Ryan Anderson has a similar observation to the point I was struggling to make in my follow up post to Tuesday's Social Media & PR meetup:

"I go to a lot of events where I don’t know anyone, but I’ve always found that events with bloggers who I’ve “met” through comments or just reading are always much easier... We are a group of like-minded individuals, who are accepting of each other by virtue of a membership to a group, which we earned through a ritual of writing and reflecting and of sharing our insights with other bloggers."

He's right on the money with this. At any gathering of bloggers I've attended, trust and mutual respect are the default state.

As Ryan notes, there is certainly something of a cultish tone to these thoughts - with many bloggers acting as true believers and keepers of the Cluetrain flame. There's a difficult, clique-ish undertone in there -- a concern that has been raised in the past. Maybe it is a bit like a religious congregation, as Ryan suggests.

Perhaps, though, our natural willing acceptance and instant sense of connection with fellow bloggers is inspired as much by what we have collectively rejected as by what we all agree upon.

Petty political oneupmanship, secrecy, conscious self-promotion, rigid adherence to sanitized and saccharine corporate messages: none of these old behaviours sit well on the shoulders of people who choose to blog with integrity - even those people whose job it is to scrub and prep those same corporate messages.

Sure, there are a lot of people and corporations who've chosen to hop on the blogwagon for self-serving reasons, but the clearest benefits of blogging accrue to those who approach it with absolute openness and authenticity.

This is one of the reasons why fellow bloggers, meeting for the first time, can make such strong and easy connections with one another. Once you've opened up some central part of who you really are online, it's a great deal easier to find that immediate kinship with other people engaged in doing the same kind of thing.

"When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to."

Ack. I'm making it sound like an AA meeting or some kind of Born Again thing, I know. Not surprising, perhaps, given the tone set by the Cluetrain's channelling of Martin Luther's original 95 Theses. As Luther was rejecting the "business as usual" of the Catholic church, so the Cluetrain rejected the "business as usual" of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

The thing is: this stuff works. Tuesday night's meeting was a case in point: a room full of people from fiercely competitive PR agencies, yet at no time did it feel like anything other than
a gathering of friends.

I was consulting with a company in the commercial lending space a few months ago. They'd started to blog, and had seen a handful of warm and friendly comments coming in from their friends in the business - but inbound traffic wasn't really picking up the way they'd hoped. So we had a conversation about the importance of outbound linking - un-selfishly directing attention away from oneself as a means of providing value to your readers. The more outbound links they added to their blog posts, the more their Googlejuice grew.

This is one of the paradoxical things that makes blogging so different from typical corporate online marketing efforts. The standard corporate website is all about pointing inward at the wonderful products, solutions, services, and successes of the company concerned.

Successful, highly-respected blogs, by contrast, thrive by the simple act of pointing outward, at things other than themselves.

Think about Boing Boing - consistently ranked within the top three highest-traffic and most popular blogs worldwide. And what does it do? Point away from itself to "wonderful things" elsewhere. Only rarely do the Boing Boing contributors post about their own extra curricular interests and activities.

It's karma, baby. Karma. You reap what you sow.

No, not our Charlie - the cartoon cat Charley, from the British government's brilliant public information films of the 60s and 70s. Remember him?

I'd forgotten just how splendid these little cautionary tales were - they're seared into the collective consciousness of generations of TV watchers in the UK. Just the phrase "Charley says" can still raise a nodding chortle on the phone with Mum.

Hat tip to Mark and April at 2plus2is4 for the pointer to this wonderful collection of classic clips from the UK National Archives.

A bunch of the "Charley says" films are there, plus "Joe & Petunia" ("that's what they call 'em, you know - sailing dingeys"), Dave Prowse's "Green Cross Code Man" (yes, that Dave Prowse), and even Jimmy Hill giving it loads in: "Think once. Think twice. Think BIKE".

I even found out that Charley was voiced (miaowed?) by the late Kenny Everett. Crikey.

In a couple of conversations at last night's Third Tuesday event, I mentioned that I'd been playing around with a tool from online marketing specialists Marketleap. If you want a quick and dirty way to demonstrate the power of blogging, their Link Popularity Check is a neat little tool. I'll let them describe what it does:

Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website's online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website.

Marketleap has designed this link popularity tool to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players.

The groovy thing about this widget is the way it lets you run comparison rankings for a handful of different sites, and benchmark the results against a cross-section of sites in the same general industry sector.

I was, I'll confess, a bit puffed-up and smug last night about the seconds of fun I've been having with this thing - comparing link popularity for my blog against the main websites of a few of my erstwhile employers. Marketleap ranks sites into a number of categories, based on the amount of Googlejuice (and other search engine links) each site has. Here's the tier system they use:

This here blog of mine shows up at the "Contender" level. It would be even more churlish and self-satisfied of me to point out specifically who I was comparing myself with, but three of my former employers' sites scarcely manage to creep into the "Average Presence" tier.OK, I know this is a pretty narrow and unsophisticated view of online effectiveness, but the point is (FWIW) the companies with which I've been comparing my stats are, one would think, far more interested in such things as web traffic, "awareness and overall visibility" than I need to be.

Yet simply as a function of running this blog for five straight years - and thanks to the very nature of the way in which blogs work - means that I score a higher "link popularity" rank than the three sizeable public companies I chose for my test report.

Markets are conversations. Blogs create good conversations. Ergo: blogging is good for online marketers.

Try it yourself. Next time you're asked in to explain to BigCo bosses why they really ought to be blogging - run some comparative reports for them. Try pitting Scoble against the main Microsoft site, or Schwartz against Sun, Bob Lutz vs. GM. The individual bloggers may not always beat their current or former employers, but they all give them a good run for the money.

Tags: thirdtuesday, marketleap, googlejuice

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That headline is from a comment Shel Israel made in conversation with Mark Evans at last night's absolutely outstanding "Third Tuesday" Social Media and PR Meetup, organized by Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis, Joscelyn Smith, Chris Clarke, David Jones, Ed Lee, and friends.

The "Blogging is" point came when Shel was talking about the tipping point for companies trying to figure out what, if anything, they really ought to be doing with blogging. He used a handful of examples from the book he co-wrote with Robert Scoble, Naked Conversations, to illustrate the fact that we're already there - critical mass was achieved some considerable time ago. We already know that blogging can get people hired, get them fired, move the markets, shift perceptions, push products, out idiots, subvert authority, bolster credibility, and drive Googlejuice like you would not believe. If your company isn't already doing something about the blogosphere - what the hell are you waiting for? If nothing else, as Shel pointed out, you should at least be listening.

The other thing last night's event confirmed for me was the feeling I've had for a long time that bloggers are, in general, just wonderful, genuinely interesting people to hang out with. OK, so I'm coming over all hippy drippy, I know - but I can't help it.

Sitting in the crowd at last night's gig, and chatting to all sorts of different people afterwards, just felt so comfortable; so right. I met people I've only previously encountered through their blogs - and instantly felt the kind of easy connection you usually only experience when getting together with old friends. You could dismiss it as a shallow read, perhaps, but several times throughout the night I got that "Hey - I know you, I read your blog" feeling.

Shel made a similar point rather better, when he talked about his upcoming world tour with Rick Segal. Rick and Shel are planning to bounce around the globe in the coming months, in part to help Shel with research for his next book, Global Neighborhoods. Shel remarked that many of the people he expects to meet in his travels are already like old friends to him - people he's only ever met online, by email, or through his blog.

I can't remember the exact words Shel used, but I know exactly what he meant. Geography and the limitations of the physical social world are becoming less relevant. There's another good reason why this stuff is called "social media", I guess.

It was interesting that this part of the discussion between Shel and Mark seemed to naturally lead them into observations on the topic of virtual worlds, with Shel commenting on Second Life: "Some people express themselves better in this kind of environment." - a thought that reminded me (yet again) of something David Weinberger wrote in Small Pieces Loosely Joined:

"...we are rewriting ourselves on the Web, hearing voices we're surprised to find coming from us, saying things we might not have expected. We're meeting people we would never have dreamed of encountering. More important, we're meeting new aspects of ourselves. We're finding out that we can be sappier, more caustic, less patient, more forgiving, angrier, funnier, more driven, less demanding, sexier, and more prudish--sometimes within a single ten-minute stretch online. We're falling into email relationships that, stretching themselves over years, imperceptibly deepen, like furrows worn into a stone hallway by the traffic of slippers. We're falling into groups that sometimes feel like parties and sometimes feel like wars. We're getting to know many more people in many more associations than the physics of the real world permits, and these molecules, no longer bound by the solid earth, have gained both the randomness and the freedom of the air-borne. Even our notion of a self as a continuous body moving through a continuous map of space and time is beginning to seem wrong on the Web."

I find myself coming back to those words, over and over again. It's more than four years since I first read that book, yet the words seem more relevant and resonant every day. Re-reading them now, through the lens of Shel's comments and my own experience of Second Life, I can almost hear the metaverse calling me home.

Jeez. I guess something must have completely flipped my geek bit there. *cough* Where was I...?

Kudos, once again, to Joe Thornley and his team for bringing Shel up here, gathering such a terrific group of people for this inaugural Third Tuesday, and for setting me thinking. They've even chosen to host these things at a pub that serves one of the cleanest pints of Guinness in the city. Outstanding. Can't wait for October's session.

Tags: thirdtuesday, shel israel, thornley fallis, small pieces loosely joined, global neighborhoods

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That's pretty much all I wanted to ask, to be honest. Why, Terry? Why limit your audience to just the loyal punters who can arrange to be close enough to a radio a couple of times a week?

If you're a CBC listener, you'll know what I'm on about. Or maybe you won't. Guess I should explain...

Terry O'Reilly is a Canadian marketing treasure - one of the top advertising guys in the country and possibly the single best writer of radio spots we have. He also created and presented an absolutely outstanding series for CBC Radio One last year - "O'Reilly on Advertising" - essential listening for anyone interested in the impact of advertising on our culture.

So I was delighted to discover that Terry has a new CBC show - "Terry O'Reilly and the Age of Persuasion", running twice a week on CBC One: Thursdays at 11:30am and Saturdays at 4:05pm. Great news.

The blurb on Terry's production company's site describes the show as exploring "the ways advertising and marketing permeate every aspect of 21st century life, from its effect on the way we act, dress and speak, to its influence on our children, to the unstoppable explosion of Ad Clutter".

I caught the last 5 minutes of last Saturday's show (enough to hear Terry talking about the blogosphere as the new focus group), and it sounded just as good as his first series. But dammit, Terry - where's the podcast?

I've missed all but one bite-sized chunk of the first two episodes, and probably won't get to hear too much of the rest, given the times the show airs. The amount of information on the CBC website about Terry's new show is, frankly, pathetic. And for the life of me, I can't find any option to listen to a streaming version of the show online.

Terry's own company, Pirate Radio & Television, has a lovely Flash-based site, but again: sod all info about the actual radio program.

Give us a podcast, Terry. Please?

UPDATE: Here's some news from Terry and Co. on why it's taking them so long to get the podcast going. It's more complex than most, and totally understandable. Keeping fingers crossed...

Tags: Terry O'Reilly, CBC, podcast

For those of you who've already collected mint first editions of the books, got the special edition boxed set of the DVDs, got your Gandalf cloak hanging in the wardrobe, your replica Sting or Glamdring mounted on the wall, and (but of course) the 18ct gold limited edition officially licensed One Ring on a chain around your neck, perhaps you'd be interested in a little real estate deal to help you complete your obsession.

The Shire, a new subdivision currently being developed in Bend, Oregon, is a gated community of really rather appealing homes directly inspired by the works of Tolkein - complete with goofy little "Hobbit dwellings" for your small folk to play in.

What a complete hoot. It's curiously encouraging to find people pouring money into something so utterly, utterly mental.


Thanks to Chasing Daisy for the link.

Bwahahah ahahah aahhaahhhh hahhhah ahahaha...

(Tip o' the hat to Gordon McNeill for the link. Not just any hat, though. This hat.)

Happy to report, the free wifi in the downtown core is still kicking butt. Had two occasions to use it today, and was impressed and happy both times.

And get this: on the way home this afternoon, sitting at the streetcar stop at Queen and Bay (I love the streetcar!), I was banging off an email message to a business colleague when the streetcar pulled up.

I jumped onto the 'car and - thinking "it'll never work" continued typing. Three blocks later, I hit the Send key, and the email flew off into the ether without a hiccup. The connection held strong for another few stops, then died.

Wishing now that I'd taken the opportunity to blog live from the 502 streetcar :-)

I'm fully aware of the inherent irony of this observation, coming from a white Irish catholic middle-class boy, but the thought struck me on the streetcar this afternoon and I couldn't not blog it.

Compare: white bread vs. nutritious multigrain.

You hafta click the links for it to make any sense, natch.

Bogus comparison and rather a forced point, perhaps; but as I said: cogito ergo blogito.

I shouldn't laugh so hard, but I can't help it.

On Skype with Chris Locke and Jeneane, and George in the background tells us that Nigeria has its own space program. Cool.

Chris's comment: "Yeah, we have a space program. Here - stand in this space... You're in the program!"

*snort*

A dozen or so people dialed into PhoneCon 2.0 Fall right now - talking about all sorts of absolutely bugger all.

Plus, a live simultaneous chat going on here and even a Flickr photo pool.

If you're not there, you're totally somewhere else.

Where one door closes, another always opens...

Stepping into the void just created by the estimable Esther's decision to call it quits with PC Forum (after twenty-five stellar years), comes the latest and soon-to-be greatest new event on the ...um... horizon: PhoneCon 2.0 Fall


After quite literally minutes of intensive event planning, logistics, schedule-juggling, and cycling lessons, the lead instigator and conference chair, Jeneane Sessum, has pulled together an unprecedented meeting of mindless.

Starting tomorrow morning (08:30 eastern time) at a phone or Skype headset near you, up to 96 members of that completely non-elite, not-even-remotely-shadowy group who make up the intriguingly nutty marzipan layer just below the sticky, scarily white icing on the top of the Web 2.0 cake, will gather together to work through the following packed and stimulating agenda:

08:30 Introductions.
Later: Conclusions.

*phew*

I'm exhausted already just thinking about it.

See: Jeneane and a number of like-minded geniuses (hmmm... can/should geniuses ever really be described as "like-minded"?) figured out that this freeconferencecall.com thingy lets you pull together calls for up to 96 people, of up to six hours long - and they'll even record the call for you, so you can archive it, transcribe it, podcast it, whatever.

Naturally, presented with such an opportunity, how could anyone not want to organize an insta-conference?

This could be big. It could be completely bonkers. It could be ...anything we want it to be.

"And gentlemen in England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,"

...although there's really no need for them to. With a Skype account, and those awfully nice chaps offering free calls to any number in the US or Canada until the end of the year, you can probably even get into PhoneCon from the rest of the known universe without paying a cent, penny, pfennig, franc, schilling, whatever.

The details:

1. Charge your battery
2. Dial in after 8:30 a.m. and before 2:30 p.m eastern time.

+1 (605) 772-3200
Participant Access Code: 619136#

3. See what happens.

Be there, or be a cotton bud.



BTW - in case you think I'm just babbling like a loon here - this thing really is happening. As Macheath would say: think about it. Why wouldn't you want to dial into a call where you might get to listen to Chris Locke, Frank Paynter, Stavros the Wonderchicken, Jory Des Jardins, Halley Suitt, Stowe Boyd, and a host of others going off on one for no other reason than that we can? Who knows - maybe even Esther will pop in.

(Bonus commemorative unlimited edition PhoneCon 2.0 plaque to anyone who joins the call and can explain why "Be there, or be a cotton bud" is not actually quite so stupid as it sounds...)

I'm digging further and deeper into Second Life these days. As this virtual world continues to expand and mature, it's fascinating to watch the number of cross-overs happening between the real and the virtual business worlds.

I'm very far from being the first to comment on this, of course.

Millions of pixels, gallons of ink have already been dedicated to the stories about real world businesses setting up shop within Second Life's virtual economy - big companies such as American Apparel, Telus, Starwood Hotels, 20th Century Fox, even an accounting firm - Baltimore's KAWG&F.

For a PR guy's perspective, what KAWG&F are doing is particularly intriguing. It's remarkable to read comments from the COO of an almost 40-year old accounting firm, jumping enthusiastically into an online virtual world dismissed by many as "just a game". From the CNet story:

"The idea is that as I began to learn more about 'Second Life' and saw how the business community had established itself, it will undoubtedly just continue to grow, and the community is unserved," (Arlene) Ciroula said. "No one is serving this community with accounting, business consulting, strategic planning or budget forecasting services."

Where the real world retail businesses go, the consultants and service providers naturally follow. The companies already building a presence within Second Life are clearly innovative marketers, willing to experiment and take some risks with their exploration of this world - so it makes perfectly good sense for marketing and PR consulting firms to be right in their alongside them.

Text 100 are the best known example here, having set up virtual shop in-world about a month ago. A good-sized handful of PR blogosphere (flackosphere?) luminaries have also been chewing on the topic for a while - notably Shel Holtz and Steve Rubel (that last link goes to a Beet.tv video interview with Rubel, talking about media relations within SL, btw).

Meanwhile, as I've been kicking around in there, it seems the lines between my own virtual and real interests have been blurring somewhat. I've started providing some Second Life promotional and publicity assistance to an in-world company with deep roots in the first life.

There's a new radio broadcaster - Crystal Clear Communications - getting set to launch in SL within the next weeks - with ten high-quality streaming radio stations coming online before the end of the year; featuring real world production values, professional DJs, actual news at the top of the hour (SL world news, of course), and access to all the new releases at the same time as the FM stations in the meatspace.

I'm now their Head of Promotions - working to get the word out, both in-world and out. Stay tuned for more on this in the weeks ahead.

It's entirely possible - normal, even - to read more than one book at the same time. My Dad's done this for years. I do it. Charlie, God bless him, who's still only 9 years old, typically has four or five books on the go at once.

It's not possible - for me, at least - to write more than one blog post at the same time.

There's a post half-written, sitting in the drafts folder, nagging at me to be finished. I was in the middle of writing it yesterday morning when I got Amanda's email about the death of Strumpette. By the time I'd posted a quick note about that news, I had to dive in to some work-type work, and now I can't finish the first post I'd started, dammit. I've lost the plot. Quite literally.

Stop sniggering.

Excuse me for a moment, I seem to have come over all ASCII

.::*.+:+:::+:.:..+:+.:
.:.*.+.+:+###++..+:+::
,:+*.+::@#@@@##*:::+.:
.++*:+##@@@@@@@#:+:+.:
::+*:*@@@@@**+*@:+:+::
+:+*:@@@**+::::#*+:+::
+:+++#@:.:::::::#::+:+
+:+::#*..:::::++*:.+:+
:.:..**..::++###*:,+.:
..+,,:#::+@#+@##+:,+,,
::::::*:@@@@++*+::..:,
+++:::++##@*::++::*::.
::::::*+.::+:+*+*:#@*+
,,,,,,,+:::+:+++*+@@@:
,,,,,,**::++++*+++@@@@
,,,,,+#@#+++++*+:+@@@@
,,,,,*#@@@+++++++*@@@@
+++++##@@@+**+****@@@#
,.++*##@W#@+******@@@@
:+++*#@@W##++*****#@@@
++**##@@W@##+++++**@@@
*****#@@W@##*++++*#@@@

Tee hee. I'm old enough to remember walking the corridors at a big British car company (way back when England had a motor industry - that dates me, for sure), seeing the tacked up pages of greenbar paper, daisy-wheel printed with ASCII representations of film stars, cartoons, and even terrible pr0n.

Now you too can have your own photo or other image file rendered into ASCII art. Clicky.

[UPDATE: Friend of mine tells me he can't figure out that picture above. Squint, for goodness sake. Feh. Kids these days.]

Amanda's end is in sight, alas.

After a roller-coaster six months in the PR blogosphere, the estimable Ms. Chapel has hung up the closed sign on the Strumpette blog, moving on to greater things elsewhere. Discussion in the Strumpette Forum will continue, I hope.

Farewell for now, Amanda. See you on the flip side.

With the weather starting to cool, the conference, tradeshow, and general schmoozing season is warming up again. Looking ahead into my calendar, I've already got three
key events locked in for the coming months. Quick plug for those here:

1. New Media for Communications: November 27-30, Toronto

This is the first of two Canadian Institute gigs I'm involved in this year. I co-chaired their "Leveraging Blogs for Corporate Communications" event last December, and - I guess - managed not to make a complete pratt of myself, as they've asked me back.

This year, I'm co-chairing with the almost criminally charming David Jones, late of Thornley Fallis, now installed at Fleishman-Hillard. Should be a hoot.

2. Media Relations West: December 6-7, Calgary

Trust me: I did not have sexual relations with that Canadian Institute. And yet they've seen fit to invite me to another of their gigs - this time to speak on the topic of "Building a Media Relations-savvy Website: Best Practices and Procedures".

Calgary in December. Yippee!

3. First up, before either of these more formal affairs, is a local event that promises to be the inaugural schmoozefest of the year for the Toronto flack-o-sphere.

Again, thanks to the tireless efforts of David Jones, his erstwhile confreres at Thornley Fallis (Terry Fallis, Joe Thornley, and Chris Clarke), aided and abetted by Fleishman's Ed Lee - the Third Tuesday Social Media and PR Meetup launches in Toronto on September 26 at 6:00PM.

They've got 43 eager flacks (including me) signed up already, and the brilliant and hilarious Shel Israel popping in for a pint. Marvelous. Had the pleasure of running a webinar with Shel a few months ago. I'm not sure how much value the audience got out of it, but the two of use were having a bloody great time, cracking each other up on the phone.

If you're coming to one or other of these events, come and say hello. If you're not already signed up - what the hell are you waiting for?

The Guardian Angels are taking a run at Canada again.

Their Canadian Director, Lou Hoffer, has been doing a good job of trotting around the radio stations and print media, getting the word out about their recruitment drives going on in Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver. Hoffer also has his work cut out, trying to raise awareness of their desperate need for funding in Canada.

Unfortunately, negative impressions of the Angels' operations still prevail in many ways. People fear and distrust what they don't fully understand; sometimes with bizarre results. Occasionally, the issue is simply one of branding.

Hearing Hoffer interviewed on the radio the other afternoon reminded me of a genuinely weird conversation with a Vancouver cab driver a month or so ago, when Angels' founder Curtis Sliwa was in that city, promoting the cause.

On the trip out to Vancouver airport, with the radio playing quietly in the background, my cabbie turned to me and started in on what became a lengthy, angry rant. From memory, his thesis ran something like this:

"My taxes pay for the police to wipe out all these bastard Hell's Angels. We've just started getting them under control - they shot eight of them outside Toronto, you know - good for them!"

Well, actually, not true - the eight bikers killed in Shedden, Ontario, were linked to the Bandidos gang; and the theory seems to be that they were murdered by their own colleagues.

But he was just getting warmed up:

"So we just spent all these millions to kick the Angels out and get control in Vancouver and Toronto - and now there's another load of the bastards trying to get back in."

Only half-listening, I think I volunteered something like: "Really...?"

He rattled on:

"Yeah - these guys are serious. I don't know why they even let them on the air. They've been all over the radio this morning - Angels this, Angels that. Why don't they just round them all up, send 'em back to the States?"

Me: "Er... are you talking about the Guardian Angels?"

"They're all murdering, druggy bastards"

Me: "Oh - er... they're not a biker gang. They're a volunteer security force - you know, the red berets, trained do-gooders - kind of vigilantes, but not in a bad way..."

"Bastards - lock them all up. Why let them speak on the radio? It's stupid. Stupid."

Me: "No, no - these are the good guys - really"

At about this point, the news came on the radio, prompting my driver to crank it up. Sure enough, the top story featured Curtis Sliwa interviewed about the Angels' attempts to launch a local chapter.

Despite the fact that the piece was broadly sympathetic to the Angels' cause, and featured Sliwa's comments about "helping people feel safe on the streets of Vancouver" and "supporting the work of the police", my cabbie was still inspired to vent and spue even more angrily about these "bastard Angels".

I spent the last 20 minutes of the cab ride doing everything I could to try to persuade the guy he was barking up the wrong tree - to no avail, I'm afraid.

If they're called Angels - whether they're good guys or bad - they're all bastards in his book. From his perspective, at least, the Guardian Angels clearly have a brand problem.

[Bonus, completely unrelated link: the headline to this post is just my lame, punning excuse to point to former Blink-182 frontman, Tom DeLonge's, exceptionally groovy new outfit of the same name. Check out their first single: The Adventure - currently filling the slot in my playlist reserved for songs with almost annoying but still utterly addictive squeaky/screechy noises in the background - formerly occupied by R.E.M.'s "Leave"]

With an hour to kill yesterday morning, I was able to sample the brand new free wifi network saturating Toronto's downtown core.

Toronto Hydro (our primary electricity utility) has invested $2 million in mounting wireless hot-spots on the top of street lamps throughout the city centre, covering six square kilometres of Toronto's busiest business area. The service went live yesterday; just as I happened to be out and about downtown, with my laptop handy and some online research I needed to do.

Overall, the service seems pretty darn groovy - from my very limited test. Not nearly as fast as the connection I can get sitting at the bottom of my garden, 140 feet away from my own $75 wireless router - but nonetheless impressive, considering the much bigger infrastructure spread they're aiming to provide.

The network is free for the first six months, with a plan to start charging $29 a month , and different rates for hourly or daily access, from March 6, 2007.

Connecting to the grid was a little flaky at first, but once I moved from the back corner of the Starbucks at King and Yonge Streets, to park myself closer to the window, I was able to get on and stay on without any pain. Registering requires you to enter a cellphone number, to which the service will send a little text message with an auto-generated user name and password. Simple, relatively secure, and almost painless.

One thought that struck home as I enjoyed Hydro's "One Zone" connection, was the impact this will have on all the existing wireless hotspot players competing for traffic and dollars in the Toronto area. From my seat in Starbucks alone, I was able to see three other pay-access hotspots, including the Bell-provided signal co-branded by Starbucks themselves.

With ubiquitous, single-provider, affordable access right across the city centre - why would anyone want to sign up with one of the many other providers any more? I wonder what this will do to the smaller players in the space, and the relationships many of the coffee shop chains have with wifi providers. An immediate revenue drop seems inevitable - at least until March of next year.

Along our local stretch of Queen Street in the Toronto Beach neighbourhood, there used to be a handful of coffee shops providing free wifi connections as enticement to customers. The theory (which absolutely worked, in my case) was that punters who chose to camp out in the corner for an hour or two to get some work done away from the office, would be guilted into purchasing over-priced carbs and caffeine, in order to enjoy the free Net connection without shame.

Sadly, all of these locations have either closed down or flipped to a pay-for-access model; making it far less likely that I'd choose to escape my home office for a good coffee and some combined writing/surfing/people-watching time. Why should I cough up for a $7 latte and $20 wireless in your place, when I can brew a half-decent bucket of java and get a faster, cheaper connection in my own basement?

On that note, the only thing that chafes a little about the Hydro's wifi service is their plan to start billing for access early next year. Frankly, they could have just buried an extra buck or two a month in their existing electricity bill, kept the wifi free, and won much, much more support.

Tyler Hamilton's article in The Toronto Star quotes Brian Sharwood, analyst with the Seaboard Group, as saying that "Toronto Hydro has likely left a little wiggle room with pricing in case it gets into a price war with Rogers, Bell and Telus."

But why entertain the notion of a price war at all? If Hydro had approached their billing differently, they wouldn't have to concern themselves so much with the possibility of competition. Wrap the cost into our standard utility bills and keep the service fast and free forever: you'd own the market in no time.

Maybe there are laws that prevent them from competing so aggressively, which is a shame. We're at the point where the always-on Internet connection really ought to be provided at the same infrastructural level as any other utility. I don't expect to get it for free, but why slavishly follow the billing model established by your competitors?

Toronto Hydro already bills more than 676,000 customers in the Toronto area. Adding a single measly quarter to each monthly bill they issue would put $169,000 a month on their topline - just over $2 million a year. They'd recoup their investment in no time, utterly delight their Net-connected customers, and be hailed as a true leader in their field.

Heck - even bump it to 50 cents a month, and give the uninterested electricity customers the chance to opt out. Even if they only got 20 per cent of their client base to opt in, they'd still cover their infrastructure cost in two and a half years.

I'm sure they probably went through many rounds of discussion on pricing models prior to launch and, as I said, it's quite possible there are fair competition laws that would prevent them from working the deal this way. Seems a shame.

Still - happy to have the system in place, and more than happy to report that it's working passably well on its first couple of days.

Friend and fellow ex-Weber Shandwick-ite, Amanda Chapel, has pulled together an interesting survey aimed at providing a health check on the state of the PR business as a whole.

From the announcement on Amanda's Strumpette site:

"The PR Hope Survey... is an industry-wide assessment of the level of optimism that exists today among PR practitioners regarding the profession's future. The object is not to answer whether the industry is healthy or broken beyond repair; it is to see if the profession has the political will to make the necessary changes to move forward."

It only takes a few minutes to complete and, with luck and enough respondents, the survey results will end up being published by Jack O'Dwyer in his outstanding and widely-read PR Report newsletter.

Click here to run the survey.