Here are a few things I’ve learned from 20 years of living online, developing or managing online things and using lots and lots of things others have developed. I’ve learned them by writing and by reading about those online things. I’ve learned them through personal successes and personal failures. I’ve learned them from watching others succeed and fail. I’ve learned them by using this blog to chornicle what I’ve seen flow by me since August, 2000, when it was created.

I’m going to number them, but they are in no particular order. I will note at the bottom what the current context is for me writing this post, however, they are rather universal lessons. Each one of them could be a book, but you’re lucky, I only had about 30 minutes to devote to this.

1. On the internet, when you think you are using a “free” service, it is only a perception. Like your parents told you, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

2. If you create a service on the internet and you want it to succeed, it’s okay to make money any way you can as long as you tell your users what you are doing and your users agree to that method.

3. If you are a user of a service on the internet that involves you sharing, friending, following, pinning, writing, networking, book-marking, checking-in or dozens of other versions of expressing yourself, managing your identity or building connections with people, you are not only adding value to that service, you are that service. And when I say you are “adding value to that service,” I mean just that, even when I describe it in positive terms (editing an open-sourced encyclopedia of knowledge) or when I describe it in negative terms (hampters in a cage or share-cropping).

4. There’s an unwritten pact that says everything’s okay when it appears there’s equilibrium in the value accruing to the creators of the platform and benefits being recognized by the users of the platform. However, at different points along the evolution of a platform, the balance of perceived value can seem out-of-synch. At those points, the creators better respond with humility and respect to the users and remember the old saying, “pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.”

5. If you create a platform on the internet, if your users start screaming in rage on Twitter or in their blogs about something you’ve done, rejoice. You matter. You are successful vs. your 50 potential competitors who no one cares about enough to complain. Now, listen. Respond. Fix it.

6. If you are lucky enough to be this week’s obsessed new thing, use the spotlight to show how humble you are. Apologize for anything and everything. Even when every fiber in your being says, “I’m right and they’re wrong.” Do not try to convince a mob they are wrong. Kill whatever has enraged the mob and then figure out another way to do the same thing later in a way that appears to be dreamed up by the mob.

7. Always be aware of the existence of what I call the Scoble 24-hour Rule, based on a quote from the omnipresent ubber-blogger Robert Scoble: “Never expect bloggers to do fact checking or original reporting. But if a blog (post) survives 24-hours without anyone refuting the facts? That’s when rumors turn to belief.” (Today, Robert would probably say that about Twitter, Facebook and Google+ rather than a blog, but the principle still applies.) In other words, unless you are Apple, you have to respond to rumors and mis-interpretations of what you do immediately, or you are implying that the rumor is factual.

8. If your platform is enjoying rocket-like growth in buzz and user adoption, don’t waste your time on trying to defend a controversial practice. Dump the practice and focus on growth. Don’t get sidetracked on defending how you can make pennies when you have the opportunity to make dimes and quarters. Just because you can make money from something doesn’t mean you should.

Be like Matt Mullenweg back in 2005, before you ever heard of WordPress and he was 21 years old.

Read this post written by Andy Baio in March, 2005, about the early, early days of WordPress. Especially focus on this quote that Matt Mullenweg, who is today an internet demigod (but, again, he was 21 at the time) said about a practice he was using to bootstrap WordPress (no need to go into it here, you can read about it on Andy’s post):

“(It) isn’t something I want to do long term but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I’m willing to let it run for a little while.” He added that if the user community didn’t like it, he’d end the program. “Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don’t want it. At the same time, if you think people don’t care, it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation.”

Hey, in 2005. Link spam was new. Matt killed the practice immediately and the rest is history.

9. I could go on and on, but I must stop.

Why I wrote this: A controversy over what may or may not be a practice of this nano-second’s darling of the social web, Pinterest, is allowing some real-time study of the points I’ve written about above. Personally, my thoughts on Pinterest and this controversy are this: They should find ways to monetize the site other than skimming links* and converting them to affiliate links (if you don’t know what this means, read the post I linked to). They should view the platform as a common carrier that users can use to express themselves. I believe such a neutral stance will protect them from the obvious copyright battles they will face if they take actions that will make it appear they are benefitting financially from something that could otherwise be labeled “fair use.” One area that I think is clearly a bad move by Pinterest (and something I’ve seen them accused of, but haven’t seen a response within 24 hours, so I’m about to consider fact) would be converting user affiliated links (links to the affiliate accounts the users have set up) to Pinterest affiliated links. That, to me, is a clear violation of the un-written pact between hampsters running on the wheel and the owner of the cage.

Final note: I like Pinterest. I’m using the Pinterest account, Pinterest.com/Smallbuiness to show it’s not just a “girl” thing (like when Twitter was a “what are you doing?” thing), but is a great platform of curragating (curating, aggreagating?) and organizing any visual ideas or topics. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t take the time to complain.

*I don’t find the practice of skimming links evil. However, I think that it’s a practice best used by publishers who are clearly presenting content that they own or create or have an implicit and transparent control over. In other words, “common carriers” or hosts of user-generated content might want to steer clear of it for legal or user-perception reasons.

If it works like it’s supposed to, this post will be an embed from Storify.com as that service makes it a snap to repost tweets in a situation like this. If you see something below (it will take a few seconds to load), it works. If you don’t see it here, click over to Storify.com/R.:

[Warning: This is a long and rambling post that may or may not make a point.]

Superbowl XLVI (46 for you non-Romans) starts at 6:30 p.m. eastern time on the NBC television network. The teams playing are the New England Patriots and the New York Giants. You may be wondering what the heck I’m talking about, but I’ll get to it in a moment.

But first, a few thoughts about blogging. Some people who know the most about the social part of the web, the individuals who helped conceptualize and role-model what can be done when everyone is wired, networked and has a simple-to-use publishing system, are using the IPO of Facebook as a reason to revisit some of the central themes that have concerned them (and me) since the days when we still said “web log” instead of just blog.

That Facebook is the launchpad of another round of meaningful debate (hidden under a layer of invectives, navel-gazing and trolling) does not surprise me.

In my 2012 prediction post, I wrote:

“The IPO of Facebook will be the focus of a discussion of the value of relationships vs. products and we will hear lots of laments from the pioneers of online community over what has been built on the foundation they laid. (The laments will be deserved.) The IPO of Facebook will be a milestone, however, not the finish line. As we learn more and more how certain companies view us as hamsters in their cages, we will start to think more-and-more about how our role as customers should evolve. (But again, others started thinking about this long, long ago.) That topic will be explored in a book by one of the Cluetrain Manifesto authors, Doc Searls, that will be published in May, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. Like I said, this is not a new topic for a lot of people — but it is a very new topic for the vast majority of people who think Facebook is the Internet.”

Way back in the early, early days of blogging, most people who blogged spent at least part of their time blogging about blogging. I tried my best to avoid that topic, but it was impossible. I look back now at some of those early blog posts about blogging and find some of them prescient. Others were clueless.For example, while I predicted early that some great B-to-B companies would start on the web and grow big, I never dreamed there would be some that, within so brief a period as a decade, would grow in size, value and importance that they would be perceived as being more important and valuable than legacy players in their vertical industries.

I never imagined that the New York Times would lose the battle for the Internet. It seemed so obvious that they had everything they needed to win. But it also seemed obvious to me that a world as large as the internet should have room for everyone to win. While I obviously thought there would be robust and large communities online (I had already attempted a startup based on that assumption even before I started blogging), I never imagined that in 2012, there would be a company that packaged up all of the things one can do with blogs and would make something out of that bundle that would ever appeal to a generation who we thought was smarter than those of us who had broken free from AOL. I could never see so-called “digital natives,” or members of a “digital generation” give up the ability to create their own web and settle merely for a web created by Facebook. And what I really didn’t think I’d ever see was some smart people express a belief that whatever seems on-top and unstoppable today (Twitter, Google, Facebook) has some sort of power that will make them unstoppable forever (Dell, Tiger Woods, Network TV).

While I have yet to hear a stock analyst employed by a Wall Street investment firm provide any over-the-top exuberance on Facebook’s prospects (Wall Street analysts have the ghost of Henry Blodgett’s exuberance keeping them in check), there is no shortage of arm-chair punditry that is over-hyping Facebook’s prospects. The most mysterious punditry (to me) is that like Robert Scoble’s mash-up stock valuation with how much time people spend on Facebook, how many people comment on his Google+ account and debates over “the open web,” which in this case, means lots of different things to different people, but for this post, let’s just say it’s everything that’s not branded by Google, Facebook or Twitter, et al.

I could understand the debate if it were focused on the nuances of whether or not an individual or corporate entity should anchor their web residence in something they can own and control, like RexHammock.com or be a share-cropper on some real estate like Facebook.com/rexhammock.

I think my use of the term “share-cropper” reveals my prejudice.

But to take that argument beyond a debate over identity, privacy and the role of the individual in a world run by corporations, and attempt to suggest that Facebook can be the most valuable company in the world in three years, as Robert Scoble does in that post, takes the debate into la-la land. Robert is a great evangelist for tech startups, but predicting the future market capitalization of a company based on how many people follow him on Facebook is lost on me.

But I think I started this post somewhere else, oh, yes: What time is the Superbowl?

Back when I started blogging, I never imagined in a million years there would be something like the Huffington Post or Business Insider (unintended second swipe at Henry Blodget) or Demand Media — types of companies and business models that are variations on the theme that news is whatever people happen to be typing into Google at the time as that’s where the clicks are.

SEO-driven news is what many people call it. Pathetic is my term.

For instance, on the Huffington Post every year before the Superbowl, they have a story with the headline,  ”What Time is The Superbowl?”

I never saw that coming. Blogging was, and is, something different for me than a lot of things people have created, using the technologies and approaches of blogging — things that are worth billions today.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, is a consistent and prolific blogger (and sometimes a controversial one, so don’t view my quoting him as some endorsement of some whacky theory he may have expressed in the past, that I’m unfamiliar with.)

Here’s something he wrote on his blog earlier this week:

“The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10%, or that it keeps my mind sharp, or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don’t need another reason. As soon as I publish this post, I’ll feel a boost of energy from the minor accomplishment of having written something that other people will read. Then I’ll get a second cup of coffee and think happy thoughts about my tennis match that is scheduled for after lunch. With my energy cranked up to maximum, I’ll wade into my main job of cartooning for the next four hours. And it will seem easy.”

Hey, that’s the reason I blog also — or, at least, that’s the outlook about my blog that has kept me blogging consistently for over 11 years.

I will never blog if it’s solely about helping me get clout or links or follows on Twitter or Google+ or Facebook. If people want to follow me, I’m flattered and I appreciate them and I’ve found many, many friends that way.

But I don’t have the energy to make all of this a game — especially if it’s a game designed to turn the internet into nothing more than Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Blogging gives me energy. And I love helping create the web with my own little website here.

Using Facebook or this or that because it can help me get more likes or comments (or, any comments, in my case) zaps my energy.

And I bet I’m not a lone.

Partial map of the Internet based on 1/15/2005 data.

[Note: This post is a Rexplanation.]

In my opinion, there are two ways people understand the internet.

The first way is to understand the internet as something to use.

The second way is to think of the internet as something you not only use, but something people are and a place people live and work.

Those who use the internet understand it with metaphors related to legacy media and channels of communication or different types of utility and tools. To them, the internet is about reading, viewing, listening, looking-up, sharing, calling, sending, buying. Even those who use the internet’s tools of social media still think of it in terms of legacy metaphors: friends, following, hanging out, chatting.

Those who’ve reached the understanding that they are the internet are similar to those who have reached an understanding that any organization or institution is both a structure and a collection of people. It’s the same dynamic that enables the Supreme Court to rule that corporations are people. Special interests describe their special interest as people (I’m the NRA- well, not actually me, but those guys holding the gun are). Cities are streets and buildings, but cities are also people (after the May, 2010, flood, in my hometown we used the slogan, “We are Nashville” to declare our can-do spirit). In the New Testament, the greek word ekklesia that we translate into the word church refers to an assemblage of people who are “called together” — in other words, a church is people, like the internet is people.

So, viewing the internet as more than something to use, but as people and place is not a radical concept — indeed, it should be a rather simple concept to grasp.

Yet some very smart people just don’t seem to get it.

One of my favorite very smart people to use as a punchline for not getting it is Malcom Gladwell who plays school marm whenever he explains the internet as only a user could.

The recent SOPA/PIPA battle demonstrated the divide between those who understand the internet as people and those who perceive it as technology. Earlier this month, I wrote about visiting my congressman regarding SOPA and suggested then (before the legislation cracked under the pressure) that the internet had not yet demonstrated what could happen if it brought its power to the debate. It was clear to me that those who backed SOPA understood the internet as being “technology” used by people — and not as a place that people inhabit. That was their downfall.

A few days later, in a comment thread on Dave Winer’s blog, I wrote, “The tech blogosphere is filled with people who have broken through some barrier of comprehension one needs to experience the internet as a place, as well as a platform for all sorts of media and utility. So much of politics — at least at the traditional activist level and the way the US representative system is set up — is tied to an understanding of place in exclusively geographic terms. While traditional media and the political blogosphere is focused on what’s happening in some county in northern New Hampshire, the tech-blogosphere is wondering how lawmakers can be so clueless in understanding the ramifications of the entertainment industry’s power grab through SOPA — a global issue. I remember Tip O’Neill’s line, “All politics are local.” But for those of us who live on the internet, I’m not sure I know what local is anymore.”

Today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about a similar disconnect in the understanding politicians have of place, compared to how businesses view it — and I would argue, the way that people who understand the internet as a collection of people view it:

“Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies — and they see their job as maximizing the economic benefits for the voters in their geography. Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere. These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more and more of their products today as “Made in the World” not “Made in America.” Therein lies the tension. So many of “our” companies actually see themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the United States.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ready declare some New World Order exists because Al Gore invented the internet because the Trilateral Commission put him up to it.

However, it seems clear to me that it is time to start seeing the internet for what it is — and that’s lots more than a platform and technology.

In light of last week’s posts  about the entertainment industry’s effort to enact the legislation called SOPA (here and here), I saw a couple of items early this morning that reminded me that much of the reason that industry wants to out-legislate what it can’t out-innovate is the frightening future they face. And I’m not referring to the intellectual property they own being pirated. I’m talking about the way in which the talent that creates that intellectual property is, more and more, going to jump ship (to continue the pirate metaphor) from companies that attempt to hold on to business models created in the age of I Love Lucy.

Here are the items: First, an article in this week’s New Yorker about YouTube developing new “channel” relationships with content companies — a strategy that is laying the groundwork for original programming from artists, online news organizations and others who can provide a  steady stream of content appealing to a niche audience. According to the author of the article, when the studios and others wouldn’t work with YouTube for existing content (ala Netflix), YouTube developed a strategy to provide creators of programming access to unlimited airtime, rather than the scarce airtime provided them by traditional network and cable channels.

“But what’s the big deal?” you might ask. People are still going to want to watch programming on their big HD TVs and for that, you need cable and networks and the quality they can provide — not YouTube (he said, rhetorically).

Well, according to a worldwide study by Accenture released today, the number of consumers who watch broadcast or cable television in a typical week plunged to 48% in 2011 from 71% in 2009. Accenture says TV is losing ground to other devices – mobile phones, laptops and tablets. (And besides, you can stream video onto those HD TVs in dozens of ways, whenever you want the big-screen experience.)

Bottomline: When it comes to what video programming and distribution will become in the next decade and beyond, we’re about where network TV was when I Love Lucy debuted.

It’s a scary time for the entertainment industry. No wonder they’d like to put off the future as long as they can.

Related Articles

• Comedian’s Web experiment no joke to entertainment industry (theglobeandmail.com)
• CES: Survey Finds Traditional TV Viewing Is Collapsing (forbes.com)

Yesterday, I wrote about a meeting I attended with my congressman and friend, Jim Cooper.

I shared in that post my opinion of the legislation known popularly (and unpopularly) as SOPA. In short, I oppose the legislation and view it as nothing more than an attempt by the entertainment industry to out-regulate what they can’t out-innovate. I also believe that by fighting battles on the field of copyright and intellectual property law and by using the term “piracy” to label activities that may not only  be legal, but be beneficial to the copyright holder, we are in a place where a lot of bandwidth is being directed at trying to convince the other side(s) (no matter what side you’re on) rather than finding ways to evolve our understanding of what the internet is and what its potential can be.

Yesterday, I wrote that Jim Cooper is a very smart and intellectually curious individual. I appreciate, also, that he believes big problems can be broken down into parts so that they can be better understood. I agree with that approach, as well.

He suggested that those of us around the table probably agree on 95% of what’s in the legislation. I have no reason to believe his statistic is correct or in-correct, but I agree there’s probably a lot of fluff included in the legislation, most of which is designed to bury the contentious parts. (I also believe what I just said was a snide way to say, I agree with him.)

I also agree with the most important take-away and challenge Jim Cooper provided the group. In essence (I wasn’t taking notes), he said, “This is Nashville. We have the music industry here. We have a lot of talented technology people here. We should try to work together to address the issues we don’t agree on here. If there’s a way to solve the issues by working together, then Nashville should be where that happens.”

While I’m not quite sure we have the tech chops in Nashville equivalent to the music chops here, I do know that inside and outside those Nashville music companies that are endorsing SOPA are lots of extremely smart tech people who understand what their executives don’t. I know there are lots of creative, entrepreneurial and tech-savvy students and recent graduates from schools like Belmont’s music business program and Vanderbilt’s engineering and business schools who completely comprehend all the facets and nuances of the issues, musically and technically and business(ly?). And I know that if there are good alternatives to crappy technology (say, the MP3), then people who care about music (say, customers and fans) are willing to pay for it if they understand the value.

So, what Jim Cooper said perhaps should be listened to by those in Nashville who want to embrace the reality of the internet today and look for ways to innovate rather than legislate wherever possible.

Perhaps someone should write a song about this.

(Illustration: Polar bears having a snowball fight. It’s a Nashville thing.)

Related articles:

• What I told my congressman, a sponsor of SOPA (RexBlog.com)

Note from the legal department: This is a parody of the iconic Peter Steiner cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in 1993. It can be purchased here: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/On-the-Internet-nobody-knows-you-re-a-dog-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8562841_.htm

There’s a story by Anita Wadhwani appearing today on Tennessean.com regarding the efforts of a company called Klout to create a measurement of someone’s influence online about a particular topic. As the company is backed by the influential (in ways more important than may be indicated by its Klout score of 50) VC firm Kleiner Perkins, the company Klout has been gaining momentum (recognition? influence? — Klout has a Klout score of 86) in the past six months or so. With its success, the company has drawn criticism for a wide range of reasons, most of which are covered in the this October Gigaom piece by Mathew Ingram, so I’ll skipped all the “Klout is evil” stuff in this post.

Anita did a great job capturing the essence of what the company is all about, and added a local angle to the story by analyzing some people in Nashville who, for whatever reason, are liked by Klout’s algorithms. In the story, I got to play the role of the “humble bragger” (see: @humblebrag), wherein I say, in essence, “Klout is a joke — unless you’re talking about my score.”

There’s a reason for my ambivalence towards a service like Klout (beyond the humble bragging one). I completely understand why people — especially marketers — want a measurement, or even a currency, of influence to exist. The topic of such an online social currency has been around for as long as online communities have existed and was popularized in a very geekish and entertaining sci-fi way by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (free download), a book set in a future in which there is a “post-scarcity economy” based on a reputational currency called Whuffie. In the past, I’ve described Whuffie as similar to the role reputation management plays for those who buy and sell on eBay. On eBay, your reputation (or let’s call it a marketing term, “brand”) has a direct impact on your ability to sell something at all — or to sell it at the highest possible price. (For example, you’ll pay a premium three days before Christmas to purchase from a seller who has a 100% ranking and lots of comments about how they ship things when they promise to.)

However, unlike your reputation on eBay, a Klout score is, at best, some not-ready-for-prime-time Whuffie for many reasons. First off, Klout depends on algorithms that analyze expressions of influence, not measurements of actual influence. Expressions are, at best, a proxy of influence. No doubt, from a business-model standpoint, “expressions” are extremely valued by marketers. Google has become one of the most valuable companies on the planet by making search recommendations based on expressions (clicks and links) and not necessarily transactions. Nearly every measurement marketers depend on (TV ratings, for example) are measurements of proxies of influence — how many people may be watching a TV show may measure something, but it doesn’t measure how effective an specific ad is in making me want to purchase a product. Likewise, the circular nature of such proxies of influence — the more Google points to your content and generates clicks (expressions), the more expressions of influence you generate, influencing the algorithms of Google even more — is a challenge that will also impact Klout scores and those who will no-doubt want to game them.

(Note: There is an exception to that generalized observation of Google advertising: Some advertisers, online direct marketers for example, do know when a specific Google ad works and can measure precisely the return-on-investment of each ad they place — for them, the use of Google Adwords is a near-scientific practice akin to arbitrage. You know who you are, if this is the way you use Adwords.)

Let me try to simplify this: Buying something on eBay and then rating and reviewing the quality of the transaction and your opinion of the seller (or the buyer), is far more than a proxy measure of influence. It is currency that can add measurable value at the point of transaction — or, as we marketers like to call it, “conversion” (as in, conversion from freemium tire-kicker to subscriber). A click or Retweet or follow or friending are expressions of popularity and familiarity that, no doubt, represent something that might be termed “influence.” But a purchase that is then translated into a metric that captures both quantitative and qualitative data could be a source of influence that could serve both buyer and seller alike in ways only imagined today (or long-ago, in Cory Doctorow books).

Another challenge Klout faces is one that Google and its competitors must address daily. The algorithm that measures influence for you may not be the algorithm that measures influence for me. Consider the Google results page of 2011 (for a logged-in user) compared to the Google results page of ten years ago, the point about where Klout might be today, by comparison. Today, it is nearly impossible for you and me to search the same terms and receive the same Google results because the company’s algorithms take into consideration information I have provided it through my active request or passively permitted by my acceptance of their terms of usage.

Klout recently threw out an early generation algorithm that was terribly flawed. I know it was flawed because I was the beneficiary of a flaw in it. No matter how much flack they received by scrapping the old algorithm, I can tell you that it’s far closer to something half-way indicative of a certain type of influence today than it was before — but it’s still not close to what real influence is. But, like Google proves, algorithms are a long-distance journey.

Anita’s article points out another challenge a marketer might have in converting a Klout score into something of value. In Nashville, for example, there are a few high Klout scores that I would say are direct results of how actively the person plays good with social media (blogging for ten years and five years of tweeting goofy tweets that others re-tweet has been my strategy to influence Klout — except I was doing it long before Klout existed).

But other Nashville examples are more about the offline expertise and popularity of the individual, and how well they’ve integrated social media into their relationship with those who know them as, well, Taylor Swift or an expert in something related to church or parenting or a topic like cattle husbandry.

Pure online influence, or offline influence that has been converted to online influence — they’re both valid forms of influence, I guess.

So, bottomline, the Klout score is, at the end of the day, about as valuable as some of the metrics it tries to replace: sheer numbers of followers or “likes” or whatever. Until you can measure actual transactions (conversions) or the roles of offline vs. online sources of influence, when you measure a big basket of metrics all based on different expressions of the same sorts of likes and follows and retweets, you’re going to find out that a high Klout score is directly correlated to how long, how helpful and how actively a person uses the full set of tools social media provides.

In the end, Klout is another company that borrows all those social media things people do online and packages them up into something a venture company might fund and marketers might buy. But all it is at the end of the day, is us: users of social media. We are, as my friend Dave Winer sometimes uses as a metaphor — playing in Klout’s hamster cage.

No more, no less.

If you want to play with Klout, go ahead. Just don’t pretend it’s real influence. (Oh, unless it’s mine.)

Addendum:

When working on her story, Anita emailed to ask me who I would suggest as influential Nashville social media users, I didn’t have to think more than a second to respond the following:

Dave Delaney is the glue that holds together lots of those of us who have geekish tendencies. I have no idea what his “klout score” is, but I’d
give him a 100 for the influence he has earned and uses on behalf of
the company he works for, Griffin Technology, and for social media in
Nashville, in general.

This past week marked the fifth anniversary Geek Breakfast, just one of the many Nashville geek community activities Dave has created or fostered. Geek Breakfasts are now monthly traditions in cities around the country and internationally.

Dave’s a great evangelist for his employer — and for Nashville.

Thanks, Dave. You’re the real deal with it comes to influencing me (as you’ll see in a post I’ll add to this blog on Monday.)

Maybe you remember the famous scene from the movie Annie Hall in which Woody Allen is annoyed by the man behind him in a movie queue for his too-loud pontifications about the theories of Marshall McLuhan. Allen steps out of line and breaks the fourth wall and starts complaining to the audience about the blow-hard. Insulted, the blow-hard explains, “I happen to teach a course at Columbia called “TV, media & culture, so my insights into MCluhan have a great deal of validity.

“Oh, really,” says Woody Allen. “I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here,” and then pulls Marshall McLuhan from just off-camera so that McLuhan can dress-down the blow-hard.

“If life were only like this,” Allen deadpans to the audience.

I thought of that clip when I saw this takedown by Jamie Zawinski of TechCrunch founder turned VC, Michael Arrington, for his post over the Thanksgiving Day weekend Arrington titled, “Startups are hard. So work more, cry less, and quit all the whining.” (Celebrating “Black Friday,” I guess.)

So how is this like the scene in Annie Hall?

Arrington’s pontifications are set up by extended quotes from the 1994-96 diary of Zawinski, then a Netscape engineer. And Zawinski’s rejoinder post is like McCluhan stepping in from just off-camera, in order to explain that Arrington has no idea of what he’s talking about.

Zawinski cuts deep with his first reference to Arrington, “I guess this guy is famous or something.” Translation: So what if you teach a course about TV, media and culture or have sold a blog to AOL.”

Then Zawinski lets loose with an Annie Hallesque McCluhan body-blow:

(Arrignton is) trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, you’re a pussy. He’s using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it’s not true, and it’s disingenuous. What is true is that for a VC’s business model to work, it’s necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.”

Apparently, life is like that scene from Annie Hall.

I’m all for ease-of-use and intuitive user-interface (UI) design. Usability is my middle name. Well, actually, Rex is my middle name, but whatever.

However, my desktop is getting confusing, now that we’ve started the journey from browser-based interactions with the cloud-thing to app-based interactions with the cloud-thing. In some ways, such apps are merely micro-browsers, focused on a narrow niche of functions that interact with a specific set of data on the cloud. We understand this concept on iPads and iPhones. Mac users are beginning to get a taste of  what happens when the iPad / apps approach heads to the desktops of networked computers (data on the cloud, light-weight client software on the desktop).

In an effort to make things obvious to the user, UI designers are starting to stamp-out design-by-number app interfaces. The image above displays two client/apps I’ve been using for a while and one I’ve just downloaded. I use, from right-to-left,  a wonderful email client (that Apple should  buy to replace its Mail client) called Sparrow, the Mac Twitter app, and on the left, Raven, a new app that’s actually a  web browser for organizing apps (very meta, as they say).

However, as the image above also demonstrates, not only are Sparrow and Raven UI clones of Twitter (which is also quite derivative of many other apps), Sparrow and Raven felt the need to give their products names that, like Twitter, evoke fine feathered creatures.

Can we at least move on to fish names?

So, excuse this interruption for some shameless self-promotion, but I’m honored (baffled a bit, yet honored) that this 11-year-old blog is included in the current issue of Chief Executive magazine, on a list their editors have selected as the Top Ten CEO Blogs. The list is a sidebar of a story titled, “Should CEOs Have Personal Blogs?” that, in turn, is part of six-issue series on CEO “personal effectiveness.”

[So, come to think of it, as this list first appeared in a print magazine, I will claim that it isn't actually a "top ten list that appeared on the internet."]

But seriously, I’m happy to appear on any list that may encourage the people who run companies, large and small, to understand how a personal blog can help them in many ways — most of which will come as a surprise, the more they view it as a part of who they are — not a task they can outsource to the PR department.*

Best part of the list: I’ve found some new blogs to follow:

Allonhill
Sue Allon, CEO; Blog: Allonhill

FirstRain
Penny Herscher, CEO; Blog: The Grassy Road: A CEO at Work and Play in Silicon Valley and Beyond

Forrester Research
George Colony, CEOCEO; Blog: The Counterintuitive CEO

Hammock, Inc.
Rex Hammock, CEO; Blog: Rex Hammock’s RexBlog

Makovsky + Company
Kenneth Makovsky, president; Blog: My Three Cents

Merisant Company
Paul Block, CEO; Blog: PaulRBlock.com

Royal Caribbean International
Adam Goldstein, President and CEO; Blog: Why Not?

Saatchi & Saatchi
Kevin Roberts, CEO; Blog: KR Connect

Thomson Reuters
Tom Glocer, CEO; Blog:Tom Glocer’s Blog

Zappos
Tony Hsieh, CEO; Blog: CEO and COO Blog

*This is a list of blogs that are written in the first person and are labeled personal blogs. Most of them are not even on the corporate URL nor, apparently, the company Content Management System (CMS), but are hosted by Blogger.com or WordPress.com. (RexBlog is running on the open-source WordPress software hosted on “virtual servers” from Amazon web services.)

The blogs on the list are labeled personal, and are not marketing or company blogs (well, in some ways they all are that, but let’s not get existential). Company blogs can be written by the legal department, for all I care. Just not blogs that purport to be personal.

I’m not opposed to having professional editors review and help out on CEO blog posts. I think, however, such posts should originate from the CEO and not the PR department. For a blog that claims to be “personal,” I believe the post should be written by the CEO him- or herself and if edited by someone else, it should be edited only for clarity and grammar/spelling.

That said (and this should be obvious), no one edits these posts appearing on my blog. Frankly, the quality of my posts would be greatly improved if I ran them by some of the editors who work at Hammock — who, no doubt, grimace at my spelling and dangling whatevers. (And they would also tell me if that should be whom instead of who.

Hammock editors make me sound too perfect. Therefore, they edit things that I write that appear in our publications or in reports to clients. But on this blog, it’s pretty-much WYSIWYG.