For the past few months, people have been pestering the hell out of me about Twitter. “What do you mean you aren’t using Twitter?! Oh man, you’re really missing out!” Well, I finally had some time today to join Twitter and take a look at it. I was underwhelmed, to say the least. Aside from aesthetically looking like something a 12 year old cobbled up, the entire tool seems utterly pointless to me.

Am I getting old? Of course! But according to Pew Internet’s latest survey, I am considered an omnivore, or in the top 8% of digitally connected people in the country. You can try your luck here.

Do I really need to know what all of my friends and colleagues are doing at any given moment of the day? No.

Do I really need to know that 15 minutes ago, Jimmy heated up a bowl of Mac ‘n Cheese in the microwave? Or on a professional side, do I really give a **** if Sally is taking a break in the breakroom, or reading her emails, or “frustrated at the world?” Save for my young daughter, I have no desire to know what anyone is doing 24 hours a day.

Later in the day, I happened to be exchanging emails with a young entrepreneur who reached out to me for help (poor bastard.) His play was to create a “better Twitter.” I asked him what his revenue model was, what pain he was solving for customers, how he was going to differentiate himself from Twitter, and what his barriers to entry would be (both before and after.) His responses were hollow at best.

Here’s a novel idea. Unless your business idea solves a painpoint for someone, or otherwise introduces an efficiency into their lives or business, it is most likely a novelty. And while they may be easily bootstrapped, novelties are rarely venture-backable. Can Twitter turn into some huge ridiculous cash cow? Of course. Anything is possible. But possible does not equal probable. And while the original novelty may attain some degree of success, knock-offs of novelties have a much harder road.

My advice? If you really want to be a successful entrepreneur, stop worrying about creating mindless tools to keep track of everything your friends are doing, and start solving real problems. If you aren’t aware of any problems in the world that need solving, go work in any arbitrary industry for a year or two and take copious notes.

Cheers.

Here is a great team building story from 1944-45, when Coach Robinson coached at Grambling High School:

A daddy pulled my best running backs off our team and said they couldn’t play anymore because they had to pick cotton. So I got all the boys on the team, we packed up and went out there to pick the cotton, then went on to win the championship.

Researchers estimate that between 50 percent and 80 percent of U.S. adults, and probably a similar share of children, suffer from some form of math anxiety. That fear translates into subpar performance of children, experts say. Researchers ranked American students 24th out of 29 industrialized countries in math literacy. Nice.

It has also been estimated that over 50% of new businesses fail in the 1st year of operation. An additional 90-95% fail within the first five years.

Now, there are lots of reasons why businesses fail, and I’m not going to even attempt to convince you that math anxiety is the sole cause – it isn’t. But I do believe that it plays a part.

How will the entrepreneur properly allocate capital, manage the assets of the business, and properly diagnose possible warning signs, if they don’t have a fundamental grasp of mathematics?

A recent study discovered that math anxiety, or the fear of mathematics, actually “saps the working memory needed to do math.” Go figure. The more you worry about it, the less successful you will be.

Worrying about how you’ll perform on a math test may actually contribute to a lower test score, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.

Math anxiety — feelings of dread and fear and avoiding math — can sap the brain’s limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems, said Mark Ashcroft, a psychologist at the University of Nevada Los Vegas who studies the problem.

“It turns out that math anxiety occupies a person’s working memory,” said Ashcroft, who spoke on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Ashcroft said while easy math tasks such as addition require only a small fraction of a person’s working memory, harder computations require much more.

Worrying about math takes up a large chunk of a person’s working memory stores as well, spelling disaster for the anxious student who is taking a high-stakes test.

Stress about how one does on tests like college entrance exams can make even good math students choke. “All of a sudden they start looking for the short cuts,” said University of Chicago researcher Sian Beilock.

Although test preparation classes can help students overcome this anxiety, they are limited to students whose families can afford them.

Ultimately, she said, “It may not be wise to rely completely on scores to predict who will succeed.”

While the causes of math anxiety are unknown, Ashcroft said people who manage to overcome math anxiety have completely normal math proficiency.

Cheers.

Enjoy this excerpt.

—

BTW – The meeting today reconfirmed these important basic business truths:

1. One should never wear a tie that has recognizable pictures on it. Much less, multiple pictures of what appears to be Wife and Daughter.
2. A blue and white checked shirt should not be worn with a tie that has recognizable pictures on it.
3. One should not hang a picture that is framed with a “furry frame” in an area of the office that is designated for use in holding meetings with potential clients. Jet black, 5 inch long, uncombed polyester-based hair on the furry picture frame makes the “no-no” very big.
4. One can easily fix the fact that their business cell phone plays sampled riffs from the band Rush during business meetings.
5. One can easily fix the fact that their home phone message device plays the theme from the Adams Family.
6. 60 to 80 hours at $125 per hour for helping with a financial plan (only) is a little too much.
7. Despite his hard sell and offer to discount his 60 to 80 hours at $125 per hour we cannot give up any equity to a guy who has a furry picture frame on the wall of his client conference room.

—

Cheers.

I don’t normally post these sorts of things, as I make a serious effort to keep my writings of a purely professional nature (per my very first blog post). Nevertheless, I thought this might be a fun departure. I guess I’m in a weird anti-me mood today. :)

So here are five things you probably didn’t know about me (and probably didn’t want to know):

1. I’ve hiked the Appalachians through three states.
2. I am an oil painter. I have fun abstracting from nature, en plein air.
3. I am a musician – I sing, as well as play the drums, guitar, and piano. I have a recording studio in my basement, and back in the 1980s, I recorded a vinyl LP in Europe.
4. I set a unit record while in Army boot camp for disassembling an M1911 (Colt .45) in 4 seconds.
5. When I was much younger (20 years ago), I spun records (“DJ” for you younger people) in a rock and roll club in Germany (The Green Goose)

With that I now tag 5 other bloggers:

• Lance Weatherby of the ATDC
• Matt Winn of Chrysalis Ventures
• Alex Muse of Spur/the Texas Startup Blog
• Anne Simons (Brandsizzle)
• Jason Caplain at Southern Capitol Ventures

Thanks, Mike, for including me. I now officially duck, and pass the buck to the five unfortunate souls above. :)

Cheers.
Scott

The title of the presentation will be “Building Atlanta’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.” In it, I’ll share some of my thoughts on how entrepreneurs and investors together can collectively build a better startup culture here in Georgia.

I believe the meeting is only open to Team Ivy members and associates, but I will be posting these same thoughts in a blog post here soon.

It should be a lot of fun, and I hope to see you there!

Cheers.

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago.

“Okay kiddies, it’s time for bed! Get comfy, tuck yourselves in and try to sleep. Santa’s coming tonight! However, before I tuck you in and turn out the lights, I’d like to read you a few chapters from The Shining, to help put you in the mood for dancing sugarplums!”

I did some digging on the net and it turns out that it used to be a tradition during the Victorian times that ghost stories were told around the fire at Christmas. Allegedly, that is one of the things that inspired Charles Dicken to pen his classic “A Christmas Carol”, which of course featured the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.

So I started thinking about Christmas in general.

Of course, Santa must be scary. 99% of kids cry a river of tears the first time they have to sit in his lap.

Oh yeah – that looks like fun, Virginia.

Then, of course, there is the Grinch. Remember him? He’s the scary-ass looking “thing” that actually stole Christmas from an entire village of other scary looking people:

I then began thinking about my own childhood. Of course, we read the Grinch and A Christmas Carol. But we went a step further. We were told that if we weren’t good throughout the year, this jolly fat elf named Santa wouldn’t bring us toys and goodies, but a bag of coal, or switches, or whatever else our parents wanted to scare us with.

Our parents actually told us this (I’m not making this up). We were told that if we didn’t stay asleep on Christmas Eve – that if we woke up in the middle of the night, snuck into the living room prematurely, and caught Santa in the act of dropping off the loot, he would “throw pepper” in our eyes. WTF?

I told this story to a friend of mine and he laughed. When I asked why he was laughing he said “that’s nothing. Our parents told us that if we caught Santa in the act we would turn to stone.” STONE?! WTF?

Whatever your individual beliefs, I do wish you all a happy holiday season, and a prosperous, healthy 2007.

Cheers.

First, if you don’t know what A-listers or Z-listers are, then here is a brief description. “A-listers” are essentially the “top bloggers” (in terms of traffic, inbound links, etc.) These are the “loudest” voices in the blogosphere, and subsequently, the ones that garner most of the attention from others.

Conversely, the blogs at the “bottom of the pile” are called “Z-listers.” At the bottom you have a lot of really crappy blogs – but also some blogs that are well-written and contain valuable content, but are overlooked (or dwarfed) by the A-listers. Mack Collier at Viral Garden wanted to do something to give these other blogs some love, so he launched a chain of events to get these blogs noticed. From Mack:

Create a new post on your blog, but CUT AND PASTE the list I have below, and then ADD any blogs you feel aren’t getting their due…It can be 1 blog, or a hundred (or none if you simply want to re-post the same list), but the idea is, find those great blogs that, for whatever reason, you feel aren’t getting their due, link-wise.

Then after you leave your post, the next blogger will do the same thing, cut and paste YOUR list, and add THEIR blogs to the list, then repost it. Add the same instructions in your post that the next blogger should cut and paste YOUR list, and add any blogs they feel should be on it to THEIR list. The list will get increasingly long, and all the blogs will get a sort of reverse ‘pyramid-effect of link-love.”

This is a PAINFULLY easy way to bring extra links and exposure to those blogs that deserve it. I would institute and honor rule that you don’t include your own blog. The end result is that many great blogs will get a tone of extra exposure, we’ll all find some great new blogs to add to our reading list, and you’ll get much good karma points for helping out your fellow bloggers! And who knows, some of that link-love might even come back to you!

I was placed on this list, and thought it was cute, but didn’t really think much about it. Then I noticed that my (completely useless, IMHO) Technorati “ranking” jumped up from about 55,000 to around 32,000. From reading other bits around the blogosphere, I can see where this is helping some other blogs jump up in the rankings.

Of course, as Technorati bases its rankings off of “fresh” inbound links, most of these Z-listers will most likely start drifting back down in the rankings as the meme runs its course. But all of this got me thinking about the “A-listers”, and why there is even a need to track them.

If you aren’t familiar with Technorati’s rankings, the only real benefit is to make your blog show up higher if someone is searching for a specific keyword, tag, etc. (it increases the “authority” of your blog). Well, and of course, it also satisfies the egos of bloggers. Since most people use Google still for, well, finding just about everything, this is a moot point – but I digress.

Personally, I could give a **** where I show up in the rankings. I blog because it is a fun outlet for me, not because I want to stand up on a podium with a megaphone and scream “hey everyone, look at me! I’m a highly ranked blogger who couldn’t get a date in a women’s prison with a fistful of pardons! I am a blogger, hear me roar!”

And yes, I do believe many A-listers fall into that bucket. I also believe that blogging has unfortunately given some people a “voice” that probably shouldn’t have had one in the first place – freedom of speech notwithstanding. As an entrepreneurial spirit, I have always “challenged authority”, “bucked” the status quo, and I’ve probably crossed more lines in my life than most people have crossed “t’s”. I hate “the man” as much as the next Joe … but …

I don’t know which is sadder – the fact that we (as a society) have placed a bunch of people who are (quite frankly) placing very little in the way of thought leadership into the blogosphere onto something called an “A-list” or the fact that people have to resort to doing things like gaming Technorati via a Z-list meme in order to get people to read their ramblings.

It is fun, I admit, to see my blog jump higher in the rankings – however, when the Z-list meme has run its course, and the fresh links stop coming, all of these blogs that are seeing an increased ranking are going to start sliding back down the list. Then, it will be back to business as usual. Of course, this assumes that Technorati doesn’t do something to prevent it (it would be very easy to do – just ignore any RSS feed entries that have more than “n” number of outbound links). For that matter, they could easily drift into the mode of penalizing your ranking if you are suspected of gaming the system (ala Google).

So far, even though I’ve jumped up pretty substantially in the rankings, I haven’t seen much in the way of increased traffic.

EDIT/UPDATE: I should also add that with all of these “generic” inbound links, it makes the task of seeing who is providing “real” backlinks more difficult, as I have to wade through the Z-list links to find someone who is actually commenting on something I wrote.

The Z-list meme will only be a successful experiment, I suppose, if it results in some new recurring readers for these blogs – not just a bunch of anonmyous links that are not going to have a long-term effect on rankings. We’ll see.

I do appreciate being put on the list, though – thanks to whoever it was out there that thought my ramblings here might be of value to others!

Cheers.

Thomas Edison State College is doing their part to help these brave individuals get on with their lives by creating a targeted scholarship fund. I hope you’ll read the rest of this, and consider a tax-deductible donation.

There is an old saying within the military.

All gave some, some gave all.

Many of you have experienced the cost of defending our freedom from a perspective most people in our country will never have.
The media reports on attacks on American military personnel and our troops are killed and wounded, but we never learn who these brave men and women are and how their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, will never be the same.

Thousands of brave Americans have been seriously wounded in the line of duty and now face new challenges as they look beyond their military careers. At Thomas Edison State College, we believe one of the most effective ways to assist these men and women is through education to redirect their careers and we want to assist them in that process.

We are appealing to you to join us in creating new scholarship fund for these brave men and women. We would like your help to enhance access to our College for members of the United States military who have been wounded in the line of duty.

Managing the costs of tuition and fees may be a roadblock for these fine men and women, especially when you consider the many other expenses they will incur during their recovery.

These extraordinary individuals have already paid a tremendous price in the name of freedom. We would like create a way that helps them with the costs associated with pursuing the education and training they most desperately need during their rehabilitation.

We hope you will consider supporting your military comrades in their reentry to civilian life. Make your tax-deductible checks payable to Thomas Edison State College Foundation (indicating “military scholarships”) or call 609-984-1588 to talk to a development staff member.

Sincerely,
David A. Miller
Associate Vice President for Development and Alumni Affairs

T: (609) 984-1588
E: deve...@tesc.edu

Office of Development
Thomas Edison State College
101 West State Street
Trenton, NJ 08608-1176

Cheers.

Like so many of you, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out how my blog could keep automatically reverting to the default WordPress theme without my involvement (or anything that I could easily track.)

So I started digging deeper. I looked at my binary MySQL logs and found several entries like this:

#061115 17:51:48 server id 1 end_log_pos 738507316 Query thread_id=572311 exec_time=0 error_code=0
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'default' WHERE option_name = 'template';

#061115 17:51:48 server id 1 end_log_pos 738507464 Query thread_id=572311 exec_time=0 error_code=0
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'default' WHERE option_name = 'stylesheet';

From these logs, I could see the timestamp that the change happened. So I cross-referenced over into the Apache web server logs and found that the only things happening at that time were just regular page views of my blog articles – nothing fancy. I even checked crontab, to make sure that one of my many database manipulating cron jobs wasn’t futzing something up. Nothing doing.

Then I realized what was happening. I noticed that all of those normal blog pageviews were coming from mobile devices. From user agents such as:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/hspr-H102; Blazer/4.2) 16;320×320

Then I realized that I had recently installed the WP-mobile plugin written by Alex King (although I hadn’t yet had the chance to test it out on my Treo using Blazer.) So, I whipped out my phone, hit scottburkett.com with my phone’s browser, and voila, the theme was switched to the default theme. It turns out that I had not properly followed the instructions provided by Alex in the plugin archive. Instead of following the instructions, and copying the files into the places he specified, I just unzipped them into the plugins directory and activated it. That was the whole problem – I needed to copy his “wp-mobile” theme over into the wp-content/themes directory. WordPress was trying to find it, and couldn’t, so it reverted automatically back to the default theme.

I have tested this thoroughly, and I am convinced that this was the problem. No, I know this was the problem. Great plugin, BTW, Alex. Good work.

If you are having this problem, but you are not using the aforementioned plugin, my guess is that your problem is caused by something similar. I hope this helps some people!

Cheers.