ICANN = Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

They’re the people in charge of the domain names. They set the standards for things like what comes after the dot. .info, .com, .org, .tv, etc. They’re meeting today to decide a few things:

1) Can domain names use characters other than the currently-allowed Latin characters?

2) Can other words come after the dot, instead of the limited set that’s allowed now? In other words, while the left side has always been a free-for-all, now the right side might be, too. So, wildwood.interactive, or mybusiness.isgreat would be possible domain names. The exceptions would be that trademarked names couldn’t be used after the dot.

This might be a great new influx of income for the domain registrars and maybe even the trademark industry. It might also be a great opportunity, now that short, easy domain names are so hard to come by.

Of course the other consideration in the dot discussion is to remember that now we’d all have to remember where the dot goes.

…What do you think? Myself? I don’t know about “dot.”

2 Scenarios, 2 Design Firms: Fictitious Names, Real Situations

Scenario #1

We have a client who is a design firm. We’ll call them Apple Design. They have several of their client sites hosted on our server, and we’ve done the development work to support their designs. One of those clients, whom we’ll call Stuff Store, moved from Apple Design to another design firm. This design firm is owned by employees who used to work at Apple Design. We’ll call the second design firm Beta Design.

Beta Design contacted us, asking for access to Stuff Store’s website now that they’re the account of record. They cited permission from Stuff Store. Beta Design also asked that we tell them everything that had been done on the site for Stuff Store since they had last worked on the account, which they had done as employees of Apple Design.

We can’t give access to our server to Beta Design or Stuff Store. We also can’t give the information to Beta Design or Stuff Store about work that’s been done at any point.

Scenario #2

We worked as the developers on a project with Beta Design, completely unrelated to Stuff Store or Apple Design. Towards the end of the project, the URL owner, Education Agency, wanted us to put the site live, while Beta Design did not because final payment had not been received from the design firm they were subcontracted through, Creative Corner Design.

We can’t put the site live, despite the fact that Education Agency, the URL owner, had paid Creative Corner Design, despite the fact that we had been paid, and despite the fact that the work was completely done.

Why Not?
In both of these cases, the answer is exactly the same. The site owner was not our client. The design firm was. If the design firm’s name is on our contract, and the design firm is paying our invoices, the design firm is who our legal obligation is to.

In the first case, Apple Design is our client, in the second case Beta Design is our client. We can encourage either design firm to do what we think they should do, but ultimately, our legal obligation is to whomever paid our invoices.

The message here is to make sure you’re okay with how your contracts for these services are set up, whether you’re a design firm collaborating with another service provider, or you’re the end client.

I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know the fine points of the law, or how these would end up if they became cases and went to court. In the second case, the issue got resolved, everyone got paid, and the site went live. In the first case, that’s still pending resolution, but I’m confident Stuff Store will ultimately be taken good care of as Apple Design and our firm will ensure that happens, regardless of the circumstances.

As you saw in one of my other blogs, Austin is a big city…I mean a small town. My experience with Apple Design is that they are committed to acting with integrity even when it’s not to their immediate monetary advantage. They value their reputation in the marketplace, as do we.

Thank You
Thank you to everyone who showed up at our open house. We had about 75 guests and a lot of fun. I hope you all met new people, had fun hanging out with people you already met, and enjoyed the food, beer and wine. We still have cookies and beer. Want some?

Congrats to the following winners of our drawings:

John Langford of Langford Photography won the Mimobot Flash Drive
Derek Leenher of Bentley & Leenher Mortgage Consulting won the iPod Shuffle
Clarence Griggs of Corporate Investments won headphones
Jeff Bright of Bright Security Systems won some portable MP3 speakers

Special Guests
Everyone was a special guest at our Open House, but in particular, we enjoyed having Sophie, “The Schmitt Kidd” and her parents from Germany in attendance. Sophie was CJ and West’s foreign exchange student. Her parents came here to see Texas and travel a bit. Sophie and her parents left for Germany yesterday, the 17th of June. They thoroughly enjoyed everyone they met at the party. Thank you all for your kindness and hospitality.

Photo
Pictured here is West and Mary Gordon Spence, who is applying to be our next foreign exchange student after hearing all the fun we had with Sophie.

I’ve been struggling to find an analogy that adequately conveys the role I want to have in my company. I want a framework and a language we can use to structure our communication and interaction with each other. I’d like it to be something easy to understand, something everyone can visualize. This is important for a few reasons. For one, when they consider whether to involve me or not, they can apply this analogy to their situation, and make a decision on how to move forward. For two, I want them to understand what value I’m trying to add, and how their interactions, contributions, and reactions can impact my ability to do that role effectively.

In my head, I’ve had the “hunter” and the “farmer” analogy working for quite awhile. It comes from Thomas Hartmann, whose theory for the origin of ADD is that the ADD person is a hunter, and everyone who’s non-ADD is a farmer. This works perfectly for me, except for one thing. Sometimes the people who I’d consider “farmers” are insulted by being called this, even though I don’t necessarily consider this any kind of lesser role.

I had a great lunch yesterday with someone I met when I was moderating a panel. I think she’s brilliant, and we got into an excellent conversation about what a company leaders role should be, and how employees at the company can view that role and understand the limitations and the necessary inabilities of that leader to respond to everything effectively if they want a successful company. She has her own analogy for it, but when I mentioned this analogy to my partner (who’s also my husband) he felt it has some of the same issues that the hunter and the farmer analogy had.

As I love analogies and stories as a way to help me and others visualize what I’m trying to communicate, my brain spent the better part of the night and this morning searching for another one. So here’s what I came up with:

My role should be like the editor of a publication. I should determine the strategic mission of the publication, explain to the public why they should invest in advertising or read the magazine. I might be involved in landing big advertising accounts, forming initial relationships with printers, fulfillment people, distribution channels, etc. I should have a public-facing role.

Internally, I might be responsible for the initial communication of how we’re going to do things, I might be responsible for planning and then communicating the direction of a specific issue, making sure the items submitted from writers fit that issue and the publication’s overall mission, edit where necessary to make sure everything fits in the issue, do final review to make sure it’s all okay, and ensure there’s value in advertisers’ investment in my publication.

Other employees should write the actual articles of that issue, and sell and create monthly ads. Additionally, they should be responsible for some of the editing choices, like should someone use the word “cajole” or “convince” in their article. Other employees should also help with printing, or distribution of the actual magazine, making sure writers get paid, and advertisers pay.

If that lead role gets too consumed in the day-to-day tasks of running the publication, there’s not enough time or energy for the vital strategic planning and action critical to the continued success and growth of the publication.

The employees of the company need to perform their role as much as possible with the guidelines given by the lead role.

Equally important, I think the person in the lead role needs to make sure they’ve adequately communicated the boundaries and strategies, along with the reasons for these boundaries and strategies, give some initial guidance to the employees so the boundaries and strategies are getting implemented correctly on an operational and tactical level, make corrections when necessary, and then just let the employees get the publication out.

I think the leader also needs to learn that sometimes there’s going to be typos while the employees learn. The leader needs to have enough security in place for recovery from errors that, while the typo is not ideal, it doesn’t shut the publication down. There’s nothing like a public typo for teaching someone how to do better next time. The leader needs to let the employees learn that lesson.

NOTE: Mind you, with all this said, I’ve never been an editor at a publication, so perhaps I have that role all wrong. I’ve just seen in my business how much more effective it is for our company if I function when I’m the “editor” of an implementation rather than the implementor itself.

Your Turn: What do you think of this analogy? Are you a company leader, or an employee? What analogies do you use in your business to communicate roles and describe abilities?

Ecards have become a bit passe….but here’s some e-cards that will get attention!

http://www.someecards.com/

Just make sure you’re sending them to people with a solid sense of humor.

Austin is a big, I mean small, town.

I went to a presentation the night of the storm in Austin (May 13th?). It was sponsored by Leadership Austin and Bootstrap Austin. Stew Friedman, the author of “Total Leadership” talked about getting Home, Work, Community and Self in the right balance for each of us.

I’m about to read this book. I’d love to hear your comments on this presentation or this book if you read it or attended.

Jott is one of the best productivity, keep-track-of-it tools I’ve found in a long time!

Here’s whatcha do:

1. Go to jott.com, sign up for a free account.
2. Put the toll-free number in your Crackberry or iPhone, and assign a speed-letter to it (I used “J” - pretty original thinking there.)
3. Next time you have a bright idea that you don’t want to forget while you’re driving?
4. Press J.
5. Leave a message.

It translates your voice into text, and emails it to you.
Can’t read it’s “writing?” It attaches the sound file to your email, too, so you can listen to yourself.

What else can you do with Jott?
My two favorites:

1) Jott other people who have Jott.
2) Jott Remember The Milk

Jott other people who have Jott

1. Get your friends to sign up for Jott. Better yet, get people to whom you delegate tasks to sign up for Jott.
2. Then, add yourselves to each others’ accounts.
3. Next time you have a to-do for them, or some brilliant observation you must share with them immediately, but you don’t have time to actually talk to them, call Jott instead.
4. When it says “Who do you want to Jott”, say their name.
5. Leave the message.

Now, they’ve been enlightened.

Jott Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is an online to-do list. It’s extremely easy to figure out and use. My two favorite things about Remember The Milk?
1) I can send an email to it, and it shows up on my to-do list.
2) I can Jott to Remember The Milk.

So, I’m driving, I think of something I need to do. I can Jott, but then it goes to my email, and I have to put it on my to-do list.Jott

Instead, now that I have them hooked up to each other, I say “Remember The Milk” (in monotone!) to Jott, and it puts the to-do on my Remember The Milk to-do list.

How cool is this?

Your Turn: What technologies are you using like this to save time or be more productive or keep track of it all? Bonus points for linking more than one together successfully!

I’ll admit, when I first heard about Twitter from my friend Steve, it looked like a lot of self-indulgent, distracting noise. Then a few things happened.

• I’ve been absorbing and learning alot about Social Media and communities, and doing a lot of thinking about the topic.
• I went to SXSW Interactive this year.
• I had a conversation with Steve (RippleOn) again at Stew Friedman’s lecture.
• Then, I had a conversation with Chris Justice (MegaJustice) from SparkSight about Twitter, who kindly took the time to show me a few things while we were in the middle of another conversation. (Chris and I multi-task)

And now?

I “get” Twitter, and it’s place in our communications, or at least I’m beginning to. My comparison when I was explaining Twitter to West, my business partner (and husband) is that Twitter is to instant messaging what email was to the phone.

When you want to talk to someone on the phone, you both have to be available at the same time (unless you’re leaving voice mails for each other.) You can have a short or long conversation. You do usually tend to talk for at least a few minutes, you do usually exchange at least a few sentences. On the phone, you’re also usually talking to only one person, although of course there’s conference calls. Those people still need to be available at the same time (if you’re not recording for later playback.)

Email takes that conversation to a different plane. You can still have a “conversation” with someone, only you do it on your own time. I send you an email in the morning, you send me one back a few hours later, I reply again in the afternoon, you reply in the evening, and we consider this a conversation. With email, you can copy as many people as you like, and those people can generally reply to your email.

On email, I can stay in touch with far more people in an efficient, effective way than I ever could if I had to call them.

Instant messaging for the most part also requires both people be available at the same time. Yes, you can leave chats for each other when they’re not there. And usually, you’re just chatting with one person at a time, although of course, you can have a chat room, or you can have three way chats, and you can have multiple chat windows up at the same time.

With Twitter, you can put out one message, and it “twitters” everyone who’s following you. And they choose whether they’re being instantly notified or not, but most of the time, they choose to go to twitter.com to see the information. So again, it’s on their time, and you’re touching many more people than you would normally touch at one time with chat.

Of course, there’s all kinds of permutations around this, but this is a general summary of what Twitter is for those of you who are just baffled.

Oh, and my Twitter name? cjromb. I know; it’s not very original. But I want my friends to be able to find me, so I can put pithy comments in for their enjoyment and amusement.

YOUR TURN: What’s your Twitter name? I’d love to follow you, too.

Here’s the shortest explanation I can give:

Web 1.0 - You needed a programmer to tell the world what you had to say.

Web 2.0 - You can say what you want to say without ever talking to a single person who knows HTML.