Last Wednesday, Mary Van de Weil was nice enough to have me back on her wonderful NY Brand Lab Radio show.

Mary is brilliant. I was her first ever repeat guest and I hope to be on her show again soon.

The show is about 30 minutes long and we riffed on some interesting topics:

• The two traits of an incurable entrepreneur (hint: you have both)
• A free website to launch and spread your idea in 15 minutes
• Why the cost of failure has approached zero
• We Work Labs – a new innovation co-working space in NYC
• How to pivot your idea for success
• The difference between ideas and shipping
• My first failed business (a non-profit involving my brothers when I was 8 years old)
• How to finally write that book in your head (can you write a page a day?)
• How to meet more relevant people in your organization
• How Elliot Bisnow dropping out of college and organizing an impromptu ski trip changed the world

I hope you enjoy the show.

Seth certainly understands the power of the medium for both good (engaging and leading a tribe) and evil (acting as crack cocaine for The Resistance, distraction from doing emotional labor and shipping). The latter is a main reason Seth has decided to personally stay off of twitter.

Until now.

Yesterday, Friday March 4th, Seth took to a twitter chat to discuss and answer questions about Poke the Box (affiliate link), his amazing new book from his new publishing venture, The Domino Project.

Unfortunately, I had a conflict and missed the chat, so I used a neat service called Storify to curate the tweets from the session. I only pulled in the questions and Seth’s answers. You can view the curated tweets below or on Storify here.

Based on Seth’s previous aversion to twitter and his last tweet below, this may be a one-time only show. Enjoy!

image credit: @heyamberrae

(Tip: If you ever need to setup wifi at a conference, I highly recommend Trade Show Internet – it all came in a nice little box and setup was a snap. Great service.)

If you don’t know about Foursquare, it’s a location based social network and game. Mashable did a great overview post on it here. The potential for Foursqaure is huge and just this week, they went global.

While I was setting up the booth amidst the thousands of others, the marketing portion of my mind (the rest is just Wire episodes) started thinking of fun ways to encourage people to stop by the Altec Lansing booth.

The progression of my thought process was as follows:

1) CES is filled with early adopter tech geeks like myself.

2) Many of these tech geeks will be using their geeky smartphones and many will be checking in on Foursquare.

3) People like to win things.

So I setup a “special” on Foursquare. Businesses can setup almost any special they can think of for Foursqaure users. For instance, they can setup a special where the mayor (the person who has checked in the most times at a given venue) gets a free drink, like in the example below.

So I setup a Foursquare special where anyone who comes by the Altec Lansing CES booth and checks in gets entered in a drawing to win the Mix boom box. If you haven’t seen or heard this thing, it’s the quickest bass-booming way to punch your ticket to cool-kid status, especially for us tech & gadget geeks.

So now when anyone checks in anywhere near our Altec Lansing booth at CES, Foursquare will notify them of the “special” we have and they can stop by to enter and win a Mix.

Is this the intended use of Foursquare? Not exactly.

Will our “venue” even exist past Sunday? Nope.

Is it a way for us to meet and connect with more people at the show and have some fun? Definitely.

Sometimes you have to think outside the (four) square.

(I also tweeted that if you stop by, play RockBand and beat Angel’s score, you can win a Stage Gig. If you’re at CES, come by and say hi.)

Everyone is worried about Twitter’s business model. Will they last? How will they make money?

Kogi isn’t worrying. The Los Angeles-based roving Korean-style taco vendors are using Twitter to improve their own business model.

Since the cultishly popular Kogi BBQ trucks are mobile venues, they use Twitter to broadcast the location and menu items to their legion of fans.

Recent Tweets from Kogi:

Heads up guys! Kogi Roja will be at The Brig in Venice @ 11 o’clock!

KOGI SPECIAL! Korean Burger w Chile Salted Watermelon! @ ALL LOCATIONS!

Kogi is in Santa Monica @ Bergamont Station @ 2525 Michigan Ave. SM. Santa Museum of Art. OPEN TO PUBLIC.

Kogi’s food is cheap, unique and fun, but adding scarcity to the equation ensures something else: the thrill of the chase. Kogi’s trucks tweet their next location and before long, the line looks like the picture above. When the masses are served, the Kogi truck packs up, tweets a new location and by the time they arrive, the line is waiting.

The customers line up before Kogi gets there. What a great business model. Even Steve Jobs can only pull that off once a year.

And like another popular Californian fast food institution used to do, Kogi keeps some of the menu items reserved for ‘insiders’. Right on the trucks, Kogi’s menu lists a few items, including tacos and burritos stuffed with Korean short ribs, spicy pork, chicken and tofu. But Kogi’s Twitter feed lists even more.

This doesn’t have to be limited to Kogi and fast food. Next time I find some perfect tomatoes at the Union Square Market, I can tweet the location and the vendor and add the hashtag #tomatoes.

Let’s all stop worrying about Twitter’s business model. Instead, think about how Twitter can improve your business model. The possibilities are endless.

Let me ask you a few questions.

1) Do you know anyone who uses Twitter? How about Facebook?

2) Have you had any sort of communication with any of those people since March 2008?

3) Is it inconceivable that that person Tweeted about it or posted something on their Facebook page?

“I just had sushi at Kotobuki with my uncle John in Long Island.”

“My friend Mike recently graduated med school and just sent me this amazing article on the future of healthcare in America.”

“I met my friend’s boss Jeff for the first time today. That guy drinks like Mickey Mantle used to.”

The same is true for YouTube and blogs and it will hold true when the next big thing replaces Facebook and Twitter.

Just like companies need to understand that they no longer control their brands, you need to understand that you no longer control where you are and where you are not online.

Like it or not, more and more, we live our lives in public. Even if you’ve never considered ‘managing your digital footprint’, some entries have already been made on your behalf.

How does that make you feel?

By EVAN WILLIAMS
Published: March 7, 2009

I GREW up on a farm in Nebraska, where we grew mostly corn and soybeans. During the summers I was responsible for making sure the crops were irrigated.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working. I moved to Florida, where I did some freelance copywriting. After that I moved to Texas and stayed with my older sister while I figured out what to do next. In 1994, I returned to Nebraska and started my first company with my dad.

We didn’t know anything about the Internet, but I thought it was going to be a big deal. We produced CD-ROMs and a video on how to use the Internet, and we did some Web hosting. I recruited some friends and we tossed around some ideas, but none of us knew how to write software and we didn’t have much money. We watched what entrepreneurs in California were doing and tried to play along.

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn’t want to work on other people’s projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn’t worked at a real company. I didn’t know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I’d start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn’t keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn’t paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

In 1997, I moved to California and worked at what is now O’Reilly Media. By 1998, I had acquired enough technical skills to do freelance Web development. In 1999, I started Pyra Labs with a friend, Meg Hourihan, to develop project management programs. Then we started a side project called Blogger, a Web publishing tool. In 2003, we sold that company to Google. I worked for Google for two years.

Several years ago I started Odeo, a podcasting company, with Noah Glass, another friend. I ran that company for 18 months. We started Twitter as a side project within Odeo during that time.

I didn’t like the direction Odeo was going. For one thing, Apple made a lot of what we worked on obsolete when it introduced podcasts into iTunes. I bought Odeo back from the investors and moved the assets to another company of mine, Obvious, a Web product development lab now on hiatus. In 2007, I sold Odeo and spun off Twitter into a separate company.

I appointed Jack Dorsey, who was engineer at Odeo, as C.E.O. of Twitter. In October 2008 it became apparent that Twitter required a day-to-day approach from a single leader. I took over as C.E.O., and Jack became chairman and assumed a more strategic position. He had worked in the courier and dispatch field, which is where he got the idea for Twitter — a social network for sending short messages to friends over cellphones and the Internet.

When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, “In due time.” They forget that we’re only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I’ve always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee. I’ve been able to pay my father back, which is nice, and my mother doesn’t worry about me as much since I got married a year and a half ago.

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We’re building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge — that’s why she’s in charge.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

_______

Did you notice? How many sentences in the entire article were longer than 140 characters? If you don’t think this was intentional, read any other article in the Times and perform the same count. (Copy and paste each sentence into Twitter for easy counting.)

Evan Williams is living the Twitter story everyday, even in a NYT interview.

Are you living your story?