When using your company-assigned laptop to make presentations, remember to disable your pornographically-themed screensaver (and yes, the video below is not safe for work):

It looks as thought the Twitter user going by the handle of betbot is going to spend the next little while absorbing a very important lesson about managing one’s online persona after making this tweet at the Mesh Conference:

betbot’s profile vaingloriously proclaims that he has three Master’s degrees:

Self-proclaimed marketing guru trying to put my 3 hard-earned Masters to work

If you;ve spent any time on a university campus, you know that having that many Master’s degrees is not a boasting point; it’s a cry for help – it means you’re a shiftless pedant majoring in life-avoidance studies. As for putting “marketing guru” in your Twitter profile; it’s a cliche on par with “I like long walks on the beach” in the personal ads.

It’s because I always end up typing the wrong message in the wrong chat window. So far, I haven’t done anything as embarrassing as the ChaCha guide below, but I’m not going to tempt fate…

Screen capture courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment: my current job as Tech Project Manager at b5media marks the fourth startup for which I’ve worked; if you count Mackerel Interactive Multimedia — whose story, Burying the Fish, was written by Cory Doctorow for Wired but never published — I’ve worked at five. I like the “feel” of working at a startup, and now that I’ve got experience and real-world and blog-based reputations to back me up, startups are willing to pay me not only to be part of their team but to also be the “adult supervision”. At the ripe old age of 40, I’m an elder statesman in these parts (and playing an old man’s instrument only adds to that image).

That’s why I read SitePoint’s article Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them with a sense of deja vu, going through each item in their list of mistakes and saying “yup, did that one…did that one too…”

Put together, the startups for which I worked had all but one of the diseases listed in the article except for “Marketing Blind Spot”. For some reason, there was always a marketer in our midst, drumming it into our heads that marketing was necessary.

I’ve taken their list of startup diseases and cures and summarized it in the table below. For full explanations behind each disease and cure, be sure to read the article.