Rebranding

A Massachusetts court signed off on my divorce last week - after about three years of separation in which my ex and I weren't in the States long enough at the same time to get it done.

This means that, on January 30, I officially become Maria Victoria Korolov again. And I am never changing my name again -- in the new Internet age, its becoming harder and harder to maintain a consistent identity if you keep changing names, email addresses, Twitter accounts....

There's probably a way to cross-post to both Twitter accounts... maybe through FriendFeed or Facebook.

My personal email address is now maria@korolov.com, but I'll probably continue to maintain the old one -- maria@trombly.com -- for the indefinite future. In any case, both are simply forwarded to my company account, maria@tromblyltd.com. A bit of advice for married female entrepreneurs -- think twice before naming your company using your husband's last name!

But it works out, irony is conserved, since my ex took my maiden name as his middle name when we got married, and now its too much of a hassle to change it back, so he's stuck with Korolov.

Meanwhile, I've already set up the Korolov Group as a separate US entity affiliated with Trombly Ltd. by virtue of the fact that I own both of them, to handle the US side of operations.

I've got the korolov.com domain as well -- if there are any other Korolovs out there who want to have a @korolov.com email address, just let me know, and I'll set it up. The email for the domain is hosted by Google, so it only takes a couple of seconds to do, and there's no additional cost for me.

Finally -- email inbox success

I've finally found a system that works for keeping my inbox at a manageable size (one screen or less), a variation of the GTD system.


Step 1: Do I need to respond to this email?

Many emails are sent to me for my reference -- or are spam. If they're spam, I lick Gmail's spam button and they go away. If they're reference, I click on the "archive" button. I don't bother about labeling reference emails -- I can always find them later by searching by keyword or date.

Step 2: Can I take care of an email quickly?

Many emails just need to be forwarded to the appropriate person, or briefly acknowledged and archived.

Some require me to do something at a particular time in the future -- to conduct an interview, for example, or write a story. All this requires is a calendar entry, an acknowledgement email, and, if necessary, an addition to the workflow database.

Step 3: Can I take care of this email as one of the group?

With some emails, it's easier to take care of many at once rather than do them one at a time. For example, when I receive a business-related invoice, I need to print it, add it to my accounting database, and file it away. Doing this one at a time is a pain, so I save them up and do them all at once.

For these emails, I set up a label -- "Print and file" or "Add to Website" or "Pay" -- and then archive them. When I'm ready to print -- or work on the website, or pay bills -- I open that folder, handle these emails one right after another, and then take off the label to get them off the to-do schedule.

To keep myself reminded of them, I also mark them "unread" -- that way they show up nicely when I'm checking my email, a regular reminder that I've got tasks to do in these categories when I'm ready for them.

Almost all my emails fall into one of these three groups. The rest usually have to do with stories I'm currently working on, and may require a little bit of thought, or some hard work.

For example, in my inbox is a reminder from my business manager to call the consulate and check on my visa. There's no particular time I need to do this, but I do need to take care of it in the next couple of days. Once I do, I'll archive that email.

Another email is a draft of a story from one of my writers, and I need to go through it and get my questions back to her within two days. I don't have to do it right now, but I might work on that later tonight.

Hey -- I just took care of another email, by deciding not to do anything about it.

Down to ... drumroll, please ... seven emails!

Life is good.

More on WordPress -- it's starting to look pretty ... pretty

I checked out SquareSpace -- nice web interface, but seems a little lacking in functionality.

Then Ottawa-based web guy Gesman pointed me to a WordPress design site specifically for magazines and news organizations.

This is EXACTLY what I was looking for - thanks, Gesman!

The designs are gorgeous and don't look like blogs at all. I particularly love the way the categories are organized on the front page.

Content management systems -- the good, the bad, and the ugly

Today (well, it's after midnight, so it was yesterday) I attended a Meetup of the Northampton Web Developers/ Web Designers Meetup Group.

Excellent, excellent meeting. Many web developers there -- most looking like young, Silicon Valley Web 2.0 types. Mostly a male crowd, four Macs to one PC in terms of the laptop ratio.

The presenters -- all local developers -- talked about the pros and cons of Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and self-developed content management systems.

I need a new content management system very badly. The Trombly Ltd. website is built using Dreamweaver, with templates and iFrames linking back to Dabble DB database exports. I love Dabble DB -- it's one of the best, and easiest to use, online relational database systems out there.

We use it for invoicing, workflow, content management, HR, CRM -- everything and anything. It requires no programming, and can hold an amazing variety of different content types and can produce online submission forms and gorgeous reports.

When iFrames aren't enough -- for example, if we want Google to be able to search the data exported by the database, or for Google Translate to work -- we use PHP to generate static pages, refreshed daily and also on demand. That's how Emerging China and China Speakers Bureau sites work.

This is getting expensive -- PHP programmers don't come cheap. I was hoping that Drupal would offer a solution that was not programming intensive but more flexible than our iFrames setup.

However, according to the presenters, none of these three content management systems would be able to take in input from our database (in the form of RSS or JSON feeds) without some serious coding, at the very least.

So we'll be stuck with having our editors copy-and-paste materials from the database into the content management system when they're ready to publish stories online.

If we're going to be doing that, I'd want a system that is super easy for them to use -- and easy for us to set up and maintain ourselves.

I Twittered throughout the Meetup (http://twitter.com/Maria_Trombly) and one of my China-based subscribers, PandaPassport (a.k.a. Rick Martin in Dalian) suggested that I take a look at SquareSpace.

I asked the Northampton developers if they'd heard of it (they hadn't) so I went to check out the site. It's expensive -- especially compared to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal which are all free because they're open source. (I do love my iPhone -- all the functionality of my laptop. Okay, it's a rather old laptop, but still....)

I'm going to be giving SquareSpace a try. They've got a 14-day free trial, and a beautiful intro video on their home page.

I particularly liked the way they were able to edit all the style elements of the page through a drag-and-drop interface (like my iPhone).

By comparison, the Drupal presentation went more like this (I'm quoting from memory here, so this is very approximate):

Me: Do you have to be a programmer to use Drupal?

Rick Hood of Flow Media Design: No, of course not. Drupal is quite easy to use. Only takes a few minutes to install. All you have to do is upload the file to your web hosting provider, create a files subdirectory, set up a MySQL database -- a simple interface in your CPanel -- and you're all set. If you need to customize it beyond the basic templates and modules, you will need to write PHP code, though.

Me: Uhum.

Rick: (Spends an hour explaining in detail all the PHP files that govern templates and design elements in Drupal)

PHP, by the way, looks NOTHING like the normal programming languages I learned in high school and college -- Assembler, Basic, Fortran, and Pascal. It looks like the top line of your keyboard exploded -- the line with all the symbols.

Well, I'm going to give SquareSpace a try and I'll tell you guys how it works out.

In W. Mass,

Maria

The future of the Internet is coming on

I don't know if anyone remembers this, but there used to be days... the days of BitNet... when using the Internet meant a command-line interface on a mainframe terminals.

Then there were the bulletin boards and their menu-driven interfaces. Anybody out there remember menus?

Between the bulletin boards and the World Wide Web, there was a transitional stage -- America OnLine. You had to dial up and log in, as if it was a bulletin board. But once inside, there was a graphical user interface -- in other words, you could point and click. There was online content -- newspapers, magazines. There was shopping. There were discussion forums, and there was email.

It was more complex, and more involved, and more engrossing than the alternatives.

At first, AOL was a "closed garden." Only members could get in. And they could only send emails to one another. Then the email system opened up, and AOL emails could go elsewhere on the Internet. Then the rest of it opened up, and AOL became just another Internet portal.

The World Wide Web was different from AOL -- AOL had buttons, and the WWW had links, but in many ways it was very similar.

Both were graphical user interfaces. And people could go shop, communicate, research, and get entertained.

At each stage of its evolution, the Internet has become more engrossing, a richer experience, with more choices. Also, at each stage, nobody expected it to change. Back when there were bulletin boards, people expected the bulletin boards to last forever -- except they would be slightly better bulletin boards.

Today, many people expect the current version of the Internet to last forever, except maybe with faster connections, more videos, and slicker websites.

It's not going to. Our websites are about to disappear as quickly as the old bulletin boards did. Well, they'll be stored in online archives somewhere.

But really, when's the last time you checked out a Compuserve forum?

The next version of the Internet will look a lot like Second Life. It won't be Second Life -- Second Life is a walled garden, has interface and scalability problems, and is difficult to use.

But it will, in many ways, be like Second Life. You will be able to walk down virtual streets that are ever-more-accurate representations of physical reality -- or down imaginary streets that have no counterpart in the physical world.

Your online representation -- currently just your email address or instant messaging handle, LinkedIn profile, MySpace page or personal website -- will be augmented by an ever-more-realistic three-dimensional avatar.

The entire planet -- and our space satellites -- will have virtual equivalents. In addition, there will entirely new virtual-only worlds.

Second Life is a poor imitation. Slow, cumbersome, and cartoonish. But for anyone looking to get a jump on the next iteration of the Internet, it's great place to learn how to do it.

Tempted to cheat on my chosen career

I believe that, on average, the sharper your focus, the further you will get in life -- whether in your career, your business, your hobbies, or anything else you're after.

Unfortunately, picking a career is no easier than picking a mate -- no matter how attractive your spouse, there will always be other people who are prettier, sexier, nicer, or just plain different.

You can't get away from it.

Some people deal by becoming promiscuous. They work on a hundred different projects, each going off in a separate direction. By playing the field, they get to enjoy variety -- but it's much harder to enjoy any success.

And, even as people in perfectly happy marriages can be tempted, so people with perfectly wonderful careers can sometimes be seen sighing over the green grass on the other side of the fence.

In my case, this past week, I've been tempted by the thought of a career as an urban fantasy novelist.

Sure, I love being a business journalist. And I absolutely love running my own company. But I have a secret desire to write novels about witches and demons.

I know, from a practical sense, that I've never written anything longer than a hundred pages -- and that was a struggle. I prefer, short, tight deadlines -- the tighter, the better.

I also don't like working alone. I prefer to be part of a large team of people. No, I prefer to be the head of a large team of people.

I also like making money. There are only a handful of novelists out there who make real money. Writing -- like music and acting -- is a career for people who don't mind spending most of their time waiting tables, or living off their significant other.

Finally, I like making a difference. What difference could I possibly make writing frothy, escapist books about witches and demons?

I'm like the guy in the bar complaining that his wife doesn't understand him -- when he knows that the opposite is true, that, in fact, she understands him all too well. And that the woman he just met is a soulmate -- despite not having any in common with her at all.

I'm the guy in the bar. And urban fantasy is that woman in the bar. She's fresh and dewy -- she's Samantha in Bewitched. She's fun and doesn't take life seriously. She drinks sweet fruity cocktails. And she compliments me on how creative I am.

Meanwhile, my old career has been with me for 15 years. Made me reasonably happy most of the time. Is likely to continue making me reasonably happy for the rest of my life. And we've produced some good stuff together.

Of course I'm not going to throw that away.

But it's nice to flirt and to fantasize once in a while.

In my fantasy, I live in a house in the middle of fields and woods. In fact, it's my actual house in Massachusetts, where I hardly spend any time at all -- it's in the middle of nowhere and I start going crazy with boredom within a week.

In my fantasy, I write on an Apple laptop -- maybe a pink one, like Reese Witherspoon had in "Legally Blonde." In real life, of course, I would rather shoot myself than get a pink laptop. A Mac, maybe, but definitely not pink.

And I write light, fun fantasy about urban witches.

I've got one idea about a former executive secretary who slows learns that she can sense an object's history just by touching it. At first, she uses her powers to help her boss, but then quits her corporate job to raise foster kids and fight evil.

And another idea about a woman whose parents immigrated to the US -- from another dimension. And she's got secret magical power and uses them to maintain peace in the city where she lives -- even as others of her kind use their powers for evil.

But now that I'm thinking about the serious implications of doing this, there are ways to set it up like a business, with teams of contributors...

Okay, gotta go... I smell the potential of money to be made.

In Shanghai,

Maria

How to kill your journalism career: The story of J.

We cover a lot of countries here at Trombly Ltd. Some of these countries speak other languages. So we're always looking for reporters with go od language skills.

J. was perfect. Young, ambitious, had the languages we needed -- plus, with journalism experience.

She wrote ten articles for us. Sure, her work needed work. She needed to improve her reporting, story organization, and grammar and style. But she was well on her way to becoming a solid international business journalism. Plus, we were getting in assignments on the movie industry -- just up her alley.

On Wednesday, I took her to a meeting with a local media executive who liked her background and was interested in helping us put her on TV.

On Thursday, I offered her a part-time assignment editing gig for one of our publications, on top of the other work she was doing, and started up the process for getting her a key to the office and a pass to the building, and a new set of business card with her name on them. Later on, if everything went right, we would have gotten her accredited, and she'd become an international correspondent.

And by "international correspondent" I mean someone who works for the top tier of publications. These are the publications that pay enough so that you can travel, buy a house, have children anywhere in the world.

This is a small group of publications, mostly based in the US and Europe, with a few in Asia, and they're shrinking. Moreover, the budget these publications allocate to international reporting isn't getting any bigger, either.

It's a hard market to break into. You have to have the experience they need. You have to demonstrate ability and connections. And you have to be able to gain their trust. After all, it's hard for an editor to manage a reporter who's based on the other side of the planet.

If the reporter is still one desk over, you can easily see whether he's on the job, how many phone calls he makes. When he goes out on assignment and brings back into, you know whether he did a good job covering the event because you've been working in this area for a long time, and may have, perhaps, covered it yourself in the past. Sure, frauds still slip through -- like the New York Times' Jason Blair -- but then your readers will usually let you know.

With foreign reporters, you don't know the beats that they're covering. You don't know the topics that they're covering. And your readers usually can't act as a fail-safe fact-checking mechanism because they don't have first-hand experience of what the reporter is covering, either.

As a result, publications typically send trusted, senior writers to overseas assignments. These guys are expensive -- but they know what they're doing, and they don't need constant supervision.

These are hard-to-get, high-profile, glamorous assignments. You don't just walk into them. You spend years working your way up.

There are short cuts, however, and our bureau is one of them.

We hire young, inexperienced writers. We train them, and we supervise them. We help them find people to talk to. We help them figure out which questions to ask. We help them organize their stories and improve their English grammar. We help them decide which stories ideas are interesting -- and which ones are the same old, same old.

Finally, J. had learned enough about our databases and processes to work on her own. Her task was to find someone to comment about a particular news development. She had a number of people she could try to reach -- and she only needed one quote for this particular story, a 250-word brief.

She had everything she needed to make the calls.

But instead of calling, she pulled a quote from an old article from another publication, translated it into English, and put it into the story. More than that, she didn't just plagiarize the quote -- she added in the story that the source talked to her, personally.

We caught the problem immediately -- before the story even went out for copy editing.

There was no reason to do this. It would have only taken a few minutes to actually call the source and get the quote. Maybe a little longer if the first guy wasn't available. Maybe a couple of hours if she had to call several different companies.

Why did she do this? Not just "accidentally" copying something and "forgetting" to attribute it properly -- that happens, we catch it, issue warnings, help the writer avoid such mistakes in the future. (If they keep making these "mistakes," though, they're out.)

This was an out-and-out lie.

I would guess that the lie saved her, most likely, 30 minutes of reporting time.

And, most likely, it killed her career.

I may have given her a second chance, but my business manager and Shanghai bureau manager forcefully overruled me. The risk to the company's reputation was too great - and the risks of setting a precedent too severe -- to allow her to remain in the office at any capacity.

We also pulled her previous ten articles and re-checked the sourcing of all stories. For two stories, we opened her company email account and checked for email confirmations of the quotes.

Then we notified all the clients whose stories she worked on -- all US-based business publications -- and explained what happened.

It is possible that J.'s career will recover from this. There are other news organizations in China, and she might also be able to report for smaller news organizations overseas, especially ones who require her language skills.

She's very lucky that her fraudulent story wasn't printed. If it had been, we would have had to run her name along with the correction -- and any future editor who Googled her would have known what she did.

In Shanghai,

- Maria