What does it take to be a team?

An article on Darwin magazine brushes the surface of how to build a team, and how to help a team that has experienced problems. Help for Team Efforts is a good first look at teamwork, and telltale signs of when things are going right, and when they are going wrong.

One thing I've noticed about building a team is that it's something you have to work upon regularly. If you give your team tasks to perform on a regular basis, they start to develop a sense of how to work together. And a good team can accomplish a lot more than the combination of the efforts of individuals.

New Navbar

Courtesy of Douglas Bowman, it seems that us Blogspot hosted bloggers have a new navigation bar instead of ads at the top of our pages.

I like the last few changes made by Google's bloggger - the navbar, the profile, the newest templates, the newer writing interface.

I've been thinking about consolidating some of my blogging efforts because I've spread myself pretty thin. I don't know if I will.

But the tools that blogger has been adding make it harder to let this one go. Maybe I'll try to breathe some life into it again, and see if I can get it going.

Sliding in on an IceRocket

I don't know if there's really anything that new to the Mark Cuban backed search engine IceRocket, but it's kind of interesting hearing his take on it and reading through the many comments that it generated.

It's good to see people trying to wrest Google's crown from its brow, regardless of how much I like Google.

I Don't Recall the Words...

A great argument for learning by rote: In Defense of Memorization

I'll confess that it's been a while since I tried to learn all the lyrics to a song, or to memorize a poem, or the lines of a play, or much of anything.

I'm going to try to memorize a couple of poems, and see if there's anything of worth to it other than the ability to spout the lines out whenever I want. I suspect that there is.

Brand (new) Experiences

Inspired by Dirk Knemeyer's article at Digital Web Magazine - Brand Experience and the Web, I started a thread on the topic of how one could use interactivity online to help build a brand.

I titled the thread How Much Would You Pay for a Cup of Coffee. I got some great answers, including one dealing with the difference between building a branding, and postioning oneself within a niche. There were also some nice links to online applications that help to provide interesting and useful ways to experience different products online in a way that is helpful to a potential customer.

I've been thinking about some responses to the thread. I'm torn between discussing the topic here, and posting responses there. If I write some words over at the forum, I stand a better chance of getting some great responses. If I post over here, I add some volume and mass and content to this often neglected blog.

It's a tough choice, and the blog often loses out to the forum. I really need to dedicate a little more effort in building a brand over here.

In case this post does spawn some discussion, I'll throw out the following question: What are some of the ways that you've seen people attempt to build brand through online activities?

Did You See Seashells at the Seashore?

My friend and usabilty consultant extraordinaire, Kim Krause, spent a week at the beach disconnected from the world (wide web, that is).

She writes about it in There Were No Search Engines At The Seashore. I think I have to give that a shot, and see how it goes.

Managing Brands

I've been running across interesting pages lately, and great reading. Some nice articles on AllAboutBranding.com

Do What You Love

It's funny sometimes when people ask you what they should do with their lives, and they act surprised when the answer to that question is "what do you love to do"?

You can't always create a vocation out of your favorite pursuit, but it really doesn't hurt to look at the possibility seriously.

Yes, there are people who make a living play-testing video games. And folks who earn a paycheck while training dolphins and killer whales. Drawing or painting, or designing a web page can be a for-profit project. Making movies, writing books, racing cars, playing sports all are someone's job.

If you could do what you love and get paid for it, what would you be doing? And if you aren't doing it, why not?

Small Business Ideas Forum

I've been enjoying making some posts over at the fairly new Small Business Ideas Forum.

Stop on by and share some of your thoughts. The folks who started the forum are friendly, smart, helpful and could use a few more faces to help make the forum a nice place for people with questions about business.

What's Up, Chief?

Sometimes people do things that they don't even realize.

I remember a time not too far after high school when I was working in a factory. It was a fairly small shop, and we were building industrial plastics machinery. Fun times.

Some days I would come in and drill and thread holes for most of the day. Others would see me laying out pipe, threading it, and piecing together cooling systems. Arc welding was a lot of fun, even on very hot days wearing protective leather gear and heavy helmet and goggles. Sweat and sparks flying - life couldn't get much better. Some of the most fun was working the pneumatic painting equipment, making large machines a uniform shade of blue, with some orange accessories (the shop trademark colors).

We worked ten to twelve hour days on a regular basis. Listened to the same radio station every day. I could guess the next song with a remarkable accuracy rate, having heard their repeated call letters often enough to understand their format, and know which songs where normally plugged into each of the 19 spots they were using. It was something I picked up on, without really giving much thought to it.

I also found it important to know where most people were on the shop floor. With a small staff like we had, many people performed multiple functions on the factory floor rather than one specialized job such as lathe operator, or welder II, or fork lift operator. They didn't work at specific stations, but moved around our large industrial area (we had ten people and probably could have fit another twenty-five people in there comfortably). I'd make an effort as I was working, of noticing who was where every ten minutes or so. After a while, I was doing this without really thinking about it. There was an almost zen-like quality to my awareness of our shop activities.

Those were some habits I was aware of. I'm sure that there were others I wasn't. And I wasn't the only one.

Our shop foreman had a habit of calling everyone "Chief". "What's up, Chief," he would say, or "Can I give you a hand, Chief"? One day, we decided that we would all call him Chief. About two-thirds of the way through that day, he asked one of us, "what's all this "Chief" business"? We stopped, but he didn't.

It's funny the habits that you can pick up as you acclimate to an environment. It's been a few years since I was a card-carrying union member, and I haven't welded anything in probably too long a period. I forget what it's like to build something from metal and sparks and sweat. I wonder about the habits I've picked up in my present working environment that I'm possibly not even aware of.

Powerpointing

Powerpoint is a tool, not the presentation.

I gave a presentation to a group of 14 this morning, and I wish I had take the advice of DonnaM in her post on A neat powerpoint trick.

Handouts are useful, and handouts that provide extra value are even more useful. Great idea.

Never Too Young to Get into Business

In case you have any young ones of your own considering this stage of growing where they learn to care for others, or want to explore the world of business, there are some pages online trying to help out.

For instance, the University of Illinois has a great guide to The Business of Babysitting.

It's pretty well done.

Babysitting isn't for every teen, and there's another site that recently launched that might interest teens in other pursuits. The Small Business Administration started up the The Young Entrepreneur Online Guide to Business.

It includes thoughts on finding a mentor, and links to help. It also discusses money and saving and investing, legal issues, and how to develop a business plan.

Torn Between Standards

I'm not interested in getting in the middle of a battle between standards.

Especially when it comes to syndication feeds like RSS or Atom, which would enable people to read titles, and portions of posts from here in feed aggregators, or to show them on their sites.

When Google updated blogger, it appears that they chose one of those standards over the other. I'm not sure that they thought too much about the choice. It sounds like their thinking more on the subject.

I'm tempted to feed this page through a third party site which would provide a third party feed for me, in addition to the one generated in the Atom format.

Watching the Office

I've heard good things about the BBC series The Office, which is a comedy disquised as a documentary.

It's set in an industrial area somewhat outside of London.

The characters are believable, and the "reality television" approach to the show gives it a unique appeal. A number of the laughs from the show come when a character stares into the camera, at a loss for words to explain to the audience what just happened. Some video clips here.

The series consists of two seasons of six episodes each. They were good enough that I had some difficulty not watching all of these in a row.

I haven't worked in an office quite like the one depicted, but I recognize some of the situations. I suspect I'll be watching these over a few times.

One of my favorite scenerios is when a trainer comes in, and tries to hold a class, while the office manager atttempts to share the wisdom of his experiences at the same time. Their ideas of teamwork clash.

Best television show I've seen in years.

Drivers, Drivers, My Kingdom for Some Drivers

I've been plagued by computer woes the last couple of days.

With some intermittent use of my computer, I've been updating critical patches, defragging my hard drive, doing a full virus scan of the hard drive.

It's been no fun.

I finally hit upon the likely culprit this morning. The video drivers for my video card. I'm downloading new drivers right now. We'll see if they work.

I've seen the complaint before that having the hardware manufacturers make drivers for their hardware is often a hit or miss proposition. Well, the drivers for my video card came with the operating system. Chances are they should work well.

The homepage of the card manufacturer linked to a download page which listed driver software that is only a couple of months old. Hopefully whatever went wrong is fixed in this incarnation of the software.

Thinking of this makes me consider how much some businesses rely upon others. Windows benefits greatly by having so many third party hardware manufacturers build parts that will work with the operating system. They mostly have no choice since there is such a large market filled with users of the software.

What annoys me is that the drivers I was using were loaded from the Windows XP CD. I noticed an updated driver on the windows update page at the beginning of the year, and updated to that. You would figure that they would have the bugs out of it by now.

I was happy to see that the manufacture had a newer date on the version I'll be trying out this morning. Fingers crossed, hopefully I can write about something a little more interesting. At least now, since I dumped the video drivers and am working with a generic driver, I can at least start up the computer and work with it. Previously, I was getting the video signal cutting out on me.

Well, I needed those critical updates anyway.

Ringing in Changes

I was getting a kick looking at a page from the Smithsonian Institute on how information technology has changed over the past 150 years.

To be honest, when I think of information technology, I really don't think of the telegraph or the telephone.

But maybe I should. The means of communicating over long distances, aided by electricity and wires, are the roots of information technology.

When you look at the pictures, it's easy to forget that these devices cause profound changes in society as they were introduced. But some of it didn't happen overnight.

I found a much more detailed view of telecommunications, which goes from the 1820s to today's mobile phones.

It's become pretty common to see people walking down the main street of my town with a mobile phone pressed to their ears. It wasn't as common in 1879, when David Hughes received the first radio/telephone call.

Yes. The mobile phone is now 125 years old. Not what you'd call an overnight success. Wonder what David Hughes would think of ringtones.

MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choices

Congratulations to the winners of the Marketing Sherpa's Readers' Choice Best Blog Awards 2004

Improving News Sites

When I was in high school, we used to get two different newspapers.

They carried all of the same stories. I'm not sure that my parents knew what they were doing when they insisted on getting more than one newspaper delivered to the house every morning. But I suspect that they might have known.

I took advantage of it, and usually read both papers every morning. What I found interesting was how stories were often presented differently from one paper to another.

It turned me into a bit of a skeptic when it comes to the media. It also had me wishing that newspapers would take active steps to improve.

I usually look at a dozen or so papers everyday now. With so many papers are on the web, I recongize that most of them that aren't taking as much of an advantage of online opportunities as they could.

CyberJournalist.net has a great list titled: 101 ways to improve your news site. These are excellent suggestions. If a news site adopted even half of these, they would find themselves amongst the best sites on the web.

Funny, but the best benefits may come from getting more involved with the community that surrounds them.

What Would Google Buy?

Google's Initial Public Offering seems fueled by the necessity to have made an SEC filing anyway, and the desire to sell some shares to reward employees - all of who own some stock in the company.

There's one topic that I haven't seen much focus upon. And that is, what will Google do with all of the money raised from the IPO?

But it's one of the topics that has me concerned. The Motley Fools joins me in speculating just exactly what is on Google's Billion-Dollar Shopping List?

Just to add a little more to the mix then those companies the Fool discusses, I like to add a company that I brought up a few posts below - Craigslist. Pure speculation on my part, without the faintest amount of inside knowledge, or anything beyond a feeling. It has the same feel to it that made Blogger's Pyra Labs such an attractive acquisition to Google.

What companies would you buy if you had a million to spend?

Sites that Use Spyware Are Some of It's Biggest Targets

Some inconsistencies are difficult to wrap your head around.

I remember sitting down a few years ago after cooking breakfast for the staff of the restaurant I worked at, and listening to the bartending groaning. The place opened at 11:00 am, and the staff all joined together for a pre-work meal. It didn't sound like our drink-mixer had his head on straight that morning.

It was a normally a nice time, where morale was boosted, and comraderie was fostered. But not every morning.

I was working my way through college, and this was a pretty good job, especially considering their "all you can eat" policy for kitchen crew. On good days, when everyone was happy, the work went really quickly.

But, it was easy to see that our man behind the mixed drinks wasn't happy. Considering that he was one of the first persons that people would see as they walked through the door, that wasn't a great way to start the day.

I asked what was wrong. He looked at me, and confessed that he had been up most of the night talking to one of the people he sponsored from AA. The person had relapsed, and needed someone to talk with. He was the one.

While I was filled with sympathy, the oddity of the statement filled me with some surprise. I tried, but couldn't stop myself. I asked, "doesn't it strike you as unusual that you're a member of AA, you're complaining about someone who is having trouble because they couldn't resist alcohol, and you're a bartender?"

To further fuel the fire, these words followed from my mouth, "Doesn't that seem a little ironic to you?"

Funny, but he quit the restaurant a few weeks later. I'm not sure why, but I hope that he found something other to do than feed drinks to people.

A post by Ben Edelman uncovers what appears to be a bit of a business enigma along the same lines - Dell's Spyware Puzzle not only looks at Dell's unusual relationship with a spyware company, but also Yahoo's.