Therefore I promise:

• I will act with utmost integrity and pursue all my works in an ethical manner.
• I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
• I will manage my professional career in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the community and the societies it serves.
• I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my businesses and employer.
• I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my profession accurately and honestly.
• I will develop both myself and other around me (co-workers, colleagues, and competitors) so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.
• I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.
• I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

This oath I make freely, and upon my honor.

Many, many times on this blog I have professed my love for Evernote.  One of the top search engine queries that drives traffic to my site are strings containing the word "Evernote".  I have stated many times on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn about how I have made a home for my GTD life within Evernote.  But regardless of all of that, Evernote has let me down.  So while I was once a champion for the service, now I have to question their customer service practices.

Some might say, "Well, com'mon, Evernote is a free service.  What did you expect?"  Evernote was not free for me.  I chose the premium service from Evernote a few months ago, which amounted to $5.00 a month.  Sure, that is not a lot of money, but because I like what Evernote did for me, I chose the pay-to-play option as opposed to choosing one of the hundreds of other free services out there.  Now I am going to completely leave Evernote and never return.  Here is how it all went down...

On March 5th, I received an email from Google Checkout informing me that Evernote was billing my credit card $5.00, just like every month before.  I proceeded to use Evernote, just like normal.

Then yesterday, I received an email (out of the blue) that Evernote was downgrading my account to the free option because they couldn't charge my card.  At this point, I lost some major pieces of functionality that I rely on by using the premium option.  My guess is because I received a new card last month, so my expiration date changed, but this makes no sense because all of my other auto-bill pays are working just fine.

So, no big deal, I thought, I will just contact them to get this all figured out.  Perhaps I could just re-register my account and set-up the pay option, but how about a little customer interaction so I can understand why they opted to just shut me out as opposed to maybe contacting me first and allowing me to update my credit card information.  No, they just flipped the switch with no attempt to contact me first.  Well, there is absolutely no way to contact Evernote.  It is non-existent!  I even dropped them a note on Twitter and Facebook - but no response.  A simple Twitter reply would have kept me as a customer, even if it would have meant that I would have had to re-join Evernote, but now I think I am just going to bail all together.  Why?  Because relationships and customer service are more important to me than anything the service can provide me.  I want to have a relationship with each and every vendor I pay my money to for use of their service.  No phone support?  Fine, I can deal with that, but you can't provide an easy way for me to email you and get a reply?  What if I would have had a major issue with my data?

A big disappointment for a service I really enjoy.  I am sure my $60/year is small peanuts to them, but maybe it is time for all of us to get back to the fundamentals of relationships in business.

The traffic to my site has quadrupled since just six months ago.  My RSS subscribers have tripled in that same time frame.  The feedback I get is almost always positive.  I don't state these facts to boast at all.  I say them to myself often, because I am proud of what I have accomplished.  These numbers make me work harder to continue trying to bring you one person's view of his small world.  I will most likely never be able to thank you enough for helping make myself proud of what I have done.

Blogging and maintaining this site takes time.  A lot of time.  Perhaps there are opportunities I have missed due to this damn site, and the time I take logged into it.  But on the other hand, it has also created opportunities.  I have met many people through my blog who I am now happy to call my friends.  My blog has even made me money.  Significant money.  I am not talking about Google AdSense money.  I am talking about opportunities for my services.  It has landed me contracts and jobs.  Some might look at a blog and wonder why someone would take such time to write what seems like wasted words.  I tell them, "No, my friend, a blog is much more than that."  My blog has opened doors, and none of that would have been possible without you.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.  I truly am grateful for your time, because I know just how valuable it is.

Sure music and my favorite podcasts help, but it takes more than that to get me going.  So over the past week, I think I have found something that will keep me going... combining my love for technology and statistics to keep me active - even when I don't want too!

Using my Palm Pre smartphone and a series of mobile fitness applications, I have found a new passion for getting out and exercising.  I am testing out the different applications to find which ones work best for me, but the overall goal of getting out there and pushing harder and harder each workout is working!  The other day, I used the "JogStats" mobile application which measured all the vitals to my run and then tweeted the results to my Twitter feed:

I am using an application called "Absolute Fitness" that helps me track my caloric intake.  "Fit23" gives me the opportunity to enter softer data on my health, like how much water I drank, how I feel about my overall health on a particular day, etc.  "iStayFit" helps me in the gym by showing me different workouts to do to focus on different areas of my body.  Finally, I use "Pedometer" to measure all of my steps I take during the day.  All of these together give me a statistical look at my progress, which for me, helps keep me motivated.

Because of the power our phones have now-a-days and with the endless supply of mobile applications, there is so much potential to do new things or get better at things we like to do.  While I always knew that technology could better my life, I never knew it could make my experience working out better.

Here are the top five most popular posts on RobertStanke.com for the month of February:

1. Class is over... let's get back to execution and implementation (Posted on: February 18, 2010)

2. The two main types of online communities - Part 1: Organic Communities (Posted on: February 2, 2010)

3. The (possible) abuse of social networks by consumers (Posted on: February 17, 2010)

4. The two main types of online communities - Part 2: Branded Communities (Posted on: February 4, 2010)

5. I want to know about your blog! (Posted on: February 10, 2010)

Here's to March, warm weather, and the coming of baseball!

If you follow my blog on a regular basis or know me well, you know I can't pass up trying a new online tool or service!  Sure, I might sign-up with one, play around with it for a week, and then never log in again... but hey, you never know when one is going to catch on fire (i.e.

* If you are familiar with Friendfeed, then you will immediately get Cliqset.  The concepts are pretty much identical, even down to the being able to connect up with others, see their social stream updates from multiple services, and can even join groups to see related streams around a certain interest.  I love Cliqset, but in a lot of ways it is a Friendfeed knock-off.

* The Cliqset interface is awesome.  Visually appealing, colorful, and the stream is easy to read and follow.

* Finding others to connect with has been difficult.  There doesn't seem to be the capability (or at least I have not been able to find it) to access your contacts list from a service like Google or Yahoo to be able to see if any of your friends are on Cliqset.  You are merely just given a search box to search by name and a complete directory of everyone.  I can't seem to find a way to connect with people in my area either.  Kind of a bummer.

* You can connect your stream to over 80+ services, including Evernote, which is how I found out about Cliqset in the first place!  From what I can tell, just about every service you would want to connect to is there.

* Sharing is easy on Cliqset, and I like how you can even share files, photos, and even reviews where you can even give star ratings.

Cliqset is basically a Friendfeed clone but with a few extra things that might intrigue some people.  Give it a look and if you are interested, you can connect with me on Cliqset by clicking here!

What I am interested in though, is whether or not community management and better moderation practices could have prevented this whole ordeal.  There are reports that the video in question did get some complaints filed with Google, but the video was not taken down until authorities informed Google of the possible issue at hand.  Now there are many questions currently out there about content moderation in general and what does it take for one item to come down but not another?  I could put up a piece of content that offends one person but not 99 others, so do I need to take it down because of the one offended person?  Could I be breaking the law because of one person?  What are my liabilities of being a publisher versus that of a host of possible questionable comments on my blog that were created by others?  The list of questions can go on and on and all of the answers boil down to terms of use, moderation, and common sense.

Could Google have prevented this through better moderation?  If you think the answer to that is yes, consider this...

Google's video service, YouTube, gets 20 hours of video uploaded every one minute (the video in question in the Italian case was actually hosted in Google Videos, not YouTube, but this puts the whole moderation argument in context).  That means if we were to expect Google to examine every video uploaded, they would have to hire 30,000 new employees and spread them out across three non-stop shifts of doing nothing but watching video.  Great for the economy?  Sure.  Realistic?  No.  Some would argue, "fine, if Google can't control the content that is uploaded and that they are responsible for, then they should shut it down."  Really?  That is your solution?  So a couple of questionable things get through, offend a limited set of individuals, and you are just going to shut the service down?  Then you don't understand the web and I feel sorry for you."

Let's change the laws, not the natural growth of the most powerful tool mankind has ever created.  It is time to start to think differently and not live by old, outdated laws.

Flavors.me is an extremely simple and straight forward approach of telling others where they can find you.  Whether this is good or bad is up to you, but Flavors.me keeps visitors on that portal to view your content as well, so they never have to leave as they flip back and forth to see all that you are up too.  You can see by the way I have mine set up, the links are on the left and as you click on them, the content shows up on the right.  My design is very, very simple - black and white - but you do have the option to add some color and upload images.  There is also a premium service that costs $20 a year that gives you some additional options as well.

The services to connect to was easy, although connecting some services timed out and just produced error messages.  I have not added all of mine yet because of these errors.

Overall, it depends what your strategy is for having people find your content or where they can connect with you.  I still like to drive all my visitors to one central location (my blog) because I can have maximum control.