Charles Torre, of Channel 9, interviewed me and Patrick on my last day in the office.

Did I really pick my nose on camera?

But, seriously, we talk about the risks of corporate blogging, Mini-Microsoft, why many corporations can’t blog or do something like Channel 9, among a whole lot of things, and then we read the questions off of Microsoft’s real exit interview.

Andy Brudtkuhl came up with an interesting idea. We need a blogosphere drama filter, he says. Too much “Scoble” and “Rocketboom.”

Oh, but we LOVE our dramas, don’t we? Did you hear that a new host has been picked for Rocketboom (not officially, but according to the Huffington Post)?

Oh, if you don’t want drama, why not come to the Lang.NET symposium, which is really just a compiler forum? No drama there. Your code either runs or it doesn’t. Lehman tells me that Miguel de Icaza of Mono will be there, along with speakers from Sun Microsystems and other smart coders. That’s July 31-August 2 at Microsoft in Redmond.

Or, why don’t you check out some code blogs like Albert Pascual’s. The problem with code blogs is it’s hard to find a single post that focused on a single problem. Let’s say you come up with a cool sorting algorithm. How will other people know you did?

What’s your favorite code blog? Or drama blog? Heheh.

Well, this is turning out to be a nice day. The sun is shining, I have a new Hugh Card for my business cards, and the JobsBloggers (who used to work in recruiting for Microsoft) give me tips on how to hire Jason Calacanis. Just be nice? To Jason!?! Heheh.

Hey, I’m human. Sometimes I step in it. Bigtime. Over at Mini-Microsoft I let my emotion run wild (which turned into a blog post about anonymity and me and, even, a “be Robert Scoble day.”)

That kind of emotionality is something that I was holding back while I worked at Microsoft.

So, why did I go on an anti-anonymity tirade? Pent up anger from being attacked over three years? Maybe. Emotional relaxation? Possibly. After all, I no longer need to worry about what 60,000 people think about me.

That might have all played into it, but what really got me going was an anonymous coward attacked someone I worked closely with: Steve Cellini. Now, Steve and I aren’t close friends. But one thing that you can’t attack Steve on is his work ethic or his work quality (two things the coward attacked him on). That set me off. It made me emotionally lurch out at all anonymous posters. I watched how Steve managed the PDC, which had hundreds of speakers, thousands of attendees, millions of dollars in budget, and I worked closely with him on that and other projects and he always was a guy I respected and who got things done with a minimum of budget. Anyway, that set me off.

I was a jerk. And, I’m sorry. I broke rule #13.

Ken Camp and a few others say I’m interesting again. When I spoke to audiences I often told people communicators have a knob that they can turn. On one side is “safe.” On the other is “interesting.”

Hopefully I’ll figure out soon where the right place is to put that knob.

As to Mini, now that I’ve calmed down a bit, there is value in having anonymity, but there’s a lot of crap that comes along with it too. If my little tirade gets people to focus on the crap a little more than the good aspects (enjoy those new Starbucks machines and the towels in the bathrooms!) then maybe my being a jerk will have helped the world.

Frank Shaw, vice president at Waggener Edstrom, hates anonymous posts too. They sure can get under your skin sometimes.

One thing, I’m not participating in Mini Microsoft’s comment area anymore. I figure fighting with anonymous cowards who’ll attack good and upstanding people just ain’t worth it anymore — if that’s the leadership that’ll get Microsoft into being a more customer-centric organization I wish them all the luck.

But, I guess everyone will post over there now using my name. That’s fun, but it ain’t me.

My last Channel 9 interview is up with Alexander Gounares, Bill Gates technical assistant (he’s now Microsoft’s Vice President of Corporate Strategy).

This was a fun interview and was done after I had quit my job.

A wifi-enabled player? Oh, the rumors printed in the New York Times are interesting, particularly given the job I’m starting next week. Of note to my career are the wifi and the video screen.

For the record, I hadn’t seen this player before I left (it was a pretty well-kept secret internally). Sounds like the Christmas season is going to be pretty interesting.

Apple’s side of the rumor fence isn’t quiet either with some patent drawings being unveiled.

I wonder which player will have the best recording capabilities?

Hmmm, I loved Jason’s bid to get Amanda to come and join AOL/Netscape and his later tome on keeping talent happy.

That got me thinking about another tough management problem: recruitment.

I wonder how I could hire Jason. Let’s see, he already has millions of dollars. So, it’s gonna be tough to get him on money alone. If that tactic didn’t work with me, I doubt it’ll work on him. Anyway, let’s just say my salary cap is less than AOL’s is so a sheer money strategy won’t work and will probably blow up anyway.

Will sheer love and attention of him do it? Nah. Although it might help get a conversation started. Jason already knows Maryam and I love him. Why? Cause he’s fun to hang around with. His personality is a little over the top, yes, so it’s not for everyone, but I like people who say they are gonna change the world — and then do. When Gates and crew was recruiting people from Borland they sent limos to pick up candidates and take them and their families places. Attention does get noticed. Shel and I picked our book’s publisher at least in small part because they flew to Arizona to meet us and buy us lobster dinner.

How about the chance to be Scoble’s boss? Heheh. That could backfire. Last week someone came up to John Furrier and, upon learning that he worked at Podtech, said “oh, are you working for Scoble?” That seems to happen to a lot of my bosses. Jim Fawcette had that happen to him despite having his own name on the company he owned and ran.

What’s the Microsoft way to get people to work for you who you can’t afford? Get big enough to buy their company. Hmmm, if that happens the last thing I’ll need to worry about is recruiting Calacanis.

Working with smart people? Yeah, the Stanford University Student Body President is interning with us this summer (seriously! You’ll get to meet her later in the summer) but I bet that won’t get Jason interested. There are lots of smart people at AOL (despite what most of the elitist geeks think about AOL).

How about California’s weather? Possibly, but then he’ll probably bring up that a house like what he lives in is four times more expensive and the schools aren’t as good.

California’s non-smoking and clean-living lifestyle? Possibly, but then he’ll bring up traffic on the 101 and ask whether PodTech has a shuttle from San Francisco like Google does.

Matt Mullenweg, Stewart Butterfield, and Dave Winer only an hour away? Now we’re getting somewhere. That’s something he doesn’t have.

Free passes to Google’s cafeteria? Sssshhhhh, I can’t arrange those until Vic gets his job in a year. Heheh. Just kidding Vic!

A dumptruck load of stock options? Yeah! But then I bet he has a dumptruck of Time Warner stock anyway.

So, how do you recruit a guy who has everything when you have limited resources?

How did Steve Jobs recruit John Sculley (remember, back then John headed Pepsi and Apple was a struggling computer maker). “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”

Hmmm, does Jason want to sell Web portals for the rest of his life or does he want to change the world of media? Again?

How do you recruit people you really want to work for you (or who you want to work for?)

Update: speaking of recruiting, the JobsBloggers, Gretchen and Zoe, (who used to work at Microsoft too) are on Jim Stroud’s Recruiters’ Lounge podcast. I wonder what they’d think of this topic?

Now that I soon will be a manager for the first time in my life I am about to face the toughest job I’ve ever faced:

Making other people stars.

This has been on my thoughts for months. What Jeff Sandquist did so well was let me be the star.

This is counterintuitive, so listen closely.

What happened when he did that? Other people wanted to join his team.

He let them be stars too. Adam Kinney and Charles Torre are two of the most talented developers I’ve ever watched. I’d hire them in a nano-second, if they were on the market (they aren’t, cause Jeff treats them right).

How did he get Laura and Tina? Cause he understood his role: let his stars be stars and make sure they have everything they need to succeed.

It’s interesting but Jeff’s leadership helped with Channel 9 too. I learned from him that it’s better to turn the spotlight away from you and onto other people. That led to my decision to rarely be on camera and always put the focus on my interview subject. What was interesting was that by doing that I got even more attention.

We’ll soon see if I’m a good manager, but a lot of what I’m writing lately is just reminders to myself as to what I want to do when I join PodTech.

I’ve learned that in between jobs is a powerful time to write. Remember my Corporate Weblog Manifesto? I wrote that to myself right before I started my Microsoft job to remind myself of what I needed to do.

Yeah, this was punctuated by Amanda Congdon’s leaving from Rocketboom. I don’t know what happened beyond the “he said, she said” stuff that’s going on on their blogs. I’d rather link to their mediator, Chuck Olsen.

What’s going on makes me remember my divorce. I remember wanting to lash out. I remember talking with Buzz Bruggeman. He told me “take the high road.” I didn’t always follow his advice, but I tried to. It paid off well for me (Maryam now gets along with Patrick’s mom, enough that all three of us spent an afternoon together recently — that was mighty weird for me, let me tell you!)

I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes, I’d love to have Amanda working for me work for Amanda, cause that’s really what a manager does. And, even more, Chuck (the world needs more mediators, not to mention a guy who is talented with a camera, even during stressful times).

It soon will be time for me to sit back and let other people become stars.

Oh, and if they do become stars and want to leave, help them negotiate the best possible deal. Although, if I’m honest, I’ll tell you to see Maryam whenever it’s time to negotiate anything. I’m very happy she’s on my side.

What do you think the toughest job of management is? Any advice as I head into PodTech?

I just organized my 1,011 business cards. I realized that is my most valuable asset from my career so far. The people I’ve met. The cards really don’t matter much anymore in the age of Google, but they do serve a purpose of reminding you about memories of meeting people.

Anyway, I realized that many business cards really sucked, so here’s best practices for making your next business card.

1) A good business card starts a conversation. My last ones at Microsoft, for instance, were imprinted with my info in braille. Now, I’ve actually handed my card to one person who was blind, but I found that always started a conversation when I handed my card to someone. Why? It felt different than any other card. Out of the 1,011 cards, by the way only two were imprinted in Braille (both were from Microsoft which offers that as an option on business cards). Another way to start a conversation? Make your card feel different. One of mine were made out of a rubbery material. I remember that made so much of an impression on people that some asked for two so they could show their boss.

2) Make sure your card can be scanned. I bought a business card scanner so that I could get my computers into computer form. This is probably the most important rule, if you want geeks to get ahold of you sometime in the future.

3) Don’t make non-standard sizes or shapes. Why? They can’t fit into binders. I bought Avery’s Business Card Pages and a binder to hold them all, that makes it easier to look through them and find cards. It’s amazing how many business cards can’t fit into those pages (I folded about 100 and couldn’t use about 10 at all).

4) Make sure the basics are on there. You know, your name, title, company, address, phone and fax numbers, email, URL of both your company’s Web site and your blog. A logo.

5) Include a line about what you do. So many cards don’t have any information about what either the company or you, personally, do. Now, Google can get away with that (its cards are among the worst of the big company cards, by the way, cause many of its employees’ titles don’t tell you a thing about what that person does. At least one Google card, from Jenifer Austin, doesn’t have any title. I guess Jenifer has a really secret job that no one is supposed to figure out) but your small company can’t get away with that. If you want, think about me. How will I remember you two years after meeting you at a geek dinner? Why would I write or call you? If you tell me your business and what you do, that’ll really help.

6) Break the rules, particularly corporate ones (but don’t get fired). I had two cards that weren’t approved by the corporate branding department. They always got conversations started (one had a drawing done by Hugh Macleod — I made those specifically for speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist conference. The cards matched my slides I used at that talk. The business cards were so popular that people came and asked for them cause someone else showed them mine).

7) Be different. One of my favorite cards? Matt Mullenweg’s. It says simply “1. Go to google.com. 2. Type in “Matt.” 3. Press “I’m feeling lucky.” (It also has his phone number on it). Or, Kelly Goto’s card looks like a BART ticket (subway in San Francisco).

Put your picture on it. Ben McConnell has one on his and it helped me remember him. It also stood out when I was just paging through the book.

9) Put your corporate tag line on the back. Alan Cooper’s has a logo and says “product design for a digital world.” But also includes lots of space to write notes on.

10) If you do business in two countries, include both languages. Liang Lu, Vice President of Blogchina, has English on one side, Chinese on the other. Ellen K. Pao, partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, has English on one, Japanese on the other.

11) If you don’t put anything on your card other than your name, at least make sure you show up in Google/MSN and Yahoo. I got one from Thomas Michael Winningham that doesn’t have anything other than his name and a picture of a drink on it. I can’t remember anything about him. It definitely is the most interesting card, though, cause it’s so minimalist and breaks all the rules above except for “starts a conversation.”

Do you have any tips for making a great business card?

Update: John Tokash says he carries two of my cards around with him everywhere he goes. Yikes, I wonder what I’ll do for my third card. Hey, Hugh, can you do me another card?

One of the last messages I got as a Microsoft employee was one of the saddest. I thought all weekend about sharing it with you, but it is getting worse and thought maybe we could do something nice for the family.

Jan Nelson, a Microsoft employee, told a story about his neighbor, Tim, that’s him here, who fell off of the roof of his second story home, and was airlifted to Harborview Trauma Center in Seattle. You might not know that place, but it’s where the wife of Joe Beda works. Don’t know him? He is a tech lead on the Google Talk team up in Kirkland (his wife is a doctor in the emergency room there).

I guess that’s why I’m writing about this. We’re all connected somehow. Cross company, cross neighborhoods. Life is so uncertain. “It’s not a lock,” Jan wrote, reminding us once again to tell the people close to us what we think of them.

Well, the tragedy is he’s clinging to life, has two collapsed lungs, is on machines, and isn’t able to care for his two sons, 11 and 15. They are terrified right now and don’t know what the future holds for them.

If you can help, here’s the info.

Checks or deposits to:
Jan Nelson fbo Fredenburg Family
Washington Mutual

Any branch can accept donations. The Overlake branch address is:
Overlake Park
1955 156th Ave. NE
Bellevue, WA 98007

PayPal account for the fund is:

jan@nelsons.homeip.net