Naked Conversation Madness::Just Get Out & Blog
So I went to a the 5th Techcrunch Meetup which was the Launch Party for the book “Naked Conversations” (by Robert Scoble & Shel Israel). It’s about how companies have changed their relationships with their customers through blogging. Robert started a *behind the scenes* show about Microsoft called Channel 9. The whole story has been great and inspiring I big company, who is trying to become more open.
I met Robert & Shel who were really cool down to earth guys, as Dossy was able to give me a good excuse. And was able to ask each of them two questions. Instead of re-inventing the wheel I decided to ask each of them the same questions. I will summarize (which can lead to intepretation) their answers, for their exact words, I’d check out the podcast:).
1.Who is one person/position you’d like to see start blogging?
Shel: Anyone who is in a position and able to (I like his all hands on deck approach)
Robert: George W. Bush (and I was hoping Fidel Castro)
2. At AOL, there are a number of employees who are on the cusp of blogging, what would tip or encouragement do you have to say for them to get them to start?
Shel: Just start blogging 
Robert: Start reading blogs, and seeing if you are interested in leaving comments; if not, perhaps blogging is not your bag.
Thank you Robert & Shel for your time.
…Will be getting the podcast out soon (hopefully it will turn out okay. Warning:it’s a bit rough) …You can check it out on iTunes: Search for AOL Mountain View, which is behind the scenes look at our crazy campus .
New Yahoo Design Library
Man Yahoo is just solid. The other day they released a Design Pattern Library that has a blog component to it. It seems like a bottom – top approach has been the theme for the Web 2.0 and Yahoo is trying to include itself into that culture. Let me explain. From what I hear Yahoo created it’s standards by first seeing what all their products are using and even created incentives for people to submit the design patterns. This is the first way they included themselves. Instead of creating a body of standards and disseminating, they looked at what was already been done and built on that. I’d like to think that, internally, the products appreciated that. The second thing that Yahoo did was to create a blog…verry Web 2.0, but what’s nice is now they have opened up the floor to the public and anyone. I am glad to see Yahoo becoming Web 2.0 in their actions. To me they have always been very clean in their design that gave it a bit of a rigid feel, lacking an experience or a *ghettoness* to it, but if they can pull this conversation off and build a community around it, the rigid feel is only one minor detail.
