When I wrote about the things I liked and disliked about the Kindle for iPhone app, one thing I hadn’t tried was the Notes function.

It’s the ability to leave a note in the margin, and stick a Post-It Note on the page so that you know where you left the note.

My brief review on Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is that it’s important for you if you’re trying to use the Internet to advance your business, your career, or your brand. I think the same thing about Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It.

Both have action items, and both will help you – greatly – if you understand how to apply the lessons these folks share to your own situation. These books have action items, but they are not how-to-become-the-next-Chris-Brogan-or-Gary-Vaynerchuk books. If we all tried to be the next Chris Brogan, we’d have a world full of Chris Brogans and nobody to manufacture car parts or make peanut butter.

Lowell D’Souza gives a brief overview of Trust Agents. Go read the section numbered 1-6 (the rest is D’Souza commenting that the book is so-so, but then, he was looking for a how-to), and then come back.

These are the notes I, er, wrote in the margins.

Action item: Build a listening station. This is a step-by-step list on how to keep track of what people are saying about you or your business. This is not just a matter of running an occasional Google search for yourself; Brogan and Smith teach you how to set up a feed reader and get search feeds from various searches sent to you easily.

You don’t have to be born with it. Forget the people who say you have to be born with a talent to be good at something. You get good at something by practice. Sure, chess might come easy to some people, but if the other people work hard at it, they’ll do just as well.

Be good to people. Here’s a direct quote.

In this chapter, we’re talking about taking advantage of systems, not people. People are real, have real feelings, and always deserve respect. Always consider what’s right and wrong when it comes to this stuff.

You Win by Having Goals. This is something that I will be working hard on in 2010. I understand the tools, I just have to set milestones that I want to achieve using the tools.

There’s plenty of room on the Web. You don’t have to directly compete with someone. There is plenty of room out there to work together, or do something similar, or collaborate, but not try to do the exact same thing someone else is doing. Find your niche.

Know which systems are open. Brogan and Smith use Pacman and Ms. Pacman to explain this concept. Pacman is a known system. As boards progress, prizes progress predictably, and a perfect game consists of a set number of points. Ms. Pacman, though, uses a random prize progression – at any given point, you may get a 100-point cherry or a 1,000-point banana (I made up the numbers, don’t trash Brogan and Smith for it if they’re wrong).

In real life, mastering a closed system (Pacman) means you are the best at something. Cal Ripken Jr? Best at playing consecutive baseball games. Barry Bonds? Best at hitting home runs (steroids or not – he has a number to prove it). But who’s best at walking down Main Street in Toledo? It’s an open system. We don’t even know what being the best at walking down Main Street in Toledo looks like – it’s all trial and error, and we’re kind of making the game up as we go along.

Action Item: Affiliate Marketing Brogan and Smith outline some affiliate marketing strategies.

Forge partnerships. I don’t think this needs any expanding. If you want to know what Brogan and Smith have to say, read the book.

Agent zero. We all have our personalities and roles in organizations. Agent Zero is the person who connects the people who need to know each other. I’m glad there’s a name for this.

Maintain relationships. I’m horrible at this. I’ve been getting better, and Brogan and Smith offer good tips (like pay attention to the birthday calendar function in Facebook).

Yes and. I love this concept. The idea is that someone says something, and you not only agree, but build. An improvised story might start with someone saying, “The bear sat on the sofa and read the sports page,” the next person continues by saying, “Yes, and he bemoaned the Giants’ season coming to an end.” The first person picks back up with, “Yes, and…”

And so, too, should go your discussions about collaborative projects. You build on what the other person says, rather than poo-pooing something that you don’t yet see the point of.

Web site and book recommendations. Here are some of the books and sites the authors recommend throughout the book.

• Akoha.com (social media reality game)
• Spinvox.com (voice mail as text)
• Jott.com (speak into your phone, have it transcribed as an email to you)
• Kayak.com (travel help)
• Serious Creativity by Edward de Bono
• How to Be More Interesting by Edward de Bono
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

» Chris Brogan on Twitter
» Julien Smith on Twitter

Tom Kelley, co-founder of design firm IDEO and author of The Art of Innovation (2001) and The Ten Faces of Innovation (2005), spoke in Syracuse January 12 as part of the Famous Entrepreneurs Series. Here are some take-aways.

About IDEO

IDEO began as David Kelley Design (after Tom’s brother), and was a group of engineers when David asked Tom to join the team. IDEO was formed in 1991, and has designed products that are both physical and conceptual for a lot of companies you’ve heard of. They’re responsible for the fact that kids’ toothbrushes have fat handles, which they designed for Oral B, and Bank of America’s checking account that rounds up to the nearest dollar on purchases and sends the change into your savings account was their idea as well.

Using IDEO’s design, Oral B became the top-selling kids’ toothbrush in the world for the next 18 months (when everybody started selling the wide-handled ones), and in the first year of the Keep the Change campaign, Bank of America opened 2.1 million new accounts, 700,000 of them for people who had never banked with the company before.

IDEO also designed the Apple mouse and the Palm V.

On innovation

Kelley focused on innovation. Everybody’s for it, he said, but in your day-to-day worklife, it can usually wait until tomorrow, because you’ve got other things on your mind (like deadlines and sales quotas). Here is an example of why that’s not OK.

In the 1960s, 100% of the passenger car tires in the U.S. were manufactured in the Akron, Ohio, area by a handful of companies. Minor innovations would appear every few years (new tread patterns, etc.), but nothing major. Then some upstart French company developed something called the radial tire. People in Akron laughed. Now, everyone has radial tires on their cars and roughly 0% of the passenger car tires in the U.S. are manufactured in Akron.

That’s right, 100% to 0% in fewer than 50 years.

Interbrand’s Top 20 brands in 2009 featured five brands that weren’t in the Top 20 in 2001 – that’s 25% turnover in 8 years – Google, BMW, Louis Vuitton, Samsung and Apple. (See source PDF, page 12.)

So the answer is yes, you have to innovate. And in a flat world – that is, a world where you compete globally and have to deal with factors like big differences in labor and materials cost – you have to do it quickly if you want to stay ahead in the game.

In 2001, you would never have even thought to look at a Samsung TV unless the price point against a Sony was the most important thing to you. Now, Samsung outsells Sony in consumer electronics. Who missed the innovation boat?

The Ten Faces of Innovation

Kelley didn’t learn until after he wrote The Ten Faces of Innovation that we’re good at remembering 7 items, plus or minus 2. So he doesn’t talk about all ten, since everyone will forget all of them. He breaks the ten roles people play in innovation into three categories: learning personas, organizing personas and building personas.

Learning personas: These are anthropologists, experimenters and cross-polinators. They’re the people who observe and learn what people need, the people who try stuff and learn from mistakes, and the people who combine ideas that are already out there with new ideas.

: These are hurdlers, collaborators and directors. They’re people who may not be the fastest, but they’re the most efficient (most Olympic hurdlers don’t run significantly faster without the hurdles), people who work with others, and people who position other people to be the stars (think about movie directors – they rarely appear on screen, rather they help actors to be great at their jobs).

Building personas: These are experience architects, set designers, caregivers and storytellers. They’re the people who put all the pieces together, put the people who propel innovation in a good space, anticipate and help fill customer needs, and evangelize how the whole process comes together.

Kelley focused on two of these personas: anthropologists and experience architects.

Anthropologists

Kelley is the first to admit that when anthropology PhDs started showing up on the payroll, he didn’t get it. There were a lot of them, and he didn’t get it for a couple of years. “We have engineers who are developing laptops that don’t break when you drop them four feet onto concrete, and these people go out and watch kids fish and take pictures?” he asked.

He’s come around 180 degrees, he says. It’s when you go out and watch people that you figure out what they need.

The kids’ toothbrush I mentioned in the first section? Anthropologists went out and saw that kids’ toothbrushes were really just smaller versions of adults’ toothbrushes. But adults brush their teeth with their fingertips – they have the manual dexterity – while kids hold toothbrushes in their fists. That’s why they needed fatter handles.

Bank of America’s Keep the Change account came about because IDEO anthropologists went into the field and discovered that people were writing checks to round numbers – for example, if your electric bill came to $56.24, you wrote a check for $57 so you could do easier math. Lots of people were doing this, and lots of people thought they were the only ones doing it. So they devised this system where if you paid that $56.24 on your debit card, $57 came out and you wound up with an extra 76 cents in your savings account.

The key is this: you have to go out and observe to figure out what people need.

Experience Designers

These are the people who create an overall experience. Kelley uses a sushi restaurant as an example. Your food is only part of the experience. There’s the presentation – especially important in sushi – and then there’s not only your table/counter service for beverages and the like, but you actually get to interact with the chef, whose preparation becomes a performance.

In terms of a website, visitors create some of their own experience: we can’t influence their physical surroundings, the noise level in their room, the size of the screen, the weather, etc. But we can set up a website experience in such a way that they can get our content (the primary reason they come) in as pleasant a way as possible. [Kelley didn't mention Steve Krug's book Don’t Make Me Think, but I'd highly recommend it.]

Your Customers

Your current customers can help you innovate in baby steps, but they’re never going to tell you the next giant leap – you have to figure that out for yourself. For example, let’s say you make VCRs, and you ask your customers what they want. They say, “we want it to rewind much faster so we can just bring the tape right back to Bliockbuster.”

So you go back to your development team and they say, “Sure, we can do that,” and next year at the Consumer Electronics Show you arrive with a table showing off the fastest rewinding VCR in the history of the world.

And then you look over at the next table and see a DVD player – no rewinding at all, and the discs even take up less space than videotapes.

Your customers can tell you how to improve your existing product a bit at a time, sure, but if you really want to innovate, you need to get out there and see what people need.

Suggested Reading

• The Art of Innovation
• The Ten Faces of Innovation
• Made to Stick
• When Sparks Fly
• The Experience Economy
• Don’t Make Me Think

» Previous speaker at FES, Chris Hughes of Facebook

I’m grabbing this from Beth, but like her, I’m not going to tag anyone. If you do this sort of thing, by all means…

One book that changed your life: The Collector, by John Fowles. There’s a strong chance you haven’t read this book, and there’s no real reason to. It’s about a guy who gets bored of collecting butterflies, and so he decides to collect a beautiful woman instead. (Some people might call this kidnapping.) But what got me is that it’s written twice: Once from the collector’s viewpoint, and once from the collected’s viewpoint. It’s really a lesson in multiple perspectives.

One book you have read more than once: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This was my introduction to the cyber-punk genre. It’s set in a world that is hyper-capitalist and (therefore?) all kinds of corrupt, and all the religious zealots are out at sea (literally). There are alternate realities (pre-Matrix, of course), and it very much predicts MMRPGs and VR capabilities. You probably need to be at least mildly a geek to enjoy it, but as someone who doesn’t read sci-fi or fantasy novels, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.

One book you would want on a desert island: My Complete Illustrated Shakespeare. Pretty sure I don’t even have to justify that to you.

One book that made you laugh: If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell. I’m a big fan of Bruce. One of the nicest celebrities I’ve had the opportunity to interview, super-nice guy, super-funny guy, and I’m a sucker for a really bad movie (and he’s made plenty).

One book that made you cry: The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. No, I’m not kidding. This book includes kids stabbing each other to death because when one child plays the butcher and the other one plays the pig, the butcher kills the pig. This doesn’t end happily ever after, people.

One book you wish had been written: I’m still working on books that have been written. I know the point to this is “what do you wish you had learned,” so I’m going to give a cop-out answer and say, How to Spot a Jackass at 20 Paces: A Guide to Making the Right Choice About With Whom to Surround Yourself.

One book you wish had never been written: Tie: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I actually held a grudge about Return for four months. I didn’t for Heart of Darkness only because it’s a quick read, even if it is miserable.

One book you are currently reading: Trust Agents by Chris Brogen and Julien Smith. I’ve got a couple going, actually, but that’s the one I’m recommending (so far).

One book you have been meaning to read: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It’s sitting on my shelf, yet I keep going to my local library. Maybe I’m scared of it or something.

I’m an avid reader.

I haven’t been moved to get a Kindle or a nook or any one of those other e-Reader deals, but I do have an iPod Touch (like an iPhone without the phone [or the camera]), and there is a free Kindle application (as there is for a PC, apparently).

I got invited to a book-club-among-friends. We were to read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

Now, this was mid-December. I had a couple of choices. I first got online and checked the library catalog. I could have run out to grab the last copy locally (one of the other attendees grabbed the other copy), but I get renewal guilt, so I probably would have returned it before we discuss it. The other, equally obvious option, was to run to a bookstore and get a copy – it’s a pretty famous book, it wouldn’t be hard to find.

Except it was mid-December, and I wasn’t going to a retail outlet. No way, no how.

And then I remembered I had an email gift certificate to Amazon.com. And it was for a penny more than the Kindle version of the book. Hmm, convenient. I commenced to downloading it.

I read the whole thing on my iPod. Here are my thoughts.

Things I Liked

Readability: Awesome. The default font was a comfortable size and face, although I did have the option to change to several other fonts and to make the font larger or smaller. Navigating through was easy; you just push the current page to the left, and you were at the next page. You could make notes and add bookmarks, and as long as you were online, you could sync those to your PC version (and, I’m guessing, to your actual Kindle).

Scanning: Decent, not amazing. There were some obvious errors. Aslan (you’ll recognize the name if you’re a CS Lewis fan) frequently shows up as “Asian” and there are a few others. Fortunately, the scanning wasn’t so bad that it was unreadable, it just wasn’t perfect. And since publishing companies actually put these pages in an electronic format before they send books to be printed; why not just pay for that version?

Price: Amazon prices the Kindle version of books about $1 to $3 less expensive than the paperback versions. Of course, when you sync your Kindle (or Kindle app), you may have to worry about your book getting taken away – apparently there was a little rights issue with some authors’ works.

Portability: I love being able to have this in my pocket. That alone might be worth the price of admission.

Things I Didn’t Like

Pagination: I’m going to be discussing this book with other people, and I’m going to have no idea how to tell them where to look. The Kindle version put things in units, and I don’t know what those units were. The Corrections came in at 9,971 of these units. So if I want to refer people to something that happens at, say, unit 4,156, I have to tell everybody else, what, go about 41% of the way into the book? I still have no concept of how long the book is, and now when I get there I’m going to have to ask how long it is and do the math on the fly.

Weight: For me, one of the joys of reading a book is the weight. It feels like something substantial. And as you make progress, the weight begins to shift from right to left. That’s worth a lot to me. Apple says the Touch weighs 4.05 ounces (that’s a smidge over a quarter pound). That’s nothing like substantial, and the weight only shifts from right to left if you change hands.

Would I Do It Again?

Yes. In fact, I’m just jumping into Trust Agents.

Wait! Wait! Aren’t you going to tell us what you thought of the book? Nah. I haven’t fully formulated an opinion. Maybe we can actually sit down and talk about it, you and I.

Too many books have been written about me, at too great length. What’s needed is a book that can be read in one sitting.

Alec Wilkinson writes that he was worried Pete Seeger would not agree to another biography, so when the folk icon told him to write something brief and readable, Wilkinson must have been thrilled. He succeeds in the task with The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

Seeger turned 90 this year, and while longevity runs in his family, his voice is starting to falter and, well, he’s 90. He’s active, but by necessity less so than in his younger years. He’s still an active voice for workers’ rights and for the First Amendment, and if you don’t know much about him or of his music, you really should catch up.

His stepmother told him once that he had “a talent for song leading,” and that he should develop it, and develop it he did. Watch that video above. He sings one line, waves his hand, and if he didn’t do anything the rest of the song, no one would have noticed. That was recorded in 1993; compare it to a video taken 30 years earlier. One line, and everybody’s singing.

Seeger’s life story is a great narrative. He used to hop boxcars with his banjo and ride with Woody Guthrie. He was drafted during the second World War, and later wound up blacklisted by HUAC. He took a “world tour” with his family as a cover while the last of the blacklisting faded out. He built the first home he and his wife Toshi lived in, a log cabin in Beacon, N.Y. (they still live on the property, though in a house that was built later).

He has stood up for workers’ rights, civil rights and all sorts of other things. Even into his 80s, he’d stand outside in the rain on the side of a highway with a sign that said, “Peace.”

To me, his legacy is song and song leading. There’s nothing better you can do with a guitar than get everyone around you singing, in key or out, the right words or not. Seeger truly is an American treasure, and Wilkinson’s book will take you little enough time to read that you’ll have plenty of energy to do more research, listen to some music, and maybe pick up your guitar and play some songs.

I’d say I’m not a big fan of motivational, go chase your dream, up and at ‘em, how to win at business and life books, but really I don’t read them, so I don’t know for sure that I’m not a fan.

And then I found Gary Vaynerchuk on Twitter.

The dude has passion, and he has a dream. The passion: Wine. The dream: Buy the Jets.

He has personality, he has energy, he has a foul mouth, he has hustle, and he’s all about getting himself out there. He’s got a site about himself, a wine shop and wine review site, a discount wine reseller and a gourmet food shop.

He’s fun to watch, and, even if it is the freaking Jets on his spit bucket, what’s not to like about a guy who knows which wine to pair with Lucky Charms.

I won’t say his book Crush It changed my life or is going to change my life. But it certainly is an invigorating read (and a quick one – one person I passed it along to read it over two lunch breaks), and you definitely hear his voice come through (which makes sense, as he dictated the book – he readily admits that the written word is not his strongest medium).

But if you have passions and goals, Crush It will cue you in to some social media platforms you might not be using, and you’ll learn how he built a veritable empire from a small liquor store.

And because I wouldn’t be following his advice if I didn’t do this, here goes:

• Follow me on Twitter
• Join me on LinkedIn
• Become a fan of my amazing cancer-fighting beard

Now, have a great Friday, read the book this weekend, and get moving.

I finally read Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Don’t ask me how I got through high school without reading it (or Catcher in the Rye or 1984 or Julius Caesar…), but I finally decided to give it a go. There are definitely some lessons to be applied today.

I’ve written a little about racism, and then there was the wedding that technically didn’t count. And I’ve mentioned that sometimes sexism manifests in subtle ways.

But it all boils down to one thing: no matter what we look like, who we share our lives with, what we believe in or what sexual organs we’re attached to (if any), if you puncture our skin, we bleed red.

Underneath it all, we’re all the same. That our young narrator, Harper Lee’s Scout, could recognize that, is a sign that it’s such an elementary concept, anyone should be able to get it.

Growing up, I learned that America was supposed to be a “melting pot” – a place where we all contributed to each other. As I hit high school and college, the prevailing attitude changed. We’re a salad bowl – a place where a diverse group of people can all be in the same place and contribute to the overall aesthetic while maintaining their own individuality.

In other words, we all bring something to the table, and we’re all important.

2010 will be the first U.S. Census on which people will be able to check more than one race. I’m not sure if this is a recognition that people identify with more than one heritage, a recognition that not everyone procreates intra-racially, or a way to brag about more diversity in some Congressional districts.

Check out NPR’s series on mixed-race Americans for some interesting stories. I’m a little embarrassed, to tell you the truth, that this is even something we’re still curious about – shouldn’t we just be at the “we’re the same” point by now? Do we still need to classify everything – everyone?

For those of you who have been wondering where the book reviews went, I’ve been placing them on HubPages. They’re also in a little widget over there on the right.

I posted three new ones yesterday:

• Hurricane Punch by Tim Dorsey
• Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
• Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

This isn’t really a book review. It’s more a look at thought and inspiration.

First off, read up on Bucky Fuller. He’s best known for the geodesic dome, the architectural style that uses the least amount of material to maximize space.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Fuller launches some great ideas as instructions for maximizing human survival. Some of his predictions have not come true, and there’s no way he could have predicted the rise of the Internet at that point, but two really inspirational ideas are what brought me back for a second read.

Great Pirates. In the old days, there were kings. They ruled over small kingdoms thanks to their wealth and their guards. But how did they come by this wealth and power?

Pirates. The guys who figured out how to sail around in big boats, bring money, and put these people in power, on promises that if the guys in the boats needed warriors, slaves or whatever else, the kings would cough up some people.

Awesome.

Synergy. This is the big thing I needed to read again. We have become increasingly specialized as we’ve “progressed” in industrialization. You need your pipes fixed? Call a plumber. You need your wires fixed? Call an electrician. You need a tooth fixed? Don’t call an orthopedist.

We have so many people with narrow focuses, we aren’t achieving much in the way of innovation because no one is looking at the big picture. To illustrate this, Fuller cites a conference that took place in the 1960s. A biologist and a physicist were among the presenters, and each had written essentially the same paper, tackling the same problem and reaching the same conclusion from entirely different angles.

It was purely by accident they wound up at the same conference – the physicist was accepted by physics reviewers, the biologist by experts in his field. If anybody was studying overlapping disciplines, the problem solved would have been evident a lot earlier.

Fuller’s idea is that while it’s nice to have people around who know their fields really well, we need more people who can dabble in a variety of industries, and who can bring together specialists if and when needed.

This is how innovation grows. Who wants to talk synergy this summer? Find me on Twitter, and let’s kick around some ideas.