Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit: A Q&A With Liz Strauss

Scott and I sat down for a few rounds of interviews starting yesterday morning here at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Orlando, Florida.

We had a number of social media luminaries in attendance, and first up was Liz Strauss, founder of the business networking event, SOBcon and author of the ever-popular blog, Successful-Blog.com.

Our topics? Blogging, of course, as well as some insight and background about SOBcon.

My favorite quote from Liz: “Write intelligently from the heart.”

Watch the video to learn what Liz meant by that!

Happy Turbo Blogging Anniversary To Me

A quick blogger’s note: I just realized today is the seventh anniversary of the Turbo blog.  I “officially” started blogging on July 11, 2005 with a post entitled “Standing Up in the Earthquake.”

It started thus:

Here’s the deal: I’m your new IBM blogger. I know your purchase order didn’t mention anything about getting a blogger, but one of our recent market research studies indicated that you wanted one, and I happened to be standing in a hallway in Armonk with a red target painted on my forehead. 

And yet, even as I was whimsical about this new pursuit, I also took seriously (if jokingly) the potential implications of somehow crossing a line somewhere (remember this was still the early days when peeps were regularly getting fired because of what they were blogging):

As for my day job, you can read my bio above, and I’ll likely be writing more about what I do at IBM here in future posts. However, I keep pretty current on the Blogosphere, and the average life expectancy of the corporate blogger has recently dwindled close to that of the average fruit fly. I figure that now that I’ve started blogging, I’m out of here within the next few hours. 

It seems a few hours has quickly evolved into seven years.

There are a lot of great things about having made this investment in time and energy, but I’m realizing quickly that the best thing about having done this is that I have a record of musings from those past seven years, observations about everything from golf to economics to the business of technology and topics beyond.

Though I was going out on a bit of a limb when I started, I also recognized the blog could potentially create a wealth of other new opportunities.  Opportunities to have my posts syndicated to other vehicles (which it has), opportunities to meet new people (which it did), and even opportunities to travel to far away lands and write about what I saw (which it also did).

But mostly, it gave me the opportunity to exercise my God-given talent of writing, a skill for which I am and have always been most grateful and for which this blog has given me a steady platform for its practice.

So happy blogging anniversary to me…and if you’re still reading this, thank you for sticking around.

The Rain In Spain

What a week. TGIF

Of course,  I’m not going to have much of a weekend.  I’m heading out on the road again (Sing it, Willie!), this time to Barcelona, Spain.

I’m arriving the same day as the Pope.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same town as the Pope before, but he’s apparently heading in to consecrate Sagrada Familia, the lovely Gaudi-designed church that’s never been finished (and which I visited in my first trip to Barcelona 10 years ago).

Me, I’m on my way to Barcelona to attend the IBM Industry Summit, an invitation-only event that I’ll be covering in the Turbo blog over the course of the next week.

The central theme of the event based on my pre-briefings is the unique and vast opportunity for innovation across a wide range of industries moving forward, and the role IBM technology, as well as our industry frameworks and expertise, can play across the gamut of industries IBM serves, from finance to public sector to telecomm and beyond.

I’ll be a fly on the industry wall, taking notes and sharing key insights and sound bytes, so be sure to start tuning in early next week, and to also follow the #ibmsym hashtag on Twitter.

I’m going to travel lighter than usual this trip.  I’ll be carrying along my new HP Pavilion notebook, my iPhone 4, and the iPad.

That’s it.  If that sounds like a lot, I had my MacBook Pro, a Dell Latitude, the iPad, and the iPhone on that last trip to Information on Demand in Vegas.

No matter the tools, look for the posts starting on Monday, and I’ll be sure to keep a look out for your comments…and the Pope.