Press Conference Jitters

Everyone has an initial fear of the proverbial press conference. We all dread the horrid worst-case-scenario where we are stuck behind a podium ducking a frontal attack from some hot-headed-newbie reporter, or worse, we are left to field a penetrating question from a professional in the field who cannot be placated.

But what to do?

Charles H. Green, at Trusted Advisor Associates, notes

But what you can do is to change your manner of thinking to enable listening by paying attention. Specifically, to think out loud. By that I mean literally verbalizing our thought process in the presence of the person we just listened to.

I couldn't agree more. I suppose what I like about his 'thinking out loud' notion is that it takes the edge off of the situation by distracting you from your fears and insecurities and focusing your mind to the task at hand. When we spend our time thinking about how we may not be able to perform we take ourselves away from the very point of us being there at all...to communicate.

Nobody has a perfect press conference. It will never be perfect because humans (are you ready for this...) are not perfect. So rather than spending the time worrying about the imperfections you possess, pay attention to the here and now, focus on the honest questions, and honestly answer them. If your honest answer is that you have no comment, then say so.

Quid Pro Quo: I must add that it is best to walk into any situation knowing both the questions and the answers before hand. There is no better means to success than preparedness.

Conflict Gets Attention

I rather enjoyed an article by 37Signals posted today here.

My favorite comment in the article is a note about the reality of conflict. If you shout "fight!" in a bar, droves of people will come running out the doors.

Conflict breeds attention. Frankly it wouldn't even matter if you had Urkel fighting Bill Gates, it would still capture everyone's attention.

That started me thinking about the reason why people enjoy conflict so much. Is it the ability to identify with a winner/looser, to root for someone, the raw energy of the fight, the feeling of vicarious participation, the ability to witness a moment that steps outside of the state of contract (that we will do no violence) and creeps briefly into a state of nature or war.

Certainly one element that conflict provides is vicariousness, if that is a word. It's the ability experience all the raw feelings mentioned above without having to suffer the black-eyes of the real deal.

So I suppose bringing that element over to marketing. If one can create a sense of conflict and engage their primary demographic in the cause, then one can create a tremendous source of viral marketing in that you can engage a core group who identifies with you (the victim hopefully) and can shout "fight!" on your behalf.

Put it to Memory

Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory

47. But a good memory gains us credit even for readiness of wit, as we appear not to have brought what we utter from home, but to have conceived it on the instant, an opinion which is of great service both to the speaker and to his cause, for a judge admires more and distrusts less that which he regards as not having been preconcerted to mislead him. We should therefore consider it as one of the most excellent artifices in pleading to deliver some parts of our speech, which we have extremely well connected, as it they had not been connected at all, and to appear, at times, like persons thinking and doubting, seeking what we have in reality brought with us.

I absolutely adored this point of Quintilian. Preparedness lends to Performance. Consider a friend at a party who sits down to the piano and plays a masterful rendition of Mozart's Sonata in C Major. Upon his completion he will receive the highest accalades. No doubt, most will say of him, "He is truly gifted to have such a talent." But the pianist knows that his piece required a labour of hours, days, weeks and years of practice when nobody was around to hear him. In isolation he toiled in his technique, style, and committed the piece to memory. In public he performed what he had finessed in private.

This I believe is a reality of great performers(persons): What the greater majority of persons deem as gifts, or talents from God in some performance, the performer does them self recognize only their long labour in study and in private.

Semantic Searches

After reviewing an article posted by Nova Spivack (cool timeline graph - check it out) concerning the evolution of what he is titling the "WebOS", my mind has been reeling.

Much of his discussion concerning Web 3.0 circles around the notion of web semantics, or describing web content in ways that are computer friendly, like OWL, perhaps Microformats, etc., etc. I have to say that I couldn't agree more with him. As content becomes more and more dense and the web becomes more and more crowded intellectually it will behoove us to better describe the nature of our information, rather than with simple text or HTML.

One of the difficulties that I have run into with myotherskills.com is the searching functionality. Namely, the problem of linguistic semantics, or how words relate to one-another. The nature of the search functionality I wanted to design was to step away from proscribed, categorized, or tagged data and to allow people to use natural language to describe their skills/needs. I would let the application do the grunt work of categorizing by indexing (ruby ferret) the skill descriptions and titles. This, although very effective still has an inherent problem.

When a person knows exactly what skill they are looking for they can easily search for it. But let's consider an example of why that isn't much help.

Let's say that John is on myotherskills.com looking for a carpenter to help build his new home. He plugs in the word 'carpenter' into the search bar with a proximity of one mile and hits enter. Jamie is a 20 year veteran contractor and can build a house in nothing flat. Unfortunately when she entered her skill as a contractor she did not use the word 'carpenter' to describe her skill. She lives within one mile of John, but will never be found even though they both meant the same thing.

Now you and I know that a 'contractor' and a 'carpenter' are linguistically similar. You could use either to describe the skill you are looking for. But the computer is looking for exact word matches (although it is possible to extend the search for pluralities). There is a huge disconnect. Even if we utilize good web semantics in describing the two words embedded in our code as being 'skill_descriptors' with OWL or some other semantic, the disconnect still exists.

I believe that one of the greatest assets to the next generation of the web will be to encourage semantics not only in the content presentation, but also within the search.

So what could the future look like with a Semantic Search Service?

Let's borrow our example from above. John performs his search again using the word 'carpenter.' Now for futuristic fun let's say that our application takes the word 'carpenter' and sets it against a web-service that compares the word to other similar words, perhaps even in different languages. The web-service returns an array (list) of words or phrases that match the meaning of 'carpenter'. We then take that array and compare it to the skills listed in our database. Wah-Lah! We find that Jamie's skill description contained the word 'contractor' which was in our array from the web-service. John and Jamie meet, build a new house and live happily ever after!

How great would that be?! The semantic search web service would be a substantial benefit to our next generation web-driven world.

The trick is how to build it. I've seen many trying to use complex algorithms to analyze language for meaning, etc. Reverse engineering language by applying complex mathematical formulas in an attempt to derive meaning is certainly interesting. That method would be very useful in translation, but still does not help provide an immediate array of associative words and phrases.

Then there is the 'reach out and solicit normal people help' solution Google used in their image tagging game. Something similar could be used to help develop word associations. Say two people look at one word and try to list as many words they associate with the word as they can within 10 seconds.

Also, creating a spider program that could real-time travel through the web comparing words in contexts, like words found in the context of carpentry websites, would be far more useful since language is just as evolutionary as the web and as technology is.

Of course, sitting down at the computer with a thesaurus, dictionary, and language lexicon entering data could do the same thing...but who has time. ;)

Just some thoughts...thanks for reading. ;)

Cheat Sheets

Yeah, yeah, yeah!! I know...it's been nearly a century since I last blogged. Truthfully I have been buried under a project building myotherskills.com from the ground up for the beta release. The prototype was effective, but the next release needed the proper foundations...you know...like a testing framework for instance (thank you Doug Alcorn).

But I couldn't help but post a link to this great command line tool. CHEAT SHEETS provides just that...cheat sheets for many of the Ruby On Rails elements like testing, svn, ruby, etc. commands.

It's already been helpful to me in just a couple of days.

Enjoy!