I had lunch with Susan Mernit today. She found Kaimuki Grill in San Mateo, 104 S. El Camino, via Chowhound. Well prepared, unusual menu items, ambience comfortable, great service.

Some things I now know about Susan:

She's lived in New Jersey and New York. (I lived in New York)

She knows David Weinberger's brother. (I know David)

She's a foodie. (I'm a foodie newbie)

She's wise enough to value colleagues unlike herself.

She asks good questions well. And listens.

We share an interest in educational blogging. Question of the day: How do we design, package and sell blogging to teachers (not the early adopters)?

She's an alum of Scholastic Magazine, Netscape, and AOL. Keen interest in product strategy, marketing management.

And she's a born blogger. Only four months into it and she's on her second blog, written up by the New York Times, and comped to BloggerCon.

I brought some of my favorite examples of business cookbooks for show and tell (I'm such an entertainer).

• CIO Insight Magazine's Whiteboards. Comprehensive project plans.
• Optimize Magazine uses a real world case in each issue. The author drafts a 90-Day Plan. Lots of text charts and graphs suitable for PowerPoint.
• Web Redesign: Workflow That Works, a step by step project process expanded to book lenght 
• The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization
• The Company Culture Cookbook: How to Change the Way We Do Things Around Here

btw, some of the first and best foodie bloggers: Barb Wong and Roland Tanglao's VanEats.

I loved Susan's "if only subway cars could blog" idea.

[a klog apart]

The word came down from the Dean campaign to the meetup hosts earlier today. Dean is against the California recall. But the campaign must keep its focus on the White House in 2004, not Sacramento in 2003. For now, this means continuing basic grass roots growth: increasing the number of meetup venues, increasing the reach of meetups; pamphleting; and voter registration.

I think ignoring the special election is short sighted. But that's the plan.

via je_apostrophe's makeoutcity"

Eric Sink writes about "Career Calculus." - His message is to focus on learning through out your career because it's in your hands only. - He writes about mistakes, "My own mistakes have been the difference-makers in my career.  When SourceGear won the Inc 500 award last fall, the editors asked me to name the most surprising thing I had learned from being an entrepreneur.  I told them the most surprising thing was that I could make so many dumb mistakes and still end up on the Inc 500 list."

And about managers who stand in the way of your learning, "This a basic axiom and a starting point for taking responsibility for your career: Don't work for a manager who is actively hindering your practice of constant learning. Just don't do it."

Reminds me of:

The road to wisdom?
Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but
less
and less
and less. 
   — Piet Hein

[a klog apart]

My suggestions:

Project and Process Blogging. What do we know about using blogs to support project communication?  

Political-Cell Blogging. Good and bad practices from local political clubs and campaign teams. In 60 minutes, let's draft a cookbook for activists and voter-journalists to set up and use blogging, to create political news and opinion that is immediate and local.  

Don't Blog: Managing (hah!) the coming blogging backlash as blogging goes mainstream. In 90 minutes, let's review some of the risks, and identify a range of responses.  

Machine Blogging. If a Coke machine can have a webcam, my TiVo can have a weblog (I'm really working on this). What do machines need to write better blogs? What do we need to help machines read blogs better? In 90 minutes, let's draft a few use cases and start some high level requirements. See the ComponentBlog, precursor to the AdaptiveBlogosphere.

Scaling the Blogosphere and Syndicationspace. Where will things collapse when everyone and everything blogs?

Candidate Audio Blogging? Can candidates do this if they can't write? Who will listen?

The State of Edublogging. In 90 minutes, let's draft a teacher's cookbook for setting up and using blogs in the k-12 classroom.

Employer-Blogger Relations. Does Harvard own its students' blogs? Winer's? What boilerplate legal text can workers bring to their employment agreement that preserves their legal interests in their weblog, and their freedom to blog? Is there a Creative Commons approach to make this easy and popular?  

Discuss this message on the BloggerCon site.