Top 10 Posts of 2010

Part of me hates these posts. Part of me feels like it's important to be introspective and acknowledge what resonated with those whom I am fortunate enough to read me (even if just occasionally). What I have tried to do here is provide a little behind the scenes commentary -- maybe my version of a "director's cut -- on each of my top 10 most popular posts for 2010.

1. How Important is your Twitter Bio - Blown away by how many retweets and reads this got. It was a fairly basic post but it seemed to resonate. Not that I'm complaining...
2. Are foursquare and Gowalla Just Shiny Objects - My favorite thing about this post was the conversation in the comments. I think no fewer than 15 new blog posts got written in the process and I learned a ton from people that are much smarter than me.
3. What Marketers Want - This was the announcement post from our acquisition of crayon, Drill Team and StepChange earlier in the year. In some ways, this is like one of those great movies that you release too late in the season to be considered for the Academy so it ends up being a lame duck in the subsequent year's voting. Glad to see this land in the #3 slot.
4. Initial Thoughts on Facebook Places - Not my best post but obviously a hot topic. I'm still VERY interested in finding out how disruptive Facebook will be in the world of location based services.
5. Brand Haiku - One of the most fun (and easiest) posts I've ever written. I was blown away by the fact that many of my blogger friends were willing to participate in this fun little game. Let's just call this my 45 in 45 of 2010.
6. Movember Time, Austin Style - Anyone that knows me, even a little - knows that I participated in Movember this year. I know, it gets old quick for those following me on Twitter and Facebook. But it was for a good cause. And we raised nearly $32,000 toward fighting cancer in men.
7. Tale of Two CMOs: A Study in Contrasts - This goes down as the post with the most potential and the worst execution. I liked where it was heading but I immediately realized how hard it was going to be to write as a series the minute I started putting pen to paper.
8. I See You - Maybe one of my favorite posts of all times. Riffing off the key phrase in the movie, Avatar, I loved what this post stood for. I was equally glad to see others embrace this.
9. Pluralitas Non est Ponenda sine Necessitate - Flexing my Latin muscles a little. This was inspired by the principle of Occam's Razor. Surprised to see this make its way into the top 10.
10. The Power of One - the result of a little experiment I did on Twitter. I'm sure there was little to no statistical significance of my study but it was a cool concept. And I liked the comments.

So who else wrote a post that you liked a lot this year? Make sure you post it in the comments. If I get enough of them, I'll either write a new post or at least include it in the body of this one as a post script.

Thanks again for taking the time to read and retweet me. Hope you have an awesome 2010 and if I'm lucky, I'll see you at SXSW this year.

The Best of Quick-n-Dirty

As you probably know by now, I do a weekly podcast with my friend and co-host, Jennifer Leggio called the Quick-n-Dirty show. If you don't know the genesis of this series, you can get the back story here.

We've been at it for eleven

weeks now and so far, I think we've done a good job evolving the show, creating chemistry and devloping a great group of followers like, ahem... Kyle Flaherty (who was kind enough to stand in as a guest host for us in week eight). We're always looking to improve though so if you have suggestions, please put them in the comments.

So what's with the "Best Of" focus after only eleven weeks on the job. Kind of like a

successful NBC pilot where you just get hooked and then all of a sudden, bam, they

revert to re-runs. Well, we're not quite that bad but Jen and I were both travelling this

week so we thought it might be helpful to take a week off, gather our thoughts and gear up for another eleven week run. To that end, why not do a quick recap of what we've covered and include a few "best of"moments. If you have a favorite moment, don't be shy.

By the way, If you want to read

recaps of all eleven, they are here... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ,10 11.

Now onto the highlights:

• On our eleven shows, we've covered ten social networks. We try and cover one every week but accidentally skipped Glue during week two so it got bumped to week three. Here are they are in order of appearance - FourSquare, Glue, Blip.fm, Daily Mile, Loopt, 12 Seconds, Shelfari, Friendfeed and Aardvark. A quick heads up on the fact that we will have have Friendfeed (now part of Facebook) co-founder, Paul Bucheit, on the show next Thursday. Scobleizer take note!
• One of the other regular parts of our shows is our featured "Tweet" or exec/person that we think is worth a follow. So far, we've covered CISCO CTO, Padmashree Warrior, Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Designs, Kodak CMO, Jeffrey Hayzlett, BIDH CIO, John Halamka, Technically Women (comprised of a group of very smart ladies), Cluetrain author, Doc Searls, Dr. Ogan Gurel, Red Sox tv color announcer, Jerry Remy, former Yahoo, Ryan Kuder, principal at The Community Roundtable, Rachel Happe and last but not least, tweeting couple Terre & John Pruitt.
• My favorite part of our show are our guests. So far, we've had a number of great ones including Michael Feferman of C3 and Rick Calvert of Blog World but in particular, Jen and I agreed that our two favorites have been Greg Matthews of Humana and Bert DuMars of Newell Rubbermaid. Not only did both impart some major pearls of wisdom about how their companies were tapping into the power of community and social media, but Greg and Bert also showed a great sense of humor. You can bet that they will both be asked back sometime in the near future. I guess I should mention Pandora CEO, Tim Westegren too 'cause he was pretty awesome.
• The reason we originally started our podcast show was as a result of a disagreement Jennifer and I had over the value of celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher joining Twitter. Since then, we've had eleven opportunities to "agree to disagree." To be honest, Jennifer and I actually agree quite a lot of the time so many times, we end up flipping a coin to see who is going to take the counterpoint of a particular topic. This is pretty fun -- kind of like debate club if you think about it. In our next batch of shows, I'm goign to have to work harder to find topics that push Jennifer's buttons. ;)

Am I missing your favorite moment? If so, be sure to either call into next week's show (we're now taking 1-2 live callers per show) or let us know in the comments below. In the meantime, keep it quick-n-dirty!