Flat Rock, Michigan is a great little community of around 10,000 people. When I was recruited up from Ohio to serve on the Quicken Loans Leadership Team I had many options of where to live. We visited communities from Birmingham, to Ypsilanti, to Monroe, and of course the more obvious options close to work–Livonia and Novi. All of those cities were very nice and I am sure we would have been happy living in any of them, but when we visited Flat Rock it had a remarkable charm that we immediately fell in love with.

You see the people who have lived in Flat Rock much longer than I have created a remarkable community. The folks are friendly and they care about their city. They are hard working and have strong family values. The City is active–there is always something going on; a baseball game, a soccer match, a football game, a parade, or a picnic. We have great walking/biking paths, beautiful parks, scenic waterfronts, and state-of-the-art community center. These are the outward things that drew us to Flat Rock.

However, as our kids started school we discovered even more hidden treasures–the teachers, the schools, the parents, and most importantly the children.

Unfortunately, the economy is going to make maintaining the quality of our community and education system challenging. This is what made me proud when several people from the community of Flat Rock asked me to run for the School Board.

I wait to represent these great people during these challenging times. And I know we will continue to improve on the strong foundation those before me have created.

If you want to read more visit the Flat Rock School Board website or the Bill Rice for School Board Facebook Fan Page. Feel free to join!

The common thread to these warnings: the danger of a single company being the sole provider of Web plumbing, infrastructure, or coral reefs.

Twitter and URL shortening services have been the most recent warnings and both have show their frailty in the last couple of weeks. Naturally this is triggering a rethinking of how this plumbing is provided, maintained, and serviced in the Web ecosystem: Anil Dash’s Pushbutton Web, Google’s PubSubHubBub, RSSCloud.

The even more interesting trend is that it is bringing people back to their blogs–little corners of the Web they own. Maybe in all the fever of compressed attention spans we had forgotten that humans still need/want context. This is Om’s point that struck me–maybe we just misapplied many of these services function:

Late last year, following the Bombay terrorist attacks, I wrote about Twitter’s growing influence as a source of breaking news and how, in order to make sense of it all, we need more context. The best place to provide that context is now in blogs. To be sure, most people view Twitter as a microblogging service, but I’ve always seen it as micromessaging service — and the more I used it, the more I realized what a disjointed conversation it can produce.

It will be interesting as we sort it out. After all we always do. Dave Winer is leading the charge to have that sorting take place on our blogs, with #blogpostfriday.

This is an interesting article from Mary Jaksch, of Write to Done, on the benefits of collaboration over the more traditional author paradigm–copyrighting.

Exploring ides like co-creation, open-source, and the new rage in writing–uncopyrighting.

I am not sure I am totally convinced. Although, I do think that writing copyright on your works provides little protection in a digital world anyway. Point being, it might be simply a smarter marketing strategy to free your works.

What do you think?

The most important part of that preparation for me (especially since we are headed for the beach) is the reading list.

Here is a peek at mine:

• Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville
• Letter to the New President: Commonsense Lessons for Our Next Leader, by U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd
• Aquinas on Nature and Grace, edited by A.M. Fairweather
• The Arrogance of Power, by Senator J. William Fulbright
• A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law, by Justice Antonin Scalia

What have you read this summer? What is on your reading list?

I love great recommendations–leave a comment with your great finds.

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I recommend reading this New York Times interview of John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems. This is one of my favorite quotes in the article–Chambers describes how he was taught to deal with challenges:

I had an issue with dyslexia before they understood what dyslexia was. One of my teachers, Mrs. Anderson, worked with me and she taught me to look at it almost like a curveball. The ball breaks the same way every time. Once you get used to it, you can handle it pretty well.

Obviously challenges give us skills that make us better, stronger, and higher performing. Is that how you look at challenges?

Another software gem from Dave Winer–be a user and listen to users. Hopefully, he will continue to build out this advice, but I thought it was valuable to pull it out and highlight here:

1. Be a user. Develop apps you yourself have a use for. If you don’t have a feeling for what it’s like to be a user, you’ll never know how to evolve the products, and the stuff you learn in #2 will never make sense.

2. Listen to users. Learning how to code is straightforward, it takes time to perfect your skills, but it’s relatively easy compared to the skill of listening. I recently suggested to a VC friend that we start a company whose sole differentiator is that it strives to perfect the art of listening to users.

I think social media and Web 2.0 are making it easier for us to listen to users–trying to use our software as well as get things done. Unfortunately, we often don’t put the effort into making it easy to hear and listen for our users.

We just added GetSatisfaction.com and the Feedback tab (widget) into all of our applications. Hopefully, that will make it easier for them to talk to us. In addition, we are becoming more active in energizing and engaging our user community.

Still, the methodology for listening is not perfected. More thought and innovation is needed…

Ideas? What are you doing to listen better to your users?

You see, Stowe is thinking about appliances and applications that “eavesdrop” on our streams and take action. His idea swirls around travel and event planning. Mine, around sales.

Let’s take a look at what one of these applications might look like:

1. Tap into “microsyntax” and keywords to trigger capture
2. Default display would be a “river of news”
3. Interesting items (potential sales opportunities) can be:
4. • Flagged
   • Identified
   • Engaged
   • Tracked
   • Captured (into CRM)
5. Provide Social Graph explorer
6. Selectively capture microformats meta-data (i.e., contacts, tags)
7. Have API to simplify Social CRM implementation

I am really enjoying this project. More to come…

(photo: Milanella)

Unfortunately, it seems that the Web grew-up with an ethos of anonymity and mistrust. I believe this handicaps the social graph and users of the true richness it could enjoy.

Here is my current reading list and tools I am experimenting with…

Identity Reading List

1. Brad Fitzpatrick’s seminal article. “Thoughts on the Social Graph”
2. ReadWriteWeb’s review of Social Graph Concepts an Issues
3. Drew McClellan’s “Can Your Website be Your API?”

Identity Glue

1. OpenID
2. XFN
3. FOAF
4. Google’s Social Graph API
5. microformats
6. hCard

Examples and Implementations

1. Magdex Labs-Great example applications using Google’s Social Graph API
2. Google Profiles. Here’s mine.
3. Microformats in the Wild
4. Operator-Great Firefox Plug-in for browsing and working with microformats

My website redesign is my first experiment with using these social graph concepts. Expect it to continue being my identity and social graph playground.

Watch as BillRice.org becomes the authoritative identity for Bill Rice.

His to be released book,  Free: The Future of a Radical Price is about to hit the bookstores and Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers
and The Tipping Point) is already taking him to task. Gladwell’s challenge to Anderson’s premise is really one that argues the economic problems with a “free” economy, not really that it is not an eventually in the “future of radical pricing.” I don’t really dispute that argument. I also totally agree with the inherent yield of free:

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies.

However, I am inclined to support Seth Godin’s argument:

Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

This begs the question…What do we do about it? If consumer behavior has adopted the expectation how do businesses adjust and avoid the YouTube consequence (i.e., “Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year.” Gladwell)?

I think Dave Winer and Jay Rosen is giving some good thought to this issue in his essays on Rebooting The News.

I look forward to seeing if Chris Anderson has any conclusions in Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I suspect as the editor of a print magazine that charges, he is thinking hard about solutions.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Give ‘em something for nothing and make your fortune (guardian.co.uk)
• Gladwell, Anderson, Godin, and Bad Brains (idiomag.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell vs Chris Anderson: a very intellectual bust up (timesonline.typepad.com)
• Condé Nast’s Grumpy East Coast-West Coast Feud (gawker.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of “Free” (tech.slashdot.org)

Obviously, several people are thinking about getting more organized with their various work queues:

• Alex Payne of Twitter talks about his “life as queues.”
• ZenHabits expands on how he “clears queues.”
• Chris Brogan talks about “presence management chores.”

My queues are much like ZenHabits–simple and consolidated

• Gmail (lots of stuff consolidated and flow into a centralized email)
• Paper TODO list
• Twitter @’s and DM’s
• Google Reader (Shift happening to FriendFeed for me)
• Inbox folder on desktop with projects (.txt files)

What are your queues? How do you manage them?