Coding In Paradise

Alright, I'm going to give this new Purple Include quote stuff a try.

I promise this is not "Let's blog about Robert Scoble day," but, I guess it is :)

I just saw a great post by Scoble about how the Google Reader team could have prepped the community better before releasing a controversial new feature. Using some great advice from Read/Write Web, he asks:

(The stuff above was grabbed using Purple Include; now if I could have just hidden this parenthetical aside using Stretch Text.... future project... BTW, if you are reading this in an RSS reader Purple Includes don't work in my feeds yet -- see Scoble's original post to view the list)

I really like the list that Scoble & Read/Write Web provide. In fact, I've turned it into a checklist of things I should make sure to try to do when working with the community around Gears when there is a significant new feature:

• Did we show anyone at a conference the new feature?
• Did we do a video?
• Did we brief bloggers ahead of time and get their feedback?
• Did we show our #1 customer/user these features and get their feedback?
• Did we give an interview to a video journalist like Kara Swisher (or Robert Scoble) before release?
• If we are about to release, are we targeting Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, versus other days?
• Do we have a demo to show off?

I'm printing this list out and putting it up on my wall here at Google.

Disclaimer: As always, I speak for myself and not my employer, Google.

Labels: community, gears, hypertext geekery, PR, scoble