DISQUS

I was in the DC startup weekend a couple years ago. It was fun, but immediately after the weekend everyone sort of disbanded, so the app we built didn't really have a chance with no one to maintain it and turn it into a business.

I would make these suggestions for your idea:

1) Think about maybe renting a house or some other dwelling where you can all stay together for the week. This will not only likely be cheaper than individual accomodations, but since you only have a limited amount of time this will mean that the brainstorming and collaboration and even the coding don't have to stop when you head "home" for the evening. If you get a flash of inspiration at 1:30am, there's your team, wake 'em up. Having a common home base would, I think, lead to greater cohesion among team members, too.

2) Vet your participants carefully to ensure you're getting people who are inspired and motivated to work (and play). You don't want freeloaders just looking for a vacation, and while some derive inspiration from such settings, many others will only distracted by them.

3) This one's important: Get the team together before the trip and decide on what you're going to create before you leave, and make sure everyone who's coming along is fully on board. This one's important. Again drawing on my startup weekend experience, we had only Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday to build whatever it was we were going to build. All of Friday evening was spent making that decision, which cost precious time, and led to a number of folks feeling rather bitter about the decision that was made. There were many competing ideas, and a lot of folks felt that some of the ideas that were discarded (myself included) were much better than the one chosen. This left a lot of us feeling uninspired and apathetic at best, and bitter at worst. Don't let that happen in your team.

Good luck. I'll be watching to see how this shapes up. :)

This sounds sort of like startup weekend with a twist it's a week long (which is good - one of startup weekend's biggest downfalls is that a weekend isn't enough time), it's away from everything, and it would have far fewer "cooks in the kitchen" (another advantage). Sounds dreamy. :)

Hi jeber -

Thanks for responding to my comment. I do have a blog, but I don't think you'd call what I typically write there a constructive expression of my thoughts.

What I often see in people around me is not racism, or sexism, or discrimination based on sexual preference (each of which are bad enough themselves), but contempt for fellow people as a whole. People in these parts act as if they have disdain for humans in general - even their peers.

You mentioned that you're left-handed, gay, and an atheist. I'm ambidextrous, straight, and I believe in God. Yet I can't help but think you and I could probably get along just fine without even trying. I don't understand why it is so many people can't treat people like . . . well, like people.

(BTW, thanks for giving me a place to say that)

I think a lot of people think of me as a misanthrope, and I completely understand why. I present myself that way. The truth, though, is not so simple. I love people. I really do. I have compassion. I want people to be happy, and I don't like to see anyone hurt anyone else. I don't hate people at all - I hate the way people treat other people, and so I spend a lot of time being angry with everyone for how they treat each other (and me), and it comes across as misanthropy. I rail against people in the DC area, and especially in Northern Virginia, not because I hate them but because I hate how rude and mean they are to each other, and to me, and to everyone else. It's my compassion that breeds my anti-social nature.

Weird, huh?

Ahh, okay, I get it now. Thanks for the clarification.

I'm a little bit confused by these statements:

1) Then social media blasted on the scene a couple of years back. People took their SEO tactics, and laid them on top of social media, completely missing the point of social media.

2) The content generated by users of social media began to rank highly in search engines, because it was RELEVANT. Because it had VALUE. Because it was TIMELY. Because it was REAL.

3) Suddenly, all the SEO experts also became Social Media Experts, as social media marketing became the hot new thing. And, being resistent to change, as most industries are, SEOs just removed the word “search engine” from their tactics, and replaced it with “social media.”

4) With the net result being social networks and user generated content that is full of useless, noisy, crap.

Is 2 the "point of social media" mentioned in 1 that the SEO folks missed? As for 4, how did these newly-rebranded Social Media Experts influence the user-generated content? An SEO/SME can tell you to make pretty, RESTful URLs, and how to structure your content, but how can they cause your users to generate crap content?

Next is this statement: "Second, select a CMS framework (I recommend WordPress), that supports solid SEO principles. With WordPress, install two plugins: All-In-One SEO and XML sitemaps. Thats it for SEO."

That's probably very sound advice for the folks that are running sites that could be powered by WordPress or another CMS. But what about all of the web applications out there that cannot?

Thanks, Micah

I have read your words. I was responding - perhaps unfairly - more to things you said on Twitter than here. "It was not satire, it was racist and stupid."

That doesn't sound to me like separating intent from execution, it sounds quite dismissive. Granted, you can't say a ton in the 140 characters Twitter allows. But even here, you declare your decision never to read the Colorado Daily again, thanks to their take on the matter. Their take appears to be "The kid was trying to write satire and blew it." (As they also point out, no one's noticing that he was far more down on whites than Asians in the piece.)

Since the first part of that seems to be quite in agreement with what you're now saying (good intention, poor execution), why is it exactly that you're never reading them again?

I am reading your words. This comment reply is the first time I've seen you mention his intent separately from what he wrote.

I am reading your words. I have no idea what your note about diversity has to do with any of this. Did Max Karson speak out against diversity? Did I? To whom are you responding, besides those who have asked you in the past why a diversity committee is needed? To bring that up here, when there seems to be no appropriate context for it, looks like posturing.

I am reading your words. Yes, the point as you've stated in your comment is simple, but I still don't see where you state it prior. I certainly don't see anywhere where you've called his intent "good", or noted that he intended to foster communication. Noting that he needs to take more writing classes sounds more like insult than insight.

I think your comment in response to mine has offered far greater insight into what you're trying to say than your blog post did, and your remarks on Twitter seemed exactly contrary. If what you say in your comment is what you really meant, then we are largely in agreement. But until you posted it, it didn't seem like that at all.

One last point: I assume that when you say you've "experienced both sides of this conversation personally" you don't mean that you've been racist, but rather that you've been the target of discrimination. Do you really think there are many among us who have not? I regret that you felt offended, but don't think that you carry some membership card that gives you insight into the matter that is not shared by many.

I've been following your twitter messages about this. I don't know how you can insist that anyone else "take a moment . . . and think" when you're clearly not. Railing against anything that mentions race or racism as if it were itself racist does not give you the facade of being hip and enlightened that you so desire. It isn't independent thought, it's mob mentality. There are millions like you, who think they "get it", and by "get it" they mean they've figured out "racism, bad. Mention of racism, also bad. I'll look sympathetic if I always speak out against racism any time it comes up. There, that was easy." You end up contributing to the problem, because the moment anyone brings up the topic it triggers you and those like you to immediately shout them down, like robots: "Racist, bad! Racist, bad! Whew, that was a close one! Good thing we were here, someone nearly had a thought."

I'll grant that the CU column by Karson was poorly executed. It wasn't very funny, and it was a bit more stinging than it probably needed to be. But it couldn't be more obvious that he was aiming for satire. If you insist that he wasn't, then you have to believe he was actually planning to round up Asians with butterfly nets.

You're not *that* dumb, are you?

I don't know that it was strictly necessary to mention in the write-up (yet again) your notion that WGS would best be used for dating; we all got that when we watched the interview and heard you mention it several times. I'm not sure why you felt compelled to call attention to it again in the write-up, unless you just had nothing else to say. But why would you call it a fact when it's clearly your opinion? You're re-defining what WGS has built, even though you were clearly told that's not what it is.

Intentionally or not, you're implying that WGS has built yet another dating app, except that they don't even know they have.

If it were my product, I think I'd be a little bit put off.

-Bill

I have this phone as well; I'm trying it out on Cingular/AT&T's 30-day trial (and I think I'll probably be keeping it). Just to step in and answer a couple of the questions from above:

B Lane: Yes, the phone supports stereo Bluetooth headsets.

Brian: Yes, you can use mp3's as ringtones with one caveat: the mp3 must be 300K or smaller, or it will not offer you the option of setting it as a ringtone. But if your mp3 is 300K or under, you can copy it directly to the phone and it'll let you set it as your ringtone. No need to use an online ringtone uploader or anything.

Emma: I can't tell you how Dustin used his Mac to transfer music to the A727, but I can tell you how I did it with mine. I just did a file push (using OBEX, I believe) from within OS X, and the phone accepted the file and saved it in my Music folder. Nothing to it.

To everyone: It's quite normal for phones to warm up in the area of their processor during a call. In a phone this thin, it's going to be especially noticeable. It's almost certainly nothing to worry about.

So, good news for everyone, eh? :)

-Bill