And no Red Dwarf or Liberator from Blake's 7 either.

But I think we can let him off. This site of one pixel per meter scale drawings is so beautifully executed.

Make sure you scroll all the way around - there's much more than a single screen full. And if you're on IE, you can drag the spaceships and other objects around - making that Klingon K'Tinga fly past the CN Tower, for example.

Lovely stuff.

Gary Turner is one of the greatest living human beings on the face of the planet.

He has selflessly devoted his entire being to enhancing the daily lives of web surfers and blog readers everywhere. His tireless and unswerving dedication to this mission is legendary.

But this time, he's surpassed himself.

Remember the "Boss Key" in your favourite PC games of the early 80's? Gary, with help from Ben James, has created the Web Fire Escape.

Imagine yourself as the web equivalent of a health and safety officer at work, think about how to protect your blog readers from disciplinary action and preserve your readership for years to come.

Sweet. Every home page should have one.

How long before this becomes a standard browser toolbar button? Or at least as ubiquitous as the little orange XML chiclet.

"I don't know much about math, but I know what I like"

Sweet, succinct, worth clicking.

Credit to Halley for the pointer (who has managed to surpass a certain other heavenly body as the #1 Halley in the Googleverse).

Rats. Something wonky is up with the Archives here, I'm afraid. A visitor just told me that the link to my "Marketing Aforethought" rant, over there in the side bar, points to a blank post.

I've no idea where the original screed went, and don't have a copy of it on this loaner machine or on the network. I think it might be sitting on my old dead Compaq somewhere.

Bugger bugger bugger - I really quite liked that piece.

Checking the actual blog entry, it now contains nothing more than this: "[BigBody]". Turns out this is a bug supposedly already fixed by Blogger.

There's an unpleasant irony in the fact that the damage seems to have been wrought when I recently forked over the additional shekels to upgrade to Blogger Pro. Certainly that appears to be the most commonly-reported cause of this error.

Great. I give you extra money: you hose down my blog with Prolixity Spray. Thanks, Ev.

I can’t bring myself to trawl through the archives and find any other examples of this kind of damage. As I tend to suffer from SARS (Super Amazingly Really-bloody-ridiculously-long-posts Syndrome), the prognosis is not good.

I do want to restore the “Marketing Aforethought” thing, though – but have no idea when, or if, I’ll be able to dig up a copy. Even Google’s cache has rolled over, alas, and only holds the blank record.

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…”

...as if it wasn't bad enough already.

I've been bouncing back on forth, here and in email, on the challenges – perhaps even the viability - of the emerging relationship between PR and blogging – if you can even call it a relationship.

This is probably going to end up a fairly long post. If you want to go straight to the punchline: follow this link. Or stick with me, as I thread it out…

A week or so ago, I wrote:

“…there's still just so much cluelessness in the PR industry….most agencies don't get it. And those that think they do can sometimes be even more clueless and dangerous…The idea of "pitching" blogs, for example, strikes me as an exercise doomed to failure…most self-respecting bloggers would be much more likely to marvel at the deed than consider the actual content of the pitch.“

I’m still circling this one, still trying to figure out whether there can be any kind of functional relationship between these two worlds. I’ve been asked to write an article about this stuff too – so there’s now some direction to my need.

So I asked a bunch of people via the Blogrollers list for their opinions. The only response (so far) was from Chris Pirillo, who nails a description of many, many of the people in my industry.

Chris calls them (us?) “PR Parrots”, and says:

“By definition, they've already lost. PR is all about spin - it's all about telling the world that your shit don't stink. If a parrot tried to abandon that "tenet," (a) his or her head would explode; and (b) they'd get fired. Parrots long for the viral nature of blogging, but for that to happen, they have to let go of one thing that keeps 'em in business: control.”

As a Parrot myself, you’d think I should be getting all righteous and indignant round about now and launching off into a characteristic Michael rant. But the truth is, I find it hard to find fault with Chris’s analysis.

I’m conflicted as all hell here. I can’t disagree with Chris, and yet I feel I should be leaping to the defense of my trade. But then just as I’m struggling to build words around a possible case for the defense, along comes something that weighs heavily, heavily on the side of the prosecution.

Some background on the dramatis personae, first:

Elizabeth Spiers, a NY freelancer, keeps an enormously popular, and unfailingly entertaining blog called Gawker, which consists mostly of a daily trawl of mainstream media items, commented on with spicy cattiness.

If Elizabeth’s blog had a tagline, it would be something like “Diligently Frivolous”. It’s deliberately frothy, and that’s the whole point – she’s really good at it.

And yet Gawker is a pure big 'b' Blog, in the best sense, and not lightly to be pitched by misguided PR Parrots.

In the opposite corner, is the new online publishing vehicle set up by Tony Perkins of Red Herring fame. Tony’s AlwaysOn has already been puffed up and picked apart in a number of places now.

AlwaysOn really didn’t strike me as that bad an idea, to be honest. I don’t know that it actually qualifies as a blog, per se, and I think Tony comparing it to Slashdot is a colossal stretch – but my first impression was that there was something of merit lurking in the heart of this thing; something that made it worth bookmarking to check in on from time to time and watch as it finds its rhythm.

But then I'm afraid the stereotypical PR Parrots get into the picture, and it all goes frigging pear-shaped.

Tony hired an agency, MRB, to help promote AlwaysOn. In a completely clueless misreading of the nature of blogs and blogging, the Parrots decided it would make sense to actually pitch other blogs in hope of generating some linky love.

One of the targets of the pitch was, you guessed it, Elizabeth Spiers – whose reaction nicely proves my earlier hypothesis. She posts both the pitch email:

“…We wanted to explore the possibility of having a link posted on the AO site for the same on yours. Please let me know how to pursue. Thanks.”

…and her “Thank you, but FOESAD” response:

“…This is first time I've ever seen a blogger hire an actual PR firm to solicit links from other bloggers. I'm not saying it's definitively a bad practice, but it seems a bit like having your mom run around the playground, asking all the other kids to be your friend.”

Nice.

Yet again, knowing that there are PR people out there who do this kind of thing makes me faintly queasy about what I do for a living. But then, there’s flacks and there’s flacks. You’ve only got to take a quick peek at the front of the MRB Public Relations, Inc. website to get the measure of the firm.

“A properly managed public relations campaign can offer your business the highest return per dollar than any other marketing venue.”

Oh. Right you are then.

And I’m wondering how many of the “clients” listed in the “catagories” on this page even know they have MRB working for them, if you see what I mean.

But as I work for a competitive PR firm, this is really a pretty underhanded and snarky way for me to be behaving. Sorry. For the record: I know a couple of tech firms who’ve worked with MRB in the past, and I’ve never heard any specific negative feedback about them.

But pitching a high profile blogger like this? Guys…jeez. You make us all look dumb. Forget about trying to pitch bloggers – get your own damn blog, fercrissakes. Turn your homepage into a blog. Try and figure out how this stuff works. Get with the goddam meme.

It’s enough to make me hang my head. But this stuff keeps happening. Maybe Chris is even more right than I thought. Maybe the Parrots are doomed to die – selected out of the corporate ecosystem by their own inability to adapt - or even demonstrate an iota of clue.

I’m going back to read Gonzo Marketing again – see if it says anything about a Gonzo PR path to follow. There’s got to be some way to get this stink of death out of the business…

Amen.

It’s just struck me. There’s one huge thing about working through this slow, sucky market that is making me ache – and I’ve only just realized what it is.

It’s not the fact that every tiny scrap of business is such a huge fight, or that we’re killing ourselves to win even the most miniscule budgets.

It’s not that the heat has gone out of the capital markets, so no one has scads of VC money to cram into the pockets of hungry flacks like me.

It’s not even the way the layoffs and shortages at the media outlets I deal with have made it so much harder to secure the attention of the surviving, and massively overworked, reporters.

All of these things make my job more difficult, and my personal and business targets become harder to hit. But we’re still basically doing fine.

No – the thing that really hurts is something quite different: I’ve realized I’m pining for the company of geeks.

Until just a couple of years ago, I’d spent my entire working life on the “client side” – working as a technical consultant, then product evangelist, then as a big picture corporate marketing and PR guy.

I flipped from Hummingbird to the agency world as a conscious move to “reinvent” myself and try on a different Michael for a while.

And it’s been great. I love what I do for a living – from the writing to the bullet-catching: I wouldn’t give it up.

But where are all the geeks?

One of the big things I loved about being in the software world was being able to work in close proximity with (and in perpetual semi-awe of) the hardcore geeks who form the heart of the business. I couldn’t always keep up, but was always learning.

If I think about the people who I’d count as my closest friends, most of them are card-carrying geeks (or at least geek-ish ;-). The people I most admire in the industry: all geeks. The bloggers whose daily feeds I couldn’t go without: geeks.

Damn. Maybe I’m just a wannabe geek.

"If all else perished, and geeks remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and geeks were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it...Nelly, I am a geek! Geeks are always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."

Ahem. (Extra bonus literary geek points if you can source the original quote).

With so few technology firms having any money to spend on PR, it’s just not too often nowadays that someone like me gets brought in to help define the corporate and product marketing strategies.

The agency role, in belt-tightening times, often becomes much more executional than influential. Marketing and communications both go into drip-feed mode – if it doesn’t drive immediate revenue, it’s an afterthought at best.

I still get to work with a lot of great tech companies – big and small. But the depth of engagement is different.

No one’s going to pay my hourly rate to have me faciliate a product marketing brainstorm, for example. Even though that’s exactly the world I spent more than half of my working life in (before morphing into what Chris Pirillo calls a “PR Parrot”).

Now that I’m a flack, I don’t get to “embed” with the geeks any more. And I miss it.

I don’t get to dig down into the creative genius at the core of tech companies and get high on innovation.

Instead, I just work with all the other fluffy marketing bunnies like me. Lovely, lovely bunnies – many of them. But bunnies nevertheless.

This has helped me figure out why I feel so extraordinarily drawn to events like ETCON and Gnomedex. OK, so sixty per cent of the content would probably sail clean over my head - I am a mere fluffy bunnykins, after all. But damn! I’d love to be there.

So now I know why I so badly want the market back. I just want to get down with the tech heads again. I want people to have budgets big enough to get the kind of close-in marketing counsel I used to do so much of. I long to participate in the rush the developers get as their latest creation grows towards its market.

I need to feed my inner geek.

I've finally gotten around to adding the latitude & longitude coordinates into my template and doing the GeoURL thingy (see that new shiny green chiclet on the right - under the XML button?)

This turns out to be considerably cooler than I thought it would be.

Quite apart from anything else, registering with the GeoURL database lets me click on that cute green widget and find out about a whole bunch of interesting bloggers within a stone's throw of this place.

As an example - it's a pleasant surprised to discover that a columnist and blogger I've been reading for a year or so (Alex Sirota, aka the "Email Curmudgeon") apparently blogs from somewhere just around the corner from where I'm sitting right now.

It also means anything I blog should start to show up at some point on this funky little service - which uses RSS feeds plus the GeoURL ICBM server to map a World of Blogs. Cool.

I just dumped the entire contents of this blog into an MS Word file, just for the halibut.

Since the inaugural post on March 1, 2001, I've written (or, more accurately, posted - as I often quote from other sources, sometimes at length), approximately:

66,609 words or 229 pages.

Crikey. That's like a small novel.

The really interesting thing about this, mind you, is that it is all bollocks. Every single word. You can trust me on this: I've checked.

Quite remarkable.

For those of you just joining the fun who might be tempted to mine the archives -- I think I can save you the trouble of wading back through all 200-odd pages, with a cunning deployment of Word's "AutoSummarize" feature.

Here, then, is the entire "I Love Me, vol. I" opus, presented in summary form, exactly as produced by Word:

(er…wtf? (Again.
Famous authors .
TV Weathermen .
Tennis Stars .
Hollywood Actors .
Even Barenaked Ladies !
4. Ask David .
Heather asks:
1.

I thank you.

Fresh off the newswire:

Douglas Hospital - Shortage of brains for mental health research

MONTREAL, April 23 /CNW Telbec/ - "We have a shortage of brains." This is what was revealed by Ms. Danielle Cécyre, coordinator of the Brain Bank of the Douglas Hospital Research Centre. During National Organ and Tissue Donation Awareness Week, which is being held until Sunday April 27, Cécyre has a delicate task: increasing the public's awareness to brain donation.

"By signing the back of a Medicare card, it allows doctors, at time of death, to remove vital organs that can only be used for transplants. The majority of people ignore that they can, simply by signing another form, donate their brain, which will be used for mental health research," explains Cécyre...

...Simple procedures have been established to authorize brain donation. Individuals who are interested or would like to have more information can call the Douglas Hospital at (514) 761-6131, extension "0" and ask for the Brain Bank. There are no age restrictions for donors.

I'm sure you all know people who aren't using theirs.

Act now! Post your suggestions by clicking the "Comments" link below and I'll make sure the names of all potential donors are forwarded to the Brain Bank.

Together, we can overcome this terrible crisis - and do society a great service in the process. I'll even start the ball rolling here, by generously donating this guy:

.

Two examples:

1. Just yesterday, I described going through a "Thomas Covenant cycle" of self-examination. It's about 25 years since I read the books, but I recall Covenant (hero of a series of epic fantasy novels by Stephen Donaldson) had no feeling in his nerve endings and needed to constantly check his extremities for accidental cuts and burns. This was a side-effect of the fact he was a leper.

Then I wake up this morning to the front page of the Globe, describing how some U.S. newspapers have nicknamed Toronto "Pariah City" as a result of this SARS crap.

"SARS creates a city of pariahs
Shunned in Canada and the U.S. alike, residents increasingly feel like lepers

Hersh Goldin found out yesterday that just living in Toronto is enough to make the outside world treat him like a leper.

A cruise company barred the investment adviser and his family from taking a dream vacation to Alaska merely because Toronto is on an international list of places with SARS. Even if the company lifts the ban, Mr. Goldin is not sure he'll go.

"I feel as though we might be tarred and feathered and thrown off the ship," he said."

No wonder I'm acting like a leper. According to some U.S. media I am one. I'd laugh, but I'm scared my jaw might fall off or something.

2. Adding further insult to injury, the WHO has warned people not to travel to Toronto unless their visit is essential.

I lack the words to describe how insanely inappropriate such alarmist pronouncements are, coming from an enormously influential body such as the World Health Organization.

To add weight to the numbers I quoted yesterday, here's Toronto's most senior practicing microbiologist, Dr. Donald Low of Mount Sinai Hospital, speaking on 680 News radio this morning (as quoted in the Globe):

"“The fact we have not seen any further secondary cases over the last two weeks tells us it has been contained ...no further dissemination — therefore the community is not at risk.” (my emphasis)

The sucky serendipity comes from the fact that embedded into this article at the Globe's website, is this little animated advert:


Indeed.

On a related note, I find it interesting that on April 10th, there were 154 reported cases of SARS in the U.S. and only 97 cases in the whole of Canada. Yesterday, however, the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control announced that they'd re-cooked their case definition, resulting in a tally of only 38 cases in the States, compared to the 140 now confirmed in Canada.

If you don't like the numbers, move the parameters. Clearly the CDC is being advised by Arthur Andersen and Jeb Bush.

Given Canada's snub to the White House in deciding not to support the invasion of Iraq, it's only a little bit over the top to suggest this might be Dubya's way of spanking our economy, like the naughty children we are, by including Canada in a new Axis of Wheezle that also includes China and Hong Kong.

Brings an observation by H.L. Mencken to mind:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

War over, need another bugbear...

It's been curiously quiet on public transport in Toronto the last couple of days. Feels like about 60% of normal traffic - extended Easter vacations, or SARS fears?

Noodling this on my ride home last night, I became aware for the first time of the cattle-truck claustrophobia of the subway system. I've been using the tube, here and back in the UK, for 20+ years - but yesterday was the first time I've stopped and really looked around in this context. I found myself suddenly conscious of all the surfaces touched by others - sitting there cautiously avoiding touching my face after holding the handrail.

A woman just down the carriage coughed. Nasty sounding. Several dry hacks with that catching-your-breath uplilt at the end. Like a tennis crowd, the heads swung towards her. I imagined the surgical facemasks snapping into place on several faces.

Young guy opposite sat holding his head low. Tired? Drunk? Headache? Early-stage SARS?

Cripes! I'm surrounded by the buggers. Pressingly hyper-aware of the potential for infection.

My nose started to itch. On the inside. Crap! What do I do now?

Just then I noticed a tiny cut on my thumb, just at the cuticle. The hell did that come from?! I go into a full Thomas Covenant cycle: visual check of all extremities to ensure all is as it should be.

I look up to catch the young bloke across the way eyeing me rather oddly - my hands drop back to my lap and I snap out of it.

This stuff's getting old.

There's 12 million people in Ontario (close to 3 million in the Greater Toronto Area alone) - 136 probable and 125 suspect cases of SARS as of April 22.

What's that - like 0.2% of the people in Ontario? Less than 1% of the population of the GTA? Is that right? And 50% of all cases so far are healthcare workers. What percentage of Toronto residents work in healthcare?

Tiny numbers, but the constant buzz through every news channel even has me spooked. How fast does this spread? How long before those tiny numbers hit an exponent ramp and start tracking steeply upwards?

I need a holiday...

Gary Turner kindly invited me to join him at this Friendster thing. I looked, sniffed around, signed up, hung out for a couple of days, but now I'm quitting - for four reasons:

1. The whole thing was starting to genuinely creep me out. Positioned as "a social and business networking service", I think Friendster is quickly revealing itself as less a viable business networking thing; more of a meeting ground for desperate horndogs, hose beasts, and wannabe swingers too clueless to realise there are already thousands of real swinger sites online.

Either way: I'm already taken and not interested, thanks.

2. I received a message from someone I've never met who is apparently "connected" to me through the forced six degrees of separation Friendster sets up for you. It's a seriously odd message. This person wants to get together for coffee to discuss "areas of mutual concern", whatever the feck that means. And that's the sane part. The rest is really quite unnervingly odd.

3. I've made plenty of real friends through this blog already - some of them very good friends indeed.

The perfect example, in fact, is probably Gary Turner himself. I've only ever "met" Gary through our separate and shared blogs. We've never even spoken on the phone. And yet I'd certainly consider him a friend. I'm taking the fact he asked me out to play at Friendster as a sign the feeling is mutual. (Thanks, mate.)

Point is: I think I'm getting all the Friend mojo I want through just being online, thanks very much - don't need no aspartame-flavoured Friendster sweetness to help me along here. Friendster aims to solve a problem I just don't have.

4. The last straw. Checking in at the site tonight I noticed my account page flagged with an Alert! message in big red type.

The message reads: Please Enter a valid Last Name

I did. It's: Michael O'Connor Clarke. That's my whole last name right there. Perfectly valid. Says so on my passport.

Screw with my head and my ideas of what constitutes friendship all you want; but build a site so clue-deprived that it can't even cope with apostrophes or double barreled surnames, and you try my patience.

More succinctly: fuck with my name, and you can fuck yourself, friend.

Just heard on the news, late, that Nina Simone is dead. Another key influence of my coming-of-age years gone.

First thing I ever heard her sing was "Strange Fruit" - long before I heard the Billie Holiday original. Even now, I still get chills when I hear Nina sing it. As an impressionable 16 year old it rocked me to my soul and opened my eyes wider than a piece of music had ever done before.

I never did get to see Nina live. Had tickets for a show at Ronnie Scott's about 20 years ago, but was too sick with flu on the night to make it to the gig.

If I knew where to find a music link, I'd point to Nina's Blues, a favourite instrumental. Can't find a link to the track, but this seems appropriate too:

Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first black man to achieve a measure of national recognition for his poetry in the U.S., wrote a simple verse he called "Compensation". Nina set it to music and recorded it as "Compassion" in 1969.

Compensation / Compassion
Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Nina Simone

Because I had loved so deeply,
Because I had loved so long,
God in His great compassion
Gave me the gift of song.

Because I have loved so vainly,
And sung with such faltering breath,
The Master in infinite mercy
Offers the boon of Death.

Yesterday was the first day in as long as I can remember that I went through an entire day without logging on once.

A near perfect day, with one of the high points being marching in the Beaches Easter Parade along with the rest of the Co-Op Playschool crew. Lily was a huge hit on the Pretty in Pink Harley Davidson I scored at our United Way silent auction late last year.

Just a great day all round, capping a great weekend. Just realised I haven't touched this blog since Wednesday. Far too busy having r/t fun to think much about blogging. But don't worry, something will no doubt nudge my nuts into note-taking again soon.

Meanwhile, with something approximating decent weather finally here, I'm taking Gary's advice:

Doc has an absolutely outstanding idea. This one deserves to sail clean to the top of the blog indexes and all the way into the seats of power around the world. ASAP.

Quoting historian John Malcolm Russell's comment that the sacking and looting of Baghdad's museums and libraries is: "The greatest catastrophe ever to befall a cultural institution in the history of the world...", Doc urges the U.S. and British governments, and anyone else with the power to start work immediately on a variety of means to recover the stolen works.

"Let's do something sustained and positive to help the Iraqi people — and the rest of civilization — get back what's been lost."

I'll let Doc explain the rest. Read it. Smart stuff.

Exchanging a little email with John Robb at Userland. John unwittingly pushed one of my Rant-O-Matic buttons – a button I didn’t even realise I possessed, in this case – but something John said certainly got me off on one…

John’s innocuous comment was as simple as: “Any progress bringing the world of PR to weblogs (or vice versa)? There is such a good synergy there, but it surprises me that most PR agencies still don't get it.”

It’s a good point. As there’s a strong synergy between journalism and blogging, surely there should also be a strong synergy between PR and blogs? I’ve skated around this thought in the past, but haven’t really sunk my teeth into it for a while. Not for almost exactly a year, in fact. Last time I noodled on this was April ’02, where among other things I said:

“The flack is the natural symbiotic complement to the hack ;-) Makes sense that both sides of the relationship should gravitate towards the same environment. Blogging is conversation, in kind of a Cluetrain sense. If lots of journalists are participating in the conversation through their blogs, it feels right for engaged flacks to participate too. If markets are conversations, marketers need to be where the conversations are happening - or something like that.”

Back then, I was responding to a comment by Steve MacLaughlin at Saltire, that: “…the public relations folks don't quite understand the whole blogging thing...”

Struck me as generally true then, and still true now.

As I commented to John: I'm afraid there's still just so much cluelessness in the PR industry. He’s absolutely right to point out that most agencies don't get it. And those that think they do can sometimes be even more clueless and dangerous than the ones who haven't got blogging on their radars yet.

The idea of "pitching" blogs, for example, strikes me as an exercise doomed to failure.

I would imagine most self-respecting bloggers would be much more likely to marvel at the deed than consider the actual content of the pitch. The act of the pitch in itself might be covered by the target blogger (probably with a note of amused disdain); the actual story being pitched probably would not.

The effect is analogous to what happens when you stand in front of a dog and point to the stick you want him to retrieve. The dog will look at your finger.

A dog has no way of interpreting what the human gesture means - you're just an alpha dog showing them your finger. The finger of this alpha dog is, for the moment at least, really interesting. They're probably going to comment on it in their own doggy way: with a tilt of the head, a waggy tail, and a curious expression.

You want them to go get the stick - they're much more keen on sniffing your finger.

As with dogs; so with blogs. You want a blogger to swallow your pitch? They’re more likely to publicly snuffle around your underparts or hump your leg.

Then there's the approach some agencies have tried to take with co-opting the grassroots, meritocratic nature of the blogging community.

Raging Cow is probably the best example here. It's true that their (actually rather neatly executed) blog managed to secure a lot of blogosphere 'coverage'. They rose pretty fast to the top of Daypop, Blogdex, Technorati, et al.

But did this really help them shift any product? They demonstrated that their agency groks the cosmetics and idiosyncracies of the medium rather well, but did they increase sales as a result of the blog?

Actually the core problem here is not isolated to the PR industry's incursions into blogspace - I'm afraid there's a systemic cluelessness in the PR business at work in this example.

The depressing thing is that the Raging Cow blog was, I'm sure, considered a raging success by the creators and by Dr. Pepper, in that it achieved what was the all-too-obvious desired result.

That is: it got noticed, fast, by the blogging community. It burned very, very brightly at the top of the indexes for a short while. Lots of citations, a good few parodies, plenty of 'buzz'.

Whoopee-doo.

I would submit that buzz for buzz's sake achieves little of lasting merit. This is success measured in very conventional PR terms - success based entirely on measurement of Output, as opposed to Outcome.

Output, in traditional PR, means getting lots of 'ink' (often regardless of the quality/tone). Same rule applies to the way many agencies are approaching blogspace - "we've got to get the bloggers talking about it".

Spare me.

Sure, you'll get bloggers commenting on your arseheaded tactics, but they won't be saying anything too flattering.

Maybe Chris Pirillo will truck a case of your free product to a blogerati party - but only so he can videotape people gagging on it, for the amusement of his blog audience.

Lots of big blog dogs linking to the finger you've pointed; no one fetching yer stick.

PR based on driving outcomes, on the other hand, looks at tangible business results as the key measurement. Did your last announcement increase download traffic? Did you increase sales leads? Did you sell more product? Did you get people into your stores?

I'm not sure yet how to take this kind of campaign approach into the blogosphere. I'm not even convinced that one can.

It’s partly a problem of what and how do you measure here? PR folk in general pay lip service to measurement, but few understand it and most are, frankly, afraid of it. But if it ain’t measureable, it ain’t worth the money (or, to purloin and pervert an aphorism: if it cannot be measured, it shouldn’t exist).

And I don’t mean clippings-by-the-pound measurement, either. If you're going to launch a PR campaign, you should know what business goal you're trying to achieve. Setting the blogvines humming is not a viable business goal. Sure, you can measure it, but what difference does it make to your bottom line?

The idea of tying PR efforts to tangible business results is a scary concept for your average PR bunny - hence the traditional focus on quantitative metrics such as "share of voice" (*ack*), impressions, etc.

There's even a line of thought still popular in my business that PR activities actually can't be measured, except in fluffy, intangible, feel good terms.

Bollocks.

I’m not saying you can be entirely scientific about PR measurement, but at least if you focus on the right outcomes, you'll have a better chance of knowing what success should look like when you achieve it.

I seem to have wandered a little, but I guess all this is a terribly long-winded way of saying I'm just not sure how PR and the world of weblogs intersect right now, or how they should in the future. My thinking is flawed and incomplete, I know.

So, again: John's right -- us PR folk just don't get it. At least insofar as "getting it" would imply knowing how to use the meme to achieve our nefarious purposes ;-)

For the moment, I'm much more focused on evangelizing blogging as a fundamentally good and right thing to do, to anyone and everyone I can.

So far I've convinced at least six new people to start blogging, and I continue to talk it up to the journalists, producers, and client-side contacts I come across every day.

If Reed's law holds, I guess you could say I'm doing pro bono PR for the entire blogosphere by continuing to promote the practice at every opportunity.

Now there's an intersection of PR and blogging that makes good sense to me.

The wonderful Brian Millar of Myrtle fame has produced an outstanding Hamlet, in the style of the worst soul-destroying, clipart-laden, magic-fucking-quadrant-riddled PowerPoint pitch you've ever seen.

"Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt Brian grooves."

Bloomin' marvellous.

orking - v. the act of taking a photograph with the animal's nose too close to the lens.

"So, peacenik, you lost. We told you so. Sure, it wasn't exactly the pushover we'd war-gamed. The Iraqis didn't rise in rebellion as we promised, the flower-throwing was a little tardy, but that was just because we'd underestimated how terrorised they were...

"...So, warnik, you think you've won? Please consider this. On Monday afternoon your guys thought they had found Saddam in a restaurant. A US plane dropped four very clever 2,000lb bombs on it. The next night, BBC News showed an enormous crater and its correspondent said that no one who might have been there could have got out alive...According to most people, Saddam escaped."

Julian Barnes, in Friday's Guardian.

I couldn’t get back to sleep after Ruairi’s 1am feed a few nights back – so picked up the laptop and started futzing around from bed (ahhhh Wi-Fi…)

Next morning, clicking down through the blogroll, I discovered Doc had just blogged the fact that someone else had also clearly been working on pretty much the same thought at around the same time, and blogged it before me.

I’m choosing to see this as evidence that Nathan Dintenfass and I are either:

a. two of the smartest people on the web, who just happen to share scarily close thought patterns, or;
b. sad losers desperately in need of a life, or;
c. one person, two identities…

I was going to toss this draft post away, but then I thought – what the heck.

So here’s the original blog, presented unedited below…

-%-

Earlier in the week, Doc described the results of an accidental unigoogle.

[Unigoogling, I’ve just decided, is the correct name for entering single character searches into Google.]

Doc was searching for some O’Reilly-related information and inadvertently hit Return after entering only the first letter ‘O’.

Thanks to the application of Clarke’s Theorem (‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ – Arthur C. Clarke), Google’s patent-pending Clairvoyain’t™ search technology managed to return the O’Reilly website at the top of the hit list anyway. Yikes!

This phenomenon clearly demands further investigation -- an Herculean labour the O’Connor Clarke Consortium is only too pleased to undertake for the benefit and edification of all bloggooglekind.

Here, then, is the first canonical list of unigoogles, recorded this April 9th 2003 [Ed. make that second canonical list].

DISCLAIMER: The results of any unigoogling are necessarily time-dependent and subject to variance based on the Google’s interpretation of the prevailing zeitgeist. YMMV.

Each entry below includes the relevant unigoogle, the #1 hit returned, and the associated stock ticker, where available.

A
Apple
Agilent Technologies

B
B’Tselem
Barnes Group

C
CNET.com
Citigroup

D
D-Link Systems (yay!)
Dominion Resources

E
E! Online
ENI Spa

F
F-Secure
Ford Motor Co.

G
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
Gillette

H
H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online
NONE (a missed opportunity for Hormel Foods, methinks)

I
Yahoo! (er…wtf? Is that ‘I’ as in ‘Iehovah’?)
NONE (candidates: IBM? IKEA?)

J
J-Phone
NONE (cue the JCrew IPO?)

K
KDE (not what I would have expected – the blue light special today is actually at #2)
Kellogg

L
L’Express (cheese-eating surrender media, perhaps, but top of their unigoogle category)
Liberty Media

M
3M (also works with the trigoogle: ‘mmm’)
NONE

N
SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer (er…)
INCO

O
O’Reilly & Associates
Realty Income Corporation

P
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
NONE (sorry, they don’t list hip-hop stars on the NYSE yet, Mr. Diddy)

Q
Q Magazine
Qwest Communications

R
The R Project for Statistical Computing
Ryder System

S
GNU’s Not UNIX! – the GNU project homepage (wtf?! Clearly somebody at Google k-nows w-ho’s w-ho)
Sears Roebuck

T
AT&T
AT&T

U
The whatUseek Network (interesting ODP-based search engine)
NONE (a nice space for U-Haul, perhaps?)

V
Bobby Worldwide (the equivalent of a Google-garbled telephone call, methinks: “No, no – not ‘b’: ‘V’!!)
Vivendi Universal

W
The White House (Question: would it still be #1 if he wasn’t called Dubya?)
NONE

X
Netscape (wtf? – I would have expected X.org or at least the X-Files, but I guess not…)
United States Steel

Y
Yahoo! (Again. The only bi-unigooglee so far)
Alleghany Corp

Z
Health AtoZ
NONE


The digits 0,1,2,3 and 4 all unigoogle to the W3C’s Markup Validation Service.

5 and 6 = Macromedia Flash Player download center

7 = Netscape 7.01 download center

8 = RealOne Player downloads
Eminem’s 8-mile.com, btw, is relegated to fourth place, alas (perhaps ‘4 Mile’ is the abridged version). He even gets his clock cleaned by Super 8 Motels, at #3.

9 = Number Nine Visual Technology

The remainder of the punctuation marks and other non-alpanumeric keyboard symbols don’t support unigoogling, I’m afraid.

Even the noble but overused @ and the seemingly obvious / produce a null Google response – not even a ‘No pages were found’ message. I guess the Google indexer ignores all such characters.

Bad news if your brand happens to be based on something such as /.

As I don’t want to run afoul of the francophone Canadian language gendarmes, I should probably complete this almost-canonical list with results for all the various diacritically-modified alpha characters (à á â ã ä å è é ê … &c.).

But it’s late and this entire exercise has already bored my entire lower body to sleep – time for the rest to follow suit.

Special final honorary mention to the #2 spot for the ‘t’ unigoogle – proudly occupied by none other than Blogger (your guess is as good as mine).

A few months back, can't remember how or why, I came across this FAQ at the Bounty website:

7) Are Bounty paper towels made from recycled material?
No. Bounty paper towels are made from virgin wood pulp.

I remember thinking at the time - WTF? What the hell kind of dumbass upside-down value set does this kind of proud claim reveal?

Remember: this is a product purpose-designed to wipe shit up. REALLY important that it's made from only the finest virgin wood pulp then, right?

Unfortunately, I forgot to mention this stupidness to the Sausage, and the other night she came home from the grocery store with a six-pack of the damn stuff, at which point I promptly kicked myself.

But it's stupider than I thought. When you open the outer plastic wrapper on this thing to get one of the rolls of towel out - get this: each of the suckers is individually plastic wrapped.

What the hell for? What possible purpose can this serve?

I'm serious - this is not just a regular garden variety Michael rant: I'm genuinely perplexed. If you have any idea about this, I'd really like to know.

Why in the name of arse do they think they need to go to the pain and expense of individually sealing something you're going to use to wipe peanut butter off the floor?

Not satisifed with just the virgin wood pulp bit; is this some kind of additional gratuitous middle finger P&G is flipping at reasonable environmentalists everywhere?

Flattered to discover, via a convoluted route (the Blogshares inbound link tracker), that the Tucows Innovation & Reseach Group blog (aka The Farm) has blogrolled me.

I guess this must be the work of the splendid blokes I met at that blogflocking in Liberty Village a few weeks ago. Thanks, guys.

Tucows continues to be one of the most important technology organizations on the map. Their evolution has been a joy to behold - from startup as the first and coolest freeware/shareware download site, to their position today as the second largest domain registrar in the world. They're a great example of the way the Net should work (but rarely does, alas) - people with a clue rising clean to the top by doing the right thing.

The About text in their blog footer is delicious too:

"This site is in no way, shape or form associated, affiliated or even linked with Microsoft Corp or their wretched software. This site is meant for educational purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Void where prohibited. Call toll free number before digging. Driver does not carry cash. Some of the trademarks mentioned in this product appear for identification purposes only. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Record additional transactions on back of previous stub. Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T."

This appalling report from chief news exec Eason Jordan in the New York Times (free subscription required) is hard to read, but I'm glad he did it.

Actually, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to respond to something like this - coming, as it does, from the top of a once-revered but now patently untrustworthy news organ. It's an important, courageous piece. Doesn't do anything to restore my faith in CNN, but I'm still glad Jordan decided to do it.

I guess David's "Moral means Ambivalent" nails it.
Read: The News We Kept To Ourselves

"Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff..."

Thanks to Doc for the pointer

Democratic presidential hopefuls.

Senior tech industry execs.

Famous authors.

Top drawer national news reporters.

The guy in the convenience store at 160 Bloor E.

Artists.

TV Weathermen.

Celebrity Transvestites.

Captain Kirk.

NOT Captain Kirk.

Tennis Stars.

More famous authors.

Hollywood Actors.

Even Barenaked Ladies!

(My tiny sixdegrees-of-BNL claim to not-exactly-fame, btw, is that my daughter used to be in the same playschool class as BNL co-frontman Ed Robertson's son. A great playschool, at which we hosted our immensely-successful Bayer photo opp event yesterday).

And if you can't be bothered to do it yourself (shame!), those nice people at Brunching Shuttlecocks even have a service to do it for you...

"...a coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and ineffectual doves united in admiration for Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on administrative leave)."

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering in conversation with the Allies-appointed psychologist Gustave Gilbert, during the Easter recess at the Nuremberg trials, April 18, 1946.

Cited in an email from my brother and fact-checked at Snopes

Great "Wi-Fi for beginners" pull out in the new Wired. I've been getting up to speed fast as possible since going unplugged this last weekend, but this supplement helped fill in a couple of key gaps.

On which note, a quick rave in favour of D-Link. I've been told these guys have had a sucky reputation in Canada for a while, but if my experience with their Wi-Fi kit is anything to go by, they've got it right. Big time.

Setting up the router and AirPlus card last weekend was a breeze.

Even better: I'm now on a loaner notebook for a few days while my trusty Stinkpad is in the hospital. Last night I bunged the driver CD into this machine, ran setup, rebooted with the Wi-Fi card in place and bingo!

Zero to 22mbps in about 4 minutes of setup time.

Wired says that D-Link's challenge is to differentiate in a crowded market. Well such stunning, intuitive ease of use is a pretty good way to differentiate by my book.

This kit just rocks. If you're looking to get your Wi-Fi feet wet on a budget, you could do a lot worse than the D-Link Di614+ router and AirPlus card combo.

Accordion Guy Joey deVilla just had a genuinely terrifying brush with a psycho hose beast BPD sufferer.

Thankfully, his own blogging saved his bacon.

Go read "What happened to me and the new girl" and be uplifted.

If reading articles like that one below have you shaking your head in despair at the cluelessness of U.S. lawmakers - so much so that you're getting to the point that you're embarrassed to carry an American passport - remember there is an alternative option.

The World Passport has been recognized (on a case-by-case basis) by 170 countries worldwide.



"The World Passport represents the inalienable human right of freedom of travel on planet Earth. Therefore it is premised on the fundamental oneness or unity of the human community.

"In modern times, the passport has become a symbol of national sovereignty and control by each nation-state. That control works both for citizens within a nation and all others outside. All nations thus collude in the system of control of travel rather than its freedom. If freedom of travel is one of the essential marks of the liberated human being, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then the very acceptance of a national passport is the mark of the slave, serf or subject."

Internet security dean, professional cryptographer, and Princeton professor Edward Felten has been tracking and cataloguing the ominous, creeping progress of “Super-DMCA” legislation across the U.S. in his blog ‘Freedom To Tinker’ (start at the bottom of the page), and at a summary page, here.

Cloned individual bills, each supported by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), have already been quietly enacted in several U.S. states (including Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan, and Virginia) with more pending in other states.

This is genuinely worrying stuff. To illustrate, Felten quotes from the law already enacted in Colorado:

A person commits a violation … if he or she possesses, uses, manufactures, develops, assembles, distributes, transfers, imports into this state, licenses, leases, sells, offers to sell, promotes or advertises for sale, use or distribution any communication device … to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication service provider … the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication that utilizes a communication device...

In other words – it’s a good job I’m not in Colorado. Sitting here, blogging on a Windows machine, sending encrypted WiFi traffic through our little home firewall out via the DSL modem – I’m evidently in flagrant breach of this law.

I’m routinely concealing the “origin and destination” of the traffic through my “communications devices”, simply by using the default setup options provided by the companies who manufactured this combination of hardware and software I’m using.

Clearly these suppliers are dangerous, subversive nests of hackerdom. Notoriously shady companies such as IBM, Microsoft, D-Link, and Nortel.

This lawmaking is cluelessness raised to the level of art. Professor Felten points to this gob-smackingly boneheaded one-pager (PDF) being circulated by MPAA lobbyists. It starts:

While the Internet and Broadband services have great potential, they can also cause enormous losses to consumers, telecommunications services, and the companies that produce and distribute content for those businesses.

You can tell without clicking that link, it doesn’t get much better after an opening sentence like that.

But rather than endure another of my rants – go read Felten for a properly informed and researched analysis of this disturbing threat.

I'd just like to put this on the record one more time:

I have the best wife any man could possibly wish for.

Today's specific reason?

It's my birthday - I've just scarfed down a huge artery-bursting cooked breakfast of rashers, fried eggs, bangers, tomatoes, mushrooms, brown bread and splendid coffee, capped with a home-baked strawberry muffin. Sausage has been up since sparrowfart cooking up this mountain of scrummy. In these going-on-40 days of moderation and eating right, we rarely push the boat out for this kind of epic Irish breakfast feast. But damn it feels good once in a while :-) *burp* *sigh*

Yet that's not the main reason.

I'm blogging this via my birthday present - a D-Link 2.4GHz Wireless router and AirPlus card in the laptop.

Totally un-wired, baby.

Have I mentioned how much I love this woman? Thank you, Sausage.

Sheesh - I'm now fully Wi-Fied and the blog even has an RSS feed. It's almost as if I know what I'm doing.

Gary's right; it feels damn good to get that geek mojo on.

And as if all this wasn't enough, tonight we have another especially rare treat planned. We've booked the baby-sitter, and we're off out to Dora Keogh's on the Danforth for a few pints with some good friends. Saturday night at the pub with our mates. Like grown-ups. You've no idea how much we both need this...

I'm starting to get into some of the SARS and Air Canada related work on behalf of a few clients. Busy busy busy. Might make for a slow down in bloggery in the days ahead...

And no, I am not making this up. Original source.

"No matter where his mission takes him, he'll never be beyond the reach of God's protection. As the brave members of the U.S. military head out to defend our freedom, it's comforting to know that each one is sheltered in the loving hands of God. Keep this radiant tribute near as a brilliant reminder of all those who proudly serve our country."

I think I'm going to spue.

Two reactions from reading this USA Today piece:

Strain of Iraq war showing on Bush, those who know him say

I'm sick to my stomach at the contrasts this non-story throws up, and simultaneously shaking my head at the sheer head-up-their-own-arse crassness of the thing.

I mean - if you work in the West Wing, even if it's not like the TV show, we've got to at least believe you're at or near the top of your career, right?

People like Rove, Fleischer, Wolfowitz – these people are supposed to be really, really good at their jobs to have gotten this far.

So what the hell kind of mass attention lapse were they suffering when they came up with this POS?

For goodness sake, will you just look at this sorry load of bilge:

'Interviews with a dozen friends, advisers and top aides describe a man who feels he is being tested.'

"Tested"?

Tested?!

You’re the president of the United frigging States, fercrissakes, the most powerful man on the planet - you’re in the middle of an illegal campaign to bomb the living goddam fuck out of a nation of 25 million people, and you’re feeling a little tested.

My heart bleeds.

There’s more:

'Friends say the conflict is consuming Bush's days and weighing heavily on him. ''He's got that steely-eyed look, but he is burdened,'' says a friend who has spent time with the president since the war began. ''You can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. I worry about him.”'

Oh, bless him, poor love.

For or against the war, I think it’s still appropriate to worry about the U.S., British and other “coalition” servicemen and women, as well as members of the press all putting themselves in harm’s way over there.

And we should certainly be worried about the people of Iraq who have been hit (oh, I’m sorry: “liberated”) by more than 1,000 cruise missiles in the past 14 days (for the record, that’s more than US$600 million of ordnance).

But I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to worry about the fact that the Shrub is looking a little burdened.

There’s much, much more to this noxious sub-journalistic puff piece, including the choice observation that: 'Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time…' and more in similarly disturbing, Olasky-inspired vein.

But I’d best not go on – I can already hear my blood pounding in my ears. (I’m not a doctor, but I’m thinking that’s probably not a good thing).

Yet even though this adulatory, sycophantic swill fails to meet even the lowest entry requirement to be described as journalism, it does at least follow one golden rule of good story structure: it puts the most telling information right up front:

'People who know Bush well say the strain of war is palpable. He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles them with sarcastic putdowns. He's being hard on himself; he gave up sweets just before the war began.'

Go back and read that last ’graph again. Go on.

You read right: He gave up sweets.

I’ll let Robert Fisk (reporter with the UK Independent, based in Baghdad) finish the thought:

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.

He gave up sweets.

Ms. Lavigne:



Ms. Lavigne's fish: