Apparantly, when it comes to mobile phone use, more people would prefer texting the text than talking.

According to the latest released Nielson ratings report on mobile phone use in the United States, the average American reads or taps out just over 350 text messages a month (hopefully, not while driving). That's in comparison to about 200 phone calls.

When you look exclusively at younger groups, like teenagers (who will be applying for jobs at your companies in a few short years), the gap between texting and talking is much, much wider. The average teenager takes about 231 calls a month (okay, about the same as the grownups). However, that's in comparison to 1700+ text messages. Yow!

Thoughts beyond the numbers

- I think it's very important to note that the number of cell phone calls is actually slightly higher among teens, than adults. So I don't think the spoken word should be put on the endangered species list, just yet.

- Teens just gab a lot. I did when I was a teen. I bet you did too. And what a shock; they still do. Have you ever been privvy to what teens are texting to each other? Much of it would fall under the "inanity" file. I'm guessing as this generation grows up, the number of text messages will go down and the importance of the messages will go up.

- While the post- 35 years old generation may be burning a lot of unnecessary time on "War and Peace" length e-mails and conference calls, I'm actually hopeful that the generation coming up will naturally economize their words (and thus everyone's time) by their 140 words or less medium for communicating.

- The Babyboom generation gave us the "generation gap" term to describe the disconnect between themselves and their parents. This time around, is it a generation gap or a communication gap? I forsee increasing communication problems in and out of the work place not necessarily by age; but by choice of technology platform. It's the Twitter gap, the texting gap, the e-mail gap, the cell phone gap, the Facebook gap, etc.

- Same language, different meanings. English in shorthand is increasingly looking less like English. All of these communication platforms are creating a techno-tower of Babel. English grammar is being butchered like a Thanksgiving Day turkey. Forget spelling. Forget typing on a QWERTY keyboard with all ten fingers. It's two thumbs on a keypad. Falling by the wayside is all the subtle meanings of intonations and timber of voice. Left in it's wake is oceans of room for misunderstanding in short cryptic messages that can be taken a variety of ways.

What's your long term plan for fostering effective communications among employees, with your customers, your vendors and colleagues?

Sometimes we can learn more by watching other start-ups flounder, rather than fly.

Just two months ago, the scrappy new search engine, Cuil, launched with much coverage and hype (It's a tech thing. Often the launch parties are bigger than the launch itself.).

I remember blogging about Cuil somewhere between the iPhone 3G launch and taking my kids to Hershey Park over the summer. See "Cuil Leaves Me Cold - So Far". For once, maybe my gut check was right.

Cuil Down.

Without reading anything about them elsewhere, I was just struck over the weekend with a "whatever happened to that new search engine?" thought. I knew that it couldn't be good when I couldn't even remember how to spell it. I typed "cewl", "kewl", "cuel", etc. Bad sign!

Turns out their usage share of the search engine market has slipped to almost non-existent. By the way, that's where it's value sits right now, as well.

Here's some back story on Cuil:

- It was founded by former Google employees. (i.e. "Let's show them and beat them at their own game." Not!)

- As recently as September 12th, Cuil was valued by its investors at $200 million. Leading that claim; Madrone Capital Partners. Madrone Capital Partners is a private equity investment company based in Menlo Park. General Partner, Greg Penner is a former financial analyst for Goldman Sachs. Need I say more. Okay, okay; I will say more. In between Goldman Sachs and Madrone, Penner was a big wheel at Wal-Mart and is, in fact, married to Sam Walton's granddaughter. So much for rolling back the prices. Cuil was Penner's baby, by the way.

- Total digression: Penner's other search engine baby that has been quite successful is Baidu, which is used in China. You know; where Wal-Mart buys all that horrible, cheap inventor!

- Other signs of doom: the VP of Product just fled, the company blog is sparse and is admitting there's trouble in paradise and even people like me are writing negative things about them. More bad signs!

What can we learn from Cuil flaming out (I just had to get one more play on words in, forgive me!)

- Start-ups need to dream big, but act humbly. Start small. If the company takes off and grows fast; great! If not, there's time and room to flounder around a bit.

- Start-ups should be about starting something new and not running away from something old. If you're mad at your old boss and want to go toe- to- toe, think hard on that one. Spite only takes you so far.

- Beta is a private matter. Launching your start-up with loads of media coverage puts on a lot of pressure. It's much easier to grow out a fledgling company,while no one is looking. I tip my hat to web sites that launch with hand-picked users, by invitation only in the beginning. So many companies today do their full launch with the "still in beta" tag line under the new company logo. Risky business!

- What makes your start-up chocolate in a world full of vanilla? Cuil's claim to fame is that it searches through more web sites than Google? From a user's standpoint, is anyone really feeling like Google isn't crawling through enough web sites per search? I just ran a search on my own name and got 42,000 hits on Google. I assure you that I haven't written that many articles. For those of us frustrated with Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., I don't think it's over any anxiety that they're missing crucial sites in their seach results.

- Only MySpace can get away with a black background and become huge, anyway. Kids don't try this at home.

There was a technology company called Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Does anyone remember them?

During it's headiest days back in 1987, DEC employed over 140,000 people. It's contributions to the technology revolution make a long list. I'll bullet point just a few:

- DEC started out making what it called "programmable data processors" (an archaic verson of the modern PC) back in the 50's. Each new version quickly morphed and expanded into high end computers for businesses. DEC wasn't really interested in personal computers for the individual. In fact, in 1977 (the same year Apple Computers incorporated and introduced the Apple II) co-founder Ken Olsen made the mother of all mulligan quotes in tech history claiming "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home". It's one of the few things that DEC got wrong in it's 30 or so year history.

- Programming languages C+ and Unix first ran on DEC computers.

- It's early database line called Rdb was sold off to another fledgling company in need of a core technology to build on and sell. You may have heard of it; that company was Oracle.

- DEC was argueably the first dot com; launching a corporate web site (of sorts) and registering its domain name (dec.com) back in 1985.

- DEC was the first to launch a fully developed search engine; Alta Vista.

- One of its last R&D projects in the mid-80's before it was acquired by Compaq was a funky little gizmo called a MP3 player. That one sat on the shelf for awhile.

Why am I telling you about all of this?

DEC ended up being a huge multi-national enterprise operating in dozens of countries. But it started where all businesses do; small and broke with a couple of ideas that might make money some day.

Back in the 50's and 60's, Wall Street didn't really believe in risking its money investing in tech start-ups. DEC was one of the first that caught a break.

Just nine years after launching it's little line of programable data processors that looked like they were made from a heath kit, DEC went public. It was taken public by Wall Street's oldest financial investment house; Lehman Brothers.

The IPO was a raging success and a door opened between Wall Street and Silicon Valley (although DEC was based in Massachusets) that would lead to thousands of high tech IPO's and gazillions of dollars in VC money helping out lots of techie startups for decades to come.

There's quite a bit of speculation how the crisis in the financial markets will impact both the tech industry and small businesses; less VC money, fewer mergers and acquistions, fewer IPO's, etc.

The MBA's can do a much better job walking you through all of that than I can. I'm a story teller. Let's hope this one has a hero or two that puts the markets back on track. There's much more at stake than $700 billion in tax payer's money, or even retirement portfolios and mortgages. Innovation stands to get knee-capped if some really smart people don't figure out a solution really soon. If that comes to a stand still, so does everything else.

Technorati has released its annual State of the Blogosphere report this week.

For those of you still on the fence about incorporating a blog in your business, here's some nuggets to consider:

- Blogs got more than 77 million unique visitors in the month of August here in the United State. That's out of a total Internet U.S. audience of 188 million.

- Blogs are making money. 100,000 unique visitors a month translates to about $75,000 a year if you place your ads right, etc.

I recently wrote an article for businesses and professionals dealing with a stale blog. Here's some tips to give yourself a jumpstart.

I'm still catching up on all the latest Web 2.0 launches that debuted a few weeks ago at TechCrunch 50.

One that caught my eye this week is iCharts. iCharts is still in beta and like most of these things it has a free version and then scales up for a price with more bells and whistles.

iCharts is sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia meets, uh, Excel.

It's a social networking site for charts and graphs.

In other words, it's a wonk's dream site.

Charts are uploaded for public consumption and organized by categories like financial, technology, society, sports, ecology, etc.

It could be a great place to find free research. But remember; you get what you pay for and who's to say the contributing author that posts the chart is working with accurate information or knows how to present data. In other words, I wouldn't swear by the data you find there, although it's fun to peruse.

How iCharts could be useful:

Nevermind what strangers are posting; this is a place where you can put together charts and graphs that are little more dynamic than a static Excel spreadsheet and share them with others by invitation to the site. Charts on the site allow for audio commentary, a little slider bar to zoom in on specifc parts of the charts and graphs, and comments below for collaboration and feedback.

Speaking of Excel, you can import data directly from an Excel spreadsheet into iCharts tool. Ditto for PDF files. Now, that's sweet!

Have fun and geek out!

Watch out iPhone! Your first most likely serious competitor is having its coming out party today.

In New York City this morning, Google, T-Mobile and HTC (a Taiwanese company) are scheduled to unveil the first mobile phone with Google's Android operating system at about 10:30 a.m. EST. (A lot of phone geeks on the West Coast will be getting up early this morning).

The Android won't actually go on sale until next month. But when it does, it's expected to start at $199 (with the T-Mobile service contract) or $399 without a service contract. HTC is the manufacturer of the phone that reportedly will feature a slider keypad. It wil be a 3G phone (meaning lickety-split Internet access, like the latest version of the iPhone).

Here's a demo video of the Android platform from Google posted on YouTube. Keep in mind this is just a demo of the software and not the phone itself. I'll post a link to pictures of the actual phone later today after its unveiled.

Why Apple should be nervous about the Android

1. In a stroke of genius, Google is just peddling a mobile operating system and not the whole phone. This is not a "Google phone", as once speculated. Android will debut on a handset built by HTC and sold by T-Mobile. But, Google is not married to T-Mobile. Android software is going to be bundled on to handsets of all kinds and by all carriers. Meanwhile, Apple is locked into four more years of that crazy AT&T only contract.

2. Android is completely open source. The iPhone is not. Yes, Apple has the App store for iPhone. But make no mistake, the iPhone is not open source. Android will have a bazillion more developers unleashing their creative powers coming up with killer applications. Apple will be hard-pressed to keep up.

3. Google has all those Googly tools we already love to use that are ready to roll out for the mobile crowd; Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Earth for finding restaurants and hotels.

4. Pound for pound, it will match most of what iPhone already has to offer; 3G speed, touch screen, etc. I'm not sure about it's functionality as a mp3 player. But, it has wicked graphics for playing video games (for killing time during layovers).

Stay tuned...

What do you look for in a Wi-Fi spot? I was thinking about this the other day as I was camped out an undisclosed cafe sipping a green tea latte that had a suspicious afer taste of algae.

Here are my preferred criteria:

1. It's free! Why pay, when so many are offering it for free?

2. Plenty of seating that allows me to have my screen facing away from the windows to avoid blinding sun and preferably with a back wall to avoid snoopy folks passing behind me.

3. Good eats. Good drinks. But no pressure to buy either after the first round. I do think it's ill-mannered to tie up a table and not buy anything. This is one time it's nice not to have wait staff.

4. Padded chairs. A hard wood seat gets old really quick. But please, no overstuffed chairs too comfy to get work done.

5. A cafe within a book store is nice. It's always handy to jump up for additional reference materials and current magazines, as needed.

6. An open area, so that I can scope out the other folks with laptops sizing up who may be a hacker at the table next door. If you get a hinky feeling; split!

Other tips:

- Don't wear out your welcome. If its a busy time and the place is packed; pack up and leave. It's not fair to tie up a table and besides, that's a lot of prying eyes.

- Keep your beverages far enough away from your laptop to avoid nasty outcomes to nasty spills.

- Go to the bathroom one last time before you set up camp. Otherwise, you'll be sooorrrrry!

I'm considering sending my 17 year old to Carnegie Mellon for a degree in computer science, and what better recommendation could there be than the following?:

On Sept 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, now a professor at CMU, invented the emoticon (i.e. emotional icon) via a newsgroup posting, starting the ball rolliing with :-) which means "that's a joke, or happy" and :-( which means the opposite. By now you've all seen these. They actually do a good job of alerting people to sarcasm in print, which typically doesn't work well except in the hands of exceptional writers (who are often snobby about the use of emoticons).

Now the concept has evolved into a plethora of new additions:

;-) a wink
:-P a tongue sticking out

and a long list of other strange things.

Curt sells solutions which unite project planning with resource management, track execution and alert you instantly when projects are in danger.

Has the business world ever been so grateful to say TGIF?

We all know when Wall Street sneezes that much of the world catches a cold. This week it was much more than a sneeze; more like the flu. What does this mean to the tech sector and small to midsize businesses?

Here's just a few consequences:

- Mobile handset makers stand to take a big hit, especially RIM, Blackberry's parent company. Think about it; who are some of the heaviest "crackberry" users. Exactly; the financial market folks who are facing up to 40,000 layoffs in their industry. That's a lot of cancelled Blackberry accounts.

- More importantly, who finances the venture capitalists who finance so many startups? Hint: it starts with a Lehman and ends in Brothers; not to mention the other major financial houses in crisis.

In search of...

ComScore has releasd it's rankings report for the top search engines for the month of August. No surprises; Google still reigns supreme with a record 63% market share of Internet searches. Yahoo sits at number two with just over 19%. MSN trails in at number three around 8%.

Nuggets to chew on:

- Search engines drive about 48% of traffic to sites. Clearly, search engine opimitization is important. But for businesses throwing thousands of dollars at SEO consultanting firms, you might want to consider throwing some of that money into a more aggressive link back strategy.

- That same August report shows just under twelve billion searches worldwide in just that one month. Let's do the math. Twelve billion searchs; 48% of traffic driven to sites; that's a lot of traffic being driven around the Internet. How are they finding you?

Tidbits to watch for next week:

- Google is expected to unveil its long-rumored "Google Phone" on Tuesday. More accurately, the Google "Android" phone is expected to sell at the same price point as the new iPhone 3G starting at $199 (with a service plan). It will cost $399 without committing to a plan.

- Yahoo is expected to launch what is desribed as a major overhaul of its home page on Thursday.

- The Wall Street Journal will be launching a new social networking site on Tuesday. Think Facebook for financial types. All those people getting laid off on Wall Street will have plenty of time to network on the new site. Sounds like a great place to artificially run up stocks through rumors and hype. I hope the SEC is keeping an eye on this one. Was that my outside voice, again?

Google offers a lot of really cool web tools; most of them are free. The custom Google search feature that registered users can use on their web sites spent a good 12 hours offline yesterday.

Imagine the havoc that might cause for a shopping site.

My tip for the day: Free tools are aplenty all over the Internet. Some are better than others. The good ones (and to its credit; I would consider most, if not all, of the Google tools pretty solid) are a great way to save money up front in the early days of a business or a new initiative.

My advice, however, would be to switch to a paid service once your business gets a bit more established. It's a lot easier to hold a paid service provider accountable for outages and technical support.

Campaigning the HP Way

I can't resist giving this story a mention. Carly Fiorina, who's been spending her untimely retirement from Hewlett-Packard as an economic advisor to the McCain campaign, really fluffed it this time.

When asked if Sarah Palin was quailified to be the CEO of HP, she said "No".

Hey, she was honest!

The folks riding the aptly named "Straight Talk Express" were not too pleased. I'm guessing we won't be seeing much of Fiorina before the first Tuesday in November.

Let me just add that Fiorina wasn't qualified to be CEO of HP either. As I recall that was a push and not a jump into retirement.

Meg Whitman, of EBay acclaim, is also an economic advisor for McCain. So far, she isn't touching this one with a ten foot pole.

Question of the day: Is Carly Fiorina qualified to be Vice President? Can she field dress a moose?

Some of the most fascinating reading is at the U.S. Patent office. It's the next best thing to being allowed into the inner most sanctums of corporate parks.

Case in point: here's a glimpse of what Google is dreaming up these days.

Google has applied for a patent to build floating data centers at sea. Talk about surfing the Internet (ba-dum-dum)!

Why would Google want to do this? Apparantly, the ocean blue may be the best way to go green. These data barges would run on water and wave powered generators.

Data centers are energy hogs. In fact, some industry estimates predict the world's computing data centers are growing at such a rapid rate that they will outpace the carbon footprint of air travel by 2020. It takes a whole lot of electricity to keep all those servers online and even more taxing; keeping them cool.

In addition to the alternative energy benefits; there's also a tax angle to boot. Keeping Google's navy just a few miles offshore in International waters would keep them out of the jurisdiction of sovereign nations and the taxes that go with them.

The patent application was filed in the United States. But apparantly, the first barge would be built off the coast of England.

I caveat all of this by adding that many a patent that is filed never goes any further. Whether this actually ever happens is anybody's guess at this point.

It's a sickening thought and still unconfirmed at this point. However, Federal rail investigators have a sneaking suspicion that text messaging may at least be part of the reason for the "human error" of last week's horrific head-on collision between a freight train and commuter train in Southern California.

Word is, the conductor was text messaging back and forth with a 15 year old train enthusiast up until one minute before the crash.

Like I said, it's a sickening thought. The dangers of text messaging while driving have been making headlines around the country in recent months.

Whether this is proven or not about the train accident, it's one heck of a wake-up call for businesses to consider.

- Do your employees really need a texting function on those company-issued cell phones?

- How about a little awareness training?

Whether you think she's passing or failing; I think we can all agree that Sarah Palin is getting one doozy of a public vetting from press and media. (As it should be. She is running for vice president, after all.)

Always one to note the juxtaposition of events; I can't help but notice that while Palin was squirming in her chair last week about "The Bush Doctrine" and that $%^%$ bridge to nowhere across from Charlie Gibson, CareerBuilder.com was putting out the results of survey of 31,000 employers asking them how they vet their recruits.

One in five said they screen candidates by looking up their profile pages on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

What's the kiss of death?

- Topping the list, employers and recruiters are looking for evidence of alcohol or drug abuse of any kind.
- TMI: Compromising pictures and/or controversial self-revelations.
- Trash talking former employers and business colleagues.
- Resume discrepancies.
- Signs of criminal activity.

While Palin isn't getting grilled like a moose burger at a Wassilla 4th of July picnic over her Facebook page; it's the hobbies (killing Bullwinkle) and family life (mother - daughter hidden baby bumps), along with previously stated positions of no position on the Iraqi War that are giving her trouble. Nevermind if she has the resume to be Vice President. It's a blend of personal and professional details that will ultimately decide what's she's doing next January.

Real life for the rest of us isn't so different. Gone are the days of being judged by your resume, an interview and a couple of carefully coached past references. Now bosses-to-be want to make sure their next product manager has the good sense not to post their vacation pictures of themself wearing a Speedo at Sandals on Flickr.

Even if you're as tame as a librarian, I recommend conducting a little vetting audit on yourself every three to six months.

Here's some tips to get started:

1. Google yourself and see what crops up at the top. Do it again under "Images".

2. Set your social networking profiles to private and only allow friends and contacts to view them.

3. Designate one profile for professional contacts and another for personal. Be thoughtful who you allow to access both.

4. Even on your personal profile pages, exercise on the side of caution. If your'e old enough to read this blog, chances are you are a grownup with a grownup job. Protect your image and don't take chances of who might share what with whom.

5. Never wear a Speedo when there's a camera present, unless you're Michael Phelps.

It's barely a headline anywhere else. But, imagine where we'd be without it. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the microchip; the first integrated circuit.

Check it out! It's not much to look at and clearly microchips have come along way since Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments unveiled the first one on September 12, 1958. Kilby would later move on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. However, Kilby's chip was made of germanium. Six months after his chip debuted, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor one up'd him with a better chip made of Silicon.

Good thing: Germanium Valley just wouldn't sound right in Northern California.

Still, props to Kilby and Texas Instruments and their place in the annals of American technology.

Speaking of Texas; as I write this, Hurricane Ike is less than 200 miles off the coast of Galveston with Houston in its direct path, as well. It's already sending in high waves and flooding neighborhoods. Over recent years I have received a lot of help on my stories for this web site from a number of techies and small business owners in the Houston area. David Robertson of Covenant Technologies and Robin Mueck of Heritage Texas Properties are just a couple that immediately come to mind. It was less than a year ago that David helped me with a story on disaster preparedness for smaller businesses. Hopefully, he'll have some stories to share with us next week. Hopefully, all with happy endings.

Please keep them in your thoughts this weekend, as will I.

I can't imagine a city on the planet more driven by it's own entrepreneural and creative spirit than Houston, Texas. It's always been a city of innovators, dreamers, wild catters and risk takers.

When Ike hits, you can bet Houston will hit right back.

Delta Airlines has announced plans to team up with Aircell to start rolling out Wi-Fi access to inflight customers as early as the beginning of the year.

It will first be available on its MD 88/90 Aircraft and later outfit the Boeing fleet.

Apparantly, access will cost a flat fee of $9.95 on flights that are three hours or less and $12.95 for longer flights.

There are so many tempting punchlines that I don't where to begin.

I'll start with just a few questions and comments:

1. What happens when a three hour flight includes six hours of sitting on the tarmac? Can you imagine adding insult to injury with the airline adding an extra three bucks to the Wi-Fi charge for their delay? I can!

2. Is Delta sure it doesn't want to offer the service free first just so we can all be outraged together when they start slapping on an extra charge later, like everything else. By the time you pay for a couple of cokes that use to be free, check a bag for a fee, pay extra for the over-microwaved mini-meal and now Wi-Fi; what does it cost to fly from D.C. to New York again?

3. By next summer Delta promises to have Wi-Fi available in all its planes. But a little extra leg room to avoid throwing a blood clot in-flight; fugedaboudit.

4. A airline is doing something Internet-related. Quick! Someone at Google launch an airline. Tickets will be free. But all passengers will be required to tattoo Google adwords to their bodies as they pass through security.

5. MacGyver tip: the SkyMall catalog makes a great mousepad.

6. Don't worry about the size of your laptop screen. When the guy in front of you kicks back his seat, it will be three inches from your face anyway.

7. So much for the "I'm going to be in the air all day" excuse for avoiding e-mail. Thanks, Delta! Keep the pillow.

8. Delta: Putting the Sky in Skype?

9. Even Delta's jumping on the cloud computing thing; sort of.

10. Captain's blog, I mean Captain's log. Oh yeah, that was Star Trek.

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I used to hear the same joke about wine making all the time.

Did you hear about the person who made a small fortune in the wine making business? Answer: by investing a large fortune first.

Chucking it all to run that quaint little winery up in Napa is right up there with that fantasy to chuck it all and run that quaint little B&B in Vermont making muffins and turning down beds for German tourists.

Conventional wisdom says go for the B&B. You may go broke. But, you won't go bankrupt.

Enter CrushPad.

Now you can live the fantasy, without buying a winery in Napa. Thanks to technology, you can become an online vintner.

Through CrushPad, a wannabe wine maker can be as involved or uninvolved in the process as he or she wants to be. CrushPad, located in San Francisco, brings in the grapes, crushes them (of course) and executes the whole winemaking process. You, the wannabe, can armchair quarterback the whole process; selecting the varietals of grapes, which vineyards they come from, how long to let them age, etc.

CrushPad brings its clients into the process through web cams, e-mail updates, even collaborating with Google calendars to loop- in customers at thirty different points of decision-making in creating their own unique wine.

While much cheaper than buying a winery, it's still a pricey venture. Making one barrel starts at about $5700. This is something you might want to consider partnering up with your other wine buddies. There should be plenty to go around. One barrel makes about 24 cases.

I'll do the fast math for you. That's about $20 a bottle.

The TechCrunch 50 Conference is in full swing right now in San Francisco (September 8 - 10).

One of the most interesting products to launch, so far, is a Twitter-like service called Yammer.

Like Twitter, Yammer is a social networking tool that allows users to send out small snippets of information (140 words or less) to a select group via mobile device or online.

Here's the big difference, however. Yammer is for use strictly within a company network. The only users that can be registered to use the account are people with a company e-mail address.

Yammer has a simple page layout with tabs to organize threads of messages. You might ask, why not just e-mail? Answer: it's designed to avoid e-mail. Yammer promises to be a great way to cut down on long tedious over shares by e-mail. It's fast, efficient and instantaneously gets the latest messages out to everyone within the company in one fell swoop.

Think how handy this might be on a project or keeping close tabs with a co-worker on the road. The Yammer site offers a streaming video demo. It's worth a look-see.

Basic service is free. For administrative control and using your network security, the cost is a dollar per user each month.

Last night I completed Team of Rivals, Doris Goodwin's
biography of Lincoln, which taught me some things about how to
improve teams in my own technology organization.

This book explores Lincoln's management style and
team-building skills in great detail. Lincoln built an team
via his cabinet that was effective enough to win a war
and end an abhorrent slavery practice that had bedeviled
smart people for generations. How did he do this exactly?

Old thinking about Internet browsers: Pick one and use it exclusively. Most likely, you chose Internet Explorer since it was the juggernaut of browsers.

New thinking: Pick two or three, even four browsers and use them to organize yourself.

Here's how:

- I downloaded the new Google Chrome browser last week and was given the opportunity to sync it up with my other browsers. I declined. I have so many bookmarks that this gives me a chance to start over without killing out something I may want later (not to mention the time it takes to kill out all those bookmarked pages).
- Pick one of your browsers to open quickly; no skins, no apps, no bells, no whistles, nothing to bloat it out. This is your browser for just quick and dirty surfing; like looking up a quick fact or headline.
- Pick one of your browsers to have all those bells and whistles. If your browser is going to be open awhile and your going to be working online; then it makes sense to take a little extra time for it to load and have all those tools at your fingertips.
- Use one browser for home and one for business. That way when you go back to "history" to retrace your steps online; it's not a mish mosh of sites you visit for work and college football scores.
- Remember: web sites look a little different in each browser. If a web site is not loading very well (that is, the widgets aren't functioning, there's little x's in boxes where pictures should be, etc.), try the same site in another browser.
- If Internet Explorer refuses to load a site for security reasons and you know that you want to load it anyway. You can either wade through all the screens to find the function to unblock that site or in a fraction of the time just use Firefox instead.
- Use one browser with the cookies turned off for more stealth surfing.
- Use one browser with the cookies turned on for hassle free access to all the sites you have a user registration setup.
- Use one browser with all the security layers in place for safer online shopping.

For the record, I like it. Yes, it's crashing here and there. Facebook needs a little time to work out the bugs. But, I think it makes better use of the page and I like the tabs.

Clearly, not everyone feels the same way.

I noticed a number of my FB friends this weekend joined the "Official petition against the new Facebook".

There's more ads. That's a ding!

For networking purposes, there's a spot of real estate underneath your profile picture to "write a little something about yourself". This is a perfect spot to put your elevator pitch.

If you don't have a personal elevator pitch, then get one. We'll discuss later.

You twitter, you blog, you podcast, you upload videos to Youtube and in the end; precious few eyeballs show up.

Here's a way to jump start your online presence.

Next time you're at a conference, trade show or professional event of any kind; cover it live through one or more of the channels above. It's far more likely to spread virally, because it's timely.

New information is premium information.

Hollywood understands this. Think about how much cheaper it is to view a movie the older it is. It starts out in the theater at $10 a seat, plus popcorn and a mop bucket of Coke. Then there's pay-per-view or $20 - $30 for a newly released DVD. Eventually, that same movie ends up in the bargain bin of DVDs at Wal-Mart for $7.50 or chopped up, censored with bleeps and sprinkled with commercials on TBS for free.

Think about the information you are twittering, blogging, podcasting, etc. Is it "in theaters now" level information or warmed over bits playing at three in the morning on basic cable?

Just in time for fall (and the here-before-you-know-it holiday shopping season), EBay has been rolling out some pretty significant changes over the past couple of weeks.

1. First off, there will be no more payments by cash, check or money order. Sellers can now only use PayPal (owned by EBay, of course) or credit card. No, this isn't self-serving.

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My thoughts:

- If EBay is tinkering with its search engine to bring certain established, high volume power sellers that can afford deep discounts and free shipping; what happens to the EBay start-up? You know; that sub set of enterpreneur that built EBay up to what it is today, so it can now toss them aside? Where's the loyalty?

- PayPal is so turnkey, of course, on EBay. Yes, there are sellers that have their own credit card processing service. But, we all know who is going to clean up with this new "no cash, no check, no money order" policy. Maybe it's all part of the plan to balance out those lowered listing fees?

Wikipedia is a tool. And, no, I don't mean that in a good way. I've always complained it's a faux-academic source. What I mean in this posting is that it's truly a tool; a public relations tool, a tool for shameless manipulation and for spinning the facts.

Case in point; The McCain camp announced on Friday that Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, has been tapped to run in the number two spot on his ticket.

According to C/Net, citing Wikipedia editors as its source for the story, Palin's Wikipedia page was "edited" no less than 1000 times that same day. More interesting, however, The Washington Post, getting its confirmation from Cyvellience, a cyber intelligence consulting group, is reporting there was a mysterious spike in edits those few days before the announcement. The edits were largely favorable, clearly putting a spit shine on her biography.

For the record, the story of her teenage daughter who is five months pregnant is up on Wikipedia. It was not one of those 1000 edits before the announcement or the day of the announcement. It went up the same day the press got hold of it.

A suspicious number of the edits were also authored and dove tailed perfectly with companion edits on McCain's Wikipedia page.

Why do we care?

Wikipedia pages always rank high on the first page of search results. For the record, I ran a Google search on both McCain and Palin. McCain's Wikipedia page ranked number three, Palin's ranked number one.

So, Wikipedia has a lot of gravitas and the power to be abused effectively. Politicians never seem to miss an opportunity.

Neither do many PR folks. Tip to businesses and executives who care about managing their online reputations; keep an eye on your Wikipedia page and those of your main competitors.

It matters.