Each Friday, in honor of the #FollowFriday tradition on Twitter, we will be featuring one of our own Featured Users on the blog.

Today we hear from James Campbell. James is a photographer and web developer living in Washington, DC, with a slew of interesting and creative web projects. He can be found on Twitter as @jamescampbell.

James Campbell

Tell us about yourself.

I am a Washington, DC area freelance photographer and web developer with far ranging interests from iPhone app development and Arduino-controlled gadgetry to music recording. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, I moved to Washington in 1999 to attend the Catholic University of America’s School of Architecture and I’ve been on the move ever since, traveling all over the USA, including two years in Monterey, California, interpreting my experiences through my words, artwork, photography, and music.

How (and when) did you first come to be on Twitter, and how has the experience evolved for you?

It’s funny, I have been on Twitter in some shape or form since April 19th, 2007. Back then, I was using clipmarks, StumbleUpon, and a service called Utterz along with Twitter. When I started on Twitter, I used the moniker @constantskeptic, which is still active today. The account was originally tied to my old website/blog, which I finally cut all ties with this past year. Using the @constantskeptic account and batboy avatar, I posted skeptical thoughts about current affairs and things like UFOs and Big Foot.

I didn’t like hiding behind a character that wasn’t me. Sometime in early 2008 I realized I should create a real brand with my real name so that people could put a face to my name and words, which would hopefully build trust and a tribe with those who shared my interests. From 2008 on, Twitter morphed into more of a living search engine for me. I started using Twitter like a living, breathing Wikipedia of people who are all experts in something and eager to share their knowledge. And the best thing about that is I am an active participant in that knowledge base as well. I respond to every single topic that I know something about, whether it is something mundane like cable service or something philosophical like the meaning of life, I can step into the stream and participate whenever I want.

Where are you located? What’s your favorite thing about where you live?

I currently live in Washington DC. I hate the traffic on 495 but I love everything else. The short tall foreign-looking alleys of Chinatown. The National Mall and Smithsonian, which provide endless picturesque captures through my viewfinder. The silence of the Tidal Basin. Eastern Market’s fresh produce and flea market every weekend. The convenience of the Metro, even if the service is sometimes sub-par. The funny tourists and wanna be hipsters hanging around Union Station looking for answers. The serendipity of walking down the street with your camera in hand and knowing that you will find something interesting to photograph and share with the outside world.

What are you most excited about sharing with your followers?

I try to post the type of messages that I love receiving, which are links to great new content that is out there, wonderful photos, or the latest technology that’s really helping me organize (like Evernote) and live my life easier and fuller than ever before. I also throw in links to my latest photos on my various photo project sites: iPhone 3gs photo a day project, black and white photos project, and of course my Flickr stream, mainly because I love the feedback and suggestions I receive. I also have projects in the works like You’re Never Too Old For Crayons, which lets anyone send in crayon drawings via a group email address and they get automatically posted on the site for feedback and discussion, and Sketch A Day, which is going to be 365 days of pencil/ink sketches that anyone can critique.

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not online?

More and more I am finding that I need to unplug from my MacBook Pro and go mobile with just my iPhone 3gs and Nikon D90. I love hiking, mountain biking, camping, and going on road trips to strange places during the warm months of the year, and snowboarding is my passion in the winter. I try to make at least one trip to Lake Tahoe every season. I also do more normal things like watch Coen Bros movies (The Big Lebowski is one of my favorites) or the latest indie flick at the Landmark in Bethesda or the AFI in Silver Spring.

Thanks, James!

This week, we are very pleased to feature an interview with Featured User Guy Kawasaki. In the interview, Guy and I talk about his most recent books, the current start-up economy, Alltop.com, and how to get a standing ovation.

Guy’s “official” bio, from his website:

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Featured Users Interviews Guy Kawasaki

I want to give a big shout out to the guys at Wetoku, especially David Lee, for setting me up with an account, helping me test it out, and being generally awesome about the whole thing. It’s a sweet tool for doing online video interviews, and I had a lot of fun with it. If you’re looking for an embeddable video tool to conduct online interviews, this is it!

Interview Transcript:

Okay, I’m here with Guy Kawasaki…

…I don’t see my book on your shelf.

It’s there, Guy, I promise, it’s just…

Okay…

Actually it’s not there. Do you know what? I’ll tell you what I did. I downloaded it from the Kindle store. But I’m a cheapskate, so what I actually did is I downloaded the preview and I read about the first few chapters of Reality Check, and I watched your 40-minute video on YouTube where you pretty much condensed Art of the Start.

(Laughs) I did. Okay.

Because, you know, I’m checking in here from Austin, Texas, Guy, and we’re bootstrappers here in Austin. So we do things as cheaply as possibly. Guy I wanted to thank you very much for coming, and speaking with me today, and doing this interview for FeaturedUsers. Really appreciate it. You have a really interesting history. You started off in the jewelry business…

Mm hmm.

And then you went on to sell Macs. This is just for people who’ve been living under a rock and don’t know who you are. And you’re one of the founders of Alltop, and you now also run a VC firm called Garage Technology Ventures.

Yes.

So you’re a Silicon Valley kind of famous guy, and also a famous speaker as well. Famous especially I think for your irreverence, and for your no-bullshit attitude.

Okay.

All things that I admire. So one of the first things I wanted to ask you about is, I really am curious about what sort of an impact, if any, the economic downturn has had on startups and on the VC world.

There’s really no way you could build a case that we all want this to happen, or want this to continue. So it’s just much tougher to make a sale, to raise capital for any start-up right now.  That said, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re waiting for the perfect economic conditions in a market with no competition that’s growing, with the perfect staff and the perfect model and the perfect product, you’ll never start a company.

So right now, if you look at the three key things that you need for a start-up, they’re probably cheaper than ever. Using open source you can get all sort of tools like MySQL and Drupal and PHP and WordPress; everything you need is free. You’d have to go out of your way to pay for something right now. So tools are free or cheap. Marketing is free or cheap, by sucking up the bloggers, or using Facebook, or using Twitter. So marketing is cheap or free. And there are so many unemployed people that they’re cheap or free. So everything is good! Except nobody’s buying anything.

So it’s not the worst time in the world to start a company, and you should start a company now when things are cheap, instead of waiting for this world when the economy’s back and then you start your company. Let’s face it, everything takes a year to create, so you need to be thinking a year in advance. When the U.S. Department of Commerce says the recession is over, if you start your company then, you may be into the next recession before you ship. Either you believe or you don’t believe.

I’m wondering what kind of trends you’re seeing in terms of business models also, and technology. If there’s anything new coming up that you’re really excited about.

To tell you the truth, first of all, venture capitalists are not visionaries, and I don’t consider myself a visionary. We’re supposed to be fast adopters as opposed to creators.  Having said that, I will tell you that a lot of times we see things and we just don’t know. If you look at some of the great successes: Apple computer, I mean who knew there was gonna be a personal computer market? We can look back now and say of course. YouTube. Did the world need the sixth search engine when Google was starting? There were ways for college students to connect before Facebook. So if you look at all these things at the time they’re starting, wow, it’s sometimes hard to make a case why this company would be successful.

I’m sort of convinced that if you have to choose between being smart or lucky, you should choose lucky. That’s the better thing to be. That’s a long answer to tell you that I don’t know. I think that two guys in a garage, two gals in a garage, or a guy and a gal in a garage, inside of UT or Stanford or Carnegie Mellon or MIT are much more likely to tell you what the future’s gonna be than I would.

Are people coming up with different ways for funding now? Not just cheaper ways, obviously. I know that bootstrapping is a big thing here in Austin, it’s a big buzzword, and a lot of people are trying to kinda do it on their own. I’m wondering if that’s becoming a trend more in Silicon Valley as well, if there’s less and less people looking toward venture capital resources.

Yes, because it’s harder and harder to raise venture capital. And for the factors I talked about before, it’s cheaper and cheaper to start a company. So you have this mother of all venture capital markets, where no one’s investing and you don’t need as much money. So guess what? You find other ways. The ultimate funding model is revenue.

You talk a lot in the book about having that sort of already in place. One of the things I think you mentioned, as a VC person, is not wanting people to walk in and say well, we have this great idea and we have all these plans…but really seeing something solid in place and ready to go. Are you seeing people responding to that more?

Yeah the day of walking in with a PowerPoint or a napkin and saying, “this is what we will do, give us five million dollars and leave us alone for a year, we promise you.” Those days are gone. Because VC’s know that marketing is free, and tools are free, and people are cheap too. So they expect you to show up having bootstrapped, and at least launched your product, and have some proof that the dogs will eat the food. That’s very different than ten years ago when you were just dreaming of creating the food, much less having any dogs eat it. So it’s a very different world. Venture capitalists have higher expectations of what you come in with and what you show. Now this also works to the advantage of entrepreneurs because the more mature your company can be, the less risk that there is, the higher the valuation, and the less you will have to sell, per dollar, for your investors.

I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you about Alltop. First, I’m just curious about why you started it. What gave you the idea to get it going?

Previously we had a website called Truemors, and it was a user-generated news content site. And we were lucky to be listed, or aggregated, by a website called popurls. And we noticed that popurls was sending us as much traffic as Google. So we looked at what popurls was, and I got in touch with the founder, and I asked him what’s the deal here, how come you send us so much traffic? And basically thousands of people go to popurls to look at the latest things about tech and business. And I asked him, you’re covering tech and business, how come you don’t do celebrities, and fashion, and baseball, and football, and adoption, and health, and you name it. And he said I’m really not interested in those, I’m only going to do tech and business, and I’m going to now deploy popurls on more platforms. And I said okay, if you’re not going to do it I’m going to do it. And that was about two years ago.

Since then we’ve gone from 18 sites to 700. We go from A to Z. we go from adoption to zoology. It’s unlikely that you would be able to think of a topic that we have not covered yet. The way to think of Alltop is that it is an online magazine rack, if you will. Imagine when you go to a Borders, or a Barnes and Noble, there’s a section of magazine racks, and there’s the home magazines, the news magazines, the car magazines, the sports magazines, the celebrity magazines. We have the same things. We have sports.alltop, celebrities.alltop, finance.alltop, news.alltop, politics.alltop. We aggregate the news feeds from blogs and sites, and organize them by topics. So, it is I think, arguably, the easiest way to stay on top of a topic.

Now, we differ from Google. Google, you would ask the question, how can I get a discount ticket, airplane ticket? What are the discount fares. So imagine if you were somebody, you’re into travel. So you want to read the travel blogs, you want to read the travel sites. If you went to Google and typed in travel, you would get literally a billion matches. And the first  pages would all be discount airplane tickets. That’s not at all what you’re looking for. If you went to travel.alltop you would find about 200 travel blogs, already organized. The last five headlines from each blog, in nice, three-column format. and so we’ve taken one billion Google matches down to about 200 websites that you can easily scan. And that’s the value. So, Google answers a question like “How many people live in China?” We answer the question “What’s happening in China right now?”

Are people who are using Alltop using it in ways you didn’t anticipate at all? is there anything new happening with Alltop that came out of this?

A lot of people in PR firms and marketing firms, they use it for competitive analysis and for prospecting. Let’s say you’re a PR firm and a new client comes in and they’re interested in social media. So they’re a new social media company. If you wanted to see who the people are who cover social media, if you went to socialmedia.alltop, you would see all the top bloggers and all the top websites about social media. It’s a very easy way to use curated collections of magazines to find out who’s in the market, who might blog about my client.

Reality Check was a big hit, Art of the Start was a big hit. Do you have a book that you’re writing now? Anything new coming?

Yeah, I’m writing a book that is going to be about persuasion, and influence, and wooing people. I still don’t know the title, but that will be the subject. That’s probably at least a year away from publication.

One of the teasers for Reality Check was “How do you get a standing ovation?” As you know I downloaded the first three chapters, so I didn’t get there.  So I’d like to know how do I get a standing ovation?

There’s several key tips to getting a standing ovation. First you have to have something interesting to say. That’s 90% of the battle. Then some tips for you are, if you have a chance, try to get a room that’s small. What you want is a lot of people jammed into the room. If you had a choice of a 500-person room with 500 people in it, or a thousand-person room with 600 people in it, you would prefer the 500-person room that’s standing room only. One second, say hello to the people here, say hello…

(Guy’s daughter makes an appearance.)

That’s tip Number One. Tip Number Two is circulate with the audience prior to the speech so that people can warm up to you and you’ll feel more at home. And tip Number Three is get moving. Tell stories, get moving, rip through it. Don’t have this whole introduction and warm-up and all that. Just get right to it. And I think if you do those three or four things, you’ll massively increase the possibility of a standing ovation.

Terrific, thank you Guy. I’m going to let you get back to your family. One last question, will we see you here in March in Austin for South by Southwest?

Yes, yes. South by Southwest, I’ll absolutely be there. South by Southwest is my favorite conference every year. I’m assuming they’re gonna invite me to speak again, and if they do I’ll be there.

Oh I think they will! I look forward to seeing you then, and thanks so much for doing the interview, I really appreciate it Guy.

Okay, bye bye.

Each Friday, in honor of the #FollowFriday tradition on Twitter, we will be featuring one of our own Featured Users on the blog.

Today we hear from the exuberant Margie Graulau of Musing Wings, known as “NewsAge” on Twitter, a Bronx, NY native.

Margie Graulau

Tell us about yourself:

I was in publishing years ago and decided to return to publishing as my own boss. I began this dream recently and, with the help of Twitter and the internet, have been making it a reality ever since. Social media has also entered my life and I’m in the process of developing it further. I’m working on hand and body lotions to sell through my blogs too. As a breast cancer survivor since 2001, and still receiving treatments every month, I realize that life is too precious to lose, so fun is the new theme.

How and when did you first come to Twitter, and how has the experience evolved for you?

I came upon the Twitter scene on March 23, 2009. Oprah was on TV and she started talking about Twitter. At first it seemed like another time-waster people were indulging in, but I decided to look into it anyway. A short time before that I had joined up with Facebook but found it ‘slow’ for me. I came upon the Twitter main page and read it carefully. “Should I or shouldn’t I?” was my internal question. “Well, I could always get out of it if I don’t like it,” was my thought. That day after joining became a turning point in my life. To discover a new medium to express myself became thrilling. Internet marketing, social media, affiliate marketing, blogging and more came flooding into my life. Art was entertaining for me but it was lacking something. Twitter opened up a whole new world for me and ideas started pouring out. I felt I had another chance to be me again.

Where are you located? What’s your favorite thing about where you live?

I was born, raised and currently live in the Bronx, NY. The favorite things I enjoy of the Bronx are the wonderful memories I’ve had in my childhood here. I was fortunate to have loving parents, small adventures and good friends along the way.

What are you most excited about sharing with your followers?

To provide information, advice, ideas and fun for my followers brings me joy. I like to give what people want. If I can make someone happy or help them with something it is so rewarding to me. With more and more followers I fulfill this dream many times over.

What is your favorite thing to do when you’re not online?

I enjoy keeping current with everything in life. I do this by reading, watching TV and interacting with people. My mind is constantly formulating so coming up with ideas and solutions has also been a fun pastime for me. Working with my hands is also a joy. I’ve renovated and decorated the house I live in and also care for Mom so I never have a dull or boring moment. Life is so full of wonder, fun and excitement. I love it!

Each Friday, in honor of the #FollowFriday tradition on Twitter, we will be featuring one of our own Featured Users on the blog.

Today we hear from Adrienne Breaux of AdrienneBreaux.com, who lives right here in Austin, Texas, where FeaturedUsers is headquartered:

Adrienne Breaux

Tell me about yourself.

My boyfriend and I traveled to Austin in a van two years ago on a country-wide tour of the United States–and never left. Austin was our first stop! Since I’ve been here, I’ve had the genuine pleasure of working at one of the coolest stores in Austin, IF+D, and starting my own business. I currently dabble in a heady mix of interior design consulting, pet sitting and freelance writing. I have an intense hatred for coffee. Smoothies, water and fruit juice ONLY, please.

How (and when) did you first come to be on Twitter, and how has the experience evolved for you?

I started twittering probably about a year ago, when I first quit my day job to take the leap and start my own business. I picked an important few tech-geeks to follow and watched how they used the tool, as well as read tons of blog posts and articles on the subject, so that I could seem like I knew what I was doing. I’ve done alright, I think!

Because I don’t have a smart phone, Twitter is primarily an internet tool for me. Besides direct messages, I rarely receive updates on my phone. I do believe I’d be just about the rudest person ever if I had constant access to the site–I’d check it at the dinner table constantly.

I’d say the only way it really evolved for me is just my understanding of the nuances of trying to market on Twitter. Listening to followers, using sites like bit.ly to track my link clicks—all to make sure I’m not being too annoying online!

Twitter is one of my main news sources now, as well. The first thing I do in the morning is go through all the new updates, clicking and opening in new tabs all the headlines or links that look interesting. I catch up on the day’s hottest headlines and learn about what my friends are interested in at the same time.

Where are you located? What’s your favorite thing about where you live?

I live just off South Congress Avenue, and I have to admit, I am a total snob about it. I really feel like my boyfriend and I live in the best part of Austin. Our favorite thing about it is its proximity to everything else. We can walk to South Congress awesomeness, walk to downtown, grab our bikes and go to the East Side, Zilker, Barton Springs or even the Greenbelt. We are in and around some of my favorite places of Austin. Man I’m lucky!

What are you most excited about sharing with your followers?

Probably the same thing I try to share with my blog readers: what an awesomely creative and talented place Austin is. I always tell people that when I graduated from college (with an Interior Design degree), all of my classmates went to either Houston or Dallas, the supposed hotbeds of design and architecture.

After living here all of a week, I saw how underestimated Austin designers were, and decided to make it my mission to showcase all the amazing architects, interior designers, landscape architects, graphic designers, photographers, artists, etc. we have here in this city. I am continually delighted and surprised. So, if you see a link I’m posting on Twitter, 99% of the time it’s an amazing local design link!

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not online?

The two R’s and L: Read. Run. Laugh. As corny as it sounds, I’m determined to publish a novel one day and so I’m constantly reading to become a better writer (and because it’s intensely enjoyable). I love to run around the hike and bike trail and get much clarity and creativity from a good run. My boyfriend is a comedian at Coldtowne Theater here in Austin, and so you can find me there lots of the time, laughing at all the amazingly funny and talented people over there.

Thanks, Adrienne!

Each Friday, in honor of the #FollowFriday tradition on Twitter, we will be featuring one of our own Featured Users on the blog. Today we hear from Will Wilmot of @R9Media:

Tell us about yourself.

I’m the founder of R9 Media. And, like Rousseau, I eschew any formal title. R9 Media was developed around the concept of informational fluidity. The digital space allows for virtually unencumbered freedom of and access to information. That being the case, R9 Media and its financial partners leverage this informational fluidity to disseminate creative content.

How (and when) did you first come to be on Twitter, and how has the experience evolved for you?

We’ve been using Twitter from the very beginning. It has shown itself to be a powerful metric for brand and content promotion. In our estimation it will continue to outpace, at least in the near term, other forms of social media.

Where are you located?

We’re located in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not online?

My personal interests include Gyrfalcons, Jack Russell Terriers, Leica cameras, rare books and ravens.

Thank you, Will!