[words and music by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz; as recorded by Kitty Kallen, 1954]

Blow me a kiss across the room
Say I look nice when I'm not
Touch my hair as you pass my chair
Little things mean a lot

Give me your arm as we cross the street
Call me at six on the dot
A line a day when you're far away
Little things mean a lot

Don't have to buy me diamonds or pearls
Champagne, sables or such
I never cared much for diamonds and pearls
'Cause honestly, honey, they just cost money

Give me your hand when I've lost my way
Give me your shoulder to cry on
Whether the day is bright or gray
Give me your heart to rely on

Send me the warmth of a secret smile
To show me you haven't forgot
For always and ever, now and forever
Little things mean a lot

Give me your hand when I've lost my way
Give me your shoulder to cry on
Whether the day is bright or gray
Give me your heart to rely on

Send me the warmth of a secret smile
To show me you haven't forgot
For always and ever, now and forever
Little things mean a lot.

If it wasn't for the fact that I've met him and know better, I'd have to assume Doc Searls is an Irishman. There's something very Irish in his response to yesterday's sad, sad news.

Doc's Mom just died, at 90. The posts and photos at Doc's site are overflowing with echoes of the tangible love his Mom obviously spent a long lifetime spreading.

The Irish part is simply this: rather than grieving her passing, Doc is choosing to celebrate her life.

It strikes me as the only possible, sane response.

I'm sorry, Doc. All our love and respects to you and your whole family. And thanks for letting so many others share in this intensely personal, wonderfully open celebration of a remarkable woman's life.

Michael

And Wow - Quebec City is just beautiful.

Great people, wonderful food, lovely city, and the high point of the weekend = a fantastic wedding in the Notre Dame Basilica (congratulations, Michael & Annie!) and afterwards at the Chateau Bonne Entente. Nice to live like that for a weekend - neatly escaping the blackout too. Tee hee.

Lots to blog, no time now - but I am here...in case anyone was wondering.

This is almost too good to be genuine.

Remember Mahir - the "I Kiss You" guy?

Well, it seems he has a long-lost online brother in ILL Mitch

Yipe.

We're off to Quebec City for a few days.

Haven't had much time to blog in the last week, and zero blogging likely to happen in the next 6 days or so. I'm sure you'll get by somehow.

Meanwhile, here's a few other places you could visit. Well, at least you could if some of the domain owners could be bothered to put them to better use:

start (or don't...)
end (much more like it)
up (Oh. Of course.)
down (wtf?)
north (bugger all here)
south (not much here either)
east (a little more interesting)
west (zzzzzzz...)
above (wide open nothing)
below (still nothing)
inside (zip)
outside (nada)
to (yarroo! A site! A site! An actual site!)
from (poop. Just when things were looking up)
left (better, much better)
right (wonder if they always are? Think of the fun you could have with taglines!)
over (not even remotely what you'd expect)
out (exactly what you'd expect)

So many great domain names, so little of value being done with them...

See you next week.

The Globe & Mail's weekly Challenge, in the Saturday Books section, has been going through something of a fallow patch. It's always worth a read, but hasn't really tickled me in the last month or two.

Yesterday's selection, though, had me blowing hot coffee out my nose - snorting in early Saturday morning guffaws.

Here's a few quality moments; compiled, as always, by the splendid Warren Clements.

Name that tune
Saturday, August 9, 2003 - Page D14

The challenge was to match a popular book with a popular song or other musical work. Where there were duplicates, I flipped a coin. To differentiate the categories, the songs titles are written without the customary italics.

The winner:
The Thirty-Nine Steps: I Could Have Danced All Night.

(Frank H. Gough, Qualicum Beach, B.C.)

Other literary ditties:

Middlesex: Dude Look Like A Lady.

(Phyllis Reinhard, East Fallowfield, Pa.)

The Origin of Species: Hey, Hey, We're the Monkees.

(Karl Dilcher, Halifax)

The Iliad: The Last Time I Saw Paris.

The Odyssey: Show Me the Way to Go Home.

The Horse's Mouth: Hey There.

(Paul Davy, Parry Sound, Ont.)

Frankenstein: Put Your Head on My Shoulder.

(Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)

...and many more fine examples in similar vein. Check out the full list at the Globe's site.

"Hey, Hey, We're the Monkees" :-) that kills me.

I continue to be a fan of most things Google (as I guess yesterday's post would probably indicate ;-), but the latest applet they've sneaked into beta seems a little half-baked.

Earlier this week they introduced Google News Alerts, a service that draws on the excellent Google News system (my default IE home page of choice). The point of the system is to send out "email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify."

Nice thought, but a flawed implementation, I’m afraid.

As a PR bloke and a voracious consumer of news of many flavours and sources, I think I'm as close as you're likely to get to the perfect target demographic for an application like this. So I think I’m reasonably well qualified to assess the usefulness of this new tool.

I’m already subscribed to a number of different news alert services, similar to this one. Most of them leave...er...let’s say: “room for improvement”. But Google’s effort is particularly disappointing, falling way below expectations for such a smart R&D company.

First of all, the process to set up alerts is opaque, to say the least. On the one hand, it couldn’t be simpler: give it a keyword, a delivery frequency, and an email address – click “Create News Alert”, and Bingo!

Humpf.

Each time you enter one of these things, you’re going to get an email message to confirm that you really meant to set it up. If you’re like me, you probably have at least twenty or so clients, competitors, and general news topics you’re tracking at any one time. You have to go through the exact same process of setting up each alert one at a time. And how do you modify or tune an alert after you've set it up? The serial, manual nature of this process is just dim.

It also relies on the user to be able to specify decent search strings for the stuff they’re interested in. Problem is, other than the obvious client names and industry sectors you know you want to watch, most people don’t know what they’re interested in until it pops up.

They can tell you the general areas of interest, perhaps – but not the specifics. And there can be no guarantee that the specific news you need to know will be “labeled” in such a way that the keyword/s you enter will cause the relevant information to be found. Unfortunately, the information that really matters to you probably doesn't come with a big red meta tag that is an exact match with one of your declared interests.

To quote from some long ago work with David Weinberger:

To know if something matters to you, we have to know not only what it is about, but also what interests you. How can you tell what interests someone? Here are two obvious ways. Neither is much good.

1. You could show them everything and ask them if they’re interested in it.

This technique is known as The Incredibly Stupid and Annoying Technique. It is the problem, not a solution.

2. You could ask the person to tell you what interests him or her.

You will end up with a list of 5-10 items of such broad generality that they are of little use. Try it on yourself. Here’s the sort of list you’ll get:

Things I'm Interested In:
My Kids.
Baseball.
Meryl Streep movies.
My stock prices.
Politics.
Airplane construction techniques

(The exact order will depend on who has requested the list.)

This list misses the fact that you are quite interested in:

- The manufacturer who has patented a new gluing technique that may turn out to replace rivets.
- The future competitor founded in a garage last week.
- The new president of Outer Slobonia who wants to nationalize one of your key suppliers.
- The new research showing that the staples your product uses have unusual magnetic properties
- The traffic jam that has developed on your route home.

So asking someone what news they’re interested in like this is not a good way to serve up the information they’re really going to want.

There is a better way, though. I wonder why they’re not tapping into the existing categories of news they’ve already established for the main Google News site?

This would certainly make it easier for them to filter based on some higher level clues. Being interested in AOL Time Warner from an entertainment industry perspective, for example, is not the same as being interested in them from a shareholder’s perspective.

As Google is already clustering news into a list of top level categories – why no drop down list on the News Alerts page?

I could go on. Oh, I guess I already did. But there’s an even bigger bone to pick.

I like the idea of what Google is doing, but why the heck don’t they just set up an RSS feed for all the categories on the main Google News page? Why reinvent the wheel?

Using RSS would be simpler, more open, offer deeper coverage, and be easier to maintain.

I already get most of the news I need through RSS feeds directly into my NewzCrawler. Lovely, intuitive interface. Fast, easy, efficient. Give me Google News in RSS and I’ll be a very happy flack.

Alternatively, if they insist on using email, someone at Google Labs should take a close look at what the SonicBoomerang guys are doing. The daily feed I get from my SonicBoomerang “assistant” is the first emails I open every morning, and often the most useful. Heck, maybe Google should just buy SonicBoomerang – if Justin’s ready and willing to sell, of course...

On another workload upspike over here - plenty going on with both current clients and new business. Nice. Haven't felt this positive about the market in a long time...

Building up a ton of stuff I want to write about, but not enough hours in the day at the moment.

For now, let me point you off somewhere else, to Earl Mardle's blog (link courtesy David Weinberger, via Jon Husband).

In amongst plenty of other good stuff, Earl casually tosses out what may be one of the most succinct and useful explanations of the power of Google I've encountered so far.

This is personally important to me primarily because, as the resident quasi-geek in a firm of pure-bred PR folk, I've been asked a number of times just why and how Google is as good as we all know it is. It has quickly become, of course, an absolutely indispensable tool for anyone involved in PR - or anyone involved in...um...any kind of enterprise in which information is an essential tool (which would mean pretty much anything, right?)

Earl says: "...Google understands the internet economy of links and opinions...It doesn’t matter what the content of a document is, beyond some basic keywords, Google doesn’t even read the meta tags. What it does is read its relationship with other documents on the same subject and, using the economy of the net, figure out how respected that information or informant is..."

[Yeah, "thanks for the epiphany" - I know. So maybe it's not exactly mind-blowing - but I just really liked the way he put it. There's a tight and lucid economy to Earl's writing which I'm quickly growing to love. Oft said, ne'er so well expressed, and all that.]

Google gives all of us our own prototype of the Whuffie Head Up Display lookup system Cory Doctorow describes in "Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom" (which, btw, I think I enjoyed more than any other e-book I've ever read on my trusty old Palm Vx - format & content just seemed to fit. Plus it's a bloody good read).

I imagine some purists will probably jump on me to debate the absolute accuracy of Earl's description, but it's certainly close enough and useful enough for me. He pretty much nails the singular character of the blogosphere too, in one richly evocative, crisp little phrase: "...the Blogosphere is a snake pit of densely linked opinions." Damn straight.

Back to Whuffie for a second, I've also noticed that my own personal Whuffie quotient, as measured by Google, natch, seems to have spiked of late. No idea why. Ego-surfing used to bring up hit counts in the low hundreds. For some reason, this search now turns up close to 6,000 hits. Not exactly in the Beckham celebrity league, of course - still firmly (and comfortably) on the D List - but still.

Also mightily intrigued to note the fifth hit in Google’s search results, points to here: Harvard Weblogs: Michael O'Connor Clarke

Er…hello? Did I somehow get admitted to the faculty at Harvard and no one told me? Lovely! When can I pick up my gown?

Actually, I think it’s just a quirk of the way the Radio Userland blogging system indexes email details from people who’ve left comments at the Harvard/Berkman Center Weblogs – but a nice little frisson of ‘just imagine’ all the same…