nptech.info

Last month I wrote the forward to a new book called The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World and it’s now available – for free! It’s essentially a marketing vehicle for the very large telecommunication infrastructure provider Alcatel-Lucent, but it’s marketing 2.0 of the best kind: the book makes almost zero mention of the company at all. It just talks about how changes in society and mobile internet devices are combining in such a way that network service providers should offer application programming interfaces to a wider developer community. It’s a really good real, actually.

My forward isn’t my best writing, but I was proud to have been given the opportunity. I wrote a better article, one I’m quite proud of in fact, this week about an acquisition the company made: Acquisition Aims to Change History for Mobile Apps & Data.

I recommend reading the book if you’re into thinking about these kinds of topics. You can read selections online and if you want, the company will send you a free paper copy in exchange for your contact info. They may or may not call you, I’m guessing, to discuss whether you’d like to buy a big telephony infrastructure middleware software package. Or they may want to talk to you if you’re a developer. Either way, it’s no big whoop and it’s certainly worth it to do all the learning you’ll get from the book. It’s fun.

You can check out the book and its corresponding online community here.

Nsyght is a clever service with a terrible name (it’s hard to remember) and stock photo on its home page, but don’t be fooled – it’s really useful. I wrote about it on ReadWriteWeb last week under the title How to Search Inside Twitter Lists, and that’s just what it’s for. After a few minutes to index your stream, Nsyght will let you search inside tweets from your friends, inside particular lists or your own archive for months back in history. It’s awesome. I’ve been using it to filter for images shared by friends on Twitter (great for quick little posts) and to find old Tweets of mine that I can’t find nearly as quickly in any other way. And searching inside a Twitter list of topical experts for their opinions on a particular matter? So hot. It’s like a Custom Search Engine for twitter lists, which is incredibly powerful.

I think of things like this as curating my existing community resources, an all-too under utilized strategy I believe. That’s the kind of thing I’m likely to bring up as a guest tomorrow on Tummelvision.tv, which I cannot recommend highly enough that you check out.

Government data as a platform for innovation is something I find exciting. Unfortunately, every time we write about it at ReadWriteWeb, very few people read our articles. Consumer data from private companies, be it Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, for example, finds far more interested readers.

Both have a few things in common: they are stories about data that you and I produce being leveraged by independent developers to build new services and ways to make use of that data. I love EveryBlock and the way it shows me the 911 calls, restaurant reviews and news stories about the area I live in. It uses mostly government data. I really liked the story I wrote about it (“The Day Everyblock Came to Town“) but it got far fewer pageviews than the equally local story Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion.

Maybe that’s because it was about an explosion, and maybe because it indicated some fulfillment of the promise of data exploited. But I think it’s in part because it’s about Twitter data instead of about public data in the traditional sense of the word. Readers just don’t find government data very interesting. It’s a part of a larger problem I think: people don’t care about nonprofit or social good stories either. Far, far fewer people read stories about human rights, watchdog organizations, etc. than they do the big corporate market leaders online. We cover social good stuff anyway, because it’s important, but we always recognize that those stories are going to perform poorly in terms of readership.

Thoughts?

Nate Silver, author of the political stats blog FiveThirtyEight, is now writing for the New York Times. That’s very cool. It’s an inspiration to try and write better blog posts and fewer mediocre ones. ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by the NYT, but that’s different. You’ve got to be pretty consistently awesome, I’m guessing, for the Times to say “hey, come put your blog on our site.” That level of consistent awesomeness is an inspiration, for any blogger, anywhere. I feel a long, long way from so consistently awesome right now. I’d sure love to grow as an author to feel like I wrote fewer mediocre blog posts than I do today.

One step I’d like to take is to learn to stop before publishing and ask myself: how could this post be better in a big way? What fundamental insight can my noggin’ churn up with just five more minutes of slowing down from the perpetual mad dash of blogging? Publishing immediately is hard wired in my brain now, though, and it’s going to be easier said than done to change that habit.

I spent a fast-paced, heavy-hitting hour on the phone today with a consulting client and it was so much fun! I introduced them to the basics about effective blog reading, blog writing, RSS, OPML, Custom Search Engines and using Twitter effectively for marketing and business development. It was intense! The client, who is a recently acquired and very technical B2B service provider, said it was immediately valuable and much appreciated.

I forget sometimes how many people have yet to learn the beauty and powerful value of personalized content syndication and related technologies. I could probably spend all day, every day, getting people excited about it, if I didn’t have an awesome day job. As it is, I do one hour-long phone consultation each week. (Info) To be honest, I’ve got that much time allotted but I’m not filling each week’s hour up. I’d like to though, because I love doing consulting work.

My advice for anyone out there reading who is also jazzed about this stuff? Don’t forget how much opportunity there still is to teach people how to really effectively leverage the basics. It might not feel that way to many of us, but these are still very early days in the history of social web technologies.

It’s midnight and I’m in Lake Tahoe, ready to cover the first Techonomy conference about using technology to solve the world’s big problems. There’s an incredible group of people participating. I’ll be covering it along with a small group of others on the Techonomy site and on ReadWriteWeb. In preparation for the event, I put together a couple of resources for my own reporting that I thought you might enjoy it too.

A Twitter list of Techonomy participants – There are 250 people listed on the site as participants and this list includes 115 of them that I (with some help from Mechanical Turk) could find on Twitter. It should be a real good place to keep track of the conference discussion and get to know some really interesting people for the future. Are you attending the event but not on that list? Let me know.

Related: A smaller list of 27 women I could identify as Techonomy participants. Just to make sure dudes don’t drown out women, as we are apt to do. These are some very powerful women attending the event, but I thought it might be good anyway. And I’ve got some other ideas in mind for that list in the future.

A Custom Search Engine of the websites associated with the event’s participants. I’ve bookmarked that link to enrich my coverage of what’s said at the event itself. If you hear about something coming out of Techonomy that you’d like to learn more about, searching inside the archives of the websites that conference participants are associated with is a good way to do it. This engine has more than 180 sites indexed, though I’m thinking of making a second version that doesn’t include big, prolific news sites so that you could search inside the websites of other organizations present more easily. Update: Here’s that link – Techonomy No News.

Let me know what you think, I’ll be shining these up over the next half day or so and then use and probably write about them elsewhere. These are the kinds of resources I love to create though, and I’ve got some more in mind. I believe they are super useful, but I suppose the proof will be in the pudding over the next few days.

I got my list of 100+ applicants for this evening news writing position at ReadWriteWeb whittled down to a list of top 10 applicants tonight. (Related story about how to get a job as a professional blogger here.) I mentioned on Twitter that in summarizing the pros and cons of leading applicants for the rest of my team to evaluate I’ve included an evaluation of their Twitter accounts. A good Twitter account isn’t a requirement at all but… it helps. A number of people asked me just exactly what that meant. And so I wrote a song about it, and it goes a little something like this…

It’s not really a song, sorry! It’s just me talking. It got cut off at the very end by an incoming phone call, but I suspect you may find it interesting none the less. Speaking of Twitter, here’s my account there. Let’s be buds if we’re not already, huh?

Direct MP3 download here, iTunes subscription link here and podcast subscription feed here.

I keep making blog posts and podcasts about the emerging world of sensor data (the Internet of Things) and alluding to the need to figure out privacy policies and considerations. I will allude no more! It’s time to start thinking explicitly about this stuff and drawing out the boundaries of our collective conversation about it. Before it’s too late!

This is an incredible opportunity but one that certainly carries some risk as well. Let’s see if we can leverage the tidal wave of data coming while protecting our personal privacy as well!

In case you’re not familiar with this concept, here’s a great primer video from IBM, one of the primary vendors in the Internet of Things market. Following that, you’ll find a podcast I recorded a few minutes ago while waiting for a bus home. Below that you’ll see the beginnings of a mind map on the topic. I’m doing some interviews and thinking this through for what I hope will be an important post on ReadWriteWeb soon. Your thoughts are more than welcome – they are humbly requested.

Intro to Internet of Things

My Thoughts So Far

Direct download
Randy Robertson left me a Cinch comment (on Cinch) suggesting that the medical industry could be a good model to learn from regarding patient data privacy. Sounds good.

In Mindmap Form

I’m looking over about 100 applications for an evening news writing gig over at ReadWriteWeb and thought I’d share some thoughts about the process.

If I wanted to be a pro tech blogger, here’s what I’d do. Heck, here’s what I did.

The short version of this story is: blog awesomely like a pro news blogger would, and the opportunities are out there for you to become a pro news blogger.

Not so long ago, I was working at a convenience store, selling candy, soda, beer and lottery tickets. I had just graduated with an undergrad degree in political science and I discovered the world of blogging, RSS, etc. in the last few months I was in school. My plan was to do consulting for nonprofit organizations about how to use these new tools for research and promotion, but I had to pay the bills – thus the convenience store gig. Maybe you have a better job than that now – but I still think this is good advice.

I started a blog and wrote about the things I was learning. Here’s the first post I ever wrote. I broke the post-page template one day and decided to move off Blogger, but here’s my first month’s archives if you’re curious.

I read other tech blogs, posted the smartest comments I could and linked to their posts in my posts. Then I went to an industry event and met some people. Barb Dybwad and Marnie Webb, now at Mashable and Netsquared, were the two people I connected with best at that very first event. We all knew each other from blogs and comments already. (Remind me to tell you the story sometime about that trip to SF. It involves an alarm clock, hitchhiking several rides through a rainstorm, a missed flight and a race to see danah boyd for the first time.)

In blogging I tried to add unique value to conversations and I tried to do a good job at important little projects I started. Both Barb and Marnie ended up hiring me to write for them at Netsquared and at AOL’s Social Software Weblog, within just a few months of our having met face to face. Once I had both those gigs, I quit the day job at the convenience store.

The months between were filled with early morning and late night learning, hard work and hustle. My mother-in-law now says she thought I was crazy, waking up so early in the morning to blog, but she agrees that it worked out pretty well.

Once I got those two jobs, the Social Software Weblog one was where I had the best opportunity for visibility in the larger tech blogging world. The pay there was miserable, it was something like $4 or $5 per post, I don’t remember. I worked that job as hard as I could, though, writing 3 to 5 posts a day. I also had another job writing as a subcontractor for an international currency speculation blog, writing 6 posts about currency speculation every weekday before 9am PST. That was nuts. So I was writing about 10 posts a day, of various lengths and about different topics, at three different places.

I tried to always improve my work while I was doing that. One of the things I learned would give me an important advantage was subscribing to the RSS feeds of key company blogs (Google, YouTube, Technorati back then) by instant messaging and SMS. I used a service called Zaptxt. That way whenever a big company blog would update, I’d get a link sent to me within about 15 minutes. That meant I could write it up before anyone else, as I don’t think many if any competitors were using such a system. (Most everyone among top tech news bloggers does today, I think.)

One day Michael Arrington from TechCrunch called me up and said “you keep beating me to news stories – I want you to come write for me.” It was a very, very small operation at that time. I think I was the first paid writer there. It was awesome and I learned a whole lot. It was a very competitive place.

Now I’m co-editor of the smaller but more tech/less business focused, more thoughtful, sweeter-smelling and more modest blog ReadWriteWeb and I’m looking to hire a killer evening news writer.

Figure out some tricks. Write some blog posts that get attention (in a good way). Leave comments on ReadWriteWeb that make us say “wow, that’s one smart cookie right there.” @ me on Twitter. Be a part of our community.

Break some news. Do some great writing. Show us what you’ve got and make sure we see it out there on the web.

Some people are doing that, to some degree. But the web is making publishing easier by far than it’s ever been in history. Trackbacks, replies and other social media mechanisms make developing connections with people easier than ever.

Tech news blogging is one of the most awesome jobs in the world. It doesn’t pay fabulously when you first start, but seize opportunity by the horns on a very regular basis and there’s plenty of opportunity for advancement. I bought a beautiful house in Portland, Oregon last year. I know that I have been able to do this in large part because I was raised white, male, middle class and heterosexual – I was raised to believe I could make something of myself, that I am at core (original sin notwithstanding, thanks) good and right. Not every one has that privilege.

If you are fortunate enough to be a fast thinker, a good writer, have low cost of living expenses and some free hours each day to strike out into a new adventure – then opportunity is right there waiting for you. Just reach out and grab it. I know you’re out there – lots of you.

Bloging makes publishing easier than ever, but given that I blog for a living at ReadWriteWeb, it’s been hard to blog here on Marshallk.com as well. Classic problem for people who work in tech. However, I have recorded 36 podcasts over the last 3 months using the Cinch iPhone app! Here’s my account there. The service is so easy to publish with! When things are going well, I try to publish there every day. The production quality isn’t everything it could be – this is super mobile podcasting – but I think the ease of publishing and quality of content outweigh the issues with background noise, etc. (If you disagree, let me know. But know that the choice is between these podcasts and no podcasts.)

I was just thinking this morning about the next podcast I want to record using Cinch, probably while walking my dogs, and it occurred to me: why on earth am I not posting those here on my personal site, where listeners will be exposed to my personal promotional materials instead of to Cinch’s on its website?

I love Cinch and am happy to promote the service, but I’ve got services of my own to promote as well. (ReadWriteWeb, the blog I co-edit, and my own personal consulting services, generally one single hour-long phone call per week. Drop me a line via marshall@marshallk.com – next week’s call could be with you!)

There will be a little more work I need to do in order to post my Cinch-casts here, I’ll spare you the details, but I think it will be well worth it and will not significantly raise the overhead on this super-easy service to publish to.

So without further delay, let’s play catch-up. Below are a few of my favorite, mostly tech-related Cinchcasts. If you’d like to subscribe to everything I record as a podcast, here’s a link for iTunes and here’s an RSS feed with enclosures.

Different types of relationships between tech startups and bloggers

Why people use location based social networks

Lead to this very successful post on ReadWriteWeb.

Passion and the Internet of Things

The new media production schedule & its consequences in terms of quality

Looking past paper, looking back from digital media consumption

The Sounds of the Eugene Train Station

One of my personal favorites, a short wordless soundscape from the train station on the way out of my home town. I’d like to do more soundscapes with Cinch.

It’s painfully challenging to stay active here on marshallk.com, but I post things all day, every day elsewhere! If you know me personally, you can find me on Facebook. And/or find me on Twitter at @marshallk.

Other places I’ve been active lately include Cinch mobile podcasting and on Formspring, where you can ask me any question you like!

And finally of course I am co-editor of ReadWriteWeb.com, in case you didn’t know that!