Leadership Is Enthusiasm

We find ourselves intrinsically attracted to passionate and excited people

Leaders often find themselves in familiar situations

Leaders are usually trend spotters. They see the trend and move toward that trend and merely ask people to “follow them”. The people would probably get there without the leader. But, in no way, is the leader worthless. Most people are followers and followers need leaders.

      

Tim O’Reilly has been a trend spotter for many years. His accomplishments range from have a Technical Writing Empire, investments in del.icio.us, creation of arguably the first portal (Global Network Navigator), and lists of other accomplishments. The most successful recent venture is a wonderfully retro idea: Make, a quarterly print magazine in the spirit of Boy Scout DIY projects. The first issue, published in February, had articles on doing aerial photography with kites, making your own videocam stabilizer, and building a machine to read the magnetic stripes on credit cards. O’Reilly believes that the urge to hack stuff is “more common than we thought.” And it dovetails perfectly with the participation-based Internet he extols. The magazine has already exceeded his goal of 30,000 subscribers. He’s created a “Make Your Own Collegiate Text Book” site where universities can add chapters from different publishers including O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley Professional, Peachpit Press, New Riders, Prentice-Hall PTR, Sams, Que, Cisco Press, Sun Microsystems, and may more.

A great article was just posted in Wired about Tom O’Reilly

If you are interested in reading about the latest trends, keep your eye on Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular. Or just try a new site that incorporates all three of those sites in one location, http://diggdot.us/.

      

There are some really neat ways to foster action. Here are a couple that I thought you might be interested in.

Get a College Team to Develop an Application - Joel Spolsky has done a great job at FogCreek with what he calls, Project Aardvark. He recruited four Ivy League interns and instead of wasting their talents giving them the usual dull and unimportant tasks of a typical summer internship, we decided to let the interns create a complete new software product, from beginning to end, over the course of one summer. FogCreek now sells this product and has developed a documentary film based on Project Aardvark.

Get a College Team to Develop a Marketing Campaign - The project explained above can be applied to any type of project that has an end goal. This project could be a computer application, marketing campaign, building restoration, office design, etc. Be creative but have a goal with specific deliverables.

Have a One Day Hackathon - What’s a hackathon you ask? Well, all of the engineers (and even some of our “business people”!) showed up in the conference room at 9:00am with ideas for projects that could be designed, implemented, and tested in a single day. We tossed around the ideas for a little while to determine which ones would be the biggest hit with our publishers and by 9:30am everyone left with their assignment: Put everything else on hold and complete their project by the end of the day.
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001299.html
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001299.html

      

http://www.invent.org/challenge/

Have you been pondering, tinkering, building, or crafting the next modern marvel of the 21st century - but weren’t sure what to do with it? Now you have a chance to be recognized and win a $25,000 grant for sharing your BIG IDEA and expressing your inventive spirit. So go ahead and take your shot at becoming a part of history!

      

If I had children, this is a game I would want them to be addicted to.

Hot Shot Business
Play the game that gives you a chance to open your own pet spa, skateboard factory, or comic shop. You choose what you’ll sell, and scour the headlines for the trends that affect your business. Act fast when big news hits - make it or go broke; it’s all in your hands!

      

Google just released Google Base. Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that they’ll host and make searchable online. Some of the major media outlets are blowing it up to be a lot more than it is. Many people are eagerly waiting the fierce competition between Google Base and eBay.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

From what we’ve seen so far, it’s far from competition for anybody. It currently seems to have an easy interface to post information and its free. But, other than that, it doesn’t seem to be scoring well with anyone.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/11/15/google-base-launched-yuck/

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/11/google_analytic.html

Michael Arrington says this on CrunchNotes this morning:

Google Base has a lot of problems. The big one for me is that is another centralized content play, when all of the really interesting content is created at the edge. Jeff points out some other issues with Base, including the fact that the data is not only centralized but there is no API for non-Google search engines to access the data.

I’m assuming that Google Base (like all other Google applications) are taking on the Agile Development Process and they’ll solve the API issue. But, they’re still far from being “competition” for eBay. Here is a list of things I don’t like:

1. I don’t really know why I would use this site.
2. Google’s purpose is to manage all the information… this site only adds to the mess
3. When I search for products, I get a bunch of junk. Drill-downs are non-existent and I’m not sure how its organized
4. I have to upload my information to Google. Can’t someone just request the information from me and allow me to store it on my machine?

Google Base by itself is nothing but, due to Google’s size and other products (Google Wallet, Google, Froogle), this could evolve into a sweet little package. All they have to do is scrap what they have and start over.

      

Congratulations to the city of Kansas City (my original birthplace and current location of many relatives). Last week it was announced that they will be the host of a Super Bowl somwhere between 2011 and 2021. The likely prospects would be for the 49th or 51st Super Bowl, after the 2014 or 2016 seasons.

A Super Bowl translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for a city. The Super Bowl is a week long event and attracts people from all over the world. In one night over 1 million people are watching a single event. Congratulations KC!

Other Links
ESPN article

kansascity.com
use bugmenot.com for a username and password

      

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that the feed reading market is very fragmented. I know… I know… ANY market that has easy entry (almost all technology markets are easy to enter) and not a big player will easily become fragmented.

BUT… it’s just a little surprising because I know that RSS technology will… already has… changed our world.

ABC News - Nov. 10, 2005 — The votes are now in: Newspapers are officially dying.

Every news web site or blog is producing news instantly. News web sites have replaced nationwide press and blogs have replaced local and specialized press. Rather than waiting for your daily 10 o’clock news, you can have it instantly from your favorite web site. And since everyone has a unique perspective, you may want to visit MSNBC for your financial news, CNN for your nationwide news, and BBC for your world news. Now, you’d hate to have to visit all of these web sites… but you will. Feed readers allow you to read multiple feeds from one central location. It is instantly delivered… you don’t have to wait until 10 o’clock.

Technology is going through another rally and funding is getting easier to come by. Investors are taking on new challenges and innovation is sparking. I’m going to predict that within the next year, we’re going to see some IPO’s, mergers, and acquisitions. One feed reader will emerge as a leader.

      

I just read a good post on an awesome music service, pandora.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.

If you go there, you enter your favorite artist or song. It then builds a station specific to that type of music. As each song plays, you can tell pandora if you enjoy the song. It changes as you rate each song. You can create up to 100 stations and share stations between your friends.

I’ve been trying it out and it’s awesome. Go check it out, www.pandora.com.

      

As I posted last week, tagging is getting out of control. And the more I think about it, the more angry I become.

I enjoy reading TechCrunch and last week there were probably 5+ reviews on “new” web sites that are utilizing “tagging”. Tagging is no different than placing keywords on an item. Listen people… we’ve been doing this since the beginning of the Internet. We use to call it meta data then keywords and now “tags”. All we’re changing is the way we display the keywords… rather than searching in a textbox (like google), we’re displaying every possible keyword in a list format.

This is not new. This is not hip.