yoherb

Rock Out with Me on Me.dium

We're trying out something pretty cool at Me.dium.  An online rock fest.  Webware did a nice write up on the event/idea.

If you are a Facebook user: join the Rock.Me group.
If you are a MySpace user: check this out.

As part of the build up to this we're also releasing some new cool features.  So, if you haven't checked out Me.dium in a while (or before), now is a great time.

Geeky stuff behind these scenes: heavy use of our location based XMPP messging platform.  Of course, also all the other cool things at Me.dium including: cutting edge AJAX, and Me.dium Match(tm) (activity based relevancy engine).

Rock On.

Books for CTOs?

I've started to mentor a young CTO a few weeks back.  He was asking me about books to read, and I realized that everything I could think of was general leadership, vs. technical leadership.  So, I'm now on a quest to build a "CTO Reading List."  I would think this includes topics such as:

Managing Development Teams
Product Management
Systems Thinking
Best Practices
Development Methods (agile, etc.)

Any suggestions? 

If you're a CTO or VP Engineering, what books have have had the biggest impact on you?

I'll start pulling a list together and post it here.

Done with Twitter?

A little over a month ago I went on vacation to Alaska.  Before I left I turned off the SMS notifications from Twitter.  I wanted to be unplugged, and my phone wasn't going to work much anyway.

When I returned I realized I didn't miss Twitter.  I still haven't turned back on the SMS side of the house.  I occasionally tweet for the fun of it, but I rarely read other people's.  I've been thinking I need to refresh my friends/network.  I have some people on my list that I don't know, don't find all that interesting, and they tweet A LOT.  It's too noisy.

So, I'm not done with it yet, but I'm going to reword my friends list and see how that changes things.  Maybe I'll care again.

That said, I really do like the ambient intimacy.  When my friend Tobias travels, it's very cool to know how things are going with him.  Unfortunately, I also learn how stressed out my development team at Me.dium is when the tweet :-)

If you use twitter and meet one or two of the follow criteria please friend me (yoherb):

- you're not boring
- you don't tweet too much
- I know you (and you have at least of the above tests is TRUE).

I'll give it some more time.  I just wonder how many people out there are getting close to being "done with Twitter" like I am.

Me.dium Widget is Back!

OK, finally, I get to post this very cool Me.dium Widget.  Look to the right ---->

We've been waiting to release this until our IE7 add-on was out of beta  It's ready now, so go download it if you haven't already.  Today marks the official start of our "coming out" party.  Lots of nice press (see below).  More in the works, including some very cool promotions.

Download.com had a nice write up today.  We were also the exclusive recommended download on the homepage.  Brad Feld also had a nice post.

Tomorrow we'll be listed as a recommended add by Microsoft.

We have more Me.dium Widgets in the works.  Check back here or watch our website.

If you haven't joined yet, you should because you could win a new iPhone. 

How it works:

The Me.dium widget is "live."  It's javascript that calls home, and gets updates with the activity around the "anchor" site (in this case yoherb.typepad.com).  Feel free to view the source of this page and you'll see the simple call back.  The "blue people" are other Me.dium users surfing sites "near" the anchor site.  By "near" I mean sites that our Match(tm) algorithm knows are correlated because of user activity.  Match is the black magic behind Me.dium.  Think of it as a giant data graph of URLs with time weighted correlations.

If you are a Me.dium user, you can create widgets from your profile page.  Just click on "Manage Widgets."

Our widget(s) will be one of many distribution methods for Me.dium.  If you click on a widget, you'll be auto-friended to the widget creator when you join Me.dium.  Pretty cool huh?

We have several Me.dium Widgets in the works, including some for Facebook and Myspace.

The Countdown Begins

Me.dium is about to go mainstream.  Lots of stuff happening Monday.  One thing is that the Me.dium Map Widget will be available, and back up on my blog.

Maybe this will get me rolling again on my blog.  Lot's to talk about:

• Technology issues
• My trip to Alaska with my son
• The Boulder Backroads 1/2 Marathon
• Political Rants
• Twitter burnout

Later.

Me.dium Raises $15m

Well, we made it official today that we raised a huge chunk of change.  Here are a few initial stories:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/medium_collaborative_browsing.php

http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/10/medium-gets-large-boost/

http://www.profy.com/2007/06/11/medium-funding/

Me.dium has a huge vision, and unless you're on the inside it is hard to understand why we need so much dough.  I kind of like the fact that people are now saying: prove it.  Keeps the pressure on us.  We've come a long ways, but you don't raise this kind of money and become just "another web 2.0 company."  Of course, I don't think that will be the case, but this is consumer marketing, and we have a long, long ways to go to build the user base.  Luckily we won't be under funded as we try...

A Day Offline

Yesterday (Sat.), I woke up and promised my family that I wouldn't touch a computer all day.  What was unusual about this is that it was a lazy day around the house so there were going to be lots of opportunities to "check something quickly." 

Some interesting observations:

My wife Terry said she couldn't remember the last time I didn't get online for a day (except vacations, etc.).  Her guess is that it had been years!

My son John (7) couldn't believe it, and watched me like a hawk.

I noticed just how much everyone else in my family is online.  Hours each.

I got bored at times, and actually had to find litle jobs to keep me busy.  I had the thought, "I remember what this feels like."

I realized just how many times a day I pop online to check sports scores, read the news, research a silly question (thanks Google), etc.  I had to ask Terry to reseach the proportional weight of fat to muscle.

Me.dium experienced a short outage, and I didn't even know until this morning.  Of course, I didn't need to know because I have great people working for me at Me.dium.

Between innings at John's baseball game I didn't check any messages on my phone.  Or, after the movie, or...  Amazing how many times a day I scan that thing, especially with Twitter buzzing away.

I woke up this morning ready for my coffee and my keyboard.

I wonder if I can do that every Sat? 

More Crazy Stuff: Please Please Think!

OK, I don't plan to make my blog a running rant on my political views, but I'm just really frustrated right now.

Here's another example of bully-meet-bully.  Russia threatens to target missles at Europe.

Sure, they probably already have missles pointed at key targets, but this escalation in response to the US bullying countries is crazy.  Clearly, there's huge economic value in moving us back into a Cold War mode.  I'm sure all of this is just posturing, but as long as our "leaders" waste time on this stuff we never get down to talking about what really matter: a vision that describes a world we all want to live in (and guess what, that's the one we're living in right now).  More specifically, this really isn't the best we can do is it?

Ultra Running

I had heard about the Barkley Marathon, but never really knew what it was.  Today, my sister Lena sent me a link to a great article about this extreme event. 

As a regular runner and occassional marathoner I can't even imagine how hard this event must be.  My feet hurt after 20 mile run, but nothing like this!

The article is a bit long, but it's so well written it sucked me in.

Me.dium Widget Update

For those following the twists and turns of Me.dium marketing, we're still working through our release strategy for the widget.  I know several people want it, and I too would like to get it back on my blog.  But, we're also trying to do the right thing on the marketing front and timing is everything.