Hunch launches. It’s the first intersting thing to happen to “search” (aka finding information) since Wikipedia and Google. I am not sure if this will have the same scale of value, but in my smaller world it means just as much.

An interesting “manifesto” from the new Building 43 blog.  Although I’m a little confused by the name (and the fact that they’re partnering with Rackspace, which hosts (among all the other sites) 43things.com, I like the spirit with which it’s starting.

The trend I’m seeing is that businesses are jumping on the non-zero sum bandwagon.  By being open, responsive, attentive, generous, accepting, and friendly, all businesses both new and old stand a better chance of not only surviving, but liking themselves while they survive.

Here’s the full list because I think they’re greater as a whole than they are as separate points.

1. Live in real time. You’ll see several components on the site that incorporate Twitter and FriendFeed. We’ll be adding others, and we’ll be on Facebook and video sites in the near future. Your business and your life work at real time; so should your community.

2. Build on other people’s technology. We could have taken six more months and built our own forum, our own video distribution system, or our own content management system, but instead we just got started by using WordPress, Blip.tv and FriendFeed, among other technologies.

3. This is an industry-wide effort. You’ll see more than Rackspace and its customers here, and you’ll see things discussed here that won’t impact Rackspace’s business at all. At building43, we’re developing an industry-wide conversation about how to improve the Internet for everyone. We’ll help businesses and people use, and get excited by, new tools and technology.

4. Teach, don’t just hype. Hey, hype is important, especially for fanatics. When we get excited about something we love to hype it, and tell other people about it. But hype alone isn’t enough. We need to teach people how to use these new technologies, even ones we take for granted. You might know what an HTML tag does, or what FTP stands for, but many, many people and businesses don’t know what those things mean. And those are things from the 1994 web. Imagine how daunting stuff such as Open ID or Facebook Connect will seem to people who are struggling to learn the basics. Let’s try to get them there.

5. We’re a decentralized community. As much as we’d love you to visit building43 every day, we know you probably won’t. So we’ll publish to Twitter, to FriendFeed, to Facebook, to Blip.tv and to other communities.

6. Be open. That means all of our videos are licensed under Creative Commons so you can use the videos in whatever way you want. That means being transparent about where we’re going, what we’re doing, who we’re talking with, our goals, our successes, and our failures. As we build technology for the community, we’re going to aim to be as open as possible, giving away source code and building APIs that are simple.

7. Link to the best. I’ve been learning to do this on FriendFeed, where I’ve liked, or linked to more than 19,000 items. Please add your own links to great resources for people who are fanatical about using the Internet to help their business.

8. Be two-way in everything we do. That’s tough to do, even with technologies that let us listen as well as broadcast. But this community is a way for us to listen and learn, just as much as it is to talk and teach.

9. Build a community of friends. The Internet is a rough and tumble place. It’s easy to troll, to spam, to be a jerk, to argue. It’s hard to make friends and treat them well. We’re going for the hard road here. Why a community of friends? Well, we want to hang out with you around the world, and we like hanging out with nice people.

10. Stay up to date. We’ve watched other communities whither and die because, for whatever reason, they couldn’t keep up. We will be traveling the world, meeting with the best businesses looking for the newest thinking to share with you.

via The building43 manifesto.

The irony of doing this talk for Ignite (and the greatness of Ignite in general) is pretty awesome. And rather than write up a whole long post about it, I’ll summarize it into one line.

Pay attention to how great people pay attention.

I saw Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) speak last week at Seattle’s Central Library. I actually saw him speak when he was here a couple years ago, because I’m a huge fan of his book Status Anxiety. His newest book is called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and couldn’t have been released at a more appropriate time for me.

The talk started off with the interesting observation that both marriage and work have recently (as in, since 1750 or so) been conquered by the notion that they should, in their ideal state, be relationships of love. We should love who we are married to just as we should love our work. Mistresses and hobbies have (in theory) suffered in reputation. Or, perhaps they’ve just become even more suspicious.

Though, my experience is that hobbies have in some ways supplanted work as the primary “do it with love” occupation. In some circles, we talk almost entirely of hobbies when meeting new people rather than work. Perhaps these are more cynical circles, or perhaps it was just more popular in teens and 20s when none of us had found our career of choice yet. Talking about love at the same time as talking about working at Circle K or Pizza Hut was sort of out of the question.

Over the last 5 years or so, I’ve been enamored by the idea of amateurs. The self-taught, the scrappy, the people who do something they love simply for the love of it. Perhaps that is a sign that love has not only conquered the idea of work, but pretty much replaced it.

So what does it mean?

Are we better at a task when we love the task? Does it imply that a certain loving attention is paid to every detail? Or does it mean that we’re emotionally tied to our product, and become codependent on it? Is loving a job really necessary?

I think so, but am not 100% positive. Is love an unlimited resource? Can we all just produce as much love as minutes of the day, filling each one to the brim and sipping its rich content? Or, do we have a certain number of love pokerchips which we can choose to allot to our cat, our wife, our job, or our bottle of whiskey. I tend to believe that like strength, the more we love, the more capable we are of loving.

However, an important point that Alain de Botton made about meritocracy in another context may ring true here too. If we strive to reward merit, it implies that the unrewarded lack merit. If we only value those jobs we love, it implies that those jobs we don’t love lack value.

Some work, then, must remain in the “unlovable but full of value” category lest we live in a world of dirty toilets and unshoveled driveways. For those jobs, and many others that are equally unlovable but perhaps not as visually stunning, perhaps respectful work is a better term than loved work.

Excited to see this film.  Wonder when it opens in Seattle?

“Food, Inc.” begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from. Along the way Mr. Kenner attempts to expose the hidden costs of a system in which fast-food hamburgers cost $1 and soda is cheaper than milk.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000,” Michael Pollan says as the film opens.

via Film – Robert Kenner’s ‘Food, Inc.’ – The Perils of Mass-Producing What People Eat – NYTimes.com.

Seems to me like a dozen things are converging and this is going to be a lot more accepted today than it would’ve been 2 or 5 years ago.

I’m about as excited as you might expect about the new iPhone announcements tomorrow morning at 10am.  John Gruber’s predictions seem about right to me.  The video camera with a really slick way to upload to YouTube or Vimeo would be the killer feature for me.  That, and all of the new software of course.

I expect Apple to announce updated iPhones with significantly faster processors, twice the RAM, and twice the storage. I expected prices to remain the same as the current lineup: $199/299 for 16/32 GB, respectively. The video camera is going to be a major selling point.

via Daring Fireball: WWDC 2009 Predictions.

I’ve had an “Internet presence” since 1998, for the most part.  It’s gone through several lives, starting on anonymous.diaryland.com, going to ianomalous.com, then erik.diary-x.com, then mockerybird.com, then erikbenson.com, then erik.typepad.com, then nosneb.livejournal.com, then bustermcleod.com and bustermcleod.livejournal.com, and now, over 11 years later, I’ve moved once again to busterbenson.com.

I’ve anticipated and later followed a lot of the blogging trends over the years.  I supplemented comments on my hand-rolled blog at mockerybird.com way before blogger.com did.  I was uploading pictures from my Nokia 6210 (I think) to my own email server that parsed the email and posted the picture to my blog way before Flickr.  I was aggregating all of my RSS feeds from around the Internet into bustermcleod.com long before friendfeed.com.  I think that the next movement in online presence is going to be in the direction of a stats page that provides a kind of “pulse” for your general life, while also allowing others to find you easily on other parts of the Internet.

Self-tracking is becoming a lot more popular these days, as it becomes easier for people to use their phones/shoes/key chains to track what they’re doing and share it with others.  But what about all of the latent second-hand data that comes out of our wanderings around the Internet?  There are now at least 38 sites that help you track your location, where you are, where you want to go, where you will be going soon, etc.  The pictures we post know where they were posted from.  Sometimes (as through Facebook) pictures taken by others know that you were in them and let you know.

And then, even more indirectly still, and more interesting to me, there’s information about our general activity on the Internet, and how that relates to our activity in general. And, being able to track your own interest in a particular topic over time.

For this purpose, I’ve created a way to search through all of the content I’ve added to the Internet since 1998 (a Ferret search index over my whole archived collection of text).  Here are some examples:

Love:

Money:

iPhone:

McLeod Residence (my now-closed art gallery/bar):

Amazon (who I worked for from 1998-2004):

Twitter:

Cognitive biases (something I was very interested in a few years ago):

You can play around with it by typing in the search box at the top of busterbenson.com.

It may be the most interesting to myself, but I think that if other people were able to search through their content in the same way, and we could all compare our personal meme trends with each other, that some really interesting insights would results.

Next up will be more advanced text analysis.  Being able to pull out statistically uncharacteristic phrases could create personal Trending Topics, ala Twitter.

Not sure what my overarching point is, other than to say that I think that this is the direction that our Internet-representation will go in the next few years. Maybe.

One of my more ambitious goals with Locavore is to create a repository of seasonal availability information that spans the whole world, all kinds of food, and is maintained by farmers, chefs, and others who know their stuff.  This information could be made available in easy-to-understand ways to anyone interested in learning more about seasonal local food.

I would love for a growing database of this information to be maintained and made available for anyone that wanted to use it.  It’s a small step in getting all of us to seriously consider the bigger impacts of eating locally and from sustainable sources.

If you are someone interested in helping with this dream, and have contacts in other countries that maintain this data and are generous enough to want to collaborate on a large scale with me, please leave a comment or email me at locavore@[this domain].

Being at heart a writer, creative person and goal-achiever, I’m a big fan of the mission statement. It’s my chance to craft a succinct statement about the desired goals of a certain collection of people and ideas.

In order to write a mission statement, I first need to back up a little and consider what my values are. Basically, an ideal world. The kind of world I want to live in. In my brief brainstorming this morning, I came up with these words that describe my values:

Frugal. Sustainable. Artful. Meaningful. Strong. Small. Good. Social. Futuristic.

These are the words that are resonating with me right now.  They are the seeds that are causing me to want to add something to the world.  To help create a world that is more frugal, more sustainable, more artful, more meaningful, etc.

The next step is to think about how I see myself in this world.  What is my contribution to this world?

Since I love constraints, I have decided to restrict my mission statement to being exactly 125 characters.  I chose 125 because I plan on making a piece of art out of this mission statement, in order to make it official.  It will be reminiscent of something I made Kellianne for Christmas last year:

This is a hand-drawn sheet of 1,000 paper cranes.  They are colored in order to correspond with a 125-character message translated into binary.  Each binary character is a series of 8 zeroes and ones, which conveniently make 125 characters 1,000 zeroes and ones.

In Japan, there is a tradition to fold 1,000 cranes in times of great intention.  Each crane is an intention, and when all 1,000 are together, they represent a great hope or wish for health, community, and strength.

What better way to set a mission statement in stone (slash paper) than to transform it into an artful, meaningful, intention?

I’ve got my first draft of the mission statement ready.  I’m going to sit on it and revise it and then turn it into reality.

Venn Diagram – Happiness in Business, originally uploaded by budcaddell.

Well Venned.

I loved reading this little interview with Jonathan Sposato from Picnik.  We had lunch with him and some of the other Picnikers back when they were still really afraid of Adobe’s Photoshop Express.  I loved their integration with Flickr, and signed up for their premium service the first day it was offered because I just wanted to support a group that had such a great vision and ability to build amazing things.

Like Sposato, I too tried my hand at the bar business (with different kinds of success, I would say), and I can also see how knowledge and experience of all kinds of business helps become smarter about specific businesses.

A few other things from the article that resonated with me:

On the importance of the team:

“I do think it is much, much more important to build that killer team first and then come up with the great idea, the killer app.”

A bit on the benefits of using your own money to fund an idea:

“You get really concrete about stuff. Your whole life is interrelated. You think about, ‘gosh, should I remodel my house? Or you can say but that money, that $30,000, could help us buy some servers and that’s an investment — not just in my future — but it creates value for a lot of other people. You start to think about that stuff, at least I do, all of the time.”

And this is a good articulation of why people should start businesses.  It’s all about freedom, creativity, and fulfillment:

So what’s the next milestone after turning cash flow positive?

“It is to be that big, long-term sustainable business where — as a company and as shareholders — we have multiple degrees of freedom.”

Every freedom taken away, sold, or compromised is one that you will have to buy back at a much higher price later on.

Jonathan’s 9 years older than me… that means I have 9 years to be in a position to say that the things he’s saying here so confidently.

I really like everything that Hillel from Jackson Fish Market is saying about small businesses and the .

1. A new definition of “lifestyle business”.
2. The reality of your life as a founder once you take VC
3. Your odds of making money if you take VC

And I also really like this video of DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails) that he links to about creating a startup that makes money without taking a whole lot of money.

The “other secret” that DHH aludes to other than asking money for it, which the Robot Co-op was a big fan of, is to create something that allows highly relevant advertising to exist alongside the product.  That also works, I’ve seen it work, and it didn’t require a hugh out of the ballpark success to be highly profitable.

My current situation is going to go back to the pay-for-product model, as much just for a change than anything else.  The real question is whether or not I can make it sustainable before I run out of personal savings, and then, at that point, if it becomes necessary to take investment, finding the right kind of investment.

This is what I am thinking about as I design my ultra-minimalist highly-frugal tech startup work space.  Feel free to disagree.

1. One room and one table + chair per person.
2. Bring a laptop. No need for multiple monitors, that’s just high tech indulgence.
3. No land line.  Use your cell phone or get a Google Voice number if you want to filter “business” from your personal life.
4. As little space as possible.  10×10 should be enough for 1 person, 10×20 enough for 2, etc.
5. No printer or fax machine (walk to the nearest copy shop when you absolutely need to).
6. No Internet (if there’s wireless available). Otherwise, go with the cheapest Internet service possible that doesn’t require a land line.  It doesn’t need to be fast (especially in my case where I’m developing mobile apps that need to be tested on slower networks).
7. No commute.  Make it as close to work as possible so you can walk or take public transit and save on a car.
8. No espresso machine (a walk for coffee is a good thing).
9. Okay, a mini-fridge (for lunch and maybe a beer or two).
10. Have a CSA deliver fruit and veggies to your office every week or two for snacks.
11. No foosball, ping pong, video games, etc.
12. No chef.
13. No conference room (step out of the office when you take a phone call if you’re not alone, go to a bar for meetings).
14. Art on the walls and a big window beats a television.
15. Share your bathroom with others.
16. Go on walks to break up the day.
17. Use your iPhone for music.
18. Have an extra chair or small couch for guests and power naps.

What do you think?

Part of my ramp-up to a more frugal and healthy life this month will be in a change in eating habits. Up until today, a typical week involved eating out at a restaurant for lunch at least 4 times a week, and eating out at a restaurant for dinner probably closer to 5 or 6 times a week. I rarely eat breakfast.

Kellianne and I are going to try something different this month.

One, have breakfast every morning. This means we need to wake up about an hour earlier, but the opportunity to have local eggs with some asparagus or spinach the last week or so has been pretty amazing. For motivational purposes, coffee beans from a local roaster (Caffe Vita) counts as local.

Two, I plan on getting my lunches at the market’s produce counter every day. Focusing on in-season fruits and vegetables that I can eat with almost no preparation. It’ll be cheaper, healthier, and supportive of local farms.

Three, for dinner grill some local fish or sausage and steam some spinach, kale, or whatever else is in season. Simple, quick, tasty, cheap, and healthy. The fact that BBQs on the roof are pretty much an utopic setting helps encourage this as well.

Doing this at the height of spring is pretty much the easiest time of year to take the plunge. It’ll be more of a challenge to keep it up at the end of summer, I think. But that’s the future’s problem.

We aren’t going to go for 100% local, or 100% frugal, it’s more that we’re going to make a conscious effort to change base habits and see if we can make something new adhere to our habitual minds.

This is the plan. Now I just need to find a way to keep it. If anyone has any tips, precautions, or motivating tales, let me know.