Josh Shear

I've been using Bloglines as a feed reader for about five years now, and there are some things I like about it, including the ability to see embedded video within the reader. But as I get more mobile, I find it's not enough.

I've recently launched a new Twitter account at @_ThatJosh (with the underscore; without was already in use). I'm using it as a feed reader rather than a conversationalist, like I do with my main @JoshShear account.

I didn't duplicate the feed list I have in Bloglines. I'm still running image-heavy feeds (like the Dilbert daily comic strip and Josh Spear's trend-spotting blog) through it, but now for the social media, search and entrepreneur feeds I read, I can see what's going on in a list form, with only a headline, a few words and a link.

This is especially helpful when conferences are going on and my feed reader blows up with the live blogging (I still love you, Outspoken and BCI, I'm just making it easier on me).

Here is how I set it up:

1. I created a new GMail account. This gives me the opportunity to use it as a pivot point for anything I decide to do with this particular group of accounts. GMail has a good spam filter, so I don't have to worry about cleaning out the inbox frequently, and Google seems to be OK with me opening as many accounts as I want.

2. I signed up the Twitter account.

3. I went to Twitterfeed and signed in with my Google account (use the "Sign in with Open ID" link). I added the feeds, told Twitterfeed how often to check each, and to post them to my Twitter account.

I use Hootsuite to read Twitter both on my laptop and on my phone (I use the Android application, not the website, on my mobile). I created a tab for _ThatJosh, and put three columns on that tab: mentions (people talking to me), direct messages (private messages to me), and my sent feed, which essentially ends up being the feeds I'm reading.

This is antithetical to how I recommend people to use Twitter, but my goal is not followers: It's a tool for me to make my morning reading routine go smoother. I hope it helps you as well.

A press release from Crazy Diamond at Assault City Roller Derby.

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Syracuse, NY – Assault City Roller Derby is pleased to announce its first-ever international bout at the Greater Baldwinsville (Lysander) Ice Arena in Baldwinsville, NY, on Saturday, August 21st. Assault City will take on the Tri-City Roller Girls of Ontario, Canada. Doors open at 6 PM and the bout starts at 7 PM. There will be refreshments, music, halftime entertainment and loads of excitement. This is also ACRD’s last home bout of the 2010 season.

Presale general admission tickets are $10 each while a limited number of front line tickets are $20 each. Reduced price children’s tickets are also available. Tickets can be purchased online or at Black Mamba Skate Park in Shoppingtown Mall. Tickets will also be available at the door the day of the event for $12 for general admission and $22 for front line.

ACRD is an all-women’s flat track roller derby league consisting of working mothers, professionals, wives, and students, ranging in age from 21 to 45. Their goal is to help local communities and promote women’s empowerment. Since its inception in late 2007, Assault City has competed on the road in Vermont, New Jersey, and Ohio as well as throughout Upstate New York. For additional information, please visit www.AssaultCityRollerDerby.com.

For all my Western Mass. friends, relatives and readers, Sinai Temple is looking to help out in Pakistan via the Islamic Society of Western Massachusetts. A letter from Rabbi Shapiro:

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Dear Sinai –

The floods that have struck Pakistan constitute what we at Sinai have always defined as a “world crisis.” Lives lost; homes and villages swept away; shortages of food, water, and clothing. Pakistan is a disaster.

PLUS SOMETHING ELSE…

After reading about Pakistan’s plight over a number of days, I suddenly realized that some of our friends here in the Springfield area are involved. I am referring to the members of the Islamic Society of Western Massachusetts. Sinai has dialogued with members of the Islamic Society. We have visited their mosque; they have visited us for our worship. I myself meet with leaders of the mosque on a monthly basis at the Interfaith Council of Massachusetts.

And members of the mosque are taking the Pakistan flooding personally.

Some have relatives in the affected areas; others simply feel a sense of solidarity the way we Jews feel solidarity with other Jews around the world.

A final ingredient:
Many of you have probably read about the controversy surrounding the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan. I am totally in favor of this initiative. I’ve read about the leader of the mosque. He is a gentleman of impeccable reputation. He has a special interest in interfaith activities.

What’s more, since this is America, it seems incredible that religious freedom would not be extended to those who choose to build a house of worship wherever they wish.

I have to imagine that our friends at the mosque here in Springfield feel horrible when they hear some of the talk against the mosque in New York City. Add that to their concern for their fellow Moslems in Pakistan. And I am feeling that we at Sinai must respond to the flooding.

I’ve spoken to Dr. Bajwa, who is one of the mosque’s leaders, and he tells me that they would welcome contributions for flood relief. (I’ve also checked the charities he mentions and it seems to me that they are bona fide charities to which we would feel comfortable giving.)
SO…MY PROPOSAL…MY REQUEST…

PLEASE MAKE A DONATION TO OUR SINAI TEMPLE WORLD CRISIS FUND TODAY.

ANY AMOUNT WILL DO.

YOU CAN SEND A CHECK TO THE TEMPLE OR GO TO OUR WEBSITE AND MAKE A DONATION DIRECTLY THAT WAY.

I thank you for helping Sinai reach out to the Islamic Society of Western Massachusetts. I will send our relief check to the Society next week.

Please act quickly.

Thank you,
Rabbi Mark Dov Shapiro

I had a chance last week to meet with Neil Brody Miller to talk about his new project, Farmshed CNY.

Farmshed is an iPhone app (I'm hoping there's an Android app in the future) that lets you see nearby farms, farmers markets and locally-owned restaurants. The download times are getting faster (it's a fairly large database), and Neil clued me in on a few upcoming changes, including organizing everything by distance (it's currently alphabetical) and further organizing what farms do (meat? veggies? organic?).

Neil met me at Strong Hearts, and we chatted a bit about our backgrounds. He's an old (70s-era) punk with an entrepreneurial mentality, great ideas, and a love for all the stuff that's going on here. He particularly mentioned Syracuse First and the guy who introduced us, Marty Butts of Small Potatoes.

Watch for more coming on Farmshed. If you're the iPhone sort, download the app (it's free). Here's a miniaturized version of the brochure:

Update, 7 a.m.: We learned this morning that the white board resignation was, indeed, a hoax. But because the viral campaign has some actual discussion value, I'm going to leave this post as I wrote it.

You may have seen the series of photos yesterday of "Jenny" quitting her job via white board and email. If not, take some time to scroll through the whole thing.

We might find this an attempt at Internet celebrity. I'm running on the assumption it's not (see note above: it is). I'm also running on the assumption that she'll be out there looking for jobs, and that she's recognizable and Google-able. So. If her resume came across your desk, would you hire her? Some things stand out to me on both sides of the argument.

Pro: Creativity. That's the obvious one. Not only is it a creative resignation, she put some time into it, which bodes well in a project-focused environment.

Con: Self-awareness. My guess is, without knowing the office situation, anybody who's worked with Spencer for several years and has seen his assistants come and go, probably knows there was a pattern of chauvinism, and may have warned her subtly. Either way, she made it two years before she knew where she really stood in her boss's eyes.

Pro: Willingness to learn from the bottom up. Jenny wanted to be a broker, so she came on as a broker's assistant to learn the business. She wasn't so arrogant in her job search to try to start higher than her abilities, and she apparently determined the path she would need to take to get where she wanted to be.

Con: Willingness to let the behavior cycle without her. Rather than go to HR with a harassment claim, Jenny called Spencer out in such a way that she probably can't file a claim now. Which means that anyone who hasn't seen her resignation or who doesn't connect it to her company, or who doesn't necessarily believe a clearly disgruntled employee, will sign on as Spencer's next assistant, and the cycle of chauvinism will continue. Her boss was doing something potentially illegal that will likely affect other people in the future – if she had gone through the proper reporting procedure, she would help others who might work for Spencer. There's a selfishness there I'm not crazy about as a potential employer.

Pro: Strong use of available tools. Spencer put monitoring software on the network. Jenny used it in a way not prescribed by her boss. Two thumbs up.

Con: The wardrobe change. I get that it's the throwing off of the business casual and the throwing on of the casual – the change from from the worker to the customer. Very artsy. But there's something about Jenny shucking the glasses and coming out from behind the white board on the first shot that screams to me, "I'm gonna do the talk show circuit for this!" Not crazy about the move.

I'm glad Jenny got out of a bad situation. I'm also glad that she recognized there were no bridges she needed to worry about burning, so it didn't matter how she did it. Whether or not I'd want her on my team in a work environment would strongly depend on what business I was in and what dynamics I hoped for within my team.

If you move your eyes to the right, you'll see a box labeled "Connect." It's under the search box, next to my mug over there. While you may not have a Delicious account, there's a reasonable chance you have a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account. Even all three. And possibly Foursquare, too.

I use those three social networking platforms very differently. Facebook is primarily social for me, although I do operate a Facebook page or 2 for businesses. I play Scrabble with my sister and other word games with my mom and some friends. I check in on birthdays. On rare occasions I'll check the status updates, but really, that is pretty rare. LinkedIn is purely business; even the stuff that feels social is business – I'm sharing professional information, and since I'm a sole proprietor, that business life sometimes spills over into the personal (and vice versa). Twitter is a mix of everything. I definitely don't over-share on Foursquare, and I only check in at clients, potential clients, and places I have a comment about. And I only share that on Twitter if I have something to say about it beyond, "I'm here."

Sometimes I find something worth sharing on multiple platforms, though I find that increasingly rare. More often than not, it's a photo shared on a Twitter platform that I send to Facebook as well so that I don't have to upload it twice.

If you're just on social networking sites to be there, that's cool. I have goals. Which is why if you're flooding my LinkedIn stream with the same stuff I just read on Twitter, totally overwhelming other connections who update what they're working on once or twice a week, I've pulled you out of my LinkedIn timeline. And really, a lot of us are on LinkedIn for the professional networking – we don't care if you're sharing ice cream with your kid. Save it for Facebook or Twitter.

I've been doing the same on Facebook lately, too.

This has a further consequence, as well: once I've pulled you out of my stream, you're out. It's not like I go back weekly to see if your practices have changed. If you point out to me that your practices have changed, I may go check, but if I've pulled you out of my stream and tomorrow you have an epiphany and decide to share good stuff on LinkedIn, sorry, I'm not going to know, and I'm not going to share it with my network.

How are you using these platforms, and how do you deal with people who use them differently from you?

On Friday of last week, Demand Media filed for an IPO.

For those unfamiliar, Demand owns eHow, Answerbag, and a handful of other sites that offer content and advertising. Sounds like a newspaper or magazine, right? Well, not exactly. The content on these sites is determined by what people are searching for, and is populated by people who can do a modicum of research and can string a couple of sentences together.

Danny Sullivan explains a little more about their revenue streams, but basically the way this works is that you search for something like "how to string a tennis racket" and Demand Media's computers say, "We could own that." So, "How To String A Tennis Racket" gets added to a list of articles available. It gets assigned a type of article and site, and based on those, a price point they'll pay for the article.

Someone who has been accepted as a writer says, "Hey, I could write that," and does. The article goes to a copy editor, the editor accepts the article or sends it back for rewrites, the writer either gives it up or re-writes it; if the article is re-written, the editor either accepts it or rejects it. If the article is accepted, the writer gets paid.

You may have guessed by now that I've done some writing for them. I'm not particularly proud of that writing, and don't generally include it in portfolios or writing samples because it's really mediocre work – the whole model revolves around the articles being relevant to searches, rather than enjoyable, in-depth writing.

But by and large, if you're asking how to string a tennis racket, you want to learn how to string a tennis racket, and if the piece is good enough to get that done, frankly, it's good enough to get it done.

I'm writing for them because they pay, and if you know how to do the research, they pay well. While $15 for a 400-500 word piece (call it 3 cents a word) is far less than a good publication would pay, it's far more than their competitors (Textbroker, for example, pays about a penny a word to its most highly qualified writers, and about a half-cent to its writers who demonstrate mediocre grammar skills).

I type in the neighborhood of 90-100 words per minute, which means that I can do the actual writing for an article for eHow in under 10 minutes. If I add 10 minutes for the research, I just made $15 for 20 minutes worth of work. Grab 3 or 4 articles that can be written on the same research, and you can clear $50 an hour for working for Demand. That's pretty good by any publication's standards, even if you're not racking up a portfolio you can be proud of (let's face it, even quality publications need someone to write up unremarkable content, and they do it for more like $8-$10 an hour).

So yes, you're definitely losing some quality in exchange for relevance, but that's been a problem on the web since before someone thought up the content farm idea. Journalism itself has fallen victim to the search engines to some extent. But frankly, if I want to know how to file for a copyright, I don't need to be wowed by the prose. Just tell me what to send where and how to figure out how much it's going to cost me.

I came across one of these notepads from the SUNY Oswego Metro Center (I snipped that image above; I figured you'd get the idea even if I didn't include all 20ish lines on the piece of paper). I love the Metro Center. It gives people the opportunity to take classes downtown. It opens its doors to groups like 40 Below. I even love these notepads: they're a good size, bigger than a shopping list, smaller than a journal. I even really like Amber Spain-Mosher, who handles the marketing for them.

But the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn logos at the bottom caught my eye. Because in order to find them, we're supposed to search those sites. And that's fine – if you make yourself easy to find.

Facebook. Facebook has a really good search. In fact, as I was typing, it pre-filled the SUNY Oswego Metro Center page. Very good. The one problem is, take a look at the profile image they use – it's the statue in Clinton Square and The Post-Standard building, as taken from the front of the Atrium, which is the building that houses the Metro Center. There's no way to visually identify the Metro Center when you land on the Facebook page.

Twitter. Twitter has good content search. I ran two different searches and didn't find the SUNY Oswego Metro Center account. For the first search, I simply typed suny oswego metro center in the search box that runs in the right-hand column of a Twitter page. My only result was someone who checked into the Metro Center recently on Foursquare. Then I went to "Find People" and searched for suny oswego metro center (most people search lower case; so do I). I wound up with a list of 20 accounts, including CNN Weather and NASA's Stennis Center, but not SUNY Oswego Metro Center's account.

LinkedIn. You have to know how to search LinkedIn in order to be effective. It's actually fairly difficult. The search defaults to searching people, and it's an all-word search. When I searched for suny oswego metro center under people, I got six results – two were people who worked there (one as a graduate assistant), and the other four had gone to SUNY Oswego and had worked at places that included Metro Center in their name. Next, I tried to search under Companies, and received zero search results (they'd be combined under the SUNY Oswego umbrella).

There are a couple of ways to solve that. One is to list URLs. Unless 1,000 people like your page, that's unwieldy on Facebook (unless, of course, you were to buy MyBusinessNameOnFacebook.com and redirect it to your Facebook page), but then Facebook's search is actually good. My business cards don't list my Facebook URL, but they do list my company website, my blog, my Twitter and my LinkedIn.

Another way is to build a QR code (like the one on the left there). You can include a lot of information (about 1500 alphanumeric characters) in not very much space. As the smart phone market grows (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Palm, etc.), just about anybody is going to be able to read one of these – all they need is to download a free app and have an auto-focus camera. Most applications will give you a button to just add the information to your address book.

What challenges do you face when trying to market your online presence in an offline environment?

My post on places to bring colleagues and clients got a bunch of reaction on LinkedIn. I said Freedom of Espresso in Franklin Square, Edward Thomas, Alto Cinco, Al's and Burnet Park.

Here was the LinkedIn response. [Note: After I created this post, more comments were added, so they didn't make it. Be sure to check out the Linked Syracuse group for more!]

Links to some of these places:

• Century Club
• Empire
• Kitty Hoynes
• The Mission
• L'Adour
• Dinosaur
• Heid's
• Onondaga Lake Park
• Tin Pan Galley [Warning: Music auto-plays]

My bars to work from were the Blue Tusk, Al's, Empire, the Limerick and Suds.

Bob has some great ideas, too. Not sure how comfortable I'd be bringing my laptop to Dino, but I like Bull & Bear as a spot, and Alto Cinco is a nice spot.

In comments, Greg added Clark's, which I wish had more electricity, but I'm still down.