Craters of the Moon, Idaho. Photo by Shel

[NOTE:  This is the 4th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  just completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. The previous installment left off at Shasta Lake and this one picks up a few miles later. ]

From Lake Shasta we drove north past snow-crowned Mount Shasta. At Weed, Calif. we turned off I-5 and onto Route 97. With extremely few exceptions, we would not put wheels onto a highway for another 1200 miles and eight days. This was a wise choice.

On the Interstates you focus is on getting there, there's a sense of urgency. On back roads you focus is on being there's a sense of exploration. We stopped often to read historical markers, soak in magnificent views and enjoy assorted oddities along our way.

Route 97 extends north from Weed all the way to Canada. At an average height of 5000 is a scenic pageant of rivers, mountains, lava beds and forests.

Our biggest stop was at  Crater Lake, the bluest inland water body I've ever viewed. Filling 30 square miles of a collapsed volcano, it's surface is 7000 feet above the ocean and it's deepest point is 1900 feet, making it the deepest in the US.

From their, we continued north another 60 miles to the very pleasant little  city of Klamath Falls. Home of Oregon Tech and with a population of about 20,000, we had nice late-night Taco salads at Hidalgos Mexican Restaurant, then stayed in a safe, clean and affordable Great Western.

We continued north on 97 all the way to Bend where we caught up with Paula's daughter, her husband and two of our grand children for a weekend at Sunriver Resort. The first person to scout around this area was Kit Carson, but that was before it had its own airport, golf course, swimming pools and tennis courts. We got a great deal on a fabulous house that slept five adults and two kids for two nights for less than $1K. We biked, jogged, swam, ate at a great restaurant and on our own deck, enjoyed free in-home wifi and just sat on the rear porch looking at pine trees. I'm not big on resorts usually, but this one gets a top rating in my view for having a great balance between recreation and serenity.

After Sunriver, our goal was to get to the big tomato of our trip, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We drove a few miles north on 97 to US 20 east, which crosses into Idaho. We had no big plans for Idaho, a state that I know potatoes and HP printers. But we were surprised by its open space unrelenting beauty.

We made an over-night stop in downtown Boise at a Hampton Inn. The rooms were pleasant but the breakfast memorably awful.

In the morning, Highway 20 followed the Interstate for a while, then cut  into sparsely populated land you picture riding on a horse. It's a gently curvy road, part river meadow, rolling hills and some badland with mesa and cathedral rock formations erupting from time-to-time. There were also some large stands of white birch.

This was not an area for cute shops and restaurants. Paula and I had some steak sandwiches and we pulled over at Riley, Idaho. The sign said population 17, but I suspect they were exaggerating. We dined on rickety picnic benches, with a spectacular view blocked slightly by a port-a-johnny that was thankfully downwind.

We drove through the Sawtooth National Forest, the turnoff for the posh Sun Valley resort, abandoned gold mines and the out-of-use Rattlesnake Station, stage coach stop.

Then we went to the moon. Route 20's absolute high point is Craters of the Moon National Monument. I took the photo at the top of this page from one stop on a seven-mile loop. My photos did not capture the eerie sense of this area of eight volcanic disturbances, the most recent being a mere 1500 years ago. The lava fields we saw 800 miles west in Southern Oregon are part of this massive, unfinished area.

It really does feel like you are walking on the moon. Paula and I have seen the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii, but for some reason, these felt even more moonlike as we strolled upon the paths.

We stayed less than an hour and continued East. At all most every stop we felt the pang of wanting to stay longer. We had seen so much and had so much more to see.

Our next stop would be the tourist mecca of Jackson Hole, WY, where I had last visited33 years earlier. I learned that my memory could move mountains.

[NOTE:  This is the 3rd in a series of off-topic posts. I've just returned from a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. It was part-family oriented, part a visit to some of my best visual memories and in part a review of the new Ford Escape Hybrid, which Ford Motors loaned me for evaluation purposes.]

We began grumpy and came home exhausted. In between, Paula and I had one if the best experiences of our lives. We were gone 10 days, slept in nine different places and got to experience the bigness, the beauty and diversity of the American northwest.

The highlights of the trip were a two-day visit to Sunriver, Ore., a resort in Bend Ore., and visits to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. But the connecting points--the towns and back roads, the little spontaneous explorations were almost equal in interest and discovery.

For some reason our vacations are almost always preceded by about a week of tumult. This one was a record setter. Paula got sick. Her mother, Jean Berman, 91, had an infected leg, which doctors attached to a clumsy medical vacuum machine until a few days prior to our departure. Our younger daughter and her two small children visited us until the day before our departure. For the first time since my heart surgery, I was feeling some chest pains and worrying.

When the tires of the Escape rolled onto our street from our driveway, I was still waiting for Paula to shout out, "wait, I can't do this. I need a rest," but she didn't. We picked up Jean in Fremont and were on the road at 9 a.m. as scheduled.

It was 85 in Fremont at 9 am when we hit the road. By the time we stopped for lunch at the Vacaville In-N-Out Burger, it was 102. We did not yet know that our departure date would be the hottest day of the year in Northern California.

After lunch,  we connected north onto the tedious stretch of I-5 to Redding.  We bickered about unimportant things as we sat in traffic, looking at flat agribiz-owned farmland. The temperature kept rising. This was the most boring stretch we would experience. It was made more difficult by a few serious construction delays.

Redding turned out to be the geographic wormhole. Before it was redundant flatland. After were evergreen forests, pristine lakes and a surprising number of snow capped mountains--always a surprise in 100 degree weather.

The biggest and most breath-taking was Lassen  stands tall and powerful over everything else. We regretted not having time to visit Lassen National Park.

We turned off for the next point of interest. Lake Shasta was our first scheduled stop. We drove through the aging City of Lake Shasta onto Shasta Dam Road. As we drove through the small city, Paula and Jean wondered why there were no people on the streets in mid-afternoon.

Our dashboard said the outside temperature was 105 degrees.

We stopped for a moment to watch a few people swimming and boating and fishing and enjoying a cooler time than we felt in the parking lot. I caught site of a speckled eagle, the first I've ever seen. The fleet-flying, fierce-looking was far too fast for me to catch a photo.

At the dam, we spent a little time at the highly informative visitor center, where we caught our breath and felt our collective moods elevate. We were looking at incredible beauty.

We were on vacation.

[Note. Mount Lassen & the speckled eagles are file photos gleaned from Google images. I took the Shasta Lake & Dam shots.]

Sometimes I call myself a social media story teller. I often get advised that this is a weak position, that I should organize my presentation like big time analysts do it with lots of numbers and graphs or like recent MBAs do it, where the key points of a presentation are called, "key points."

I disagree. I find story telling to be powerful, memorable and effective. I find charts flashed on a screen to be puzzling and often forgettable. Sometimes talking points work, but often they are either redundant or forgettable cliches.

Sometimes, I open my talks by mentioning that back in 1987, I was the PR guy who gave the world PowerPoint. I pause,  then say,"forgive me." It always gets a laugh.

I do use PowerPoint, but mostly I just put up a photo of a person that I'm telling you about. If it's a marketing audience, then I may add a page of "takeaways" on my last slide. But I know the audience won't take away those closing bullet points.

They'll take away the stories of people whose faces I showed them. They will have certain key points that stay in their memory, even if I did not make those points, and those words never appeared in bullet point fashion.

Hopefully, one of my stories will contain information or insights that is useful or interesting to audience members and will help them adjust course where they work. I find telling stories let's people get inspired. I'm certain that demonstrating what I know does not.

Marketers today really have two courses to take in talking to customers. It doesn't matter if those customers are business people or consumers. The can make claims and deliver talking points, or they can tell stories.

Stories work in traditional marketing forms such as advertising and PR and they most certainly work in new marketing forms such as blogs and video.

It is something in our nature as humans that makes us lovers of stories. Story-telling is how we remember our ancestors. It probably goes all the way back to caves.

When Org and Morb came back from the hunt and the tribe held a great feast. At the end our hunters used grunts and gesture to tell the story of their adventure. Maybe they enhanced their effort by drawing little pictures with sticks in the dirt.

The next morning, while they slept, perhaps another member of the tribe, one not as adept at hunting, went to the wall of the cave, and using blood and berries, drew pictures on the cave that told the story of the great hunt.

This was story telling, but it was also--in some ways--the beginning of the marketing of that tribe continuity. It was the beginning of making representations that led to a common knowledge and it was an early dot on a continuum that gives us TV and YouTube.

Can you picture how it would have gone, if that first story teller had drawn bullet points to explain how the project was planned, executed and the return on investment along with lessons learned? Can you imagine a world, whose history is shaped by 10,000 years of PowerPoint.

The last time I spoke before taking a short break for open heart surgery, was to discuss Userville [formerly Blurring Boundaries] at SNCR's NewComm Forum. It was well-received, but candidly, it did not generate the kind of excitement I sensed when announcing either Naked Conversations or Twitterville.

Sometime, after they rerouted my heart at Stanford Hospital, I realized that there was less of my heart in the new book than there had been in my two prior attempts. I started thinking that maybe I was working on this book because I like writing books rather than, a sense that I had a great story to tell and was just bursting to tell it.

Two weeks ago I came home. I found myself more enmeshed in the Gizmodo-Apple fracas than I was the Userville story of how big companies like IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and SAP were finding, measuring, scaling and sustaining business value in social media.

I put Userville aside and started something new under the working title of "iPhoneGate--not a hero in the room."  Since I was confined to home until a few days ago, I spent a good deal of my time reading every word written by journalists covering it.

Once I could be mobile, I'd go out and start conducting my own interviews.

A few days ago. my friend Ken Yeung stopped by to help me with a project that I could not yet handle on my own.Ken had been a big booster of Twitterville, one of the project's most passionate supporters.

He didn't like the iPhoneGate idea. He told me he already knew more about the story than he wanted to know. He did not share my interest in how it redefines who and what press is and how laws must adjust.

I found myself quietly simmering.

After he was gone, I realized that I had just spent two weeks, and written over 10,000 words without checking with anyone on the concept, not in social media and not off.

Over the last few days, I have learned that most people share Ken Yeung's view and few people share my continuing fascination with iPhoneGate.

So here's the bottom line. I am abandoning both book projects, the first for lack of passion and the second for lack of audience. I'm going to take at least a short break on the book-writing business

I now have a repaired heart and vocationally a blank sheet of paper in front of me. Think I'll do some gardening and then figure out to do with the remainder of this extended life that I now have.

I could end up being something completely different.

Got any suggestions?

I've been having an interesting pair of discussions over on Twitter this morning about the twin blazing issues of Apple Computer's reaction to an iPhone G4 prototype being sold to Gizmodo and a Facebook user privacy policy seemingly designed by Rube Goldberg.

I'm very curious to know what everyday people think about either of these issues--if anything at all. What has surprised me is the number of people who seem quick to say they know of many people moving away from Apple product or leaving Facebook caring nothing whatsoever about it.

One woman told me that all her friends were switching from iPhone, but she later said she was "speaking figuratively." Same with my Twitter colleague who estimated that 60 percent of facebook would leave.

I just do not think that this is how a major brand, supported by hundreds of millions of people implode, It is not so simple and it is certainly not so fast.

Let there be no mistake. In my view the decisions and actions of Facebook and Apple are deathly serious and could have enormous, and long-lasting impact on corporate position.

That is if the actions of the last few weeks end up being datapoints on a timeline that show a reversal of company behavior, a behavior that continues for a prolonged period into the future.

There's really no doubt about it. Most people who use Apple products and Facebook don't like what these companies have done. They don't like it enough to remember the incidents for some time to come. They don't like it enough to insert privavcy and police in the night into conversations about these companies.

But so far, very, very few people will be willing to just walk away.

It's sort of like a loved one who disappoints you. Have you have a long, well-established relationship, that disappointment would have to be huge for you to just walk away. It should be.

But still, it makes you pause to think. It makes you watch the other party's words and acts a little more closely and with a tad greater suspicion. If there are subsequent breeches of faith, then you might start seriously examining other options.

And while such trends always start on a minuscule level, they can accelerate with great speed. Just look back. In my life. conventional wisdom told me that GM simply made the toughest and most enduring cars; that IBM literally owned the PC industry that no modern enterprise would trust open source applications; that IT would never allow the internet security dangers. We also knew that there three TV networks, and few powers were great than big media power.

And so on.

Each of these were tiny, little movements. Then one day, we blinked and generally recognized truths were no longer true and the new powers seemed to have come out of nowhere.

One of those two powers came out of Harvard University fraternity houses. Another, Apple Computer involves the restoration of an exiled founder named Steve Jobs. This latter one is the best industrial comeback story I know.

Both Apple and Facebook got to where they are with great speed and with few people seeing it coming. Both could return to oblivion with equal or perhaps great speed.

Whether this happens or not does not depend on a few poor choices they recently made. It depends upon what they do next.

I have never felt so well-support in my entire life. It is humbling and gratifying. For those of you who pray to God or Jehovah or Allah, these entities may be wondering why he, she or they are being besieged to help some guy named Israel.

Some of you all suggested that I use creative visualization to see a positive outcome. They tell me that is the central force of the universe.

Whatever you have prayed or visualize on my behalf, I thank you for it. I hope tomorrow your Gods confirm your faith. I tested such faith yesterday asking that you pray for the Boston Celtics who went on to beat Cleveland.

It happened. I don't know what that did to the faith of my friends in Cleveland.

Tonight, my prayers are going to my surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses, and all their assistants. May they  have a wonderful,  peaceful night enjoying themselves, their love ones and getting a good night's sleep. Let them awake with happy hearts, steady hands and their best ability to concentrate.

As for all of you in Twitterville you have brought me an amazingly wonderful aspect to a very scary experience. I have written about this sort of thing, and I have reported on many stories like this, but I never was the recipient.

It isn't just on Twitter. I have received over 1000 messages on Twitter, on email, by text and even Google Chat. I have heard from a friend of 50 years and people I have never spoken with before. I have heard about other people's surgeries and the operations that have saved or preserved the lives of loved ones, often parents who are about my age.

I have heard not a discouraging word. Not one from anyone. Thank you all so much.

Now, all that is left is to pack a minimalist satchel of pajamas, bathrobe [Paula got me new ones, that are really cool]. Then I have to take the first of two showers using this antibacterial, pre-surgical soap, they sent me home with today.The second will be when I get up at 3:45 am so that Paula and I get to opening curtain at 5 am on the 2nd floor of Stanford Medical Center.

I have been growing a full beard for the last week and now I have been directed to trim it off my neck, so that they can insert a catheter into my carotid artery. I forgot why they're doing that. I'll take their word that it's necessary.

I spent six hours today over at Stanford today getting poked, x-rayed  and being redundantly interviewed about my medical history. The only glitch was that Stanford's computer refused to save a 13-year-old update on my current address. The insurance carrier refused to recognize me at my old address, and there was some chance the whole surgery might get postponed until it was resolved at about 3 pm today.

I wouldn't want that. I want to get through this wormhole and get back to writing and exercising and tweeting and joking.

That will happen soon enough.

I would ask you to wish me luck, but most of you have done that already. And my thanks to you and what you believe in for all that positive, supportive loving energy.

I learned last Wednesday that I will have open heart surgery this Tuesday, May 11. There really hasn't been much to do since then. There's a few details: I need a new bathroom, and if I am going to use my computer outside during recovery I need a new patio umbrella.

Support from friends, particularly on Twitter has been astounding, just astounding. It has come from all over the world. I've written a lot about how twitter is best in a crisis, how communities of support form and make a difference. I did not have a clue that I would experience it first hand and in such significant numbers. It has allowed me to spend time chatting, often with humor and always with someone wishing me well. It has been a distraction and it has buoyed my spirits and trust me, that isn't so easy to do in a situation such as this.

I had written about Connie Reece in Twitterville. She's a spunky, compassionate, charming communications officer in Austin Texas who started what was the first Twitter-based health support meme when Susan Reynolds, a Virginian she had never met, discovered she had breast cancer. Connie has had health problems of her own but she doesn't talk that much about her own stuff.

Yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang started a  #Hearts4Shel hashtag supporting me on Twitter. Connie added the cute, downloadable icon for people to use as their avatar. For some reason, when I saw it, tears came to my eyes and I choked up. It is the only time in this entire experience that I got teary.

This experience is nothing at all like it is so often portrayed in the movies. There is no light surrounding my head, no archipelago  choir singing in divine harmony off camera. You just like to do the stuff you always do, speak with the people who give you pleasure and make you smile.

My best friend Charlie O'Brien was dead by the time he was my age. When his time was growing short,  he told loved ones that all he wanted was to have as many good days as he could before he had to leave.

I have no intention of dying anytime soon, but there's something about open heart surgery that makes me reflective, makes me realize that the simple and everyday things are more sacred than we sometimes realize, and that when something happens that irritates us, we should remember the angry words we say to someone may be the last words you ever share. It's important to show your love. There may not be time later.

On the big picture, I have nothing new or profound to add, just yet. That may come in a few days. But I keep thinking of something I wrote somewhere, probably in a blog post but I can't find it.

My generation came of age in the 60s. We tried to have a revolution back then. It was uglier and angrier than the Conversational Revolution we are now experiencing. We had hoped to achieve world peace. Obviously it has not turned out that way.

But my generation did give you the PC and the internet and social media--and oh yes medical technology that can mend broken hearts. We have made it possible for people in a great many places to talk to people from other lands and cultures.

This is the legacy of my generation. If you are younger than we are, then the baton gets passed to you. We took to the streets to shout our messages in the 60s. Now you can just go online and tweet or blog, or YouTube it.

It's more powerful this way and a whole lot more fun.

[US Library of Congress]

Twitter has gone through a wormhole in the past ten days. It went in as an aging, fascinating startup and has emerged as something more enduring and important.

First, it first announced acquisition of Tweetie, a superb and popular Twitter client for the desktop and the iPhone. This required it to also announce a more mature platform strategy, which in turn caused consternation among many members of the developer community that has contributed  to the platform's success so far.

This all happened in the days leading up to Chirp,  Twitter's first-ever developer conference. Many developers went to the event expressing misgivings. Most came out still loyal and passionate to the evolving platform. Twitter's "secret" was to not be secretive.  Company spokespeople set a new standard for candor and transparency in their comments and quips from the conference dais.

The most discussed wormhole event was the launch of contextual tweet ads. Now when you search for a topic on Twitter, you will get a sponsored tweet in some returns. Like Google ads, they are contextual and unobtrusive. An interesting aspect is that if people do not retweet a sponsored post, then the sponsors are required to replace it with one more to the community's liking.

This, of course, caused some grumbling, but less than I would have thought. Observers have been unanimous that the company needed to introduce a serious monetization model and this one looks promising.

It could get muckier in the future, however. In the next phase, sponsored tweets will be inserted into user streams and we may not like that. But so far, Twitter has handled the issue with great sensitivity and I personally trust that they company will continue to do so.

My favorite Twitter wormhole week announcement was that Twitter has gifted its entire-four-year archives of billions of tweets, to the US Library of Congress [LC], America's largest library and official keeper of our national culture. This archives will continuously be updated, once tweets are six-months-old.

The LC is where serious historians and authors go to research books. It is the best way to see how people were in this country at earlier times.

Twitter is a wonderful record of what what everyday people did and said at any given time. For example, if you want to know what life was like on an Ohio farm in 1810, this is the building that stores the body of knowledge on that or any other such topic.

Twitter's inclusion means that what people say on this platform will be stored from this time forward for historians of the future to know we said on that space in this time and that give a continuity and a permanence to Twitter.

Although it has digitally expanded it's role and accessibility, the LC has traditionally been for  for scholarly research. You can't just drop in and thumb through Thomas Jefferson's personal diaries.

But Google will let you do that with the Twitter archives. The world's largest search company has announced it will make the Twitter archives searchable online and apparently has exclusive rights for now. There will be a six-month time lag before you can do this so searches will be historic rather than for finding out who became mayor of your local pizza joint yesterday.

If you read my books and blog posts regularly, you know that I am very interested in the continuity of human culture. I am fascinated with how much we people remain the same even as our communications tools get better, cheaper and faster.

To me the Twitter archives gives a sense of continuity and permanence that goes beyond anything I could have imagined.

Well, my suggestion yesterday that I replace Blurring Boundaries as the working title for my new book, with Customer-Centered Communities was greeted with a universal gaping yawn.

That's okay. I use this blog and Twitter to get feedback and the feedback was valuable and certainly candid. Better here and now than when there's a book on a store shelf being ignored for it's lame title.

In response I came up with a title that got me excited--the first such title that is not already in use and had a URL open.

The new working title is [drum role and envelope please]:

USERVILLE

How Big Software uses Online Communities  to get closer to customers.

There are many reasons I like this title. The book is essentially about how IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and SAP are using online communities to get closer with partners and customers. In so doing they are achieving a new sustainable and scalable business value for all parties concerned.

Each of these big software companies discovered these communities work best when they put their customers at at the center of these communities. This may seem to go against conventional wisdom. After all, these four enterprises have invested human resources plus the cost of developing,  hosting and managing these communities.

Why shouldn't the enterprise  who foots the bill be at the center? Well, it turns out that there is much greater business value for all parties when the customer is at the center. Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group, estimates that SAP's ecosystem and partner group has a market value of about $90 billion, for SAP and it's corporate customers. He emphasized that SAP's network of communities is the heart of the ecosystem.

Enterprise communities are about the users. When users are put at the center, then they make sense. They answer the tough and nagging Jerry Maguire challenge to social media: "show me the money!" For large and medium-size communities the money is in the social network and it is sustainable and scalable.

Userville, also continues explaining the concept of lethal generosity, which I introduced in my last book, Twitterville. It's the argument that the companies who are the most generous to their customers will prevail over competitors; that loyalty is strengthened by serving the customers interests and ultimately so is enterprise revenue.

Of course, I like the title because there is continuity to it, with my previous book.

But there is yet another, more subtle reason that I like the title. Dave Winer, is the pioneer who gave us blogging as we know it and RSS subscriptions that catapulted the popularity of blogs. At the time he was head of an innovative software development company called Userland.

It was there that one of his employees learned about blogging and would have a great influence on my thinking of the subject. His name is Robert Scoble.

For me that final reference ties a few pieces together very nicely.

It is very early in the game but it seems to me that both Apple iPad and Google Buzz are ugly puppies. No matter how cute the marketers try to make them look, people just aren't going to want to cozy up and play with them.

You'd think that these two brilliant product companies would know better. I did.  expected more out of an Apple slate and Google's first real foray into social networking. I've even tried to love--or even like- Buzz and the iPad but I don't.

These are companies whose design teams have understood product simplicity and elegance. They have found demand where conventional wisdom assumed there was none. Yet here they are dragging these ugly puppies to market and they are going to wind up with pee on their feet.

The horridly named iPad seems to me to be no more than a jumbo iPhone, except it doesn't fit in your pocket and it's not that good for talking.  It's good for visually impaired people I'm told, but I can see no other compelling use for it. I've asked people on Twitter their views and their is little love and less lust for it.

Google Buzz has an appropriate name. Buzz is the last thing that you hear before getting stung and that is what is about to happen to Google with this intrusive first serious foray into social networking.

This product adds nothing to an already crowded market. Those of us who use Gmail and other Google products have no choice to see it because Google has inserted it on our products and makes it nearly impossible to remove.

I can find no consumer need for Buzz. It duplicates functionality in an already crowded market.  I suspect its primary purpose was not technical inspiration but a desire for Google to open a new advertising channel.

Why did these two mistakes happen? How could they have been prevented?

Well, they happened in part because success causes arrogance. Development teams start thinking, "Hey we're Apple. People love our products." So they develop an unlovable product and figure brand and marketing will push it into the marketplace.

But instead of market acceptance, these two mistakes are going to put big zits on the face of the Apple and Google brands.

They could ave been very easily prevented by having the companies join the conversations of social media just like other companies have done. As cool as Google and Apple seem to be, they are among the most traditional of marketing companies.

If they used social media to ask customers then listen and respond, then expensive mistakes like these would happen less often.

Yeah, yeah, I know. They are public companies and they cannot talk about future products that can impact revenue. The workaround are abundant and so are the case studies.

The bottom line is you can ask people what they think. You can say, if we engineer a puppy that looks like the one above, would you take it home with you.

People will tell you.