I have a blog, Linked In, Facebook, multiple internal IBM tools, Twitter, Friendfeed, Plaxo, and on, and on, and on.

Most of these have gained steadily in numbers of friends, contacts or whatever you call them, it’s just semantics for numbers. Sure at first there was a bit of a spke, then the growth either leveled off or grew slightly.

Until this week….

One post about a group that was started by Carter Lusher at SageCircle changed all that. The A/R Twitter Contact directory. It seemed innocuous and logical to join the group.  I’m in that proffesion, and there are a number of folks that tweet about it or converse with others.

My inbox has been full of folks wanting to follow me. Now that is relative in terms of numbers as I don’t draw WSJ type number, nor do I drone on like many on the tool, but the spike is what was amazing.

Credit to Carter for thinking of this as well as the power of community to get together that quickly

Carter Lusher included me on the list, which I’m sure will grow exponentially soon….it is a good resource for both sides of the analyst coin.

ZDNet reports that the iPhone has experienced buggy applications from it’s partners.  I’m not surprised.  Opening up a Stalag type operation to a 3rd party is not a flip of a switch.

developerWorks has many applications from which we work with our partner developers that go through many iterations and or checkpoints.  Many even begin at alphaWorks.  Code has to be tested, retested and put into an environment that can be regulated, adjusted and not cause reputation injury.

I’ll give Apple a minor pass that this is their first attempt at iPhone applications, but I think their company has been around 3rd party development since VisiCalc.  That should give some indication that not all developers stay within the SDK rules, or will play nice with other applications.

Welcome to the real world iPhone.

What is the fallout?  Apple better get on top of their developers and applications to make sure there is some tighter regulations.  Next, they better get on top of their messaging so that the word on the street is not stay away.  I’m guessing that they have the 800 lb. gorilla mode though and know they have the momentum and won’t care that much.

On the developer side, the one that comes up with more than a game is the winner.  Here are my 2 killer applications.

1: synchronization with the top email platforms if they are serious about competing with Crackberries in the corporate space.

2. a landscape keyboard layout

I’ve been away for a while, on vacation with the family in Denmark and Sweden. As always, there’s no place like home. They say the Danes are the happiest people of any country, they are a nice folk, I’m married to one, so I have to say so.

Since half of my family lives there, it’s very familiar. It’s quite easy to get between the two countries now that they have a bridge.

Stephen O’Grady, we caught Pike and Perch in Sweden, they were so big it almost sunk the boat, and here’s my son and me on the boat.

As you can see, there are LOTS of trees in Sweden. We were in a town near Tingsryd. While there, we helped with the canning and distribution some of the 35 kilo’s of honey a family member harvested.

In Denmark, we saw the sights, like one of the kings and a statue of Hercules

Went to Tivoli and rode the rides. Walt Disney got his ideas for his theme parks from this place.

We got to go to the largest weapons museum in Europe. Here I am with a Gatling gun and I also got to see a V-1, the weapon that my Dad helped to defeat in WWII. By now, any reader should know how I feel about guns and the 2nd amendment.

So what happened when I was away? Tony Snow, a great man and a former White House Press Secretary passed away, man knows not his own time. They found 550 lbs of yellow cake in Iran. For the naysayers of WMD in Iraq, they’re in Canada now, but they were in Iraq when we attacked so the CIA and British intel was correct….as well as the 16 words in the state of the union speech prior to the attack.

The Tour de France got underway, Kyle Busch won a couple of races….and I missed my dog.

Did I think about work while away? Mostly about how nice it was that I wasn’t working.

So it’s back to work tomorrow, and the fun of analyst relations. I took a photo of that too… I asked about work in a Swedish animal park, here is his response.

Here is a video of me breaking 6 blocks or about 12″ of concrete. I used to break them in front of my daughter’s boyfriends so they would know I was serious about not messing with her. From what I heard, most of them didn’t want to mess with me, I was ok with that.

I did this break at my 2nd degree Black Belt test.

Michael Cote interviewed me at RSDC about these topics as we (and a lot of other analysts and A/R firms) connect with each other via Social Computing.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time, as it was just a discussion about how we do the work, but it has made the rounds enough that I re-thought the relevancy. I had fun doing it and thank Cote for putting up with me.

Here is the original post

SageCircle then picked it up, thanks Carter for saying for one of the few times in my life that it is interesting and worth watching.

Today, Cote pinged me that Lighthouse Analyst Relations picked it up also, thanks guys.

In fairness, all the links are the same video, so just pick one.

For those that wonder what I do for a living, this should shed some light on it, or not.

Here is a really cool video of Sam the man at the BPLC conference. One very cool feature is the annotations that Frank puts in like the warning to Salesforce.com….look out App Exchange. Thanks Frank

Click on the Link to the video of Sam.

Here is the link to the entire blog where Frank discusses IBM’s Blue Business Platform. Watch out SaaS marketplace, this one comes with Partners, a Server, Lotus support, GBS Services….and it’s SMB focused.

Why does this matter for analyst relations? We started talking to Frank more than eight months before this got posted, so you can see the cycle of behind the scenes talks that go on about what we are doing and why the analysts know IBM so well.

One of the things we tried to do to influence analyst relations is to add new tools.  Now I readily admit that video is not a new tool, but using it is another bullet in the gun, so a tool that is expanding in our A/R arsenal at events.

Special thanks to Cote of RedMonk who did all the work here.  At the bottom is his interview of me, so have at it, I can take a joke.

Jamie Thomas on RSDC

Grady Booch on Multi Core UML

Scott Hebner on Rational Team Concert, SaaS and Jazz thinking

Laura Bennett on alphaWorks and developerWorks

Telelogic

Ashok Reddy on Rational jazz

Mike Orourke on Rational Team Concert

Dave Klavon on Testing

John Simonds, yes yours truly on Blogs, Tags, and Twitter in Analyst Relations

I was 20 miles from El Diablo himself Hugo Chavez off the coast of Venezuela. The stench of sulfur was still burning in my nose from his presence. While there, I was depleting the ocean of Kingfish, Tuna, YellowTail and Bonita (all pictured here except for one tuna that I caught).

Here is a video of my son fighting a kingfish and landing it in the boat. Done with only a flip camera.

Click here to watch the short video.