I'm going to be speaking in two different Oracle OpenWorld sessions on Sunday. They are OOW-S312303 -- Enterprise-Enable Dynamic PHP, Ruby, Python Apps: Oracle WebCenter Interaction and OOW-S312304 -- Enterprise Ruby on Rails: Rolling with JRuby on Oracle WebLogic Suite.
I know it feels like we just put the wraps on SXSW 2009, but Panel Picker Voting is already live for 2010! This year they're using the Panel Picker to crowdsource session proposals for all three conferences: Music, Film and Interactive (whereas in the past it has only been used for Interactive).
As you well know, Social Collective, Inc., a company I started to serve the conference industry with better and more social software tools, provided the official social network and schedule builder for SXSW 2009. We're on tap to provide that service again this year -- in fact, the site is already live at my.sxsw.com. We have some exciting new features planned for this year, so stay tuned for announcements on that front as we get closer to the event.
So, even though we're intimately involved with SXSW, I still have to EARN the privilege of speaking there. 30% of that is decided by YOU, the voters. So, in the name of shameless self-promotion, I must ask you to vote for my proposed talks (if you think they're worthy):
SXSW Interactive: Developer from Mars Takes on Designer from Venus
Every great project needs a designer and a developer. Yet sometimes working side-by-side can be about as fun as pulling teeth. A veteran developer and a veteran designer use real-world anecdotes to spar on the dynamics that make it challenging for people in these two disciplines to collaborate effectively.
Neo-patronage: Can It Save the Music Industry?
Starting with the idea that all recorded music should be free (as in beer), I will explore the idea that a system of "neo-patronage" -- think of the way European artists were commissioned during the Renaissance -- can help reinvent the beleaguered music industry to ensure that artists can get fairly compensated in a world where music is free for consumers.
You have until Friday, September 4th at 11:59PM CST to cast your vote. Thanks for your support and see you at SXSW!
I just returned from the fabulous ODTUG (Oracle Developer Tools User Group) Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA. I had the pleasure of giving two solo presentations and sitting on one panel.
I recorded both presentations and the panel. Here is the first full recording for your edutainment pleasure.
ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.
Stay tuned for two more new videos which will be posted very soon.
So, rumor has it that I'm now a professional public speaker. Sch-weet! How did that happen, you might ask? Or maybe you're thinking, if Bucchere can haz professional public speaker-a-bility, how can I haz professional speaker-hood too?
Well, it's actually easier than you think. Here is a simple, five-step guide so that you too can haz professional public speakerness:
1) Speak (a lot) -- this is really crucial. You need to have a good track record of presentations, lectures, etc. Hopefully you have a nice collection of audio and video clips too. If not, well, then start volunteering to speak at different events in your area of expertise to help build your speaker cred. And bring a friend with a handy-cam.
2) Find a photo you like of yourself. This is not 100% necessary, but it might be nice if your "speaker page" (look ahead at Step 3) has a photo of you on it. If you can't speak well, at least maybe you can haz good looks. Purrrrrrrr.
3) Hire a great designer (like Paula Bee) to give you good looks, even if you don't have them naturally or via surgical enhancement. Your speaker page should be your home on the web for all your past and upcoming public speaking engagements along with links to your other achievements, e.g. books you've published, companies you've started, podcasts, blog posts, web sites, awards, testimonials, etc. Let your ego guide you to the highest form of self-aggrandizing and narcissistic speaker web page Valhalla. w00t! (Oh, BTW, if you haven't done any of those things, maybe you're not actually cut out for professional public speaker-dom just yet.)
4) Ask for money. No one is going to pay you to speak unless you ask them. How much? Well, that depends on who's asking, how much of your career you want this to be (e.g. are you a full time professional speaker or a full time software developer with a speaking habit/hobby), and how much you think your words of wisdom are actually worth. Start small and grow your rates as you continue to build your speaker cred. Oh, and negotiate a bit, please. A certain person recently asked for $40,000 + two first-class airline tickets, hotel and meals. He ended up getting $20,000 and flying SLF-style, by his damn self. (For you those of you who haven't heard of that great TLA, SLF stands for "Self Loading Freight," which is the most succinct and accurate description of coach-class airline travel that I've ever heard.)
5) Ask for feedback. Just so that you don't think my ego has inflated itself beyond all sense of reason and responsibility, I do want to let you know that I take feedback very seriously. Nearly every event at which I've spoken has had some formal or informal feedback process. And if not, there's always Twitter. Why bother telling me you didn't like my talk when you can tell the whole fucking world, right? Seriously, carefully consider and respond to each bit of feedback -- positive, negative and all points in between -- and consistently use feedback to make each talk better than the last. Brad King had a great tip on responding to feedback: use humor. If someone calls you a douchebag, respond by saying, "Thanks for your feedback! Since we don't know one another well, can I ask that you please refer to me as Mr. Douchebag from now on?" You might get surprisingly good results -- often a line like this can convert a hater to a fan.
If you keep that up, before you know it, you'll be a coveted and highly compensated professional public speaker. However, it's not all fun and games. Please be prepared to really "Bring It/Kill It" when you speak. Repeat business is super important and no one's gonna pay for your speaking services again or recommend you to anyone if you give a dull and lackluster performance. As Dubya so eloquently put it: "Can haz fooled me once? Shame on you. Can haz fooled me twice? Well, um, you can't fool me twice 'cause I can haz Presidency or some shit." Oh, STFU George. (And while I'm on the subject of politics, who anointed Karl Rove as a Fox News commentator? Haven't we all had enough of his piss-all-over-the-constituion horseshit?)
UPDATE: SXSW released a complete audio recording of this panel!
I'm at SXSW again this year. I attended SXSWi last year and, if my memory serves me correctly, I also attended SXSW Music in 1995, though I might be confusing it with H.O.R.D.E., Austin City Limits or one of the other great music festivals in this fine city which is known internationally for its eclectic music scene. Anyway, because The Social Collective is powering my.SXSW, I actually have the pleasure of spending 10 full days in Austin and attending all three festivals this year: Film, Music and Interactive. I'm also speaking, oddly enough, in a Music Panel called Social Networks for the Anti-Social. I have to warn you, most panels (at any conference, not just SXSW) totally suck and this may not be an exception. But who knows, it might be a completely magical and transcendental experience, but you won't know unless you check it out.
I've never really understood the phrase, "You are what you eat." If it were true, I'd probably be an In-N-Out burger (double double animal style) or something far worse for you and/or better tasting.
Recently, I overheard someone on Twitter saying something to the effect of: "You are the sum of the five people you hang out with the most." My immediate reaction was to disagree vehemently. I'm totally not like that! I'm exactly who I want to be! I don't subject myself to the influence of others like that! Etc.
Not only am I completely wrong about this, but it may be that -- in some strange cosmic way -- I'm actually the sum of ALL the people around me, good, bad and everything else under the sun.
Today I discovered TwitterSheep. (No, this has nothing to do with sheep, fraternity rituals or anything else of a sexual nature, I assure you.) TwitterSheep simply looks at your followers and constructs a tag cloud based on keywords in their bios. That's not really remarkable, but what is remarkable is that when I ran my Twitter account through the application, the resulting tag cloud literally read like my own bio. Seriously. It's a visual representation of terms that -- when you sum them all together -- equal me. The largest words are what I do and care about most.
Am I right about this? Are you the sum of your followers? Try TwitterSheep and let me know how it worked for you!
We're rolling out a huge conference site today called my.SXSW for the legendary film, music and interactive festival SXSW!
We certainly haven't done a scientific study about this, but using "thumb in the air" math, I would venture to guess that this is the largest conference ever to roll out a white-label social networking platform. We're very pleased they they chose The Social Collective.
You can read the full story on Collectively Speaking, The Social Collective blog.
Today Robert Scoble wrote a really interesting and thought-provoking article on his blog about the alleged suspension/removal of Joel Comm's Facebook account. He draws a parallel to the revocation of Robert's own Facebook account and makes a good case for Facebook being outta line.
Here's my response to Robert:
In defense of you, Joel and countless others who have been suspended or removed from Facebook, it certainly doesn’t seem like you’re being treated fairly. It’s hard to imagine that someone with 5,000 confirmed Facebook friends and ten times as many followers on Twitter could be considered a spambot. Generally speaking, online communities, wikis, social networks, etc. have a way of policing themselves; content that other people enjoy gets shared and promoted while spam and other “noise” gets blocked or ignored. Facebook and other social sites would all be best-served by this sort of grassroots self-policing, rather than a top-down approach.
However, there’s a subtle point to which some other readers have alluded in the comments. You wrote, “I don’t support companies that ‘erase’ MY data without my permission.” What you may not realize is that based on Facebook’s TOS, what you think are “your data” actually are not “your data,” not by a long shot, not once you’ve posted them on Facebook.
If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!
Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In return for providing “free” distribution of “your” content, companies like Facebook, Google and the likes are creating massive databases of incredibly valuable “information capital.” This in turn allows them to offer you a “free” service while they sell this information capital — the stuff you gave them, remember? — to advertisers. That pays their bills, which in turn allows them to continue to give you “free” content distribution.
Average people (who upload videos of dogs on skateboards, etc. to Facebook) don’t care about data ownership and are perfectly happy to hand the rights to their content over to Facebook or Google it order to share it more easily with their friends. Average people — however — aren’t one man media outlets, either, but YOU are. So, being an internet/social media mogul, I’m sure you understand that content distribution isn’t free.
The solution? Host your content yourself! People like you and Joel have the resources to pay for your own hosting AND you have loyal audiences that will follow you wherever you go. You can leverage social media to help the viral spread of your content, but the obvious goal of your participation in social media and social networking should be to drive eyeballs/click-throughs back to YOUR site so people can view YOUR content, ensuring that YOUR advertisers get bang for their buck.
It really all boils down to two old sayings: there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you get what you pay for. Want to pay for your own hosting and distribution? Then you can own your own content. Want to get free distribution from Facebook or Google? Then be prepared to give them something in return.
Times are tough, right? Everyone is slashing spending, especially around travel and conference budgets. But you need (read: want) to be at SXSWi. So it's time to convince your boss that your attendance at SXSWi is something that the business needs to be successful.
Fortunately, if your company does or wants to do anything with the interwebs (and seriously, who doesn't these days?), this is easier than you thought. Just follow these five easy steps.
1. Look at the SXSWi speaker/panel lineup and pick ten panels that are relevant to your line of work. I'm a web 2.0 developer with more than a passing interest in social media, so this is easy. But the panels run the gamut of topics, so you should be able to find something that works for your business/industry. Here's an example: Building Personal and Company Brands with Web 2.0 Tools. Every company wants a stronger brand, right?
2. Copy the titles and abstracts into an e-mail to your boss and elaborate on how you'll benefit from them. More importantly, give specific reasons why what you learn will help you and your team, peers, etc. achieve 2009's business goals. To continue with our example, my company needs to grow our social media cred. The panel consists of Saul Colt, C.C. Chapman and Gary Vaynerchuk. According to their bios (on their web sites), Saul is "an accomplished marketing professional, with more than a decade of diverse high-level experience and a respected publisher" and C.C.'s company, The Advance Guard, "focuses on helping brands of all sizes smartly and strategically leverage emerging technologies for radical marketing programs." Gary doesn't really require an explanation, but if your boss has been living in a cave, then you might want to drop a few adjectives like "inspirational" and "passionate." Example: This panel will help me form an action plan on how to grow my company's social media cred, following the examples set by these three extraordinary social media mavens.
3. Outline the maximum line item costs for the event. The pass, the travel, the hotel and the food. If you really want to go, make your food budget less than $50/day, your hotel budget less than $100/day and cover the rest (if necessary) with your own cash. Don't provide a total, as it might overwhelm your boss at first brush. Besides, I'm sure he or she can add.
4. Plan a post-conference re-cap meeting. This is crucial! Set a date and make a list of team members who you will invite, including your boss. During this meeting, promise to share the highlights of what you learned at SXSWi and what you recommend that the business do differently. Explain how these revolutionary ideas will boldly move the company forward in ways they never could have imagined.
5. Split the difference. Remind your boss that the conference takes place Friday-Tuesday (March 13th to 17th). If you travel after work on Thursday or on Friday morning and return to work the following Wednesday, you're only missing three days of work AND you're donating your time to the company you love so much over the weekend.
There you have it, your "free" pass to SXSWi. Well, it's not exactly free. You have to deliver on all the promises you're making to your boss, especially if you want to go next year! Now if only it was this easy to justify the music festival. . . .
(Thanks to allisonb00, the inspiration for many things in my life, including this blog post.)
