Today I’m at Real Estate BarCamp Boston, connecting with industry techies, vendors, and agents. One presentation, one interview, and many introductions later, I’m done with the scheduled sessions and off to enjoy some pizza and networking. If video of the presentation or interview become available, I’ll link to it here. Thanks to everyone I met for great conversations; please check out my real estate marketing website service, EasyImpress.
Friends and colleagues have given me a lot of praise for seemingly knowing about everything web-related. And while I can answer a good number of “How can I…”, “What are the…”, and “What’s the best…” questions off the top of my head, the biggest lesson I’ve learned about providing value to others is that it’s not about knowing everything, it’s about knowing how to find almost anything. Below are my top 3 resources for being able to find almost anything.
I hope these resources help you. Let me know your favorites!
This Saturday and Sunday, BarCampBoston4 is happening at MIT! It’s a fantastic geek unconference, with close to 400 attendees networking, eating, and participating in sessions on everything from Rapid Application Development to Entrepreneurs Anonymous to Battlestar Galactica: The Aftermath. The main thing I’m thinking about is… what am I going to present on?
Some ideas I’ve been thinking about…
Right now, the Boston startup community is an invisible network with no persistent points of connection or knowledge-sharing. Students, newcomers to the area, and corporate refugees have a particularly hard time discovering and feeling connected to the local community, resulting in a talent drain from Boston as individuals move to San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere.
Events like BarCampBoston & Web Innovators Group are great at drawing them out some of the time, but these events are ships making port only occasionally, and often passing in the night. A persistent, publicly-available space for the Boston startup community would act as a magnet for entrepreneurs & talented individuals. It would allow them to network, collaborate, gain inspiration, and feel more connected to the community.
The session would be about my vision for such a space, the challenges in creating one (some questions I still don’t have answers to), and some action items for any who want to be involved, or can pass along the items to others who may want to be involved.
Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to advise a couple of entrepreneurs younger than myself. One an intern from CareerNumbers, the other a connection from a high school friend, now in college. I was amazed at how much advice I actually had to give; that is, how much I’ve learned since moving to Boston almost three years ago, attempting my first startup, and now working on my second. It got me thinking about where I became aware of entrepreneurship, from my mother as a small business owner, and what I’ve done to make others aware of it.
I’m not sure what the goals of this as a session would be, though. My main thought right now is it would be interesting to hear the stories of others from different stages of this lifecycle.
This relates to the article I wrote on Evaluating Your Competitors’ Products. First you have to know who your competitors are. And just as important as understanding how their product works and how their customers like it, is understanding where their customers are coming from (and where they’re not). Essentially, this session is me compressing a bunch of marketing expertise, bundling it with a dozen or so useful tools, and uploading it into everyone’s brains at T3 connection speeds.
Leave a comment if you’re particularly interested in any of the above, I might not present until Sunday. I’ll post slides after the presentation, but hope to see you at BarCampBoston4!
I was wondering, where have all the fanboys/girls gone? Startups like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Basecamp got nothing but love when they were young. These days Twitter is the hot topic, but more among the mainstream than the early-adopter community; they’re 3 years old now.
I haven’t seen as much buzz from early adopter enthusiasts around any single startup lately, and I’m wondering: is it because there’s nothing hot? Or is there nothing that’s hitting a large enough number people at a common intersection (like Flickr did with photos)? Or am I just more out of touch these days with my head buried in my own products?
Who do you think are the darling children startups these days?
At IgniteBoston5, I gave a presentation entitled, “Is Social Media Bullshit?”. I’ve synced up an audio recording of the talk with the slides, and embedded it below.

Jay Neely is a Boston entrepreneur interested in online strategy, user experience, and emerging technologies.
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I'm currently available for short term web strategy consulting projects.
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E-mail: jay [=dot=] neely [=at=] socialstrategist [=dot=] com
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