PeopleBrowsr’s Big News!

Thursday, 2 July 2009, 16:16 | Category : marketing
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Announcing BETA!!!
Finally, after 8 months of Open Alpha and thousands of revisions based on user feedback, PeopleBrowsr goes Beta.

There are now 5 ways to view social media through PeopleBrowsr: Search, MY, brands, Biz, and Conf:

PeopleBrowsr.com - All about SEARCH
PeopleBrowsr.com is now a very simple search page. Search following, followers, and all. Search posts or bios. Search for links. Select Advanced Search to see a wide range of filters you can apply to your searches of twitter, facebook, and friendfeed.

PeopleBrowsr Search

PeopleBrowsr Search

MY.PeopleBrowsr.com
This is where you’ll find your usual PB “Dashboard”. Now in Lite, Advanced or Business mode.

  • Lite is a simple dashboard. Make stacks and post. Run searches.
  • Advanced includes ready access to many more features, including numerous reports. Easily navigate multiple accounts and applications.
  • Business offers the deepest way of managing information and engaging with others, including the ability to assign tweets for others on your team to respond to. Build campaigns for tracking, run sentiment report stacks.
My PeopleBrowsr Lite

My PeopleBrowsr Lite

BRANDS.PeopleBrowsr
A SENTIMENT tool for brand and community managers to track their brands, buzz, customers and stats. You can even export ready-to-print sentiment reports. (If you’re looking for more advanced options, contact PeopleBrowsr about enterprise offerings).

PeopleBrowsr Brands

PeopleBrowsr Brands

Sentiment Report

Sentiment Report

BIZ.PeopleBrowsr
PeopleBrowsr for your business. Discover the first Twittery step into industry reports.

PeopleBrowsr Business

PeopleBrowsr Business

CONF.PeopleBrowsr
The ultimate Conference visualizer with streaming tweets and word cloud. Get more from your conferences and learn from conferences virtually.

PeopleBrowsr Conference

PeopleBrowsr Conference

Messes–there is no right answer

Wednesday, 1 July 2009, 18:04 | Category : Art and Creativity, Coaching
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I still find myself resisting my own crazy idealism. But life experience has brought me to understand something a wild teacher in high school said to us.

“There are no right answers, there is only more or less appropriate.”

Life is messy with little black and white and a whole lot of rainbowed spectrums. story of stuff

Work is complicated. There are always compromises. No worker or organization lives in some ideal world where they don’t compromise. What matters is the choices around when and where to compromise. And each of us are the only ones capable of making those choices and living with them.

What makes this all bearable? One, we have no choice. Bear it or do something else. Two, it is navigating this complexity which makes it interesting and each of us unique. Three, the spectrum brings color and light to life, embrace the intricacies as life flowing experience.

Language is not black and white either, though it might look it sitting on the page in colored ink and white space. It is a fluid breathing beast that roughly translates what we have inside us to others. Metaphors are never perfect. It is all messy. And therefore everything that we do through language is already and always to some degree imperfect and unpure. Scientists, theorists, and other black/white seekers might want rigorousness, but as long as they use language, there is always a resonance of poetry and multiple meanings and multiple interpretations. Multiple frames of understanding and relevance. There might be more and less appropriate, but there is little black and white, right or wrong.

Thus we have play…difference…complexity.

Collaboration and Complementarity

Wednesday, 1 July 2009, 18:02 | Category : Coaching, marketing
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Collaborate with others to build your visibility, their visibility, gain access to resources, share access, increase value. Complimentarity. And I mean something pretty simple with this–who compliments what you are doing? Who has a similar market to your which will allow you both to increase your visibility to your target? What products and services compliment what you are offering? How can you leverage that compliment to build your revenues?

It matters significantly less what your competition is doing (unless you want to stay in red oceans) and does significantly matter who you have explicit and implicit cooperation with.

See Blue Oceans.

Followers, Following Social Practice and PeopleBrowsr Report

Thursday, 28 May 2009, 16:08 | Category : Community, Technology
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PBReports1I love Peoplebrowsr reporting. I used to run all over the web for different tools, trying to find which ones would tell me which things I wanted to know. Now PeopleBrowsr has a tab full of the reports I need. See the purple report icon in the header. In the early days I read about every user that connected to me. I made a conscious effort to ban ones I thought were pure spam as part of an effort to help the network filter garbage. I contacted people that interested me. My process was so time consuming. I finally had to let it slide when I realized I was losing an hour to connecting this way. Surely there was a faster process. I look now at the Followers not Following and the Recent Followers reports when I want to connect with more people. I admit to every few months notifying my followers to reply to me if they think I should be following them and I am not. But I don’t think that works well with the firehose we have now. I nearly always follow people back who reply to something I say, just to discover who I am in conversation with. All these practices around following people has my main twitter stream moving pretty quickly. I don’t mind when I am using PeopleBrowsr, because my filters still give me the information I want to receive. However, if I need to go back to twitter.com or I am on my smart phone, I can lose the people that matter to me in all the noise. So every couple months I run the Following nor Followers report so I can stop following, easily, some of the strangers that stopped following me. It makes an easy sweep that I have few qualms over. After all, they disconnected from me! I readily admit that there is a group of people that I follow who do not follow me. And if I am really valuing what they are offering, I still follow them.

* Remember that it is best to unfollow in PeopleBrowsr as the twitter api does not make it easy to match up unfollows. PeopleBrowsr has added a synch following/followers option in the settings (see footer).

San Francisco Sunshine

Wednesday, 27 May 2009, 18:09 | Category : Community
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Home again and settled in after many magical days in San Francisco. I had so many phenomenal conversation, and I simply must share a bit of it with you.

When you have an hour or so with someone you have been admiring for a long time, how do you make the time productive? I had lots of practice on this trip.

1. Gil Friend. As I walked up to the building we were to meet in, I saw a man just ahead of me. Dark hair streaked deeply with gray. Yep, it was Gil. And as he turned, he saw me. Thank goodness for profile pictures and avatars. He recognized me immediately. We sat down in the Natural Logic office space - a warm open area full of treasures, books, and yet a bit minimal too. He asked me for a story, and I gave him one. I spoke of years in the country, middle america, of gardens and composting, of care for community, of care for the land. I told him of the path that brought me to thrivability - via philanthropy, writing, and social change and online community, network weaving and the gifts of strangers. I showed him the thrivability cards and spoke of my vision for growing this work. He listened. He really listened. He smiled. There is something quite thrilling about having someone you admire hear your story. I mean really hear it. And I asked him for his story. And he told it. It is his to tell. I listened, as you know I do. Deeply, feeling the emotion behind the words and the passion fueling the effort to move along the path. If I admired him from afar before, I admire him even more on closer connection.

I look forward to reading his book, The Truth about Green Business. Gil has the experience to have watched the green movement evolve for nearly 40 years, and he has the rigor and presence to discern what works and when.

2. Bobby Fishkin of Reframeit, a firefox add-on that lets you mark up the margins of any webpage (and see what others have marked up too). I met Bobby, late, for crepes. (FYI - do not think that a stroll from the Embarcadero straight up California to Van Ness is easy or quick.) Bobby has a mind like a racecar and a tongue of a poet or playwright. Well, the later makes more sense as he has written plays. I met him originally at NetSquared in 08. And I delighted in seeing him at sxsw (we had dinner with Frank Hamilton and Evonne Heyning there). He is young, brilliant, creative, and delightful. I do not know what will will ever do together, but I am sure the path forward will be fun, interesting, and profound.

3. David Hodgson. Well the main purpose of the visit was to spend time with David hacking on thrivable and revenue streams. We spent much of Monday doing wall drawings and having conversations before heading out for Paul Romer’s talk at the Long Now Foundation.

Tuesday! Lovely Tuesday!
4. David Evan Harris of Global Lives and research guy at IFTF. I took the train down to Palo Alto for the Internet Identity Workshop, so I lined up all the visits in that area on Tuesday. I got off the CalTrain and switched to a local train. Only the ticket machine didn’t take credit, and I didn’t have enough cash! However, a lovely man had said hello to me. I asked him where a cash machine was, and he generously gave me a dollar so I could take the train immediately. Thank you Sam. So…on to David. He was recovering from a bit of surgery. We talked of this and many other things. And now I owe him a ton of emails for follow up. David is a wonderful and creative thinker with a heart of brilliant gold. We spoke about philanthropy and thrivability. He shared a bit about the Long Now Foundation and a few other orgs helping with Global Lives.

5. Kaliya Hamlin, Judi Clark, Guillaume LeBleu and a host of others at the Internet Identity Workshop. I made it in time to enjoy a few quick conversations with these friends before a session on Currency. Now you know I had to come for that, and Kaliya had tipped me off on the time to attend. Thanks Kaliya. I still need to send photos of the notes I took on the board during the session. Waves to Hannes, a new friend I met there.

6. Thomas Kriese. mmmmm Thomas, it appears, has left Omidyar Network. We had a terrific conversation over coffee discussing urban chickens, triathalon training, and thrivability. I always cherish time with Thomas, and I love how he pokes at my ideas to test them and me.

7. David’s Dinner: Lana Holmes, Ann Vowels, Carmen Mauk, and Mariah Howard plus David and I. MMMmmmm good food, fabulous wine, and amazing encouragement. I can’t even describe the energy in that room, and perhaps I should not try, for there was safety in that space that I would not want to break. However, I will say that I was inspired and well fed - body, heart, head, and spirit.

Ken-day
8. Ken Homer and his lovely and funny wife Diane Fischler. David and I drove out to Marin to see Ken and Diane. The two of them have a wonderful and playful dynamic between them. Warming to see. I have met Ken once before. He is a total twitter connection, just as David is. Ken really knows how to have productive conversations. And I don’t say that in any way flippantly. With years of doing world cafe, coaching, and facilitation, Ken is very clear on process and has some terrific webinars now on conversation art. He took David and I for a walk in Kentfield? We absorbed amazing views, many micro-climates, with a rich and diverse topic range as well. Ken took the lead and told us inspiring stories, guiding us through the rich topography of his knowledge and experience while we navigated the varied mountain terrain. It is beautiful to watch connection emerge as people move deeper into awareness of each other, and I was delighted to watch this process as Ken and David “grew on” each other.

9. Ken Lynch. I was serious about it being a Ken day. :) David and I passed through the campus of Dominican where he earned his Green MBA (gorgeous space), and into an area in the East Bay to meet Ken Lynch for dinner. I met Ken through my dear pal, Jo Guldi, because Ken was working on carbon coins and very interested in currencies. He came through Chicago, and we talked briefly. I was here to get an update on the currency work he was doing. My takeaways from this meeting were less about specific outcomes and more about sensing that Ken is one wicked dude. And I don’t mean evil at all, I mean bright, pure hearted, very present, determined, curious, and open.

10. Jerry Michalski and April Rinne. Mmmmmm Jerry and April. While I stayed with them, I don’t feel like I got serious conversation time with either of them at any length. I reveled in the flowing love between them and the presence of great intellect and warm humor, play and reverence. To give you a sense of it, April and I had a brief but intense discussion about philanthropy. I think she got more out of me about my big beliefs in 5 minutes than most people ever get. And dynamically, at one moment I think Jerry had April in some wild circus-like position, and I thought, they have the cirque du soliel in their living room.

11. Charles dear Magowan. I met CM years ago on Onet. And he has made me laugh regularly ever since. I take deep delight in wandering with him anywhere, as he has this amazing encyclopedic knowledge of something within sight. (I sense this is especially true in San Francisco.) I learned about the changes in Cognitive psychology, the history of Crissy Field, the efficiency of the biz model for his upcoming wild business, and so much more. To understand my relationship with Charles, one must understand my appreciation of absurd humor, the male mind, professorial dynamics, and a love of being a bit awed.

12. Kevin Jones. Well, Charles took me for a bit too long of a walk, so I drove dear Ziggy (Jerry’s old BMW) across town as best I could. I was very late to meet Kevin, and he was very kind and gracious anyway. Like Gil, I have been watching Kevin for a long time. Admiring for years - xigi.net, good capital, socap… all good works. How do you connect in 20 minutes or so? We moved fast and talked faster. cards, games, thrivability. Boom. and off I went.

I also spent more time with David and had lunch with Chris Watkins (ChrisWaterGuy) of Appropedia. I missed his comrade Lonny. I stayed a couple nights with my dear cousin Kim too! I also missed Kara (someone I had met at Portland BarCamp a couple years ago). There are many friends I did not get to see nor have time to meet with. :( Almost all of the conversations were too short. And I feel really touched by these connections and inspired on the path forward. Thank you. And thank you to David for making it all possible!

ps. On the way home, I got a fabulous education on Hinduism from an amazing man from Mumbai, Pradeep. What am amazing trip.