I am playing around with the idea of a new theme for the site. Click on over and let me know what you think of this one. I am planning on changing the colors, but I like the basic layout.

This blog was hacked earlier this week, in the massive attack on WordPress blogs hosted by GoDaddy and Network Solutions. I am going to be using this basic theme for a while, as I am busy fixing the rest of the hack on this site and those of my clients who were attacked as well.

Thanks for your patience!

Business Week has an article featuring Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr:

Fake, center (next to the dog), with the Hunch team.

Getting the Startup Equation Right – BusinessWeek

The Entrepreneur: Caterina Fake, 40

Background: Social media pioneer and co-founder of the photo-sharing service Flickr, she led the technology development group at Yahoo (YHOO) after it acquired her company in 2005. In 2008 she left Yahoo and joined Hunch as co-founder.

The Company: Hunch is a recommendation tool that uses machine learning to harness its users’ knowledge and offer customized answers to their questions. The 12-person business launched the public version of the service in June 2009, had 1.2 million unique monthly users in January, and has raised $6 million in funding.

Her Journal: I have always been very interested in invention and creation and the Great Idea. But the idea is just the starting point, just the first step. You also have to find the right people to help you do it. No successful company has have ever been the product of just one person.

The way the story is told is that Martha Stewart or Steve Jobs or Richard Branson is the sole driver. But that’s because people like to have a protagonist, just as there’s a protagonist in every novel. A group of people makes a bad protagonist. Turning an idea into a company means you have to find brilliant, capable, amazing people and put together a team. [Ed. note: emphasis mine] And then you have to get everybody on board with the Great Idea. And then figure out how to get there.

Putting together a team to help you implement your idea is essential, and quite probably harder than you think. I have put together a couple of teams, and been on some teams, and it is not easy to keep everyone motivated and in the game.

My number one tip for making it work: establish a budget early on and “hire” the team members. The financial incentive works very well. Building a team of entrepreneurs is like herding cats. It takes a lot of time and effort and the cats don’t like it very much!

Daily routines for maintaining your Social Media Presence from Chris Brogan

Your Farmer List

Your Farmer List

By “farmer list,” let’s call this the chores you’ve gotta do every day. They’ll be different for everyone, but let’s lay out some starters to get you thinking. Then, the real opportunity will be for you to lay out your own farmer list, inspired by what this one makes you think. And by the way, this might remind you of 19 presence management chores you could do every day. It’s not entirely unintentional that I’m revisiting this.

Daily Chores

* Get your blog post up. Make it helpful, worthy of comments, and unique.
* Comment on other people’s blog posts.
* Share other people’s blog posts.
* Comment back to people who’ve commented on your blog.
* Read something not related to your market.
* Connect with five people not in your vertical or your geography.
* Reconnect with people who matter. Drop an email or call. Don’t ask for anything.
* Look at the map of where you think things are going for your business. Anything change?
* Read the “weather” from the blogs you follow. Anything there?
* Think about what seeds you might plant for future projects.
* Share at the farmer’s market your best yields.

This is just a starting point to a much better list that you’ll write.

What goes on YOUR farmer’s list?

This is not a post, it is a temp claim token post for Technorati
C73NKGZWCMBG

This past Thursday I had the great pleasure of meeting for a day with my colleague Dave Seah to exchange some knowledge, best practices and ideas. I also got to met Dave’s friends Sid and Joanne, who brought some great questions and insights.

We called it a “summit” and had invited a few more people to join us in COncord, NH, but bad weather here prevented the rest from attending. Undeterred, we took the opportunity to really dive in to our own businesses and take a good hard look at what we do, what we sell, who our clients are, and how we can serve them more successfully.

I learned a lot from the group, especially with regards to the tools of production and design of the products that I create. I also discovered that there were some pretty important things that I did not know that I did not know! The unknown unknowns are always the most dangerous, aren’t they?

How a Knowledge Exchange can help your business

Getting together with like-minded individuals can create a tremendous opportunity for sharing and collaborating. I found this meeting to be particularly valuable because I had the chance to meet with people in very different industries, which gave me a chance to think about new ways of applying the things that I do. Flexing your mental muscles is always refreshing.

We talked about products.

We talked about services.

We talked about SEO and web design.

We took a look at each others’ websites. (This was especially fun, because we have such different approaches to what we are trying to accomplish.)

This is something that any one of you can do, that is, put together a meeting of the minds and share your knowledge. Learn something from another businessperson. The beauty of this idea is that you can do it in person, with local businesspeople, or you can do it online. See what Dave Seah had to say about the meeting here :

The key pieces fell into place at the informal New Hampshire Knowledge Exchange that Stephen Smith and I held up in Concord NH. Stephen arranged for a conference room at The Centennial Hotel (the staff was very accommodating) and four of us showed up despite the threat of snowstorms. Neither Stephen or I knew exactly how this would work, but we had a simple agenda: (1) Find out what people were wanting to know and then (2) Share our relevant expertise.

It ended up being quite informative for me, because Stephen’s knowledge and experience with using the Internet as the platform for his information and knowledge-based businesses filled in the missing pieces. Plus, Stephen has the mindset of an independent business owner coupled with his years of hospitality management experience. Here’s the distillation of what I learned, framed in the context of my current drive to adopt the “owner” mentality: (Getting Unstuck at the Knowledge Exchange)

This meeting got me to thinking about how to apply this meeting format in a larger group, and how to share it with everyone. I was also struck by the parallels to the Linchpin mind-set that came up in the discussions. Each person in this meeting is working hard, creating some amazing art, and is bent on owning the means of their own production. That last part is essential to the Linchpin Way of doing business.

The Linchpin Way

My friend Justin McCullough has put together a community site on ning.com for cultivating the Linchpin Mindset. Called The Linchpin Way, it is a place for this type of knowledge exchange to take place regardless of geography and availability. Click that link and join us. Tell us about your situation and what you have to share, or what you would like to learn.

If you are still not sure what all of this means to you, or how you can use it, here are a couple of additional resources:

Order the book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
(from Amazon, aff link).

And sign up for the Knowledge Exchange newsletter. I will publish this from time to time with more detailed news and information about what we are working on, as well the time and registration information for future Summits (all free, too).

I will also be using this newsletter for more in-depth book reviews than the ones I post here on the site. This will give you a chance to learn a little more about how the books I share affect my life and business.

I am tentatively planning the first newsletter for Friday, 5 March 2010.

Email Marketing You Can Trust
If you are reading this via RSS and can’t see the sign-up form, please click on the post title to come to the website and register. Thank you!

I read 64 books last year. That is up 20 from 2008, and I feel very good about that.

My 2010 list is off to a good, if intimidating, start. This is quite a stack of books that I received as Christmas gifts or just purchased for myself in December.

Please let me know what you look for in a book review, as I plan to write many more of them than I did last year.

I recently watched a video presentation by Seth Godin at Benjamin Hysell’s blog, and it got me to thinking. The video is from 2008, and is about Godin’s then most recent book, Meatball Sundae (aff link) and contains a preview of his next book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (aff link).

Creating a remarkable product

Godin uses this time with some software engineers to exhort them to create something remarkable, that is, something that people want to talk about, because “ideas that spread, win.” In fact, if your product is remarkable, people will talk about it, especially if talking about the product (or service) makes it better.

This is something that Godin has been talking about since he released Unleashing the Ideavirus (aff link) as a free, 200+ page PDF.

All of the concepts from Godin’s previous books that applied to businesses and products and services have been leading up to the single most important thing that Linchpin represents…you can and should apply these very same principles to yourself and to the people that you lead.

Personal Development = Business Development

Watch this video (it’s about an hour long) with a pencil and paper handy, and jot down notes for yourself as you watch – keeping in mind that you are looking for ways that you can apply these creativity and marketing principles to your own personal development and the professional development of your team.

This is a great video for anyone who makes anything, software or otherwise.

Please to enjoy Seth Godin at the Business of Software 2008.

BTW, tomorrow we start talking about our Groundhog Day Resolutions.

To honor the unofficial holiday – National Handwriting Day – I am going to pen a couple of letters to friends and family. Yes, actual letters. On paper (which you know that I have plenty of around here).

I saw this at Moleskinerie recently:

“A man’s penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments.
- 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope,
in “Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World” “

The origin of NHD? See this:

National Handwriting Day was established by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association in 1977. Their motive is obvious…to promote the consumption of pens, pencils, and writing paper.

January 23rd was chosen because this is the birthday of John Hancock. John Hancock was the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence.

I response to our inquiry, WIMA informed us that they did not obtain a presidential proclamation or an act of congress when designating the day. An official “National” day requires an act of congress.

Of course, but I am still going to do it!

Cynthia has posted the 6th Carnival of Pen, Pencil & Paper at the Journaling Arts blog, here is a snippet of one of the posts:

In Defense of Handwriting (plus tips!) | Happenchance

Why Have Good Handwriting?

Besides assisting my admittedly puny mind, I would also argue that good penmanship increases the usefulness and impact of whatever I write. If I’m taking notes on some topic, and I take the time to make the notes look decent, I get a lot more out of the notes and feel less resistance to go back and reread them.

Writing neatly will initially take a few moments longer, but it will save time if and when you need to read over what you’ve written. If you’re typing something you’ve written by hand but struggling to decipher the words, squinting, struggling, turning the paper upside down, you’re spending a lot of extra time. Had you written a little slower initially, reading what you had written would be far simpler.

Bookmark that carnival page, there is a lot of great information there. (My own contribution is here Pen, Pencil & Paper – a pen review)