Here’s what I experienced with respect to the Traveling Geeks crew.

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[1] My advice to clients is “Go where your clients and prospects are.” So if you’re a tech writer, and all your clients are spending their time on Facebook, you must be on Facebook. And if they’re tweeting about you, you’d better be on Twitter.

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Automattic released their WordPress app for the iPhone this week. Since I’m fairly mobile, I wanted to try it out.

For offline blogging from a laptop computer, I already use Ecto, which gives me substantial freedom in that I can create new posts even when not connected to the net. Having the ability to write on the iPhone whether online or off might be fun.

My first impression is that this tool will work fine as long as you don’t want to include any fotmatting, because it’s really a pain, on the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard to get to the < and > characters – it requires several taps for each. So it’s probably only viable for text with a photo or two interspersed. For many people that’ll be OK, but it’ll be somewhat limiting for me.

I am, however, finding that a one-finger typing method while allowing the phone to correct the typos really is quite excellent! And the “fatter” I make each tap on the screen, the more accurate the algorithm seems to be.

I’ve had the app just quit out from under me several times, but I haven’t lost any data, so it’s inconvenient but not fatal. And I know it will get better with the next version.

This app looks like a keeper.

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Most particularly, the data show that Wikipedia rose from zero to “Daily Traffic Rank” of about “10” in about four years, and YouTube rose to “10” in about a year and a half. (Making them among the top sites on the web.)

You’d have to attribute this to the fact that these sites are created by, or at least “formed” in some way by, their users. That belies the suspicion that people are couch potatoes and won’t lift a finger to create their own media entertainment, other than to channel-surf. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of channel-surfing going on at YouTube, but there’s also lots of participation, even if 90% of it is deadheaded talking-head responses. And Wikipedia is certainly a creation of its readers (even though there’s a core group that does a huge percentage of the heavy lifting).

So, I want to know if this phenomenon only gives “voice” to those with broad Internet connections, or whether it can be used by those with only occasional access to the net. Can conversation take place offline and then be put online in the form of blog postings, or wikipedia entries or online video?

The proof so far – and I’d say it’s working – is that it may actually work. Our friends – teen-age Tibetan refugees living in India – have now made a dozen video segments and posted them online – and my gosh all we had to do was provide them with a digital video camera and some online time. They do their video work offline, produce a great little movie, and upload it for all of us to see. In Nigeria, our friends have far less Internet connectivity, and yet they have made movies to share with us, and have made more which are being burned to CD to be physically shipped to us!

I’m making a trip, next month, with a group of bloggers, to the Middle East. My formal role is to “blog the bloggers” – there will be a dozen or so prominent bloggers going on that trip – and I will mostly be attending to the process they use and how their perceptions and interactions develop over time. But – we are going to visit with a number of people who are using technology for social good – and I will track and write about all of that so you can share in the information. You will have a chance to feed me (and the group) some questions you’d like to ask – and I will soon give you the info on how you can ask your own questions.

I think this phenomenon of using digital media to spark two-way conversations is really going to take off. Everywhere! This is more than just a YouTube thing. It’s true two-way storytelling and conversation. And 2008 is the year when it will really bloom.

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I’ve been having recent conversations with Howard Lieberman, who following successful runs at company-building, rented an office on Sand Hill Road (Palo Alto) for a year and then decided to dump it in favor of going virtual. He said that the expense of the office just wasn’t worth it – everything could be done from mobile platforms and you could always get/find a meeting room somewhere.

I agree with Howard’s action, if you are well-enough-known to be able to make connections in other ways. And if you already have some other connections to keep your business alive. And the other factor is that you have to be “in the area” once in a while, so you can visit F2F with backers and customers.

I repeatedly find that if I’m not “in the face” of a customer they can pretty rapidly forget about me. Especially if the product I’m selling is a bit on-the-edge and they don’t quite understand how much they really want it.

As a counter-example to the University-Avenue post, I founded a company in 1980 in San Francisco, and in 1982 we relocated to the China Basin Building south of Market (SOMA). In those days all the action was in Santa Clara and Cupertino, and my 1968 Volvo 142 got mileage put on it like crazy going from SF to the South Bay for meetings – things like a couple of times to pick up Steve Jobs, who in those days did not drive a car, to go see interesting things (like PLATO-IV) at other companies. My company did just fine, even though none of our customers were SOMA – they were all in Chicago and New York, and a couple in The Valley. As long as I saw customers once a month we grew and fluorished. And our VC investors were primarily in Palo Alto, and they loved coming up to The City to meet with us.

Then came MCI Mail (anybody remember it?), and AOL email, and finally AOL got connected to the Internet, and we moved into the current era of tight virtual connections. Now I do most business electronically, but only after I have set things up face-to-face. And I’m still in Palo Alto at least once a week, which gives me the ability to meet with people and stay in their sphere of awareness, which has more than once gotten me work that I would not have otherwise gotten. There’s no substitute for some F2F contact!

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