Last Day In Cayman

It's just after 1 pm and my flight leaves in a few hours. The last two days of diving in Grand Cayman were excellent. We never made it to a site called "Aquarium," which we really wanted to see because of all the fish, but instead we dove an interesting wreck called Balboa, and had an excellent first (and deepest, at 94 feet) dive called Little Tunnels.

On Thursday, we had to dive on the South side of the island due to the heavy surf on the side where we're situated, so we had to take a van about 10 minutes away to where they put the boat. However, the South side diving (Bullwinkle West, and another site I'm blanking on at the moment) was very dramatic. Tall coral structures with plenty of swimthroughs and what I call see saw surf (where you have to ride the tide one way, then kick to get somewhere when the tide's going the way you want to go).

These structures reminded me of Cozumel (Punta Sur and Palancar Gardens come to mind), and had ample sea life with really interesting reef structures.

For our last dinner, we headed out to the Reef Club at Royal Palms for an excellent meal of grouper, sea bass, ceviche and shrimp. I highly recommend this restaurant. Great service and food, and incredible views (ask for a table upstairs...great place to view the sunset).

So, another dive locale checked off on the checklist, and one I'll most assuredly head back to at some point.

Greetings from Grand Cayman, day 3. Yesterday, we hit two boat dive sites, Big Sand Chutes, and Lone Star Ledges...Both were nice dives, and the conditions were remarkable. 300+ visibility. We saw all kinds of sea life, including getting a nice tracking shot of a slow turtle on video.

Yesterday afternoon, we did an offshore dive from Sunset House, and I attempted to learn how to navigate by compass. I mostly got it (mostly being the key word). I also got dizzy with some depressurization issues on a too fast ascent, and was dizzy when I got out of the water.

Today, the diving was superb again, this time at Trinity Caves and Royal Palm Ledge. Bill picked Trinity, and it was a great swim through dive with a tall reef. We were as deep as 93-94 feet, then worked our way through the reef and up back over the front side. With Royal Palm, we were in 50 feet of water, with a horseshoe shaped reef that gave us plenty of fish video and photo opps. One of my favorite dives thus far (and apparently the favorite site of our divemaster for the day, Ivan).

After posting some pics and cleaning up, we headed into town to Carribean Joe's restaurant. They closed at 1:30, even though their hours posted were until 2:30. That's the second time that happened. And while I'd like to cut them some slack because it was election day, it gets a little old to drive all the way to a restaurant and have it be closed.

Note to Grand Cayman Better Business Bureau: Have your restaurants stay open to the time posted, or fine them for false advertising. I understand you're making some extra dinero with all those cruise ships coming in that were deterred from Mexico because of the swine flu, but c'mon, people are looking for a place to eat and you close on a friggin' whim?

Otherwise, this place has been great, and I would definitely come back. Although I might consider bringing some cookware and a f---ing hot plate so I could get a decent meal. : )

Arrived in Grand Cayman yesterday afternoon...Bill and I were able to do a quick shore dive to check out our equipment and the mermaid just offshore.

Today, after breakfast, we got on the boat and went to the first dive site, the Eagle's Nest. The profile was 80 feet for about 40 minutes. Second dive was Oro Verde, a wreck site from the USS Navajo, where we followed a turtle as soon as we descended. Also saw lots of fish, including a number of Angels. Visibility was incredible, more than 200 feet. Spectacular diving so far.

Smarter Commerce, Smarter Analytics

According to the swine flu map that Facebook put online Tuesday night, Texas leads all the states in terms of online postings mentioning the swine flu.

Apparently it hasn't impacted me or the 500-600 other folks who have come together here at the AT&T Conference Center in Austin to talk social commerce these past couple days.

The now apparently annual BazaarVoice Social Commerce Summit provides an opportunity for BazaarVoice customers, digital marketing experts, and people who like to ride mechanical bulls to come together and talk all things crowdsourcing commerce.

If you've ever rated or ranked a product or a story on a Website, then you, too, have participated in the fine art of social commerce.

I've been most pleased with the summit thus far. I've had the opportunity to hang with some local and far away colleagues from IBM, as well as meet some new friends from various vendors and BazaarVoice (Look for increased integration of BazaarVoice capabilities into the IBM WebSphere Commerce product line).

And most importantly, I've done all of this less than three miles away from my domicile here in Austin. (Inside joke: If you've followed this blog recently with any regularity, you know my recent home has been Seat 15F on an American Airlines 757).

And based on the Twitter stream emerging from the conference, there are no "Twitter Quitters" in this audience.

This despite Nielsen Wire posting that "for most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention."

I can see the T-shirts now: "Real Twits Never Quit!"

A key meme here in Austin at the Summit has been analytics

How do we measure the impact of all those ratings and rankings? How do I reassure my CEO that those cool stories people are telling about my brand on my web site are turning into a gazillion dollars worth of new sales? etc. ad nauseum ad infinitum.

So I was pleased to see IBM announced yesterday it is opening a global network of advanced analytic centers, including the initial five in Tokyo, London, New York City, Beijing, and Washington, D.C.

These centers will enable IBM to meet growing client demand for advanced analytics capabilities.

One of our first engagements will be with my dad's home state of Arkansas, which IBM will help effective monitor and manage the use of stimulus grants for improving education programs.

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano remarked about the announcement of these new centers:

"Advanced analytics are increasingly essential to help companies and organizations confronted with vast amounts of data and systemic change, and who are looking to build smarter business systems. All organizations today need to sort through myriad choices, make smarter decisions quickly and accurately, and act decisively. IBM is ready to help."

Now, if you'll excuse me. The New York Times' Jeff Graham is about to tell us about "Using Word of Mouth to Build ROI!"

Outdated Web 2.0 Analogies For $500, Alex

I hope you had a good weekend.

I spent mine lamenting my Sony big screen going on the blink, and then acquiring more frustration by chasing around a little white ball.

Oh, and trying to find something else on the news other than the swine flu (Insert appropriate charcterization here A. Pandemic B. Epidemic C. Hysteria

Which brings us to some very exciting news coming out of IBM Research this morning.

But first, a quick IBM flashback.

In 1997, I had the opportunity to participate in and witness the Kasparov v. Deep Blue series of chess matches, and had a number of IBM amigos who worked on the Web site.

It was via the Web site that I followed a number of the matches, but I also had the opportunity to attend one match in person at the Equitable building in midtown Manhattan.

Even it wasn't quite in person, as Garry Kasparov and the Deep Blue team were situated about 50 stories above us, while we pawns and press and mere mortals sat in the audience following the play-by-play as we watched a huge chess board on display above the stage.

I've never seen something quite so exciting.

I know, I know, chess? Exciting?

What made it so was the element of Man v. Machine.

The drama was inherently built in to the challenge.

It was John Henry all over again.

Only this time it was about brains more than brawn -- although judging by the toll the matches seemed to take on Kasparov, there was a little bit of brawn involved as well.

Well, and there's really no other way to say this....They're baaaccccckkk.

Yes, the IBM Research team has been hard at work in their labs, this time working on a highly advanced Question Answering system codenamed "Watson" that soon will be competing with other mere humans on that gameshow of gameshows, Jeopardy.

Specifically, Watson will be attempting to understand via artificial intelligence very complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete in realtime Jeopardy games.

As Dr. David Ferrucci, project lead for Watson, explained, "The challenge is to build a system that, unlike systems before it, can rival the human mind's ability to determine precise answers to natural language questions and to compute accurate confidences in the answers. This confidence processing is key. It greatly distinguishes the IBM approach from conventional search."

Me, personally, I'd like to see Watson take on HAL from "2001," but of course, we all know HAL's just a fictional character in a movie.

Right? Right, HAL? You're not real, are you buddy.

There is a flower within my heart
Daisy, Daisy
Planted one day by a glancing dart
Planted by Daisy Bell

I'll take the Turing Test for $500, Alex?

Alex?!?!

While I get my computer back in working order, please visit that other great bastion of artificial intelligence, YouTube, to see a video outlining the Watson and Jeopardy project.

The Coming Social Media Train Wreck

Everybody likes a good train wreck.

Hopefully, of course, those where nobody gets hurt.

But when I was a kid, growing up in the sticks of north Texas, I'll never forget the first train wreck I stumbled upon.

Unfortunately, i didn't get to actually see the cars come crashing down off the railroad trestle.

But the aftermath was pretty powerful, in and of its own right.

Twisted steel, splintered and broken railroad ties, spilt cargo...it was awesome.

Of course, I'm sure Southern Pacific didn't agree, and heaven help them, it was a mess to clean up aftewards that took them weeks.

That's what I expect the coming social media train wreck is going to look like.

I've been here in Orlando at the Forrester Marketing Forum for several days now, and it's been fascinating to hear all the talk about social media amongst a largely traditional marketing crowd.

This, of course, ten years after I first read Cluetrain Manifesto and when the first glimmer of insight that this shift was already beginning to occur.

When I would tell colleagues about the book and about what was starting to happen, explaining that this was the future of marketing, they would look at me like I'd dropped in from another planet.

Maybe I had. But I also wonder now what their Twitter IDs are.

If you haven't read Cluetrain, and you want to be a social media practitioner who can help your business enter into the market conversation, run to your nearest bookstore and buy a copy.

Because context is everything.

When I first read the Cluetrain theses online, it made sense to me, particularly at the time, because I was starting to see the power and empowerment that the strength in connected numbers could bring.

The mass in mass media was going to be rendered increasingly impotent by the singularity of social media, the one-to-many equation would soon be equalled by the one-to-one.

Those who historically didn't have a voice soon would be able to, affordably and without prejudice.

The economics of scarcity (spectrum, channels, media outlets, high production costs) had been replaced by the economics of abundance (lower costs of bandwidth, storage, processing power, production tools, etc.)

Watching some of the traditional media and marketing entities, then, over these past couple of weeks jump onto the Twitter bandwagon has been downright amusing to me.

Not because they, like everybody else, shouldn't have the opportunity to tap into the social media.

No, rather, because so many of them seem to be missing the entire point.

Oprah and Ashton and so many others already have a voice.

This was never about a race to the million subscriber finish line.

It was about opening up a new way of communicating, between institution and individual, about evolving the monolithic top-down communication umbrella to a democratic megaphone.

Most importantly, though, it was about listening.

As the cluetrain.com website conveys to this day, where markets are conversations, "Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."

For those attendees of the Forrester forum, as well as companies around the globe wrestling with their emerging lack of control of the market conversation going on about their business, rather than worrying about whether or not you're using Twitter, you might be better putting your efforts towards determining whether or not you have something to say, and someone intelligent and thoughtful and eager to listen to others to say it for you.

In other words, don't fake it.

Don't pretend.

Don't think just because you got a Twitter account or you put your company on Facebook that you suddenly get it.

No, those steps were only the beginning.

Now it's time to open the kimono a bit and actually tell us something.

Enlighten us.

Show us the smart people way down deep inside your organization and have them tell us something we don't yet know but should.

As Cluetrain went on to explain, "Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in."

This is what Doc Searls and Christopher Locke and Rick Levine and David Weinberger understood and communicated, and it's what the rest of us ought not forget (although evidently which some of us never learned).

I don't know about you, but I'm certainly ready for a new kind of market conversation, especially coming out of the Great Financial Collapse of 2008.

A little brutal honesty and transparency and sunshine and liberation of new and more truthful voices is something we could all stand about now.

But while I wait for it to emerge, I'm going to enjoy watching the great social media crash as so many jump on the bandwagon with little thought to where or why or how they got here.

Because everybody likes a good train wreck.

Colon, Portobelo, and the .45

 

December 27, 2008 – Last Day in Panama City

Today's our last full day in Panama City.  But yesterday was probably the signature day for the journey, primarily because we knocked out so much in one day, and because I got up close and personal with the Panama Canal.

Of course, nobody hates getting up early on vacation more than I, but it had to be done if were going to catch the Panama Canal Railroad train that leaves at 7:15 AM.  Fortunately, the Radisson Decapolis room service team cooperated, and we were all able to have a real deal meal before heading out towards Miraflores to catch the train.

The train itself was a classic, complete with two diesel engines on either end (one for going to Colon, and the other for coming back to Panama City), a number of passenger cars, and even one club/viewer car that has big windows for the turistas.  On the way to Colon, I ended up opting to go outside between the cars, where I could get some amazing videos of the roughly hour-long ride.

Having just read most of "The Path Between the Seas" didn't hurt.  As the train hurled through the jungle, I could only imagine what it must have been like for the French, the Americans, the West Indians, and everyone else involved in the enterprise, hacking their way through that jungle, and worse, digging a big trench through the middle of it.  You can read about it in a book, but until you've seen it live and in person, it's awesomeness fails to be truly realized.

Once we arrived in Colon, clueless turistas that we were, we had no game plan other than to try to find a cabbie to take us up to Gatun Locks and to Portobelo.  Fate, however, intervened, presenting us with a large, friendly black gentleman named Dino, whom it turned out, also spent quite a bit of time in Brooklyn, NY. 

Dino explained that for a mere $120, he would take us around the entire day, covering the Gatun Locks, Portobelo, lunch, a tour of Colon and the "Zona Libre" (the free zone) before heading back to the train.

Done.

So Dino's driving out towards the Gatun Locks first, when he pulls out a .45 caliber pistol.  He explained that he doubled as a security guard, and the gun was always useful to have while traveling through Colon.  O-kayyyy.

The Gatun Locks were my favorite part of the Canal experience.  There were a number of large vessels lined up to head south (they head south from sometime early in the AM until around noon, before reversing direction), and we're talking LARGE.  Like, there's no way that big ass ship is going to fit into that little lock large, but the Panamians move that sucker through with their 440 volt mules (small trains with large cables attached to the ship and the mule) with the finesse of a fine surgeon cutting out a brain tumor.  It was something to watch, and again, no description of it really does it justice.

I asked the nice lady providing color commentary how much these ships were paying to go through the Canal, and she indicated it was around $300K.  If you think that's high, start figuring the cost of labor, gas, time, etc. to go around South America, and you start to realize why the Panama Canal is so strategic, and booked up months in advance.

I took lots of video and pics of the locks, and will try to link to those at some point.   But once we were done with that, Dino also took us by the "School of the Americas," the former U.S. military based where we "trained Latin America monsters" (Dino's words…and I wasn't going to argue with him…he was the one with the loaded .45) like Ortega and Somoza.  Today, it's a nice 5 star Melia hotel.  Go figure.  From dictator training camp to the finest of 5 star hotels, complete with zip lines (or were those left over from the School of the Americas???)

From there, we started off to Portobelo.  The drive along the coast was quite nice, if you mostly looked left at the Atlantic Ocean tide rolling in.  Otherwise, it was a whole lot of reminders of what third world poverty looked like.  Shanty housing with tin roofs, small cervezerias here and there, a whole lot of trash amidst a gorgeous natural landscape.  I just wanted to suggest maybe cleaning up the place a bit?

Once we got to Portobelo, a sleep little town that has been noted as a "World Heritage Site," it started to rain.  But that didn't stop us from our historical rounds.

Portobelo was founded in 1597, and from the sixteenth to eighteen centuries was an important silver-exporting port in New Granada on the Spanish Main, and one of the ports on the route of the Spanish treasure fleets.

Portobelo was also visited by Captain Henry Morgan, when in 1668, he basically came through with a fleet of privateers raping and pillaging along his way.  Despite Portobelo's good fortifications, he stripped the city of nearly all its wealth over the course of two weeks.  I know, not nice, but that's what privateers did.

In 1739, the Portobeloans were attacked again, this time by a British fleet commanded by Admiral Edward Vernon. The battle and subsequent British victory demonstrated that Spanish trading practices were vulnerable and lead to a fundamental change in their approach, with the Spanish switching to a new strategy, one in which the Spanish had small fleets visiting a wide variety of ports so that they weren't as exposed.

So, with that historical backdrop, we saw the remnants of the last fortifications built by the Spanish in the 1800s which, as it turned out, they didn't really need, because everybody was SO over the territory by that time.  And until the building of the Canal, Portobelo remained a very sleepy little town.

Judging from what I saw, it's still pretty damned sleepy, and its inhabitants and their dwellings could probably stand a home makeover.  However, the fortifications themselves were pretty cool, complete with the original cannon.  And, allegedly, Sir Francis Drake was buried out there in the bay somewhere in a lead coffin, although his remains have never been found.

Looking up at the hills above the bay, one can just wonder what it must have been like to start hacking through that jungle to cover the 60 some odd miles across the Isthmus.  Thanks, but I'll take Air Panama.

Once we finished our Portobelo tour, Dino made a pitstop at an authentic tourist trap restaurant that had an authentic thatched hut roof and everything.  Though Ginger or Gilligan were nowhere to be found, we had a nice meal of fish and shrimp creole and coconut rice and, para me, Balboa beer. 

From there, we made our way into the Zona Libre, the free trade zone next to the city of Colon.  Basically, the Zone is a clearinghouse for goods from all over the globe, and a place where buyers can come and buy beacoup stuff in bulk at discounted prices before shipping them on to their intended destination countries, and all with no tariffs.  To me, it looked like a really big ass flea market with storefronts.

Little did I know that you're not supposed to buy anything for individual consumption, because Dino was in search of a bike for his two year-old tyke.  So, I found a very cool GelaSkin for my MacBook, and only as we were leaving did I discover that one wasn't supposed to take merchandise out of the Zone.  Fortunately, Dino's brother was head of security for the entire Zone, so he was quite friendly with the seguridad at the perimeter.

From Zona Libre, we drove right into the heart of Colon.  I can only describe Colon as something of a real shithole.  It certainly has its history, particularly with the Canal, but they really haven't kept the place up, and in many ways, it seems the ass end opposite of Panama City.  It's importance as the Atlantic front end to the most strategic waterway in the Western Hemisphere is not supported in the ack streets of Colon.  Now I could see why Dino carried the .45. 

The streets and buildings were extremely run down, many with tin roofs and exteriors that were mildewed and pockmarked.  Clearly there was a large poor population, so it gave me no small pleasure to see all the young kids scooting around on their new rollerblades they got for Christmas.  Those were some happy kids, and we're talking 4 and 5 year-olds, zipping around the cars and buses like true pros.  Apparently in Colon, when they say go play in the streets, their parents mean it! 

That was basically the end of the tour.  Dino dropped us off at the train station and explained he'd be happy to take us to see some real live Indians in the middle of the Isthmus the next day, and to the Gamboa preserve.  We told him we'd certainly give it some consideration, but it was readily apparent to me that Saturday was going to be a day of semi-rest, one in which we would be vacating to prepare for the end of our vacation.

More on the last day later…