So why was I sitting in a meeting that those very words were uttered in? To be honest I don’t know any longer. I sat in that meeting and listened to the opinions and discussions going on while quietly formulating my own opinions to bring up. See I don’t like to speak until I know what my stance in on something. This ability was a hard lesson to learn because well I tend to fly off the cuff sometimes and the outcome is never what I had intended it to be.

Back to this meeting where things changed forever. We don’t innovate here kept playing over and over in my head for a few seconds. Did I hear that right? Was a management level person really saying those words to their team? I must have heard it wrong right? Was I in the right meeting?

Nope, we don’t innovate here, was exactly what I had heard and yes I was in the right meeting. It was at that point my own ideas and opinions went back into the deep dark life sucking regions of my head. You know that feeling you get when you go from inside to outside of a building in winter that pushing or sucking of your being in or out of a building?

That’s exactly how I was feeling. I can say I physically felt myself withdraw for that meeting. I can also tell you I could feel myself mentally withdraw from that meeting as well.

We don’t innovate here, was the worst thing to say to a team that was seeing their moral drained from their souls for the previous 6 to 9 months and it was said at the worst possible time.

Traits for Leaders:

• Decisiveness – Make good decisions without delay! This is one of my pet peeves. Far too often people sit on their hands and think over a decision. This causes a ripple effect and slows the rest of the company down.
• Enthusiasm – Have a sincere interest & exuberance in what you do.
• Initiative – Don’t wait for orders Take charge! Prompt action when meeting new or unexpected situations.
• Integrity – Be honest and truthful about what you say and do.
• Justice – Be fair and consistent in your leadership practices. Favoritism will rip a team or company apart with time.

As a leader you are supposed to lead. You are supposed to inspire. You are supposed to be looked upon as what others are striving to become. Becoming a ‘yes’ man or woman is the last thing a leader should become. If you find yourself shying away from a challenge as a leader ask yourself if you are fit to lead your group.

1. You are not an employee. You are a partner.

1. You will be an employee of this company reporting to higher management.

2. We do not care when or where you do your work as long as the work is completed on-time and meets or exceeds the projects needs.

2. You must be in the office Monday through Friday 9 to 5.

3. Meetings are to last no longer than 1 hour at most. We prefer 30 minute meetings.

3. Meetings are in integral part of this company and as such can last for many hours at a time.

4. We encourage you to work with a wide variety of people from diverse backgrounds & skill sets on your projects.

4. Working within your department is the optimal way we function here at xyz.

5. The Customer is NOT always right. Educate them!

5. Listen to what your customer is telling you and adapt to their needs.

Clove is an Adobe Air application being built by a local company call Spice Apps. Yes you are getting the correct picture each of Spice Apps is name after a spice. This is a point that was made to us during the demo.

Clove is not the Normal Adobe Air app though. When you look at it for the first time you will think it’s a native application to either Windows or Mac, although we have only seen the Mac version at this point.

Another interesting part about Clove is its memory footprint. With Tweetdeck you might see a 300 to 600 MB memory footprint. With Seesmic you might see a 65 to 80 MB memory footprint.  This is where Clove is starting to differentiate is self more. It’s showing a significant improvement over both Tweetdeck and Seesmic. I still would like to test this out a bit more.

Clove is also making improvements to the ability for third parties to develop on their platform. Where both Tweetdeck and Seesmic are closed development environments Clove is a more open development environment. Spice App accomplishes this by allowing third parties to create plug-ins for Clove. This ability to create your own plug-ins is the most interesting aspect of Clove so to this point.

So are these improvements enough or is it another Tweetdeck or Seesmic in difference packaging? The verdict is still out for me and will be for the foreseeable future.

Other Clove Posts:

Albert Maruggi: Clove a Step Above Tweetdeck Hear Why
Julio Ojeda-Zapata: Clove social-media application may be the anti-Skimmer

The other word that got my attention was Humor. This word is thrown around sometimes without much action to solve a problem. It is also a word that I have been looking at today from an organizational perspective. Humor is critical to the development and continued innovation that a company is doing. It’s it’s playfulness that keeps people thinking and striving to attain what might at first seem un-attainable.

Failure isn’t something I go looking every time I open my mouth but it’s healthy to fail. It’s important to fail because it teaches you something about yourself and what you think you understand. The lesson a person learns from a failure is more knowledge then they would have had if they were to not even speak up.

In my case a peer asked what the company was thinking about a possible event in January and if that events room nights could be counted towards 2009 room night goals. After a minute of discussion on this I opened my mouth to bring in the social media aspect of this. The suggestion I had was to place a coupon code on our Facebook and Twitter pages along with a link to our booking engine. This would require us to work with local venues to get buy-in and participants for the promotion.

Silence fell over the room for a few seconds. Then the chatter started again. The consensus was the social media tie-in would not work because venues would not go for it. They would want as much as they could get per item or room and would not bite on a tie-in that offered a discount or incentive of some sort.

So I went back to my desk and started to work on other things. Then it hit me why not take the same idea and adapt it. Instead of hotels why not Car Rentals, Metro Transit, restaurants or bars?

This is why failure is a good thing. It keeps a person thinking and adapting to the situation at hand or approaching.

When has failure helped you to adapt?

“Don’t settle”

These words still ring true today. Whether you are just starting out, made it to the peak, or somewhere in between these words should always be on your mind no matter what your background is. These 2 simple words are all about passion. They are about what drives a person to do things they normally wouldn’t do in the first place.

If you have a thought or ideas don’t just keep them to yourself. Express it to other you might be surprised at how contagious passion can be. You might be surprised at the number of people who had the same idea or thought a few years back. You might even be surprised to find out that the idea or thought you mentioned leads to some change.

“Don’t settle” is even more important to someone working at a company with some ridged structure because it will help you get through those hard times. “Don’t settle” may even help you break through the structure and grow professionally and even personally.

“Don’t settle” should be a rallying cry. “Don’t settle” should keep you looking. “Don’t settle” should keep you Questioning. “Don’t settle” should keep you driving for a goal.

Never settle for second best or it is what it is.

MISSING: Geek/Developer/Creative TRUST!

I’m missing something and I’m hoping you all can help me find it.  It’s gender neutral. It speaks with a passion for what it believes in.  People call it Geeks, Nerds, Artsy, Modern, Thoughtful, Innovative, Brilliant & Disruptive to name a few things. It looks for an outlet for its passion.

If you know of where to find it in Minnesota let me know.

Email: me (at) davidnewberger (dot) (com)

Twitter: davidtc

A few weeks ago I sent out this tweet in frustration with some things going at work.  That frustration is still there but I’m keeping it under the surface and not visible to people for the most part.  Since that tweet I’ve found the reason for the frustration is an outlet for the kind of thinking that frees a person from the day in day out work in an office. You know that creative, pie in the sky, no limits, outside the inside the outside box type of thinking that some thrive on.

I was surprised when I only got 1 response to the request. I also only got 1 ReTweet as well. Not really what I was hoping for but oh well.

Yesterday morning there was again some movement in that direction of thinking. There were sparks of ideas. There were off shoots. And there was even some off the wall thinking. This movement can be attributed to meeting up & having coffee with someone else who thinks in some of those same directions. That movement was all it takes for my mind to start thinking more and more in that direction.

It also made me realize how much affect the Silicon Valley type of thinking has sunk into every nook and cranny. And the last time I was in the valley was 2000. Since then I have moved around and finally landed here in Minnesota in 2005.

I really don’t want to have to move to either the east or west coast to find what I’m looking for.  I would much rather see Minnesota become another developer /creative trust that it should be. The only way for this to happen is for developers / creative types to meet with a goal in mind the breathing of life into or the decimation of an idea.

Take an idea that a participant of the group has and throw everything we have at that idea for a short period (no more than a  month) of time and move on to the next idea a participant may have. By throw everything I’m talking the whole house including the Kitchen sink and then adding the houses and sinks from all sides to that. Bring outside people in from outside fields to add to the mix like an anthropologist or sociologist or a space alien if we can find one. Kidding that last one was to see if you all are still with me.

Hopefully I have made my point.

The economist.com has a great story on innovation from the perspective of Evan Williams, founder of blogger and twitter. In it he says there are 3 rules to innovation

1. Genuinely new ideas are stumbled upon
2. New Ideas are by definition hard to explain to others.
3. The idea seems obvious in hindsight.

This is exactly right I think. I try to explain blogging, podcasting, and social media to people and I get blank stares. Sure others are explaining it as well but they have more success then I. For me it is in the enterprise that I have the blank stares. If I talk with friends and collogues it is a different story.

How long has Simpy been around?

The Simpy idea is an old one. The timeline is roughly as follows:

I started thinking about it and tinkering with it in 2002.

After going through lists of neutral, easy to remember, and possibly interesting names and available domains, I decided to go with Simpy.

The simpy.com domain was registered in June 2002. In the beginning, I worked on Simpy slowly and part-time. Finally, I released the first version of Simpy to public in May 2004. Since then I’ve tried to make a new release every month or two. Here’s the full history of Simpy releases.

Why was Simpy Started?

It sounds like a cliche, but I started Simpy out of a personal need. I’ve always been interested in information gathering, analysis, extraction, and retrieval. I (and everyone else with a web browser) had this nice collection of bookmarks inside the browser, but no ability to find anything in that potentially rich collection of information. You may know that you once bookmarked a site about insert your topic here, but you couldn’t really find it in the haystack of folders and subfolders. There was no bookmark search inside the browser. There was no full-text search that everyone was already used to from daily Web search engine usage. There was no way to check which of the bookmarks have gone bad (404) or have changed their locations on the Web. When you found a web site at work that you wanted to bookmark in your browser at home, you had to resort to methods such as emailing yourself the URL. And then came the problem of filing. Which category, which folder or subfolder does each bookmark go into? What happens when you want to file a bookmark in more than one folder? And what happens when you want to find this bookmark later? You have to remember exactly which place in your folder hierarchy you saved the link. Impossible! Slow! Tedious! Welcome tags!

Where do you see Simpy in 5 years?

While I think I solved all of the problems that I initially saw with bookmarking, new problems and new ways of doing old things always come up. People who use services like Simpy quickly adopt the basic functionality, establish their usage patterns, learn that more can be done and had, and then they demand new features. I add the new features, and the whole cycle repeats indefinitely. When it comes to features and functionality, where Simpy goes in 2006 and beyond will largely be dictated by the community of Simpy users. Simpy is lucky to have a great group of loyal, smart, and advanced users who help push Simpy forward by suggesting new ways of improving it.

To communicate with the users, Simpy has 2 mailing lists: simpy-user, for regular Simpy users, and simpy-dev, for those who want to build tools around and on top of Simpy. In addition, there is the blog that accompanies the service .

Personally, I hope that Simpy remains a fun and exciting project for me, and as long as that is the case, I will continue running it, evolving it, and creating small revolutions here and there.

What do you think Simpy is doing better than other services of its kind and why?

As I already mentioned, I’m in love with information. This love is one of the reasons why I’m involved with Lucene, a very popular and high-quality open-source search engine library developed under the Apache Software Foundation brand, which led to Lucene in Action that I co-authored with Erik Hatcher. Naturally, I put a lot of value in search, and thus Simpy has always had the best search functionality compared to other similar services.

To make the long search story short(er), with Simpy you can enter all kinds of queries that let you really zoom in on the information you are after. Topics and Topic Filters are extremely powerful ways of watching others’ bookmarks, and discover new sites with minimal effort. All you need to do is find authorities on topics that interest you, subscribe to those people, and watch over their shoulders. Unlike other services’ single “Inbox” feature, with Simpy you can have any number of Topics and any number of Topic Filters. Topic Filters are simply saved searches with a scope of a Topic, which means you can use the same expressive power that you get with the regular search. The Notes feature is also very handy, as it lets you select a piece of text on any Web page, save it and tag it for later retrieval. Not many other bookmarking services have this features, if any. There are other features that put Simpy ahead of others, and some of them are mentioned in “Why Simpy over del.icio.us” blog entry. The entry is from August 2005, and since then Simpy has advanced through several releases.

My favorite new feature is the Group functionality, which, I think, makes Simpy truly social and different from other “social” bookmarking sites. One of my pet peeves is the common misconception that a service is “social” simply because its users have no choice but to make all their information (bookmarks in this case) public. I think”social” is the wrong adjective to use here. The analogy I often make in my head is this: Humans are social creatures. We have a circle of friends and acquaintances. We share some things with that group (or groups) of people. We chat with them more often than with strangers. We do not chat with just anyone and everyone on the street. Thus, I like to distinguish between making the information public and sharing information with a group of selected people. It is the sharing with a selected group that makes a service “social”. This is why Simpy has the Group functionality. I’m intrigued by human social behavior and much of what I do with Simpy are emulations of real life.

Where do you think Simpy needs work and why?

There are ways to make Simpy even more social and suitable for information discovery, and I plan on improving that facet of Simpy. Also, I’m not an UI expert, and while many people like Simpy’s UI, I have been told that it is too busy, so I hope to find a way to make it cleaner in the coming months. I will also be bringing forth some buried and therefore underutilized features, such as Topics, Topic Filters, and Notes. It was quite interesting to watch people leave del.icio.us to join Simpy when Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us. A few days after the initial wave of newcomers, I saw an emerging pattern in the type of feedback I was getting. A lot of ex-del.icio.us users were requesting the same 2-3 features that they were used to. Clearly, these features will be included in the upcoming release.

What have some of the mistakes been that Simpy has made and why do you think they are mistakes?

I’d like to think that I haven’t made a lot of mistakes with Simpy. However, I wish that I had had the ability to devote more time to Simpy during the initial phase in order to make it public sooner. On the other hand, during the same time, I was very involved with Lucene. Had I not been as involved with Lucene, I probably would not have had the opportunity to co-author Lucene in Action, which was a great experience that paid off in many direct and indirect ways, personally and professionally.

Why should people use Simpy over other services?

Simpy’s strength lies in its rich set of features, many of which other services do not have, such as powerful search functionality that includes full-text search, Groups, Notes, Topics, Topic Filters, etc.

Simpy is completely open, in the sense that that it provides an API that lets users and developers take their data out of Simpy, manipulate it, integrate it with other applications and services, remix it, back it up, etc. From day one, I provided the export feature, as I did not want Simpy to be one of those unfriendly services that keep users locked in. I want people to use Simpy by choice, because they find it useful, and not because they have no way to leave without losing all of their data and hard work. The door is wide open.

In addition, the smart users that I already mentioned make the social aspect of Simpy even more enticing and beneficial for everyone in the Simpy community.

Where do you see web based bookmarking in 5 years?

Five years is a long time in Internet terms. Currently, only a small fraction of regular Web users is aware of the Web-based bookmarking options, not to mention services with abilities beyond the core bookmarking functionality that’s been around since the Mosaic times. Until this fraction increases and moms and dads around the planet start bookmarking and tagging pages with the same ease they use email today, I would still consider Web-based bookmarking in its infancy.

As I said earlier, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the social aspect of bookmarking. I think people will increasingly find that they can benefit by sharing selected pieces of information with one another, the same way they share data in various file sharing networks (legally, of course). Similarly, I think people will realize that social bookmarking and similar services make for a great”micro-market”. I see a lot of exciting and innovative things that could happen within this “micro-market” ecosystem, for example, with individuals benefiting from sharing their content and expertise. I would like Simpy to be part of that evolution.

What hurdles do you and web bookmarking in general have to overcome?

The bookmarking services are still used mostly by more advanced users. While people and companies running bookmarking services can help speed up the adoption process by making things simpler, I believe that the process can be sped up by only so much. The rest will come naturally, as the space and its users mature and evolve. Just like everything else in life. As for me, I need a clone.

What else would you like to let people know about Simpy that I may not have asked?

I think we covered most of Simpy one way or the other, but it may help to summarize a few things:

Simpy offers a demo account (demo/demo), so people can try it out before signing up. When they sign up, they can sync their bookmarks from del.icio.us or upload their bookmarks (pretty much all browsers are supported). Bookmarks and tags are imported in real time and become full-text searchable shortly thereafter (think My Very Own Mini Google). Simpy has a unique set of tag management features that, I believe, cover all aspects of tag manipulation.

I think that a few other special features are worth emphasizing:

* Simpy integrates nicely with web browsers through a plugin or a bookmarklet.
* The REST API allows for integration of Simpy data with other applications and services.
* In addition to Web pages, users can save, tag, and search any linkable type of data (an image, an audio or video file, any type of document be it PDF, Word, or plain text, etc.).
* Through the Notes feature, users can save, tag, and search any piece of text of any length from any source (Web page, Word document, email…)
* Users have a choice of making their bookmarks public, private, or share them with one or more Groups. Groups is a great feature that allows users to collaborate with colleagues, friends, or family.
* The Topics feature, on the other hand, lets users lurk and watch other people’s public links.
* Complementing the Topics feature, Topic Filters let users weed out uninteresting links and focus on links that truly interest them.

While I’m the lonesome warrior behind Simpy, and I only get to work on it during my free time, I have derived great pleasure from building it, watching it grow, and working with a great group of users. Their enthusiasm and insights have provided tremendous support. I hope that together we can push Simpy to where no tag has gone before.