Just back from the latest intense session with the Jazz pilots' union guys.

Phew

Got all our stuff into the court just (just) under the deadline - despite some last minute technology nightmares.

Now there's nothing to do but wait.

By about 9:30 tomorrow morning I should have something to point to tell me once and for all whether or not I'm any good at my job ;-)

[UPDATE: 08:30 Sunday morning] The other guy blinked.

Lots going on in r/t life - hence temporary blogdrought. I'm having all sorts of fun in the middle of this and also this (which I can't say anything about or even link to until, hopefully, later today).

Normal service will be resumed as soon as postable.

Meanwhile...

[update: so now the announcement is out, I can add this link to the above...]

Here’s the new plug in I want for my email system.

I’m reasonably disciplined when it comes to email (i.e. I delete most of it right after reading or responding), but in every day’s traffic there will be a small amount of stuff I want or need to keep. I have multiple nested folders set up in Outlook for this purpose.

But I don’t want to kill our email servers by storing all the monster attachments I receive, plus it’s harder to find an attachment through Outlook than as a discrete object sitting on a server. So I strip the relevant attachments and squirrel them away in the appropriate client folder up on the network.

What I need, then, is a plug in that will do this (with as few clicks as possible, please – drag & drop would be ideal):

- Save the current message to a designated Outlook folder (with option to create a new folder if required)
- Strip all attachments and save them to a server directory with the same name as the Outlook folder

Then:

- Index both ends, so they’re fully searchable (from one UI) through metadata and/or full text.

(I think Fulcrum SearchServer used to do this last bit, but the front end would still need automating).

Is there anything like this out there? If not – would somebody build me one?

Dave Winer pointed to the PDF source of an announcement from Harvard’s Institute Of Politics earlier today – an interesting survey that suggests college kids will be an important swing demographic in the 2004 U.S. presidential race.

On the Blogrollers mailing list, Dave asked: “I'm still looking for an HTML version of the press release so I can write it up on the Harvard weblog. If you have a pointer, please send it along.”

So there’s me thinking: "hey! I’m a PR bloke and this is a news release – I already have all the right sources bookmarked. Should be no problem to find Dave what he’s looking for..."

Oh dear.

First place to check, natch: PR Newswire. The release is up there alright, but you just know the page is going to rot within a month – and they obscure the darn URL of the page so that it’s not even linkable anyway.

So there's not one but two examples of mind-numbingly clueless PR here, I'm afraid - one of them from a supposed bastion of the industry.

First - why the hell does PR Newswire make it so difficult to point to the news they carry?

This one makes my brain hurt. It’s akin to the big media 'archive problem' chewed over by Doc (and here), David Weinberger, and others of late, but we now find ourselves at an even deeper plane of stupidity.

If there’s any way of linking to the news PR Newswire carries, I can’t see it. And their archives (for all but their “Company News on Call” subscribers) roll off the site in 30 days. As Microsoft pays the extra for this service, you can search for Microsoft stories from way back. But try finding anything for AOL older than 30 days and you’re SOL. Same deal for thousands of other companies who pay to have their news distributed through PR Newswire.

(It's a little better if you're north of the 49th, btw. Their Canadian affiliate, Canada NewsWire, keeps a two year archive of everything online, searchable, and linkable).

Of course, you can still find the news in other ways, but from the perspective of a PR pro or journalist, it’s sometimes really useful to see the release exactly as it was originally issued. The version on the company’s own website may be different in subtle but important ways.

The other clue-hole here returns me to the subject of an earlier rant. Why does anyone ever think that posting their news release as a PDF is even a remotely good idea? It seems to be an increasingly popular approach, but not one I can make any kind of sense out of.

I’ve said this before: anything that makes your news harder to access and harder to read should be considered a dumb move, right? For the record: I love Acrobat - it's a terrific invention, and I use it every day. But that doesn't mean it should be used for everything.

The whole point of a news release, presumably, is that you want people to find and read it. Locking your news up inside a PDF makes the information less useable, less accessible, and less easy to find.

Hiding links in such a way that you actually prevent people from driving any traffic to your site by linking is even more wrong-headed.

If I pay to get my news out on the wires, I want people to be able to find it and point to it - forever, please. If there's any good reason for forcing interested media and other audiences (including influencers such as Dave) to jump through hoops just to read your news, I'm missing it.

Don't know how long this has been up, but thrilled to note that the outstanding Google News service now comes in a .ca version.

Google News just plain rocks. We get a couple of newspapers at home every day, and I get 3 more in the office. At the weekends we have at least two, sometimes three of the major dailies at home.

And yet I still can't wait to get my first hit of the Google News aggregator every morning. Having a version custom-tailored to Canada is even better. This is my new default home page.

Ben Edelman, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School, has published the first phase of some fascinating and revealing research into the methods used by Gator, one of the main advertising servers on the Net.

If you've ever worked on a machine where someone has inadvertently installed the Gator client, you'll probably have seen examples of these intrusive and annoying pop ups, and may have wondered why certain ads show up at particular websites. How come all those ads for other banks and credit cards pop up when you visit the TD Canada Trust bank site, for example?

Ben's research includes information about more than 7,000 sites currently covered by Gator - including images of many of the ads currently in the system.

There are unpleasant inferences to be drawn from some of the "targeting" going on here - the ads primed to pop up at certain sites seem to be chosen to match fairly obvious demographic groups. Some of the choices seem a little curious. Readers of The Onion, for example, are perceived to be big users of online dating and "personals" services. H&R Block visitors are assumed to be interested in online stock trading...

Reading Ben's research, I found myself almost wanting to agree with one small thing Andrew Orlowski said:

"You only have to step outside tech-savvy circles to see what a massive disappointment the modern tech experience is for most people: many of whom are your friends and relatives...Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements. (Yes, we know the tools to turn off pop-ups, but the vast majority of IE users don't have that luxury, and their patience has already been tested to the limit.)

It's a terrific and genuinely important piece of research - congratulations to Ben for this. Well worth a read.

"The dullest blog in the world..." really isn't all that dull at all. Especially when you read some of the comments.

Here's why.

Still sniffing around for interesting material for this Jupiter business blogs conference thing, and this turns up - Mark Glaser writing for the Online Journalism Review:

Journalists Debate Closure of Another Blog

Excerpts:

A journalist working for a major media company decides to start a personal Weblog in his spare time. His blog becomes popular (or not). His association with the media company is stated, but discreetly. He has the usual disclaimer: This Weblog is the opinion of Joe Journo, and not the company he works for. But what does the company think? If it's CNN, Time magazine or the Hartford Courant, it doesn't think -- it acts, killing the Weblog for reasons stated (and unstated)...

"A CNN.com spokesperson told OJR previously, "CNN.com prefers to take a more structured approach to presenting the news. We do not blog."

The piece closes with some advice for would-be journalist bloggers (aside: as a blog is a form of online journal, surely all bloggers are, by definition, 'journalists' - even if not many journalists are bloggers...?). Glaser suggests:

Some recipes for success in journo Weblogging: 1) You're not a "name" reporter, or you write your Weblog under a pseudonym that isn't discovered; 2) You write your Weblog for the official media site, with full oversight from the publication; 3) You make your name as a blogger first, then get hired by the media company with the power to write what you want.

I'm sure there's a fourth option in there too.

How about: you write your weblog far enough away from the official media site (but link back to them, just as you would to any other site - when it's appropriate to the context of what you're writing), and the publication is smart enough to remain hands off; knowing they don't own your brain and/or anything you happen to write outside of their four walls...

WDYT?

The pointer to this piece, btw, came from David Akin - probably Canada's only mainstream journalist blogger, who mentions that he's going to be addressing precisely this topic on a panel at the upcoming Canadian Association of Journalists conference next weekend.

Halley sets out to clean up her grungy computer keyboard, and comments: "Boy Do I Have a Strong Vacuum Cleaner"

Hmmm...

She says: "...I vacuumed up the C and J keys..."

Er...OK. Am I the only one to have noticed something funny here?

Halley - if you ust vauumed up your [] and [] keys, how exatly are you managing to ommuniate that? Or is this ust another ase of me being piky?

I've been noodling much of late on the intersection of this blogging stuff and my r/t business life, and then up pops Andrew Barnett, in a comment to this post below, asking: "...seriously, does that say anything about your passion for what you do for a living, or has this blog come to fill another, separate need? i'm curious because it has some relevance to my own situation."

Oh man, that's a tough one.

The easy part of the answer is: yes, this blog does fill another, mostly separate need.

Thinking about it, this need is one of the many things David Weinberger has helped me to realise over the years. When I first got to know and (briefly) work with David, six or so years ago, he was always encouraging me to write more. I'd post something to a mailing list or discussion forum, or fire off one of my characteristically loquacious emails, and David would keep telling me how I should be doing more of this stuff.

Then Cluetrain happened - instantly kicking the volume (both loudness and quantity) of online discussion up several notches. I found all the conversations about "learning to speak with your own voice" really resonated for me.

At the time, I was part of a team of smart, committed, but constantly frustrated individuals fighting desperately to fix marketing (and many other aspects) of a company "...so lobotomized that they [couldn't] speak in a recognizably human voice", to borrow RageBoy's seminal phrase.

I started to write more often, slowly at first, not quite sure where it was going. Then I discovered Blogger, set this place up, and suddenly found myself experiencing this head-spinning, exhilarating catharsis.

I was writing! And publishing! And people were reading it! (OK, admittedly very, very few people – but that’s never been the point. It’s the give that counts, not the get).

David was right - I needed to write.

This blog is my pressure valve, my doodle pad and my gymnasium. I come here to blow off steam, to try stuff out, and to keep my writing muscles in trim.

This might sound daft, but when I don't write for a while, I find I grow stupider.

Seriously.

I can hear myself becoming less articulate, less engaged, and far less engaging in everyday discussions. The circuits in my brain that manage coherence rapidly atrophy without regular exercise.

So this is why I blog. And this is also why it’s not primarily, or even secondarily a vehicle for business stuff (‘stuff’! – listen to him. Now that’s articulate ;-).

Inevitably, I wind up blogging about some of what I do from time to time – but that’s mostly incidental.

It works like this:

- I write about what interests me.
- My job, of course, interests me (to a greater or lesser extent from one day to the next, depending on the usual ebb and flow of workload and career motivation).
- So every now and then I write about my job.

Or about general tech trends and news. Or business issues and developments. Or international politics. Or nob gags.

So - returning to Andrew's question (and assuming I'm reading it right) does the fact that I don't spend all my time blogging about what I do for a living reflect on my passion for my job? I don't think so.

Like Esther, like all of us, I guess - much of what I do in my daytime life would not be appropriate to blog about, for all sorts of reasons.

Indeed, most of the really interesting things I’m involved with at work fall into this category. There’s a line in my official corporate bio, for example, that describes my experience as a bullet-catcher for clients: “Paradoxically, for a PR professional, Michael’s best work is often measured by an absence of media coverage”.

"I've seen things you people would'nt believe..." ;-)

So I write about the other stuff. Lots of other stuff. Doesn’t really matter what it is, to be honest. Nor does it matter much if anyone reads it.

Blogging just feels write ;-)

So.

I’ve been chatting to, and occasionally blogging about, my mate in the convenience store here in our Toronto office building – to the best of my knowledge the first “store guy” to start his own blog.

He’s mentioned a couple of times in the past the “crazy software guys” who used to run their company from one of the ground floor offices here. Today’s the first time I remembered to ask him the name of the crazy software guys’ company.

Omigosh.

The crazy software guys in question were an earlier incarnation of OpenCola - including this particular crazy accordion-wielding software dude who I got to meet for the first time a couple of months ago when Doc was in town, and this guy, whose book I'm right in the middle of reading.

This is like sixdegrees of bloodyflippingcrikey or something.

Here's just one way of working the linkiness:

- I used to work for an absolutely outstanding bloke named Craig Wallace (who now works here), one of whose closest friends is:
- Ken Nickerson who was an early investor in and, for a while CEO of:
- OpenCola, aka “the crazy software guys”, who last year briefly employed the wonderful and talented:
- Cheryl Alden (who now works here, a former client of my current employer), and who was:
- part of the team back when I was El Vente Poobah of marketing at PC DOCS.

Plus:
- OpenCola is now run by Joel Silver
- who was a client of mine at my last agency, when he was running Salesdriver.com.

Moments like this make me wonder why I sign up for things like LinkedIn...

Be 404 no more!

Genuinely useful widget here: Jonathan Rentzsh has built a new bookmarklet that can instantly pull Google's cache of the page your browser is currently looking at. Fuse took the idea and built an even better version.

Next time you hit a 404, you need not slink away disappointed. Add this neat little Googlehack to your 'Favourites' and you're just a click or two away from pulling the most recent snapshot of the page back from Google's cache. Neat!

Just tested it on this page of a venerable Toronto PR agency that seems to have mysteriously vanished from the face of the Earth in the last two weeks. Using the GoogleCacheHack brings up this.

Credit to Jon Udell for the original pointer and some interesting thoughts about the Net's role in our global race memory.

Doing research for my panel thingy at the Weblog Business Strategies gig, I've been finding all sorts of great blogs and bloggers discussing PR, marketing, corporate communications and the emerging role of blogs in this curious dependent world I inhabit. Plan to blogroll most of these sites once I get around to it.

Meanwhile, thinking back through 2+ years of this thing, and reading things like Tom Murphy's excellent PR blog, I'm struck by just how little of the stuff I write here has any obvious relevance to what I do for a living. In 200+ pages of bloggery, I've only mumbled a bit about public relations a half dozen or so times, afaik.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, of course - there's a lot more stuff that interests me outside of the day job. And yet with this conference gig coming up, especially since it's supposed to be covering Business Weblogs, I figure I should maybe add a little more business to the blog.

But don't worry - I'll continue to post the same lameass crap as ever. I'll continue to link to goofy japaness animations and write insane, frothing-at-the-keyboard rants about trivia such as the ingredients of chicken soup.

Just from now on, I'm going to do so wearing a suit.

What's dumber than an i-Loo?

How about: ripping off someone else's idea for an i-Loo?

Not the first time Microsoft has been accused of plagiarizing someone else's crap.

Since Andrew Orlowski's latest anti-blog piece appeared in the Register, there's been plenty of furious invective, a number of voices raised in support, and the ocassional balanced and restrained response.

The great thing about the Net, of course, is the speed at which opposite ends of any debate can find each other.

Orlowski, smirking with glee over a misinterpreted signal from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is quickly corrected by none other than Evan Williams himself.

Ev's response is reassuring news, but I'm even more tickled about the process here. The power of blogs, indeed. Splendid.

So how come Eric Schmidt doesn't have a blog yet?

Or Larry Page or Sergey Brin for that matter...?

C'mon, Ev, give 'em a prod, willya?

Couple of weeks ago I was whining about a nasty side effect of upgrading from Blogger to Blogger Pro.

Somehow, the switch over had blown away one of the really long posts in my archives - one I was kind of attached to, for various reasons (apart from anything else, it was David Weinberger's feedback to an earlier draft of this particular rant that first inspired me to start blogging).

As I didn't think I had an offline draft of this piece I was pretty crushed to find it gone. Not that it's such a fantastic piece of writing or anything, but it weighed heavy with emotional baggage.

I posted a forlorn error report to Blogger Control and then, not really expecting much of a response, I did something incredibly dumb - I went back to the placeholder "BigBody" tag slotted in by Blogger where my essay once was, and posted a snippy little message about how much this sucked.

Stupid. Stupid. Head-smackingly stupid.

As the chap assigned by Blogger support politely pointed out:

"In doing so, the original file was overwritten and replaced with the new post. We are sorry, but we cannot offer any assistance in recovering your original post.

Ahhhh crap.

Course - instead of just accepting my dumbass fate or birching my cretinous hide, I responded with a really quite unpleasantly snarky message about this.

Let the record show, therefore, that Steve of Google/Pyra/Blogger support is a vertiable Demi-God of Customer Service.

Unfazed by my bitter wingeing, he diligently dove back into deep backup, sorting through goodness knows how many grandfathered tapes of blog cruft, to emerge, 10 days later, with the original post restored in all its glory.

Steve: you rock. Official.

Ev, Eric - look after this guy. Far as I'm concerned, he deserves a medal, a pay rise, mondo quantities of stock options, free beer and ice cream for a month, a kiss, a new iPod, my undying gratitude, his own special flavour of Pot Noodle, a shiny red indian rubber ball, and the secret password to the executive massage suite.

Thanks, mate.

BIG POST ERROR, POST ID 200268895
REPORT IT

"We are not afraid of the Americans. Allah has condemned them. They are stupid. They are stupid" (dramatic pause) "and they are 404."

I'm back to gnashing of teeth over the name of this blog. More than two years old now, and I still have ocassional moments of doubt over what I chose to call the damn thing.

You see: almost every time someone new cites a link to this place, they either misspell my name (which I've become inured to by now), or they knock off the end of the blog title, describing it as plain "I Love Me".

Ahem.

It's true, of course - I do love me. If you don't love you, how can you possibly love another? But that's not the point.

And yes, this is a blog, an online journal, a whatever you want to call it - a form of vanity publishing vehicle for even the most humble of us. So the choice of name is intentionally sardonic. But that's not the point.

No. As my "Who He?" page points out, it's a PALINDROME, fercrissakes. That's the Roman numeral "I", not the digit "1". And if you lop the "vol. I" off the end, it's no longer funny.

Once upon a time this seemed like an oh-so-smart idea. Even the URL of the blog is a wanky little word game too: Llareggolb. It's a Dylan Thomas gag. (Look - if you spent close to 3 years suffering undergraduate philosophy and Eng. Lit. at the hands of scary-haired trolls like Dewi Zephaniah Flipping Phillips in Sodding Swansea, you too would be making crap Dylan Thomas gags, so naff off).

My original theory was that once visitors figured out that it's a palindrome, they would immediately realise that the title of this blog is, of course, ironic, witty, and charmingly self-deprecating in an entirely dry, urbane, and just terribly Michaelish kind of way.

But as the traffic and inbound links continue to grow, I'm just getting miserably tired of explaining this. And as my friend Liz tells her kids - if there's only one person laughing at it; it's really not that funny.

So what do I do?

Finally switch everything over to michaelocc.com and rebrand the site?

Chuck a coupla hunnerd million at a brand consulting firm, and pull a PwC?

Or deal with it?

I know for a fact what Gezzie would say: "quit whining and post some more nob gags".

Righto then (at the foot of the page).

Good to see it's not always the flacks that are clueless...

A local newspaper in St. Marys, Ontario just told the local Canadian Alliance candidate in the upcoming by-election, in effect: you didn't buy any ads, so we're not going to write about you. Nyah nyah nee nah naaaaaah.

I don't make this stuff up you know. No less august organ than the Globe & Mail carries the story and quotes the newspaper's editor:

". . . We will surely repay your patronage in this week's Friday edition, when we plan to devote as much space (including the editorial) as possible to encourage voters not to vote for your party."

Is that how it works, then?

I’m getting really quite excited about going to this Jupiter Weblogs conference in a few weeks, for a whole bunch of reasons.

1. The speaker list just keeps getting better.

In addition to the top geezers already mentioned, below, they’re also listing: Anil Dash of Six Apart; Userland’s John Robb; Dave Shnaider (former President of ZDNet and founder of Prodigy); both Elizabeth Spiers (Editor of Gawker), who recently delivered a splendid bumslap to a perky PR type who foolishly decided to pitch her blog and the guy at the other end of Gawker’s deliciously understated snarkiness -- Tony "Red Herring" Perkins, now of AlwaysOn; and finally (last but very, very far from least) Halley Suitt - one of the sharpest, freshest writers on the web right now.

Bloody marvellous.

2. It’s in Boston, a city I love, and close enough to our Cambridge office that I may get a chance to pop in and meet some of the most brilliant people (#19) in our network – people I’ve exchanged email with or spoken to by phone, but never met face-to-face.

3. I haven't done one of these things in ages. Back when I was software marketing bloke (before I came over to the dark side as a flack) I got to do a lot of conferences and seminars. Internet World, KMExpo, Seybold, Upside’s Showcase, AIIM, Xplor, AEA - all sorts of fun gigs, getting to meet really smart people. I didn't realise how much I enjoyed this part of the job until it wasn't there any more.

4. As I’m doing research for my panel session, I’m turning up all sorts of terrific examples of both the best and worst possible practices on the battle lines between blogs and PR folk. And I don’t mean “worst practices” in Chris’s sense. Collecting some fantastic stories, and finding some really helpful and thoughtful posts from other people looking at this issue from their different POVs.

In particular, this series of pieces from Jon Udell is well worth reading.

And Stowe Boyd, responding to one of my earlier posts on the subject, makes some really good points, as always. In fact, Stowe’s idea for a new kind of blog-enabled online corporate newsroom has terrific potential. Something worth noodling in deeper deepness…

The only thing I’m not looking forward to is being away from home for the first time since Ruairi was born, and leaving Sausage to cope with all three kids for around 72 hours by herself. Bloody hard work for her. But maybe by then my folks will have arrived from the UK to help out (and perhaps Sausage could even come with me to Beantown – yee ha!)

…

And man does he ever have a lot to say...

Carve yourself out a good 30 minutes of time and go read this. First post from our long-lost Baghdad Blog Buddy since March 24th. Weeks of stored up posts, finally uploaded via a proxy named Diana Moon.

Welcome back, Salam - good to know you're still kicking.

Outstanding stuff.

"If you post something funny that you saw in a forwarded email or whatever, for the love of GOD be sure to put "Author unknown" or "from an email", or the self-declared Internet Police will go Matlock on your ass, and wet themselves with "I got you!" glee while doing so."

Sage advice for the tyro blogger.

I've just been added to the list of panelists for the upcoming ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference in Boston, June 9th & 10th.

I'm speaking on this bit:

Are Weblogs A Threat Or Opportunity For Enterprises?
Weblogs offer new communication opportunities for marketers - and in some cases, they may prove to be more valuable than traditional marketing channels. Are blogs part of the new marketing mix? Where do blogs fit in? Can blogs be used in the same way other e-marketing strategies and tactics are used - to increase interactivity, to understand how customers are using the content and information being distributed? Are enterprises ready?

Should be a good opportunity for me to finally sort out my thinking on this PR vs. Blogs stuff I've been noodling.

The other panelists look interesting. There's a wireless sorceress from the Borg, a fellow flack, and this Rick Bruner bloke, who sounds like someone I may spend a lot of time agreeing with.

There's also, almost inevitably, Dave, David, Doc and (more evitably, but still very interestingly) Denise

I paid to upgrade my Blog*Spot hosting account to Ad-free some considerable time ago. So how come my archive pages still have ads? What's the deal with that?

On this page it very clearly says: NO ADS, and yet there the buggers are.

Is this a bug, or am I getting hosed?