Florida Ramblings

I was just passing Palm Coast on I-95 this morning when I noticed an Osprey flying above the road, clutching a fish.  If you drive most anywhere in Florida south of Orlando or along any of the coasts you can spot the big nests atop trees, utility poles, and transmission towers.

It reminded me of why I like Florida so much.

I can be in my car and within 45 minutes or so be watching wild dolphins swimming in the Banana River, or drive the other way and see Manatees in Homossassa Springs.  You can’t pass by any large-ish body of water without seeing a gator or an otter or something you don’t see most other places.

While living in Celebration I was lucky enough to see Bald Eagles from time to time, which was always unexpected and always amazing.

I’ve never seen a Florida Panther in the wild, but hope some day to be able to – hopefully at a distance where I and the cat don’t soil ourselves.

Most of us locals really take the natural beauty of where we live totally for granted.

My only regret today – by all measures beautiful – was that I didn’t have time to take A1A on the way back home.

Maybe next trip.

Macgregor – OYHA Most Improved Player Squirt A

Building Trust and Authenticity – While You Sleep!

When we watch a television show regularly, or listen to a favorite radio personality, we internalize a connection. We come to know these people superficially, perhaps even a little about their background and families. But over time, even though we may never meet them in person, we do believe we know them on some level. Stalkers of course take this internal dialogue to a dangerous level but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

What comes to happen over time as we have these internal dialogues about the people we see and hear all the time is that we begin to form a picture of how trustworthy they are, how authentic or true is the picture we have of them versus the works and deeds that we are able to see them do when they are not in front of a mic or camera.

For example, this week we got to see Michael Phelps smoking a bong. Not quite the narrative that all of us have been fed by the media since China this summer. Trust has been broken and more than a few people now question how authentic the story line about Michael really reflects the person behind the image.

In out interactions on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter we have similar interactions with our online communities – though we may not consciously know it or even think about it. Fred Wilson had a post today about how important it is to have a consistently identifiable avatar across your online presences.  Why is it important?  Because it helps people construct that internal image of who you are (or at least, appear to be) over time, using a familar and easily recognizable touchstone.  It helps build your virtual bank of trusty personal capital.

Online, it’s much harder than in real life to verify how authentic the image projected by a person or company is versus the real entity behind the image.  Ultimately, it comes down to performance – how consistent are the messages coming from you online, do you do what you say you will do when you say you will do it, is your work consistently high quality, can you work a process to a successful conclusion.

You have to do something – positive or negative – in order to give others something to compare their internal dialogue of who you say you are to something more approximating who you really are by how you perform or what you do.  Whatever that happens to be.

But the operative word is “Do.”

I am a noisy friend to have online.  It’s on purpose, and has a reason.

The reason is this – my clamor will help someone visualize what my thought processes are, how I go about conducting business, and what my reputation is online.

And their internalization will either incent them to make a real personal connection with me at some future point – personally or professionally – in a way that has more impact than some schticky spiel about getting rich while you sleep.

Great Visit with VisualCV.com

I had a great visit with the fine people at VisualCV.com Monday and Tuesday of this week. They were kind enough to have me up for a “meet and greet” and we actually managed to get some good work done at the same time.

I can’t really say what we were working on… only that in the next couple of weeks the site will have some new features that will make creating and publicizing your personal VisualCV much easier, while creating higher visibility.

Funniest moment of the trip – for me, anyway – was when one of the VisualCV guys said that when he was told I was coming he was thinking of a 25 year old Shaun White type Social Media Guru.  Needless to say, I’m not THAT guy.

By way of disclosure, I have worked (and am working still) with VisualCV on projects.

A Little Love for an iPhone App

Well… at least not outright dislike anyway for myBloglines.

Thanks again Dusan for the very fair review.

UPDATE: I had written Dusan, and he provided an update on his blog about the communication.  His original synopsis of my email was not quite accurate – so, I’m putting the full text below for context.

Dusan,

Thanks for the review on myBloglines.  Very fair.

I hear you loud and clear on the feature requests you mentioned.

Some of the items need a little additional help from Ask.com on the API – I have a couple of messages into Eric Engleman (General Manager of Bloglines) but so far I haven’t been able to hook up with Eric – though we did speak briefly a little over a year ago when I launched a Facebook version of myBloglines (http://apps.facebook.com/mybloglines).  Would love to have Ask.com involved to make myBloglines as good a user experience as we can make it.

Again, many thanks for the mention.

David J. Hinson
President, Sumner Systems Management, Inc.