This is cool. My mate Albert has just been TechCrunched - kind of the Web 2.0 version of being Slashdotted.

A brief review up on the TechCrunch site says:

BubbleShare - Best Photo Service Yet?

Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something, because I don’t think I’ve ever used a site’s full functionality without consulting a single FAQ or other instruction...

The only key point the reviewer misses, is BubbleShare's unique audio tagging widget, that lets you add a voice commentary to every photo you're sharing. It's still an awesome little review for Albert and his incredibly hard-working team, though.

Go read the full thing, then start playing with BubbleShare for all your holiday snaps and blog-photo plugins.

For a great example of the kind of things you can do, check out some of Jeneane's BubbleShare albums.

Yay Albert! Congratulations and kudos, dude.

In Vancouver. Dog-tired, fighting a cold, missing the family, but feeling good otherwise - getting stuff done. Having a great time working with our new head of product management, who may just turn out to be one of the best hiring decisions I've ever made.

If I get the time, I still want to post some follow up thoughts from last week's Syndicate conference, although I see Doc (who chaired the gig) has provided a pretty good roundup from other attendees, and some thoughts of his own. Shel Israel's absolutely right to single out Larry Weber's lunchtime keynote as one of the high points of the conference. Reassuring to listen to someone at the very pinnacle of the PR world who so clearly gets it.

Meanwhile, a quick observation on what you might call "connected customer service". This is a relatively small point, but it was interesting to me. YMMV.

In the last week, I posted comments concerning three different vendor companies - Hilton Hotels, Google, and Pandora Media.

One was a complete rant (about how outrageously crappy my experience of the SF Hilton was), the others were more general concerns about Google's Blogger product and the long-term viability of the Pandora music service.

The response from Hilton and Google: zip.

Not that I was even remotely expecting a response of any kind. I don't imagine for a minute anyone there really gives a toss about what some bloke in his PJs is writing about in his low-readership blog. And if I'd wanted an actual response, I would have addressed them more directly by email or in a letter.

But here's an interesting thing: within 12 hours of me posting my concerns about the Pandora business model, the company's CTO, Tom Conrad, had seen my post and responded in the comments with some very reassuring and encouraging remarks.

Now, Tom's running an early-stage, fast growth company with a big interest in the needs of people who live a good part of their life online. So it makes perfectly good sense that he'd be on top of all the latest tools and conversation tracking widgets - groovy thingies like the nifty Blogger Web Comments extension for Firefox.

I'm tickled that he read my note and responded so fast, and I'm pleasantly surprised. But then, when I stop to think about it, I'm kind of surprised that I should be surprised.

What Tom did is simple, easy, and extraordinarily valuable. It should be the norm. I'm now even more in love with the Pandora service than I was before - it's not just an awesome music discovery tool, it's one I feel a personal and direct connection to. Tom's simple action has helped turn me from a happy customer into a raving fan.

On the flipside, I don't think I ever want to stay in a Hilton Hotel again - certainly not in San Francisco. And my frustration with the Blogger UI continues to grow to the point that I'm very likely to switch soon - after closes to five years of continuous, more-or-less satisfied use.

And here's the rub: Google and Hilton, two mighty companies, have access to exactly the same conversation tracking technologies as Tom does. In fact, as their corporate comms budgets are, do doubt, much bigger than Pandora's, I'm sure they have some major reputation monitoring weaponry. It should actually be easier for them to keep tabs on what people are saying about them, but no one at Google or Hilton bothered to respond to my concerns.

Again - my ego is not as far out of check as it sounds. I really don't expect these two ginormous companies to respond to every pissy post from some disgruntled bum with a blog.

But think about that for a second. Ask yourself: why the hell don't they?

Tom's response shows that he cares about individual customers - about the little guy. Thing is - we're all little guys. Little guys staying in hotels, little guys using a web product, little guys searching for new music, little guys shopping for a car...

Is the mighty Hilton's reputation any less valuable and important to them than Pandora's? It's certainly bigger and, they might think, more durable - but it's a reputation built by exactly the same means, by the only means possible. Reputations are built by satisfying customers, one little guy at a time.

As a company's reputation grows, little guy by little guy, the ambient volume of conversations about the company happening out there also grows. Makes it harder to keep on top of what's going on. This is not a hard problem to manage, though.

At the same time as the volume and range of conversation grows, the amount of money and resources the company devotes to staying plugged into those conversations is also, presumably growing.

How much do you think the Hilton guys budget for corporate comms every year? $12 million? More? I wouldn't be surprised. That was about the size of the North American PR budget for one of the big computer companies I used to represent, back when I was a full-time flack.

And how much is your PR budget, Tom? I'd guess at less than $100K. Yet Tom, with his constrained resources and, I'm sure, busy work schedule, is able to stay connected to the little guy conversations that make up his market and are responsible for steadily building his reputation.

The response I got from Tom Conrad reminded me of the way things were with Blogger back when I started using it, when the number of users could be counted in the thousands.

Back then, if you had a problem or a suggestion about the service, you could post up a note and get both a response and, quite often, a fix within a few hours. In the post-Google Blogger world, alas, the responsiveness hasn't scaled.

As companies get bigger, do they inevitably grow deafer? Seems to generally be the rule, but it doesn't have to work that way.

As your company scales, surely you can afford ever bigger ears to listen with, and more mouths and hands with which to respond. Selective deafness becomes a choice.

The Hiltons of the world get to stop listening to the little guy, simply because they can. And the little guys get to vote with their feet and their credit cards - one outrageously-large hotel bill at a time.

In conversation with friends over the last couple of days down in SF, we realised that Pandora's ad-supported free version may be doomed.

This would utterly suck - I've come to depend on Pandora to supply my daily soundtrack, whether I'm working or blogging. If you still haven't tried it yet - I urge you to go there right now and give it a spin.

Think about it for a second, though. Pandora is a music-discovery service that creates a custom radio station for you, tailored to your individual taste, based on research originally done as part of the Music Genome Project.

The truly brilliant part is that it requires, in my experience, only the tiniest amount of training. Give it one song that you really like, and it'll fill your ears for hours with an ever-changing selection of terrific music.

Both the research and the technology behind this are impressive. And the best part? It's completely free.

Free, but doomed.

See - it's a music service. It's the perfect music service to have running in the background while you're doing something else (like blogging, for example). They even have a neat, unobtrusive mini-player you can use.

The point is - it's running in the background. The ads that are supposed to be supporting the free version are ads you're never going to see in normal use. Why would anyone pay for advertising that no one's going to see?

This is probably a bloody good reason to go and buy a $36 subscription for the thing right now, unless someone can let me know what I'm missing. I certainly don't want to see it die...

When the heck are you guys going to give Blogger some damn love over here?

You used to be the guys who got it, ffs. You bought Pyra Labs, back when those other big guys were still figuring out how to spell blog. So when are you going to FIX IT?

And I don't mean adding in a bunch of kludgy Moveable Type tweakiness - that stuff's too geeky-trickery for its own good. Please, don't think you need to go down that path. They may got a lot of higher-end business, but let me tell you: I've used that stuff. A lot. It's hard.

No. I don't think we want you going that far. But how about a decent editor, for a start. With a fast spellchecker (one that understands the word "blog", for example). And how about a few more formatting tools?

Or no - how about just this: one that auto-saves, dammit.

Now where oh where could you ever find one of those...?

Oh yeah - in Gmail. Wonder who owns that...? Maybe they'd let you borrow some of their code.

Don't make me come down there.

Many, many happy returns to little Cameron Turner, three years old today.

First of the original Blogsprogs to arrive, and forever older blog-sister to Ruairi and Sawyer.

Hope you had fun at your party, Cameron. Love from all of us.

(or I never meta level I didn't like).

Doc Searls in his closing roundup at the Syndicate Conference has covered a lot of ground, touching on notions of identity, metaphors for the static web compared to the live web, the idea of value constellations.

It's good, thought-provoking stuff - as Doc's things generally are.

He threw out a rhetorical question at one point, discussing layers of abstraction and the meta-ness of things like the Web. The example he used was something like this (I'm paraphrasing):

The URL = an abstraction of...
The IP address = an abstraction of...
The MAC address.

His question was - what's the level above the URL? What's the next level of meta-ness or conceptual abstraction above the URL.

Struck me that in my case, and for many of us on the "Live Web", one candidate answer is: identity.

This is literally true in the case of my blog. The URL is michaelocc.com. "michaelocc" also tends to be the prefix of many of my email addresses, IM names and ways of identifying myself at various sites and services.

So the layer above the URL is me, in a real sense. If you stand on top of my URL and peer around, you'll get a good look at me.

Does that work as an answer? It feels right...

I'm watching the Microsoft guys do their post-lunch Live.com and Gadgets pitch.

One quick, uncharitable thought: given that these guys produce the most widely-used presentation software on the planet, how is it that Microsoft slide shows suck so hard?

And it's not just the PowerPoint content. Get these guys some presentation training, ffs. The appearance of suckage is emphasized and underscored by how dry and uninspiring the demo dude's presentation style is.

Yawn. I'm afraid I'm tuning out the content because the presentation is just so dull. They've just brought up the homepage of Live.com, projected 15 feet high in 1400 x 1050 resolution. Ugly, unreadable, pointless. No one can even read it.

UPDATE: OK, in their defence, the guy who's on now doing the Gadgets demo, is pretty good. And the demo really does rock - you still can't actually see it, but it sounds really cool.

Well...perhaps hate is a little strong, but they sure seem to be going out of the way to make my visit to San Francisco... interesting.

It started at check in on Monday night. I turned up at the hotel around 9:20pm local - 12:20am by my body clock. Looking up my reservation, the guy at the front desk got that slightly queasy, shifty look and then broke the news - they didn't have a room for me. Oh my reservation was there, alright - they were just all booked out and hadn't kept me a room.

ME: Er...but it says right here "your room is guaranteed for late arrival". I'm late. I'd like my guaranteed room.

HILTON GUY: Sorry, but I'm afraid there was no room preference stated on your reservation. We didn't know if you'd need a king bed, or...

ME: Well you could at least assume I'd prefer a room. There's my stated preference right there. I'd prefer my guaranteed late arrival room.

Sadly, there was no way the guy could just magic up a room out of nothing, but they did find me a corner to sleep in. They parked me in something called a "parlour suite" - basically a big meeting room with a sofa bed.

A bad sofa bed. One with all the springs across the small of your back mounted sideways - just to keep you writhing in cursing discomfort all night.

Yesterday, they promised to get me into a proper room. The helpful and awfully apologetic lady on the front desk cut me a key for a new room - a real one.

As I was running off to a meeting, she said I could transfer my stuff any time I was ready. She even offered to have someone move my stuff for me. Nice, but I thought that would be a bit daft - I only have the one bag.

Trotted off to my meeting, then out for something to eat with the team, getting back to the hotel about 11:30 last night.

I popped up to my "parlour suite" to grab my stuff. Problem: the key wouldn't work. I tried a number of times, with rapidly decreasing patience. Nothing. Not only did I not have a proper room, I was now locked out of my own non-room room.

Back down to the front desk. Nice lady even more apologetic. Cuts me a new key for the old room.

Back up to the 39th floor - in - packed my stuff - out.

Of course, the new room is on a floor served by a different elevator bank, so I schlepp my stuff all the way to the bottom, across, and back up again.

I slide the key into the lock of my new room and throw wide the door, to be greeted by some guy standing there in his socks with an entirely understandable startled look on his face.

"Excuse me?" he squeaks, as I retreat, mortified.

Back down to the front desk. Nice lady now almost implodes in a fit of apologies. I don't care. It's now about 12:15am local time - 3:15am according to my body. Just give me a damn room. Anything. I'll even take the stupid hide-a-bed again.

She says they'll upgrade me to an "executive" room - "it's the highest standard of room we have".

Back up to the 33rd floor with my stuff, and (thank God) this time the room is dark and empty. Tiny but empty.

So at last I have a room, a bed, and a semi-decent night's sleep.

If this is the "highest standard" of room they offer, though, I dread to think what kind of broom cupboard my colleagues must be in. You actually could swing a cat in here, but it would need to be an exceptionally patient cat. On valium. With a hockey helmet.

Whatever. It's a room. And no startled dude in his socks.

Bleh.

This could be very interesting indeed. Very.

I need to noodle on it a little and figure out what I really think about the promise of the Structured Blogging Initiative, but the power and potential of this seems terrific.

As an aside, I really like the way they're handling this announcement. Marc Canter gave a quick overview of the initiative, Salim Ismail spoke briefly about the business case for such a thing - and now they're going through the audience with a radio mike, having a whole bunch of different fans and fellow travellers "represent".

There's a grassroots evangelical feel to the whole thing, and it's just really cool to hear so many ideas about how different companies will use and benefit from this initiative. It's also great to be able to make an announcement like this and have a bunch of companies and individuals already willing to stand up and offer testimonials to support your idea, right on the day of your announcement.

Marc Canter and pals are about to get up on stage here at Syndicate and announce a "Structured Blogging Initiative". Interesting...

More thoughts once I've had a chance to grok. For now, here's the news release.

And here's the website

Still at Syndicate, Larry Weber just threw out a challenge to the audience - one of those "here's a great business model" ideas.

He suggested someone should build a "CMO's Dashboard" to simplify and automate the work a lead marketing guy has to do to keep track of all his campaign threads and analytics information in one simple, consolidated UI.

Hey Larry! We're right there, mate - right there.

Excuse me being a little self-promotional for a moment, but one of the main reasons I joined Marqui is that I recognized how their solutions solve precisely the problems I used to face as a chief marketing guy, trying to juggle a 50-person marketing team and multiple, interwoven campaign threads.

We've got some work to do to complete the whole vision, but we're already very far down the path. It looks lind of like this:

Larry Weber, who I used to work for, is up on stage at the Syndicate conference right now, talking about "The Rise of Unpaid Media" and predicting the accelerating demise of the big media conglomerates unless they hop on the social media train.

Entertaining to note that, right as he's talking, Time Inc. has put out news that they're laying off some of their most senior, long-serving publishing executives.

Included in the end-of-year axe job are Jack Haire, EVP in charge of corporate advertising sales, Richard Atkinson, former EVP of the news and information group, and Eileen Naughton, president of Time magazine.

Ouch. A bunch of suddenly unpaid media right there.

AdAge has the backstory on the fluffy "corporate reorg" release (registration required).

I'm in the Hilton in SF for the first day of the Syndicate conference. Marqui are sponsoring, and I'm here to catch up with some old friends and get plugged deeper into some of the new stuff in content syndication and online marketing trends.

Sadly, I misssed Doc Searls' keynote this morning - on the phone with a potential client and then catching up with the boss (who's also speaking a little later this morning).

Still haven't caught up on my blogging from last week's conference. Must do that later today, if possible. Right now, listening to IBM's Mike Moran.

More later.

Jeneane was kicking my shins on the Skype-o-phone earlier today, about my habit of giving stuff away - consulting, writing and editing stuff for others, pimping friends into cool jobs, helping out with the Rotman MBA program, doing speaking gigs for the fun of it.

We all do it. Some of us have figured out how to get paid for it. Some of us just feel uncomfortable asking - even though we recognize the value of the service we provide. (I once did a deal with David Weinberger where he did some consulting for the software company I was with in return for a set of Beethoven CDs - he and I were both just too uncomfortable negotiating a daily rate or payment terms).

Interesting to find Hugh McLeod thinking along similar lines in one of his posts today, riffing off Jeff Jarvis' understandable outrage at being asked to pay to attend a conference at which he's been asked to speak.

Hugh says:

"...I figure every time I go to one of these things, it'll lead to something else down the line- a paid gig, an English Cut sale, whatever. The rule in meatspace is no different from the rule in cyberspace: Blogs are a good way to make things happen indirectly.

"I like Adriana's idea that all long-term personal value comes from one's network. So the priority should be building that; and the bill-paying mechanisms will follow in time."

What he said.

The closing paper at this week's Canadian Institute conference, "Leveraging Blogs for Corporate Communications" was presented by Howard Levitt from one of Canada's premier law firms, Lang Michener.

As far as I know, Canada hasn't had an example of someone getting "Dooced" yet (getting fired because of your blog) - but it could still happen.

Howard, an acknowledged expert on Canadian employment law (and an occasional blogger) gave an excellent overview of current law as it applies to bloggers and their employers, and some guidelines for creating "acceptable blogging" policies.

Interesting stuff. Interesting enough, I thought, that it would be worth getting out to a wider audience. So with Howard's kind permission, I've created a PDF version of his paper, which you can download and read here.

Let me know what you think.

Lots of catching up to do.

I should post some further reports from this week's Canadian Institute conference, and I haven't even mentioned the evening event I had a lot of fun chairing for the Canadian Public Relations Society the previous week, with Mark Evans, Jack Kapica, Rick Segal, John Oxley, and Geoffrey Rockwell.

And then there's Jeneane's new gig - working with my super-talented buddy Albert Lai and his friends at Bubbleshare. Yay! Bubbleshare rocks. Hands down, the easiest way to share photos and your own mini-voiceovers about them. I've already been using it to let family back in the UK and Ireland catch up with shots of the kids. No registration, no fee, and so simple to use.

Oh, and I need to blog about Charlie's soccer team. I only just finished jumping with joy a few weeks ago when he was picked for the school team. As if that wasn't thrilling enough, they just won their first tournament! The Toronto Catholic Schools Athletic Association Primary Soccer tournament. Way to go Charlie!

Looooots of catching up to do. Not too much time. New job very busy - all good, but very busy.

More on the CI conference soon. At this rate, I'll probably still be blogging my notes on this week's conference while I'm in San Francisco for Syndicate next week. Sheesh.

Just back from dinner after chairing day one of the Canadian Institute's "Leveraging Blogs for Corporate Communications" conference.

Really interesting day. Some terrific presentations, panel discussions and Q&A sessions.

Lots to blog when time permits - great stuff from Mitch Joel, Mark Evans, Jack Kapica, Colin McKay, Tim Shore, Chanchal Bhattacharya (from York U's Political Science Dept.), Diane Patell-Pernari (great case study about Canada Post's internal CEO blog), and many more.

Just too darn tired to blog more now, but I'll post my notes tomorrow if I have time.

So as I'm crashed out in front of the TV news, summoning the energy to drag myself up to bed, Sausage turns to me with a smile and says, "Well while you were mingling with bloggers, I've been reading about bloooooooooooooogs ".

Blank look on my face. She heads off upstairs and brings back the book she was reading with our kids at bedtime tonight. This one:

Well somehow I've never noticed this, but right there on page 12, Seuss has these words:

Sometimes, it's just bloody good to be proved wrong.

The party leader I thought would be the long shot candidate when I called odds on who would start a campaign blog first, has surprised me and pleased his supporters by getting out ahead of the competition.

Ladies and gentleman, the first official party leader to launch a campaign blog for the 2006 Canadian Federal Election is Gilles Duceppe.

"Fortunately, the Bloc is here", as their campaign slogan puts it. Who woulda thunk it?

Now, a note to any Tory fans reading. Yes, your party does indeed have a Campaign Blog prominently linked from your home page. And yes, your blog was up before the Bloc's. But it doesn't win the race in my book for three main reasons.

First, it's not a party leader blog. That's specifically what I was looking for. In fact - it's impossible to glean who the author of the blog posts is at all. Although the blogger writes in the first person ("Over the next several weeks, I will attempt to provide an "inside" look at Stephen Harper's national tour..."), nowhere are we told who the anonymous camp follower is, or what their relationship to Mr. Harper might be.

Second, it's not a blog. No permalinks, no comments, no trackbacks, no RSS, no links to external sites - nothing.

Listen - I don't want to wade into the mud of the "what defines a blog" debate again, but really - if your site is just a reverse-chronological series of articles, without:

i. the clear, unedited, personal voice of a real human being, and;
ii. a means of conversation and interaction (comments, trackbacks, etc.);

... then you can call it whatever the hell you want, but it sure ain't a blog.

Le Blogue de Gilles Duceppe may only have one post so far, but at least it's signed by M. Duceppe himself (entirely likely it was actually written by one of his flacks, of course), and it has comments and a permalink.

And finally, the third reason I can't award first place to the Tories is that, quite simply, their campaign blog is bollocks.

Let's look at a sample from the top of the latest post to illustrate my point. The big campaign news yesterday was the Conservative's announcement that they plan to cut Canada's hated Goods & Services Tax by 2%, if elected. So what pithy, back-story insights does the blogger with special access to the Harper strategy team offer us? Here:

"Stephen HarperÂ?s promise to reduce the GST to 5% makes a lot of sense to me."

Thanks for the epiphany there, bud. If you're going to have a blog to help build a dialogue with voters, you've got to do something more than just recycle the same cant we already get in your press releases.

So, the Liberals have a kinda blog, of sorts. No RSS and no comments, but it's entertaining.

The Tories have something called a blog, but it isn't.

The Bloc have something that might well become an actual blog, but it needs a little help (and again, an RSS feed, dammit). UPDATE: In fairness, btw, it's worth noting that the whole of the Bloc's main website is arranged to be awfully blog-like. A stream of posts down the middle, with comments, permalinks and other goodies on each. That's pretty cool. It's a natural and smart way to run a constantly updated website.

The NDP, meanwhile, haven't even presumed to call their thingy a blog - but they do have a thingy, and it's something approximating what the others offer. Their "Rapid Response" page is certainly blog-like, and could be great if they'd open it up for dialogue (and add, you guessed it, an RS-bloody-S feed).

On reflection, then, maybe nobody wins. The race is still open.

Bonus link: "The good, the ugly and the stupid." The Globe and Mail critiques the party websites.

The Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford, travelling on the Conservative Party campaign plane, draws attention to the fact that the plane's call letters are "C-GITT".

Christie suspects it's a Liberal plot, the letters being so close to C-GRIT ("Grits" is used as neutral shorthand for the Liberal party in Canada; much as Conservatives, everywhere, are labelled "Tory").

I agree it might be a plot, but for different reasons. Growing up just outside Birmingham, England, I learned to relish the explosive dismissiveness of "git" as a mild but pointed expletive; typically used in expressions such as "you lazy git" or "useless git".

My paperback Oxford Dictionary defines "git" as "a silly or contemptible person".

How thoughtful of Transport Canada to assign such a descriptive call sign to Mr. Harper's plane.

As an aside, I'm afraid that the Globe's online version continues to be a triumph of cluelessness.

I've been a subscriber to the print edition for years, so I was able to enjoy Christie's column at the breakfast table this morning.

When I try to access the same column at globeandmail.com, however, I'm told "The page you requested is only available to INSIDER Edition subscribers".

Even when logged in as a registered "user" of the site, I'm being asked to pay $6.95 a month to read the exact same content I've already paid to read in print

"That's $8 less the regular subscription price of $14.95!" the site tells me. Woo bloody hoo.

Catching up with my friend David Akin's new Canadian Election blog for CTV News. Good stuff - great to see David blogging again.

David points to what might be the first (and is certainly guaranteed to remain the funniest) of the official political party blogs to go up. It's not a party leader blog, so the betting is still open, but...

Hosted at Liberal.ca, the Prime Minister's chief speechwriter, Scott Feschuk, is running a Blackberry-driven campaign blog.

Feschuk's last gig was as the TV critic for the National Post. His columns alone were well worth the cover price for the paper. And if his first few posts are anything to go by, his campaign blog is going to be at least as irreverent, deranged, and coffee-sneezingly funny as his old TV columns were.

Check this out. Remember - what you're about to read is excerpted from an official campaign blog hosted by the ruling political party of Canada:

These blogs are great because they allow people with special insight to instantly convey their astute observations and sage opinions to a knowledge-starved world. Or so I'm told. Personally, I'm mostly going to use this one to talk about the lost thespian promise of Erik Estrada. Because really, someone ought to. The man had screen charisma the way Marlon Brando had neck fat.

I may also touch on this whole "who should run the country" deal we've got going on here in Canada.

Last night, the opposition voted non-confidence in the government and forced an election campaign that will take place over the holiday season. This means two things: 1) the prime minister will this morning be visitng the Governor-General to ask her (very nicely, possibly while eating a crumpet) to dissolve the 38th Parliament. And 2) millions of innocent Canadian children will be confronted with the onerous task of staring into the television this Christmas season and trying to tell Stephen Harper from the Grinch.

Remember, kids: one is grumpy and has a heart two sizes too small. And the other one's the Grinch.

Travelling as part of what is officially called the Leader's Tour (and what is colloquially known among staffers as That Plane That Hardly Ever Seems To Land in Alberta for Some Reason), I will be filing typo-ridden, thumb-pecked dispatches on my Blackberry over the course of the campaign.

Remember: views expressed on this blog do not necessarily represent the policies or beliefs of Paul Martin. Except when I write about the hypnotic musical stylings of Nana Mouskouri. We're totally in sync on that.

Only two small gripes - no comments, and no RSS feed. Apart from that, it almost makes me want to vote Liberal. Almost.