That marks the end of the Minnebar coveage for 2008 - I’m off to the Metrodome to watch my beloved Boston Red Sox beat up on the Minnesota Twins.

Now in the discussion session on “How to build a kickass web development team”.. facilitators are from Bloomington, Minnesota web development firm Sierra Bravo.

“some of our success has come about by growing the talent within…”

Star Tribune’s project manager for the internet - “my development team is moving onto another floor - how do we handle this when we’re used to just yelling over the cubicle wall?”

interesting discussions here about roles within a team - do you have dedicated project managers or not? Where should this go?

Be careful of pigeonholing people into specific roles - better to develop generalists rather than focus too much into one single area…

typical team for Sierra Bravo is 2-3 developers looking at a 400 - 1000 hour project

SB guys: “our philosophy is that collaboration is king. within the interview process we’re asking ‘if you have a really hard problem, what are the steps to solving that problem’”.

“we encourage people to get up talk each other - move about, etc”

“we encourage you to work closely together and have alot of collaboration… we want to give you power to innovate…”

innovation clearly becomes more challenging as a company grows…

in-house development teams have different priorities and roles..

U of MN Medical Education group - no web development team (formal, anyways) - team of 3 that have taken on web development but lack a project manager - just now putting some processes into place to deal with this..

discussion about how to expand teams with getting better & stronger people on the team… how do you build a cohesive & effective group.. getting bodies is a challenge…

getting out and into your local user groups is a good method for building our your teams.. if your team is happy and content then you’ll have an easier time recruiting folks…

How do you ensure a cultural fit within your corporation or team? — is it about the interview process? Formal and informal?

Do you require code samples from programmers or design samples from designers? Mix of about 50/50 in the room on this question…

Code samples do allow you to look at how the individual tries to solve the problem…

Sitting in on the panel discussion about Distributed Teams. I was asked to be a part of this panel and declined since my main intent here at Minnebar was to cover the vent as a blogger/journalist for The Blog Herald.

How do you build a strong distributed team for your projects(s) will be the theme here.

“Distributed ain’t all that…” says one panel member.

“Have any of you worked with a remote team that has gotten it done better, faster, and chaper because of the remote team?”

“Have you had any issues with passing the work back and forth amongst the teams”

Structure of the team will be part of your success - particularly with software projects

Is it advantageous to have a remote team or not?

Audience member: “With distributed teams, the management overhead can really become part of the problem…”

Economic value of the dollar is also impacting the ability to offshore..

24×7 reality with the right software and management solutions can make problems be solved faster - and push a product forward in a much faster timeline - but this experience is relatively rare.

Barry Hess: “I’m the small team guy here… our company is all about the people. New designer at the company is based in Portland because he was the best guy that applied…”

Cost reduction / cost savings is the driver in some companies - china/india is much cheaper than US based labor…

“How many jobs are moving overseas - is this what is driving some of this…”

U of MN CompSci Professor: “Population since 2001 here at the U of MN in computer science is way way down… the bubble had an impact…”

Some companies shift to outsourcing because they can’t manage software projects - so they outsource or offshore in order to drive down costs… and then find themselves with an even bigger issue because now they can’t manage distributed software projects…

audience member: “a distributed team is much more than just designers and programmers”

We’re finally getting to talking about tools rather than some of this philosophical stuff around whether or not this is the right thing to do…

“how do you convince your client or employer to allow you to work remotely” as your own distributed team? Rather than having to work onsite… - trust and having a personal connection is a big part.

“sometimes communication amongst distributed teams is better because in a colocated team we talk more than we document and build processes correctly from the start…”

“sometimes you have to distribute a team in order to increase productivity…”

Many tools mentioned - including most of the 37signals applications.

“is anyone using sharepoint? does anyone like it?”

Google is using high def video conferencing on all day in order to have two halves of one team work together across multiple locations (Mountain View, CA + Boulder, CO)…

I’ll be writing a follow-up post later about how to manage distributed teams along the lines that I’ve seen during my time as a blogger and blog network owner as well.

The Disqus blog commenting service is catching on - with many popular blogs such as Scripting News signing on to use the service.

VC Fred Wilson talks about three reasons to use Disqus in a recent post:
2a) Email Replies - Disqus emails every comment to the blogger. If the blogger wants to reply to the comment, he/she simply replies to the email and it is posted as a reply (with the indent described above). This feature, which I requested the day I met/saw Disqus for the first time, is the single best thing about Disqus and has transformed my blog comments because I can now participate in them in real time throughout the day as the conversation develops. This is a BIG DEAL.

Now in the panel discussion on State of the Technology in Minnesota with speakers from Microsoft, Split Rock Partners, Dow Jones, Geek Squad, and elsewhere…

Discussion around the level of talent in Minnesota - and seeing more folks moving back to Minnesota from silicon valley in order to work for some organizations here. Adobe has had an office here since 1995 in Arden Hills, MN, for example.

Split Rock Partners - big booster of talent locally - more than $200m invested in local tech startups and in the area of healthcare as well… but don’t kid yourself - it’s a brutal competitive marketplace.. we just believe that this standard is being hit on a regular basis here in Minnesota - but there does happen to be more density of that sort of activity in Boston, Austin, and elsewhere..

“we need more of… people who get the business of software” - Dan Grigsby

“it’s about leadership - great leadership is hard to find, they don’t grow on trees… U of MN is not a top Computer Science School.. it’s not a top school for business”… This is interesting since Carlson School of Business is a Top 25 business school…

Geek Squad founder: “so when geek squad acquired best buy… ;)… my dream is to turn the death star into a theme park, not to blow it up… no one is trying out the $500 idea within best buy because is costs us $100k to get the $500 idea through the theme park…”

Robert / Geek Squad: “Maybe we could get an API that would cause the IT department to calm down…”

“How do we knock down this barrier to risk… with open source, there’s nothing holding you back…”

Concept of Silicon Prairie as a nickname for the midwestern technology centers, like Minnesota….

“doesn’t take alot of money to write software.. it takes guts.. be bold and do what you think is right.. especially in corporations, it’s appreciated much more than you might think it is…”

“great example of big large successful companies like Skype.. rumor is that no two developers live in the same city.. we do not have to look at geography as a huge limiter…”

If you were in charge of the social networking industry, what social product or service would you offer?

WordPress has always been defined as “social” when it comes to creating an online presence and community, after all, a blog is all about community building, which differentiated it from a static HTML site.

I see many of today’s social networking services as accessories to your blog. No matter where you go around the web, you can always point to your blog like a virtual business card and resume. “Check out my blog! See what I can do!”

However, Matt Mullenweg and others want to really push the limits of what social means in social networking and put WordPress at the center of your social experience online. Their first steps came with the release of the Prologue WordPress Theme and the incorporation of BuddyPress. They are hard at work to make it even more “social”, though what that means is my question.

Let’s brainstorm. What would that look like? If you were in charge of social networking around the world, what would you want on your blog to make it more social and connect all the online social with your blog as the center focal piece?

Statbot has taken a look at the all-time leaderboard for TechMeme.

Of course, no one should be surprised to find that TechCrunch is at the top of the list…. interesting data, however, nonetheless…

U of MN professor teaching the session - also works at IBM.

First mashup - Mapdanjo. In the words of one participant “most crap thrown up in one place”

Again, audio/visual problems in this session (same room as last session).

Some of the mashups allow for integration of behind the firewall information as well - he’s referring to Google though as “the google” which is entertaining… Google Maps can also be brought inside the firewall completely through some of their licensing options…

IBM has an internal Map Analytics ‘2008′ application with a whole ton of options - but unfortunately it appears to be internal only at the current time… The capabilities are pretty impressive though…

Solutions could look like: Trusted secure reusable information services + web 2.0 + data visualization. Everything from metadata and web 2.0 information merged with various business problems to create unique internal mashups…

Now in the 10am session on Social Search in the Corporate Environment here at Minnebar.

Presenter is Rich from Honeywell Labs - he built the first websites for Honeywell back before the graphical website days when most folks were browsing using Lynx and other text online web browsers.

Original blogging platform at Honeywell was Movable Type under their commercial license approach - we’ll find out in a bit if he’s still using that internally. Session will be focused on social media and search within a large corporation.

Honeywell using alot of open source based software within the firewall for social media and social work.

Appears that they are using Connectbeam for social media search inside the firewall - and also using a Google Search Appliance for internal search. Mmm, I’d love one of those at some of my clients.

Connectbeam integrates with Exchange Server, if that’s your poison, and integrates with internal Google search appliances as well as external Google searches as well. It’s not an issue integrating services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and others into the Connectbeam platform. Interesting..

Unfortunately, his projector is not working so we may go without any live examples…

<5 minutes later> PROJECTOR IS NOW BACK UP. Yay

Connectbeam appears to integrate directly into Google Search and other search engines - displays bar on the right with related internal content and tags…

10 licenses for $1k - rather cheaper than what I would have probably expected.. upcoming versions will have RSS feeds and an API…

Confluence is their wiki platform - $3k for a license… 16,000+ users are contributing to their wiki..

Wiki has a tag cloud already associated with it - plus can be tagged for use within ConnectBeam..also has a Sharepoint 07 tie-in.. very semantic web connections here… looks like the goal is to provide discovery within the enterprise..

Honeywell has tried for years to build a skills database to let folks connect with each other - the tagging within Connectbeam has really fulfilled that function.. Senior leaders (direct reports of CEO) are using the system to some extent - and want to foster more connectivity amongst individual contributors throughout the company…

Using some simple windows based feed readers inside the firewall - doing this to read competitive intelligence feeds and other RSS feeds within the corporation…

technical library showing information on various pre-built RSS feeds on key topics for research to keep team members and employees informed on their competition, etc.. using Compendex Plus for some of this (license fee involved)…

Honeywell running daily rss searches/google searches on the names of key engineers at their competitors

Rich’s blog is at eContent.

Sitting here at Minnebar in the session on “Small Teams, Big Results” along with the guys from August Ash, Inc., a web design firm here in Minneapolis.

The session is being led by Ben Edwards of Refractr. Ben happens to also be the co-organizer of Minnebar.

Ben’s key point here is that small teams can be as highly effective as large teams - and often without alot of the administrative overhead that large organizations bring with them. Being small allows many teams to simply “be nimble” - able to move with extreme agility as needed.

Should development teams be co-located with the business teams in larger organizations? Ben recommends that even if you can’t co-locate then try to find ways to incorporate the teams together through effective meetings… not just meetings to have meetings.

Small teams often have more accountability - “one’s ass can really be on the line”.

Many references made to later session on Distributed Teams which I’ll also be liveblogging this afternoon.

Audience is now stepping up and participating…

“Small Teams need smart generalists” that are good at a number of things - agile, self-curious, self-driven are all attributes that will be critical for success in this environment.

“Hire passionate and curious creators” - people who do creative things… and do so with passion.

Book references - “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman.. “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink - both excellent books.

“Ensure that team members can manage themselves…”

“Fire prima donnas and complainers” - great advice - the highest maintenance bloggers that I’ve had on small teams have been poisonous - I was happy when they chose to move on…

Asking audience for thoughts now… on how to build small teams

“Look for people that dabble in alot of different areas…” - look for who is building something and are naturally curious..

“Most business side folks don’t understand the soft fuzzy side of software project management estimation…”

Lots of discussion around firing prima donnas - some are saying they’re the best people on the team - others saying that they are poison…

“don’t overdo your processes” - empower your team to make decisions.. i.e. “empower or take power”

“do, don’t document”

“use unobtrusive tools” - best question so far today “Has anyone found an actual job for Microsoft Project?” hahaha… I am personally not a fan of MS Project - simple tools like BaseCamp is much easier to use..

Russell Beattie, who we earlier profiled as eating more than buttered macaroni as his startup Mowser failed to catch on, has sold the property to dotMobi.

Russell states on his blog:
This is great news - Miker and I got pinged by a surprising number of people and companies interested in Mowser, but we went with dotMobi because they were first, enthusiastic, and we felt they would provide a good home for our work. While we didn’t get rich on the deal by any stretch, I’ve been able to pay off a bunch of debts (and not worry about stuff like rent and food) which has been a huge load off my mind.

TechCrunch also covers the story.

I’m at Minnebar 2008, the unconference being held here at the University of Minnesota. We’re just about ready to kick this thing off.

There’s an anticipated 400 attendees here today - I’ll be twittering and liveblogging as the day goes on.

Drop me a note or @reply via twitter if you’d like to hook up.

Oh my.

Oh my oh my oh my. I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just say it outloud.

BusinessWeek are stupid!

Not the journalists or editors working there though, but the knucklehead that thought it was a good idea to tell users not to link to pages on the site, and put it in a user agreement (the only link to BusinessWeek you’ll find in this piece) at that, and then follow it up by telling you not to link should you do it, well, s/he’s stupid.

Web 2.0, oh yes.

I thought old media (this is ancient media really) had gotten a bit further than that, and an overall pretty good site/mag like BusinessWeek should be getting it, right? Well, obviously they’re not, as SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill found out, after wanting to link to an interview with him from his blog. My, my, very smooth.

What happens next? Well, Gawker picked it up, along with CNET’s News Blog, and I’m guessing this’ll make even more rings on the water.

So stupid. Really, it is stupid. Why would you say no to free traffic? Traffic brings ad dollars! Making it hard for bloggers and well-meaning sites like this makes them pissed up, and you end up on The Blog Herald with a cranky editor whining about your policies!

What do you think? How stupid is this?

I’m reading that Google is closing Hello, which apparently was (and is, as I’m writing this), a photo sharing service that came with Picasa. I guess they feel it doesn’t fill a purpose anymore.

This from Hello.com:

We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come.

We hope that you continue to enjoy the other sharing products Google offers including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk.

More over at Google Blogoscoped, with some links to the old version. Matthew Ingram says that Hello was a really cool app, in which case it’s a shame it closes.

On May 15, Google can begin doing something really cool with hello.com, a truly premium domain name. Too bad for the users of the defunct service though.

Sometimes our thoughts crystallize not through direct learning but through looking, comparing and contrasting. Such a moment happened for me after returning from Chicago and checking through Twitter and my emails. I saw a division between the openness, positivity, helpfulness, encouragement, passion of social media, with one or two individuals who, frankly, don’t want to get it.

I was jabbed with a tweet yesterday “all this ‘feelings’ stuff and those that gravitate to it are for those that cannot compete”. Oh dear, how sad. How many ways can one sentence be wrong? Now, of course, this particular tweet account is all about getting a rise out of people, so best not to give too much attention to it. Let’s instead look at the top of human achievement, according to Maslow:

Read through what Maslow said we as humans need and, you know, I think feelings do matter. It’s very much not just about competing for dollars. I do ok financially, I pay my bills, have nice vacations, buy boys toys, but if that’s all it was about I would still be in my corporate commuting day job.

Self-esteem, confidence, respect, morality, creativity. Sounds right to me.

As Terry Starbucker (via the New Radicals) says:

“Wake up kids. We’ve got the dreamers disease”

That’s what I like about blogs and bloggers. We achieve without climbing over each other, we cooperate, we assist, we share. The old guard can keep their cut throat business, I’m sticking to my touchy feely social media stuff because I like it :)

I recently interviewed Colleen Coplick about taking over Buzz Networker, and there I said that an interview with her focusing on PR was due on BloggerTalks. Well, it is up now, and Colleen shares her views on paid reviews, PR agencies sending out samples, getting famous in the social sphere, how to write a great press release, and more.

Check it out, over at BloggerTalks!

MyBlogLog have added some new stuff, since the obviously get that we’re not monogamous when it comes to online apps and social networks.

Specifically, whenever you:

• post a question to Yahoo Answers
• share an item on Google Reader
• post a video on Seesmic

MyBlogLog will post those events and make them part of your New with Me page.

All you need to do is to share your service ID for these services respectively. Good stuff.

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) in Chicago last weekend was a collection of moments I will remember for a long time.

Throughout the weekend, people kept asking what was different about this conference from all the other conferences they go to. It was clear it was different, and different from the first moment. Why?

Was it because it was a group of bloggers? I’ve been to blog events and while that was part of the reason, it wasn’t the whole reason.

After the first pre-conference party, Joanna Young of Confident Writing made an attempt to explain it. She said that so many business conferences are filled with attendees that arrive with an agenda. It’s all about them and what they can get. It’s all about grasping the opportunities. Admitting she hadn’t been prepared for the openness, she struggled to make sense of it. I told her that there is something special about social bloggers. They don’t arrive to such events ready to grasp and grab. They arrive with open hands, waiting for whatever drops in.

As fans of Liz Strauss, the leading expert in the art of the blog conversation and online community building and producer of SOBCon, the people within the room in Chicago read each others blogs. Even if they didn’t, they had some notion of the type of blogger they were, and cut to the chase. Unlike other conferences, conversations didn’t start with “How do you do. Nice to meet you. What do you do?” There was no need to explain what blogging is or why it’s easy to get so passionate about it. We knew all that. We got right to the point.

“Tell me about you.”

It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about preconceptions or assumptions. These people were here for the connections, not the surface stuff. As showcased in the post-conference reactions, there was a level of honesty and sincerity that was extraordinary. People didn’t want to play the typical social games. They wanted to get right to the heart of the issues. No holds barred.

In her presentation, Liz Strauss made these important points that might help define the difference:

Customers: Is your traffic a reader or a customer?

Don’t sell your customers something they don’t need or what you think they need. Sell them what they want.

Make it about them.

How to be irresistible. They are all about Frosted Mini Wheats. The fiber appeals to the adult in me. The sugar appeals to the kid in me. If I don’t want breakfast, you need to tell me something to make me want them. Tell me they make a good snack or that they are good for me.

Head, heart, and meaning. Make the connection.

Make it about them. Sound familiar? For these bloggers, it wasn’t about them. Having learned that the strength in a successful blog is making the blog about the readers and giving them what they want, the conference attendees understood how to connect in person, too. Make it about them, not you. When you do, you’re more interesting, and they want to know you better. You make them want to come to you.

A lot of business connections were made this past weekend. And a lot more will develop over the next year or two. These connections will be stronger as the courtship dance was over before they ever met.

I’ve been to a lot of blog conferences and events, but there is something special about SOBCon. Maybe you and the attendees can explain it better, but I think Wendy Piersall of Spark Plugging summed it up very nicely:

SOBCon is like walking into a room of your best friends you have yet to meet.

We weren’t there for the day. We were there for the moments. And we got them.

It looks as Blog*spot users will soon be able to insert a ratings system in their Blogger blogs which will allow readers to rate an individual post from one star to five.

Unfortunately it seems as if they launched the feature prematurely, and the Google team has currently disabled the feature–at least for now.

(Blogger Status) Some users may be seeing star ratings on their posts without having opted in to this new feature. This is an experimental feature that was accidentally enabled on some users’ blogs. We’re currently working to remove star ratings on all affected blogs. In the future, you’ll be able to choose to opt-in to this feature; it won’t appear automatically.

Update: The Star Rating feature has been disabled for the moment.

Previously the only way Blogger users could insert star ratings (or something similar) was through OutBrain and Spotback, the former who previously raised $5 million in a financing round.

There is no word on whether a user will have to register for a Google account in order to rate, although if so, they will hopefully add OpenID users to the mix (since Blogger is an official provider now).

Celeb gossip blogger Perez Hilton, aka Mario Lavendeira, is set to launch his own line of clothing, to be sold exclusively in the Hot Topic chain of stores, as well as online.

“2008 is all about expanding the Perez Brand,” the blogger explained. “I talk about clothes all the time on my website. I have a good eye for what’s hot and what’s not.”

Perez, who says his celebrity website, Perezhilton.com, is more popular than MySpace among women aged 18-25, said he can’t wait to share his new line with fans.

The line will debut on June 6, includes T-shirts, hoodies, flip flops, and other extremely necessary stuff every Perez fan should own.

Let’s wrap this little piece of blogger branding news up with another nice quote from the announcement post:

“It seems natural to make products that my readers will love and hopefully some guys will rock it too,” he said. “Some people might even call me a perfectionist, well that person would be me! I’m very passionate about my brand. I have extremely high standards and I like to get my hands dirty!”

Yeah…

Hat tip!