I have been working for myself for one week now and I have not yet met all the goals that I have set for my business. While that is certainly understandable there were moments this last week I was ready to panic about that… like Tuesday. Tuesday morning I woke up and thought “maybe this whole adventure won’t work”. What? In one day of working for myself I did not conquer the world? Perhaps I should wait, it occurred to me, until I had worked full-time on the business for more than one day.

I have my long term goals and I have a plan. I also have a whole lot of work ahead of me.

Let’s see how the first week turned out:

Worse than hoped for

• I will probably pass up a consulting project I was considering because of some issues that have come up
• the Vietnam trip I was trying to pull off looks like it will not happen

Better than expected

• On my last day of the day job a client called about some consulting work
• I helped someone on their social media strategy and they in turn are trying to figure out how to include the Amateur Traveler in a pitch to a major airline
• One of my joint ventures may be getting some traction so I spent some time brainstorming logos and URLs

All in all that sounds like a pretty typical week for an entrepreneur. Only one thing to do. Work the plan.

Come join me at the Social Media Breakfast East Bay on February 3rd. The breakfast will be held at the Buttercup Grill and Bar in Oakland, 1000 Colton Street in Oakland, just off 23rd Ave. and easily accessible from the 880. I will be speaking on social media strategies and how they need to be shaped by your brand strategy and you company strategy. We will look at some examples from my 13+ years building web communities.

Sometime last year Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User podcast, Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.tv and I started talking about organizing a cruise for podcasters and other new media creators. All three of us got too busy to move this idea forward but since I am leaving my day job in 2 weeks I want to make this idea a reality.

The Idea

The idea is to create a floating unconference on new media. I have had a chance to do a themed based tech cruise and found that it was much more enjoyable and interesting than a regular cruise vacation (bingo is not my game). We will spend the time in port exploring but when the ship is at sea we will have sessions of interest to the attendees on new media and social media.

I want to keep the cost low so I am targeting a 3-5 day cruise with no additional fee for the conference as long as you register through me. By registering together as a group, the ship should provide the necessary meeting space with no additional charge. Also we will sit as a group rotating people through different tables to make it easier to meet people.

What is an Unconference

Again to keep the costs low it is my intention to do this as an unconference where the people attending will decide what sessions we will have rather than paying for speakers to attend. I would like to provide a place where novices and experts alike can learn something.

Who are we?

I am the host of the Amateur Traveler, The Bible Study Podcast and a co-host on This Week in Travel podcast. All together I have published more than 400 podcast episodes (both audio and video).

I am working with Lorene Romero of the Home Based Travel podcast to pull this off because she is a cruise travel expert and knows how to coordinate this with the cruise company and how to help people book their travel, excursions, etc.

For full and fair disclosure Lorene and I will make money on the commissions to help pay for our time working on this.

Where should we go?

If you are seriously interested please comment on this post with your thoughts. Because of the way cruise travel gets booked and cabins get reserved I am planning this cruise in  June – July.

My first choice is a cruise from New York City June 28th 5:00pm – July 3rd 8:00am that cruises north to Halifax and Saint John with two days at sea.

Some alternatives we have identified: 3-4 day cruise from Florida to Bermuda, 5 night cruise from Galveston to Cancun, a repositioning cruise September 19 from Vancouver to Los Angeles, 5 nights from San Diego to the Mexican Riviera

How much will this cost?

It will depend on the cruise and how fancy you want your cabin to be but figure that the base cruise with all meals and with the tip but without drinks at the bar, soft drinks, and excursions to be $110 per person per day or less.  Also remember that internet on a cruise ship is expensive and slow.

Do you want sponsors?

I would be interested in sponsors. If you are interested in sponsorship I would love to find sponsors to:

• host a party the night before the cruise
• fund a group excursion
• subsidize the internet expenses of the attendees

Who is with me?

Comment on this post if you are interested. Also comment on the proposed schedule and destination. Based on what we learn we will reserve a block of cabins and publish the itinerary later this month.

It is a new year and many people are making resolutions and many bloggers are blogging about their resolutions. One effort that caught my attention is that Borders has added an area on their blog with the resolutions of 4 of their employees.

This is notable because no one mentions something obvious like “I will read more books”. Their resolutions instead are:

• I’m Going to Take the Presidential Fitness Test
• I’m going to eat only real food
• I’m Going to Give 29 Gifts
• I’m Going to Save $300 in 30 Days

Will they mention books? David, who is a book buyer, already mentioned that his resolution came from a book he read last Summer. I suspect a book or two will come up in the conversation as I suspect these 4 actually do like books and are avid readers.

Why is this significant?

Borders seems to get that a great strategy in social media is putting a face on the company. Here are 4 real people and 4 real goals. The idea is for me to identify with the people and therefore the company. Each blogger has only posted once so it is too early to predict the success of this campaign… but I will do it any way. I think this will be beneficial to Borders. I think the tone of this site is of a company that understands social media and I am interested to see what they will do next.

I was inspired by CC Chapman’s 2009 in Pictures post to document this year… and what a year it has been.

This year included:

• 3 trips to Mexico – one paid for by Amateur Traveler, one blogger trip and one volunteer trip
• Conferences like Blog World, MacWorld and TBEX
• Trips to Arizona, Chicago, Colorado and Las Vegas
• A Trip to Paris, Geneva, Berlin and Prague
• A new podcast – This Week in Travel – bringing the total to 4
• A great niece
• A 30 year high school reunion
• A decision to start my own company

It has been quite a year

Happy New Year and my best wishes for an awe inspiring 2010!

It’s time to go

We just announced to my team and the rest of the company that I am leaving LiveWorld. My last day will be around the middle of January. My boss Peter Friedman and I are parting on good terms after I have worked for him for 13 and a half years here at LiveWorld and 17 and a half years total. It’s time. If you are reading this blog then you probably know that I have been working 2 jobs over the last 4 years. I worked for LiveWorld as the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations during the day and then I worked for myself at night on the Amateur Traveler “media empire”. For now it is my intention to focus the 60-80 hour weeks that I have been working just on my own projects.

Peter, Jenna and the team

It has been my honor and privilege to work with a wonderful team of people all these years. Special thanks go to Peter Friedman (CEO) and Jenna Woodul (Chief Community Officer) who I have worked with this entire time.

Over 17 years is a long time to work for someone in any industry and in Silicon Valley it is simply unheard of (Peter tells me if I had worked for him for 2 more years I would have gotten alimony). He has always been supportive of me both at LiveWorld and in my efforts at Amateur Traveler. He knew that my heart was now in the later and has given me a gentle push out of the nest for which I am grateful as I was still trying to get up the courage to leave. I would not have worked for Peter this long if I did not respect his honesty, creativity and dedication and I wish him and the rest of the team the very best.

Jenna has been the heart and soul of a company that really believes in the value of community both for its employees and for its customers. My thanks to all of the many people who have worked alongside me these many years.

The Ride

I was employee number 4 at LiveWorld and helped steer the company from 4 employees to 256 (by my count) before the dot com bubble burst back down to 15 and then back up to 50-80 employees more recently. It has been a hell of a ride and one of the reasons I have stayed so long is that it felt like 2-3 different companies as we reinvented ourselves from an ad-supported community site (Talk City) to an online event company to a white label social network supplier and online agency. LiveWorld still has some tricks up its sleeve as some of our new products like facebook communities and credit card LiveBar show. I hate to get off before this ride is over but I am excited about my new journey as well.

Customers and Former Customers

I put together a list of some of the brands I have had a chance to work with or work alongside. I am sure I left some off, but wow! My thanks to all of the customers who have made my time at LiveWorld so much more interesting. My favorite part of my time at LiveWorld has been helping solve customer problems. I plan to continue to help customers like these as a social media and new media consultant.

My last day at LiveWorld will be in the middle of January.

The room was full of podcasters, my people. I wandered around not talking to people but listening carefully to see if I would recognize someone’s voice from their show. I sipped a glass of wine and got in the long line for hors d’oeuvres. I listened to the music and then after an hour I left. I never talked to anyone. I am shy.

Fortunately, that was not this year but instead my first ever party in the podcasting / blogging space at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo of 2005 in Ontario, California. Now Ontario is not a very intimidating space. The music at this party was not so loud that we could not talk. I can’t imagine how I would have reacted if that party was instead one of the parties from this years BlogWorld / New Media Expo 2009 in Las Vegas. I think I might have actually imploded.

As I walk around the convention center of the parties in the big hotel discos this year I greet numerous friends. I am still shy but I am now “functionally shy” and this is how I got there.

Start Small

At the 2005 show I did finally get bold (for me) and strike up a conversation with a few people. I had some wonderful conversations primarily with lesser known podcasters although I did chat with Rob Greenlee who now heads up the Zune podcasting effort at Microsoft and briefly chatted with Chris Pirillo before he did Gnomdex and live streaming.

Acknowledge

If you have a blogger who you love to read or a podcaster you love to listen to and you see them in the lunch line, the hallway or the expo floor tell them you like their work. Better yet, be specific. I talked to Brian Ibbott of Coverville last night and even though I have known Brian for years I was sure to say that my favorite episode of his show was an episode of Originalville featuring the original songs that Elvis Presley covered (and if you have not heard the originals of Blue Swede Shoes or Hound Dog it is quite a surprise). SImilarly I introduced myself to Andy Walker, now of the Butterscotch Network, and told him I remembered the illustrations he used to do to explain technology with food on the late Call for Help show. We had an interesting conversation about how that all came about because he could not get a budget of $500 to illustrate the workings of a transistor so he ended up it doing it with a $50 block of cheese.

I also met Jeff MacArther of CommandN in the hallways and I told him how much I enjoy his show. We only chatted briefly and did not establish the kind of relationship where we will be exchanging Christmas cards this year but we had a nice encounter and that’s a start. I am always honest. When I met Jay Berkowitz of Ten Golden Rules I griped about the quality of one of his last interviews and he shared how frustrated he had been also that the “podcaster” he was calling could not give him a clean audio feed.

How much do you enjoy it if someone says they love your work. One of the highlights of the show for me will be Mignon Fogarty of GrammarGirl, who is an acquaintance and whose work I greatly admire, saying that she loved my enhanced podcast work on the Amateur Traveler and thinks that I do that better than anyone. Heck, I think that is one of the highlights of the year.

Participate

BlogWorld is a show for bloggers and podcasters. If you don’t read blogs or you don’t listen to podcasts then frankly you are going to be a bit boring to this crowd. I subscribe to something like 60 podcasts (did you know you can now listen to them at 2x the speed on the iPhone). When I go to a show with podcasters I have something to talk about. I follow lots of bloggers on Twitter and love their blog posts and their tweets.

Connect Others

I love to connect the people I know. Even when I only knew 6 podcasters / bloggers I wanted to make sure they knew each other. I know I have appreciated all the people over the years who have said “do you know?” and it is my turn. Last night I was able to introduce Jessica of Italylogue who is moving to Italy to Paulo Tosolini of Microsoft / Italy from the Inside. They quickly started speaking in Italian and I was out of the conversation but that did not bother me because I could see how excited they got.

Be Low Maintenance

Some of the most popular people I know get really really busy at events like BlogWorld. I chatted briefly with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief but I don’t expect to spend much time with her and Neal at a show like this. They will be running around like crazy interviewing more popular people than me. It is not because we aren’t friends. It is because they are doing their job. I try and be helpful if I can and then I try to give them space.

Jeremiah Owyang is an acquaintance I have met through work. I chatted briefly with Jeremiah about his new job but pretty much only asked him that one question because others wanted to talk to him. Friendship is a long term thing and there is nothing wrong with being an acquaintance. Every conversation does not need to end in a book deal, trip invitation, joint venture, contract or technical breakthrough.

Find Other Parties

I went to parties at JET at the Monte Carlo, Lavo at the Palazzo and the Bank at the Bellagio Hotel. I won’t say they were bad parties but they were not the sort of party where you were going to have an interesting conversation and get to know someone. They were the kind of party where you would get hoarse trying. The best party to meet people that I have seen so far was the RawVoice party. By the way it was also free and had free drinks and food. If you had stopped by the booth they would have given you an invitation. Look for small meetups, breakfasts, etc instead of the big party if what you really want to do is meet people.

Connect Offline

Twitter is a great way to prepare for a show like BlogWorld as is leaving comments on blogs of the people whose work you appreciate or calling the comment line for podcasts you enjoy. Back in 2006 I met CC Chapman at his house but it was his house in SecondLife. At that time SecondLife was like a virtual podcaster meetup. An acquaintance or a friendship does not have to start in the real world. I went to a cousin’s wedding last week who met his bride online. If he can do it so can we.

Work in Progress

I am still shy. I have walked by Darren of ProBlogger and Chris Brogan, whose work I enjoy, and did not introduce myself because they looked busy. I still have not met Leo Laporte who got me into podcasting (even though we have been on a panel together after MacWorld in 2006) because there is always a crowd of people around him. Being “functionally shy” is a process and I am still improving. You can be “functionally shy” as well.

If you found this article useful retweet it with the #shy tag so I know who my people are.

If you don’t read AdWeek you, like me, may have missed the controversy around an ad that was produced for the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) that tried to get people to understand the loss of life for the 2004 Tsunami by comparing it to the loss of life in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The video shows two planes hitting the towers and then shows a sky full of planes heading towards New York City. The ad may have appeared briefly in Brazil before the defecation hit the rotary oscillator.

Is this ad just too soon? Would we ever be able to look at an ad like this and not cringe? It seems to me I have seen ads that show a nuclear explosion and certainly that is more shocking. What do you think?

via WWF: 9/11 ad ’should never have been made’

“Enter to Win a Trip” is a more than just a lure, more than just an enticement, it is a siren song that calls out with the promise of adventure. Sure I know that I am unlikely to win. I took a fair amount of math in school and understand probabilities, but… someone has to win, right? I don’t gamble. I don’t buy lottery tickets. But, I do enter travel contests.

I must certainly not be alone in my love of or addiction to travel contests. When I recently created a travel contest area for the Amateur Traveler website I was quite surprised at the number of companies offering travel contests and sweepstakes. Fodor’s is having photo contests to put a picture on their guidebook cover. You can currently enter to win a trip to Japan, London, NYC, National Parks, Bali, Virginia and many other places.

It used to be that entering a contest was a simple thing. You gave the company your personal information in a form (which is why they are running the contest in the first place) and they entered your name in the drawing. But with the success of the “Best Job in the World” contest run by Queensland Australia earlier this year contests increasingly are asking you to shoot video, blog, take pictures and get votes. So now in addition to providing personal information contest junkies like me are fueling social media marketing campaigns with content and attention.

Is it likely that people will get tired of these offers? That does not appear to be the case. Certainly no one is getting the kind of free press that Queensland did when they held a competition to work for them for 6 months in a tropical destination for $100,000. Somehow that 2 free nights in a Day’s Inn in Portland are not going to be able to compete with that. But companies continue to run contests because users continue to enter them. Sometimes the contests seem odd, like one web company that wants you to describe your perfect trip to win a contest that is… well… a completely different trip (this one is from i-to-i.com).

So what is next for travel contests? No one has matched $100,000 as prize money so it seems that the big sort of contests will still be rare. But, I know of 2-3 different contests to get you to the World Series or to next Year’s All Star Game. One of the reasons that I enter contests may be that we have won contests before. Back in the 1980s my wife won a free computer, an Apple ][e, in the second chance drawing for Crest’s Back to School Sweepstakes. If you are not familiar with a second chance drawing, it implies that the person who had the winning entry never claimed their prize. So, someone will win. Someone will be lucky. Why not me?

Excuse my while I write a blog post about my ultimate trip to Timbuktu. I have a contest deadline to meet.

M, concentrating
Originally uploaded by
henrybloomfield

I used to think that I was a champion multi-tasker. I could get work done and watch TV at the same time. I still listen to podcasts while I work and now I read my new Kindle while I brush my teeth. But I personally have learned, which is what a new study showed, that people who multi-task a lot may actually be bad at it. They may be unable to ignore what does not matter.

The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That’s the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.

“The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked,” Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford’s communications department, said in a telephone interview.

via Study finds people who multitask often bad at it – Yahoo! News.

I was an unwilling subject in a multi-tasking vs concentration experiment as a child. In grades 4-6 I attended a brand new state of the art elementary school called University Park (named from a nearby street inexplicably miles from any university). I was in the first class to spend a compete year at the new school which was an experimental design called a “pod system”. Brilliant educators knew that there are advantages to team teaching elementary school kids. If you have 2 4th grade classes and 2 4th grade teachers why not let the teacher who is better in science teach both classes science while the teacher who is better in english teaches them both english. A perfectly rational theory which I think makes perfect sense. But that did often mean numbers of kids moving from one class to another, so these brilliant educators decided to remove the walls between the classrooms. And heck, as long as we are removing walls why not get rid of all the walls and have 6 classrooms of 30+ kids in one large room with only some closets and shelves between them. 6 classes grades 4, 5 and 6 in one big room. Get the picture? You are trying to take a test and the classroom behind you is showing the rather entertaining film “Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land” (which may not be completely responsible for my love of math but was none the less the nadir of 1960s educational film achievement).

I learned to concentrate but I also learned to perform one task while chaos reigned around me. I would go home and do my homework in front of the TV set to continue this grand experiment.

Until recently I was convinced that I was just that good at multitasking that I could still work in front of the TV and since I work at a semi-virtua company I can, if I like, work from home on most days. What I learned is that, at least for me personally, there is an order of distraction to different stimuli. When work and a good TV show are vying for my attention the visual stimulation of the TV show will cause me to miss, I sadly must now admit, the work in front of me. Interestingly it appears to me that when the work is visually here in front of me on my laptop and the stimulus is audible (like a good podcast) that when there is a conflict it is the podcast then I have to rewind because I did not hear what was said.

I feel like the de-throned king of multitasking when I have to admit that I seek out a quiet office at work away from the distraction of conversation, away from the TV and errands of home. I have been given the freedom to work virtually anyway and end up commuting into the office. Am I some 1900s throw back on our road to complete integration into the matrix? Even at home I have a room, this room, which is where I podcast and blog. It is an environment prepared for work and not distraction. So I ask you… is it just me? Stanford says no.