I have proof.

A while ago, I got an email from somebody interested in a position at Aptima, my former company. While Googling to find out more about Aptima, the candidate came across my blog. Below is an excerpt of an email to me:

… in the course of researching the company I ran across the posts on your blog about your work there. From your posts it sounds like you had a positive experience at Aptima. I was wondering if you have any advice for someone interested in joining the company. Did you find it to be a good place to work? How would you describe Aptima’s culture? Can you speak to particular characteristics and/or skills that Aptima values?

The happy former Aptimist in me saw this as a perfect opportunity to really talk up a great group of people. Luckily, the candidate (who I will call “the candidate”) seemed like a perfect match for Aptima based on past professional experience. I know what Aptima is. If the candidate was a hot shot Ruby on Rails developer, I would have said to move on. But the candidate’s background fit right in line with the company’s core work.

After a nice exchange with the candidate, I started thinking… wow. Holy paradigm shift. Your past employees could be telling prospective employees to not even give you the time of day before they even send you a resume. I left Aptima on very good terms. If I had not, a bit of power would have just fallen into my hands.

What is the lesson to take from this? Too many to list here. But not only should an employee leave on good terms (because you never know when you’ll run into a former colleague in a new position), but the employer could have a lot to lose in a messy breakup, too.

You may know that up until recently I was with a small government contractor called Aptima. Well, I still have a whole lotta friends there, so I wanted to publicly congratulate them on the release of their Distributed Dynamic Decision-Making (DDD) application.

Lemme quote Aptima.com, since they know it better than I…

Our flagship simulation product, DDD, models the core functions that drive team performance, such as communicating, sharing resources, making decisions, and coordinating tasks. It is unique in its ability to represent a wide range of environments, letting you create your own operating scenarios and use them to plan missions, conduct training and rehearsal exercises, perform team research, and many other applications involving individual players, teams, or teams of teams. Since DDD is client/server-based, participants can be geographically distributed and still interact as if they were all in the same location. Embedded within DDD are tools that capture and quantify team performance, providing stop-action replay and other feedback measures to help team members improve their skills.

It is a medium-fidelity simulator with a whole lotta brains behind it. A friend of mine is part of the DDD team and he blogged about the release.

It’s nice to see that the DDD’s release really resonated with the folks at Gizmag. They wrote:

As we pointed out last week, the science of building an effective team is often overlooked but we’re pleased to note the release of some new software designed to forge a highly functional team when the job is mission critical. Aptima’s DDD 4.0 is simulation software for military and civilian organizations involved in planning and preparing for complex team-based missions.

You can actually download a 30-day full-functional trial of the DDD at Aptima.com.

Congrats to the team on a job well done.

This ends an exciting (nearly) four years with Aptima, a company that allowed me to follow my interests the point that my interests simply outgrew my position. BatchBlue is a tiny startup that is close to home and allows me to exercise all of these crazy web ideas I’ve had lately.

Pamela O’Hara, BatchBlue’s president, prepared a post to the BatchBlog that not only mentions that I’m now onboard the BatchBlue team, but also pins the tail on the “Blog is the New Resume” donkey. My blog—simply put—was my new resume.

Here’s a teaser of what Pamela wrote:

My job as a small business owner is to find the person with the right skills, the right attitude, the right personality, the right temperament and the right passion to work with all of the other personalities and temperaments in my company. Not easy when all I have to go on is a one page resume. While Adam’s cover letter and resume provided a telling introduction, his blog was the real page turner. I learned he thinks beyond the immediate problem, he self motivates, he aggressively educates himself, he aggressively educates those around him and he’s a Red Sox fan. I would have discovered some of this eventually from the interview, the references and various other communications. But in the blog, it all became part of the first impression, helping him stand out from the crowd early on.

Good stuff.

I wrote a separate post that talked in detail about my approach to this latest job hunt (Hint: I have dubbed it “calculated informality“). The short version: BatchBlue simply offered me everything I was looking for.

I’ve wasted no time contributing to the BatchBlog, as well. I have written a post that sums up yet another aspect of BatchBlue that attracted me—the fact that they are creating Web Apps for the Rest of Us.

Time to put the head down again and get initiated.

I’m sorry to say that Aptima.com doesn’t have any Microformats, but I recently put together a small site for a Visualization Workshop that Aptimist Cullen Jackson is going to chair. I took the opportunity to put the event in hCalendar while marking Cullen up hCard. Small, quick, but fun.

I’m not a scientist, so I can’t relate to this problem. I do know, however, that web development is a very competitive field as well. In web development, blogging gives you an edge. Taking part in (or even hosting) a global conversation about your field gets your name out there. For web developers, this can lead to key jobs, book deals, or even sponsorships. Wouldn’t these benefits appeal to scientists?

Today, at a company-wide Brown Bag lunch presentation, I officially launched the CogBlog: The Cognitive Science Weblog. Ever since returning from Webvisions 2006, I pushed for my company to establish a blog. And now it has happened.

One nice thing is that it isn’t just a corporate blog for Aptima. Aptima is simply hosting a cognitive science blog for our company, customers, partners, competitors, and other members of the community of interest.

I’ve got two posts on the blog as we kick off. First, I provided a Hello World! post to kick things off. A sample:

I’d like to brag that I fought a gallant battle to convince Aptima to host a weblog in order to better have a pulse on the human-centered engineering community—but I’m proud to say that there was no “fight” involved at all. Aptima’s line of work (new and exciting technological solutions to mission-critical problems) is a breeding ground for great ideas that should be shared with our customers, partners, competitors, and other interested members of the field.

I also provided a more research-based article titled “Distributed Learning for the Army: Cost Effective or Just Plain Effective?” In this post, I talk about how distributed learning might not be simply more cost and logistically effective for the Army, but but also far more effective because it will be using technological means that new recruits will already be familiar with. A snippet:

I’d suggest that the benefits are not just about efficiency, flexibility, and frugality. In the not-too-distant future, distance learning could actually be a preferred method of training for new soldiers. Why? Because we’ll be seeing more and more enlistments from the MySpace generation.

I would really like to send a big thank you to Brian Oberkirch and Jeremiah Owyang for their indirect support during the planning stages. And of course, Dan Cederholm was very inspiring for the development stage. I recorded the audio of my presentation to the company kicking off the CogBlog, so I’ll see if I can mash it up with my slides to make a compelling archive.

So, check out the CogBlog if you get a shot. It’s also semantically marked up, designed to be bulletproof, and kinda pretty if you ask me.

A while back I mentioned that I was kickstarting the initiative to start a corporate blog for my company, Aptima. There are a few reasons why I haven’t posted here in a while, but one of them is that every spare moment over the last couple of weeks I have spent designing and implementing the blog for my company.

Well, today I launched the blog internally on our secure server. It was a very fast development process for a few reasons—the biggest being that I didn’t have a budget for it, so I did it on my own time. I consider it my Christmas gift to the company.

We even had a bit of a contest to name the blog. Luckily, I was still allowed to take part. My lone submission ended up winning: CogBlog. We have a large number of Cognitive Scientists at Aptima, so it seemed to be a good fit.

So, what are some notes on the development so far?:

• Multiple Authors: We will have quite a few folks contributing to the blog, and I wanted each blogger to have an identity. One design decision I made right away that seemed to help this was adding a thumbnail photo for each blogger. Also, each author will have an archive page that will also contain a short bio.
• Excerpt vs. Full Content: On the home page I’m showing just an excerpt of each article. Why? Since we have many bloggers, there is bound to be many different topics on the front page (more so than if it was just one blogger). So, for that reason not every reader will be interested in every topic. Just posting the excerpt will allow readers to see more posts than just the most recent.
• Popular Posts: I found and installed Alex King’s excellent Popularity Contest plugin. It uses an algorithm to calculate the most popular posts based on views, comments, trackbacks, etc. Should be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

Also, (of course) the blog is done with 100% standards. I’ll be looking out for places to add Microformats, but I’m not seeing any obvious choices yet.

More to come as we inch closer to launch. We’re anticipating sending the blog live sometime in January. So, stay tuned. I’ll post more info here.

It’s going to be a very different experience for me. Team Leads get to deal with the additional responsibilities of labor planning, business development, and people management, all while juggling project work. Project work is my first love, but I’m very intrigued by trying to find new business opportunities for Aptima. We traditionally do government research and development, but we have plenty of folks to develop that business. I plan to look outside that comfort zone more than inside it.

We are a team of four, and it’s a very different type of team—in many respects, we play a “support” role to other teams in addition to molding our own identity. I’m, of course, very excited about this opportunity… but also a little nervous since it is all very new. In many ways it is formalizing some work that I’ve already been doing, but with formalization comes increased responsibility and accountability.

So, if any team leads want to offer advice, I’m all ears!

I’ve got to tip my cap to Jeremiah here. His work and his advice was instrumental in helping me formulate an attack plan for this—though not much of an “attack” was really needed in the end. I went into the meeting with some notes, shown below. A great deal of this came from various posts by Jeremiah, and I thank him for that. I’ve included all my notes, with the exception of my section on “Recommended Next Steps.”

John Shaw, our CEO, mentioned in the company-wide email today that my WebVisions presentation was instrumental in kicking this into gear. Thanks to Aptima again for sending me there, and thanks to Jeremiah and Brian Oberkirch on giving me so many great ideas at the conference and in the months following.

And, the notes:

What is a blog?

• A simple technology
• A conversation
• A relationship
• An opportunity to share

What isn’t a blog?

• A series of press releases
• A news ticker
• A sales pitch
• A guarantee of increased revenue

What are the benefits of a blog?

• Your site always has fresh content
• Search engine optimization (search engines love blogs, improve rankings)
• Customer opinions easily published and searchable, which is good because customers value other customers’ opinions above all others
• Consumers are having conversations about companies with or without you—it is in your best interest to participate
  • If you’re not participating, you at least need to listen
• Dialogue with customers proves you care about them
• Prospective employees get a more detailed look at the company
• Web research is an important stage in the purchase process

What are the keys to success?

• Authenticity
  • In your voice (be yourself)
  • In your message (don’t have hidden agendas)
• Commitment
  • To your writing schedule
  • To writing with your customers’ goals in mind
• Focus (Stay on Track)
  • On your own goals
  • On your audience’s goals

How do you measure success?

• Web Traffic Analytics: Both for the blog and the main site
• Discussion: Number of comments on blog
• Inquiries: Track number of emails to contact addresses before and after
• Technorati: Ranking within blogosphere
• Subscribers: How many are regularly checking your site feed
• Be sure to prepare these measurement methods before going live

Who should blog?

• Someone who is:
  • Available (if people contact you, you need to be able to reply)
  • A domain expert
  • An effective writer with conversational style
  • A web user (up to date on how the blogosphere works)
  • Passionate (about the topic and about sharing)
  • Honest and transparent
  • Committed (you have to keep it up)
  • Thick-skinned (the blogosphere can be mean—customers can be frustrated)

Individual vs. Group Blogs?

• Individual blogs:
  • Pros: Users can subscribe to individual bloggers within a company, get content more specialized to their needs; each blogger has a stronger identity with the audience.
  • Cons: A well-read blogger could leave the company if offers start coming in because of the blog (but remember that person did open up new channel of conversation for the company); more pressure on each blogger to write consistently.
• Team blogs:
  • Pros: Less pressure for each blogger to write as often
  • Cons: Can come across as “faceless” if not implemented right (need to promote the individual personalities of each blogger)
• Team blog doesn’t have to be the whole Aptima team. Could have blogs for product teams.

The basis of my presentation will be the sessions I attended, but I will have several technology “breakout examples”. For example, I will use the CSS Zen Garden to explain CSS-based design for web standards. I have a few “evolution of a header” slides to demonstrate semantic markup. Social informaion architecture is demonstrated through Del.icio.us. I also mark up an hCard using Microformats. Plus, as they say… “and more!”

I’m up to 76 slides, following the “show ‘em a ton of slides, but fly through them rapidly” approach. I’m looking forward to talking about all of this new technology that I’m really excited about. I’ll be recording the session to post on the blog and as well as sharing my slides.

Why did I do this? I’ve been at Aptima for three years this month. I was taking part in an interview with someone who has been with the company for over ten years (she was employee #4; there were around 50 when I was hired; now we’re in the 110 range). When she was telling the candidate what she does, I realized that not only did I not know a lot of what she was saying, but I found out she had a lot of experience in collaborative web sites.

So, that was it. I decided that I needed to share this information about her and other employees in an internal podcast. Each week I am interviewing two people—an Aptima “veteran” and an Aptima “newbie”. I asked the interviewees about their backgrounds, current projects, professional interests, and personal interests. The first episode launched today and I feel it went very well.

This is the first step towards corporate blogging for my company. I want to take baby steps. Perhaps an internal podcast can turn into an internal blog. Then perhaps the internal blog can turn into an external one. We have great minds here and I think blogging could be a hit.