Microsoft Technologies - An infographic by the team from Next at Microsoft

Hi-res PDF is here  (to read the tiny type :) ).

The bad news is, that I also was wearing the wrong orthotics and the wrong shoes (orthotics meant to go in dress shoes only, and because of the treadmill not having a cushion I went for more cushiony Brooks (Glycerin instead of Trance for you running wonks and wonkettes).

The 24+ hours in one week of Skyrim/treadmill walking didn't help either. So I had to endure (as did my coworkers) 3 weeks of Das Boot (and a cortisone heel shot, to combat the plantar fasciitis that did not succumb to mondo ibuprofen and too much SXSW walking. (see a pattern here?)

The reason for Das Boot post-shot is, since I apparently can't be trusted not to walk around (and I do have a community outreach job to do) I need to be wearing something that keeps the pressure off that foot as much as possible. Aya has already mocked me for making a velcro "swish swish" sound when I walk -hardly menacing when I was going more for Dark Lord of the Sith style.

So, after 3 weeks of babying and mocking and no SXSW style conferences, Das Boot has come off and I am flat-footed again (wearing Brooks Trance with new orthotics.)

I did invest in this little number - a calf stretcher.  For those of you who like the stairmaster or naturally have tight calves, this wedge thing is a godsend in that the incline forces the stretch and varying your position while standing on it (or adjusting the incline) does even more for you as your muscles loosen.

I don't believe my results are that typical - I have fussy feet, and overdid it, and am trusting that a gradual buildup of walking will do it.As now have the right shoes, right orthotics, and soon, the right foot to put forward on it.

Besides, the rule was - no Skyrim shall be played not on that treadmill and I intend to finish that game in 2012!

Cheers!

First we ask ourselves - will online shopping replace a trip to the store? Note the Nov/Dec 1985 date up top here. :)

Dude's socks are atrocious but note the floppy disk-related (word processor?) he's got in his hot little hands,

Next, the goods from my own days of yore - my first computer. The DEC VT 180 (made by Digital Equipment Corporation.)

 We couldn't find the dot matrix printer that went with it ( remember the paper with the holes streaming along either side? That was it!).

The left "A" drive was for the boot disk. The right was to store your word docs and BASIC programs on .  It whirred and made an awful racket.

What you can't see very well is the nonsense on the screen - in theory it would be processing the boot disk but ours was so old...

rinting is blurry on the post-it but .. things were much simpler then. I think we determined that it had 64K of RAM.

Other people had Atari's and commodores - I had a computer for use from the Boston area.

That's why it's so fun to work on Bing Booster startup program in Boston - look how far we've come! :)

 .

I've had to learn a lot in the last 3 years. I will always remember Melissa Powell having to explain to me what a PRIME score was ( it sounded like some sort of beef thing to me) but I've also been struck how many of the skills transfer over. Not everything, and of course some things are born not made - there's no way I'm going to achieve Stefan's level of hair volume or Aya's level of coolhunting event intuition 

But for those at large companies thinking they might toy with a jump to "the dark side" from engineering, or those in startups who have to do everything, the following observations might help you make sense of the differing mindset needed to do a PR role vs. your engineering one.

1) As a program manager, dates are important – for internal political reasons, for release to manufacturing or business reasons, or for point of pride – a well-run project with no whammies hits its dates.  As a PR person, dates become everything, good or bad. Shifting the day the news breaks will affect how well your product does in public perception, may have it run into other news through no fault of its own and fail, or may have it serendipitously be the only news that day. If you are an engineering person committing to a PR date, and you miss, you affect the goodwill of reporters toward your product and possibly the entire success of your launch. Have a nice day.

2) Upgrade your gadgets and your wardrobe.  The gadgets part as a geek you may already have in hand, because the one thing geeks like to do is stand around hallways comparing phones (I know, the visual but it’s truth). The wardrobe of course differs from company culture to company culture, and developers who are also consultants to business will wear suits as opposed to the unofficial official t shirt and jeans uniform. But, even stuck among their own and not among the public, dressing is often more of a competitive sport for PR and marketing people.

3) Only sometimes is the story about the sausage filling (meat filling= tech details that you wearing your engineer hat, care about). Story narrative and how a product is talked about has more in common with personal ads and dating profile strategies than you’d think.  A person is a complex being, with soul and microbes and organs pumping viscous fluids. The part they tell people they want to date, is way less information than that and filtered to be stuff people who are open for relationship would find interesting. You may have 100 features but if you can’t explain who would use them and why, or tell the anecdote of how someone has used them, the press won’t care as much. Startups take heed as I’m talking to you here.

4) Like software methodology, there are formulas, metrics, and fads in PR – and they still manage to fail capturing what makes greatness. There’s agile, there’s PMI, there’s lean startup, waterfall and more. In PR there’s embargo, there’s pre-brief, there’s seeding, there’s viral, there’s social (which has a whole umbrella of tactics and strategies underneath it). The problem with both disciplines on this is, those formulaic structures never approach the effect of personality or the uniqueness of the times, on the outcome. It’s like Schroedinger’s cat – opening the box destroys the waveform. In software development itself, you see that where the second time a dev has to code something similar to what he or she has done before, it goes faster. In PR, the market forces around how a message is received may be so unique that even if you execute it “right” again, it won’t work, and the fact that it’s second time around, may kill its effectiveness outright.

5) PR is more of a female-dominated industry, with attendant wage issues. Guy engineers, tired of working only around men, and female engineers, tired of being the only female, may find this new environment a welcome change. I can’t step too far into this topic without heading for clichés, rabble rousing feminism, or both, so I’ll just sum up here with – marketing and PR for women as disciplines culturally have “had good PR.”  Engineering will have to step it up to catch up, in order to attract women the same way.

6)  Just as nerds have taken over the mainstream, so has PR – in its own way. You see more gadgets in the news. You see more folks using the Internet to get things done. You also see more obviously staged reality shows, you see people worrying about their “personal brand” in their dealings online and other others, and while consumer culture has always stressed appearance, through social media there’s more of a self-publishing aspect to that “ideal self promotion.” If you only know me by my twitter avatar (me and a chicken) that’s a very different me than the bedraggled one at Microsoft at 10 pm. (for one thing, the day I wear an apron to work, see who spiked my coffee)

7) Attention to detail transfers over.  Much as folks joke about PR spin and shill, you have to get your facts straight before you can spin  them, and if you do demos, briefings, or stunts you have logistics to consider. All that spec writing and tracking on Excel stuff transfers. Broad brush strokes work only for certain aspects of either profession – there are always brass tacks.

8) Two-drink minimum observed by Dilbert, continues to be observed. I have only a 3  year sample size on this, and tech evangelists or tech sales people with clients may have some of the same factors at work. If your job is to meet with people, you will end up with a ton of lunches, dinners, events, drinking events, places where you are expected to drink. You can get adept at the “lime wedge in soda water” “water for vodka” ruse that people did getting others drunk in college while they stayed sober, or you can just roll with it because your liver is mighty.  Let’s just say I know lime wedge trick cause the liver she is not mighty. :)

9) There’s more swag in PR and marketing. Constant exposure to the marketing closet, conferences, vendors that want to send samples for PR events, and your own need to wear branded t-shirts means that you will end up with more of a swag haul at the end of a PR year than an engineering one. If you are good at inventory management or charitable donation (yet another laptop bag to Goodwill!) this will not get out of hand. In engineering people fake brick others’ offices when they go on vacation. In marketing or PR, swag box delivery may brick you into your own office. Be warned.

10)  Making it all up, or finding a new spin, is not a bad thing. Creativity is needed when your startup has hit a wall and needs to pivot. The ability to fake it til you make it, put a smooth move on it, or spin  a reality distortion field around you is also helpful. It gives you practice incubating new ideas.  While engineer to engineer, we may always tell each other the truth (another Dilbert cartoon reference), and designers will always know what things their designs fail to handle, creativity of expression and the ability to communicate is useful everywhere. Brainstorm with your PR person in the room - they may be able to give you something all the engineers in the room won't think of.

View from coffee line, rockstar TEDActive barista making my drink 2011 . You learn a lot by watching the process!

Thanks to a link from Dare Obasanjo, I was reading Scripting News " Hackathons are Nonsense." It's a perfect nugget of thoughtful skepticism, where he notes that you won't have a Julia Child movie about software because unlike food being assembled for a recipe, you can't see the code blocks form inside the developer's head. Also, a few hours or a sleep-deprived weekend is too short a time to be real software development.

With all due respect to Dave Winer, I think about hackathons differently, and it may be because I've been a program manager most of my technical career, charged with the idea that the entire project runs smoothly. Steve Jobs didn't *code* the iphone.The software that comes out of a developer's head  can take the same detail mania, the same creative high bar, all that mental acuity we ascribe to Steve Jobs. But, Jobs wasn't the dev on the iphone OS, and his overall role at Apple shows you that there's more to a product than just the code. Someone had to figure out how to get the hardware working. Someone had to figure out how to get the software working. Someone had to get customer requirements and have the artistic sensibility to make it useful and usable. Someone had to shill that stuff on stage and in the retail shops, customer by customer. Winer would possibly agree with those  examples- but he suggests they come after the coding is done first.  I would argue why not toss them in at the prototype stage?

Hackathons (while often producing code), are actually in tandem producing several other things - the first possibly being an ad hoc  team of people united around an idea, the first step toward fleshing out an idea that may start in code and end up in hardware or as real-life service (think Zipcar, airbnb, etsy).  A byproduct of the hackathon may be a startup, or something that leads to a startup. Even if it's one guy/gal hacking on one idea, at the end of the event that guy/gal has to answer to judges, their peers, attendees. There is a dialogue with their work from the time the hackathon opened its doors. It's not like writing code at home or making design decisions no one will see.

Don't get distracted by code as the output of hackathons. By getting a bunch of devs in a room, it is likely you will get code coming out. If you put a bunch of oil painters in the same room, I suspect you'd get paintings to solve the problem. But a lot of interesting things happen in addition to good code  when you let OTHER people in the room with the developers. The OTHER people get dev-education. The developers get OTHERwise educated. All this regardless of whatever prize a sponsor or the community have created for the "winners" of the hackathon. A lot of life is showing up, and so it is with hackathons.

Obviously, if a developer wanted to code in silence alone, they could have stayed home. When they join the hackathon,  they open up their process and become a walking advertisement for the stuff they do without having to say a lot. This is not a bad thing for the dev community - it attracts more people to the discipline (and with luck, more women) and by being in public,  the process is demystified.

I cannot tell you how many times over the years I've had to do this mental calculation around "how technical this guy is telling me he is and how mystical he is telling me the code problem is" and "how technical this guy really turns out to be (along with how unmystical and hard work the process of writing code is)." As a woman, sometimes you are handed instant subtraction, like  -15 tech points when people meet you, so call me petty, I keep score on folks that talk more than they code or make something a mystery where a more objective dev or tester explains it plainly in two sentences. In the hackathon, some pettiness can be brushed aside. The thing you are getting done with only limited time to do it, trumps everything. Communication is about this thing we are making. Even if its one dev, and the community who watches her work being demoed at the end, communication has happened between the code and the community. She or he stayed up all night - there is no mystery, just the hard-won new day.

What's in it for the devs (besides possible prizes, startups or fame?)  Well, there is also something significant about feeling part of a tribe that can improve your own work. Gertrude Stein had salons so writers and artists could swap notes, talk shop, stimulate each others' work. Writerly types will know about NaNoWriMo - the national "write-a-novel-in-November program where thousands of people have uploaded their high-word-count files to prove they did the work, and possibly created art at the same time.  NaNoWriMo usually kicks off in each city with a meeting or online discussion - because people want to feel tribe even when creating in their own heads alone for the rest of the month. Some folks meet in cafes to write together, separately. See how hackathons imitate art? :)

In a few hours, I'll be flying to TEDActive where we (Bing) have an interesting hackathonish type project going on and THEN I'm going to Angelhack in Boston (see http://www.angelhack.com) . Both are experiments, both could go north or south, both are assertions in human creativity and the power of teams to make good stuff. Who knows if "software as a product" will ensue? But at the very least we should see ideas (and teamwork) made manifest. That's not nonsense.

 PS if you want to see how the Wall Street Journal views hackathons going mainstream, they've got a decent overview article on that here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903532804576566930629307852.html .

Standing desk

Folks at Microsoft know that in late 2011 I requested a standing desk at work. My constant travel has meant difficulties in keeping to a workout or diet regimen, and since I didn't grow up at the weight I'm at now, my back has been protesting more and more about being at a computer job. Other people I knew at Microsoft swore by their standing desk eliminating back pain, and I had been duly alarmed by "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity" article in the New York Times.

But I knew from working CES booths that all-day standing can be painful, so I read Gina Trapani's switch to a standing desk to get a feel for what it would be like to take this on.I consulted Jeremiah Andrick, who works from home when not traveling and swears by his (my inquiries and others' led to this blog post of his on his setup).

I met with my doctor, got the note, went through the ergonomics team, and here's something similar to what I work on in the office. What's not evident in the photo is how ginormously wide it is even as a corner setup - the photo looks like one person barely squeezes in, but I think 3 people could stand at my desk and work on their laptops without issue (though of course they'd have to sit and stand in unison :) ).

Obervations after a few weeks: The nice thing about my office setup is that it is sit-to-stand, an important concept for folks used to sitting on their butts all day. I'm finding my current ritual (as I work my way up to more and more standing) is to come in in the morning, hang coat. Drink coffee standing up and work til noon. Go somewhere to eat or eat at my desk while sitting. Come back to office and stand for another couple of hours. Finish the day sitting.

When I talked to Jeremiah, he was saying he took phone calls sitting down, that that felt more natural, as well as eating. I can actually take phone calls on speaker phone while standing, walking around etc - so that part wasn't a big deal. Eating standing up though felt like that "eating over the sink" manuever and wasn't relaxing.

One thing I did do after a day in nice designer boots (usually I wear sneakers to work) was personally invest in a anti-fatigue mat. (Microsoft might provide one but I didn't bother to check.)  

I do have to watch for plantar fasciitis flareups and after realizing the boots were girly with no arch support and I'd skirted a flareup, I decided better safe than sorry. The mat is bright cold blue and matches nothing I own, but whatever, price of comfort. The mat has to "air out" (outgas?) so recommend if you buy one - air it out at home and bring into office when its done fuming. Usually the sneakers/orthotics suffice, but sometimes you gotta dress up, and I still wanted to be able to continue the standing regimen regardless of dress.

Jeremiah makes some interesting observations about motorized adjustable desks versus fixed. Since the motors jack up the price quite a bit, I'm grateful that Microsoft is able to do this for me at work...'cause I'm definitely not at the "stand-all-day" level of athletic training yet.

But for home use, I had to go a different route.

The Skinny on My Treadmill desk

After a few weeks of standing at work, I felt ready to tackle the higher level aim of all this: a treadmill desk for home. I did a bunch of research, neither having a standing desk nor a treadmill at home as a starting point. Here are some resources in case you are fortunate enough (or want to do some Craiglist action) of your own.

If you have money to blow, and/or need wider desk, there's the original Steelcase Walkstation variations of treadmill desk.

Instructables: gym treadmill in place, now you need to build a desk setup

Folding option - if you have a folding treadmill and need to fold the desk away too

If you have an old Ikea Jerker desk

If you can't find a Jerker, a friend suggested experimenting with Ikea's Frederik (his coworkers are standing desk users, what we aren't sure is how it may fit your treadmill) . I had an original Ikea Jerker desk, but not the kind that would go high enough for treadmilling at my height.

If you aren't going to buy the treadmill and desk as a specific packaged set, some tips:

Are you going to need sitting capability too or is this for treadmilling only? Fixed height is cheaper cause you aren't paying for a motorized desk.

Figure out the treadmill first. If you buy a treadmill in the style of The Tread  (no upper console arms to get in the way),figure out how you will lift it from driveway to where you are going to park it inside (it's a two-person carrying item for sure). There was no way to get a gym treadmill up to the attic office where I wanted this treadmill desk to be, so gym treadmill was not an option.

Then, measure around it. Stand on the tread and measure the height you want your hands to be while typing. If you go motorized adjustable this isn't as big a deal, you can have a range and fiddle with it, but for me going fixed (and cheaper) I needed to know exactly how hight the desk surface had to be ergonomically, so I could buy the right fixed desk. Another option for those with gym treadmills and a wider floor space is the Trekdesk . Make sure the measurements really work for you, with some buffer built in.

What I ended up going with was buying a treadmill "Tread" from http://Treaddesk.com and a Safco standing desk from amazon. This Safco desk was almost a mistake, in that you have to assemble the desk around the Tread, the fit is that tight. On the other hand, I'm less worried that the desk will wobble or lean sideways away from the treadmill - they are practically one body now and I discarded the casters. I have not been to Ikea to measure, but the specs seem to indicate the space between the desk legs is much wider than the Safco is.  I had to get help (see above) to properly adjust the desk around the Tread but if you an old hand at Ikea hacking, this won't faze you.

The reason I picked Safco over others is that it had a listed height of the desk at 48 inches, and to fit in the right spot, I needed a desk not much wider than the Tread width (I shaved it too close). I measured myself standing on the tread in order to get the height. I'm tall (between 5' 9'' and 5' 10'') and I can see a taller person really wanting to experiment with Frederik or the Treaddesk.com fixed height desks that go higher than 48". Remember that the treadmill thickness and that of the mat under the treadmill will add to the calculation.

Observations on the home treadmill desk

There is no cushioning/padding on the Tread's surface.  Wear running shoes vs. going barefoot if you aren't trained to barefoot running. The time on tread goes by quickly and you don't want to injure your feet - you want to ease up to barefoot walking in any case. When  I was trying to figure out the cost analysis of the whole setup I looked at this Signature desk and noted the "cushioned treadmill upgrade." Since I wasn't sure how the treadmill desk would pan out, I didn't go whole hog and invest in one of these, but I could see if the Tread or desk conks out later down the line, replacing with a more cushioned model.  

A killer combination for me over winter break has been the PC version of Plants vs. Zombies (Popcap games, they have a Win 7 phone version too) and the treadmill desk. I would look up and I'd been walking for two hours straight at 2 mph after much zombie carnage. My legs would be wobbly as I staggered off to seek coffee, bio break, etc The total absorption of gaming completely masked the effort. Next up: Skyrim. I'm hoping to be able to say I've lost wait playing that game in 2012. :)

At this point it's too early to comment on the durability of the Tread or the desk, but it has a decent warranty and the fellow who brought his Tread in to work at Microsoft Research I chatted with, had had his for a year and was still going strong. So I have high hopes for 2012 - will no doubt do an update later in the year to let you know how this is working out.

I've spent a year being massively unfaithful to this blog. :(

Last year (and to be fair the year before), it was more about twitter growing in influence and eating away my will to write long pieces.

This year, it's been more about posting other places - on the Bing blog about our social hackathon or for Blogworld about cause marketing. I've written most recently a slew of posts around Bing's work with startups at Bing Booster - the Seattle Casting call, or Geeks on a Plane: Asia .  Oh yeah, and I'm doing a chickenblogging experiment unrelated to work (though tangentially related to Chris Pirillo) at http://www.businesschicken.com . But that's because I get so many questions in social media channels about the chickens!)

And part of it, the bar for this blog is getting higher. In the early days of blogging, typos were a sort of badge of authenticity and real-time meaning. With twitter and SMS and fat-fingered phone statuses, not only do typos in blog posts seem quaint, they seem inadequate. :P I can't compete with the autocorrect sites either cause of the nature of this blog demands it be safe for work! :)

I don't believe blogs as a medium are dead. I personally am not dead, and I'm (possibly due to my lack of self-actualization and enlightenment) not yet willing to call this blog dead either. But more and more I feel like it's the place where you have to get Betsy brainmatter unrelated to what's going on in the Bing evangelism world, the twitter world, the FB world, and the "guest blogger around startups" world. Because all those worlds have their outlets and you see enough of me there. They key thing about this blog is that you can email me through the contact list. Straight into my work inbox (though you might want to tweet at me to remind me, if you think it might have been too long and/or caught by Microsoft corporate junk filters).

That means the cadence of the writing here will of necessity slow down and the posts will all end up being longer. And topicwise, more about cyberculture and social media and women in tech. So for 2012, that's what you will see here. I've got a decent lifehackerish post in the works up next that will be my first of 2012. It will probably take me these two weeks (on vacation) to finish it (my how things change right - blogs used to be our twitter).

So more in a bit, and thanks for your patience! 2012 will be an amazing year!

The number of attendees was gated on the number of mentors - each person got a one hour slot to pitch their business, ask technical/marketing/funding advice, and the rest of the time was filled with panels to help you get the leg up technically or investor-wise. During the time I mentored my two people (one per hour) , there was a startup "speed-dating" sort of circle where folks got practice pitching and introducing themselves - something I've seen before at BlogHer conferences but especially important  here, where practicing that pitch for your business was important. Because I have been to a ton of technical tracks at conferences, I decided to focus on the entrepreneurial/funding tracks for my own development and of course, I was in the metrics panel close to the end of day.

What  I love about the BlogHer founders' mindset - Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Paige - is that each project they do has as its subtext giving women a voice and empowering them to sit at the table. Bet was designed to answer the question "where are the women with big tech ideas" "where are the women who want to found tech companies" - and create a conference that gives those women a leg up.

Here's what I learned...

About mentoring...  the mentees were nervous to meet us, but being a useful mentor was actually nervewracking in its own way. I was fortunate in that I had different experiences because my mentees asked questions not only abou social media marketing but forums hosting, SEO/SEM, Web site and book cover design, holding events and managing email membership lists, and in general the refinement of their pitch. I texted my boss Stefan at a break that while I mock PR/marketing as an engineer,  (and Stefan's hair to boot) the stuff I've learned directly and osmosis by sitting for two years on a PR team served me in good stead.  You need to be able to explain your business and why you care about it in a paragraph or less. I told my mentees "the guys I meet at tech conferences can all do this. You gotta do this too."

About pitching to VCs...

You need a strong team. VC, unless they are already friends, don't really go for one-woman shows the way they go for an exec team with a business plan and a rock star pedigree. There is no such thing as a wallflower CEO - the CEO has to be the one making the pitch (though it would help to have the CTO or other folks who are subject matter experts in the financials or the product there for demo).

Know your market/competitors - even if you are so new you think you don't have any. There are different ways to make your case, but there's no such thing as a pitch deck without a look at competitors. Think of it this way - the world is getting along fine right now sans your business (or they think they are) - you need to include your thinking around competition or potential competitors early, even if it's in the appendix.

People, Terms, Valuation: Lisa Stone, CEO of Blogher, relayed this great advice she got from Caterina Fake  (Flickr, Hunch, Chairman of Board for etsy.com) when BlogHer itself was getting venture funding - prioritize yourself by People, Terms, and Valuation.  If you assemble the right all-star team who is 100% behind your business idea, and get your business idea to a provable state faster,  you will attract the right terms from VCs and a better valuation follows from it. If you are only interested in your valuation and the money you take from the company before the people, you are more likely to run into trouble and an outcome you don't want.

If you are lucky enough to get past the courting stage and are talking terms, you can never invest too much money in financial and legal advice.  Have these professionals run models for you so that you know with each round of venture funding, how much you and your employees/prior investors' shares are diluted. VC investments - rule of thumb is they want a return of 10x their investment (if not more). So if you are asking for $1 million in funding, they want you to have a company valuation of at least $10 million - ie, they now own a stake ina $10 million business.  I won't go into the lengthy legal terms covered in the term sheet panel but for folks close to this stage,  it's likely worth the virtual access fees to see it. http://blogherbet.wmbly.com/buy/ .

Where the pitch meets the money and ownership percentages is risk.  If you already have a profitable business, with customers, and your goal now is scale, that's a way different risk than the company with a new idea  that has no customers yet and wants funding to acquire some. Every time you pass a major milestone for the company, the valuation goes up. You may get told to come back to ask for funding once you have done X (gotten customers, built a prototype, etc). Ironically bigger/well-known firms tend to be "softer" about terms than smaller ones - they know that if the founder makes a great business that's the only way they win - having controlling stakes in a tanking company serves no one.

The best VCS help your business with more than money - the best VCs help you shape your company into a better one and its not supposed to be adversarial. While founders/owners may be skittish about giving up control at all, the better relationships are more like partnerships.

Metrics and measurement panel:

This was fun. I sat next to Amy Chang of Google Analytics and Laura Fitton (@pistachio), CEO of www.oneforty.com - Laura took notes and tracked all the tools we mentioned and put them here . I mentioned The Goodness Engine ebook, which was a cross-industry project to help Donorschoose.org, but which had lessons that apply to startups and new businesses (because like non-profits, they start with no money and stil have to drive traffic,engage customers, get donations, decide if they need an API or other feeds coming from their site, etc).  The main reason I mentioned it in this context though is that the ebook shows how much metrics homework Donorschoose.org did, before baring their problems to our team of 30+ industry experts. Some of the metrics Donorschoose.org offered could be found in Google Analytics or on the twitter tools Laura mentioned - but some of them were innate to their unique business premise and value proposition. You really need to focus around your customers and where your cash flow for your business is coming from - if it's online advertising, then tools that measure user behavior on Web sites and actions they take, will be key. But only you and your database will know how many actual sales you got or consulting appoints you made - it's not just going to be handed to you by an off-the-shelf tool.

Why do I love this kind of thing? Well, aside from the fact helping women in technology rocks, folks from Bing benefit in talking with startups and new business folks as much as they benefit from rapping with us. Yes, I reminded folks that Bing webmaster tools (http://www.bing.com/toolbox ) is where you can learn how to ensure your site is noticed by Bing, and that helps get the word out beyond the SEO conferences, but it wasn't about shilling Bing so much as absorbing the energy and feeling part of that upstart uppityness that has to accompany any new venture. Bing still has a way to go, but like any startup hopefull we've got to justify spending and deliver on promise. It always feels good to tap into the energy of the upstart tribe :)

Live it vivid!

This is a somewhat decent metaphor for the idea that the micro-blogging or status-update applications will take over blogging functions in society, much like TV was supposed to destroy radio.

But I have to admit that my purposeful blogging has gotten lighter, even as my thinking gets heavier. True, I did write these pieces for Blogworld - one about how effective community outreach for a cause can be in turning up engaged users  and the other that represent my top 10 learnings  while building social or community-based applications, and doing social media marketing.  But there's a bunch of thinking about social and social gaming, and social good that I still need to get my head around, and I'm not sure what format that output will take. Sometimes a personal/individual blog seems a necessity. Sometimes it just seems like ego - I've always been more interested in talking about what I'm working on at Microsoft that explaining how grand I am. For me it's about who I'm excited to talk to,  and the blog discussions of my travels are just so folks can share these things with me. But I can talk about Bing and the future of search on the Bing blog too, and it makes more sense in most cases to post it there.

I'm wondering how other folks are doing - those that are not consultants or where their blog is a money-maker/ad proposition - where blogging is still because you love it, or have something to say, and whether it's harder to find time for it as I am finding it. Perhaps I'm just lazy. But I also know the landscape has changed from 5 years ago.

We all know social media channels can be a distraction and all of them have gotten more popular and noiser. Internet usage is up worldwide  and according to Pew,  3/4th of  US online teens and young adults use social networks. it's a faster, real-time, cacaphonous online world out there and a certain percentage of thinking time for me has had to be diverted just to listening. I have enjoyed working at Microsoft because of all the brains I get to meet in my job, and I enjoy social media for all the brains I get to meet online. I forgive a ton of shyness, awkwardness or abruptness for exposure to great brain processes and the chance to swap thinking with someone who has pondered stuff as deeply as I have in some favorite obsessive areas.

What you've seen though is a pulling away and silent thinking for other reasons. There is the dismay of the early adopter - once everyone in America likes your band, can it really be as cool as when only you and your small group of friends like it?  And thinking about the trends and the next big thing. The marketers have gotten into social now with a vengeance, and while you've seen a bunch of creativity there (all hail Old Spice dude! still one of my faves) you are also seeing trends of failure. That's natural in a new medium - fail, I say, as fast as you can. And also, some things only work once while the medium is new - and then first mover advantage is used up and you are now just an online marketer like everyone else.

The other thing that has informed my silent thinking/non-blogging brain lately has been the issues raised by Linda Stone and others about continuous partial attention and what it means to have software that shuts off inputs so we can get things done.  I don't have a quiet life, I leave the computer on all the time, I take the computer and phone into restaurants and on vacations,and I think the last time I had 3 days without the Internet was in another country over a year ago. My novelty-seeking noggin wants candy, and well, maybe I should start feeding it vegetables and slowtime, do handcrafts so that I get the actual brainspace to think instead of receive, receive, receive.

Some of my best blog posts of yesteryear came out of lucidly felt emotions and discoveries and the chance to think about how to explain them. My life at Microsoft was just as slammed at those times as now but I feel like my brain was different.  I guess what I'd hope for all of us in 2011 as we navigate the social and the new technologies that change day to day, is the ability to rise above tit for tat, ping for ping thinking and get that deep breathing, deep thinking, deep blogging in. Or tweeting if you like ( quite expletive filled, so maybe read at home -  it was pointed out to me recently that the fake @mayoremanuel 's twitter feed was essentially a short story or novella written in 140 character bites).

No, the blog as a medium  is not dead - and this blog is not dead. But to do it right I will have to change my life (or at least the part inside my head) to suit. I'll let you know more how that goes.

Live it vivid!

I'm a completely public-educated person. With the exception of nursery school (ie pre-kindergarten) I went to public schools in Massachusetts and California, and got university degrees in California and Washington from public universities.

When I was somewhere between 4 years old and 8 years old (this era for me blurs a bit), the issue of Japanese Americans being put in internment camps during World War II was explained to me. Specifically, Japanese-Americans I know. My dad was about 5 years old when he got out, his parents were immigrants, and like many folks of my age, I had relatives who went there and some lost all they had. Talk about recession and losing money trying to sell your home - when people know that the government is forcing you out of your house and you are desperate, they know you will take any price. People could only take what you could carry. In those days there were no Xboxes or Nintendos, no big screen TVs, but try if you will to think about what you'd put in your laptop bag and suitcase and wheel down the street to your new home.

So as a kid with a vivid imagination, I imagined all this. The feeling of being singled out, a freak, unwanted and forced to leave my school. Being scared to go somewhere strange and yucky with my family as a kid.  Would this kind of thing ever happen to people I knew again?  And in these discussions, my mom noted: "Your dad's family has always valued education because when you are packed off to internment camp, it's the one thing that can't be taken from you."

Education is this amazing, invisible tool. It helps solve problems, create new possibilities, and fits into a laptop sleeve - it fits into any pocket and up any sleeve. When my relatives got out of internment camp, it was education (and freaking hard work) to get back all the physical, economic and social ground they had lost. The video on the REDU site "The Education Crisis in Two Minutes" has a great moving graphic that shows what happens when folks get a good education and can empower themselves in society.  That's why education matters so much. It's a lever that rights things, helps the downtrodden, brings out  solutions to problems.

So REDU is personal to me and I'm personally glad we were able to launch it. Because I got so much of my life and superpowers from public education and it deserves some karmic payback, but also because I know that secret about what education really is. World War II is over but we still have social inequities and societal problems in this country. Education remains as a tool that can't be taken from the people who have it and they can still use it to change their world.

Live it vivid!