Knuckle Sandwich

Bre Pettis, who does a lot of the really cool videos on the Make Blog has a television pilot that will be showing on the History Channel later this month called History Hackers.

His first show is going to be on Nikola Tesla, who, if you aren’t familiar with him, you should be counting your lucky stars as most of the electronics in your life are based on his research.

History Hackers is going to be debuting on 9/26 on the History Channel at 9:00. Be sure to check it out.

Congratulations to all of the winners of the SlideShare ‘Worlds Best Presentation’ winners. You might recall that I entered this a few weeks ago. Sadly, I didn’t win, but took a mighty swing.

The winning presentations were amazing, but this was one of my favorites:

I was listening to Carly Fiorina tonight on the way home from work. It was really, really boring. I’ve heard more passion from my kid about finding bugs. I hated this speech. There is nothing there. On the radio, there was even less.

Fiorina is supposed to be getting people excited about voting for McCain, instead, she simply reads off the teleprompter much in the way that I would read a speech I’ve never seen before and didn’t really care about my performance.

Joe Lieberman was slightly better, but still has that annoying 3 - 5 syllable and pause speech pattern that everyone in both conventions has. He makes a few, well scripted jokes, but for the most part, the speech was dull and predictable. In other words, it was clear he was pulling from the teleprompter, and while I believe that he believes his own bullshitake, he didn’t really do a great job of conveying it.

Speakers at the DNC did a slightly better job in conveying their passion for reform in this country, but I suspect that the aura of Barack generates passion from speakers. Nancy Pelosi did a pretty decent job, but still doesn’t get me doing cartwheels.

Hilary Clinton, also did a fairly decent job

It seemed like she deviated from the teleprompter slightly, but I still don’t get the same warm & fuzzy passionate feelings that I got from this:

I don’t know, maybe it was the slides, but in the end, Steve is more passionate about selling a 3G iPhone than any speaker I’ve seen at either DNC or RNC selling why I should vote for their party.

And that’s just sad.

The epic battle continues.

The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo.

Dear Mom & Dad,

Comparatively, I don’t live a crazy life.  I’m fairly passive and things aren’t too exciting, but I know that you love keeping up with my life.  Work, kids, house, dog, etc.

Like a lot of the kids these days, I’m doing all sorts of things on the interwebs.  Blogging, taking pictures, making videos, sharing all sorts of stuff that I find interesting.  Things move pretty fast.

Sadly, neither of you use IM.  I’ve tried to explain RSS on numerous occasions, but let’s face it, most people in my industry can’t explain it to their folks, so let’s skip that one.  And Twitter, I might as well try explaining things in Klingon.

So what to do?

My friend Alan and I were talking about creating a service that would allow you to follow just one person in Twitter.  Just to keep our parents up to speed with what we are doing.  Clever, but kind of dull, especially as your other kids start to realize that the interwebs are a series of tubes and post their own missives.

But I’ve been using FriendFeed for a while.  As a parent, this should be super fantastic cool for you.  Kind of a one stop Scott shop.  Want to know what I’m up to?  Look for my Twitter feed.  Want to see pictures of the wedding I was at this past weekend (or of the kids), look at my Flickr Feed.  Want to see my latest blog post, that is fed into FriendFeed to.  That article that I mentioned from the NYTImes?  Like Prego, it’s in there. Now it’s all available in FriendFeed.

So check it out.  I even took the liberty to sign you up for the service and subscribe to my feed.  Once in while check it out.  Total strangers know what I’m up to, now you can too.

Love,

Scott

PS - yes I realize the irony of the odds of you reading this on my site.

Congratulations to my friends over at Flickr for launching embeddable slide shows. This is really very cool.

Here is a slide show from when we built our house. You can read more about the process here.

I’ve been really hooked on this record for the past couple of days.  I think that I listened to it 3 times yesterday and actually had it playing at the beginning of my staff meeting.  It is that perfect, soothing, record that could be great office music, dinner music, and, I’m sure, long drive music (I’ll let you know next week).

I’m also insanely intrigued by what Ian and the team at TopSpin are doing around the promotion of this and other artists.   The back story on this particular album and the partnership with Byrne / Eno is espeically fascinating.  I encourage you to check it out.

If anything, listen to the album here.

The other day, I looked at Google Reader and noticed that I had almost 200 feeds coming in.  This was horrendous as it was starting to become quite a bit of a time sink.  Mainly, there were just too many distractions coming in.  I’d read something from one source and that would go down a rat hole to something very different.  The next thing I knew, I was reading Make on how to do LED grafitti in London or something equally crazy. There was also too much duplication going on.  If TechCrunch says something, GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb are also going to say more or less the same thing.   I needed to get a handle on it.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was starting to play with Feedly, a more magazine like RSS reader.  My first glance with Feedly, I really liked it quite a bit, but it needed a bit of effort to get it in a format that worked for me.  As part of my plan to clean up my feeds, I realized that Google Reader just isn’t going to work.  I am going to try to make a 100% migration to Feedly.

Here is how I managed it:

Deletion of Feeds

The first thing that I did to get organized was to go through all of my feeds and delete a bunch of them.  In doing so, I mentally broke them into three categories, dead feeds, feeds I don’t read and duplicates.

Dead feeds are easy as both Feedly and Google reader tell you the last time they were updated.  If something wasn’t updated in the last 3 months, it was gone.  I had about a dozen of these and they all went.  At some point, I’m sure I’ll wonder ‘what ever happened with so and so and go back and re-subscribe.  Until then, gone.

Feeds I didn’t read was a bit more challenging.  These were feeds that I subscribed to at one point, probably because I liked a post or two, but then fell out of like and quit reading.  There were probably a dozen or so of these feeds and I think that one or two made the cut this time around. Wired’s blog made the list on this, not because I don’t read Wired, but because I find it annoying that I have to click through to their content.

Finally, there were what I termed duplicate feeds.  These are feeds that seem to simply cut and paste from other people’s content. Again, this was a little tricky due to discerning between what people write as original content versus what people just nick from others.

When it was all said and done, I was left with 137 feeds.  Definitely more manageable as a long list, but now was time to categorize my feeds.

Categorization of Feeds

After thinking about this over my morning latte, I decided to come up with 9 categories for my feeds.  My goal was to have a nice mix of both work and personal categories and a feedly layout that makes these easier to digest.  These categories are:

Customers: I don’t want a set of pre-canned feeds from a customers website or their marketing blog, I want real news.  Since I’m only working on a dozen or so deals per quarter, I set up a Google News feed and a Technorati feed for the customers name.  My goal is to spend 15 minutes each morning just scanning through these and reaching out to customers based on new events.

Competitors: Should be fairly obvious, but I’ve grabbed a set of Technorati Feeds and Google News feeds for our top 5 competitors. This allows me to keep track of what is going on with competitors, to learn about new customers and new product announcements.  Seeing the Technorati feeds is realy valuable as I can see what their customers and prospects are saying about them.

Socialtext: This is the company I work for.  I keep a set of personal blogs of other employees such as Ross & Alan, as well as a Technorati feed to find new business and learn what others are saying about us.

Sales & Self Development: These are feeds that I believe will make me both a better sales person and a better person all around.  Some of this is feel good stuff, some of this is excellent guidance.  Feeds include Hello, My Name Is, Selling to Big Companies & SandHill.com.

Technology: I’m a junkie for this stuff, but with more and more companies popping up each day, it is hard to keep up with it.  I’ve gotten it broken out so that I can hit this when I have some free time.  Feeds include engadget, TechCrunch & Mashable

Venture Capital: At some point soon, I want to launch my own company.  I don’t really get too much into the specifics of deals, but I’m interested in knowing what is hot and what is driving deals as well as how to get funded.  I’ve tried to keep this VC general, but it does include some personal blogs such as David Feinleib, Fred Wilson’s AVC & Alarm:Clock.

Internet Famous: This one is probably pretty obvious, but I took the personal blog posts of people who are internet famous.  I don’t mean to be rude about this, but I tend to believe that if my wife doesn’t know who you are, you aren’t famous in the traditional sense, even though I probably think that you are.  Feeds include Louis Gray, Robert Scoble & Joi Ito.

Friends & Luminaries: I was originally going to include both my friends and people who are internet famous.  I then decided that I wanted to check my friends sites more frequently.  This isn’t friend like a Facebook friend, but people I actually know and can call or IM and know that I’ll get a response.  The list is short, but important.

Fun: Finally, I have a handful, okay, more than a handful, of feeds that really don’t have anything to do with work and end up being a total time sink.  They are great fun though and a wonderful way to kill time on the train.  These sites include Make, ValleyWag & Tool Monger.

The whole thing looks like this:

So far, I’ve been using this method for a few days and it seems to work out well.  It allows me to focus on what is important when I need to and what what I want to learn when I have some free time.

Bonus: This set up in Feedly transfers over nicely to Google Reader so I can use my phone to read my feeds.

Let me know what you think and what works for you.

A couple of months ago, I had our PR guy create a Yahoo Pipe feed of just the top sales blogs that are out there.  Not necessarily the Sales.Alltop blogs, but some how he managed to do it based on some algorithm of popularity as judged by comments, saves in del.icio.us and diggs (which sales blogs never get).  If you want the feed, go grab it here.

Like I do every few days, I logged in to see what was shaking in the sales blog world.  Usually, it is full of posts of ideas on how to build strong sales teams, overcome objections, ask better questions, etc.  Pretty standard stuff.

But once in a while, something odd slips through the system and I usually can tell right away based on the title.  So when I saw Three Boxes of Condoms with a 10.0 rating, of course I had to click to see how this one got into my feed.

The post, from The Sales War, is a great read and it turns out that it is about knowing if your prospect could really be a customer early on (read it, it is really well worth it).   The lesson that Kevin shares is something that I’ve been struggling with lately.  Not qualifying prospects, but disqualifying them.

When you are learning sales, you spend a lot of time learning what questions to ask to understand if someone is qualified or not.  What you don’t spend a lot of time learning is when to disqualify someone.  There is nothing worse than spending a ton of time and energy to bring on a customer only to find out, late in the game, that something that should be obvious is going to prevent you from doing business.  Technology is on the wrong platform, deployment options don’t map to requirements, they don’t like 2 vowels in your name.  There are a ton of reasons why someone won’t do business with you.  The important thing is to smoke that out early enough, try to overcome it and if it is an impossible hurdle, cut bait quickly.

I don’t climb mountains, but I understand that more people die coming down Everest than going up.  Usually this is due to some lack of planning at the beginning of the trek.  Sales is the same way.  Don’t die when the finish line is in view.  Especially when you could have prevented it at the beginning of the climb.

At some point, I’ll do a longer post on disqualification.  In the meantime, check out Three Boxes of Condoms.

Photo by victoriapeckham