(Read my original post on why 100 Day countdowns are meaningful and actually work here.)

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken an extended hiatus from blogging this summer, and am just now finishing up a 6 week project that took a little longer than expected.

But I am back, and determined to finish out the last 100 days of 2010 STRONG, which includes posting regularly again.

BTW, I have remained somewhat active on Amplify.com curating the Business Mindhacks relevant goings on from across the Web and the Tech world. You can catch up here:

alexschleber.amplify.com

I had already been bringing key excerpts along with quick comments and footnotes through Posterous to my Twitter followers, which proved useful and popular. Amplify has been taking it up a notch in terms of intelligent Curation, as well as a great community with much engagement all around.

OK, back to the 100 Day Countdown and finishing the year out strong:

Decide right now what you want to accomplish until then in your business and/or personal life, and you’ll be doing yourself a much bigger favor than if you were waiting around to making those typically flimsy, rapidly forgotten New Year’s resolutions on December 31.

As SelfGrowth.com editor David Riklan once wrote in a newsletter email:

What if I were to follow you with a camera crew for the next 100 days while you went for your goals? I bet 3 things would happen…

1) You would START doing the things you say you need to do.
2) You would STOP doing the things you know you shouldn’t be doing.
3) You would MAKE monumental performance gains and change your life.

Here’s to your finishing strong!

Best wishes

- Alex Schleber

Still working on modifying that habit to posting here instead… :)

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt on Google’s non-social DNA from: “Why Google won’t give Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut tomorrow” Google has been struggling with creating their own successful Social Media, and there is a reason…
• Scott Stratten demonstrates a potential Geo-Location Mishap in: “@Unmarketing’s 4 Point Social Media Future” Geo is only gaining in importance, but the potential pitfalls and even outright dangers should keep those companies on their toes.
• Key Twitter-relevant excerpt from Scoble’s: “Google’s two-front war with Apple and Facebook”
• Steve Moses..I mean Jobs..comes down from the mountain, and..the Tablet is busted?! Did Steve Jobs finally reach the limits of his presentation magic? Is the iPad “a bridge too far”?
• Key Moving The Freeline excerpt from: “5 Essential Blogging Tips from Confucius | Copyblogger” More validation for a concept that is the key to winning in the Attention Economy.

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt on Hyperlocal Advertising from: "2010 Predictions – ReadWriteWeb" Yet more reasons for Rupert Murdoch to shake in his boots…
• Key excerpt from: "What Matters Now" – Gary Vaynerchuck validates Moving the Freeline I preach the concept, nice to see it validated by a social media "big deal".
• Pretty Funny From A Frank Kern Email – FTC Christmas Cards… Half in jest, fully in earnest as they say… this topic will occupy us in 2010 more and for longer than a lot of people are realizing.
• Key excerpt from: "FTC trains government focus on..bloggers – HotAir.com" – gov’t overreach in action More on the FTC’s overreach. A whole new class of complaint will likely get added to our already over-developed litigation menu.
• Why would Twitter lie this blatantly about its broken "Retweets by others" UI? Strong words, but this post struck a nerve. Twitter has been acting a bit too Orwellian of late. The issue has been fixed since then, the PR black-eye remains…

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt from FEED 2009 Report: "Digital Primacy..connected consumers are the new mainstream". It looks as if "geeky" interests, tools, and toys are no longer geeky anymore, they are what everyone is using.
• My comment on: "Was the Twitter Retweet Feature Designed to Bring Value to Google & Bing Search?" Twitter has stirred up a hornets nest with its recent feature upgrade, the question is, are the gains worth messing with their archetype branding?
• Key excerpt from interview with Tech VC Peter Thiel: The U.S. debate on gov’t size has a mindset issue. Is everybody asking the wrong question?
• Must-read, & some of this worries me: "What Twitter’s New Geolocation Makes Possible – RWW". There goes what little of your privacy was left. Is the brave new world of geolocation going to be worth the sacrifice?
• My comment on: "Twitter to turn on advertising you will love -> SuperTweet – @Scobleizer" Twitter is about to finally monetize their service, could the new ads they’re invisioning be a game changer?

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Twitter Lists as a new form of linking – this could be huge Despite some flaws, the new feature is a potential game changer. Note: I am working on a longer, comprehensive post on the new Twitter Lists as well, stay tuned.
• Key excerpts from: "Behind Closed Doors: What’s On the Mind Of Chief Marketing Officers – Jeremiah Owyang" + my footnote The times they are a-changing when it comes to the relevance of social media for business, only Old Media remains defiant/in denial.
• Key excerpt from: "What Startups Are Really Like" – this applies to ANY business Guard yourself against pointless competitive/scarcity mentality thinking.
• Key excerpt from Robert Scoble’s Posterous about impacts of the new Twitter Lists + my footnote First impressions, and some glaring feature omissions are already apparent.
• Key excerpt from reader comment on: "Jason Pontin: How to Save Media" + my footnote A sharply worded reader comment sums up Old Media’s crisis in a great analogy.

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

(Read my original post on why 100 Day countdowns are meaningful and actually work here.)

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken an extended hiatus from blogging this summer. This was large due to my Dad passing away a few months ago, and things being quite topsy-turvy and sometimes emotionally exhausting since.

But I am back, and determined to finish out the last 100 days of 2009 STRONG, which includes posting regularly again.

BTW, since the beginning of this year, I had experimented with capturing shorter, "Quick Hits" Business Mindhacks posts to my Posterous blog at

http://alexschleber.posterous.com

Bringing key excerpts along with quick comments and footnotes through Posterous to my Twitter followers has proved useful and popular (feel free to peruse the archive).

And it also helped me keep the "blogging flame" alive in the past few months, when I didn’t have the energy, or Tech/Business World events moved too rapidly, to work on the kind of longer, more integrative posts that had been the staple of this blog so far.

Combined with my other social media activities on Twitter and FriendFeed, my Posterous posts in some way closed a gap between "micro-blogging" and "long form". Call it mini-blogging.

But the experiment also has come with real drawbacks:

Because Google penalizes duplicate content, I didn’t want to simply forward my Posterous posts to this blog. And this over time has led to too few posts for Business Mindhacks, and too much of my content "held hostage" on a service I don’t control.

Now mind you I have been an early fan and evangelist of Posterous, and I still believe that it is a great service to get anyone started with blogging and/or what has been called "lifestreaming". And I congratulate Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal on all of their success so far (they finally unveiled "themes" and customization in the last few days).

But the small team has taken longer to add functionality than would have been preferable in my view (in part holding themselves back by wanting to control everything a little too tightly), and in either event many issues around the ideal blogging/lifestreaming/curation platform still remain, as Robert Scoble rightly pointed out yesterday.

So, I’ve decided that as of next week, and after finally updating my blog from my custom/rogue Wordpress 2.3.3 version to the latest 2.8.4, I will create those Posterous style posts in my own blog instead, using Wordpress’ "Press This" bookmarklet to do so.

This will mean more frequent posting, and more raw, immediate, and shorter posts. Which, given the pace at which things are moving, should be a good thing:

One example, I have long promised the follow-up to my "Search Literacy" post, covering FriendFeed Search and Google Search in depth tricks and techniques.

While I was also side-tracked by personal events as mentioned above, things have changed so rapidly (FriendFeed was recently acquired by Facebook, mostly for its founders’ engineering talent, putting its continued long-term operation into some doubt), that some of the content I had already written became outdated before I could even publish it.

So, the lesson is:

Rapid, shorter posting = good.

Outsourcing it away from your self-hosted blog = likely bad.

(Of course I’ll still make time for the longer-form posts every week or two. And yes, the Search Literacy Post, Part 2 is coming as well.)

OK, back to the 100 Day Countdown and finishing the year out strong:

Decide right now what you want to accomplish until then in your business and/or personal life, and you’ll be doing yourself a much bigger favor than if you were waiting around to making those typically flimsy, rapidly forgotten New Year’s resolutions on December 31.

As SelfGrowth.com editor David Riklan recently wrote in a newsletter email:

What if I were to follow you with a camera crew for the next 100 days while you went for your goals? I bet 3 things would happen…

1) You would START doing the things you say you need to do.
2) You would STOP doing the things you know you shouldn’t be doing.
3) You would MAKE monumental performance gains and change your life.

Here’s to your finishing strong!

Best wishes

- Alex Schleber

Love him or hate him, no one could accuse him of not getting his hands dirty with actually using Web 2.0, including in the service of the creation of countless interview videos with both start-up and established players in the Tech Industry which he posts over on FastCompany.tv. His above mentioned participation actually does appear to border on the super-human, and he seems to at times be simultaneously asking, AND himself be a guinea-pig for, the question of where all of this technology usage might lead us next.

An astute commenter over on the aforementioned TechCrunch "Intervention Post" stopped to

wonder if 10 000 years from now, just one month’s worth of all Twitter content, if preserved, could provide an interesting historical clue to future generations of how life on earth was….like a Pompeii or Rosetta Stone unlocked secrets of past civilizations and languages. And who could blame them upon discovering such a treasure for thinking Robert Scoble the God of the Twitterverse?
 
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/22/im-sorry-robert-but-its-time-for-a-friendfeed-intervention/#comment-2575369

Given all of this frantic Web 2.0 activity and the constant exponential expansion of information and information processing in all of its forms, I found it instructive that several of Robert’s recent posts appeared to confirm a theme that I usually try to drive home with many of my coaching clients: Simplicity wins. Or at least tends to confer an unfair advantage to those companies and entrepreneurs practicing it.

First, his post on his personal discovery of the joys of the dead-simple and low cost "Flip" video camera ("The best gadget I stole in 2008") – the one with the fold-out USB plug arm obviating the need for an extra cable, and one of the gadget sales hits of 2008 – reminds us that users want things to just work, without having to first navigate a dizzying array of menus, settings and options. "Do one thing and do it well" (enough), without requiring training just to do the average use case of that one thing, is the operative mantra.

The Flip starts and stops video recording with one large/obvious button, and records in formats that are immediately uploadable to YouTube et al. without further video processing. I opted for similar simplicity this past Christmas when I selected a Casio Exilim digital camera for its one-button video function and YouTube friendly formats over other possibly more feature-laden, but more complex offerings. Simplicity wins.

Next, Robert wrote on what he sees as the promise of rapid growth in 2009 for Tumblr.com ("Tumblr’s lead dev: Scoble doesn’t know what he’s talking about"), a Web 2.0 "micro-blogging" service (really I consider it "medium blogging") that thrives on a simple posting mechanism (via browser bookmarklet that simply works, and fast) for clipping and reblogging Web content, as well as reblogging the "Tumble blog posts" of other Tumblr users one follows – all with automatic attribution. Tumblr may well be the currently fastest way for a complete novice to get a simple blog up and running, and then actually post to it frequently because it can be fast, easy, and fun.

Notable competitor Posterous.com pursues a similar strategy by making simple email-based submission and intelligent/automatic media handling its main mechanism. I hope both services continue to push/copy each other’s innovations, add a few more useful features, and above all, keep things simple. Because if they do, they are very likely to win (Tumblr’s bookmarklet post submission already prompted the addition of a PressThis! feature in Wordpress blogging software for example).

Last, Robert did a half-in-jest-fully-in-earnest piece on the comparison of the Twitter and FriendFeed services mentioned above ("10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not"). Despite having been one of Twitter’s heavy users with tens of thousands of followers, he had started to really kick things into high gear on FriendFeed since about Q2 of 2008, and may have almost single-handedly driven early adoption of this startup aggregator service conceived by a handful of ex-Googlers.

But while FriendFeed has just won the Crunchies for Best 2008 Startup, Robert makes the case that it has features sufficiently complex that they may prove a turn-off for non-techy users, and could prevent wide-spread mainstream adoption of the kind that Twitter is now experiencing (besides nightly mention and some crowd-sourcing uses by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the likes of Shaq, Lance Armstrong, Hodgman of the Daily Show and Mc vs. PC ads fame, and ex-Saturday Night Liver Jimmy Fallon have recently adopted Twitter to communicate with their fans).

Whether or not sophisticated users like Robert feel that FriendFeed’s advanced features are useful or not is besides the point: What counts is that Twitter’s single-minded focus on 140 character "micro-blog" updates makes it immediately accessible and understandable, whether or not a prospective user ultimately decides that they find the service useful or not (I had previously described how Twitter’s branding also aides in people rapidly "getting it"). This has also made Twitter somewhat of the "Swiss Army Knife of the Internet", prompting hundreds of third-party services, extensions, and uses based on its simple infrastructure in often ingenious ways.

So, three different examples of simplicity wins, all just from one blogger’s posts. I hope they have you convinced that simplicity indeed provides a competitive edge, and that with each additional layer of complexity (each additional step in the use of your product or service), you tend to lose say 50% of your residual audience, prospects, or users. You can do the math as well as I can: You want to keep the number of those additional steps to a miminum. Less really can be more after all.

So my prescription for you, your business, or your new product launches in 2009 obviously is: Keep it simple!