Ross Hill

A new use case every day

Ross Hill — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:18:37 +0000

As the engagement grows in your network you will start to create more and more use cases, particularly where people are forming teams across departments, offices and even countries.

The Puyehue volcano in the Andes mountains of southern Chile hadn’t been active since 1960, but for the past two weeks it has been busy spewing its ash plume into the skies and in Australia disrupting many millions of dollars worth of flights in the southern states.

When I spoke to Pete Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital he said that the ash cloud was Deloitte’s Yammer Use Case of the day. Pete explains in this Youtube video, below.

What’s your Yammer use case of the day? Share it with us in the comments below.

Ross Hill leads Yammer’s Customer Success team in Asia Pacific. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Mindful – a day about mindfulness and the edge

Ross Hill — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:32:11 +0000

This is what happened through my experience with thisismindful.com on May 21, 2011.

I started the morning in St Kilda… waking up and grabbing a coffee with some eggs at Cafe Racer, then walking by the beach with Jan Stewart and Steve Hopkins before heading into the city.

The #mindful people gathered in the upstairs space at Hub Melbourne. Many of them tweeted.

After meditating for two months, Xavier Shay opened Mindful with a Beginners Mind session on getting started with meditation.

Ron Laurie described the intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic realities while showing us the differences between mindless, mind and mindful.

Pete Williams shared his experiences in a meditative life, about how that translates to action not just relaxation.

When the group split in half, some of us had lunch at Kinfolk followed by Bryony Cole‘s great session on mentors and what that idea looks like now.

Steve Hopkins lead an experimental open space afternoon in the basement labyrinth that sparked many concurrent sessions each with their own unique atmosphere. A few people actually got lost. Others were caught hopping around like frogs.

Edward Harran ran an amazing session about transcending bipolar.

The #mindful tweets were everywhere!

We went upstairs, but everything was different, for drinks and music from Mykel and Jeremy.

We had dinner at Gaylords, followed by Claypots.

My day ended 2am standing in the water at St Kilda with Steve Hopkins and Nathan Sampimon.

It was an intense day that would ripple through many lives.

Joining the webstream

Ross Hill — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 01:21:57 +0000

The internet is a transformational tool leading to the emergence of psychic cyborgs who have a second self. I want to explain how to connect your thoughts to the planetary consciousness.

Twitter is about short bursts of inconsequential information, yet it is vital information as you learn to learn. You access this web through mobile devices like iPhones, iPads and laptops – they know where you are and they are your interface to the planetary network. When you get a message in the virtual world, your phone twitches in the physical world.

This is all quite simple, yet vastly powerful when engaged.

1. Exist.

Go to twitter.com and hit the signup button. Fill in your details, use your full name as your username if possible. Upload a photo of your face, because people like talking to humans. Now you should see the big update box. Write something in it, something short – you are limited to 140 characters.

That was easy wasn’t it?

Now follow interesting people so that you see them in your stream. Follow me @rosshill. Then have a look at who I follow and follow some of them as well. That’s a good start. It is vital that you trim your following list to ensure it is super relevant to you – you need to do this or the Twitter will be irrelevant.

2. Search.

Search is one of the foundational pieces of the web. This is how you will find things. You probably already use Google to find pages, but if you want to search thoughts the best place to do it is using Twitter search. Type in a topic and you will see who is talking about it. Click on the people with the most interesting messages and you will see their profiles. On the profile there is a ‘follow’ button that you can click to subscribe to their future messages. Do that with the most interesting people.

3. Comment

You know how to share messages, search to find interesting things – the last piece is commenting on other people’s contributions. This is how you participate. On twitter you do this by referring to somebody with their username, like “@rosshill thanks for sharing the joining the webstream guide“. The @ reference means that I will be notified of the message. Take a look at your own @mentions tab to see who is talking to and about you. This reciprocation is how your thoughts will spread.

That’s all really. This is reality now.

This is one of the topics that we will explore at Mindful* – a one day conference to explore focus, integration and wisdom in the technology age. Join us there May 21, 2011.

Nomadic personal presence for the entangled web

Ross Hill — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:54:58 +0000

As the edge of the web grows further outwards, how do our virtual footsteps evolve?

Websites have become commoditised and with that have attracted many of the typical management processes (contrasted to the lighter startup and growth processes), which means updating and keeping the official website current often falls into the ‘too hard’ category. This goes for large organisations who channel everything through a particular department that needs approvals and moderation at every step, as well as personal sites where the individual doesn’t always have enough technical knowledge to make the updates themselves.

This has lead to an interesting environment because there is a social site for every type of media object. You put your messages on twitter, photos on flickr, check-ins on foursquare, music on last.fm, resume on linkedin, places you travel on dopplr, etc.

Once the data is out there aggregation services such as Friendfeed can pull it all together without the need for a dedicated website of your own. The internet doesn’t need you to pull it all together to one place anymore.

What does a web presence strategy look like if there is no home base? An assemblage of loosely coupled pieces. An organic pattern that has holes at the edges. When all the pieces are out there, as they are, anyone can join the dots into a collection they find interesting.

The rise of the coffee on the side

Ross Hill — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:47:42 +0000

I’m sitting down at Little Mule in Somerset Pl in the heart of Melbourne’s laneways. They sell great coffee of course, but they also sell colorful fixed gear bicycles.

A friend of mine wants to open a cafe florist. It seems to make sense, right?

I had lunch earlier today at Captains of Industry, which has grown from a sparse unknown space into a popular space for creatives. They sell tailored suits, shoes and cuts alongside their coffee.

As great coffee has become the standard in Melbourne the new set of openings are going beyond that traditional formula to offer more. The aspect I really like is that the stuff around the shop isn’t just decoration – it is practical and functional and you can take it with you. Of course there will likely be a few coffees in the meantime because all of the objects are tailored.

The reason I love spending time in these spaces is because they have a really unique atmosphere that is much more grounded and based in reality. People have more conversations about the things they do, riding for example. The nature of the web is invisible as we go beyond to discuss the activities that all of these elements enable when integrated together.

The coffee is becoming the side object again.

If you never did, you should

Ross Hill — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:07:11 +0000

This is an interview with Jodi Sagorin, the South African professional adventurer and adrenaline junky who writes at If You Never Did, You Should, and author of the free book How to be an Adventurer.

What are the most extreme adventures you have been on, and what is next on the list?
Skydiving, living in India, flying a plane, or going to circus school would all rank up there in the most extreme adventure category. The next thing on the list is a cross country road trip. I’m bumming my way through America and proving that you don’t have to be moneybags to see the whole U.S.

What have you learned about your mind by going on all these adventures?
Conquering that little voice of reason in the back of your head is a must and with practice you can learn to banish fear, doubt, and insecurity. All those pesky adventure-killers are learned and through constantly pushing the limit, I’ve unlearned them.

You raised the funding for your trip to India through Kickstarter. What did you learn through that process and what aspects of it worked really well?
I learned a lot about the generosity of others through fundraising for my trip. It was hard work to raise the money in such a short time and I know so many others who want to do it, too. I am actually in the process of writing a short guide to fundraising, so you’ll just have to wait for all my juicy tips and gory details. One thing’s for sure, though: Kickstarter is a miracle platform.

Have you had any interesting responses to sharing your stories publicly online?
Definitely! I’ve had people send me pictures of themselves on crazy adventures, stories of overcoming their fears, and even someone who accused me of being older than I am or a photoshop master.

How do you find adventures in your own city?
Finding adventures in your own city can be as simple as changing your attitude and perspective. I talk a lot about seeing the excitement in the little things in the ebook and put a huge emphasis on your attitude. I find that when you approach your city as if it were foreign to you or through the eyes of a kid, the opportunities for adventure are endless. Get lost. Explore. Enjoy the ride.

Which blog / stories are inspiring you right now?
I really love the Art of Noncomformity. Chris Guillebeau is an incredible adventurer and contributed to this ebook. I’m also inspired by Raam Dev who is on a mission to change the world and Lachlan Cotter who is setting out to smash fear.

In your new book you have interviewed a lot of adventurous people – what is the common thread that you see in their responses?
Most of the adventurers I interviewed said that the best way to get started was to just go for it. They also agreed that being an adventurer is an individual journey. Adventuring to one person might not mean the same thing to another.

“If you never did
You should.
These things are fun.
and Fun is good.”
from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

The Awesome Foundation Melbourne

Ross Hill — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:08:53 +0000

The idea of the Awesome Foundation is simple: a monthly $1,000 cash grant awarded to a person doing something Awesome – whether it’s music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing…

The money will be spent on a project, activity or research and we don’t even really care if it’s for fun or profit. We never claim your intellectual property or anything like that, and anyone in the world is eligible. So long as the funding will have a material impact on what you are doing and the idea is awesome, you will receive the cash no strings attached.

Edward Harran and I brought together the founding board of the Awesome Foundation Melbourne:

Ross Hill - Minimalist, explorer, blogger, kiteboarder, entrepreneur. Founder of @coverhunt, @thehive, @awesomemelb. Work with @deloittedigital at @green_dot.

Jason Smale - Creative Technologist running WhatWeWishFor. Creating & exploring things at Deloitte’s Online practice. Snowboarder, surfer, wakeboarder & volleyballer

Dan Peou - Birdwatching. The Internet. Long walks along the beach.

Jan Stewart - interested in the evolution of consciousness and culture and building awesome customer service systems

Bryony Cole - Digital Strategist @ Department of Justice; likes hip hop, Fridays, lemonade. Writes @ social4social.com & theinsideoutblog.com

Xavier Shay - Coder, vegan, dancer, athlete. I blog and more, check my site.

Darren Rowse - ”I blog about twitter and tweet about blogging. Sometimes I blog about tweeting about blogging and tweet about blogging about twitter.”

Amantha Imber – Creativity & Innovation Psychologist, using science to increase idea generation capability

Derek Winter - Helping people get out of (unproductive) ruts into (productive) grooves. See more at www.ergoconsulting.com.au and www.bsrt.com.au

Brad Krauskopf - Co-founder and Executive Director of Hub Melbourne.

Edward Harran (Dean of Awesome) – Futurist, Blogger, Philanthropist, (Know)mad. Passionate about seeding, spreading + sharing awesomeness. I like exploring the edge and connecting dots.

This video explains how the hunt began, before we were blown away by over 60 people who were interested. We have the ten now but why not start another chapter – Awesomeness has no limits!

The first Awesome Foundation Melbourne grant will be awarded in January 2011, but chapters across the world have already funded over $30,000 of ideas like…

For updates on what we get up to subscribe to this blog and the @awesomemelb twitter account, and you can always see what we are paying attention to by watching @awesomefound/af-melbourne.

If you have an awesome idea, head on over to the AF application page and let us know.

Have an awesome day!

50 days of adventure in Thailand and Cambodia

Ross Hill — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:52:01 +0000

I want to give you an update on what’s happening in my life right now, as many of you have asked what’s now and what’s next? I had a really amazing time traveling through Thailand and Cambodia living an adventurous life while meeting up with really interesting people all over the place.

I tended to wake up every morning and go for a walk or run, get a healthy breakfast and do some writing, and then see where the day brought me. I really had no plans but to catch up with a few amazing people who were scattered across the area.

In Bangkok I met Mark Wiens and Dwight Turner – I have never seen someone’s face transform so vividly into pure joy when they talk of food as Mark, and Dwight runs an amazing group called In Search of Sanuk where he helps with alleviating the ills of urban poverty in Bangkok while corralling the stream of voluntourists into action every day.

In Koh Phangan I met Cody McKibben from Thrilling Heroics, where he inspires people to pursue the life they really want to live with his story as a prime example. I met Nikki from SEA Backpacker magazine, a quarterly publication that guides backpackers through the area. I also tried Yoga for the first time at an epic yoga platform with Aaron from The Middle Way, that was fun and good to learn something new that a lot of friends have an interest in.

After meeting up with Melina Chan at a rooftop bar in Bangkok she talked me into visiting Battambang – Cambodia’s second largest city – where she runs an organization called Kinyei to help grassroots enterprises grow through collaboration. It’s also a great co-working haven in the small city, on 2.5 street. I ended up running a series of Twitter classes as part of the Open Learning space.

Justin and Katie, outlasting the local ‘late night’ bars and philosophizing about NGOs, self-actualization and how to summon drinkable coffee.

I saw some temples, lots of temples, in Siem Reap.

Back amongst the Thai islands again, after some fun times motorbiking around I had a bit more solitudinal time to finish reading Walden – a really interesting book from the minimalist and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Then I moved on to Krabi for a week with the blogger crew. Carlos Miceli, an Argentinian currently studying in Australia. Colin Wright, that guy who moves to a new country every four months based on where his blog readers vote to send him and whose book Networking Awesomely I contributed to.

Cody also joined us again and we had an amazing rockclimbing jungle-walking abseiling adventure with Brooke Ferguson from Business Backpacker.

Then I took a sleeper-train up to Hua Hin where I learned to kiteboard. It’s amazing fun, which ended when I stepped into an enormous jellyfish! The jellyfish won that time, but I’ll be back!

What’s now? During that time I learned a lot about how I want to work. The baseline ideas are time, location and action independence. My three focus areas right now are:

Coverhunt – my minimalist business that has taken over the CD cover world. When you have imported a CD to your computer and you need the picture of the cover, Coverhunt will help you find it. 15 countries didn’t use it last month, so I only have a couple left to work on :)

Blog – this online presence and the things I broadly group as making things happen – including being at great events, running The Hive, sharing insights as they happen both publicly here and on Twitter as well as privately at letter.ly, and the Awesome Foundation we’re starting in Melbourne.

Deloitte – the third space is working with a large organization. Being a soloist is great but I believe that to have a broad impact there are some things that you need more mass for, and that is why I am continuing to do some speaking, projects and consulting with Pete Williams and the innovation crew at Deloitte Australia.

Which brings us to South Africa! For the next month I will be working with the Deloitte team in Johannesburg on a digital strategy project. Let me know (ross@rosshill.com.au) who I should meet with there and what I should be exploring around the area after hours and on weekends.

The adventure continues :)

Living the optimal nomad work day

Ross Hill — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 01:59:59 +0000

I have been noticing a consistent pattern to the lifestyles of a number of people with more flexible schedules. When you ask this group to describe their ‘normal day’ they respond that there is rarely such thing, but pushing deeper there are usually common elements that support an optimal mindset.

Movement
After waking naturally, go for a walk, run or do some yoga. Fitness is a by-product here, the key is to get your blood pumping through the body and through the brain.

Mindful breakfast
Take some natural and likely organic good food and enjoy it. You may or may not decide to pair this with some information like a newspaper or a glance through the twitter stream. The newspaper describes the external removed world, the twitter stream describes your personal but virtual world, and the choice of neither will often lead to connect with your personal internal world.

Two strong work hours
Now it is time to get some work done. Work being defined in the physics sense of having an impact on the world, changing some things. Two hours is long enough to hopefully connect and maintain a flow state to enable your most effective output. To do this your will have minimized interruptions – this probably means you haven’t checked your email or twitter and have turned off anything that could potentially flash or beep to distract you.

The limited time constraint means you need to spend those hours wisely and not blow it away refreshing your blog stats – you need to have an impact in this time or it won’t happen all day.

Emergence
The aim of the two focussed hours is to get into a flow state while working on the most important thing for the day. Once the two hours pass you are either in this state and feel like you can work all day without wanting to stop, or you’re not and you might as well move on because it just isn’t going to happen. Try again tomorrow.

The flow days are absolutely amazing. They are why you make the two hour bet each day. If you have one or two of these each week you will get a lot of momentum on your main projects, while also enjoying the freedom of your afternoons on the days they don’t happen.

What does your day look like?

Micropatronage exploration continues with letter.ly

Ross Hill — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:29:44 +0000

letter.ly is a simple platform for people to share private email subscription newsletters, that I have been playing with over the past few months. It leaves behind some typical assumptions of the web and has lead to some really interesting interactions. You can subscribe to my Field Notes here.

I have sent 27 letters to my 11 early adopter letter.ly subscribers over the past month at the current rate of $3.99/mo. Most subscribers reply to every second email and some really interesting discussions have sparked from there. These people have discovered the letter.ly through the twitter notifications that are sent out with each letter.

The first surprise is the ‘now’ nature of letters. When you subscribe you get a copy of the current letter, but there is no way to access the whole archive. I really like this because it adds an interesting layer of value to those people who have been subscribed the longest – they get to collect the set. This is a really strong experience similar to having the whole set of National Geographic magazines, or in my case Melbourne’s Dumbo Feather!

As a private space there is a much different type of interaction taking place as contrasted to the public web we use each day. The responses are more personal as people share stories that have taken place around them, and the way they communicate them is very different. Think about how people react when you start recording a conversation on a camera – the vibe is suddenly different. That’s how your typical public blog comment and twitter status atmosphere is different to what happens in the quieter environment at letter.ly.

Putting a price on information is somewhat of an old idea that we often laugh at on today’s web. We have become used to everything being free, but in doing that we are in one perspective reducing the value of it to zero. Just as advertisers pay to get people to look at their stuff, most people are happy to price their goods at $0 if some people will actually see it. The challenge of the paywall then is how do people find you? This is an area I will continue to explore, and for now I’ll continue to post some things on my public blog and Twitter because I want to share them more broadly.

Letter.ly brings directness to the value question and so the results show that yes people see $3.99/mo value in what I am sharing. Setting the rate itself is an interesting choice. I first set the price at $10 and then reduced it to $3.99 because I felt that was becoming the market rate on letter.ly, but I am also curious how people would feel if they were paying $25 – would they value the information more? The price you sign up at is locked in for the length of your subscription so if you feel $3.99/mo is good value then now is the time to sign up. I’ll definitely be changing it in the next few months, higher or lower I’m not sure yet.

I myself of course subscribe to a number of letters as well, spending around $20/mo on the information. I really enjoy the considered nature of things that are being posted. There is a hint there of what I used to enjoy in reading magazines and getting a new issue in the mail. When I see a letter.ly in my inbox there is a moment of joy because I know that the contents will be exciting. If it’s not I will cancel the subscription. In contrast, I don’t subscribe to any RSS feeds at the moment.

The core is in the atmosphere it creates for interaction. The quality of discussion is one of the main elements that I enjoy. I keep experimenting with commenting in the search of a deeper and more meaningful connection, and letter.ly has been great for this. I switched out the public comments on my blog for an email link, and as a result got a stream of long and interesting emails from people who had never even left a public comment before. I see a similar result with the letters, with most subscribers replying to most emails – resulting in a good exchange where we both learn more from the experience, through the personal context we can apply in the more private space. Public blog comments often contain a lot of ego because the name and face is up there next to the original message, but that all falls away in a private space. For now they are simple one to one discussions but I have some ideas on how to broaden these interactions to all subscribers.

To clarify, I want to point out that when I talk about comments I mean email replies to the emailed letters. There are public comments on the letter pages (as you can see at Setting Your Moods With Music) but the few comments I have received on there have been completely irrelevant and out of context because they are only responding to the subject line and not the whole letter.

What I learned from responses to the previous micropatronage experiments was that in general there just aren’t enough people who are ready for the direct approach, so with letter.ly you are getting some private media in exchange for your contribution. This is also why I am putting together the Awesome Foundation in Melbourne because that fuels a similar line of thinking and exploration in a simple fashion that most people can get behind.

Of course I would love to hear your thoughts on everything so please email / share your response.