They're dropping the writ and we're definitely heading into yet another federal election in Canada (the fourth in the nine years we've lived here, and the second in 18 months - they're election crazy these Canucks!).

So I'm opening the book on when Canada's various party leaders will get their campaign blogging mojo on.

Last time around, if I remember rightly, Paul Martin (incumbent Prime Minister) was the only leader with anything approximating a campaign blog.

The site's locked behind a login wall now, alas, lost to the archives. Singularly clueless and un-bloglike of them.

From what I can recall, Martin's blog was mainly a sequence of bland baby-kissing-in-Moose Jaw stories with the occasional mildly interesting policy rant. But at least he had something approximating a blog - even if someone else was actually writing and posting the pablum for him

We're 18 months deeper into the evolution of the blogosphere now, and I find it hard to imagine how any of the party leaders are going to connect with informed, internetworked voters without committing to blog - and blog properly - this time around.

So let's post some opening odds on which of the main Canadian party leaders will be the first to launch a campaign blog:

Paul Martin (Liberal - Canada's ruling centrist party, in power for most of the last 80 years or so. No one seems to understand why.): - 5/4 favourite

Stephen Harper (Conservative - holds the distinction of being the only party leader who looks like reanimated corpse): - 2/1*

Jack Layton (New Democratic Party - the closest we have to a true left wing here. We love you, Jack - but when was the last time any Western nation elected a leader with a moustache?): - 5/1

Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Québécois - holds the distinction of being the only party leader who really is a reanimated corpse): - 8/1

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets in the comments here. Odds will be updated as and when the management feel it's interesting enough to do so.

BTW, before all you tree-huggers pile on to accuse me of ignoring Canada's fourth national party, I'm afraid the Greens are disqualified from the betting on two counts:

1. Be honest - even in your most intense fluffy-bunny moments of Sting-worshipping, woven-beansprout-trouser-wearing, eco-righteous Green pride, you don't honestly think Canadians would ever elect a Green candidate, do you? Admittedly, one could say the same about the Bloc, but there's another reason;

2. Minor technicality - the Greens already have a blog. A real one. And one in which party leader, the splendid Jim Harris - my local Green candidate - actually writes his own stuff. That's just not fair to the other guys, Jim. Where would be if all our political leaders were as articulate and net savvy as you, eh? Play by the rules, dammit.

*N.B. The Harper site has a leg up on the others in that it already includes a couple of podcasts. Martin still comes in as favourite here for complicated reasons too arcane for you to understand (involves careful application of sophisticated statistical science and chocolate timbits), but I'd say there's a pretty strong chance they'll launch Harper's Army of the Damned Blog soon, so it's going to be a close run thing.

The Conservative Party's "yoof" wing already has a blog, of sorts. You'll find it here. Only one post up so far, and it doesn't augur well for the quality of stuff we're likely to see. Here's the first part of their opening salvo:

"Hey readers, and welcome to C-Blog!

Under news: new and exciting, we here on the C-Blog are pleased to bring to you 5 daily bloggers, diarists working in the internet medium if you will, who will wow you with their wit, their edge, and their diverse perspectives on current events, what’s new on the cpcenergy.ca landscape, and of course with their own thoughts and feelings..."

Right. Well, that's the Conservative youth vote banjaxed then.

Phew.

What a brutal, soul-destroying, relationship-straining period of weirdness that was. Sheesh. Don't want to dwell on all that now, though. Suffice to say – it has sucked mightily to be us for most of the last few months. But 'tis done. Finito.

As of about two weeks ago I've joined Marqui, Inc. as Vice President, Business Development (with VP, Product Management thrown in for good measure – but they don't make business cards that long). Been talking to and kinda working with them for a while now, but we couldn't tie the knot properly until very recently. Long story.

You may already know a fair amount about Marqui. If you don't, but you're curious, you can Google them , of course, or check out the site.

FWIW, here's the short version of why I'm so pumped about this new gig.

I spent almost 15 years of my life working in marketing for tech companies. (This was despite studying philosophy at University. Guess I spent nearly four years reading philosophy, then asked myself "why?").

Many of the tech companies I worked for had something to do with document and content management, of one sort or another.

I worked with a little startup document management/workflow company that went from six guys in a rat-infested basement (really) on London's City Road, to a big glossy North American IPO in the space of about 18 months. I ran marketing for PC DOCS – one of the leaders in the DM/CM space way back when. Then I mucked about in corporate communications at Hummingbird, and was the first guy to suggest they get into the enterprise portal business (still the centre of their product set today).

I bloody loved this stuff, and thought I was sort of half-way decent at it.

For complicated but very good reasons, I chose to leave the software business in early 2000 – moving into Public Relations. Five years as an executive with some of the world's largest PR agencies and, of course, now I think I know everything about that world too ;-)

Actually, working at the high end of agencies like Cohn & Wolfe and Weber Shandwick – rolling around as a cog inside the mighty WPP and Interpublic marketing empires – was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. They're fundamentally messed up in all sorts of complex and nutty ways, but it's interesting as hell working for them. Imagine seeing the Gordian knot from the inside...

And then running a tiny boutique PR firm for a year and a bit after that was an... um... "educational" experience too. (Ask me if I know any good, small agencies in the Toronto area - go on, I dare you).

Enough. Here's the neat bit: Marqui's roots are sunk deep into the content/document management world. Hey! I know something about that stuff!

Better – they've extended and expanded their scope to address a whole bunch of common workflow and brand integrity issues faced by a typical marketing department. Call it "marketing automation", a bit of a holy grail thing for integrated marketing/measurement dogmatists like me. Cool! I know some of that stuff too!

Oh, and they've spent a bunch of time and effort carefully defining their market: PR agencies, Ad agencies, Interactive/creative shops, and mid-sized in-house marketing departments.

Heh. I am Marqui's target customer.

Or I would be, if I hadn't just gone and joined the management team, dammit. Don't suppose I can sell to me really, can I?

Many people reading this will also be aware (to put it a little euphemistically) of Marqui's presence in blog technology circles. Doesn't suck to be able to join a company that knows its Atom from its OPML.

So all in all, I'm doing quite the happy bunny dance right now. If I were a bell, I'd be ringing.

And you, you lucky people, you get the full force of my obnoxious joy in all its unfiltered, grinning foolishness.

It's nice to be back.

Ding dong, ding dong ding!

What a terrific little note for your daughter to bring home from 9 o'clock mass on a Sunday:

"Your child has been selected to play the role of Mary in the St. John's Nativity Play."

Woo Yay Lily! Excellent casting, I think - even if I am more than a little biased.


Oh, and not to be outdone, Charlie landed the part of one of the wise men. A fine choice - he looks great with a beard, and knows the difference between frankincense and frankenstein...

I think Gordon M. Nixon is a charming bloke. And hiring Barbara Stymiest is one of the smartest things he's ever done.

Now, what did you want to ask me?

These things are the most complete and utter twonk, and yet...

Sausage's horoscope in the Toronto Star this morning (with my italics):

Aquarius
The ruler of your sign is all but standing still in the sky. Soon, it will gather pace in forward motion after five months of apparently slipping backwards. You love things to keep moving and changing. Now, you'll be able to make up for lost time.

Just plain odd.

"All...bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother department. The first two process most matters, as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave.”

Doc Searls has had something big brewing up for a time now.

The result of many rounds of conversation with numerous Net luminaries and Doc's characteristic passion-fuelled deep thinking, is "Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes", posted in the wee hours last night over at Doc's day job home, Linux Journal.

It starts:

"We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths."

It's a long, link-rich, thoroughly-researched piece; driven by righteous and well-grounded anger and fear of what the giant phone and cable companies are doing to the Internet.

If you care about the future of the Internet, I urge you to read it. Print it off. Leave copies lying around where others can find it - especially at the phone company store, in your local Best Buy or other retail tech warehouse, in the reception area of your cable company. Email it to friends. Fax it to your congressman or MP. This message wants to move.

It's long. If you don't have time to read the whole thing right now - here's a "Cole's Notes" version. Doc and I got into a brief email discussion last week about one part of the problem he digs deep into in this piece. From that thread, here's Doc's epigrammatic précis of his central argument:

"1) They hate you.
2) They've always hated you.
3) They always will hate you.
4) They're the fucking phone company
5) They fuck you with phones.
6) That's all they know, and all they'll ever know.
7) They want to turn the Net into a phone system.
8) They are very single-minded about that.
9) Bypass is the only hope.
10) We're all fucked."

Tongue in cheek, sure - but deadly, crucially serious.

I have a couple of good friends at the biggest phone company round these parts (which also happens to be my Net carrier of "choice" - if choice is really what you'd call it). Knowing these good, clueful people are carrying the torch inside the phone company sometimes gives me a shred of hope.

In my moments of naïve and clear-eyed optimism, I'd like to think Doc's wrong - that smart people will fix it from within before we reach the end times Doc foresees.

Yeah, right. And then I wake up...

Read it.

If you can, do something about it.

Charlie made the soccer team!!

Yaaaaaay!

Go Charlie! Go Charlie! Go Charlie!

#1 on the Feed dial right now, Madame Levy blows my mind.

This morning, for the first time, after the kids were safely off to school, I poured my giant mug of coffee and, instead of turning right to sit down with the morning's newspapers, I turned left - to sit down with the morning's feedreader, mainly to see if La Vache Qui Lit had discovered any more tributaries in her ongoing stream of consciousness.

Mind cleansed, refreshed, enlightened, and sparkling, I now feel set to tackle the newsprint.

Over the past several months, I've had countless discussions with recruiters in a number of different countries, as we've been working to figure out what the next chapter in our lives is going to look like - and where it will unfold.

Out of all the headhunters I've exchanged email and had phone or in-person conversations with, two have really stood out for their remarkable approach to serving me, their client. One blew me away for all the right reasons; the other...? Well, I'll get to that.

First, the superstar.

Way back in June of this year, I dropped a note of introduction and my C.V. into the inbox of Liz Snell, one of the principals at Goddard Gadd in the UK. In less than 24 hours, Liz responded with a gracious and encouraging note.

Over the next few days and weeks I had a number of conversations with members of Liz's excellent team. Every discussion was productive, enjoyable, and rewarding. We didn't end up doing anything together in the end (my fault, not theirs), but the entire experience of dealing with Goddard Gadd as a potential client was a thoroughly positive one.

One point in particular impressed me no end. Within a week of my first email exchange with the Goddard Gadd team, I received in the mail a beautifully-presented, hand-written follow up note, wrapped in with some of their corporate marketing materials. Terrific.

On the purely speculative assumption that I might, at some point, be able to earn them a good commission if they were able to steer me into a well-paid gig in the UK, they took the time and spent the money to send me a physical pre-emptive little "thank you" note. Their marketing materials, btw, are really well produced - but the quality and the cost of the materials in this case is immaterial (ouch - sorry). Really - it's the thought that counts.

It must be five months since I spoke to anyone at Goddard Gadd, but the positive impression they created is still strong in my mind. Good karma. The whole experience is banked away in my "people to repay" file. If it's in my power to help these guys succeed at some point in the future, I'll do all I can.

Now, the dog. Grrrrrrrr...

About a month earlier than my first email discussion with Goddard Gadd, I had tried to contact one of the executive search firms in Toronto. I was sending out tons of these emails at the time, and making many, many phone calls. This particular one was a little different, as an old friend had given me a personal referral to one of the principals of the firm in question (who shall remain nameless for the moment - why should I send them any linky-love?).

I dropped them an initial note not unlike the one I'd sent to Goddard Gadd, with the key difference being that I also shamelessly dropped the name of our mutual contact - hoping that would help... um... lubricate things. I always hate doing this kind of thing; just feels so fake and uncomfortable. Still, we do what we must to put food on the table.

Didn't get any kind of a response to this email, so over the course of the next three weeks I sent a couple of follow ups and left three voicemails for the guy I was trying to reach.

Gets to the point, after a while, you just think, "screw it".

Getting on for a month after I'd sent the first email, I found a job ad in one of the local newspapers - a job I really liked the look of. The recruiter contact was the same guy I'd been trying to reach at that certain firm of headhunters. So I pinged him again, with what I thought was a pretty well put-together argument for why they should interview me.

Nothing. Zip. Two more emails, five phone call attempts. Not a sodding word in response.

No big deal, really. As anyone who has been on the job hunt for any length of time knows, having your approaches ignored is the norm. It's insanely bloody frustrating and just plain wrong, but it's the norm.

Just over a month after that, when I'd already moved on and washed my mind of the thing, I got an email from the recruiter. Not something written by an actual human being, though. This was stock rejection letter version 0417B. Made me feel like firing off a little John Kador-style response: "After careful deliberation, then, and because a number of firms have found me more unsuitable, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection". Heh.

OK. End of the affair that never was, I thought. Until this morning.

This morning I was blessed to receive an image-saturated, bog blocker of an HTML message from that certain executive search firm. It's a quasi-personalized bit of corporate spam, advertising some custom market research they've produced, with a link to a big fat PDF and a bunch of "thought leadership" puke.

The spam is (ostensibly) signed by that same guy I had originally tried to reach way back in early May.

Better - there's a full colour photo embedded, featuring His Unreachableness in all his smugly-grinning glory.

Sheesh, he even looks like a pompous twat. (Mind you, so do I - if you judge by the one official blog-publicity shot of me in circulation. Glass houses, &c. *cough*)

But really - how utterly lovely is this? Not a pixel of a response from you in almost six months, then your first proactive contact with me - a real potential client - is to abuse the explicit trust I placed in you by SPAMMING ME!?

What the hell does that say about your respect for my privacy? Isn't working with a recruiter supposed to be one of those things automatically covered with an implicit blanket of mutual confidentiality and trust. How can I trust you when your very first response is as crass as this?

You've taken my email address, stripped away all that annoying, too-hard-to-even-acknowledge message stuff, and chosen instead to shovel your completely uninteresting head office pontificating down my gullet.

This is MY email address and MY inbox, goddamit.

When I gave you my email address, I explicitly granted you permission to respond to my entreaties. I most certainly did NOT grant you permission, explicit or otherwise, to hose down my inbox with this inane, steamy vomitus. And where the hell is the "unsubscribe" link in your giant, glistening bolus of spam?

*sigh*

Look, you cretins. It's simple. Read this. That's the Canadian government's Anti-Spam Taskforce's "Recommended Best Practices for Email Marketing".

Ten simple rules; you broke at least seven of them. You would have scored higher, except for the fact that you didn't actually manage to include any naked chicks in the message.

Back when I used to do a lot of media training, one of the things I'd remind people of was a maxim drawn straight from early years as a sales guy: Every interaction is a data point – if you don’t call back, what does that say about your company?

Every point of contact with a prospective or current client is a means for them to form an opinion of your firm.

Ignore your customer for months, then drive-by spam them. Yeah, that's gonna work.


At the risk of belabouring the painfully bloody obvious, the title of this post is also the moral.

In the first example, the customer was exceptionally well served.

You could say the same of the second example, but the verb takes on a much older meaning...

[Cross posted to Flackster]

I've used this Gandhi quote as a post heading in the past, but it seems even more appropriate for the topic at hand this time around.

There's been a minor bushfire spreading through the blogvines in the last few weeks, building into something bigger and more important as each successive blogger and MSM outlet picks up the story.

In short: Gaurav Sabnis, a blogger in India quit his job with IBM after something of a dust storm blew up over his online criticism of a local IBM client, IIPM, and that client's pigheaded and disproportionate over-reaction. As a result, what was a minor dust storm grew into a tornado of criticism and intense online scrutiny of IIPM, spilling over into the mainstream and causing no end of embarrassment for them.

Mark Glaser's account of the tale at Online Journalism Review provides a thorough analysis of the brouhaha and draws some useful conclusions.

To me, the most interesting aspect of what's happened here is not the tale of IIPM's cluelessness -- although that is indeed mighty, and certainly worthy of the scorn and outrage being directed their way by many in the blogosphere.

No; what resonates most for me is the exact point Mark Glaser chooses to make in the closing paragraphs of his piece:


Mark gets that there is an inevitable and appropriate AND logic in play here. As he says:

"The story of IIPM and its battle with JAM and Indian bloggers follows a familiar trajectory here in the U.S.: There's a story in a smallish magazine, picked up and magnified by bloggers, then picked up and magnified by the mainstream media (MSM). This snowball effect has bloggers exulting, and the MSM taking bloggers much more seriously."

As I've said before - this is why I don't buy into the ongoing "journalism vs. blogging" debate - it's because the "vs." part is so painfully wrong. This is what Forbes failed to get in letting Dan Lyons run off leash.

It's not "Them" OR "Us", it's You AND Me.

Bloggers + MSM = better media. Damn straight.

Complementary, collaborative, mutually reinforcing, keeping each other honest.

When a blogger fisks a poorly-researched, badly-argued MSM piece - that's good. And when an MSM reporter responds to an inflammatory, baseless blog post with their own dissection, rebuttal, and counterpoint - that's good too.

Conversation. Debate. Ebb and flow.

Blog-like "participatory" media initiatives such as Newsvine clearly have the potential to OR and then NOT mainstream media outlets that fail to understand this.

But seeing the AND value is a much smarter path, and one more likely to improve the quality and amplitude of reporting everywhere.

Bonus links:

1. Doc points to a five-year-old interview with the late Peter Drucker, in which Drucker tangentially underscores a related aspect of the AND.

2. The Toronto Star so very nearly gets it. They've adopted blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds. One of their smartest reporters, Tyler Hamilton, has a piece in this morning's @Biz section, print and online, on the importance of podcasting to traditional print media outlets. It's a great piece. Tyler gets it.

The reason the Star only very nearly scores, IMHO? Clicking that link to Tyler's story requires you to register before you can read it. So near, yet so far...

Finally managed to unearth the thing I was looking for - the stuff that I started searching for a couple of hours ago, then interupted myself and caught up with the thing I was supposed to be doing, then headed back into the archives, turning up other things that led, incidentally, to a certain realisation.

Here's the sage words I was trying to recall - from a post to the old Cluetrain Topica list by the big bad blogdaddy himself, Chris Locke:


Just what I needed for the presentation I'm building.

Starting to feel like '99 all over again around here.

Damn! but Pandora is one fine service. I know there's been a lot of raving and drooling about this already, but had to add my two cents here. It's just so freakin' groovy.

This morning I plugged in "Kirsty MacColl" and asked it to create a "radio station" of stuff in similar vein for me. Apart from one off track, so far it's been streaming a drop-dead terrific selection of music - old friends and stuff from people I've never heard of, mixed in with the odd Kirsty track here and there.

I'm in new-instant-favourite-music discovery heaven.

Just now it played "Starstruck" by The Auteurs, which I remember hearing only once on John Peel just before drifting off to sleep many years ago. I loved it at the time, but then almost immediately forgot all about it as my snoozes deepened.

Awesome way to discover (and rediscover) music you love. And it's FREE.

The class thing about this is that, as a business model, it just plain simple bloody well works.

As I've been sitting here pounding away at stuff today, with Pandora offering up a steady supply of new treats in the background -- three times I've clicked on the "buy this song at Amazon" links.

OK, so we're stone cold broke - so I didn't actually buy anything. But if we weren't teetering on the poverty line, I certainly would have. And I will - those three links have made it onto my wish list.

This is my new path to wanton consumer gratification right here.

I <3 Pandora - thank you for opening your box.

Swapping email with Doc a few minutes ago, while searching for some of the old Cluetrain Topica group threads and blog posts - turns out that today is the sixth anniverary of the original Cluetrain Blog - now better known as Doc's weblog, of course. Full scoop here and the first posts here.

Conblogulations!

Dan Bricklin (one of my geek heroes, who I got to meet, and gush all over, back here) has a new product in the works.

wikiCalc is (from Dan's description) a tool for "...creating and maintaining web pages that include data this is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet."

I'm playing with it now. Bloody deadly.

Twice in the last hour, someone in or around Meriden, CT has reached this site through a pretty specific Google search for info on my last company. Email me (michaelocc AT gmail.com). We should talk.

Doc has a billion dollar idea to share with the big hosting companies and carriers.

"Like many users, my ad hoc solution involves a growing pile of external drives that I keep meaning to put in a safer place than the closet where they're piling up now... But what happens when somebody big starts offering big offsite backup, and hosting as well? With its massive experience with installing and maintaining zillions of servers, Google and Yahoo would be ideal candidates for those kinds of offerings...Think about it. Terabyte offsite storage for ordinary citizens at attractive prices."

Bang on target.

I already use one of my Gmail accounts as a kludgy offsite storage system. I figure I can trust Google not to lose my data. I'm sure their multi-gazillion dollar server farms are way better put together and cared for than any home-office storage setup I could ever build. Plus there's the advantage that I can, in a pinch, access my backups from just about anywhere I can find a browser.

It's less than ideal, though, mainly because of the asymmetric download/upload deal I get from my ISP. If someone came along and offered me the same kind of broadband speed I get right now, but made it symmetrical and threw in some kind of low-cost mass storage option, I'd jump in a second - as would many millions of others, I think.

It's a terrific idea for the big carriers for another reason - apart from price, how else are they supposed to differentiate themselves in a flattened, commoditized market? And price really isn't a good enough differentiator for Internet service nowadays, anyway. They're all at about the same level, all offering pretty much the same kind of thing.

Maybe the idea of backup just doesn't seem sexy enough to the marketing folk at the carriers, cablecos, and other ISPs just now. It's not exactly something people tend to get excited about until they suddenly discover how much they need it, which is usually about 10 seconds after things have gone to bollocks and they realise that the backup isn't there. Disaster recovery, in general, has the same image problem as life insurance. It's a tough sell; which is dumb, considering how bloody essential it is.

So, OK - maybe no one would be jumping up and down, hollering "hell yeah!" if one of the big players suddenly picked up Doc's challenge - but a lot of very influential punters the world over would most likely sign up for such a service.

I'm tempted to add this thought skein to the glutinous Web 2.0 meme soup. Affordable massive offsite storage for the average punter could well qualify as a 2.0-ish kind of idea, or at least it should. It fits square in with the notion that Internet technology is just another utility - as essential to the smooth operation of everyday 21st century life in the developed world as electricity, running water, garbage removal. Salesforce.com and Netsuite made ERP work like a utility - so why not something as simple as a backup service? My ISP bill already feels like any other utility company bill - so add dependable, limitless, brain-dead easy 100% offsite backup to it.

That's how I want my essential digital life bits managed for me. Take my ever expanding music collection, the masses and masses of family photos, the 15+ years of assorted writing, powerpoints, saved games, email archives, contact lists - all of it. Suck it off my hard drives every night and squirrel it away in some bottomless, military-grade data centre, without me even having to think about it unless I need to restore something.

Make it invisible, painless, and relatively cheap. Offer whatever guarantees you can – something that promises to keep my data safe and private, but gives you some reasonable “act of God, war, terrorism” opt outs.

Any of the big boys (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, AOL, Comcast, Bell…) could implement this in a heartbeat. Heck, if one of them was willing to offer it right now they could add $10 a month to my bill – I’d be all over them.

While we're sitting around waiting for Google and/or Microsoft to hurry up and digitize every book every published, here's a small selection of fine paperbacks to peruse.

It's genuinely mind-blowing the things you stumble across online - things you'd never expect to find.

Exhibit A: just came across this old newspaper clipping, probably from the Birmingham Mail, advertising one of the most extraordinary gigs I ever went to, way the hell back on October 24th, 1979, featuring not only the utterly fantastic Buzzcocks as the lead act, but also the no less brilliant Joy Division at the absolute height of their brief arc of success.


I remember queueing up at the back of the old Birmingham Odeon several months before the night of this gig, to get the tickets as soon as they went on sale. We scored seats bang in the centre of the front row - giving us an extreme close up view of Ian Curtis in all his frenzied glory. Even got to sneak around the back after the gig and hang out with Steve Diggle and Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks - sharing their lukewarm cans of Heineken and making a point of being far too cool to ask for autographs.

Ace.

Exhibit B: (Thanks to my brother Kieron for unearthing this one) a fine bit of TV footage from deep in the BBC2 archives, featuring The Clash belting out a ragged but right version of "Clash City Rockers".

Crikey - check out Simenon's hair! And they're all just so darn...young.

Scary thing, of course, is to see poor old Joe Strummer, God rest him, looking so young and gorgeous, and then to realise how much younger I was when I was lying on the carpet at 17 Castle Lane watching this on the Beeb's "Something Else". Yikes. Great bloody time to be alive though.

Scoble is ruminating on a suitable name for those little widgety plug-inables that knit much of one's Web experience together these days. Here:

"I’ve been struggling to communicate with others what the new Internet ecosystem is made up of and it hit me a few minutes ago.

They are Internet Connected Components ... What do you call them? Web Services doesn’t seem right. Web Parts, no, that’s what Microsoft calls Sharepoint things. JavaScript components? ... I think we need a non-branded name to generically refer to these things. What do you think?"

Tricky. Those things like the Flickr "zeitgeist" bar, the Adsense bar, Feedmap plugins, the odd little weather fairy things you see on LiveJournal blogs... what do you call them?

Lots of suggestions popping up in the comments at Robert's place.

"Blogdets", suggested by one commenter, sounds too much like blodgetts – of the Henry variety. Not a good set of resonances.

"Webplugs" sounds like some kind of internet-connected sex toy. Probably something that already exists on some grotty little adult site somewhere.

Robert's own suggestion, "ICC" (and the variations thereof suggested by other commenters) is kind of accurate, but not terribly memorable, descriptive or specific.

“Thingies”, “Widgets”, “Gadgets” - all too generic.

Ethan Stock offers “rawpotatoes”. The idea is attractive - but technically incorrect. His definition - “Why? Because they’re what you mash up” is a bit off. You might well grate raw potatoes for latkes or rösti, but if you were gunna mash up, you’d have to boil 'em first. OK. Pardon me while I flip my pedant bit back off.

I like “netules” - but that’s already taken, alas.

Plugules? Hmmm... sounds a bit nasty.

Or … ooh! Hang on - as these things are so very webby, and they work at pretty much the highest level of the Internet stack - mebbe we should be calling them “stacklets”?

‘k I’ll shuddup now.

Autumn in Canada takes my breath away.

All my life this has been my favourite time of the year; yet I don't think I'd ever really seen the autumn until we moved to Toronto. Perhaps it's our knowledge of the bitter pale months of monochrome misery ahead that makes the outrageous colour fanfare of a Canadian Fall even more welcome.


We're blessed to live at the top end of Toronto's Glen Stewart ravine and enjoy watching the changes from one week to the next throughout the year.

This last weekend gave us one of those utterly perfect crisp, fresh November days. The photos tell more about the walk we had than my words ever could. Clicking on the shot of Charlie, below, will take you to the full Flickr set.


Uploading these few snaps reminded me of how badly I need a Flickr Pro account. Of course, that's just one more thing to be added to the long, long list of "badly needed" non-necessities that will have to wait until I'm fully re-installed again. Now entering our seventh month of somehow managing to keep body and soul together (and five souls fed and clothed) without regular income. An interesting experience, for sure; not one I'd recommend.

But at least a walk in the woods is always free.

Now that just about everyone in the blogosphere has taken a run at coating Forbes magazine and writer Dan Lyons in rotten tomatoes, and the noise has started to quieten down a tiny bit, along comes Michael Malone, former editor-at-large of the once-great Forbes ASAP technology supplement.

Michael's response to Dan Lyons' now infamous "Attack of the Blogs" piece ("They destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?") is entertaining and balanced.

Key quote:

"I used to run Forbes' technology magazine, Forbes ASAP, which was based in Silicon Valley. ASAP was probably the largest circulation technology-business magazine in the world. I like to think it was because of the good writing and editing, but the truth is that we were respected then (and remembered now) because we understood technology, and we got the big stuff right.

By comparison, when it comes to technology, the mother ship, Forbes magazine, NEVER, EVER gets the big stuff right. It is, in fact, one of the best technology counter-indicators I know. If you want to learn about mutual funds or the annual incomes of dead celebrities, Forbes is the place to go. But when it comes to tech, read Fortune (or, if you can stay awake, Business Week) because if Forbes says something ain't so, by God it certainly is."

Bonus link: Kurt Opsahl's superb parody "Attack of the Printing Press!" over at The Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog.