jay cross: Okay. I give up. I have wasted 30 minutes trying to rent a car from you guys. Don’t enter anything. I will find a car elsewhere.
Kathy R: we are not reservations; we are the Support Department; we test the error message
jay cross: So what did your test find?
Kathy R: Otherwise you can call reservationsThe Reservations phone number is 1-800-654-3131.
Kathy R: and they can book the car rental for you; they maybe busy as well and you may have to hold
Kathy R: So, are you continue to hold on the chat session ; until we test the see if we get the error message or are you calling reservations?
jay cross: I thought the purpose of Customer Support was to support customers. Guess not.
jay cross: I think I will rent a car from someone else.

Google Chrome leverages Google’s knowledge of page popularity, mal sights, pfishers, and so on, but the new browser sounds like it breaks new ground in flexibility, speed, and robustness. Not that I know from experience. Google enlisted the wonderful Scott McCloud to pen a elaborate cartoon that digs into the details. Don’t look at the cartoon unless you’ve got 30 minutes devote to soaking in McCloud’s amazing visual display; it conveys some very technical material in a most captivating way.

Notice to Personal Learning Portfolio theorists: Chrome may be your ticket.

I’ve got to go get my copy. See ya.

Sarah Lacy’’s Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 hi-jacked my brain for the last week. After her presentation at Gnomedex, I told her how impressed I was with her technique: abandoning the stage to wander confidently through the audience talking and interviewing. (I’ve been too sheepish about this myself). Sarah gave me a copy of her new book.

Once You’re Lucky describes the re-incarnation of the web in Silicon Valley through the inside stories of the entrepreneurs behind PayPal, LinkedIn, Digg, Six Apart, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, and others. The drama of PayPal founder Max Levchin reads like a novel, and a good novel at that. A former Business Week reporter, Sarah manages to stuff in cautionary tales of venture capital, the start-up cycle, and the rise of friend-tors.

She contrasts the web 2.0 wave to its dot-com predecessor. Today’s successes are social networks built for one’s friends that just happened to prove viable as companies. The users provide the content; there’s no inventory and no staff creating content. Marketing is viral. Often there’s no physical office. This new web is about connecting with people and sharing things with them, things like video, news clips, restaurant reviews, photos, blogs. “Every single one of these sites is about meeting people, staying in touch, or witnessing people’s own personal quirky forms of self-expression.” This is a different deal than web 1.0; in fact, the pall of the dot-com crash still tempers the exuberance of today’s web 2.0 millionaires.

Sarah Lacy

The bursting of the bubble was a psychological disaster. Outsiders thought it had all been a scam. The new economy was hype. Six years later, people’s crap detectors were still too finely tuned to buy into a new vision with abandon.

In the midst of the bubble, I remember hearing a wag on the stage at PARC answer a question with, “Tulips.com.” Sarah brings up Tulipmania, a book that debunks the seventeenth-century tulip trading stories as urban legend. It wasn’t really so bad.

Nor was the dot-com bust the total disaster people remember in hindsight. Half the businesses founded in 1999 were still around five years later. That’s better odds than opening a restaurant.

I agree with Sarah’s take on why the current movement has staying power. In fact, I think this applies to the culture inside and among business organizations as well as among netizens.

Some people believe the more we socialize online, the bigger the rift in the real-world social fabric. That interacting with each other via machines makes us all more antisocial. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Web isn’t a replacement for offline relationships; it’s merely an efficient tool to keep in touch with people more easily, reconnect with friends and family once lost, or discover new friends that you may never meet in the real world. There are no online or offline friends; friends are friends.

Does your telephone separate you from friends or bring you closer? Well, the same holds true for the net.

Years ago I took the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire on Marty Seligman’s Authentic Happiness site, an exercise I encourage anyone who wants to know more about themselves to take. The VIA tells you what turns you on, not necessarily what you’ve good at. The results used to report your percentile among the tens of thousands of people who had completed the questionnaire.

Ever an extremist. I ranked 99th percentile in:

• Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
• Curiosity and interest in the world
• Love of learning

Of course, there’s a flip side. I scored abysmally low in:

• Modesty and humility
• Spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith
• Caution, prudence, and discretion

Randy’s photo captured me breathing in the lessons of Gnomedex and trying to mash them up with enterprise learning. The annual trek to Gnomedex is part of my professional development, and I try to learn things there until I drop from exhaustion.

Cisco Telepresence makes is easier to imagine (though it still lacks online transfer of pheromones.) You walk into a room like the one above. Half the circular table is real; half is a life feed from a similar room anywhere else in the world. Cisco WebEx’s Bob Lee and I had a brief session after lunch today:

Businesses have streamlined, re-engineered, and re-furbished every aspect of what they do with one exception: management.

The practice of management today reveres the same rules and beliefs that were invented to run textile factories and railroads. When I was in Melbourne in June, I addressed the need for change in a presentation for National Australia Bank. Here’s the first fifteen minutes of that talk:

Grab a glass of wine, get comfy in front of a big monitor, and check out Nikon Universcale.

Make sure your sound is on; do it full screen. Breathe mindfully.

Fall 2008 CLO Symposium
Measuring Success: Learning’s Positive Impact on Business
September 24-26, 2008, Del Coronado, San Diego
I plan to talk about the ROI of informal learning.

Future of Talent. October 12-14, 2008. Two dozen top talent management professionals hunker down in Tiburon, California, to take the pulse of talent management, network professionally, and learn some new tricks. All professional events should feel like this! This will be my fourth year as faculty.

Hero Camp. October 23-27, 2008. Houston. Site in development.

Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations. November 17-21, 2008. Online. Free. Sponsored by George Siemens, Tony Karrer, and Internet Time Group. Agenda in development.

Online Educa. December 3-5, 2008. Intercontinental Berlin. I never miss this one.

Vendor relationship management: CRM in reverse. Sun’s Eve Maler talks of personal digital analytics.

Charlene Li - and the Groundswell site