Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

Blogola review: Simplifi from Griffin

Dave Delaney sent me a Simplifi from Griffin Technology to review. OK, Dave, here’s the review.

First, this thing is small and cute. Nice design, feels solid.

It’s a combo iPod dock and 2 port USB hub and flash card reader.

That’s it in a nutshell, right?

Not quite. Because this thing purports to be a hub of sorts for your desktop, I thought I’d beat the crap out of it, so to speak.

So I loaded it up. Order my iPod to resync everything. Put a card with 900 images in it. Connected my USB external hard drive and started playing a Matthew Ebel concert in DV quality on it.

How’d it do? I was surprised. I was expecting it to choke, and it didn’t. The video throughput from the external hard drive remained consistent, and iPhoto and the iPod both did fine.

For a consumer device, that’s pretty damn amazing. No choking, no failing, just doing what it’s supposed to. It’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but it passed a throughput test like a champ. Nice work, Griffin. I’ll be carrying this on the road with me a lot.

One criticism: two USB ports? That’s it? There’s enough room on the back for two more. Come on, four port powered hub!

If you want to buy one of these, Amazon has them for about $40. Disclosure: paid affiliate link for the Student Loan Network.

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October 14, 2008
A Ninja Response to Chris Brogan's Pirates

A Ninja Response to Chris Brogan’s Pirates

I of course couldn’t let the pirates win out over at Chris Brogan’s blog, so without further ado, a followup commentary on the beauty of pirate ships: one shot.

The ninja clans of old were fundamentally a mix of esoteric practitioners of mind sciences mixed with samurai who were on the losing sides of battles and didn’t feel like killing themselves for their overlord’s strategic screw-ups. Many were just young kids – Daisuke Nishina, the founder of the Togakure Ryu lineage, started out life as a ninja at the ripe old age of 16, having been enlisted in an army that lost to a neighboring overlord.

As such, ninja battle strategies focused a lot on influence, stopping problems before they became problems (because you didn’t have the resources to wage all-out war), stealth, espionage, influence and persuasion from afar, using force multipliers, and above all else, an emphasis on the practical. Much of this is still transmitted in the essence of the ninja martial arts taught today by students of Hatsumi sensei’s Bujinkan method, especially those who are students of Stephen K. Hayes.

One of the timeless lessons learned very early on is this:

You will probably only get one shot.

Whatever your strategy is, whatever your goal or game plan is, the world is changing too fast. It’s a moving target. You can’t waver or hesitate, because in the time it takes you to make a decision and stick to it, you’ll get run over by your competition in business, and you’ll lose your life in battle.

Think about it for a second. If you’re facing someone else, both of you have three foot razor blades, and both of you want to go home. In all likelihood, one of you probably won’t. If you’re especially unlucky, neither will. You have just one shot, because in sword fighting, there’s not a whole lot of parrying or dueling. A sword fight between skilled swordsmen lasts a fraction of a second.

So commit. Pick one of the strategies that Chris mentioned, or one of the many other plans or strategies you’ve got out there, set out your battle plan, and then do it. Don’t walk into your office or your boss’ office in a week with completely different plans or whatever the fad of the day is, because that’s the equivalent of trying to change up as your opponent’s blade is headed for your neck. Waver, hesitate, question yourself, fail to commit, and your opponent wins, in swordfighting and in business.

Trivia: did you know there actually were ninja pirates? It’s true.

Shameless plug. If you’re in the Boston area, and want to try your hand at learning actual ninjutsu, visit:

The Boston Martial Arts Center
The Winchendon Martial Arts Center

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October 13, 2008
Choking in clarity

Choking in clarity

Friday nights at the Boston Martial Arts Center are always interesting. It’s the night that black belts get to train and focus on material relevant to them (one of the few nights/evenings exclusively dedicated to advanced training).

This past Friday, we were looking at various choke techniques to put someone’s lights out if need be. I thought I’d point out that this is advanced training so that no one gets the mistaken idea that if you’re interested in trying out martial arts, this sort of stuff won’t happen to you on the first day you show up. Ten years after the first day, maybe, but certainly not day one!

What’s interesting about choke techniques is that when you’re on the receiving end, they bring astonishing clarity to your mind. Everything and anything else going on in your head immediately ceases to be important when you’re running out of air or on the verge of passing out. Even food and water are irrelevant because your body knows it’s in trouble if something doesn’t change real soon. The economy? Not even on the radar. Troubles at home or work? Not important.

Nothing matters because your body senses it’s in mortal danger.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing. This sort of training creates some intense presence of mind, because you can’t be thinking or worrying about anything else. Nothing else matters. It immediately narrows your focus down to the most important things in the world to you – the air supply to your lungs and the blood supply to your brain.

Sometimes it takes a shock like a well-applied choke to put the rest of life in perspective. The economy is a legitimate concern. So is the climate crisis, war, poverty, disease, etc. However, training like this helps you re-prioritize because you can’t afford to focus on anything else. You have to solve the most immediate problem first.

I’m not suggesting that you go out and have someone throttle you if you feel like you’re out of focus, but to the extent that you can have experiences which help you snap out of unfocused anxiety mindsets, you’ll be able to achieve greater clarity.

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October 13, 2008
Back up your data today – even in the cloud

The cloud is wonderful. Google Apps, Twitter, Gmail, etc. It’s a great way of making sure everything you have is available wherever you are. That said, could there ever come a day when Google’s apps aren’t available to you?

It’s possible.

If you have stored anything of value in the cloud, make sure you have a local copy. If you have stored anything of value on your local computer, make sure there’s a cloud copy.

Could Google ever fail?

It’s possible.

Lehman Brothers was a venerable institution, a 148 year old firm, that lost it all. Or Merrill Lynch, which vanished overnight after 94 years. In turbulent times, anything is possible.

How much trouble would you be in if the cloud weren’t available when you woke up tomorrow morning?

Not saying any of the Web 2.0 companies we’ve come to love and rely on are in danger, but given how much uncertainty there is, you owe it to yourself to be backing up your important stuff. Buy an external hard drive or two – 4 GB USB flash drives are $3 now and 320 GB drives the size of a hip flask are $150 – (disclosure: paid affiliate links for the Student Loan Network) – and keep copies of the things that matter to you.

Other useful tips:

Back up Google Docs with Greasemonkey and Firefox

Back up GMail with Thunderbird

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October 12, 2008
The war against despair is up to you, new media

It has become depressingly apparent that no leadership, no guidance, no inspiration will be forthcoming from any of the traditional sources in our society. Our politicians are locked in partisan bickering with each other, fighting like junkyard dogs over scraps. Our financial leaders are in a tailspin. Our heroes are largely fictional now at best.

This creates a void and sets our society adrift. There is, however, a new source of leadership, of wisdom, of inspiration.

How many of you have blogs?

Podcasts?

MySpace & Facebook accounts and groups?

Twitter accounts?

How many of you have at least 10 listeners/followers/fans?

100?

1,000?

If you have reach that exceeds 10 people, then you can step up to lead. If you have reach that exceeds 100 people, then you may be asked to lead. If you have thousands who follow you and call you a leader whether or not you feel like one, then you must, here and now, accept that mantle of leadership. You must don the cape and boots even if you feel as though they were made for someone else.

You have been called.

Here is what your followers need of you. They need not only to be pushed away, but to be pulled towards.

It’s not enough to say what to avoid; you have to provide your followers with something to do. A mission. A calling. A focus that will let them in their passion and intensity drown out the voices of panic around them so that they can generate momentum with you. Pick your cause, pick your battle, and engage your followers.

Direct them towards a mission, towards a goal, towards something that provides tangible benefit so that they can get the ball rolling in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Give your followers missions and tasks towards the goal you are united for, and you will help them to realign themselves away from chaos and panic towards growth, progress, and even prosperity. Ask them to give and give double what they do. Lead through example.

Despair thrives in confusion and inaction.
Despair withers under the heat and light of passion.
Despair dies in the face of confident leadership.

You have the following. You have the crowd. Your community and the people who respect you need you now more than ever.

Step up.

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October 10, 2008
Enduring darkness

I’ve been watching our economy since starting the Financial Aid Podcast 3 1/2 years ago. In that time, I’ve seen the first cracks form in it, spreading and ultimately bringing us to where we are today. A few folks have used the labels visionary or seer, which is most kind of them. Here’s what I see ahead.

The bad news? This is the bottom of the third in a nine inning game. There’s a lot of darkness ahead, a lot of trouble. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes that will work. Momentum has picked up so fast that on the financial markets, news that would have been hailed as revolutionary a year ago is shrugged off in less than an hour now.

What we face in the months and years ahead is nearly unprecedented in terms of economic turmoil. Our society at large will be different when we emerge on the other side. Some won’t make it.

The goods news? You’re not alone, as my friends remind me often. You as a participant in social media, in new media, have a vast network of friends and acquaintances. Now more than ever, you need them and they need you. Think of it as a guild of sorts, your particular band of rogues, working together, helping each other out, doing what must be done to keep things moving forward. Know what your superhero powers are and what your Kryptonite is, and band together with like-minded folks who have complementary powers.

Go to conferences. Go to events, go to meetups, get out of your office and away from the desk and talk to real people. You say you’re not in customer service? Wrong. You’re in customer service more than ever, especially if your title has a capital C in it. You may find that you need your customers as more than a revenue stream or a commodity – you may find you need your customers as friends and allies.

There are unquestionably dark times ahead, and there will be points when it seems as if there’s no light.

The light that you need to get out has to come from inside you, your heart, spirit, will, and drive.

The light that you need will grow more powerful when others bring theirs, too.

Grab your light and set foot on the path.

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October 10, 2008
The never ending war

“There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”

– J. Michael Straczynski

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October 7, 2008
11 years on the path, still going

11 years on the path, still going

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity and privilege to attend New England Warrior Camp (NEWC) 2008, the 11th year of the event. For those not involved in the martial arts, NEWC is a 3 day, 2 night seminar that gets together practitioners of the Bujinkan ninjutsu family for an intense amount of training. This year’s theme was Togakure Ryu ninjutsu, one of the ninja methods for self-protection.

There’s so much to be said about camp that can’t really be put into words. It’s literally training of every kind for 48 hours, sundown Friday to sundown Sunday. You wake up in the morning on Saturday and Sunday and do some fairly intensive fitness methods, from stealth running through a forest (stumbling and falling will really hurt) to hiking up Nobscot Mountain and seeing the Atlantic from 30 miles away. Training is conducted by the master instructors in the New England area, and you’re guaranteed to walk away both full of information and badly confused.

A lot of the training is what Stephen K. Hayes calls “investment training” – stuff that you learn in a very short amount of time, but then literally take years to work on and process, until much later down the path, you finally “get” what that training was about so long ago. This entire camp was a lot of investment training, working on ideas from the Togakure family method of keeping your community safe from harm.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the opportunity to do some tameshigiri, or live sword cutting. Master instructor and swordsmith Matt Venier gave us the opportunity to use live, sharp swords on bundled bamboo mats, which traditionally were used to simulate cutting against an opponent. They’re a diagnostic tool to indicate your level of precision with a sword – a clean cut with no curves or seriously ragged edges is the sign of a minimally competent swordsman. An explosion of bamboo bits all over the floor indicates that lots more practice is needed.

I’m proud to say that I’m minimally competent and have the picture to prove it, though as with everything, lots more practice is needed on my part.

After 11 years of attending these camps, after 15 years of training in this particular method of martial arts, I’m still excited and happy to be practicing, still learning, still finding all sorts of things that I can add to make myself a better practitioner. It’s equally inspiring to look at my teachers and see what’s possible, what lies ahead on the path, and know that with practice, I’ll get there, too.

Many thanks to everyone who made this camp excellent, but most especially camp organizer Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center for creating and organizing the camp year after year. As a fellow organizer of conferences and events, I know just how much stress and duress a community-focused event can be, and I admire him for being able to pull off better and better camps every year. I hope that PodCamp, the event I created with Chris Brogan, will be able to celebrate its 11th birthday.

For those of you considering taking up the martial arts – any martial art – give it a try. Give yourself a month and see how it fits you. Martial arts training isn’t for everyone, but if you never set foot on the path, you’ll definitely never know for sure. And hey, if you’re in the Boston area, there’s always the Boston Martial Arts Center, too, where I train.

11 years on the path and still going…

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October 7, 2008
Why Pixelated is brilliant and wrong

Mitch Joel created a great meme over the weekend – Pixelated, the 100% virtual online conference, assembled from video footage of conferences past. Since then, lots of folks have created their own riffs on this idea.

It’s brilliant and gets the idea of conferences wrong.

Conferences aren’t about sessions, talking heads, and lecture format, which is what online video captures best.

Conferences are about interaction, collaboration, and meeting people, at least to me, all things that one-way, online video is terrible at.

What is Pixelated, then? It’s pretty much a Gigadial podcast or a Google Reader shared items for video – hand-selected content that you think is important.

Does this make the idea bad? Not at all. It’s especially insightful when you see a Pixelated from someone you respect, like Mitch, because it’s a way of seeing what they think is important. Like seeing their iPod playlist for business, if you will.

But it’s not a conference or an unconference. When you finish a Pixelated, you probably will not have increased the size of your business network or collaborated to create a new meme like bacn or lolsaurs.

Make your own Pixelated. Call it a conference if you like, but realize that it doesn’t fulfill those vital roles of collaboration and interaction, not yet.

How would you add interaction, collaboration, and networking to Pixelated?

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October 6, 2008
Shorting a stock, 2.0 style

Early this morning, someone filed a CNN iReport (citizen generated content) saying that Apple (ticker: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs had a massive heart attack.

Apple’s stock immediately dropped 5%.

Apple PR responded to mainstream media inquiries denying the rumor, that Jobs was perfectly fine. (hat tip to the Unofficial Apple Weblog for breaking it on Twitter first)

If you were going to short a stock, spreading a false rumor about the CEO’s health would be a great way to cause a panic, long enough to make some serious money. The brilliance of this tactic is that the rumor was done using CNN’s brand. Early “viral” messages said the report came from CNN, not CNN iReport. CNN, in other words, had their brand and credibility hijacked.

What would you do if you were Apple? What should you do?

Apple: get on Twitter. Get in the blogosphere and the new media world. You need to have a point person in the fast moving channels of citizen news to immediately knock down crap like this.

Then have your legal department file a complaint with the SEC and ask for a formal investigation.

Apple shareholders: if you lost money on Apple due to the rumor, is CNN responsible? Is CNN liable? Are they a media outlet or a content distributor. If they fall under common carrier, then who is liable besides the original rumor spreader – and are the shorts, if there were any, profiting with no liability?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Bottom line: if your company is not participating in new media, especially in news channels, you’re going to get run over. Get going.

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October 3, 2008

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