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Powered by Voice123 – Voice-Over

Voice work and voiceovers seemed like a natural extension after recording 400+ podcasts. I have had people comment on my telephone and podcast voice over the years. So if you hear my voice on the next Dreamworks film… or more likely on someone’s voicemail tree please let me know. See my voice over profile on Voice123.

I wrote a while back about Disney’s Give a Day Get a Disney Day program where Disney was giving away a day at a Disney park in exchange for a day volunteering. I thought this sounded like a great program so I joined and found a volunteer program near me… well sort of near me. Yesterday I took part in Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco. I had volunteered to help people find jobs by helping do internet job searches and mock interviews. There were other opportunities closer to me, but this one seemed like it would be worthwhile.

Project Homeless Connect was an amazing effort to provide services for San Francisco’s homeless. The volunteers were encouraged when we arrived to look around at all that was happening. The DMV was there to provide id cards as was social security. There were medical services, and dentists doing teeth extraction, people performing HIV tests, acupuncturists and a popular group literally providing hands-on help with massages. There were groups providing help finding shelter and several groups dealing with victims of abuse or with people dealing with addiction. There were barbers, podiatrists and wheel chair repair people. Both the number of homeless and the number of volunteers were stunning.

My expectations to simply sit behind a table and wait for people to come look for a job were quickly shattered as I was handed a clipboard and told to talk to people and find those who wanted help finding a job. Some of my expectations of what a homeless person looks like were accurate and some were shattered. I talked to one young man who is a student at USF working on his degree in operations research. One man had just moved to the area and was looking for a job he could start tomorrow. Another man laughed at me that he had not had a job in 20 years. Two men informed me that they could not get jobs because they were homeless. Who would watch their stuff?

When I did get a chance to help a few people with an internet job search I was reminded once again that acts like checking your email, remembering your password and doing a job search that I take for granted are skills that I have learned over time. It was satisfying to help one woman get past her frustration submitting a job application and to provide some guidance what employers might be looking for. I would certainly consider participating in Project Homeless Connect when it happens again in two months. I think that was the point of the Disney project. If you get people to try volunteering, they might just like it.

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update 2/25 – I just got the stats for the event:

The numbers of people needing your help yesterday at Project Homeless Connect #33 was enormous – 2497. Thanks to the 1598 volunteers we were able to accomplish so much.

91 ACUPUNCTURE TREATMENTS
52 BANKING ACCOUNTS
168 BENEFITS Cal Works, Food Stamps, GA
162 CALIFORNIA STATE ID’s
47 CHIROPRACTOR
124 DENTAL TREATMENTS   300 SCREENED
153 EMPLOYMENT
635 EYE EXAMS & GLASSES
22,727 lbs GROCERIES
115 HAIR CUTS
22 HEARING SCREENS
113 HIV TESTS
162 LEGAL SUPPORT
72 MASSAGES
258 MEDICAL & 64 FOLLOW UP APPTS
125 NEEDLE EXCHANGE
352 PHONE CALLS &  102 VOICE MAIL ACCOUNTS
58 PODIATRY
145 SSI/MEDI-CAL
106 SUBSTANCE ABUSE, MENTAL HEALTH & METHADONE TREATMENT
95 VETERANS SERVICES
78 VETERINARY CARE and PET SITTING
31 WHEELCHAIR REPAIRS
46  SHELTER &  STABILIZATION 52 pending HOMEWARD BOUND

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think that also means I need to pay attention to my listeners but had decided to do that in the way that Facebook recommends using “fan” pages (yes I hate that term).

So if you friend me these days don’t be too surprised if I say:

I don’t think we have met, but please let me know if that is just because my brain is made of swiss cheese.

I am making a change to how I use facebook to change my profile to be just family and friends. I am hearing a lot of smart people I know tell me I was using facebook wrong and I see the wisdom of what they are saying. So please don’t be upset if I don’t accept your friend invitation but if I get your updates I might miss pictures of my new grand niece and I don’t want to accept you and a friend but ignore your updates.

The Amateur Traveler page on facebook is at http://facebook.com/amateurtraveler

Of course, since my 30 year high school reunion is this week, that swiss cheese brain is a really good posibility.

1. By day I work as the EVP of Engineering and Operations for LiveWorld which runs online communities, social networks for the likes of HBO, eBay, A&E, History Channel, NBA, Mini Cooper, J&J, Kimberly Clark, etc. I have been there 12+ years. We used to be TalkCity.com.

2. By night I podcast and blog at the Amateur Traveler (and also The Bible Study Podcast).

3. I started programming just after Christmas of 1979 when my best friend’s rich aunt gave him an Apple ][ computer. If not for that I might have gone to Berkeley as a Physics major.

4. My wife and I met at college (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in beautiful (sarcasm) Troy New York. We have been married for 27 years and have two kids: Mike and Liz who are in college as a film major and marketing major respectively.

5. The hardest physical job I have had was the one week I spent after freshman year of college making 20,000 gallon wooden wine tanks at Monterey Vineyards in Gilroy. This is the only job I every worked on with my brother Eric. I do, strangely enough, volunteer building concrete houses in Mexico annually (13 trips), carrying tons of cement by hand in buckets. Normally the most aerobic part of my job is fast typing.

6. I have just the one older brother. My parents are still living in the house I moved into at 3 years of age in Salinas, California.

7. I was born in Wadsworth, Ohio and my best friend from elementary school in California (David McCray) was coincidentally also born there and delivered by the same doctor.

8. I used to be a ventriloquist although the last time I remember performing was elementary school. My cousins were still talking about it when I saw them recently.

9. I have (or rather had) 42 first cousins. My dad came from a family of 6 kids in Colorado and my mom came from a family of 7 kids in Wisconsin. My most distant cousins geographically are from Australia. Two of my three Aussie cousins have lived with us. One for 1 month and one for 2 years.

10. My mom’s family tree is confusing because a) her mother was one of 16 b) she married a widower with 5 kids c) one of her younger brother’s married the widower’s daughter (my mom’s half sister and now her aunt) d) another brother and sister married into the family and the sister married the son of my mom’s sister/aunt. We figured out at one family reunion that these cousins were first cousins, first cousins once removed and second cousins all at the same time.

11. If you watch an old episode of Rick Steve’s travel show called “Royal London” you will see me explain how the whispering gallery works in St Paul’s London. We ran into him and his two person crew while we were there. Coincidently the last time we were at St Pauls we were interviewed for a series on Discovery Channel about the human body, but I have not seen that series air.

12. One of the ways that my wife and I got to know each other was doing a late night (1-4am Sunday morning) radio show on WRPI with the Christian group we were members of. It is the only radio host experience I have.

13. I have been on 5 continents. I have seen the coast of South America from the Caribbean. I have not seen Antarctica.

14. I worked on Apple’s Newton although I was not on the Newton team per say. I wrote the email application and one had business cards (ok I still have most of them) that say “Newton Mailman”. I worked for Apple’s Online Services which also created AppleLink (before my time) and eWorld (I managed the Mac and Windows clients also).

15. I have worked in two startup companies. The first was Momenta and it failed in spectacular fashion. We put a product (a pen based computer with a Smalltalk operating environment) on the cover of Byte magazine, PC Magazine in Germany, Personal Computing, etc and then ran out of money. My second startup is still alive after 12+ years but went from 4 employees to 256 to 15 to around 70-80. It was a dot com that managed not to die.

16. I have performed in musicals in community theatre (at our church) in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Littlest Angel (The Gatekeeper), Beauty and the Beast (Lumiere), Fiddler on the Roof, Anne of Green Gables (Mathew), You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown (shaved my beard to play Linus), Cinderella (the King), Children of Eden (Father) and Mashuganas. My favorite review was when the local paper described my 40ish self as “30ish”. I think they may have said nice things about my performance as well.

17. I also write songs, mostly about my faith. I do play guitar but I am not really a musician.

18. I love photography, mostly travel photography. I don’t usually buy souvenirs, but I do drive my family and travel companions crazy taking pictures. Some of my photos I have made into travel posters in my online store.

19. I am a TV addict. If it is on in the room I will watch it. At least with Tivo I am not just watching what is on. To get things done I leave the room.

20. I hate not knowing things and I have a good memory. I love history, science, technology, etc. I am a font of useless knowledge. My wife assures me that “I heard that” and “I learned that” are not synonymous for most people. Names I have a harder time remembering.

21. I like studying languages and have studied German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Mandarin, Swahili and Turkish. I only speak English fluently (when sufficiently caffeinated), but can get by in Spanish. In most of the other languages I can still remember how to say “I don’t speak your language very well”. You would be surprised how far that gets you. I can spell better in a few other languages than I can in English, but I swear this language was broken when I found it.

22. I grew up being told I was a picky eater and then found later on that I like a lot more things than my parents do, but I like more spicy and bold flavors than they do. I love Indian, Mexican, Greek, Turkish, Italian and French food in particular. I did grow up eating fish 3 times a week. Fish I don’t care for. I don’t like bitter tastes so I have never developed a taste for either coffee or beer. I do enjoy wine and as a programmer I get my caffeination from tea and Diet Coke.

23. Perhaps not coincidentally according to my doctor’s height vs weight chart I am, at 6 foot 3 inches, too short, but I am working on it.

24. I volunteer with Correctional Institute Chaplancy teaching a bible study on Tuesday nights in San Jose’s juvenile hall in a lock down unit for violent offenders. I know more gang members and murders than the average person.

25. I can clap with one hand.