a 5 minute talk, do a brief overview and front-load. That's what saved me (once the music started) - my most complex and entertaining story was the first one I told (and possibly could have been the only one I told, but I wanted to balance the presentation with more data).
Ignite has it right - memorise your words and use vivid pictures. In my case I had to animate some twitter tweets because I was talking about them - but if you have a more visually oriented talk, go the Ignite route and do minimal words, big photo.
For 140 Characters, I saw some presenters lose their audience (10 minute was the longest, so not even that long a period in which to lose people) by being dry and not conforming to the "story" format that Jeff Pulver really espouses. The best stories were human and vivid (Wm. Marc Salsberry's photos didn't work and he had us all weeping from the narrative of his foray into tech photography and the support for his brother dying of cancer).
AV fallback = interpretive dance. I joked with my manager Stefan and coworker Aya that if I couldn't use the slide deck of the tweets I'd do an interpretive dance of what happened on launch night. I actually DID think of some poses I would have to do, if I got no visuals. That cracked me up and helped me mentally before going on stage.

Venue

The Kodak Theater is a 3,000+ seat venue. This is where people receive their Oscars and by custom Jack Nicholson has his own marked chair. If you have a chance to speak here, do, but be prepared to think "Holy crap, this place is REALLY BIG!"
The nice thing about Kodak is that it is a beautiful piece of architecture. There are lush balconies, an awesome sense of history, and while enormous, it doesn't quite scare the way a stadium or arena venue could, because it has STYLE.
The AV guy, JT, was awesome but I wasn't used to the cameraman actually flipping from me to the screen of my laptop. Other panelists I talked to, who had to sit in front of monitors showing thier faces, also had eerie feelings. There may be no way to rehearse the sensation without being in the venue, but practicing in front of a mirror could help people get over their own faces.

This photo is more of what I looked like to myself when the camera was on me and not my laptop. Lights are super bright when you are onstage -people warned me and it is true that you really can't see any faces in the audience.

Garb

I wore a skirt thinking I'd be miked and walking around, but I actually ended up behind a podium (to work the laptop). This meant that a key element of my presentation,a 1920s style cloche, stole some of the show (which was fine by me, its an homage to the decor of the theater). I know most of you won't want to wear 20s hats, but it helped disguise my bad hair day and turned me into a "character."
If I had walked around, I would have tried to imitate Berkun (see his ignite video mentioned in prior post) and his wider gestures. From my high school theater daze, I remembered that people see you as mostly tiny on stage and you can get away with more exaggerated arms and motions.
I saw killer boots at this conference (after all, it was LA). Next time I'm going for OSSM footgear and walking around the stage.

Hope this helps others in the same boat - live it vivid!

Betsy

Giving an Ignite Presentation - What I learned at Gnomedex 2009

2009-08-25T03:47:00Z

Note: All photos this page Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com

I am grateful to Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media for nudging me into giving my first Ignite talk at Gnomedex 2009, in the same way I'm grateful for previous circumstances nudging me to bungee-jump off a bridge near Victoria Falls or tandem hang-glide off a cliff near Rio de Janeiro. Doing an Ignite - like doing one of those crazy stunts - changes your brain.

Because other resources online helped me get ready, and because it's not really like any other kind of presentation, I offer some observations for people wanting to do an Ignite talk themselves. I hope you find them useful and look forward to seeing yours at the next Ignite!

Preparation and Delivery

It helped that I'd been to several Ignite events, including the first one ever (held in Seattle). I had seen various topics presented really well and I kenned the general vibe. Though the Gnomedex venue last Friday had no alcohol, many of the Ignite venues do, which can help.
I picked a topic around which I had strong feelings (social media 'guruhood') and knew a lot about, and tried to make it funny. The important part of the formula there is the strong feelings - it's a hard enough format without adding apathy in to weigh you down. Passion buoys. Use it!
Read other people's pointers. Required reading and viewing were helpful items prepared by Scott Berkun (who is writing a book about giving presentations). His stuff especially helps you craft and prep the deck.
Scott Berkun will tell you about the double slide trick. I will tell you about the blurred slide trick. Meaning, have slides that could do double duty for each other, even though they are different images. For example the "trail" and the "foursquare" slide of mine are really about the same premise (social gurus tooting and you finding them). I could give either slides' points no matter which of the two were visible. Also, the "good" social media guru and the "bad" social media guru slides - since "bad" was the opposite of good, I had some breathing room to recover.
Get better photos than I had. I was paranoid about copyright and except for photos I took myself, and one Scott Beale photo with permission, the rest were (aiieeee ) Powerpoint stock art. If I had it to do over I'd have gotten better images.
Pare, pare, pare. My original idea for the ignite deck had 5 ideas per slide. Too many. I tried for 3 points per slide. I ran out of time on some of them, even in the final performance. Jason Grigsby's advice was my watchword here. Improv comedy is improv editing.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. If you haven't gone through your deck 12x (ie, one hour of solid practice) you are slacking. Sit with a long suffering friend for an hour and just do it. I could recite slide order driving to work. Those were days I did not carpool. :)
There are two modes of preparation for Ignite. The drill mode where you have the deck done and now you are practicing delivery, ad libbing at times but the slides are all set to move at 15 seconds. The prep mode, where the deck is still changing based on how you are talking about the slides. Know which mode you are in and no cheating!
It's important to drill without starting over, as Jason Grigsby notes. Even if you mess up. In drill mode, you soldier on til you have one completed rev.
Drilling daily also teaches you when you get stale and sick of speaking. It's like overtraining - the first run through of the day sucks, but so does the last one (if it's an ignite talk). I was very conscious of not wanting to practice too much day of the talking, but knowing I had to get the "first timer" jitters out.
In my early practices I was saying too much and running out of breath.Good thing you don't die after holding your breathe for 5 minutes. Have someone sit with you and coach you on when to breath. Usually it's after you make a point, but it's hard to remember.
I tried to figure out the right pace through a number of tactics. I did one rehearsal in a John Wayne accent just to try for alternate delivery. Then I watched Randy Pausch's Last Lecture and some Margaret Cho standup routines about race. Both of those two have excellently paced delivery with humor.
Use shame if you have to, and channel muses. I used Pausch to shame myself somewhat (dude is dying of cancer and he did it, so woman up Betsy!) and Cho for her insane faces and impeccable timing. (I know I had to have been channeling Cho because Randy Stewart, who took these pics of me, tweeted that I had made faces during the talk and he was glad he had a zoom. )

"We can take them!"

As you might expect, the actual experience of diving off a bridge with a harness and straps around your feet changes your perspective and likewise, so does an ignite talk.

I bought new clothes for this (hey, I'm a girl). The pants had to flow and I had to be able to raise my arms over my head without the shirt whacking out.
An hour before, find a nook to get your head together. Before the talk, that afternoon,I tried to practice. There really was no place to do it at Bell Harbor without being like the crazy old dude on the street corner who talks to people you can't see. What I should have done was snuck off to my car in the garage and drilled - instead I ruined some guy's cell phone call in a side conference room by babbling to myself. I also did some yoga stretches which was also fairly embarrassing but I was starting to clench up.
Mental breaks help. When I got sick of my own voice in the hour before the talk, I went back to looking at Margaret Cho routines. I was trying for funny so I needed her as my muse. Pick a Youtube video that has the tone of your ignite talk and watch it when you are sick of drilling. It really helps shift the chemicals in your head.
Remember the challenge and cut yourself some slack. Watching Elan Lee leave the stage after nailing the first Ignite Gnomedex talk - he is a fabulous presenter innately - showed me what it really costs to do an ignite even if you are a veteran. The two people before me, literally stood against the wall and panted afterwards. You can't help it - your adrenalin is up and you are coming down from a chemical cocktail.
Take what comfort you can. Brady introduced me and I used that time without the mike to ham it up. Cynically, I was thinking - hey, better bow now before I do the talk, just in case I bomb and they don't want to clap later! But the movement (bowing, flourishing my arms cause I didn't know what to do with them without the mike) actually loosened me up and carried me through most of the talk ok.
Being on stage, you can be more expansive with your movements. Death grip on the microphone does not work. But more than that, at the beginning of the presentation Brady was with me, and it's psychologically much easier on me when I share a spotlight. Knowing I was sharing let me be expansive and I tried to use that feeling while I had it (it fled quickly! ).
You are supposed to pick out faces in the audience and talk to them - I blew that part. I just looked around randomly.I have no real memory of anyone I looked at. :)
I made mistakes and kept going. The audience does not know what you leave out. Use that fact!
Figure out what your best last sentence is head of time. It's hard to tell when the slide will blank out, so I ended slightly early with my last sentence and handed the mike to Brady.Other presenters seemed to end right on time. Your mileage may vary.

Live it vivid!

Blogher09 - the evolution of a conference

2009-07-30T06:42:00Z

Coming back from Chicago inundated me with work, and so I'll admit to only lately becoming aware of negative Blogher09 reactions to both the size and the swag-gish aspect of the conference. You'd think I would have been in the thick of the ire, being a sponsor, but I didn't get the same vibe as the critics at all. I wrote this after seeing Blogher co-founder Jory DesJardin's post which resonated with me on a lot of levels (In my blogging I don't care about ads, product reviews, or being known for much except enabling others to do community stuff).

It's true, that Bing came to Blogher with swag at ready. I forgot most of my business card stash and handed out Bing stickers with my name scribbled on the back instead. Microsoft Spa appointment recipients left with travel packs and meetup attendees ended up with Pokens, a cute little gizmo that exchanges social media info like a USB. To be honest, the Bing folks felt like bringing swag was good manners. We weren't sure what other companies could afford this year, and we knew that for many bloghers this was the only conference they might attend all year. Unlike the geek elite who are drowning in USB keys and t-shirts, this was it for some people and so we wanted to give away stuff that would be worthwhile.

As to brands, I personally (as an experiment) wore three different Bing-branded t-shirts and juxtaposed them with the brands I encountered for fun. So, you could say I contributed to making the conference more like Spons-her.That wasn't a medal, that was Bing across my chest. But everywhere I went, it showed I was willing to answer questions about Bing and people asked them. Or they savored their favorite crazy Bing ad.

Branded shirt or not, I also made time (despite meetup and booth required shifts) to attend one session where many people were tearing up or opening up and weeping. I say this because, no matter how bad you think Windows Vista has treated you, nobody but nobody is crying at PDC or Tech Ed. :) And a gaming conference? Forget it.

I sat in the front to help take pictures of the panel so I saw it all up close, women telling their very real stories of grief, change, and transformation. Babies died, innocence died, old ways of thinking died and you know, when something dies or changes, often people cry. Bloghers in the audiemce told their stories and cried. At that point there is only one brand - human - and we all have it tattooed across our chests. It's hard for me to think anyone went to the session I went to, and then felt like Blogher was only commercialism.

(And, yes, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile team was in the audience too, and they told me they were as moved as I was. )

I wasn't able to be at the Community Keynote but I was told later it was the same intensity. The blog posts people read aloud ripped through to the heart of the listeners and people at the cocktail party I talked to, still had to shake themselves to get out of the funk (in a good way) the keynote created. Talking about it brought the bloghers "back there" to the narrative of the keynote .

You know, some people may have had a hard year, and maybe being showered in free swag was what they got out of blogher. For them, maybe it was the chance to feel like for once, having too much, abundance, pampered materially. I'm a geek girl who has too many USB keys and conference t-shirts. I am lucky to take or leave material things.

For others, surrounded by all this emotion (and writing is a very private effort even if the results are public) the brazen storytelling and constant talking, sharing, expressing may have driven some to just spend a few nights with a book and the bathtub in the hotel. There was one night I did that, the last one I was in town. The sleep deprivation just crashed me out, and I knew I'd be meeting someone for breakfast the next day before my plane.

Blogher as it grows up to become its next phase, and the phase after that, is only going to get denser and richer like one of those ridiculous lava chocolate cakes. It will be in different languages, it will combine new groups of women, it will engage on all sides of the political and economic and social fence (I would have loved to see the Palin session as well but again, only heard from others how that went). It can't please everyone in the same ways but it can continue to be a rich and supportive mix of both old and new bloggers, niche and broad topic writers, paid and unpaid.

Blogher10 is an awesome prospect - the 10th year, New York, and incredible momentum around the voices of women. Whether I'm a Bing booth babe again or not, I'm going. See you there.

Live it vivid!

Brands Gone Wild - Bing & other brands at Blogher 2009 (Part 2)

2009-07-26T22:25:00Z

As an experiment, for most of the Blogher 2009 conference (except when I worked out in the gym), I opted to wear a Bing t-shirt everywhere I went. We are a new brand, and I figured it would help not only spread brand awareness but would allow me to be remembered if anyone had questions about Bing when they saw me.

Yes I had clean ones for every day, thanks for asking. :) There was the ibing, ubing (employee), the regular plain bing (official ones we give away), and "bring it/bing it" (don't ask) -- visually enough alike that I'd jog the memory but different enough you would not get bored if you knew me.

This meant that the truly wacky moments of branding during Blogher, I was showing the totem or waving the colors. And there were wacky moments.

My first moment of brand wildness was realizing I was sitting next to the guy who drives the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile at breakfast. You know what's coming here don't you?

Doggone Dave, at the helm of the Oscar Mayer Wiener

That breakfast, I was also sitting with Betsy Weber of Techsmith (I'm the Other Betsy) and we vowed upon hearing they were giving rides at lunch that WE HAD TO GO. I mean who can resist the Big Bun?

Here it is in full glory...

The Oscar Mayer crew took video of the "Betsy and Betsy" show as part of their ongoing tips for bloggers; stay tuned at the www.hotdoggerblog.com for more info on that.

Betsy of Techsmith really is an instigator - next she wanted to go for a ride in a Bitchun Yellow Camaro - we didn't EXACTLY follow the route GM wanted and we MAY have been irregular in our driving habits. People got out of our way though. No photos are provided here to protect the innocent and GM. :)

Next, I was getting ready for the cocktail party when I had more close encounters of the Brand Kind; an unusual visitor to the Microspa led by some Office folks.

And on Saturday (once again with Betsy Weber - do you see a trend here? :) - posting with the Michelin man. Note how the curve of the Michelin brand is echoed by the phrase on my shirt. And yes, dude was self-inflating the whole time we posted for that photo and I don't mean ego. :) I mean that suit is its own air conditioner....

What can we conclude from this experiment? Apparently if you are riding in a giant hotdog, anonymously screaming by in a yellow Camaro, following a giant feminine potato down escalators and huga beehive-shaped tire dude, nothing really bad happens to you from the brand police. At least, Stefan didn't call on my cell to fire me.

Bring it and bing it!

Bing at Blogher 2009 (aka #blogher09): Part One

2009-07-26T21:24:00Z

I'm writing this in the Chicago airport in the familiar happy post-conference exhaustion. Unlike my previous Blogher attendance, I was doing more booth babe/evangelism of a product than being a social media expert, and it was cool to see how folks have reacted to Bing. And I got into Chicago at the right time - luckily for me - to catch the Chicago appearance of Tara Hunt and the Whuffaoke crew at a meetup at The Coop, a Chicago co-working space.

The Coop Party - met some really cool local folks interested in creativity and design

The Whuffaoke crew parked outside The Coop.

What drivers see - the view behind Winnie the Winnebago above.

Tara Hunt,right, getting ready to rawk the mike at Whuffaoke

Blogher this year was a sold-out conference - and it sold out months ago. To help combat disappointment, they added "Lobbycon" and some additional registration spaces but I think we taxed the Sheraton to its limits. I tried to find a photo setup that was emblematic of Blogher and honestly, other people took better ones. See here for a stunning array of bloghers' photos.

As mentioned, I wasn't really free to roam too much, between presenting at the MicroSpa with some amazing women bloggers and working the booth. As part of our presenations about Search Overload and Bing, I met Devra and Aviva, cofounders of http://www.parentopia.com/ and authors of Mommy Guilt . I also got to meet Beth Blecherman of Techmamas. All of these women are presenters of great poise and grace and I learned a lot from watching them in our presentations.

Here's me at the booth demoing video search:

I did see a panel moderated by Ponzi Pirillo, and featuring Kelly Russell-Donner, Kate from Sweet|Salty and Daniela Capistrano about Transformational Power of Blogging . It reminded me that blogging was about bravery and storytelling.Corporations could learn from the storytelling skills found in these "issue blogs." If your brand packed as powerful a punch as discussions of babies dying and sexual assault, you wouldn't need marketing programs.

I snuck away from the booth, leaving Nathan Buggia behind, to see one more session. Here's Nate:

I'm always interested in learning more about search issues that cross all engines, and Vanessa Fox's Advanced SEO session was fabulous - she is really great at adjusting the level of discussion for technically wonky and technically newbie audience members and really approachable. She was mobbed at the end. :)

Next year, Blogher turns 10 years old, and it will be a blow-out celebration in New York (and no doubt even bigger than this conference, which burst the Sheraton at the seams). See you there!

Transparency is good, but not a replacement for the "old objectivity"

2009-07-20T04:08:00Z

I was a newspaper reporter before I went into Web technology as a profession, and well before becoming any kind of blogger, so when I comment on journalism I have both perspectives ensconced in my brain. I was also a reporter before the journalism field took a lot of flack for lack of objectivity, so my expectations may surprise some of you jaded by disappointment in journalism.

The title of this blog post riffs from a well-written piece by David Weinberger Transparency is the New Objectivity. In his piece, he notes that the hyperlinked nature of online articles and blogs, which enable presentation of reference documents (ie, the materials used by a reporter to create a news story) create a more authoritative sourcing and thus more respect for that author's work. Also, he believes respect is fostered by an author's transparency with regard to personal and political views.

In other words, if I know your political bent,and I see photos/scans of all the documents you used for Watergate, I'd believe you more 'cause I know where you are coming from. I could reconstruct for myself how you came to the conclusions of your news story, and agree with you based on that knowledge.

While I am actually a fan of transparency, and it's nice especially for journalism students to be able to recreate the thought processes behind great investigative journalism, I'm not sure presentation of author views and reference material alone is enough to create the kind of journalism that was the goal of the "old objectivity." We can't afford to mistake the gloss of transparency for the heavy lifting objectivity in journalism was supposed to do.

Transparency of reference materials

Transparency will not always result in the most accurate reporting coming out. As I tweeted to Dare Obasanjo, what happens if your sources are people in Iran who are afraid for their lives, to go on the record. Do you not publish a blog post from Iran because you can't be 100% transparent about the sources?

Another problem is that the kind of investigative journalism that creates social change (see Seattle Times Health special project on MRSA) may require creating a new record of assembled data (a db for example). Do you as a reader now distrust the data because it was assembled by The Seattle Times and not an easily referenced document? How will you vet their db analysts? Will you look at the code to ensure they coded it right and their select statements are properly formed?

Even if the reference materials are simple flat files and/or readable in a browser, will you as reader really have 5 hours reconstructing each detail of the Seattle Times data processes, or do you just want to look up the hospital near you to see if the doctors wash their hands? Why pay for the paper for access to this information if you have to re-create the reporting entirely yourself?

Placing a higher value on linkable reference materials also brings out the question of coverage skewing toward what is easiest to link to. Will reporting just become groups of links to documents that are already public? Link to videos and photos that were already reported (but maybe presented the wrong experts or sources in the captions?)

And while we are at this presentation of a collection of links, well, doesn't this notion sound like a search engine results page to anyone? I have yet to see anyone claim that a search engine can replace heavy-hitting, muckraker journalism. Why? Well, often a reporter has studied an area for far longer than the casual Web surfer, so the content value added in synthesizing the information will be higher (it's why you ask only certain people to help you fix your computer, and others you don't bother - the experienced people know what to look for and how to troubleshoot).

But also, search engine results are presented in response to queries, and are dependent on the user knowing what terms to put into the box (this is why the bing user experience is so interesting, it tries to visually nudge you to get more of an idea what you really want back). If the searcher doesn't know what cognitive linkages to make between documents beforehand, it's not likely the materials would come back together.

To get 3 document links back that resemble the 3 reference materials for a news story, you'd have to know what was in the docs, and their relationships to one another with regard to the investigative conclusion. In other words, you'd have to know the horrifying statistics of MRSA before you put down the search terms. This is why the term "human aggregator" doesn't begin to talk about what a good reporter does with information - they really have to analyze it enough to teach other people how to make these connections.

Reliance on only linkable/readily transparent items creates other dynamics. Doesn't even have to be laziness but shortage of time...What if you are blogging nights and weekends and have a day job, without the time to look at older documents on microfiche at the courthouse or pull public paper records to affirm for yourself things got done? The temptation will be high to link to what's easy and write about what's easy and the bar will lower to ease of linkage. Really, only one rich news org has the resources to do any real reporting - then the rest of us just link to that, right?

People hotly debated whether Techcrunch should have released the Twitter business documents they blogged about, but few really talked about whether actual journalism was being committed around the documents. (Michael Arrington would argue yes of course, but to Silicon Valley outsiders the docs themselves became news. In a j-school context, you could argue that the docs were really just one "fact check" against an emerging Twitter story that Techcrunch has not yet written and now may not ever write.)

Transparency of author viewpoint

Fear of a reporter skewing news coverage based on their background, political views or opinion is at the heart of the objectivity debate. However, this fear of non-objectivity applies to other professions as well and people tend to forget that.

Every day, you hope that your doctor doesn't mind treating people of different political views than her, and will prescribe you the right medicines for your cold regardless of your choice of vacation home. You hope that your bus driver drives the same (safe) way regardless of who is on his bus. You hope the guy giving you the fries and hamburger didn't spit into your food because he hated the rock band on your t-shirt. Heck, people work with people all the time that they can't stand, and for professionalism's sake, they put personal feelings aside.

It's so interesting that people more readily trust there isn't spit in their Coke, but are sure that a reporter is hiding something from them.

What were my own standards of objectivity?

Here's what I understood to be my standard of objectivity, when I was in the journalism profession. I was told by one news editor early in my career that essentially if everyone disagreed with the "bias" of my story - all the special interest groups opposing each other hated it equally- there was a likelihood I had hit the sweet spot of objectivity. I was supposed to get along with my sources, but they were not supposed to be my best friends, and they should not be able to guess which way I would vote in an election. They should not see me as biased against their religion or point of view. To do my job well, both sides had to trust I'd represent their point of view fairly (or at least piss off the other side equally).

So to do a good job, I had to be free to aggravate everyone, because the truth is often complex, hard to get at, and debateable, and if I was always worrying about pleasing people in power or high in celebrity quotient, I wouldn't be representing the truth correctly. The newspaper would stand behind me, protect my notebook (paper not digital), and bail me out of jail for the stories I wrote when powerful public figures or companies went after me. In return, I had to be meticulous in my accuracy, get as much on the record as possible, and as scrupulous about representing as many points of view as would fit in a 6-20 column inch space. It helped that both states I worked in had decent public records laws and my note-taking verbal memory was really good. And I had good editors, who took out things from my stories they felt weren't decently backed up or were redundant and therefore presenting too much of one source's point of view.

Transparency meant something other than documentation or stating my political views of the moment- it went straight to the heart of where I got my money from. If I had ever worked for an organization, owned stock in that organization, had relatives in an organizaation, I either did not cover the story or (as sometimes you see in MSN Money) I would have had to disclose my interest "this columnist owns 5 shares of stock in Microsoft." The appearance of being unable to cover a topic area fairly was good enough to keep me from it. Mostly, journalism kept me out of public activism because as a cub reporter I really didn't want to close down story areas I could write in. Other journalists who were more established (ie, could focus on one beat) could afford to have private causes not related to their beat.

BTW, I found I always had more notes and material than I could fit into a news story. It wasn't sinister, it's that people hate reading anything long.

Even as a freelance book reviewer, which is pure opinion, The Seattle Times constantly ensured I was reading books by people I didn't know, or have any ties to. Being "out of the scene" was helpful because it meant I didn't have a social or political agenda to like or dislike the books.

This is the kind of self-policing relative to a standard of objectivity. A standard of transparency for online journalism might help someone get caught violating the standards of objectivity and fairness but I think the root issues would still remain: did you try to get an objective truth? is the article or post accessible to people of all persuasions and initial points of view? Do you have documents, facts, quotes, witnesses to back up the conclusions of your piece? Are you being a lazy journalist/blogger, or are you digging deeper even as you seem sure the conclusion can be reached for this piece? Have you annoyed everyone equally, even the people you are supposed to be in the pockets of?

So, while I think transparency is good, I don't think it replaces the old goals of good journalism and transcending the reporter's personal point of view to get the complete story out. Empathy is key to good journalism and blog reporting- the ability to put yourself in the flood victim or the astronaut's shoes as they tell their stories. A piece of reporting that goes beyond him/herself to reach other people is usually the most powerful kind of reporting and I'm not sure a page full of links can take the place of that human processing information for a public/purpose well beyond the personal.

bing.com and a decent shot of courage

2009-06-04T08:38:00Z

I haven't written much lately because I've pulled some weird stunts, like stay awake 26 hours and tweet for a good percentage of that while triaging bugs. I've put on my painted shoes and my marketing hat and gone to conferences while blitzing in and out of ops calls. This being in PR while shipping web stuff is a little nutty. ( My main search feature is http://www.bing.com/community and like any new community site it is in a constant state of improvement.)

There's a lot of blogging and tweeting going on about bing - some of it even from my team or me - and I think its best if other folks try to parse out the brand, the new features, and the context of what this means for the industry. As usual in my community woo woo way, I have to go back to the people both inside and outside of the search team and that's where I get my bearings on bing.

This search release was assisted by the internal testing of thousands of Microsoft employees on their lunch breaks, spare time, late nights. Way more people than is represented in the search organization, which despite all "still hiring" reports, is still not as big as you'd suspect for an org taking on a major player like Google.

Those employees' feedback made bing what it is today. That's an important difference from other launches.

Then of course there's our twitter and facebook accounts. I know more about those because they started really during the time I joined my current team. Those are the folks that keep us honest, cheer us on, kick our butts, and make us think. This too is an important difference, which I hope will only be assisted by the /community site's forums and blog commenting capabilities. There's more you in bing than there was in Live Search. Because we have these new tools and the folks ready to listen.

People who have gotten email from my Microsoft email address know I always carry the Anais Nin phrase "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage" in my signature. I remember being in the search engineering building, talking with Andy Oakley about the search presentation to MVPS at the MVP summit, and being spontaneously dragged by him into some sort of beer thing with the entire org and VP Satya Nadella giving a short speech.

Satya may shoot me for this bc I don't remember what he said. But I remember looking around at the faces of the search employees around me which were carrying a totally different vibe than two years ago when I left search for Xbox. It's hard to explain those ineffable crowd moments where you know folks are committed and its a quiet commitment, not rowdy, not arrogant, but just in it. Every time I faced a skeptical customer at a demo (you know who you are MS Hater Guy) I remembered that sea of faces, just in it. Showing up and saying hello to the doubters and the haters.

There's a bit more smiling around the building now, because it always feels good to get something out the door. And everybody knows there's more work to do, we can't just stop here. But the essence of bing to me are those non-search employees who never gave up on us, and gave us feedback whether we liked it or not. And the customers, who, whether they liked us or not, cared enough to give us feedback. And of course the search team, who have spent a couple years since I left, working to create this thing you have now before you, called bing. They pushed and pushed through it. Here it is - a start at what we hope will be a new way to think about search.

We hope you try bing of course. And send us feedback via the feedback link, the twitter acct, the blog, the http://www.bing.com/community site. But remember us when you are faced with something tough, where you commit without knowing the outcome, and do it because you choose to & your heart says so. That's what we made it for, that's what we made it with.

Live it vivid!

Community tip of the day: Give the props to people who have helped you

2009-05-13T03:50:00Z

Recently, in the process of promoting Will Code for Green, our killer Live Search API contest that lets you use whatever technology stack you desire to write your Web app, I dug deep and went back to one of my old teachers Tim Maher from http://www.consultix-inc.com who is a Perl guru around these parts of the Northwest. His educational company essentially gets people ready for system administration gigs using some variety of Unix.

Even after more than a decade having passed since I took his class, Tim responded pretty quickly. He kindly said he'd pass the contest along and that he remembered me and was glad I found a tech job I liked.

Which consideirng I'm part of the "Evil Empire" to some Open Source folks, I felt was very gracious and also why I'm blogging about Tim here.

Tim is one of the better technical teachers I've run into in the course of my nefarious tech career and it's because when I took his courses, they iterated each time they were taught. The feedback from one class drove a better experience for the next. When I went, the courses on Unix had been honed to concentrate on things that you needed immediately to get oriented. It had smooth building blocks. Things progressed fast enough that your head stopped just short of exploding, and you could leave his classes and feel like at least some tasks, you could do at your job right away.

What Tim does in his classroom is a great model for certain kinds of software evolution (Agile anyone?), or in my current line of work, honing your presence in social media. Keep listening, keep honing, and keep it central to what your passion is.

I outgrew my passion for Unix/Linux (when it became readily apparent I don't have the temperament to be a system admin - of any stripe) and my ability to explain Unix concepts faded with my memory of where everything was in the filesystem outside of dev/null . I'd be a sucky OSCON evangelist. But Tim lives in this stuff, and he loves it, and I remembered him and his company al this time because he had stayed central to his calling.

There's a complete credibility gap in me recommending his classes - I did not ultimately go into Unix system administration you may have noticed. Also, I'm essentially a PR shill for Microsoft, and I truly think Win7 is sweet, and writing C# games for the Xbox is cool, and Silverlight is da bomb, so I'm not believable as testimony. You have to talk to other people who took him recently and actually remember any of the curriculum to get the detailed goods. :)

But over a decade later, who Tim is as a teacher, his "personal brand" if you will ( I hate that term) is what stands out over time. So it brings out the question - how will *you* be remembered?

Live it vivid!

Tips on personal brand as it pertains to painting your shoes

2009-05-11T04:10:00Z

I was going to write a long post about personal brand, and how I don’t really believe in it as a phrase. I believe in protecting your good name, and standing for something, but I personally am not a product, I personally can’t be bought (only rented) and it was going to be this long diatribe.

Then, as happens in Seattle sometimes, it got sunny and like any other Seattleite, serious thoughts fled my brain and I only wanted to be outside. It was then that I decided to paint more shoes, and from this exercise you can probably learn more about ‘personal brand’ than if I went on a long rant.

First off, I have been dying to paint some shoes ever since Howard Rheingold declined to paint some for me, but instead opted to teach me to paint my own. (He is such a wise sensei of the internet – only when I realized what it meant to paint shoes did I realize why he would not paint shoes for me). I also hadn’t realized this shoe-painting movement or frame of mind, is a pet thing of his and he has been part of the paint-your-shoes movement for quite some time.

Howard’s amazing how-to (which talks about the philosophy too) can be found here: http://www.rheingold.com/paintyourshoeshow.html

The other resource I’ve been reading is the guide to customizing your sneakers by Sabotage in this forum post (there is apparently a book called Sneaker Freaker that really tells all):

http://forums.n-sb.org/index.php?showtopic=11778

Unlike Howard, I don’t trust myself as a visual artist, so the first shoes I tried to paint were some secondhand ones purchased at a thrift store – the loafers you see above. I was overly optimistic – when I read the part about sanding and acetone, I thought – but maybe MY shoes are worn down enough – they seem worn down enough. Ooh lookit the pretty colors!

WRONG! You can see in this photo that the paint is starting to crack on them. I can still wear them places but they won’t last long.

Personal brand tip # 1 – Believe what sage experts who have done this before tell you, even if it means more work you hate. It'll last longer. :)

Personal brand tip # 2: Think about the underlying materials you are working with – old leather shoes have chemicals on them to repel things like paint. You can’t get around the intrinsic nature of what you are working with. In social media, that’s the tools or the tech or the industry OR EVEN YOUR OWN PERSONALITY :) . When you make a name for yourself don’t ignore underlying material.

So this time, I bought 2 sizes of shoes that don’t fit me – so I wouldn’t be as tempted to cut corners or have personal angst if they flaked out as well – and proceeded to follow Howard’s advice more closely.

This time, I skipped the acetone treatment bc he said the sanding is more important – if you listen to Sabotage though, acetone is the way to go.

Once I had sanded to raise a “tooth” I painted white dots. You can't really see the tooth here bc of the distance but the shoes looked suede-like.

And then after that dried, I went for the color.

Personal brand tip #3 that would apply here is: Do not be boring. Black and white works for some people, but in my case, if I was going to go to the trouble of artsy shoes I wanted them to 1) not necessarily match 2) be COLORFUL. You want people to remember who you are right? At least let them remember you on a day when you were "on" and not say, when you wake up in the morning.

I did all this outside. It’s a good idea to paint and to sand and to (next step) spray the clear coat on outside because of the mess/fumes. This is the picture of the shoes drying from the clear coat. I have about 3-4 coats total before I can see if these will flake like the originals.

Personal brand tip #4: If there’s a lot of makeover in your brand, do it in a well-ventilated place. :) (There’s a lot of bad jokes to make here, suffice to let you do it on your own!)

My next step after these shoes dry enough from their clear coat, is to get some friends to “test drive” the shoes and give feedback.

Personal brand tip #5: Try out your social media experiment/identity first with a few people (friendly or at least not haters) to make sure you are on the right track. If my friends find that the 2nd wave of shoes flake like mine do, then I know I need to go the Way of the Acetone. Since I’m recycling these shoes into ‘new shoes’ from Goodwill, I don’t mind taking the time to figure it out.

Bonus tip: Why not test out your personal brand on free services before you start playing in the paid (advertising) or other market? Don’t be afraid to be wrong or innovate.

....I'll let you know how they progress. Thanks again Howard!

Foo Camp East: Some tips for survival and what I presented

2009-03-31T07:40:00Z

This blog post is a combo conference narrative and a summary of my presentation. Because so much of the conference is in the conversations done without fear of blogging (or tweeting), I felt better about airing more on what I presented than speaking for others. Really other folks said more brilliant things – I just don’t own their words. :)

Oh and it rambles a bit – my sleep deficit is starting to look like the national deficit. :P

By all accounts, our experience in Cambridge, MA and the first Foo Camp East was a bit upscale from the normal Foo. For one thing, the building facilities were new – so new they’d not been used yet!

An essential aspect of Foo Camp has often been, well, the camping. Because it was still wintry and rainy and this is Boston and they do things posh there, folks who camped did so on the inside of a snazzy building with shower facilities and a beautiful staircase (in this photo Barney Pell, founder of Powerset, vaults down the staircase).

I, as my readership may expect, was a total wimp and slept at a nearby hotel. But the key to the Foo Camp experience is not to sleep much so I didn’t.They advise you to overdo on sleep before Foo and unfortunately for me, that wasn’t really that possible.

Foo Camp is one of the great unconferences. Participants were told to come expecting to present. I presented on Social Media and Bath Bombs which actually dried faster than expected so folks got to take them home.

Readers of my blog know where the bath bomb recipe is. I first got everyone setup with their own soap molds (stars and hexagons) and artistically arranging the petals/petal fragments at the bottom of the molds before putting the bath fizz mixture in. We used blue as a coloring agent for one bowl of mixture and kept the other white.

While people pressed and stirred and such, I told them why bath bomb making has such parallels to community building and social media. For one thing, you can’t rush the process. It takes about 10 min to spritz a bowl with witch hazel and you can’t skip or over do, you have to keep checking on the consistency to make sure it is gelling right.

Just as community managers have to test the waters repeatedly, and build trust over time. Have the right ingredients to hand. Timing is everything. Gelling seems to happen on its own and you have to be watchful.

Everyone’s bath bomb designs actually (to me anyway) surpassed the ones *I* usually make. A testimony to the power of many people approaching a design problem - imagine what you could do with your software.

Rob Faludi even managed to figure out a way to put his business card elements at the bottom of the molds, and pressed hard – when his came out, his business info was embedded in the bath bombs. He could give them out as business gifts. Dong that had never occurred to me!

I told them about how I had posted the bath bomb recipe on Wikipedia, and how its gone now. I pointed them to bliss soaps in Seattle, whose word of mouth, their many free samples ethos, and warm and friendly storekeeper demeanor have made them the darling of Yelp. In fact if you look at their Live Search results, the yelp references are among the highest. Think of how much the avid endorsements mean to a small business online!

Liz Lawley got us all started talking about social objects, that is, those things we talk about with others that help form bonds. I give bath bombs out to co-panelists and people I know from the social computing symposiums at conferences just for fun, and she pointed out they become objects of conversation, shared experience (scent is a very powerful memory-enhancer and emotional connector), and created a community of folks who knew what the bath bomb experience was like.

I know if I do this presentation again I’m going to improve on it – for one thing, I will suggest to them the business card trick. I’ll also increase the number of molds so that more people can have a bunch of fizzies to take home. I’ll also factor in the dryness of doing it in an office complex vs. my old Craftsman house – my house is often too wet for the bombs to dry out in one day, but a Microsoft office building? those puppies were dry in 24 hours! (note the photo below depicts an actual chair)

I am grateful to the folks who tried out my class (Other Foo Camp advice is to go to things you wouldn’t normally attend) and to the folks who gave the talks I attended and stretched my neurons considerably. I hadn’t thought much about vendor relationship management, social media in government, open source stuff, or the origins of the Web and folks opened my eyes. I’ll admit death of newspapers I had previously thought about, but I’d forgotten some of the key things in my past that made being a reporter so solid for me: that people respected the newspaper, that the newspaper would fight to get me out of jail and prevent people from taking my notebook with confidential sources in it.

Oh, and the Poynter Institute. If anyone asks you to take a class or attend a conference there, you should go. The Dali museum is right near it with amazing art, but more than that, the folks there are smart and will blow your mind. I hope for one they can help keep the journalism flame alive, regardless of the form the new world order for newspapers might take.

Now, I pack for San Francisco! I'll be tweeting you... so...

Live it vivid!

Boston in the Springtime: Foo Camp East

2009-03-26T18:07:00Z

Well, I admit it; I've been textually unfaithful. I've blogged in everyone's blog but my own (Live Search, Eileen Brown) about my adventures and my tweet stream probably equals 10 blog posts in length (if not in actual coherence or sanity).

Community tip of the day (or reminder): Try to live large enough that you can either repurpose or re-use your textual genius. I'm just old school and hate to repeat posts.

While Search Road Warrior Aya is tearing it up in New York I will be in Boston this weekend, attending O'Reilly's FOO Camp. Next week: San Francisco and Web 2.0. Then after that, we actually have to do real work on this team and stop drinking mojitos. Too much mint, bad for you.

Anyway, I would tell people I was going to Foo camp and they'd say: Food camp, how awesome, is the Iron Chef coming? You marketing shills have all the luck, etc. etc.

Then I would say no, Foo. Like Foo Bar.

Oh you mean like there's a bar?

No F-O-O. Like Friends of O'Reilly. Oh forget it. I hope to be presenting on bath bombs and social media.

Bath bombs...?

Yes, like I was making in Search a while back. I actually gave bath fizzies out to my team at XNA too, but people looked at me funny. Like, there's no fire button on this thing, why do I care? Although their female relatives and significant others benefited.

Anyway, O'Reilly tends to favor hands-on presos and as I was preparing for this craft and crafts session I realized there are actually a lot of things I can say that tie the making of bath fizzies and social media. I have a great example, http://blisssoaps.com, local to Seattle, that I can talk about Whuffie with as well as the supplies store for making them. Well, as long as the package I mailed to Microsoft Cambridge made it. :)

More from the other side of the country - live it vivid!

Heading to Texas and South by Southwest, but leaving the black Stetson behind

2009-03-09T03:34:00Z

Last time I was in Texas, I bought a cowboy hat outside of San Antonio. It was a real Stetson, would keep the rain off, and of course to work with my urban wardrobe, I bought it in black. I think I made Paul Tidwell on the XNA team wear it once or twice, but there was a Viking helmet they used for "dude you broke the build" and that really reigned supreme.

This time, like last time, I am going on behalf of Live Search, but unlike last time, I don't have to present and I've realized with all the other stuff I have to pack, the Stetson has to stay at home. A nice offshoot of not being on a panel (since I didn't know a year ago I'd have this job) I get to enjoy the experience without the "speaker jitters" dominating my thoughts and also just get to meet up with folks I have not seen in ages.

I will also get to meet Nadia Payan for the first time; me/Live Search ended up sponsoring her on her odyssey to go to one of my favorite conferences ever.

Internet geek girl (lurv that pink!) has a nice post about the tweetup Live Search is sponsoring - 4-6 pm on March 13th at point in the conference while people presumably still have intact livers. :)

Windows Mobile setup the space but we provide the drinks, food etc so you can prefunc prior to the rest of the evening.

I will also be booth babin' it for a couple of days in the convention center, as will Aya and Stefan. Then on to MIX09, another adventure entirely....

Paid to tweet, like I was paid to blog

2009-02-27T07:03:00Z

So, I've done many awkward things in my bespeckled and bespectacled community career.

I've worn speaker Oxford after speaker Oxford - and you tech geeks know the ones. The ones that have embroidery that say "Speaker - Teched Amsterdam 2005" and you feel you can't give them away, yet you can't wear them to a hipster bar - or anywhere except your own house - without feeling like Class A Dork.

I've been recorded saying "um" on channel 9, channel 8 and other random podcasts. Be ready for more!

I've been photographed with Ms. Dewey. That, may not come again.

But now.

Now, it's my duty not only to man (or woman) a blog for Live Search on occasion, but to drink and stream into (now, that doesn't sound right does it) the firehose that is Twitter. And more than that, I have to pick a twitter client. Because like blogging, mystic vital forces forbid you actually type into a Web interface. Nonono. The hands they must not be sullied in touching web...parts. No, you have to find some desktop client with a t in the first part of the name - twhirl. Tweetdeck. Twitterific. T-rouble my friends. T-rouble right here in Twitter City.

Pray for me. And if you have a favorite Twitter client (sorry no Macbooks - just a T-Mobile Wing and a T-hinkpad laptop running Vista) feel free to tell me what to do. I am currently fascinated by this writer who left the choices of his life up to the community.

Live it vivid!

Leaving Xbox ...going to Live Search and MSN (Online Services)

2009-02-17T05:28:00Z

A job where they had free beer on Fridays. Free video games handed out by our administrative assistant. A job where a person can be "working" by playing with a big Xbox and TV sitting on their desk.

Yep, the days (daze?) of XNA Community Games are behind me. I've gone over to the Dark Side. I work for Stefan. I flipped over from engineering to...dun...dun...dun.....marketing/communications.

This change was not without drama. Frank Savage sat me down and schooled me one last time in Star Trek lore so I wouldn't forget where I came from. I've discovered there are some swear words they say in Xbox they just don't say in PR. And, of course, I had to give my beloved covered-with-crumbs Xbox 360 back to Vern, along with my monitor and TV.

But the new gig is going to be cool for these reasons:

- You. This new job is about listening to you, meeting you at conferences, hearing what you have to say on blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. If I don't seem to be listening, click the email link on this blog and kick my ass. It's my job to be there for you. I'm accountable, and I'm not going anywhere. The developer denizens of the dearly departed Gotdotnet know this part of my drill, but I literally lose sleep over community issues. Tell me what's on your mind.

- Change. If I do the first bullet item right, then both of these online products are going to change in the ways that you want them to. It helps that I used to be on the product team in Live Search (though admittedly in the Live QnA part). I still think like a Web program manager and I know about the cycle by which Web sites get built. There are some excuses that won't slip by me.

- Outings. Don't look now, but I think they may let me out of Redmond more often. This tracks back again to the first bullet point, but it means I get to emerge a bit from the Redmond bubble and see the real world. I'll be seeing you all at South by Southwest Interactive (one of my favorite conferences) and Mix09 (which I've oddly enough never been to).

A couple of us will be manning the twitterphone but check out the new official location... Live Search on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Live_Search .

I'll be working on my wisdom.

More to come...live it vivid!

Community Tip of the Day: Send A Latte of Human Kindness

2009-01-13T05:16:00Z

Ah community.

Where the seething hordes of imbeciles and bad spellers heckle the makers of perfect prose.
Where the trolls and the ogres outpace a Tolkien novel. Where There Be Dragons.
...But when it shines, it really shines.

For example, there is a Facebook photo album I became aware of through my Facebook network called "Everything is possible..." and repeats the phrase in French. It features a photo of what looks like a young Jewish boy with his arm around a young Arab boy walking along (they are seen from the back.)

The originator of the album says she intended to put it up and have a few friends tag it. She's now replicated this photo 72 times so that people can see it through their friends' tagging and add their own names (I think 30 people apiece can tag a photo). It's become a meme about peace.

There is no info about the source of the photo, which implies the originator didn't shoot it. It may be two kids in a US high school play or summer camp, or it may be in the Middle East. The image however - combined with the caption - was so captivating it took on a life of its own. The album grew so large replicating the photo that she gave up and made a Facebook group out of it where there are over 150 comments as of yesterday...today it has over 500 and the group has over 12,000 members today. Mostly the comments left have been about peace, and possibility. Some have been angry or have their own axe to grind, but mostly it is positive and keeps spreading.

I call this effect the latte of human kindness because it is not really milk - hot milk puts me to sleep and sometimes the milk of human kindness is so soothing it lulls. Sometimes kindness can be so relaxing you lose barricades in your head. The facebook album image is a kind image - two young boys together. Like the cuteoverload blog, or LOLcats, any photos of children together tend to give humans a feeling of warmth.

But by calling it "Everything is possible," the originator just added the two shots of espresso. The photo now tells a story and the image is striking enough you know instantly what the story is, and how the originator meant you to read it. It is a call to action: Those kids can get along, why can't we?

Social media gurus will tell you tricks to make your community messages snappy and pithy; marketing and brand folks will tell you how to sell yourself. But there is something about kindness and calling out possibility that sells itself.

So you know, I purposefully do not link to this Facebook group because

this blog isn't about politics and I don't want to get embroiled into the reasons why peace should or should not happen in the Middle East- that's not the point of community tip of the day - you can type in the name and search for it on facebook to see the group
this photo and group is a Facebook "friend" phenomenon and that's the way it should spread...it's had no difficulty and its power lies in itself.

Live it vivid! (what world-changing photo album will YOU create? :) )