Might have to have a shuffle around for the upcoming year – moving to San Francisco at the end of this month for a reasonably permanent amount of time means that I won’t be categorising activities there as ‘Travels’ any more!

As a sponsor we got to host a couple of the speakers for a chat and lunch in our office and The Mister got to meet one of his internet heroes Steve Souders from Google.

He took Steve to Nikau for lunch an he was super-impressed by the kedgeree – and really touched that after I heard this, I got him one of the Nikau tea towels with the kedgeree recipe on it – he said it was the best souvenir he’d ever received! (Meanwhile I’m kidding around saying if we ever visit California he can cook it for us … I really had no idea who this guy was nor his internet infamy, so to me he was just a lovely guy who liked Nikau as I pushed in front of the line of people waiting for their 5 minutes of fame with him! I went to his Webstock presentation, didn’t understand a word of it (way too geeky) but felt I should support him as my new friend, told him as much afterward and he roared with laughter!)

Again with the random notes I took, sometimes something the presenter said, sometimes a thought that popped into my head while they were speaking – read no further if conference notes aren’t your thing, I just wanted to write them down somewhere. I did feel a bit like I did last year where I didn’t ‘get’ it – I didn’t emerge having identified a particular theme or trend as others did, I wasn’t wowed by any new inventions, I thought after hearing a couple of things that I might change my ways but doubt that will happen – this all sounds like I was disappointed but I wasn’t! Well, perhaps disappointed in myself for not getting more out of it seeing as everyone else was raving that they did (or perhaps it’s like The English Patient that everyone crooned about, yet I felt like the only person in the world who didn’t enjoy it).

So, in speaker order:

Frank Chimero

• Has blogs in draft, stories and thoughts he starts when they strike that he just finishes off some other time
• mentioned The Catcher in the Rye – I’m sure I read that at school, can’t remember a thing about it, am wondering about reading it again
• says we should ‘warm up’ our content and language, gave the example that you don’t describe your significant other as ‘72.8% water’ – factually correct but not very personable!

Michael Koziarski

• There’s the real world and the Webstock world – the real world conserves money, works in cubicles, develops apps that look boring because you have to use them so no effort required and the Webstock world is all designery, with cool offices and a charmed life (had some great photos capturing the differences)
• Talked about what happens on ‘Planet Webstock’, why companies on this planet seem to be successful:
  • small teams – more time in their lives to do work rather than time in meetings and keeping everyone informed
  • top talent – take recruitment seriously, hire people like yourself
  • best tech – most suitable technology for the job, ability to iterate, ship something small and make it better
  • make it work – managers should encourage ’skunkworks’ projects and developers need to find a way to make their work fun, if you can’t you should quit.

Mark Pilgrim

If you want to be that guy that does that thing – pick a thing and go do it! But it has to be the right thing.

Jason Webley

Played the accordion. Was kind of spine tingling in that setting.

Steve Souders

As mentioned above, didn’t understand a lot of this, although it wasn’t totally foreign to me as I’ve been to a few of The Mister’s talks on the topic of performance and also sat through a few of his practice runs!

However, apart from all the acronyms I wrote down a couple of cool phrases (that I’m now trying to use in meetings at work!) …

• speculative parsing
• look-ahead tags
• every byte of this Javascript is painful (sounds like a dental issue to me!)

Kristina Halvorson

• WALL-E was left on earth with a pile of junk to sort and make sense of – that’s what’s happening to content on the web
• WALL-E finds little interesting things to save and show – that’s essentially what we’re trying to do now with social media
• Our websites are full of crap – people come to our sites to look for the interesting special things
• Before you write any web content think: what, why, for whom, how, by whom, with what, when, how often, what next?

Doug Bowman

• DELIGHT. When was the last time you experienced true delight? Your city lights at night? A movie? An experience?
• Used the example of a child as the ultimate form of delight (oh what a sad and undelightful life I must have!)
• Broaden searches for mentions of your company name to find delight that others have in your product or provide delight by responding (use things like ‘I wish [company] would’ and ‘I wish [company] had’)

John Gruber

Showed screen shots of old versions of Mac O/S and Mac/Apple apps tracked through time until now. Made me wonder if stuff on the web going to change as much in the next 20 years as they have in the last 20. Like if I started saving screen shots of Xero or other websites/apps from now on, could I put them up on a slide in 20 years and experience the gasps and nods of recognition and remembrance that he had with the Mac journey? (Or was that just all the Apple fan-boys jostling for some kind of knowledge credits?)

Marco Arment

People like you, geeks like you will ‘get’ your product – should aim for the non-geeks as typically that’s the larger customer base.

David McCandless

Absolutely fascinating. The collection, curation and storage of data that is pumped out as amazing infographics. Stuff about the environment, human behaviour, spending habits, comparison of trends and events. That saying ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ is true in this case, and seeing numbers of things or values of things represented as different sized boxes is quite compelling and in my case easier to understand – even things like national debt of various countries.

Jason Cohen

Suggested Webstock was on a break-the-rules theme and had some wise words on the topic. Traditional bloggers have rules, like the roles of VIPs and sales guys – there are no hats and no departments in the startup world – just get on with it and make a good product – it’s everyone’s responsibility. Even if you don’t have a fancy title or hat, you might not understand but you can comprehend it. Give yourself credit.

Michael Lopp

If there was a table with 3 chairs at it in your life, in your future, who would be sitting there with you?

Scott McCloud

We’re so drawn to the human face and emotion that we can see a smiley face even in objects  : )  and showed some photos people had uploaded to picmoticon.com

Talked about The Grimace Project – facial expression sliders – learn to recognise one or more emotions in a face.

—

So no big themes for me, just a whole lot of interesting stuff. And the realisation surrounded by smart phones that I just don’t have any apps on my phone. About 4.

I don’t have the version of the iPhone that this is for … enough to tempt me? Not yet, they’re too heavy and slippery and don’t do any whizbangery that I’d make use of in my own narrow band of self-taught iPhone activity! And still my purchase decisions are less influenced by being a cool kid than they are about orange so if the orange doesn’t do it, it’s going to be a while!

Because TelstraClear stuffed up the lifetime redirect for my Paradise email to my Clear mail box a power bill from Genesis Energy did indeed bounce back to Genesis. Being true to my word, I got back on Twitter and expressed my displeasure at this, directed at TelstraClear. They were most apologetic and made up for me being out of pocket by sending me some vouchers to put towards my TelstraClear bill – nice of them, but I have yet to figure out how to see and pay my Clear email bill because every time I ask them to send me the forms to pay by credit card, they send me direct debit forms …

However, I digress. Back to paying my Genesis bill – also want to pay this with new credit card to get airpoints so was pleased to see how easy it was to find and submit a credit card payment off their site. But. Amount X is due if the bill is paid by 11 August and Amount Y is due if paid after. Clearly I have to pay Amount Y with it being the 14th, in fact the site has big flashing “OVERDUE. PLEASE PAY IMMEDIATELY” all over it. So, click the ‘Pay Now’ button and I’m only offered the choice of paying Amount X. What? I want to pay the full amount and they won’t let me? I paid the smaller Amount X, thinking it would leave the difference on my bill so I could just use ‘Pay Now’ again to pay off the bill. No. ‘Pay Now’ button has gone. I’m dubious that this amount is going to stay on our account as an overdue amount and will not be included in what’s on offer via the ‘Pay Now’ button next month, so I’ve had to pay the little extra bit via online banking.

Boy oh boy I am getting SO frustrated with all this. TelstraClear has been pretty good, the guys manning the Twitter account very patient with me but generally the websites for these big companies SUCK. The Genesis FAQ page is erroring today, the TelstraClear site for adding alisases to my email address keeps looping back to an ‘Account Summary’ page … The other day I gave up on the TelstraClear website and phoned their 0800 number to find out about paying by credit card. The automated voice system said “I can understand most of your commands. Tell me what you want from the following options. You can interrupt me any time.” One of the options offered was ‘Your account’, so I said ‘My account’ (thinking she was addressing me) but she ignored me, so I tried ‘Your account’ … that didn’t work either. So I hung up on her and tried again. This time interrupting – not sure how many times I shouted ‘My account’ before the voice switched to an ad that said you could now pay by credit card by selecting Customer Zone on the website, so I hung up again! GRRRR!

Received a call out of the blue this morning asking what my decision was in light of Paradise being ‘retired’ by TelstraClear … hmmm … I was supposed to be making a decision? Seems I’d missed an email about it … ironic really. Anyway, the offer was on the table to switch to Clear (well, back to Clear in my case) and keep my existing Paradise email address, well, for an additional $2.99 per month. So I organised all that over the phone then they guy told me I had one day to forward all the email I wanted to keep to my new Clear address because once the redirect was in place for Paradise, mail would go straight to Clear and I wouldn’t have access to my old Paradise mailbox. So I spent ages doing that. And it all worked fine.

So no more Paradise webmail for me:

I know a few people at work who use it so I asked them if they were going through the same thing. Seems they weren’t and were rather alarmed that they hadn’t been told that their Paradise email address, that they’d also had for 10 years, was going to disappear. We began to worry it was a scam. So being a good Internet citizen I phoned Paradise to see if it was a scam … overlooking the fact that it’s TelstraClear who answers Paradise’s phone now, I spoke to someone who assured me that it wasn’t a scam and that the person who’d phoned me that morning was indeed a real person, and employee of TelstraClear who worked in the Auckland sales team.

So I’d been tweeting about all this as the day went along, wondering online why none of my colleagues were going through the same thing and wailing about someone else already having orangegirl@clear.net.nz as their address. Then what do you know but TelstraClear tweeted me back! We swapped a few tweets then email addresses and I got the full low-down on why it was me and no-one else who was loosing their address. Seems customers of 10+ years who were paying by credit card and didn’t use cable had some whole lower level of security that meant through lack of address, drivers licence and secret question information collected at the time of becoming a Paradise customer all those years ago meant they were getting rid of all these accounts. Seemed plausible. And I was pleased to get the personal help and to be able to put the minds of my colleagues at rest.

For everyone out there who emails me at my Paradise email address, this doesn’t change, I can give you a new Clear address if you like, but my Paradise email is going straight into my Clear inbox for the duration of my time with Clear.

Update several days later:

So, am going through all stages of loss here. First the denial/disbelief that Paradise was going, then the sadness associated with no longer logging in (although I was glad to see the back of the ugly web site used for reading my mail) and now I’m firmly in the anger stage. Someone emailed me at my Paradise address and it turns out the redirect is not working, it bounced. I have all our electronic bills going to that address and let me tell you if Genesis cut off our power through non-payment, TelstraClear will be covering all costs associated with that! And I received a ‘Welcome to TelstraClear’ pack in the mail asking for my bank account details for the monthly payment – what? I want to pay by credit card – I have a shiny new card that gets me air points so I want to pay by credit card like I have done for the last 10 years!! Although given that credit card paying customers seem to be those who lost their Paradise accounts it seems that they perhaps don’t take credit cards for payment any more, perhaps it’s too much trouble to chase around updating card expiry dates, although it never was a problem before.

So I’ve emailed the person who ‘convinced’ me to swap to Clear to tell them of my annoyance, and I returned to Twitter, although now I’ve conversed with a real person at the end of that Twitter account I feel kind of bad that the person and the company are one in the same and that they’ll think I’m mad with them. Although it happens to me all the time with the Xero account and no-one holds back their displeasure even if they do know who ‘OG’ is receiving the tweets at the other end.

Of course, it’s the weekend, and no-one is responding. Sigh.

Hi, my name is @orangegirlnz

I heart @TeamXero

I tweet @Xero

Recently the company made a promo video and asked Tweet4yourtee wearers to join them in Wellington to take part – of course I couldn’t be there and was so disappointed, but have always sent them photos of me wearing my t-shirts (from both sides of the globe it turns out!) and if I could’ve joined them I would’ve!

However, I got a really nice surprise today when the promo video promo was released as a teaser …

Then the real video was released a few hours later

Famous me! Am getting a spot up the front when they do it in a year – I wonder how many tweeting t-shirts will be around by then?

Tweet 4 Your Tee have changed their homepage to recognise me for a day! I’ve only ordered 4 t-shirts from them, some posted all the way over here, some hiccups when I got a man size instead of a girl size, not to mention the SPECIAL treatment that allowed me to have my Twitter username written in orange!

I feel very special today. And strangely compelled to buy another t-shirt!

So for 2 days in late April I attended the NYC 140Conf - a conference about social media – aptly named 140 Characters (that’s how many characters are available to you in a tweet) where 140 people spoke for 10 minutes only, or took part in a 15 minute panel, over 2 days. A very engaging format – sure some people were a bit boring and by the end of it we were starting to hear the same things again and again – but still a very cool way of presenting a conference.

It was an extremely full on 2 days – 8am-6pm both days with a half hour lunch slot each day otherwise people just came and went and got coffee and networked out the back – unless you were me and didn’t know how things worked so stayed rooted to your seat, nervous of drinking too much water in case a toilet stop was needed and then what did you do with your bag and how did you make sure your seat in the overflowing 500+ auditorium would still be there when you got back given all the networking comings and goings?

Miss America opened the 2-day conference!

Aaaaaanyway, some notes I took/things that people said that sparked my interest, for me to look back on, and some of you might be interested in (I think I’ve captured every speaker’s name (as in their Twitter name) correctly so apologies if I’m incorrectly attributing people):

• @JohnBorthwick: currently the average length of a tweet is 77. So people aren’t using all the characters they have available. People are thinking shorter. Night before his talk, the most mentioned person on Twitter was Obama and the most used hash tag still Michael Jackson
• @acarvin: it’s all very well having a large Twitter account with millions of followers, that’s good for broadcasting but you get more conversation and better relationships with people when you have a smaller account – if you can manage your user base you can more easily let your audience get to know the face/person behind your account.
• @TheKotel: poeple can tweet their prayers and a team of people via Twitter voluntarily co-ordinate the printing, spooling into scrolls and delivery of the prayers to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where the original tweeter can’t go themselves. An old sewing machine has been turned into the prayer spooler! One guy started out doing it by himself, just an idea, not his job and now he’s seeing it pay forward as other people are approaching him to help.
• @Donny_Deutsh: don’t sell out your brand by leaping into new media trends. Never lose your brand and stay true to it. Everything is changing but fundamentals like your brand shouldn’t change on a whim. You’ve got to give something – everybody wants something so don’t just broadcast hard sell.
• @IvankaTrump: if you’re trying to build a platform or a personal brand you must be consistent. If you’re direct and honest, then be that way always, across all your platforms and personas.
• @1000TimesYes: Chris Weingarten – “good writing is dying at the hand of search engine optimisation” [GREAT point!] People can’t write well any more and Twitter contains a lot of rubbish as everyone is basically stringing together keywords and mentioning things that will get good search results or clicks because everyone simply wants to be first. In the context of bands, good musicians are basically no longer artists, they have to be keyboard (as in computer keyboard) geniuses. Musicians don’t want to worry about being viral, they just want to be good musicians!
• @AndreaSyrtash: we should worry less about trying to impress people and take time to let people impress us. We need to be present and alert, people can’t connect with you if you aren’t. Don’t try and change people, it’s OK to challenge someone but don’t expect them to change. Don’t confuse immediate gratification with long term fulfillment – ask yourself “am I a good version of myself online?” – don’t worry about the number of followers you have, worry about who you are.
• @lizstrauss: monitoring and listening aren’t the same thing – monitoring just flattens the data we have where as listening is gathering intelligence. Using the example of a traffic camera at the red lights – monitoring the data might show that x number of people ran the red light where as listening might show a good reason some ran the red light.
• @jeffjarvis: why do we only allow comments after we’re done what we’re doing? [I especially liked this point as it relates to work, as a late-comment-bloomer myself I can see that when you're building a product that permitting your customer base to communicate with you is going beyond pure lip-service to their feedback.]
• Lots of discussion and commentary on various industries using social media to get out there and spread the word for doing good in real-life communities and in times of crisis. Lots of ‘keeping it real’ – social media despite common belief is still about meeting people and people online aren’t in fact hiding there.