I’ve been reading quite a bit about the latest beta version of Ecto, and decided that I had to try it out for myself. Typically I’m not big on external editors for blogs, however I have to say this one is growing on me, and I’ve only been using it for about four minutes.

I wish that it were possible to have my AOL overlords allow API access of some manner so that I could use one unified interface (something like Ecto) to write posts for all of the blogs that I could potentially write for.

If you’re a Mac user and you want to see what I’m talking about, check out this page.

Hat tip to David Chartier.

I happened across this photo on Flickr of the Windows Vista demo that Robert Scoble gave at NorthernVoice, with help from Chris Pirillo. It shows Pirillo, Scoble and me at the table.

This session was an unexpected treat. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Dave Sifry (of Technorati) speak before now, but it’s clear he was born to do it. He made great use of the time he had. The first half of his talk was a brief lecture, lessons he has learned in being an entrepreneur, encapsulated into a set of rules. The second half involved getting people involved in sharing a bit about what they’re about, and a “leadership hack”. Here are my notes:

Dave’s “Rules for Entrepreneurs” (stolen right from his first slide)

• Find your passion
• Team, team, team (A players hire A players, B players hire C players)
• Lead, don’t manage
• Develop leaders
• Prepare for the scalability traps
• Back of the napkin it! (A business model should fit on the back of a napkin for it to be viable, otherwise it’s too complicated)
• Remember, it is a business
• Vision is easy, execution is hard
• Fail fast
• Be of Service

Notable quote: “Starting a new business is an intensely egocentric act; you’re basically saying ‘I know better than all of you.’” (funny moment; Dave delivered that line with his middle finger extended). “So you’d better be passionate about it.”

Leadership / Entrepreneur Hacks from attendees:

• Give it away, it’ll come back 10x
• If it’s not working, change it
• Get passionate about what you’re doing
• Tell the truth, be willing to cut your losses when something goes bad
• Never underestimate the challenge in getting something off the ground
• Make listening and communication top priorities
• Never underestimate the motivation of a noble cause
• Say “thank you”
• Find out what motivates people
• Patience - you may have to wait for the market to be ready for your idea
• Be willing to reinvent yourself
• Figure out how to get customers from day one
• Once you have customers, listen to them
• Document your assumptions, so others working with you know what’s going on
• Hire people that are passionate about your product or company
• Keep (make) it real - getting out of the basement into an office can clarify and solidify your resolve
• Always build the bare-minimum product necessary to ship
• Keep perspective
• “Indecision is decision” - “I’d rather make a wrong decision than no decision” (’cause then you can fix it)
• Create a culture that makes meaning for your employees and customers
• Whether you’re conscious of it or not, your corporate culture is being built - so be conscious of building it
• Figure out what your mantra is - for Technorati it’s “be of service”
• If you’re going to go to the trouble of hiring a good team, then trust them
• Ship the bare minimum, and don’t be afraid to iterate
• You not only need to be open to serendipity, you need to invite it.
• Once you find a thread of interest, follow it even if nobody understands what you’re up to
• Look for reasons why you’re wrong
• Aim high - the worst you can do is aim low and miss

Tags: leadership, leadership hacks, entrepreneurship, Dave Sifry, Sifry, NorthernVoice, Northern Voice, Moose Camp, MooseCamp

[Update: The host of the tagging session, Phillip Jeffrey commented below, allowing me to update the text with the correct name of the presenter. He also mentions other notables taking part in the conversation during the session. Thanks Phillip!]

Note: This post was written in a very stream-of-consciousness manner during the Tagging session at Northern Voice this afternoon, however I was unable to get back onto the wifi to post it.

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Right now the session focused on tagging is going on. The presenter, Phillip Jeffrey,  is doing his master’s thesis at UBC on the tagging phenomenon.

After the prepared presentation, the first question was about tagging style, i.e. how to approach tagging. The pertinent point is that tagging has been implemented in different ways at different sites, so that for example on del.icio.us, you are forced to use single words. The hack is to use an underscore - apparently Technorati understands this as multiple words.

In the previous citizen journalism session, the topic of tags came up briefly, and the overwhelming majority would prefer to use comma delimited tags which would allow for multiple word tags.

Next question: What about malicious tagging? (malicious is such a great word - it’d be fun to have a site called mal.icio.us, but since Yahoo! now controls the icio.us top-level domain, we’re unlikely ever to see that…) This is also known as “tag bombing”. It looks as though most tag-enabled systems (del.icio.us, Technorati, flickr) have some form of system to reduce or eliminate malicious tagging.

A further discussion (wish I could get the names straight) about the fundamental differences between tagging and categorization. The description given was perfect; essentially, when you’re looking at categorization, you have to consider the entire world, then decide where what you’re working on fits in that world and categorize it accordingly, usually before you start writing. In tagging, you simply create something, then associate some words to it after the fact, which is a much lower cognitive load - uses less “brain cycles”.

Tags: tagging, delicious, del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, NorthernVoice, Northern Voice, Moosecamp

This presentation is being done by the creator of X:Posted (pronounced cross posted). The idea here is that rather than trying to earn money from your blog using advertising, you can use their system as a broker to sell your individual posts. Their concept is that overburdened corporate bloggers, non-profits, and potentially even mainstream media will want to buy the right to republish individual posts.

Question from Chris Pirillo: “What about search engines that could consider this content repetition as spam?”

A: “That’s a really good question, and we need to work closely with search engines to make sure that this does not happen. That’s a great question, and we’ll have to pay more attention to it.”

Funniest moment this morning:

Arrived and signed in, and walked up to the list of sessions posted on the wall. Two other guys were standing there. One comments “Interesting, all the sessions seem to be relating to citizen journalism and media”, to which the other responds “yeah, it’s like a wet dream.”

Our laughing got us hushed by someone from the session happening in the next room.

Tags: Northern Voice, NorthernVoice, Moose Camp, MooseCamp

Moosecamp is the name for the first day of the two day NorthernVoice blogging conference going on in Vancouver. It’s a loosely self-organized day of discussions on Friday, in advance of the full day of formal presentations Saturday. Two days of geeking out with like-minded people; I can’t wait!

Tags: Northern Voice, NorthernVoice, Moosecamp, Vancouver Blogging Conference

I was recently interviewed by Gerald Bauer for Vancouver 2.0 for a series of blogger interviews they have been doing. My interview went up on the site yesterday. Doing this sort of thing is new to me, but I think it went okay. The series has been great so far, too - I’ve added a few feeds from local bloggers to my news reader from reading it.

Tags: Vancouver interview, interview, Vancouver 2.0, blogger interviews 

Like many other bloggers, I waited with bated breath for the release of Performancing Firefox 1.1, the latest version of the Firefox extension that allows you to blog from within your browser on any page you happen to be on. For me, the main thing that has kept me from using PFF is that it adds some form of blank space in front of both the post titles, and the first paragraph in the body. Strangely, this odd formatting does not show up on the blog’s main page, but it does show up in the RSS feed.

Well, although 1.1 was mainly a bug fix release, this particular bug does not appear to be fixed. Oh well.

Tags: Performancing, Performancing Firefox