If you're in or near Toronto and have about a hundred bucks to spare, get yerself over to Ticketmaster and pick up one of the last remaining tickets for the Canadian Opera Company's Turandot before they're all gone. Only four performances left, including the extra matinee added for this afternoon.

Sausage and I went as part of her birthday treat this past Thursday. Stunning.

Every thing about this production is just perfect. Richard Margison is simply phenomenal as Calaf, as is Serena Farnocchia singing the role of Liù. Her big moment in Act I - "Signore, ascolta!" - was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

And Eva Urbanová even managed to pull off a convincing transition in the difficult final scene - showing us the change from petty, unsympathetic ice maiden to wam, beautiful princess through the power of her voice alone.

The orchestra under Richard Bradshaw found great depth and colour in the music, and worked in perfect complement to the singers - not always easy to do in the Hummingbird Centre's cavernous, echoing auditorium. The set and lighting designers also deserve full credit for painting jaw-dropping, memorable images with minimal fuss.

Yes, it's a silly story, and a maybe justifiably dismissed as a "lesser" opera, but there was nothing "lesser" about this production.

Do anything you can to get a ticket - I guarantee you won't regret it.

The only tiny flaw in an otherwise pefect evening came not from the stage or pit, but from the audience who burst into rapturous applause even before the end of that aria, effectively drowning the great orchestral swell that crowns this show stopper. A beautifully staged moment, powerfully sung and played - brought to a messy, crashing close by fans rushing to applaud even as the last note still tremored on Margison's lips. Grrrrrrr...

Pisses me off no end - why can't you just sit back and relish the moment? By all means, show your appreciation - but let them finish, for goodness sake.

Unfortunately, this audience behaviour seems to be the norm. I wonder what the singers and musicians think...?

Yes…it appears to be true (again). A few reports starting to pop up on Google News and through my NewzCrawler.

The Snopes story on this from the last time the rumour made the rounds hasn’t been updated, but there’s no real reason to doubt the veracity of the Reuters story that appears to be the primary source.

My honest first reaction on receiving this piece of news was, as you might expect, a fair helping of disgust and outrage.  My deep-seated lefty instincts automatically spewed up the “what the hell kind of world are we living in?!” response.

But then you stop to think for a second and dig into how such a thing could happen.   What kind of world are we living in? How the heck did they get nominated?

Rather than go from the gut, this is one of those moments where a little intelligent Googling goes a long, long way.

First, as noted in the Reuters piece, the difference between nomination and actually being awarded the Nobel is enormous.

There are more than a hundred nominees every year and tens of thousands of people around the world have the right to submit nominations.

The list of approved nominators for the Peace prize, according to the info on the Nobel Foundation's site, includes all members of every national government in the world, plus members of international courts, university rectors, professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology, directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes, past prize recipients, active and former members of the Nobel committee, Phil Lewer, Jan Brewer, Harry Hawkins, Hugh Davy, Philly Whitpot, George Pausley, Dick Wilson, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all...

The Reuters piece quotes one Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, commenting that: "...many people wrongly believed being a "Nobel prize nominee" was itself a kind of honour...."

So the first thing to take way from this should probably be: getting nominated don't mean dick.

It's also worth pointing out that none of the news articles so far is able to quote anyone from the Nobel Foundation either confirming or denying the nominees.

The Reuters story quotes Lundestand several times, but without getting him to either confirm that Bush and/or Blair are on his little list. (I know they're on my little list -- and they surely won't be missed -- but that's another story).

In fact, to officially confirm these nominations would be a breach of the Statutes of the Foundation, which state: "information about the nominations is not to be disclosed, publicly or privately, for a period of fifty years. The restriction not only concerns the nominees and nominators, but also investigations and opinions in the awarding of a prize."

Not all qualified nominators abide by this particular rule, however. Hence the Reuters reporter is able to source "...a right-wing independent member of Norway's parliament..." as one of the people admitting to have nominated Bush and Blair.

The member in question is Jan Simonsen who already, according to this archived MetaFilter thread, raved about nominating the B Boys last year.

This is the same Jan Simonsen who, in the September 1999 Norwegian local elections, campaigned on an anti-immigration platform. "Simonsen suggested that asylum-seekers should only be allowed into shops in the company of a Norwegian, a suggestion that apparently was offered in the interests of crime prevention."

Simonsen certainly has an...um..."colourful" past. In 2001 he was expelled from his own party's Justice Committee for a scandal involving... well...go read the story yourself.

Armed with this information, then, the second thing I take away from the story is that it's manifestly a goad piece.

It's the sort of story that's almost purpose-built to work it's way around the 'Net, fueled by people like me clicking the "righteous indignation" option in their email.

Great big headline, but little of real substance - just some minor Norwegian right-wingnut (who’s willing to dispense with the niceties of confidentiality agreements) popping up to stir the fires of liberal rage and anguish.

And, hey – it worked. I was ready to blow chunks across the keyboard the moment I saw that headline.

As the story is very, very unlikely to have come from the Nobel Foundation themselves, what's the betting it was Jan Simonsen's own PR people who made the call?

The last point of note in the story, is that:

“Nobel watchers say Bush or Blair's chances of winning are close to nil. The 2002 prize went to ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who argued against war. The head of the Nobel committee called the choice a "kick in the legs" to Bush on Iraq.”

This is an opinion first noted in a much earlier Reuters story (from 2002) quoted at the Snopes site:

"Neither Bush nor Blair is likely to win. Bishop Gunnar Staalsett, a member of the secretive five-member Nobel committee which elects the winner, has spoken out against the U.S.-led and British-backed strikes on Afghanistan."

So.

1. The fact that they've been nominated is really no biggie. 
2. The Norwegian politician who threw their names into the hat this year was out of order to blab about it, and, btw, appears to be a nutbar.
3. They're very unlikely to win.

I find all this Googling very soothing to the nerves, don't you...?

I'm still Uninstalled, but (as I think I've said before) it's remarkable how busy you can be when you're not engaged in gainful employment. 

Life at the moment is one long round of meetings, lunches, breakfasts, and drinks with potential employers, old friends, former colleagues, sometime clients, networked associates, and the like. 

One of the problems I keep running into is that all of this networking inevitably lands one in situations where business cards are being exchanged - and I don't have any goddam business cards because...well...I don't have a goddam business.

I'd looked at getting some generic name & address cards printed to fix this gap, but none of the bland and nasty designs available really appeal to me.  There's too much sense of the desperate network marketer in most of the standard card designs on the market.

Then a post at Joi Ito's blog lead me to the wonderful Hugh MacLeod's "Blog Cards" service.  Yippee!

I've been a fan of Hugh's work on gapingvoid.com for ages - Hugh's story of why and how he first started doodling his "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" resonated with me the first time I read it.

Now Hugh is reversing his original approach - instead of cartoons drawn on the back of business cards, he's selling business cards on the back of cartoons.

Perfect.

I've picked this image to go on the front (or is it the back?) of my new "Blog Cards":

 

I think the reverse will just list contact info and the words:

Michael O'Connor Clarke
Reformed Big PR Bloke

Mind you, now that I've looked through more of the site, I kind of like this design too:

WDYT?

I have a big meeting this afternoon with a really, really cool company I'd love to end up working for one way or another. Wish I had my shiny new Blog Cards to hand out...

Here's a great tool if, like me, you're fortunate enough not to live in the U.S., but concerned enough to maintain a healthy interest in the constant rumblings of their malformed political machinery, you might also, like me, have occassional trouble keeping your Dean and Kerry in the right corners, knowing your Clark from your Edwards, staying up to speed on Kuchinich's plans for Healthcare.

The Christian Science Monitor has put together a terrific online knowledge base to help cross-reference the candidates' positions on the key issues such as the economy, education, healthcare, and Iraq.

Pick a topic, pick a candidate, get an instant read out on their stated position and a reminder, in case you needed one, of why this stuff matters.

I can't vouch for the accuracy or the impartiality of the content - my knowledge of U.S. politics is not advanced enough to detect partisan nuances in the copy.  But I just think it's a great example of a simple web app, neatly implemented.

Like Fred Wilson, I also haven't read this book, but the list of the top eleven reasons why CEOs fail struck a chord the moment I read it:

• Arrogance— you think that you're right, and everyone else is wrong.
• Melodrama— you need to be the center of attention.
• Volatility— you're subject to mood swings.
• Excessive Caution— you're afraid to make decisions.
• Habitual Distrust— you focus on the negatives.
• Aloofness— you're disengaged and disconnected.
• Mischievousness— you believe that rules are made to be broken.
• Eccentricity— you try to be different just for the sake of it.
• Passive Resistance— what you say is not what you really believe.
• Perfectionism— you get the little things right and the big things wrong.
• Eagerness to Please— you try to win the popularity contest.

I've worked for and with CEOs that displayed every single one of these traits.  Some of them were very, very successful CEOs - for a while at least.  All of them failed, for one or other of the stated reasons.  I think the list ports well to presidents and politicians too.

The Hutton Inquiry report is out, and (*gasp*) pretty much exonerates Tony & cronies of any evil.

The main conclusions make interesting reading, particularly chapter 12, section 467, point (1), paragraph (viii), which starts:

"The term "sexed-up" is a slang expression, the meaning of which lacks clarity in the context of the discussion of the dossier..."

All the semantic fancy footwork in this paragraph, around the issue of whether or not the dossier was "sexed-up", is eerily similar to Clinton's obfuscatory definition of not "having sex" with that woman.

"...because of the drafting suggestions made by 10 Downing Street for the purpose of making a strong case against Saddam Hussein, it could be said that the Government "sexed-up" the dossier. However in the context of the broadcasts in which the "sexing-up" allegation was reported and having regard to the other allegations reported in those broadcasts, I consider that the allegation was unfounded as it would have been understood by those who heard the broadcasts to mean that the dossier had been embellished with intelligence known or believed to be false or unreliable, which was not the case."

Hmm.

If I understand Lord Hutton's point correctly, he concludes that while it's fair to say that the Government "sexed-up" the dossier, this does not mean that they actually did anything as egregious as to "sex-up" the dossier.

Indeed, it was simply the case that: "Mr Alastair Campbell made it clear to Mr Scarlett on behalf of the Prime Minister that 10 Downing Street wanted the dossier to be worded to make as strong a case as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD..."

Absolutely zero "sexing-up" potential in there. Apart from all the perfectly acceptable "sexing-up" that went on, of course.

Oh - and earlier on the same page we learn that Kelly had "clinically silent coronary artery disease", so he was probably going to pop his clogs any second anyway. Well that's alright then.

Following the example set by the honourable Lord, I think it's fair to note that Blur is, as any fool can see, not in the least bit culpable for David Kelly's death. Completely and utterly innocent and untainted.

The blood soaking through the cuffs of his Thomas Pink shirt is simply a matter of the media making "...accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others..." without appropriate management oversight.

It's all down to a shocking lapse of diligence on the part of the BBC, allowing Andrew Gilligan's report to air at 6:07am "...without editors having seen a script of what he was going to say and having considered whether it should be approved."

I feel much safer now.

Thanks to ChasingDaisy for pointing out this terrific interchange between a former English Teacher and the marketing drones at Coca-Cola (originally sourced from a copy of Harper's, apparently). Excellent stuff - including the comments. Huzzah for pedants!

Nasty, blustery, stormy day in Toronto. But plenty of reasons to be cheerful at home, celebrating La Belle Saucisse’s thirtymumbleth birthday.

Krispy Kremes for brekkie, new watch, jewellery (carefully and very well chosen by Charlie & Lily), tickets for Turandot this Thursday (Richard Margison giving it loads as Calaf), plus a big family dinner earlier tonight.

After dinner, I ran back out to the kitchen to whip cream for the birthday cake, then popped upstairs to the loo.

As Ruairi has taken to saying: "uh oh"...

Lily, bless her, wanting to be helpful, decided to carry the huge, squishy birthday cake in from the dining room to the kitchen (so I could get the candles into it, I guess).

I’m afraid it really was a very, very squishy cake. Fresh cream Italian double chocolate truffle cake – rich, creamy, decadent, and…

On the floor.

A little too heavy for a well-meaning four year old, I’m afraid. Splosh.

Coming back downstairs just as the cake met the floor, I hovered for a moment between two possible responses. I tried on the annoyed-but-fair stern Dad for a few moments, but just couldn’t keep it going.

Poor Lily, she was so upset. Not sure it helped much that Sausage and I were obviously biting our tongues to keep from giggling.

Well it was a bloody nice looking cake before it hit the hardwood. Here's the ‘after’ picture:


Figured I'd stick candles in and light them anyway.

We did manage to save most of it, btw - and very yummy it was too. (The 'before' picture, if you really want to compare, is over here -- scroll down to the 'Chocolate Truffle' cake).

A memorable birthday moment.

Could this be the greatest photo caption ever to appear in a national newspaper?

The Books section of last Saturday's Globe & Mail carries a review by Roger Morris of Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty" - the "quasi-memoir" of Paul O'Neill's brief tour of duty as treasury secretary in Dubya's White House.

The print edition runs this picture:



...with this wickedly arch remark, clipped (and lightly pruned) out of the main review:

"George W. Bush and Paul O'Neill: including a man of character and experience in the President's inner circle was a horrendous mistake."

Snort!

Three different sides of the Dean Scream story.

From today's National Post:

Scream may end Dean's dream
Mr. Dean's speech has done serious damage to his campaign because it confirms for many Democrats the things they feared most about him: that he is a candidate driven by anger, that he is inexperienced, that, when faced with adversity, he folds.

From today's Globe & Mail:

Debate gives Dean chance to refocus campaign
Mr. Dean has been desperately trying to refocus his campaign in an effort to shake off the image he showed Monday. His unbridled enthusiasm in the face of defeat, climaxed with a high-pitched yelp,has been lampooned all week on radio talk shows and late-night television programs, including last night's Late Night With David Letterman, where he delivered the host's famous top 10 list.

"I wear suits that are cheap. But I say what I think. I believe what I say . . . I lead with my heart and not my head and that's the only chance we have against [President] George Bush," he said.

And the backstory, from Dave Winer's Scripting News:

I was at Dean headquarters on the night of the Iowa caucuses, and I watched the Dean rant on TV in the office, with the other Web programmers. A few minutes before the speech they had a staff meeting in the conference room...Several times during the meeting a loud crazy-sounding scream came from the room, everyone was doing it, and it was really frightening...This was before Howard Dean's rant. I asked Jim Moore what that was about, he said it's an Indian war yell or something like that, they used to do it in United Farm Workers rallies, and they adopted it at Dean For America.

The press, as usual, is making a big deal of catching a candidate being a human being. But that's what he is. He's not an actor, he's not a commercial, he's not a deodorant, he's not a product, and I'm glad we have a chance to have this discussion.

So now we know. It wasn't a scream it was a haka

(full credit to Doc Searls, btw, for first citing Whitman's "Barbaric Yawp" in this context)

This is really very cool.

The National Post and other CanWest papers have launched new "electronic editions" that I've been playing with for the last few days. (The free trial is only up until Jan 24th, so that last link will probably rot by tomorrow).

Most major newspapers produce half-decent online versions nowadays, but they always leave a little to be desired. A really enjoyable newspaper is a product of much more than just the stories and the people writing them.

The page design and layout, the photos, captions, even the advertising ? in a good newspaper all these little things come together to create an absorbing experience.

Laying out content for the web, of course, requires a completely different approach from layout for a print broadsheet. You can?t use a web site in the same way as you use a newspaper ? we don?t even read things on screen in the same way as we read a printed document.

So it makes sense to publish an online version of a newspaper that reshapes the printed content into a format that works within the constraints of the browser.

And yet there are many reasons why, particularly as a PR guy, you want to be able to see precisely how a story actually appeared on the printed page.

Was that photo above or below the fold? Where did the story breaks fall? Did our guy?s quote make it onto page one? What was the headline for the back half of a split story? What ran next to this piece? Did the story appear next to our advert? (That?s not a good thing, btw).

Subtle points, perhaps ? but parsing the layout like this is one of the key differences in the way a PR person digests a newspaper compared to the typical reader. It's one of the ways we like to measure our successes.

If all you have is the online version of a story you?re going to miss many of these subtleties.

The other big thing that can be an issue with newspapers? websites is that very few papers will put their entire daily content online ? there will always be chunks missing.

The new CanWest electronic editions fix these problems. As their own advertising puts it, you get: Every Headline, Every Column, Every Story, Every Picture.

In fact, you get a very nicely-rendered facsimile of the entire daily paper ? an ?exact digital copy?, they call it. Even the classifieds and cartoons.

Beautiful job. This technology has come a long, long way from the days I used to muck around in what used to be called the DIP (Document Image Processing) business.

CanWest is using a product called ActivePaper from Olive Software. I see they have a slew of other interesting papers signed up, in addition to the CanWest stable. Soon, I'll be able to read Ireland on Sunday and the London Evening Standard online - in all their gaudy tabloid loveliness.

I?ve also been checking out Olive's ActiveMagazine product. The UI in this demo is just drop-dead cool.

Now if only they could squeeze something this good looking into a format I could read on my Palm while strap-hanging on the subway...

I still have a search box sitting on the old site. Haven't managed to get around to putting up a search box here. Sorry.

Still - I continue to get search reports from the old blog site, but they're almost always exactly the same.

Seems that a never-ending river of lost souls winds up at my old blog, searching for "micro* or borg". Always exactly the same search syntax.

Just plain weird. Maybe it's one of their defamation lawyers? Nah - they probably have a software-based solution. An automated spidering tool that prowls the underbelly of the blogosphere, sniffing out anti-Microsoft sentiment and ranking it by some nasty little scale of pissiness, before determining whether to go medieval on the site owner.

Wouldn't surprise me.

Sure, I should probably be a good little leftie blogger and post some acidic insights about tonight's State of the Union, but I'm honestly too depressed to think about it. And what is it with the standing o-freaking-vations every 3 minutes, fercrissakes? The whole grotesque liturgy nauseates me.

I'm also trying to hold back the urge to rant about all this "looks like we’ve pretty much trashed this joint, let’s go screw up the moon" crap.

Sigh.

Forgive me, instead, if I dwell on mindless things. Like the small, simple, frankly rather pathetic pleasure to be taken from this latest message from those lovely Levenger people.

Unable to convince us to pay $19.95, or even $9.95 for the RoboCalc, they're now reduced to giving the sodding things away. Which is, as I've previously pointed out, exactly what everyone else has been doing all these years.

And then there's the heart-warming story of 17 year old Canadian Mike Rowe. Slammed, then forgiven (kind of) by the Beast of Redmond, for using the domain name mikerowesoft.com. "We take our trademark seriously, but in this case maybe a little too seriously," Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said.

Finally, a must read piece in Forbes. Not often that happens these days, but Ben Fulford's "Korea's Weird Wired World" from last July is well worth the trip.

"Strange things happen when an entire country is hooked on high-speed Internet ... South Korea has gone gaga over broadband. This nation of 46 million people, packed into an area smaller than Virginia, has quickly become the world's most wired nation. Politics, entertainment, sex, mass media, crime and commerce are being reshaped by a population as online as it is offline. Some 11 million homes, or 70% of the total, have broadband."

A fair shake of scaremongering, but fascinating stuff all the same.

I'm just a selfish git. I'm shopping online for Sausage's birthday (next week), but I can't stop thinking about my own fast-approaching birthday.

I'll be 40 this year.

I don't feel 40. It's strange to even write it. Forty. Sounds sort of old, but it isn't really. The really curious thing, now that it's nearly here, is the realisation that I'm actually looking forward to it.

When I stop to think about it, I guess that all my life -- or for as long as I can remember, anyway -- I've been impatient to grow up. I can still recall the excitement of first hitting double figures, and how thrilling it was to finally reach 18. 30 was a great birthday, and a great year.

Perhaps it comes from having two older brothers to look up to. I don't know. Not sure how to explain it. But I do know that I'm approaching the supposedly scary 4-0 with a feeling of mounting excitement. I can't wait.

Hope I still feel like this when I'm approaching 80 -- assuming I make it that far.

Oh - and I know what I want. A great big trip to Disneyland with the whole family. Preferably Mom & Dad, as well as Sausage and the kids.

Failing that, an M9244LL/A would be nice too.

Here's a great feel good story from David Pogue, writing in the NY Times about six weeks ago.

Nothing much further to add - it's just a really happy tale.

My long, barely coherent, soul-searching post below seems to have struck a chord in a few places. Drawing higher than usual traffic and a bunch of very nice emails.

Quick summary to save you reading the whole thing: I finally realised that my blog and I are inseperable. After years of worrying about the balance of public/private information disclosed here, and the 'risk' that potential employers might be put off by discovering my blog - I've come to the conclusion that if they don't like what they read, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway. Not exactly newsworthy, but a key awakening for me.

One of the most encouraging things to come out of this post is that it seems I've inspired the President of one company to put up a new, candid disclaimer on his blog. Read Ben Langhinrichs' post, here.

As his blog is hosted as an off-shoot of his company's main corporate site, I think this uncomplicated and lawyer-free disclaimer is entirely admirable. Courage of convictions, and conviction to content.

Good stuff, Ben. Thanks.

My New Year’s wish: please will someone build a call centre scripting system for tech companies and ISPs that ALWAYS prompts the CSR to ask some simple qualifying questions at the top of the call? Something to establish the caller’s general level of competence before you start firing dumbass questions at them.

In just about every single tech support call I've ever had to make, there's always come a point at which I want to scream down the phone: "I know what I'm #$%#*! talking about!"

Spent 47 minutes on the phone to my ISP this afternoon. (Yes – I timed it. I really am that big a loser.)

I was trying to sort out a really stupid, non-fatal but very annoying email problem.

30 minutes on hold (“your call is important to us” - arrrrrgggggh). 17 minutes of actual discussion.

So by the time I got to speak to an actual warm body, I already had the steam of frustration pissing out of my ears.

And then I had to endure 10 minutes of intensely annoying low-level questions of the "is your modem switched on" variety, plus circular discussions about the Spam filtering options and folder settings in webmail and Outlook Express when I'm not, for the fifth freaking time, using your rotten webmail UI or Outlook brain-damaged Express. Grrrrrrrr...

All this, just to get to the point where the support dude (who sounded like he probably got online for the first time last week) finally realised that I probably had a better technical understanding of my own email set up than he did, and perhaps he should "escalate" my call to someone with a demi-clue.

3 minutes of discussion with support dude #2: problem solved.

The really depressing part is that I know that the next time I have to call them I’m doomed to endure the same enervating ordeal all over again.

I asked the last guy I spoke to today – couldn’t they flag my account or something? Put some kind of “this customer is not a knob” marker next to my user ID? Please? “Sorry, sir – the system’s not really set up for that.”

Every time I speak to them, I’m going to have to go back through the same exasperating process of establishing that yes: I know where the ON switch is, and yes: I have tried rebooting, and no: I haven’t been fiddling with my account settings.

Every time I speak to them, I’ll get a little more grey hair, slightly deeper frown lines, a stronger headache.

And every time they take me through this BOFH hazing ritual I'll get one more reason to switch ISP.

Part Foo in a series of N...

OK. Apologies, as usual, for wandering off there for a while too long. We've been busy, of course - Christmas and all that - but that's no real excuse. Guess I just blogged off for a while. No particular reason, just sort of bored...

Before I forget - overdue birthday greetings to the third of the original BlogSprogs -Sawyer James Matrullo, who turned 1 on Christmas Eve. Congratulations Tom and Wendy, hope all is well in Mexico.

I've come close to putting pen to paper (putting pixel to Presario?) a number of times in the last month, but always found something more interesting or, at least, more pressing to do. Times like this I wish I was able to do the Bill Joy thing - "leaving the urgent behind to get to the important", as he's reported to have said when he fled Silicon Valley to set up shop in Aspen.

Whenever we've had the laptop on over the last few weeks, I've either been working on business development stuff (a.k.a. Mission: GetAJob), emailing friends and family, or playing Beyond Good & Evil (which is very cool, btw). All that plus entertaining, reading, and enjoying a terrific family Christmas = precious little time or desire to blog. Been having a lot of fun, in fact. So stuff Bill Joy.

This was going to be the "hello I'm back, and here are a few interesting links I've found" post, but then I had a funny little moment of clarity yesterday, so I think I'm going to set off in a different direction.

With all the intensive networking I've been doing in the last few months, I've been asked for my C.V. or bio a fair number of times. I've pointed most people to the online bio here, knowing that this means they'll probably wind up reading the main blog, if they're that way inclined.

I've had a tiny but significant frisson of doubt every time I've done this. I mean, quite a few of the people I've pointed here are people I'd really like to work with. There's always that little twinge of: "oh no, what if they read my blog and think I'm a complete dork?" It has been known to happen.

And then, earlier today, the question came up again. Someone I really respect and would certainly like to be working with asked for a copy of my C.V.

I went through the routine cycle of qualms before reaching a small, liberating moment of epiphany: I realised that, in truth, I don't care what potential employers or work colleagues might think about my blog. Or rather: I do, but in the right way.

I'll try to explain...

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have remarked on the increasing prevalence of disclaimers on people's blogs. It seems almost the norm for employed stiffs who blog to put up some kind of rider to distance their blog writing from their worklife. I remember watching the disclaimers start to pop up on blogs of Blogger employees within weeks of the Google acquisition.

Often these take the form of: "the personal views and opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of management", or "...not those of my employer", or some such rhetoric.

The problem I have with this is that for as long as I've been blogging, I've also been "the management". I've been part of the leadership team of every company I've worked for in the past six or so years.

So to state that the views I'm blogging are not those of the management would seem disingenuous - 'coz, honey - I am the management. (Or, at least, I was. Till they canned my ass. But you know what I mean.)

As an example, I don't mind the disclaimer on Robert Scoble's blog, FWIW:

"Robert Scoble works at Microsoft. Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here"

It's kind of a roundabout way of saying "YMMV".

But other disclaimers are rather more pointed, or just plain odd - at least to my current way of thinking. Take this example at Ray Ozzie's blog:

The views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Groove Networks, Inc..

Er...? But Ray - you're the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Groove Networks, Inc. I'm finding the distinction a little hard to swallow.

For the record: I've had a disclaimer of sorts on this blog's "About" page for as long as I've been writing. It's here - "If you think for even a nanosecond that the opinions expressed through this site have any relation to the views and opinions of my employers, you clearly need to lighten up a little. Frankly, I'm not even sure half the time that the opinions expressed through this site are an accurate reflection of my own thoughts and feelings. Get a clue."

Thought it was kind of amusing at the time. Now I've really gone off it.

OK. I'm deliberately skipping steps in the logic here. I know. Bear with me. I just need to get this muddly thing thought through. It's cathartic. Feel free to go watch paint dry or something...

I know other employed bloggers who've wrestled with the disclosure boundaries at the intersection of work and blogging. And I've walked a fuzzy line in my own work life - steering an ill-defined course between two sets of work colleagues: those people who know about and read the blog, and the other set of people I'd rather didn't find out.

The little moment of epiphany came from realising that, of course, the people who wouldn't grok the blog most likely fall into the category of people who just wouldn't grok Michael anyway, so what the hell do I care what they think? I'd much rather be working with and for people who grok blogs and the whole "blogosphere" (*ack*) in general, or are open-minded enough to be receptive to this way of working with the world.

The me on this blog is the real deal - not too different from the full and unfiltered offline me. (OK, so perhaps my blog self doesn't cuss quite as much as my real time self. I'm conscious to mind my language a little more online - just as I would offline when there's kids around. Can't pre-define the readership, so best to keep it relatively clean. And yes, I know I'm contradicting myself here, of course. Having just expressed my reluctance to compromise to fit within the expectations of a certain audience group, here I go fessing up to toning down the vernacular out of consideration for my audience. Fuck it anyway - I never said this was going to make any sense.)

Where was I...?

Given what I do for a living, it would be just wrong to suggest that the views and opinions I bring to this blog have no bearing on my professional life. It's not like I'm suddenly viewing the world through a different lens when I sit down to write. The subjects discussed may be different, but the world view is still the same - it's still my POV.

Of course the opinions and ideas expressed here are inherently linked to those of the companies I've been working for - at least insofar as I have embodied the ethos of those companies to some extent. (Hey! Do you think that's got anything to do with why I got canned from the last place? Failure to embody the corporate culture? Ahem. No comment. *cough*)

I guess I've said this before: blogito ergo sum (and vice versa: I am, therefore I blog).

Apart from anything else, it's pretty durned easy to find this thing anyway. There is only one Michael O'Connor Clarke you can find online, AFAIK. No matter how deep you Google (and trust me here - my ego-surfing leaves no hit unclicked), I'm the only me on the Net.

Any potential employer, client, or stalker who Googles me will pretty easily find this blog as the first hit.

(The curious fact that never fails to surprise me, BTW, is that people do Google me, from all corners of the globe, at the rate of about two hits per day on average, according to my server referral logs. People in countries I've never even visited show up here having Googled my full name. It's just odd.)

Back on topic: I've come to realise that the sort of people who might be baffled by the blog, or have any issue with the fact that I hang out here (and yes, I have been known to post from the office), are exactly the sort of people I have no interest in working with. No disrespect, no offence - we just have different ways of seeing (and vive la difference, fer sure).

This also means that I no longer have even the slightest twinge about pointing potential employers or prospects to this blog. I'm assuming that wherever I end up landing, I'll be coming into another management position, at which point I'll be quite happy to announce that the thoughts and opinions expressed here are indeed those of the management. And if the rest of the management team aren't comfortable with my ideas and opinions as expressed through this blog, then I probably wouldn't be happy working with them anyway, so knickers to it. Or we'll fight it out in some stuffy board room and then go off for pints. Not to say that they have to agree, of course. Just cut me some Voltaire.

So now that I come to think about it, what the heck was I so worried about in the first place anyway?

Post coming. Honest. Soon.