Rockport Mass finally made it a priority to legalize alcohol after 149 years. I can only imagine that it will be a great night to party in Rockport.

I went to the job source location this afternoon because they were having a free seminar on networking. I am increasingly interested in real networking with actual people outside of the Internet after having listened to the Tipping Point in the car for the past few days. Among the areas that I found interesting in the Tipping Point were some studies about how large a social group of humans can be before the group is too large for each individual to have the capacity in the social part of their brains to connect in a meaningful way with other people. The number comes out to about 150 people. I do wonder whether the Internet and computers can help augment an individual to be able to overcome this limitation of the human brain. The 150 is somewhat related to the magic number 7 for the human brain in that people can only easily recall seven items at a time. That is why phone number lengths were chosen to be seven digits long. So what does seven and 150 have to do with each other - I think it had something to do with the interrelationships you can track naturally growing as a geometric number where you can track seven people and all of their relationships with each other you can get to about 150 real relationships that you have.

So during the networking class I represented the dorky Internet world that is very expert at communicating with people using computer tools but who have extreme panic attacks when faced with the prospect of meeting a new, strange, and intimidating human being.

Among the things I knew that I always forget about people included:

- Saying hello to people isn't very hard and is a generally good thing for building a very simple foundation for relationships with people in your world (gym, library, classes, dog walking, coffee shop, house of worship, etc.

- People are more likely to answer your questions if you don't want something from them and as a result they will be happy to provide you with help when you ask for it later. For example - calling on non human resources related people to just ask questions is a good guerilla job hunting tactic. It may also be a great guerilla PR, sales, and marketing tactic as well. So why not ask a press contact for their opinion about the space you are in, a user about how a product might fit into their day and the problems/challenges they see, or a partner sales person about challenges selling a partner's product

- People like to talk about themselves. It is easier to approach someone with a question about them then about you. I may try to put this into practice by testing the emails I send to recent downloaders to not ask them to help improve the product but to just tell me about themselves and in user interviews I will start with the basics to ask them about what they do for work and their hobbies.

- Smiling, humor, taking risks, and energy are as important if not more important than the content of what you say.

- There is a book called the Adam's Cover Letter Almanac that is apparently well worth having in order to get he best templates for engaging people with initial letters. I'll have to purchase it.