Ensight – Jeremy Wright

This isn’t really my thoughts, since I just woke up and don’t have the energy for thoughts. But, there’s been some more talk on this over the last few days, and I wanted to highlight some of the interesting bits.

Rick Segal posted a more detailed entry on some of his thoughts. James Cox had a really great response from the entrepreneur’s standpoint, as did as did “Hank” (he can’t find funding for his great idea).

There are a few things going on here. First, James is right that part of the misconception amongst A Listers is that many of the people they know who are building these services have enough money that they are able to take 3-6 months off and build a product. Which is fine if a) you can afford to take the time off, b) you are able to personally build and c) you have the blog connections necessary to bring in decent traffic.

But that’s just the old guard approach. What about new guys like Hank and James who don’t need a lot of money (my guess is that 50-250K would go a long way… I know it would towards b5media).

Doc Searls feels this is really about pre-user testing and acceptance, before any funding (or something). Not sure I agree, as I never really bought into the “a small pool of users will accurately be able to predict what a large group will want” philosophy.

And I like James’ idea about starting a mini thinktank. This was one of the things I could see happening in response to this.

To finish off this summary post, here is my comment to Rick’s idea generating:

I wrote some of my response to this in my post yesterday, but I believe the key values that I and most of my entrepreneur friends (who, admittedly, aren’t the Robert Scoble’s and Mark Evans’ of the world, but we still have a lot of fun in spite of that) are looking for from VC’s are:

1. Support: In spite of our egos, we’re all very aware of what we do and don’t know. And most of us have somehow learned that “play to your strengths” is a great mantra. We just don’t know who to turn to for our areas of weakness.
2. Knowledge: One of the areas that isn’t a “strength” for this new generation of entrepreneur is knowledge. Sure, we have lots of head knowledge, but the experiential, stand-alongside mentor type knowledge is missing, and most of us want this from investors / VC’s.
3. Training: I touched on this in the post, but training new entrepreneurs is, to me, absolutely essential. In addition, running training as “camps” would allow entrepreneurs to develop relationships with each other early on, which is sure to help the VC / early stage investment firm in the long term.
4. Connections: Yes, blogging is a rolodex. But, getting beyond that rolodex is still very hard. Getting ad deals with newscorps, content partnerships with MSN and Yahoo, etc, is still a lot of hard work. Hard work that the relationships VC’s have can mitigate.
5. Money: Not much, and not too much all at once, but in the right hands, it’s amazing what 50-100K can do these days. In truth, many of my entrepreneur friends are asking for 3-5M$ these days because they have to. Sure, the investment looks good to VC’s and many of my friends are getting that funding. But they know that they could have done just as much with 1/10 of what they received. Strategic funding.

This is a great discussion. I’m doing a lot of travelling in the next few months (Rochester, Toronto, Vancouver, San Fran) and I’m hoping to continue having this discussion with entrepreneurs, business managers and whoever else I bump into.

At the end of the day, though, I believe you either need to choose between changing everything and changing just a few things. Changing just a few things, in my mind, is far more likely to succeed. I know Dave wants to change everything, though, and I’ve never been one to stand in Dave’s way

Later on today I’m going to try and look at this from a different perspective. Right now the only way I can see this issue is on these 5 principles, but that’s largely because I’m looking at it with an entrepreneurs hat on. I’ll try and look at the industry sidelong in the next few days to see if there are some different trends that can be answered, capitalized on, etc.

After all, it doesn’t do any good for me to stand in my little corner of the web just yelling out the same idea over and over again!

It’s likely that most Ensight readers have realized that in the last year my posting level has gone down. I used to blog 3-7 times a day. Now I barely blog 3-5 times a week.

This is because in the last 6 months I’ve taken on a campaign to become more “healthy” and “balance” in my blogging, my work and even my life. To be honest, I’m still a long way off from healthy or balanced in my work and life, but it seems like I’ve hit a measure of balance in my blogging. I do wish I blogged more, but I’m okay with my current volume.

So, it’s with some amusement, that I read Scoble’s meltdown at being called an edge case. His argument is that being an edge case isn’t bad, because most of the cool “features” in software are due to edge cases. Which may, or may not, be true. But he’s still an edge case. And I’d argue that 99% of the features that edge cases request are never useful to anyone else.

This whole issue came about because people have begun dismissing Scoble for his “I read x number of feeds” line. He feels he’s being characterized for it. As he should be, really. After all, it’s he that is characterizing himself by the number of feeds he reads, so it was only a matter of time before the inverse happened. Be careful what you wish for, eh?

The truth is that there was a time that I “read” 600+ feeds. One day, I decided to trim the ones I wasn’t reading, and I got down to 500. Then I decided to trim the ones I didn’t actually tend to in any way get value from, and I was down to 400. Then I decided to delete ALL of my subscriptions and start from scratch. Now I’m at about 100 feeds.

And you know what? I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. At least nothing important. And I end up saving about 2-3 hours per day in reading / blogging / emailing / commenting that didn’t have any real value.

In fact, if I wanted to, I could probably bring my reading list down to about 50 and not miss anything. I’d check Memeorandum once or twice a day for any major news, I’d read 50 blogs, and I’d check Scoble’s and Doc’s blogs once or twice a week to see if there was some major shitstorm brewing that mattered to me.

And instead of reading 2-3 hours of feeds, I’d read 20 minutes.

Yes, being hyperconnected is nice. But y’know what? Having time to do valuable things is nice too. Having time to build companies, having time to speak at conferences without feeling like the world is slipping away from me, having time for my family and having time to help friends who are a little swamped.

Time is precious, and I’d much rather spend it on things I value than on the imaginary luminosity that comes from being an “edge case” or “bleeding edge” person or “industry leader”. After all, in generations to come, I’m more likely to be remembered by my family than by the industry. And even if I was remembered by the industry, unless I end up being Bill Gates, it’ll likely be as some footnote somewhere.

Yeah, I’ll follow my passion. But I’ve decided I’ll follow it my way. If it means getting “there” 5 years slower, but with 5 more years of experience, knowledge and wisdom – well, I’ll choose the slow route. Because I’ll probably enjoy “there” and be more useful doing whatever it is I’m doing when I “arrive” with those years under my belt anyways.

Yeah, rambling thought. Sorry. When you have a few extra minutes, it’s alright to have them because they aren’t taking away too much from other things that matter

This is from a post to the b5media blog this morning:

As many people have noted, we’re having server issues. To be honest, it’s no longer load issues. In fact, the several experts we’ve brought in to have a look are stumped. And the server center says there is “nothing wrong” with the box, even though it’s throwing scads of errors, MySQL keeps dying, one server refuses to talk to another, etc, etc, etc.

So, we are looking for another server company to go with. We’d likely be looking at 3 servers initially. We don’t need a lot of support, but we DO need the servers properly configured initially, and we DO need them to stay up. Ideally all 3 would also be on the same switch, or close to it, since they’ll be talking to each other pretty heavily.

If you know of anyone, or are a server provider who would like to talk, please email me or even call me (506 466 3855), as this is incredibly urgent.

Well, a new year means a new conference circuit. Here is my current travel lineup:

February 9-11: Rochester, presenting a workshop to the Rochester arm of the American Marketing Assocation, focussing on using blogs to create positive experiences with customers, as well as on the nature of brands. I have about a day free for meetings, social and consulting.

February 15-17: Toronto. Doing work with The Blog Studio on b5media’s next incarnation. Available for a chunk of that for meetings, social and consulting.

March 1-3: Palo Alto, CA. Speaking at The New Communications Forum with Jory Des Jardins. It’ll be a really great session where we “put blogs on trial”.

March 20-24: Vancouver. Speaking at the Computerized Airline Sales & Marketing Association annual meeting on the west coast. Should be a lot of fun. I’ll be doing 2-3 sessions. One intro to blogging, and then at least one going deeper into developing strategic blogging guidelines and relationships (internally and externally). I’ll be available for some social, though I’m hoping I get grabbed for quite a bit of conference and airline-related work while I’m there.

October 5-9: On a cruise ship in the Carribean. I’m speaking at Blogonomics. Probably on how companies can really integrate blogs into their external and internal marketing practices – specifically how they can use blog research to interact more with customers and get a real sense of what their market is doing.

I’m still open for more invitations, specifically during the summer and fall. I want to keep a month or two between April and June free to work on my 3rd book.

Just got back from a car accident. I’m not sure if it’s totalled or not (never can tell with new cars). But there were two impact points that collapsed the driver’s side of the car. One half a foot from my head. One half a point from my feet.

I’m very happy to even be alive today. I’ll have pictures tomorrow sometime as soon as I figure out how to get them off my RAZR.

I said before I was voting Conservative, and today on election day I haven’t changed my mind. Everything I’ve seen since then (particularly the Liberal attack ads) has strengthened my decision to not vote Liberal.

At the same time, I’ve seen some good things from Layton. I think I’ll be watching the NDP more closely next election and giving them some more credit.

However, this time it’s Harper. I’m voting Conservative. Not with a “strong” amount of trust or faith in them. Consider this a “minority vote”, because they’ve yet to give me a reason to like or trust them. However that’s better than most of the parties and most of the leaders which seem to actively be trying to push me away.

I don’t really feel so odd voting Conservative. In the grand scheme of things, Canadian politics is just about as centrist as you can get. In any given year, most parties will agree on taxation, military spending, healthcare and educational issues, etc. Maybe not on key specific decisions, but overall everyone wants to see taxes down, the country safe and our soldiers provided for, healthcare and education improved, etc. We don’t have very many truly divisive issues, so the reality is that it’s really hard to vote idealogically.

All the best to every Canadian who is largely unaligned with a party (like me). This will be a day of holding our breaths to find out what happens. I may live-blog the election, or I may not. I haven’t decided yet. Either way, best of luck Canada.