My buddy Lachlan Hardy was recently featured in the Sydney Morning herald answering some quickie questions about hot new web tech. He put the questions out to his friends and readers. I realized I was about to cannibalize his comments section since he got me hot with the questions, so I began crafting my own post.

The three questions are:

1. What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
2. What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
3. What will be the Next Big Thing?

Read my answers, and then respond with your own!

1. What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
   • Viddler.com Custom Branding & API - A totally customizable player. Colors. Brand badge. Clickthru link. And the among best quality with no file/length limits. Oh, and the only player with time tagging and commenting. Via their API, you can build your own site powered by Viddler’s video engine. You can even build your own viddler.com if you want with Viddler’s B2B API. These guys are nuts and I love it.The video space is among the most compelling on the web right now, and I love everything that Viddler is pumping out for it’s users.
   • Pandora. If this service goes away I will lock myself in my bedroom and cry listening to The Cure on repeat. Why? Not just because I’m depressed, but without Pandora, I’d have no idea what to listen to anymore. It’s a vicious cycle.Really though, the saddest part of the possibility of Pandora potentially closing its doors is the fact that there are people in this world who have not yet experienced it, or are just getting around to it.
   • Twitter. I know it’s not new. In fact, I can’t believe I’ve been on this service for nearly 2 years. But it’s certainly at a critical mass where things are more interesting, both socially and technically, than ever before. All of these presence/messaging apps are interesting in general. Really, really interesting. Watch this space.
2. What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
   • I’ve always got my iPhone, and more and more, I’m carrying my Flip Mino. My iPhone is a must have because even though I hate talking on the phone, I’m an info addict and the iPhone fuels that addiction. The Mino is a badass new addition to my pocket arsenal, and is becoming increasingly valuable as I get better at remembering to capture some of the brilliant (and often ridiculous) conversations we have around IndyHall and with the IndyHall members out and about in Philly. Even the ability to quick snap a video while walking to/from work, or to/from a client site, just to capture my thoughts, is fantastic. Partner that with Viddler, and I’m in heaven.
3. What will be the Next Big Thing?
   • What, you mean besides me? JUST KIDDING!That’s a hard problem. That’s like asking “whats the next problem you’re going to have”? Whatever solution solves the biggest problem for the largest number of people…that’s the next big thing. I’ve got LOTS of itches that need scratching. Do we share an itch? Are we the only ones? If we share one, we’re probably not alone, and we should talk.

Earlier this week we celebrated the 1 year anniversary of the first day in IndyHall. Amazing how far we came from sitting on the floor to packing the house and tearing up the Philly Scene on a regular basis.

Click to play this video.

Enjoy!

Clearly, I’m learning! Normally I don’t do anything to plan for SXSW until a month or two before. This year, I’m turning over a new leaf!

Last year I submitted a panel about coworking with the help of Patrick Tanguay from Station-C Coworking in Montreal. The panel ended up taking the form of a core conversation, which ended up being a huge success! This year, my 3rd time to SXSW, I’ve managed to get myself involved with a BUNCH of panel submissions, rather than just one at the last minute. Here are a few I was involved with, either as a submitter, a panelist, a moderator, or a general supporter of the idea.

Before I ask you to vote (actually…after, since the title of this post kinda hinted at the call to action), I want to remind you that this support is HUGELY appreciated. There’s a number of reasons that I did not join the barrage of twitter requests, not the least of which is the fact that voting and commenting only counts as 30% of the placement of a panel. At the same time, I see the panel picker as more of an advertisement for our panel ideas, and your votes have a degree of influence over what makes it to the SXSW panel board’s field of vision.

Furthermore, I believe that the quality of SXSW does not come from the panels that are picked, it comes from how we pick the panels that we attend.

With all of THAT out of the way, PLEASE VOTE AND COMMENT ON THESE PANELS! :)

Do Well by Doing Good - Civic Entrepreneurship

Geoff DiMasi and myself

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1471

Working Alone Sucks: Join the Coworking Revolution.

Diverse representation from across the global coworking community.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1292

Regional Whuffie Building: Attracting Innovation to Your City

Tony Bacigalupo, Geoff DiMasi + others

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1171

An Urban Plan for the .edu

Geoff DiMasi & Rick Banister

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1462

Social Influence: Empowering Your Customer

Panel proposal by Marcus Nelson. To include myself, Tony Hsieh from Zappos, Amy Muller from GetSatisfaction, Chris Brogan. This one’s going to be a firestorm, should NOT BE MISSED!!!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1381

Other Panels worth looking at (list will grow as I find more I like. Want me to look at yours? Leave it in the comments!):

Amy Hoy & Erik Kastner - Building Micro-apps for fun and profit

Finally, a bit of exciting news:

Tony Bacigalupo from New Work City and I have set forth with some preliminary planningon how to integrate coworking even deeper into the SXSW conference. For those who are familiar with the BlogHaus, we’re looking to riff from that idea and create a space conducive to *doing*. You know how SXSW is great for making connections and getting inspired. How many times, though, does that get followed through on? We hope to use coworking as the vehicle to guide those ideas into being materialized.

More on that as soon as we sort out some details. Stay tuned, Coworking is going to ROCK SXSW09!

Today, 8/10/08, marks the 1 year anniversary of Geoff and I signing the lease and acquiring the keys to the office at 32 Strawberry street that myself and a few dozen others have come to fondly call home. That home has allowed for the cultivation of one of the most exciting and impactful communities I’ve had the privileged of being a part of.

In less than a week, it will be the two year anniversary of the first time I blogged about coworking. (note that in that post, I hyphenated co-working. ha!). That’s right. Two years.

I’ve been talking about coworking in Philadelphia for longer than Snakes on a Plane has been out.

I talked about coworking in Philadelphia before Steve Irwin passed away.

I was still in school when I started down the path of founding IndyHall.

Longer than Viddler has been publicly available.

A year and a half’s worth of Juntos.

Two SXSW’s, both times changing my perspective on an industry and opportunity.

Longer than most of you have been twitterholics.

Longer than John Gruber has been avoiding me.

The last 24 months feel like a blink of an eye.

I’ve been talking about this coworking thing for a long time, but I’ve been immersed in it the whole time, not just talking about it. Action has been everything. My inability to sit still has been my greatest asset.

Thank you to everyone who’s inspired and encouraged me. This past year has been truly astonishing, and I’m so proud and thankful to be surrounded by so many brilliant, motivated, hard working, and life-loving individuals.

It wasn’t easy.

In retrospect, it seems easy, but it wasn’t easy. I gave up a lot. I’ve turned almost every aspect of my life upside down. Each step of the way, no matter how difficult, came easier and easier because of a combination of fantastic mentors, and trusting myself.

Where will I be in another 2 years? Where will IndyHall be in another 2 years? So long as I keep following my heart and my intution, I’m confident that wherever it is, I will be happy.

IndyHall’s office is almost 1 year old. We signed our lease on August 10th, 2007, began occupying the space on August 13th, and over the next 2 weeks, built out our intial office. At the end of August, we threw our inaugral party.

It’s August 2008. That means we’ve been at this for a year, which still blows my mind. It’s time to celebrate.

There are 31 days from today until the end of August. In the next 31 days, we’re going to put our birthday party together, but we’re not going to do it alone. Just like IndyHall came together as a community, so will our first birthday party.

So here to explain what we’re doing is…well…me!

OK! So you have 1 week from today to give us your best connections to the raddest venues in Philly.

The constraints are:

• Hold lots of people
• Serves alcohol
• A stage/sound system would be really helpful for some of our other ideas
• Outdoor is cool, but remember the weather is unpredictable!

Send your venue connections/ideas to me or leave us comments here or on the IndyHall blog.

You have one week to complete this challenge, if you choose to accept it. Let’s make this the best birthday party ever by open sourcing it and powering it by the community that makes Philadelphia a place we love to call our home!

The meta/double negative jokes ran wild yesterday, when Philadelphia became home of the first successful FailCamp (again, with the irony).

Joining a wonderfully diverse Philly contingent were some of my best friends from around the world, including Tony Bacigalupo of New Work City in NY, as well as co-organizers Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs (in from Vienna via DC).

And for those of you in Philly and those who planned on coming from afar, but didn’t, consider yourself a successful participant of a meta-fail for failing to attend failcamp. There were a lot of you, so you weren’t alone.

When Amy and I put ourselves on the hook for this event, Amy promised that I wasn’t going to have to do much besides agree to host it at IndyHall. Honestly, she kept her promise. This event was the least work I’ve ever done to pull off a successful event, and that’s not to say that Amy did more work than I did. The fact of the matter is, the beauty of the BarCamp model meant that we could totally wing it and let the participants drive the event.

The Format

Amy and I discussed briefly the night before (yes, you read that right) a loose format for FailCamp. We started with that, and let the day take us for a ride. Since all of the participants seemed to consider the event a success, we wanted to share it for future FailCamps to spin off.

Step 1: Invite everybody.
NO discrimination of business, personal, or any other kind of fail. Everyone has made mistakes, so don’t be exclusive. If your RSVP blows up, just find a bigger space. That was our plan, anyway. We had almost 40 people RSVP on upcoming, and ended up having about 60-70% of that show up over the course of the day. I think that’s a reasonable expectation from your RSVP list, so you can use that for basing expectations on. As I mentioned before, many people failed to comply with their RSVP, so account for that, but don’t hold it against them.

Step 2: Set the tone, and lay down the one and only rule
Which is, “this is about your failure”. No finger pointing, no blame. We suggested, but never got to execute, on a whistle-blowing technique where if someone was finger-pointing, you shout “FAIL” as loud as you can to interrupt them. It might not be necessary, but it got the room to chuckle.

Step 3: Brainstorm/Icebreaker, or “Lend me your fail”
We kicked things off by brainstorming categories within which fail tends to occur. In a matter of minutes, we kicked off with:

• Personal
• Business
• Financial
• Romantic
• Technical
• Spiritual
• Health/Physical
• Education

There were some other failure categories, such as Military and Government, but we felt they were going to be difficult for people to apply to their OWN fails.

From these categories, we asked people to jot down one failure from one category, identify the category as well as the lesson that was learned. We asked people to keep their failures anonymous, to attempt to elicit some of the more emotionally jarring ones. After collecting the anonymous fail-slips, Amy and I read through them, poetry-slam style. After each one, we opened up the room for some discussion around them. Something pretty cool happened: nearly every failure we read was openly admitted to, and discussed with the group. Lessons were learned. Laughs were shared. It was a really positive direction to point the day, and carried us up until lunchtime.

Step 4: Failcamp becomes HelpCamp, or Entreprenur’s Anonymous
Some group feedback pre-lunch pointed us in a new direction after lunch. Two specific pieces of feedback, from Christine Cavalier and Blake Jennelle, significantly shaped the rest of our day. Blake pointed out that while he was learning a great deal, he hoped that the takeaway at the end of the day would be uplifting and positive. That brought us back to Christine pointing out how the room got very animated while “coaching” her through some issues with the completion of a novel she’d been writing.

We took that feedback and, on the fly, spun out a new format to try. We set a 10 minute timer and asked people to share a problem/failure they were experiencing at this current period of time, and then within the same 10 minute window, gave the room an opportunity to speed-coach.

This was intensely awesome, as the problems approached ran the gamut of the categories listed above. Furthermore, EVERYONE’s problem that was brought up was coached thoroughly and by a room full of high quality people who had great diversity in their experiences. I really believe that everyone who had an opportunity to share, got to take something away as well. And those who didn’t share still got to learn a great deal by hearing their issues in other contexts. It was EXTREMELY cathartic and holistic.

This went on for another 3 hours or so (all of which zoomed by), at the end of which we were excited, exhausted, and ready for celebration of a day of successful failure, which landed us at our local haunt, National Mechanics.

Overall, the response from the participants as well as those who joined us on our uStream channel, was overwhelmingly positive. We look forward to continuing the “Entreprenur’s Anonymous” event with the help of PhillyPreneurs, so stay tuned for that.

And of course, our sincerest hope is that some other groups can benefit from what we learned during our FailCamp, and help your local scene benefit from your own FailCamp.

Special thanks to everyone who came out, the event would have been NOTHING without you! For me personally, events like this are a great reminder of how brilliant many of my peers are, and how lucky I am to be surrounded by them in order to be able to pull off an event like this.

Viva la Failure!

About 3 weeks ago I announced my departure from Round3 and that I’d be pursuing new work as an independent consultant. The main reason for that announcement was my decision to put focus on continuing to grow IndyHall with Geoff while finding other projects and teams to consult with regarding their user communities, as well as social business practices.

I’m really, really stoked to announce that I’ve teamed up with Anthillz.com, a Philadelphia startup founded by Blake Jennelle. Blake is also the founder of Philly Startup Leaders, and we have become friends over the last year through the similarities that our organizations’ (PSL and IndyHall) goals share.

Anthillz is building out tools to help freelancers and independents manage their reputations by organizing client and peer feedback and helping generate measurable statistics that can help in freelancer searches, as well.

Where do I fit? Well, besides my obvious interest in the value of freelancers and doing things that make it easier to be an independent, Blake and his team realized there was value on community marketing as well as using member feedback to drive their product design process. I’m being brought in to help advise and lead that process, all along the way helping be a liaison for the community and the management team. I’m there for the community, and there for the team, when they need things and will help facilitate interactions between them.

My favorite part? Read this part of the position description that Blake and I drafted together:

When there’s a tension between his roles of representing the company and advocating on behalf of the community, the advocate should take the side of the community.  Any company has the natural tendency to give extra weight to its own interests, and the Community Advocate is an essential counterweight.

Blake wrote, this not me, but it’s attitudes like this that makes me have hope for company leadership in general. Blake and his entire team are as excited about this new partnership as I am.

I look forward to being able to share our findings as we continue to develop Anthillz as a product and a community, and encourage you to check it out and feed back as well!

I’ve got a couple of other similar projects and partnerships in the work, and am excited to share them with you as they unfold. Stay tuned, everybody!

I recently found out about an open source OSX App called Precipitate via Viddler’s Brandice, via Viddler’s Colin Devroe. The original app was created by Stuart Morgan, who I can’t find a freaking thing about except that he participated in last year’s “Google: Summer of Code”. Stuart, if you’re out there, drop me a line. I wanna thank you personally for this app and keeping it open source.

Precipitate is a simple prefpane that, once installed, regularly scans your Google Documents repository for a given Google account (only supports one at a time, right now), and makes those documents available in OSX Spotlight searches.

My only complaint: I’m working in a lot of docs that are changing regularly, so the built in “scan for new/changed files every 60 minutes” interval was too long.

Luckily, as I said, it’s open source. So I pulled down a copy, started poking around Xcode, and found the interval and switched it to every 3 minutes.

I had some compile issues due to a whacked out dev environment, but with the help of Dave Martorana (of MultiFireFox fame) got it compiled and it’s now been running and scanning every 3 minutes.

My version (changing less than a single line of code) is available on my S3 Account, as “Precipitate More Often“. The license is the same as the original. The entire codebase is the same as the original, with the exception of the interval.

Download Now - Precipitate More Often 1.0

Hope you enjoy.

Reading through some comments on yCombinator’s “hacker news” board tonight (which my previous post was just featured on, welcome new readers/subscribers), I dove into a thread about a post I’d read earlier in the day by 37Signals about some of their early guerrilla marketing techniques that they used to generate buzz around their products, ideas, and methodologies.

The comments struck me as interesting: readers were talking a decent amount of smack, as commenters tend to, both on 37 Signals as well as yCombinator’s co-founder, Paul Graham. The smack centered around the notion that the 37S team, as well as Graham, were notorious for writing about how “easy” it was to be successful.

Interesting, I thought. These people don’t like being told something will be easy. Personally, I’d find that motiviating to try that thing that someone told me was easy. Maybe that’s just my entreprenurial spirit.

“That sounds easy/appealing. I can totally do that”. Who among us hasn’t at least thought that.

I guess my thought was really simply that yes…it is easy, if you get past step 0 of actually deciding to do it in the first place. Which, if you REALLY read into 37Signals’ message, you’ll realize, that’s the point. Just get going.

The rest really is easy, if nothing else, by comparison to the first step.

It’s like going to the gym. I’d be ripped if I would just go in the first place.

The next most difficult part to the first step is keeping up your momentum.

Stretching your “stay inspired” muscles.

Toning your “remain motivated” muscles.

Working your “don’t stagnate” muscles.

Flexing your “continually learn” muscles.

That’s all a lot of work.

But, if you’re headed down the so called right path, it’ll feel easy. Because even though it is work, if you’re working smarter instead of harder, it probably won’t feel like work.

And if it does, you’re not flexing those muscles often enough. Or you’re working the wrong muscle groups.

Oh, those inevitable cramps you’re feeling?

Quit your whining and get back to the gym.

Brian Oberkirch is one of only a few people in this world who’s every word I hang on. Brian is a thought leader, in it’s truest form. I’m proud that Brian even knows my name. Enough fanboycrap. On to the thoughts that Brian stirred up for me.

Brian just wrote a post taking a jab at conversational marketing, clearly pointing his pointer finger at the “Misbegotten & generally borked offspring of Cluetrain“. His point is something that drove me to create a Flickr group over 6 months ago, tounge in cheek renouncing the phrase “Join the Conversation”. I ended up not following through with the Flickr group because all that happened every time I looked at it, I got angry.

I hate the phrase “join the conversation” because it encourages the worst thing that conversational marketing could have: dilution of valuable, community contributed information.

“Join the conversation” encourages a poor signal to noise ratio.

“Join the conversation” has bred an entire movement that’s forgotten what the social in social media means.

“Join the conversation” doesn’t mean “listen to me, me-me-me-me-me”.

Conversational marketing doesn’t mean “talk about it until they can’t help but listen”.

Conversational marketing DOES mean that your pitches don’t sound like pitches. Conversational marketing means STOP PITCHING.

Guess what. If you are still trying so hard to be conversational, odds are, it’s coming across as far less genuine than if you aren’t trying at all.

Stop, collaborate and listen (yeah, i went there)

How about listening for a change? Rather than spending all of your time talking about what your customers/partners/vendors/markets/employees/members, whatever might want; ASK THEM.

So what does this boil down to?

I think that you should take a good hard look at your “conversational marketing” techniques and exercise the side of the conversation that most people aren’t terribly good at:

listening.