After a long vacation, I am finally back in the saddle.

Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Guy Kawasaki speak around themes from his new book. He was keynoting the SalesForce.com Developer Conference put on by a friend of mine, Rene Bonvanie, who is now at SalesForce.com running the AppExchange and associated programs. This was a great conference, and I will not do it justice, so here’s a link to a blog which covered the event nicely. In fact, the blog also has a post about Guy. In fact, the guy writing that blog sat behind me and mercilessly, and tactlessly, typed that blog loudly in realtime during the presentation , so if he’s missing a little between the 3rd and 4th points of Guy’s presentation, that’s because I was dressing him down.

Now, back to Guy.

Turns out that Marc Benioff did a little stint at Apple in ’79 (at least as they told it on stage, which I believe might have had some additional narrative compared to actual events), working for Guy. Marc wrote some demo programs for the Mac. Guy mercilessly ribbed Marc, Marc laughed uproariously, and we all got a terrific package of good sense and entertainment to boot.

Guy is terrifically funny, and very nuanced, and has clearly put some thought into the book. The talk itself was a model of how to present, and hands-down I give Guy props as one of the best, if not the absolute best, presenter in tech.

Guy also talked a bit about his new site: Truemors. It’s a buzz-keeping site around true rumors.

In keeping with being honorably arrogant:

Arrogant: the site isn’t baked yet, although it’s pretty interesting.

Honorable: Here is my list of to-do’s before I would look at it again:

1. First Impressions are important: make the default sort “most popular” or something other than most recent. The most recent is, due to high volume, a bunch of spam and junk, which leads me to #2. At least give me the option of sorting by most popular, or most relevant (see #3)
2. Get a spam filter
3. Relevance is king: develop a neat way (deep algorithm) to determine which true/rumors are most buzzing. Something like ( hits * recommendations * # of searches * number of incoming links ) / (average score of the current top 100) Of course, a la Google logic you would have to iterate the algo for this to work, but you could assign something for the denominator to start, it really wouldn’t matter, as long as you kept the score iterating it would come to equilibrium.
4. Push to mobile: send RSS and text messages to people based on relevance (see # 3 and #5), and let me set a tolerance of say the 10 most important rumors a day
5. Buy-in: Let me subscribe to categories
6. Personalize simply – let me use my Google Account to get to the above

Love the idea though – I am a rumor hound, and will have to post about rumors, markets, and the econometrics of information in an upcoming post. Maybe.

Buy Guy’s book.

“Now get out there and be somebody.” ($10 cash sent to you if you can identify the comedian here quoting a president, sort of)

Just heard a great biting track (Courtesy of Garth Trinidad, who has been rocking my nights for more years than I (or he, more than likely) would like to admit.

As far as making me laugh, it ranks right up there with Pato Banton’s “I do not sniff na coke, I only smoke. . .” (as an aside, I will soon post about Pato – I am a huge General Public fan, and Pato has a very interesting story with some twists. . .)

Take a listen to Benjamin Zephaniah’s Superstar, off of his Naked Album.

Garth – better hook up that website my man. . .