Technically Media meeting style: effective, productive and professional from home

Larry Summers, former Harvard president and National Economic Council director, asleep in an April 2009 meeting. Courtesy of IvyGate

During presentations, we at Technically Media have talked about our failures. We do a lot of speaking (me too), so we’ve also touched on the power of working in threes.

But I think we haven’t touched on what I think is our most innovative reason for sticking together for more than two years: our meeting style. And the power of drag of meetings are important to us.

OK, yah, it sounds pretty boring, and, well, maybe it is, but if you ask about our success (whatever it is) I think it has quite a bit to do with the meetings we’ve almost always held, from the very beginning.

It’s largely a style I’ve advocated for years that has now been further evolved, practiced and cemented into our culture with a lot of follow through from two colleagues who really buy into it and have crafted it on their own. So much do I prefer our meetings over others I often find myself getting into, that I often find myself bringing the style elsewhere.

You can see advice from Google and a startup.

Below, I share a typical agenda from a Technically Philly meeting, some unwritten rules we’ve adopted for these meetings and the phrases you’d be sure to hear at each of our meetings.

Continue reading Technically Media meeting style: effective, productive and professional from home

Technically Philly April Fools’ Day 2011: the stories we ran and those we didn’t

After a couple years of resisting, we at Technically Philly went ahead with a bit of some April Fools’ Day fun.

Yes, we, the Technically Philly crew, announced we were moving to New York, and then followed that up with hourly news items that were a bit less than real. We put them in an ‘April Fools’ category, colored the post background pink and avoided too negative posts, all in the interest of combating annual newsroom concerns about breaking news trust. We’re also deleting the posts next week, so they don’t get caught in search for the future.

Posts we ran:

  1. Technically Philly to relocate, rebrand as Technically New York
  2. First Round Capital invests in cheesesteak, Rocky references
  3. Port Richmond still has no Fortune 500 company
  4. Ignite Philly changes to stodgy 20-minute, 5-slide format
  5. Regional video game business leader Mike Werth “still stuck on Level 5-3 of Super Mario Brothers”
  6. Google to pit cities in epic cage match for Gigabit access
  7. Azavea to release GIS tool to map all Philadelphians who know what GIS is
  8. Comcast to host NBC acquisition parade down Broad Street

The reactions were great. Some were surprised, some weren’t. There was a lot of love from many people, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Councilman Bill Green.

Below are some headlines I suggested that didn’t make the cut.

  1. Company moves to Center City, ‘taxes actually pretty sweet,” CEO says
  2. ‘New city sustainability czar admits not knowing what ‘LEED’ actually means’
  3. ‘BREAKING: Inquirer reports on new co-working phenomenon’
  4. Penn Professor completes ENIAC defrag
  5. Duck Duck Go Founder: “When it comes down to it, Ask Jeeves remains the web’s best search experience”
  6. Mayor Nutter: “Wordpress is for pussies”
  7. Geekadelphia to turn editorial focus to pharmaceutical, biotech — “Ever since Sean Blanda whooped on me in Starcraft, I knew we needed a new niche,” Mikey Il said.
  8. With new website, BRT shares more bullshit tax info faster
  9. Mayor Nutter announces 811 to reduce call stress on 311
  10. City Controller: city needs new oversight group to oversee other oversight groups
  11. Census: Philly population actually closer to 2,500
  12. Philly Startup Leaders new residency requirements encourages entrepreneurs ‘to get the hell out of this town’
  13. Josh Kopelman: ‘What I really want to be is a dancer’
  14. Nat Mechanics to become Long John Silvers
  15. Philly Cocoa Heads challenges Philly CHI to Jell-o wrestling contest
  16. Safeguard Scientifics: Wait, who are all of you?
  17. Entrepreneur slyly changes his LinkedIn location to NYC — “Philly is so much cheaper, but I really really want my friends to think I live in New York.”
  18. Pew: “78% of poor people don’t know Pew”
  19. John Street still on line for new iPad [Sean had iPhone idea]
  20. City Council President Anna Verna “has an idea for a pretty sweet Facebook app”

Quotable: GSI Commerce exit for WHYY and design challenge for Temple Times

Sometimes journalists are desperate for any schlub to give perspective on an event, and I’m there to fill in the cracks.

News broke this week that eBay purchased regional e-commerce shop GSI Commerce, and WHYY was interested in whether an exit was good or bad for the region. (I said the region needs balance: exits are great for marketing, provided we also have a diverse portfolio of large, small and startup businesses, though exits can also limit growth.)

“Give me a thousand Philadelphia companies that exit with note, and I’ll give you a region that is seen as a real hub for technology talent and innovation, and the long term benefit of that is real,” said Wink.

Also, earlier this month, I judged a Temple University student design competition and was quoted in the school’s write up of the event.

“Action is a virtue, and the Design Challenge is a way to bring action, entrepreneurship, community involvement and collaboration together,” he said.

 

 

My first police ride along

A police officer friend welcomed me to ride along for the latter half of his 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. patrol this Saturday, and I eagerly accepted. After providing and filing paperwork a few weeks prior, I climbed into his Crown Victoria and took to patrolling a relatively quiet college town, particularly so, considering the college was on spring break.

I was left with a few take aways:

  • I found myself trying to parse what culture, rules and protocol were local to his department, state-wide or universal — and all came into play.
  • Patrolling was much more of a team sport than I expected.
  • There was more action than I expected for a sleepy college town during spring break — a few car stops, a couple pedestrian interactions and a car stop and search.
  • Aggressive cops, of course, get more stops, while simultaneously stopping more innocent people too. Where the line is for all of that is about as American and challenging a debate as we have.
  • Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is pretty good

Photo by Flickr user 10-42Adam.

9 YouTube videos that changed my perspective on the world and the lessons I learned

Above, TED co-founder Chris Anderson talks about the impact of Youtube and other online video has on the world.

Youtube was a powerful part of moving forward content dissemination on the web. Suddenly there was a free place to host, distribute and embed easily video that drove traffic and audience.

About which time Youtube was overwhelmed with kitten videos, personal photos looped under copyrighted music and clips of everything in between.

But, through all the muck, there is brilliance. That much I’ve found since I first clicked on a Youtube link in an email in my college sophomore year apartment and shared with my roommate. Universities are beginning to share lectures online, and more teachers, lessons and ideas are spreading on Youtube. (Perhaps not as much as kitten videos)

To prove there is more than the nonsense, below, I share the 10 videos that have made the biggest impact on me and the lessons I took from them.

Continue reading 9 YouTube videos that changed my perspective on the world and the lessons I learned

Three proposed ONA 2011 panels

The annual national Online News Association conference, to be held this fall in Boston, has launched its 2011 panel picker, in which those interested can vote to support their favorites of a couple hundred suggested sessions.

I am somewhat involved in three. To vote, users just need to sign up with an email. If you’re interested give love to any of these three:

  1. Data Sets You Free — Informed by my Transparencity work, I proposed to lead a session with Robert Cheetham of Azavea and Chris Satullo of WHYY that would focus on the following: “In Philadelphia, a GIS shop, an NPR affiliate, a foundation, an indie news site and a technology community are coming together to organize, catalog, share and use city government data to create applications, stories and coverage that boosts transparency and efficiency. This presentation focuses on what was done, why collaboration was important and lessons on doing the same elsewhere.” Questions: 1. Why is government data so important? 2. What are challenges, obstacles and lessons from an actual example? 3. What can other journalists learn from such a project?
  2. This isn’t a panel: 10 lessons from Technically Philly — “10 actionable lessons derived from what we’ve learned building Technically Philly, a profitable blog that covers technology in Philadelphia. No panel discussion, just 10 takeaways that you can use at your job tomorrow including sources of revenue and editorial philosophies that you didn’t learn in journalism school.”
  3. Making it work with a small staff — Organized by colleague Sean Blanda, “How can you keep the lights on and the posts coming when you have a staff of ten or less? Join us as we discuss the workflow hacks and editorial jujitsu necessary for a first-rate news site.”

15 best Back on My Feet videos we made in a year

Short, compelling videos of interest travel well on the web.

That means video can take your brand, organization, mission, message or call to action with it. I served my media director role with Back on My Feet for less than a year, but I’m proud of moving the staff to more frequent video creation for those reasons and to give our members — people experiencing homelessness — a platform to share their stories.

Looking back, though I shared other metrics from my time there, I realized I never shared the best of what I thought was some meaningful video for just a start.

So, below, that’s what I do, highlight 15 of the best videos we created during my tenure as media director, clamoring on email that “everything is content!”

Continue reading 15 best Back on My Feet videos we made in a year

Faint Praise: Alex Hillman, Karl Martino encourage folks to read here

Recently, I’ve had a couple big compliments on my writing here. Independents Hall co-founder Alex Hillman gave a nod on Twitter, encouraging his followers to follow my work in a similar way Comcast developer and Philly Future blogger Karl Martino did last summer.

Thanks to you both.

 

Why print will last so much longer than you think it will (hint: we can feel it)

Print is going to last longer than we might think because we can prove print in a way we cannot prove with digital.

Someone recently mentioned to me that in 10 years, we’ll still be predicting the death of newspapers. I think sitting here, in my office, looking at a copy of the Wall Street Journal that I stuffed into my pocket after finding it on a bench at the 2nd Street station in Old City Philadelphia, I believe that to be true.

Let me say something controversial: newspapers mean something more than news sites. Just like printed photographs mean something more than Facebook pictures.

Digital media still should amaze in their flexibility, utility and reach. But their printed counterparts are also still remarkable for all the reasons their future seem limited: they are inflexible, expensive and in-viral.

Continue reading Why print will last so much longer than you think it will (hint: we can feel it)

Reading: Improving Sales, The Excuse Department is Closed

We at Technically Philly have had many short stops with sales help, making it one of our most prominent failures. Like  many startups, we found that the three of us did the best sales, particularly when we were getting started.

I came across one of the better summations of why and what one could learn from working with sales people in a startup environment:

I boil it down to this: sales people are sales people. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different. Obviously to understand a “class” of people you have to make broad generalizations. Here are mine.