I am seriously considering attending BarCamp and I imagine I could get away with going and not presenting, but I kind of want to. I want to put that pressure on myself to actual talk to people about the things I’m passionate about. It’s a bit intimidating though, since I don’t feel like I’m an expert in these things – but the website says I don’t have to be, so I’m going to go with that.

Some ideas:

Things That Shape Us: Why Enterprise Software Matters

The New “Blue Collar” Worker – Defining the Future of Customer Service

Creative Uses for Call Centers & Outsourced Operations

Info Addicts: Share How You Get Your Info (blogs, news sources, forums, etc)

Personas: Who Uses My Stuff Anyway?

Hmmm, I could find a way to weave in location aware mobile tech… I’ll have to think on that.

As you might have noticed, since I blogged that the dog was coming home, over a week ago, there hasn’t been another peep out of me. That’s because this little ball of chocolaty goodness is a total time suck! I was expecting that, but I’ve got to drag myself kicking and screaming (well, not quite) back to the adult (and human) world. In this pic he’s running around in our back yard with one of his many toys, keeping us very busy with his high-energy demands for pretty much constant play time.

I’m looking forward to eating at Branzino tonight, a new restaurant opening Belltown. Maybe in addition to scoring the first review on Whrrl, I’ll get the first on Y*lp. We’ll see.

I am so excited, because I am finally getting a puppy. He is 8 weeks old and I will be bringing him home on Saturday. He is a chocolate lab, and I’m naming him Rafe. Kevin has been out of town, which has left we with plenty of time to shop for pet supplies without him complaining. I am actually surprised by how stressed out I am about whether I will be a good Mom to this tiny little dog. I’m sure it will be fine, and I mainly just can’t wait to get him and snuggle with him and pet him for hours on end. That’s probably what I’ll do all weekend, while I work with my Dad on building the gates in the backyard.

In other news, I just signed up for the Six Hour Startup Conference on May 31st. I’m looking forward to it on multiple levels. I haven’t really gone to any kind of networking anything since I started working at Pelago, mostly because I’ve been so busy and when so much was under wraps it wasn’t much fun not being able to talk to people about what we’re doing. This conference will undoubtedly be more fun than the stuffy talks I attended for the Transportation Alliance, Port Authority, Seattle Chamber of Commerce, etc in previous work experiences. The speakers including Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime – who I have blogged about here, and whose product I still use daily. Most importantly, I am looking forward to meeting new people. I don’t have a business idea to pitch, I am really more in information gathering and learning mode, so it will be interesting to soak as much in as possible and look to make meaningful contact with people that might be resources in the learning process or just interesting to befriend in general.

I promise, puppy pictures soon.

Last night I finally got all of our household accounts updating in my Mint.com account and it was so easy!

I had been procrastinating really getting myself set up with Mint.com because, in my past experiences with Quicken and MS Money, the process could literally take days. Time spent digging up statements and account numbers and old balances, all in an effort to get everything organized enough to actually pull useful data. Then even more time spent categorizing all my transactions so that my trending and budgets would work.

There are many features that make Mint a joy to use, such as the ability to load multiple accounts at the same time. It is very accurate with the categorization of my expenses so I don’t have to do much fixing, unless the credit card company or the vendor have something strange on my statement. My one complaint is the navigation of the site. When I deep dive into the details of a transaction from the trending graphs I can’t use the back button to go back to the graph I was using before, which is usually a drill-down pie chart into one of the main categories. I have to go back through the “Trends” tab and drill down again. I find this to be time consuming and wasted clicks for me.

I got an email today from Mint.com offering me an RSVP for a private beta they will be doing soon that includes 401k, IRA, and other investment and savings accounts that they don’t include right now. I’m looking forward to that. I also hope they will soon have more trending tools for the income side of the equation and not just the expenses. I’d like to be able to look at how our household income is trending over time.

Today is mother’s day and we gave my mom-in-law gift cards – and, as usual, she was thrilled! She has a very interesting gift-giving policy, which it has taken me about three years to finally begin to appreciate. Today I saw the light.

For every holiday, my mom-in-law tells all of us exactly what she wants as a gift. Not just an idea or a suggestion; no, she is expecting to get exactly the gift she has asked for no more, no less. If she doesn’t get it, she isn’t even that nice about it, and I’ve come to realize that this policy has existed in my husband’s family for a long time and is seen as a rule. At first, I disliked it because I felt like it took everything that was personal and heartfelt out of selecting and giving gifts, not to mention fun. I mean, how many different ways are there to dress up an envelope containing a few pieces of symbolic plastic? Now, as I begin to accumulate well-intended clutter, I am beginning to see things from the other side more clearly.

Take Easter for example, where people often give cute bunny rabbit stuffed animals. Easter comes every year, without fail, and if someone gives me a stuffed bunny every year and I’m on of those insane people who feels like they can’t throw anything away (read: my mom-in-law) then I am going to end up storing a lot of bunnies in my guest bedroom closet.

We’ve come into a culture of choice – where people like me can afford to buy their own luxury items and would prefer to do so. The best gifts I can think of are ones that are perishable like flowers, chocolates, food, and drink. Another great gift is experiences (movie/concert tickets, bed and breakfast gift certificates). These are the things that I don’t tend to splurge on as much as I should with my hectic schedule.

So what does this mean? Why have we changed so much?

This morning was like Christmas morning. I went to bed last night, but plenty of other people around the office were up all night working on the final touches of the latest and greatest version of Whrrl. I’ve settled in at my desk this morning and played with the new features, and I am so excited to tell all my friends to come on back and check it out all over again.

Don’t miss these new details:

Quick and easy ways to indicate you have been to a place/event, or want to go. If someone says “I want to go to Red Door” and you view this note in your feed, you can indicate you also want to go in two clicks. From place detail pages, it is just one click.

7 new metro areas covered in that drop down menu on your profile page: Miami, Kansas City, Portland, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Columbus, and Denver

Tons of event data – movies, concerts, and more – as was mentioned in a press release earlier this week. I’m going to try and check out an event at the Seattle Public Library this afternoon for a little while, and maybe also go to a tasting at the Seattle Art Museum. I used to have to get the newspaper and go through it for worthwhile events, this is SO much better.

Disclaimer: I work for Pelago, the makers of Whrrl, so I am pretty proudly biased. Also, any opinions expressed in this blog are mine only and are not necessarily endorsed by Pelago. Check out the official Pelago blog

This was going to be a meta-post about my own blog, and why I am so bad at keeping it up to date. Last night we cooked dinner with some friends and I made a comment that anyone who wanted their blog to be significant to the blogosphere had better be posting a least once a day, if not multiple times a day. I made this comment without a lot of thought, but then came to thinking “is that really true?”

What do we expect from the blogs we follow on a daily basis. For that matter, what is our expectation on status updates (micro-blogging) via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?

On Whrrl, the product of the company I work for, I tend to update my status multiple times a day (often whenever I check in at a new location). This makes sense to me – I want to contextualize the other piece of information I am sharing about where I am. For example, if I check in at the office I am likely to update my status to “Danielle is whrrking” or if I check in at Purple Wine Bar I’m likely to say something like “Danielle is tipping back a great glass of claret”. On Facebook, I update my status a couple of times each week on average. Although I check my Facebook profile for messages and updates nearly daily I don’t remember to update my status unless I see someone else post an interesting status. Rarely do I go to Facebook explicitly to update my status – in fact I would say I never do.

Twitter is somewhere I text/go explicitly to update my status and answer the question “what are you doing right now?” because that is the point of the service (although people are using it for micro-blogging and posting links and whatnot now). It isn’t hard to post an update to Twitter, sending a text to the shortcode is probably the easiest text command I use on my low-tech phone. Offer my “tweets” will come in sporadic bursts, maybe 6 in a day and then radio silence for the rest of the week. I don’t feel much of a need to space them out though – I feel like it is expected that I will lifestream on Twitter in a way I don’t do on Facebook or Whrrl.

This all culminates into the obnoxious noise that is my FriendFeed, loaded with so much crap even I don’t want to read it. Who wants to see the long list of articles I’ve shared, changes I’ve made to profiles, status updates in multiple locations (which become annoying duplicate/cross posts when viewed in FriendFeed). It is just overload – and then on top of monitoring FriendFeed (which I’m not doing regularly, btw) I have email, GoogleReader, and stupid voicemail (for those people still stuck in the stone age, like my parents).

The thing is, sometimes I will have moments of “oh man, I should just disconnect all of this” but it isn’t just an “online-life” anymore – it is my connection to people in the real world. Disconnecting online really does hinder my ability to keep in touch with my real world friends. Sounds like they have me hooked. I think this bodes well for Whrrl, but I’ve still got to figure out to manage all this information in my life. I can’t wait for 5 years from now, with all the technology being developed around solving this problem.

If you actually update your status on LinkedIn I’d be interested to hear about what kind of things you write there. So far, I’ve been a bit baffled about how to use that feature in that context.

Today Google announced that they are giving the KML file format, originally developed by startup Keyhole who Google acquired, for geophysical data (maps) to the Open Geospatial Consortium.

I am curious to hear how different businesses intend to take advantage of this open standard – it seems like there must be a business opportunity here for services *other than Google maps* to do great things for consumers with user-generated mapping, especially now that the format will be so much more portable from one place to another. For example, a user of Gmaps could create a map there and then upload it somewhere else. Combine this with services that track where you are via GPS and there becomes an event more compelling story for what users might want to do with their location data as a timeline for their lives.

What would you do with the new KML standard if you could start a business today?

When I worked at Expeditors the arch-nemesis was UPS. Of course, the koolaid we all drank was that all our competitors were inferior, but at some point after the honeymoon period wore off I began to actually examine that claim. Of course, I quickly found the various “I hate UPS” website disgruntled employees and customers alike had created online (and didn’t find any equivalent for Expeditors), but I kept seeing ads in business periodicals suggesting UPS is solving some of the problems nearest and dearest to customers’ interests.

I picked up the April 21, 2008 edition of Forbes tonight, and on pages 14 and 15 there is a great ad. It shows a to do box piled with paper (drawn in the brown UPS white board pen of course) with a steaming cup of coffee next to it. Then it has a little post it note in the upper right hand corner (page 15) that says:

International shipping means lots of commercial invoices – in triplicate. But that paperwork could disappear when you sign up to use UPS Paperless Invoice, the industry’s first electronic commercial invoice. It’s just another way UPS simplifies international shipping.

Below that is a laptop with a steaming cup of coffee.

Even though I no longer work at Expeditors, I still have deep respect for the things they do for customers and I can’t help but wonder what they have up their sleeve to respond to solutions like this one? So much of transportation today has less to do with moving physical freight efficiently from point a to point b (a lot of companies do that, and a handful do it really well) – and much more to do with efficiently moving the documentation of that freight. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a third party software-as-a-service business to step in and offer solutions to shippers that will help them streamline the amount of paper in the international shipping process and integrate with the big transportation services companies out there.