Relationship marketing in a liquid exchange

Universal Hub – The online Boston community.: What’s the Point?. The Point, in Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, is the first bar in Boston, and the first bar I know of period, with an RSS feed. Granted, it’s an RSS feed with links that don’t work unless you hit the most recent item, but hey, they’re trying.

And I could use a beer. We had another few inches of snow last night, and I found two broken shear bolts on the axle of our snowblower this morning (translation: it stopped clearing the driveway).

Another blogging Sloanie… er, Sloan CIO

Al Essa, the CIO of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, has not one but three public blogs: Tatler , described as “A personal perspective on intellectual history, aesthetics, political economy, and arts and letters”; The NOSE (Navigating Open Source Elearning); and Rude Mood, about running. I’m not sure that three complete independent, separately branded blogs aren’t overkill, but I guess it keeps things from getting confusing. A belated welcome to the blogosphere, Al.

It’s wicked pissa

Boston Online: Wicked Good Guide to Boston English. This is a compendium put together by Adam Gaffin, who maintains the Universal Hub site—and who, on the strength of this guide, will be a judge today in the Wicked Boston Accent Contest.

The guide, in the spirit of HL Mencken’s The American Language, captures information about pronunciation, odd vocabulary, and usage. Where else would you learn, for instance, about the Massachusetts Negative Positive? Or, for that matter, what the title of this post means?

ThisOldHouseblog

this old house project in carlisle

My parents came in last weekend for a fun-filled weekend of sightseeing and home improvement—we didn’t plan it but it kind of turned out that way. This was the first visit to our new place by my mom & dad, and it turned out to be a perfect introduction to New England winter.

I already mentioned the Boston Camerata concert on Friday night. On Saturday morning we piled into the car, drove out through Lexington and on toward Carlisle. We were curious to see if we could find the current This Old House project. (My dad, Lisa, and I are addicted to the show, and my mom is very tolerant.) As there are only three or four major roads in Carlisle, it was pretty easy to find the house, though we did have to stop and get directions from some cookie-selling Girl Scouts. We did a brief drive-by and took a few photos to prove we were there.

Afterwards we went downtown. Lisa introduced Mom to the wonders of Filene’s Basement, and my dad and I wandered the North End, taking in Modern Pastry and the Old North Church.

On Sunday Lisa and I went and picked up a long-awaited tool purchase, our first major power tool: a 12″ compound miter saw. My dad and I assembled it—and promptly learned that the extension cord powering my workshop didn’t provide sufficient juice to power the saw and the lights. Guess I’ll be running in a new outlet—and learning about fishing cable above plaster ceilings. (I’ll probably take the opportunity to try to run some conduit up there to make it easier to run future cables.)

Monday, though, was the real home improvement day, thanks to a surprise six-inch snowfall. My dad and I started by hanging a coathook board in the entryway/mudroom to mitigate some of the winter coat clutter. Then we took the closet door off its hinges and took a half inch off the bottom with a reciprocating saw. Not only was this fun and therapeutic, it also meant that we could now open the closet door all the way, even with our snow-absorbing all-weather carpet in the mudroom. (Incidentally, there are probably a few more precise ways to cut a door than with a reciprocating saw, but most of them involve tools I don’t have—and, even with a 12″ blade, the new miter saw couldn’t cut all the way across the bottom.) I finished the job by sanding the new bottom, and priming both the top and bottom of the door. The previous owners hadn’t bothered to finish the tops and bottoms of several of the doors, and we had noticed that some of them got swollen and impossible to open and shut properly in the summer humidity. In between, we also took down a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room that was obstructing traffic flow between the rooms, and Lisa painted the hall connecting the kitchen to the living room.

Somehow with all this going on, we had time to make homemade pasta, roast lamb, and polpettone (Italian meatloaf, basically a very large meatball). On subsequent nights, not all at once.

It was a great visit—I only hope that the snow and hard work didn’t scare my folks off!

Subscribe to what I’m listening to

Craig asked for an RSS feed for his iTunes so he could share what he was listening to. Turns out that’s a feature of Audioscrobbler, the community app for sharing your playlists. With a simple plug-in for iTunes for Windows or the Mac, you can upload everything you’ve listened to, and your friends can subscribe to the content in RSS (1.0).

Frinstance, here’s my Audioscrobbler feed. The only problem: what do you do with the information once you have it? Here Audioscrobbler is missing an opportunity. An automatic “buy on iTunes” or link to a tune excerpt, where available, might be pretty damn cool—and might make some money.

The politics of Beethoven

Tin Man: Sing Softly. Interesting story from my friend the Tin Man about being asked to identify himself as a member of the Gotham Chorus, not the Gay Gotham Chorus, for the sake of a bunch of Baptist college girls who were paying to sing in Carnegie Hall with them. I like the solution that Mipiel identifies in the comments: “after the concert, casually walk hand in hand with Matt until the Baptists can see, and then give each other a big hug and kiss. Then walk away as if nothing happened. If they’re unable to accept that gay men (and lesbians) are ordinary people just like them who do ordinary things like singing Beethoven that’s their problem, not yours.”

Still, it sucks all the way around—sucks for Tin Man and Matt, sucks for the Alabama kids that they have to be protected that way, sucks for Tin Man’s former glee club director that he, even as the concert manager, didn’t feel he had enough power to turn the occurrence into a “teachable moment” for his Southern guests.

I’m reminded, by contrast, of Robert Shaw, who regularly integrated Southern hotels and restaurants as he traveled around the country in the ’40s and ’50s with the Robert Shaw Chorale. Or Donald Loach, who directed the Virginia Glee Club from the 1960s through the 1980s, who integrated diners at truck stops in rural Virginia with his integrated Glee Club at the same time that the state was mounting its Massive Resistance campaign.

Farewell, Uncle Duke

MSNBC: Writer Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide. Dr. Gonzo’s insistence on eradicating the illusion of objectivity in his reporting paved the way for the blog world’s embrace of subjectivity. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to overcome his demons.

I feel a little like I did when Elliott Smith killed himself. Not quite the same sense of loss—I wasn’t that emotionally connected to Thompson—but the same anger. There is no bigger opponent for some of us than our own black angels of darkness.

Committee to Protect Bloggers finds first cause

BBC: Global blogger action day called. Two Iranian bloggers, known as Mojtaba and Arash, have been imprisoned in Iraq, and the new Committee to Protect Bloggers has declared today “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day.” Mojtaba was arrested for reporting the arrests of three fellow bloggers on his blog; Arash for keeping a blog called Panhjareh Eltehab (The Window of Anxiety) which focused on the arrests of bloggers and online journalists.

The original post has instructions on how to contact Iran’s UN representation (Iran has no US embassy).

Blog fright

In the course of answering an email about my blogging, I wrote the following which I thought might be appropriate for a broader audience—it’s about some challenges in blogging about your job and about your life, and about getting a blog started:

It’s very tempting once you become a blogger and get the spirit of sharing to write down everything that’s happening to you. If you’re single, that’s maybe OK (though there can certainly be some things about your private life that you are OK sharing at the age of 20 but might not want to be Googleable when you’re 30). But when you’re married, as I am, your spouse has a right to expect a certain amount of privacy and to get a certain consideration about what gets exposed in public and what doesn’t. It took a while for Lisa and me to find that balance. There have been some big things in my life—like our decision to relocate to Boston from Seattle—that I might normally have blogged just so that I could get perspective on them, and so that I could share them with our families as they happened. But because the information affected both of us and might affect both our jobs, I had to hold off on writing anything about the decision until the wheels were already in motion—basically until after we sold our house and I was getting ready to drive across the country.

With respect to work, there are all sorts of issues. Intellectual property is one—your workplace may claim ownership of ideas that you have. How does that affect blogging? I basically documented my blog and my existing software as an exception to the intellectual property agreement I signed with Microsoft, but I felt constrained in what I wrote afterwards—especially in talking about the company or its policies. This was a year or two before Robert Scoble helped to define the culture of blogging at Microsoft—that it was OK to have a blog and talk about your team and what it was doing. But figuring that out on my own was tricky, and for about a year I basically punted. I talked about RSS, because at that point the company wasn’t doing anything in the space, or about things I was learning on my own about CSS and web design, and then I blogged a lot about music, food, beer, and home improvement. It was only after a year had passed that I even publicly said, “I work for Microsoft” on my blog.

It was very liberating to realize after a while that there were other people at Microsoft who were able to maintain that balance and still write good interesting technical things on their blogs. That freed me a bit to have a stronger voice about software matters.

Ultimately, I got full liberation by joining a group whose business was about building community—customer-to-customer and Microsoftie-to-customer relationships. I had done work with an early version of that team as an intern, thinking about how Microsoft should work with customer-run websites that talked about its products and how to encourage those sites. At the end of my Microsoft experience, I came full circle, this time helping the company build a service that would take employee weblogs and weave them into the corporate website—effectively blurring the line between employees’ perspectives on their products and corporate messages.

…on starting a blog…

First, if you’re doing blogging in a business context you need to think about a very few important things: how tolerant are my employers of me saying things that might not jibe with corporate messaging? and is it appropriate for me to write about what I’m doing? (Cases where the latter is an issue: startups during the quiet period; if your entire job is working with clients, especially difficult ones; etc.). Then dive in afterwards, as long as you remember Scoble’s rules, which basically boil down to: would I have a problem if my wife, my boss, or my CEO reads this post?

Second, remember what Ted Hughes said about Sylvia Plath’s poetry, which was that if she couldn’t get a table from the materials she was working with in a poem, she would be happy with a chair or a toy. Not every post has to be hit out of the ballpark, but you always need to do the best job you can with the material you have at hand.

Third, link to people on both sides of an issue, not just the ones you disagree with.

Fourth, if you read something interesting on someone’s blog, point to it and write why you think it’s interesting.

Fifth, get a Bloglines account or a Kinja account or download NetNewsWire or RSS Bandit and start subscribing to sites’ RSS feeds. It’s a lot easier to manage the information flow that way.

Sixth, read Tony’s “How to Blog“. He covers a lot of the rest, including how to manage the fact that you’re writing for an audience that may be sometimes larger than you think.

Reposted from a post that was lost from Friday.

Bubbler blowback

I got a couple nice notes from Glenn Reid, CEO of Five Across, following up on my critical review of their new blogging tool Bubbler. They’re starting to add in some of the missing features I complained about, including RSS—which Glenn blogged about at his new Bubbler blog. (Subscribed.) I like that the RSS feeds are automatically built for all the content sections, not just the text posts.

Remaining things that the team could do fairly quickly to simplify the process of interacting with Bubbler blogs:

  • Update the default templates to provide permanent links for each entry. The anchor names are already in the XHTML—the app just needs to build an easy way to grab the permalink without viewing source.
  • Revise the client to make it possible to enter HTML source so that I can do proper hyperlinks and images.

As I guessed, the team is moving pretty quickly to add features to the basic bubbler™ beta, so I expect to see the app progress. I also like the responsiveness of the company—it’s not every day I get emails from a CEO after I complain about the company’s product.