Been missing Heather Mallick ever since she quit the Globe & Mail last December. Delighted to hear her this morning on CBC radio, and learn that she's started a regular column for the CBC.ca site.

Only one complaint - where's the darn RSS feed?

That headline is from the title of a piece of old-fashioned direct mail (deadtree spam) that dropped through the door earlier today. Shiny brochure advertising a Melcrum Publishing research report of the same name.

CAN$695 + $40 shipping ($40!! Holy inefficient atoms, Batman!).

For the bargain fee of exactly CAN$0.00 (incl. GST), I'm willing to share with you the results of my own five years of deep, wide-ranging research into this subject area.

...sounds a bit like an Ozric Tentacles album title. But I digress...

Who could not love their own blog referral logs? I've muttered about this on the blog in the past. It's a regular source of late night fascination for me.

Every now and then, normally just before heading to bed, I'll check in on Sitemeter and find out where my visitors have been coming from. I have to be careful not to do this too often, as every time I do it sends me off into an extended reverie; a magical mocc-stalking mystery tour, trying to figure out the person at the other end of the search.

Take this inbound hit, for example. In the early hours of the morning, someone reached my blog with a Google search for "Michael O'Connor Clarke email contact". Interesting, but not all that odd.

Yet this wasn't just a regular Google.com or Google.ca search - whoever ran this was using Google.bs. That's Google Bahamas. Cool. I had no idea there even was such a thing.

Digging just a fraction deeper, it's even more interesting. The ISP who served up this connection appears to be based somewhere in the Cote d'Ivoire. Blimey! Who the heck do I know in the Cote d'Ivoire? (And why have they never invited us for a sleepover?)

Also, lots of hits coming from within the Beeb - close to 10% of all traffic to the site in the last 48 hours. Wonder if Euan's been giving his old friends a nudge.

Right now, this blog is the #2 hit on a Google search for "boomshakalaka".

Crivens. How exciting.

But who the hell's gonna buy an adword for "boomshakalaka"?

Other than these guys, of course.

Tempted to do the Mike Kaltschnee thing :-)

Just checked back in on Hugh Macleod to see if he'd cranked out any more of his terrific new cartoons in the five hours since my last post.

Oh no! Something horrible seems to have happened. I'm getting an almost blank page with this terse, nasty message:

Hugh Macleod has a new Motion Computing Tablet PC and is posting some groovy new colour cartoons - and he's on fire! This is some of the best work he's ever done. Loving it.

I want this one as my new blogcard:

Trogdor Lives!

Google's rumoured Page Creator is up. Very interesting. Spent 10 minutes just now futzing with it, and got a test page up with close to zero pain. Rotten product name, though. "Google Page Creator" - how very... literal.

Still; it's basic, and a little frustrating in places, but the darn thing works and does the job required of it pretty well. For people with only a very limited knowledge of page coding, it's an interesting entry-level solution. Pick a pre-built template, add some content, tweak the layout a little, and publish. Bingo.

It's kind of like Blogger, but without the post structure and all the back end stuff. Does raise the question again, though - just when the hell, exactly are the Google guys going to get round to throwing some development resources at Blogger?

Even simple, tiny little things like adding the "remove formatting" button from Gmail to the Blogger editor would make a bunch of people happy. Sadly, Blogger seems to be the forgotten child in the Google portfolio.

Perhaps one of their most widely-used products (behind the search engine, of course) and the last time there was any kind of an upgrade was when, exactly...?

It's really hard to answer that (only semi-rhetorical) question, in fact. Partly because they have a habit of sneaking little things into the product through the back door without anyone noticing. Or - more accurately - without anyone being notified.

But really - how hard would it be to have put some of the Trogdor stuff into Blogger. In fact - why didn't they just start on top of Blogger and push out from there...? Why have two WCM products in parallel?

There's a clue, perhaps, in the one frustating error that kept popping up as I was futzing with Google Page Creator right now.

In 10 brief minutes of use, I got this error nine times:


Now, clearly no one else was actually editing my page at the same time - at least, I really don't think so. But it's curious to note that they would build this error message into the system to trap for such a possibility.

The obvious conclusion (at least to me) is that the next step will be to offer collaborative page editing in a Wiki-ish kinda Writely/Jot/Socialtext sorta thing. Makes sense.

Meanwhile, dirt-simple Web page creation and publishing, with 100MB of hosting all bundled in for free. If you have a low end CMS/hosting package on the market right now, you should look to your laurels.

The splendid David Jones at Thornley Fallis just cruelly sneaked up behind me and bludgeoned me with a soggy meme, the swine.

I have no choice but to respond:

Four Jobs I’ve Had
Janitor in a deli (nasty)
Actor (marvelous, darling – simply marvelous)
Barman in an Indian Restaurant (at 15 years old, 9pm to 1am)
UK Sales Manager (drove a Ford Sierra and all. No mustache though)

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
Withnail & I (“We've gone on holiday by mistake”)
The Godfather (“Leave the gun. Take the canoli”)
The Girl in the Café (“Don't think because I'm not saying much that I wouldn't like to say a lot”)
Return of the King (“You fool. No man can kill me.”)

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
The Daily Show
Um…
Don’t really watch much TV…
The Clangers?

Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation
Lesbos
Kenya
Buzios
Corsica

Four Favorite Dishes
Wild Mushroom Risotto
Leona’s amazing Salmon thing with asparagus and ‘sploding tomatoes
Anything on the menu at Adil’s Balti house in Sparkbrook
Eda mame

Four Websites I Visit Daily
Google News
Memeorandum
Gmail
Pandora

Four Places I’d Rather Be
McDaid’s of Harry Street, Dublin
On a beach with the kids
Pier 39
In the garden

Four bloggers I’m tagging
Chris Locke (who prolly won’t play)
Elke Sisco (who might)
Skot (who’ll think it’s lame. Well… it is.)
Madame Levy (who might sing her response)

Two smugly self-affirming moments of odd warmth.

1. My poor neglected dusty old Flackster blog was just tagged as a part of a Top 10 list of PR blogs. Thanks Kip! "Elitist-bourgeoisie" though. Um...

2. Noticed a pointer in the referral logs from logophile site WordSpy. Seems that an offhand blog remark I made almost three years ago has been picked up as the earliest citation of the word "chiclet" in the sense of "A small image that links to a syndication file for a web site, particularly a blog".

That seems simply wrong, if you ask me. I feel pretty sure I'm not the first person to have used the word in that context online. Be prepared to put money on it, in fact.

A quick Google for "xml chiclet", for example, brings up a boatload of hits, including this 1999 reference from David Weinberger. Come to think of it, David may be the first person I heard using the word to mean a web-button-thing - but I doubt even he'd claim first use.

What-evah. I'm still just as happy to bask, briefly, in the visceral glow of the thing. A Dr. Johnson moment.

[There's a story attached to that cartoon, btw. More on that later...]

So Henry Rollins gets on a flight to Oz. Parks arse. Cracks book. Quietly reads to self (assuming Rollins capable of doing anything quietly).

Punter in neighbouring seat takes exception to the book Henry's reading.

To the book.

NOT to Henry Rollins his-utterly-honking-mental-(but in a good way)-self, mind you: to the book.

Punter reports Rollins to the 5-O.

Rollins now considered a "person of interest" by Oz authorities.

The book? Ahmed Rashid's "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia"

True story.

Nannies, nannies everywhere.

Give me strength.

(Hat tip to Madame Levy for the pointer)

Boo.

Sod it. Charlie sobbed. Bless him. He's such a passionate, loyal, patriotic fan.

Hard luck to the Canadian Men's Hockey Team. Congrats, meanwhile to all the other medalists - notably Cindy Klassen, Kristina Groves and the Women's Hockey Team.

Been a while since I checked in on Chasing Daisy.

Searching for something completely unrelated a moment ago, I stumbled across this old post of hers. I remember chortling over the first time around, but it looks like I completely neglected to link to it. Well worth a re-run:

Question: How many bloggers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answers:

One to change the light bulb and to post the fact that the light bulb has been changed;

14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently;

7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs;

27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs;

41 to correct spelling/grammar errors in the flames about spelling/grammar errors;

6 to argue over whether it’s “lightbulb” or “light bulb”;

Another 6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive;

Two industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is “lamp”;

27 to post URL’s where one can see examples of different light bulbs;

12 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy;

4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ;

44 to ask what is a “FAQ”;

2 to post reasons why the light bulb burning out is the result of a government conspiracy;

4 to say “didn’t we cover this a few months ago?”;

43 to say “do a Google search on light bulbs”;

5 to say “thank you”;

1 lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.

==============

That last one is me, I guess. Some excellent additions in comments to the original post too - check it out.

So I'm sitting in my third Webex session of the day, watching someone else's email and IM traffic occasionally popping up onto their screen.

If you've ever seen one of these things, you'll instantly know what I'm talking about.

Webex is probably the best known of a number of web-conferencing products that let you share your desktop over the Web, for online presentations and meetings. The idea is that you have some documents, slides, or an application you want to show someone, without physically being in the same room, so you all log into this Webex gizmo and it lets a whole group of people look at the same shared PC screen online.

Of course, depending on how you set it up, this can often mean that anyone you're sharing your desktop with can see everything that's happening on your machine.

They can see that link to Grand Theft Auto in your Start menu. They can see your Britney wallpaper. They can see when auto-complete fills in some really ...um... "interesting" search terms as you're typing into your Google toolbar.

And they can see every one of those little popup notifications you get from Outlook or your IM client.

From an audience perspective, this can be highly entertaining - in a peering over your shoulder, sneaky kind of way.

From the presenter's perspective, it can be bloody embarrassing - especially when an IM from "SmoochyPoo" pops up, suggesting some enticing, but physically improbable, act.

Nothing quite that salty happened during the sessions I've been watching today (dammit :-), but I sat there thinking "I've got to blog this - someone needs to remind people to shut down IM and Outlook when they're running a Webex session."

But then I had a better idea. There's a market opportunity in this.

Some enterprising geek somewhere needs to write a little app to drive faux popups during your Webex session, with a bunch of impressive and ego-stroking messages from all sorts of important people.

Imagine something like this suddenly popping up while you're pitching a prospect:

From: webuffett@berkshirehathaway.com
To: you@youraddress.com
Re: stock tip
Dude! You're the best. That thing took off like a Saturn 5. Owe you big time, man.

Or this:

From: VPdick@whitehouse.gov
Re: Project Decoy
HA! It totally worked. Google hits for "Dick Cheney+hunt" = 1.4 mill. Google hits for "Abu Ghraib" = 130K. Only 130K!! That's officially no one in Google terms. We buried that sucker! You ARE the flackmeister. Harry says thanks for the spa trip, btw. See you in Clyde's?

Webex Vanity Popups! Sounds like a job for Gary Turner - we could even license them as a package deal with the fake helipads.

Excellent news this morning from Edelman - fast proving themselves to be the most blog-clueful big agency out there.

Steve Rubel, perhaps the best (and certainly the best known) PR blogger on the planet has jumped ship from funky boutique firm Cooper Katz to become a big swinging SVP at Edelman, working with Rick Murray's team and other Edelman flack-blog luminaries such as Guillaume du Gardier, Phil Gomes and Michael Krempasky.

Further proof that Richard Edelman knows how to swing a mighty cluebat, and a ray of hope for the PR industry as a whole. Also encouraged to see Jeremy Pepper, another genuinely terrific PR blogger, land at my old firm Weber Shandwick.

Some days I can almost see the light.

Congratulations, Steve. And congratulations to Edelman for continuing to pay attention to the blogosphere and, even better, do something interesting in the space.

Just heard the tail end of a mortgage company ad on the radio:

"And now available online 24 hours a day, seven days a week to serve you better, at facelessmortgageco.com"

Yeah, sure beats those other sucky old-school firms that switch off the website when they leave at 5:00

Today's Globe and Mail has a piece by Grant Robertson on CEO Blogs, with a link to me in the sidebar. I spun some further thoughts about this over at the Marqui blog, here.

One point in Grant's piece I need to get on top of - he cites me as posting "...up to several times a day or as little as once a week." That's what I told him - and it's totally true. Well... sometimes.

Afraid it's been rather more like the "once or twice a month" (if you're lucky) in the last little while. Bad, bad blogger. Getting back into it now. Honest.

As I'm sitting here plugged into the third of today's five scheduled conference calls, a coffee-snortingly funny email from the twisted mind of Gary Turner pops up, pointing to this:

The Best PowerPoint Slide. Ever.

Click that link. Trust me. If you've ever had to sit through a meeting where a clumsily built, ineptly presented PowerPoint deck has been used as a proxy for real live actual conversation, you need to see Gary's latest work of inspired office sabotage.

Reminds me a little of this singularly evil idea.