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Michael Silberman wrote up a nice post on what Web of Change meant to him. I had the pleasure of getting to know Michael a bit as we co-facilitated a session on software integration. I was was very impressed by him on a professional and personal level. He’s a known wunderkind of our movement, having run the Dean Meetup project in 2004, and has none of the hubris or bluster you so often see in people who have risen far and fast. Really a great guy, and a huge asset to the conference. He writes:

The conference really was a group effort, and would have been a shadow of itself without the amazing people who showed up. And Michael hit on one of the key points for me–there was no one there to make a pitch. Most of us had some pet tool or software project we were involved in, but this conference wasn’t about finding converts. It was about learning from others on a whole lot of levels, and getting better at this work of social change. And as Michael said, it made for an amazing conference.

I’m back from my trip to Web of Change way up north in British Columbia. It was an incredible gathering, and quite humbling. I was wowed by the level of skill, compassion, curiosity, and friendliness of this amazing community of people working to change the world for the better. About halfway through the conference the wheels in my head hit the RPM red line, and they haven’t really slowed down yet. I’m working on some substantial posts about what I saw at Web of Change, what I learned, and how I’ll be different from here on out. I hope to get those synthesized pretty soon, before the buzz wears off…

Thanks to TechCrunch, I just stumbled across Grazr, another entrant in the “drop the r” Web 2.0 product category. It’s an HTML widget (my newest obsession) that displays XML data in a hierarchical format. It reminds me of my gopher days…

Here’s a very simple Grazer example. I created an XML file (OPML format), pointed Grazr at it, and generated the HTML to embed it on this post. You can nest folders, list out multiple text entries, and put in URL lnks, links to RSS, OPML, etc.

As you can tell by the Grazr content in my example, I’m thinking about creating a Help resource for my Salesforce.com customers. As Mark showed a while back using Meebo widgets, Salesforce.com lets you easily drop components like this into their app. So I can create a help file in OPML, and put my Grazr help component in the left nav area of the Home Page.

Voila, simple help now in Salesforce.com. And it’s easily updated because the data lives in an external XML file, which I could generate from a database of some sort as necessary. You could even put the help data in Salesforce objects and use the API to generate the XML file…

I’ve been struggling with a good way to hand off simple documentation to my customers. The Salesforce help is very deep on general issues, but I want to document the business processes that I’m supporting. Grazr gives me a simple display of my structured help, and lets me put it where people will use it, right in the Salesforce UI.

Just yesterday I wrote about how I think these kinds of UI widgets are going to explode and redefine what it means to create web applications. Salesforce.com is way ahead of the curve on letting us crank on their UI, remaking it as we see fit, for our specific needs. I hope the ability to insert S-Controls in dashboards that they’ve been talking about for the Winter ‘07 release is a sign that they’ll be opening up the plugability of their UI even more.

I’m co-facilitating a session on software integration at the Web of Change conference this week with Michael Silberman of Echo Ditto. I’ve been thinking about where integration is right now. I mean, integration was possible as soon as the second application was written.

Building custom integrations has been a business model for decades. So what’s new and interesting? A couple things come to mind:

1. It’s easier
2. It can happen at a distance
3. We can now use UI components like we used to use software libraries

First, it’s definitely easier. As software has matured over the last 50 years, the levels of abstraction have built up to dizzying heights. Abstraction means the levers to move software are much more graspable, and more powerful.

Second, it used to be that applications had to be on the same machine, then in the same data center, and now they just have to be on the Internet for us to be able to integrate them. Since everything is on the Internet, place no longer matters. Distance, as measured by bandwidth, can still matter, as Gareth pointed out yesterday.

Third, while we can still pick best of breed applications and integrate them together (i.e. CRM with accounting) we can now choose best of breed UI components and use them when and where we want. Notice how any place you find a listing of street addresses you now find an embedded google map. Google maps is the best of breed UI widget for displaying geographic data in your app. These components can be plugged into our apps where we see fit with very little work or expertise needed. More and more of these widgets are coming into existence, and I think we’ll find that our best of breed apps become amalgams of core functionality and welded in widgets, where you can’t easily tell which parts are from the core app and which are from the widget.

I’m working on an integration with a killer widget that I think will change the way we look at CRM data. Seriously, it’s really cool. I’m integrating a widget with a full-fledged application, and a novice would have no idea it wasn’t core functionality.

So will our job descriptions start to look like Igor’s in Young Frankenstien? Will we be scouring the morgues, looking for good body parts to graft to our monsters? Probably. And they’ll probably come after us bearing torches…

Keith Olberman is distinguishing himself as one of the more articulate and pointed critic of the President in the mainstream media. Starting with a special comment on the President’s grisly failures in reponse to Katrina, and increasing in velocity and amplitude with recent lambastings of Donald Rumsfeld and the President, he’s been finding his voice. I now consider him at the vanguard of a long-overdue, Murrow-like stand against those who use the language of freedom and democracy to support efforts to destroy those very things. I hope this movement will grow in size and volume, and that Olberman is joined by other mainstream journalists in voicing outrage.

In his comment last night about the President’s failures post 9/11, he was eloquent, insightful, and unflinchingly critical of the President. This is not a rant, this is not venting, this is not partisan rancor. This is the media doing it’s job in the face of overwhelming evidence of mendacity, incompetence, and political thuggery by this administration. But Keith can say it so much better than I can…

Aluminum Man is a small triathlon on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge. I survived, finishing my first Olympic distance triathlon in 2:54:25. It was a lot of fun, and also the hardest thing I’ve done in a while!

You may know the Columbia river Gorge for it’s world class wind surfing. Turns out, it’s pretty windy there, and was at 9 am when the race started. The swim was a weird one. It was my first running start from the beach, er, mud flat. It must have been a funny sight to see 50 men running off for 100 meters in knee deep water, wondering when the swimming would begin. Finally it did, and we all had fun in the wind blown waters of the river. As I overheard one participant in the swim to bike transition, “I don’t have to worry about hydration after that swim!” I didn’t have much problem with the chop, but I guess a couple folks really had a hard time. The hardes thing for me was finding the bouys in the waves and with the final bouy right into the rising sun. I found it when I was 6 feet from it…

After 18 minutes in the water, the exit from the river was nothing like the entrance, and I moved on to the bike. This was probably the most fun 30 minutes of the triathlon. It was fun to be on the bike and riding downwind, up into the table lands above the gorge. It was gorgeious scenery–rolling hills, basalt columns, old abandoned farm buildings among amber grasses. I was having such a great time I even passed some folks, the whole time trying to hold back for the wall that I knew would come sooner of later.

At about 18 miles I began to tire. At 20 miles, we started the descent from the table lands and the crew I was riding with showed me why they all had aero setups–they blasted downhill, into the wind, leaving me on my touring bike to pedal harder down he hill than I had going up it.

After an hour and thirty minutes in the saddle (which seemed like 3) I made my way to the transition and actually had the thought, “I could stop now…”

But I didn’t, and made a quick transition to the run. the run was a 10K, which was really the longest run I’d done in months, so I knew it was going to be pretty hard. And it was. Luckily it started into the wind. I kept the cadence up and just kept it moving to the turnaround point. It’s amazing how far that seems sometimes…

On the return, I found myself slowing as my heart rate remained constant, which I figured was not a great sign. I was passed a couple times in the run, mostly by the top women, and had no hope of staying with any of them. But 1 mile from the finish I was passed by a guy that I decided to stay with and that helped me get through the last mile.

I finished 22nd among the 50 men, 4th in my age group of 11, which is where I love to be, just above average. Here’s the most unbelievable stat of the day–I was in 13th place coming out of the water. I don’t consider myself a swimmer, but I guess the Total Immersion DVD has been working. If you are interested in being a better swimmer, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The recovery has been pretty easy. My knees were sore, but better now a couple days later. I drank about 2 gallons of recovery drink, and I think that helped. I’ll do another one. Maybe next year I’ll even do a couple…

One key use of CRM is the tracking of your interactions with constituents. Even if you don’t have a CRM system, you probably track your constituent interactions in a bunch of places: Outlook, in your head, on paper, etc. A good CRM system lets you easily track those interactions. Easily is the key word in that sentence.

If your CRM system makes it hard to record your interactions with constituents, it just ain’t gonna happen. Interactions are so frequent that even small hurdles to tracking them will stop all but the most committed users. Bad UI for entering interactions, slow servers, and lack of integration with Outlook are all hurdles that will derail your efforts. And if your users are tracking the key interactions, you aren’t getting a full picture of your touches, and then you can’t trust your CRM to have the complete picture.

The chart above shows the interactions that we’ve recorded in our CRM each week for the last couple months. You can tell by the sheer quantity that the hurdles are pretty low to getting these touches recorded–in middle of summer we’re recording just under 80 interactions a week.

We’re creating a very detailed picture of our interactions with our constituents, one that all users have access to. This institutional memory can be used as background when prospecting major donors, working with our consulting customers, and should the case arise, bringing new folks up to speed after staff turnover. If the costs of tracking these interactions are low, there’s a clear upside to doing it.

Salesforce.com has just put up a site at ideas.salesforce.com where they’ll be trotting out features of their new release and allowing the great unwashed to vote on them. Should be a nice buzz generator for their Winter 07 release, which they have officially touted as the “biggest API release ever” for the company.

The site is a simple voting app where they give you a brief description of the new feature and allow you to vote for it. You can also leave comments.

Best thing about it is that we’ll all get a sneak peak into what’s changing. Subscribe to the feed of new features so you’ll know about additions to the site.

Looks like they will be adding “Suggest a Feature” functionality in the future. Currently we all suggest features via bug requests or conversations with sf.com folks we know personally. It would be nice to have some visibility into which features are very popular among the Salesforce.com user base.

I’m doing my first Olympic distance triathlon this weekend down in Oregon. I wasn’t really planning on doing one this fall, but things just worked out. About a month ago I started stepping up my training–not nearly to an ideal level, but not so bad keeping in mind I have two kids and a full-time job. I shouldn’t drown…

Aluminum Man is a smallish triathlon down in The Dalles, Oregon. They’ve done what a whole lot of races have done–their course is plotted on Google maps. This is just about the perfect use of Google maps. The course is very straightforward, but small budget events like this have historically been very bad at map production. Using Google maps gives them a stellar online map in minutes.

They’ve mapped the bike and the run on the gmap pedometer site.

I used to use that free service until I found favoriterun.com, which I really like. It lets you create arbitrary routes, and then log exercise on those routes, creating a running/biking/walking log. favoriterun.com doesn’t let you track Kcals per exercise, but you can’t have everything. For free. Yet.

I’ll post a short race report after the fact next week. I’ll be sticking around for Monday in the ONE/Northwest Portland office hanging with Drew and Jon and talk about process mapping. I bet they can’t wait!