I recently spoke at the 140 Character Conference in NYC. I could not believe how nervous I was, with everything I’ve accomplished over the last year, I don’t know why I thought public speaking was going to be easier. What I realize though, is I will be doing a lot more of it as the Life In Perpetual Beta doc comes into fruition – so I better get cozy up on that stage.

What I also realized is this, even with the advent of social networking, getting the word out is still a lot of work. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. I think raising awareness about the film and blog series will take more work than making the film itself.

Disclaimer: This video was edited by Melissa and not her professional production team. Don’t worry, the actual movie will only be edited by people who actually know what they are doing. OK, if you recall last week’s kidnapping you know that I did get to know some of the skinnyCorp gang on Friday and my children will in fact be modeling their threadless tees, however going to the skinnyCorp HQ was like being a kid in a candy store for me. I immediately wanted to touch everything, open every box, play every game and high five anyone who was within hand slapping range. It’s hard to imagine that anyone actually works there by the look of the ping pong tables, video games, and graffiti. Alas, they do actually get some work done. We noted a few things while waiting for our interviewees to get out of a meeting, what we thought was some goofy "playing doctor" shenanigans was actually a photo shoot, the people playing ping-pong were actually settling a workplace dispute, and the employees singing along to the loud music were unpacking boxes while they did their best Michael Jackson impression. but you already knew skinnyCorp, the force behind Threadless T-shirts was "awesome" like that didn’t you? We tried something new with our interviewing technique here, we actually crowdsourced interview questions from twitter during the interview. (For a definition of crowdsourcing click here) From that, what was an interview turned into a live call in show! Talk about your community deciding the direction of your product. Can you believe I didn’t make the correlation between asking my twitter friends for help and the threadless business model until AFTER the interview? Me neither. We’ll be repeating the twitter live interviews with the rest of the documentary from here on out. Friend me on twitter to get updates as to when and who we are interviewing. For perpetual doses of awesomeness subscribe to Life In Perpetual Beta

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Questions, questions, who’s got the questions? Oh, it’s me! Wondering what the new economy is going to look like if it’s built on the conversation “How are you?”

This is just a tiny teaser snippet of an interview with famed bloggers Liz Strauss, Terry Starbucker, and Lorelle VanFossen. I caught up with them while they were preparing for the second annual SOBCon (Spirit of Blogging Conference) in Chicago. I spoke at length with them all both on and off the camera, and what I came to understand is that most blogs are meant to build community and start a conversation. With the term crowdsourcing on everyone’s lips, I guess it’s no surprise that businesses are lining up to start blogging. But can they really build a business on just conversation? Really? Guess there is more to find out. What is it?

PS. I edited this snippet myself. AKA, my production team can’t and shouldn’t take credit for my shoddy work, and ignorance about what format to upload for best quality.