Crikey! This is a bit of a turn up. I've just learned that this 'ere blog has been nominated as one of the candidates for "Best Business Blog" in the 2006 Canadian Blog Awards. W00t!

I find myself in some pretty impressive company, alongside some excellent blogs such as A Canadian Econoview, Canadian Entrepreneur, Jim Estill's CEO Blog, Bruce McCoubrey's Market Insight, Kate Trgovac's My Name Is Kate, Thomas Purves, The Vancouver Housing Market Blog, and Stephen Gordon's Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.

Mind you, if voting turns out to be a sheer numbers game, it looks like it will be hard for anyone to beat Barry Welford, who has managed to get no less than three of his blogs nominated in the same category: BPWrap, StayGoLinks, and his The Other Bloke's Blog.

I have no idea who might have nominated me, but thank you very much. I'm tickled.

Click the maple leaf widget below for more info on the awards program.

As if I ever had any doubt, I now have further evidence that people who show up here by Googling "Michael O'Connor Clarke" are indeed looking for me and me alone.

According to HowManyOfMe.com, there are precisely zero people in the U.S. named Michael O'Connor Clarke. By extrapolation, I find it hard to imagine there are too many MOCC's out there in the rest of the world. Even if there is another one somewhere, the chances he has a blog must be infinitesimally small.

It's just like my old English teacher, Mrs. Williams, use to tell me: "Always remember you're unique. Just like everyone else."

I found out a little over a week ago that my utterly brilliant friend Janet Johnson had her new blog up and running, but I promised to hold off until there was something more than just her first "hello world" post up there.

Well it was worth waiting - since launching janetleejohnson.com a scant 14 days ago, she's been blogging up an absolute storm (and quoting Larkin! Gawd bless 'er).

Janet was, without doubt, one of the single best things about the time I spent at Marqui. A consummate professional and outstanding communicator, Janet is very definitely at the forefront of Web 2.0 marketing.

I've met and worked with one hell of a lot of tech marketing professionals in the past twenty years. Very few have impressed and inspired me as much as Janet.

I love the fact that she's back in the blogosphere.

For the last month, I've found myself following conversations among PR bloggers a lot more closely than I had been doing for quite a while. There's a reason for this.

Back when I was last a full-time PR guy, and when I was posting at least semi-regularly to my Flackster blog, I felt a lot more closely connected to the flack-o-sphere. Then I moved out of agency life to give the software startup world a try again, and, after a few months of heads-down Product Management and Biz Dev work, my active engagement in the PR world inevitably dwindled somewhat.

In the time that I've been away, it's been good to watch the incredible surge of energy and the arrival of many, many new PR voices in the blogosphere. The "PR Blogs" sub-section in my feedreader has now grown to three times the size of the main section. Even while I was off playing around at being a client-side bloke, the truth is: I never really left PR too far behind. I've missed it.

One of the regular PR-business bloggers I've really been enjoying reading in the last year is Joe Thornley. His comprehensive coverage of last week's Blog Business Summit in Seattle was absolutely terrific - a great example of live-blogging from the conference floor.

Joe gets it. If you check out the recently re-launched website of Thornley Fallis Communications, the company Joe runs with Terry Fallis, you'll notice that the front page is now an aggregate of staff blogs. Very cool. Not the kind of thing you might expect from a PR agency, but then TF are definitely not your typical agency.

So the even cooler thing (for me at least) is the fact that my own blog will soon be added to the TF aggregate feed.

Yup - I've had to sit on this news for a few weeks, while we worked out a couple of details, but I can now spill the beans. On Wednesday of this week, I'm going to be showing up bright and early for the first day of my new job at Thornley Fallis. I'll be working closely with Joe, Terry, and the rest of the TF team to grow a technology and social media practice for their current clients and (we hope) lots of new ones too.
I'll be keeping some of my existing projects going, or transferring them through into Thornley Fallis, as appropriate. More news on that in future posts.

I can't wait to get on board with TF. It's clear from my discussions with Joe and some of his colleagues to date that they've built a healthy, energetic, and confident culture, and a firm that both knows where it's going and has the expertise and resources to get there. I haven't felt this pumped about starting a new job in years. It just feels right – for so many reasons. Quite apart from anything else, this will be the first PR agency job I've walked into where I don't have to explain what my blog is.

Oh, plus the TF group of companies also includes a kick ass design studio - so I'm hoping this blog will finally be able to get the facelift it so badly needs :-)

While I was necessarily off the grid for most of the last three days, I missed the splendid news that Toronto's Gang of Five - Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Stuart MacDonald, Michael McDerment, and Rob Hyndman - have announced, as hoped, the dates for next year's Mesh Conference. It's happening on Tuesday, May 30th and Wednesday, May 31st at the superb MaRS facility in downtown T.O.

The team have also planned a six-month-early opening night shindig for November 15th at the Irish Embassy. With the way this group can light up the Canadian blogosphere, I think we're all set for a terrific night. See you there.

The Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO) is a generally smart organization, from what I can tell. They do a great deal of good work for businesses in Toronto, and are tireless in their efforts to bring more employment and more opportunity into this terrific city.

Just wanted to say that up front before I break the bad news, because - guys: someone was clearly asleep at the wheel here.

For background: TEDCO is one of the main backers of Toronto's bid to host the 2015 World Expo. This morning, the corporation ran an expensive full page ad in the Globe & Mail. It was framed as an open letter to Canada's Prime Minister and to the Premier of Ontario, entreating them to support the bid at the Provincial and Federal levels.

Here's the offending excerpt, quoted in context:

"...the bid cannot go forward without your support -- indeed it is the Government of Canada that must submit the bid to the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE). Respectively, we call upon your governments to support the bid by submitting a Letter of Candidacy to the BIE by its November 2 deadline."

Um... "respectively"?

I had to read this twice to make sure I wasn't mistaken. "Respectively"?!

Then I thought - hang on a second, maybe they do mean "respectively" - as they're talking about two distinct levels of government.
But that still wouldn't be correct. The adverb here needs to refer to the items in a list, and means "each, in the order given" (e.g. Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty are the Prime Minister and Ontario Provincial Premier, respectively.)

I tried re-writing that sentence a couple of different ways in my head, but there's just no way to make it work with "respectively".

Respectfully, TEDCO, you need to hire someone who can write.

[Disclaimer: It is a matter of public record that I am a great pompous nit with nothing better to do than ineptly juggle sizeable stones inside my big glass house. I have no doubt that many out there could choose to find fault with the style and grammar of my own writing here - and with good cause. Feel free to oneup-pedant me at will.]

Writing this offline (thank you, Qumana!), as I'm camped out in an office in the West end with no Net connection (a Bell Canada office with no wi-fi - go figure). I've been using time between meetings to catch up on my feed reading, and this post from Mark Evans just jumped out at me.

Mark paraphrases Peter Drucker's advice to "focus on the customer, and what they want, what they need and, most important, what they will buy." As Mark comments, "It seems like pretty straightforward advice because the customer is always right, right? But the more I thought about it, the more it's probably something that doesn't receive enough attention."

Damn skippy it doesn't.

In my experience, this is one of those "mistakes companies keep bloody making". It's simply astonishing how often the strategic planning process in companies is completely divorced from any understanding of who the customer is, and what they might actually be interested in buying (especially in the world of technology vendors). As Mark puts it, "For many businesses, the focus is on the product or service, and then trying to figure out how to convince consumers to buy it."

I've developed something of a mantra around this in the last few years - something I find myself saying over and over again in meetings with corporate executives, marketers, and communications people:

First figure out who your customer is; now put them at the centre of everything you do.

Should be blindingly obvious. So why isn't it?

Bonus link: forgive me for citing myself, but *ahem*

A bit swamped here, but a quick note on the latest Terry O'Reilly "Age of Persuasion" show on CBC last week.

The framing for this episode was legendary ad man Albert Lasker's famous "contract". Lasker -described by many as the Father of Modern Advertising - was the first to put forward the idea that advertising would be acceptable to radio listeners or TV viewers on the central condition that it offered them some value in exchange for their attention.

It's a simple but absolutely effective concept, and one of pivotal importance in the success of advertising.

While I was listening to Terry's piece last weekend, I was a bit surprised to hear him illustrating his point by using several examples of advertising drawn from his own agency's body of work. He even tangentially referred to his team at one point as examples of "the best minds in the business".

For just a moment, this apparently blatant self-promotion seemed like a jarring note in an otherwise seamless slice of intelligent radio. That's just unacceptable, Terry (I thought): you can't be using your CBC airtime to pitch your own firm.

But then I paused, and had to smile. Terry's upholding both the letter and the spirit of Lasker's contract.

Yes, he's boosting his own firm's work (on the CBC, even - a national network that doesn't carry advertising) - but he's doing it in context and wrapping it up in such a terrific, informative, entertaining piece of radio that the listener draws a great deal of value from the work.

It's not just appropriate and acceptable - given the context of the story he was telling, it was actually meta-appropriate. 'S funny.

Still no podcast though, darn it. What's up with that?

Tags: Terry O'Reilly, advertising, CBC, Albert Lasker

Picking up on Mathew Ingram's revelation from Tuesday night, that after the Globe pushed his columns behind the paywall, his online readership dropped from around 10,000 to 300 readers per column - here's an excellent recent piece from Doc Searls, packed full of advice on how newspapers could unsuck themselves, if only they'd choose to do so.

Doc offers ten clues for building "Newspapers 2.0", starting with:

"First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisible."

Mathew - maybe you should print a bunch of copies of this and leave it strategically lying around on the desks of some of the management team over there...

Tags: newspapers, Mathew Ingram, Doc Searls, paywalls

It's been a while - far too long, in fact - since we updated Charlie's blog. He was only 6.5 when we last put one of his stories up there. He's nine now, and his writing just keeps getting better and better. I'm going to get some of then newer ones up there soon, but in the meantime I just couldn't wait to share this little limerick.

Background: for a school project, Charlie has had to choose and research an endangered animal. He has to do a diorama and a little booklet about the beast of his choice. He picked the Jaguarundi - which I'll confess I'd never even heard of until a couple of weeks ago.

In addition to the great little booklet he's producing, Charlie also came out with this (he'll kick me when he learns I've posted this, but I simply couldn't resist):

There once was a Jaguarundi,
Who only went hunting on Monday.
'Cause he couldn't hunt well,
His prey never fell,
So he ate leftovers all week until Sunday.

Tee heee. There's a terrific drawing to go with it, which I'll scan and post if I have the time.

There's been a huge amount of noise in the Canadian blogosphere in the last 24 hours, reacting to the news that Conservative MP Garth Turner was just summarily dismissed from the federal caucus over comments he'd made in his blog, The Turner Report. A couple of friends have asked my opinion on this, so here it is, for what it's worth.

For the record, first of all: I'm no particular fan of Mr. Turner's political views, nor am I in any way a Conservative supporter. In truth, I don't really have a strong opinion on Garth as an individual, one way or the other. He's done well for himself, clearly, and seems like a smart bloke - but whatever thoughts I have to offer on this incident inevitably have to come from a different perspective.

Like Garth, I'm a blogger, and have been for close to six years. So my response to this comes solely from a blogger's perspective. As Voltaire put it: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," to which I would add: especially when you say it on your blog.

Blogging is about openness, clarity, transparency, truth, and opinion. In this respect, Garth Turner is a good blogger - he speaks his mind fearlessly; is clear and candid about his opinions.  I may not like his opinions, but I respect him for his candour.

Perhaps, as a very public figure, he should have been more prudent in his remarks. "Blog smart" is a good maxim to follow, no matter what your day job is. From what I've gleaned, the reason for his dismissal was stated as "compromising caucus confidentiality". If that's true, he goofed - for sure.

The scuttlebutt, however, suggests a different story: that he was uninstalled primarily because his outspoken and sometimes controversial blog comments flew in the face of the official party line. If that is really the case, then the entire incident is much more worrying. Is Garth Turner being punished for having and expressing ideas?

A government that is not open to a broad mix of ideas and opinions - especially within its own ranks - is a scary thing. Is bland, on-message homogeneity really what we want from the people we vote into positions of power? Again: I don't particularly like where he stands on a lot of issues, but I like the fact that he says what he thinks and causes me to think in return.

Brendan Hodgson also has some thoughts worth reading on this topic.

Tags: Garth Turner, Conservative, Blogging, Politics, 1984

Adrian Duyzer has a great cover letter to show you. Pretty much anything I could say here would totally telegraph the punchline - so just go read it.

All I can say is, if I'd got this guy's letter, I'd just have to get him in for an interview - just to see if he's for real.

Is it any wonder that relationships between the press and PR organizations are so strained when both sides resort to stealth tactics and subterfuge?

The specific example that's set me off this morning is the news that certain publicists at well-known NY agency, Rubenstein PR, have apparently started obscuring caller ID when dialing up reporters. But in fairness to Rubenstein, it seems the technique they're adopting is one they've learned from observing the behaviour of certain media outlets.

The story appeared online at New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer last week and was also picked up over at Gawker.

In brief - it seems that certain large media organizations have, for some time, practiced the simple ruse of "fixing" their outbound caller ID - so calls from the offices of the NY Times, for example, show up as 111-111-1111. This is pretty sneaky in itself, and so it's not surprising to see an agency turning the tables.

According to the source quoted at the Intelligencer:

"...Rubenstein PR is doing something to their phone system, and now their number comes up as 111-111-1111. Which means that every reporter who uses Caller ID to avoid publicists is going to be thwarted. I just picked up my phone thinking maybe someone at the Times wanted to give me a job, and it was just a Rubenstein person."

As Jack O'Dwyer put it in a recent editorial:

"The reality of press/PR relations is that it's a daily bruising, knock-down battle. Both sides snub each other regularly, go over and around official contact points, and use just about "every trick in the book" to get what they want."

I know from my own experience and approach to this business that the situation Jack describes certainly doesn't have to be the way it always works. This is the kind of stuff both sides need to work on fixing.

There's a small, worrying coda to this story, by the way. I learned of the Daily Intelligencer's piece through the YoungPRPros group on Yahoo - where more than one person commenting on the report suggested that they saw no issues of ethics with this kind of behaviour. Am I missing something?

Tags: Public Relations, ethics, Rubenstein, caller ID

Earlier tonight I was parked on my butt in the Gallery space at Toronto's Spoke Club, listening to the splendid Mathew Ingram, Globe & Mail columnist and blogger of note. This is not anything like a structured discussion of what was a well-attended and most enjoyable event, more a stream of some of the thoughts and notes that came to me during the evening...

Particularly interesting to hear Mathew chastise the Globe for its policy on shoving columns behind a paywall. His traffic per column dropped from 10,000 readers per column online to only 300 readers per column after they shoved him behind the cluewall. Ouch. OK - so those 300 are now "valuable paying subscribers" but, as Mathew points out, he was almost driven into the blogosphere by the actions of his employer - an author in search of a better audience.

I still can't fathom why the Globe and others continue to do things like this. Sure, I understand the economics of the newspaper game, but still. As I pointed out tonight - I've been a six-day subscriber to the dead tree version of the Globe for a long time now - yet if I wanted to actually go online to read some of the same stuff I've already paid for (including Mathew's columns, for example), I'd have to pay more to become an "Insider Edition" subscriber to the Globe's site. Bollocks.

Later... Joe Thornley asks Mathew to describe the relationship between the blogs he runs and the work he does for the Globe's print and online editions - and whether there's any overspill.  Mathew comments that he has on occasion found that the stuff he's blogging about starts to seed ideas for business columns. I asked him if the influence and overspill ever ran the other direction - has he ever written for the Globe and then blogged: "now, here's what I really think".  After a pause to reflect, Mathew responds "I don't think so". I can believe that, in his case. He's a columnist rather than a reporter, so (as he pointed out) he's paid to express his opinions anyway.

There was some interesting discussion about the GooTube deal - what's fueling these huge acquistions (with Skype cited as another, earlier example).  This discussion sparked Mathew to talk about the remarks he's had from one of his readers who confessed to being "addicted" to following the comments at Mathew's blog.

I had a half-formed thought here.  There's a line of connection between YouTube, MySpace, blogging in general - and the older social media forms of Usenet, IRC, CompuServe, and their ilk.  It's all part of David Weinberger's thread on "The Longing". Mathew's point in linking the GooTube deal to blog comment addiction (I think) was that it's just human nature to have this kind of vicarious interest in what other people are saying, thinking, doing - hence the success of YouTube (where we get to watch regular punters do stupid things) and blogging before it (where we get to read regular punters saying stupid things, and then add our own stupid thoughts into the lovely, mutually-assured-stupidity huggyfest of the whole thang). It's why we love flamewars; why trolls moved from Usenet to listservs to IRC and to blogging with ease and enthusiasm.

We all just love to talk, to debate, to read others' thoughts, to hear what people have to say, pick fights, pick nits, pick bones, etc. Now, of course,  the technology barriers of adoption have just come down low enough to make your medium of choice a whole lot more accessible, visible, and just much, much easier for the man on the Clapham omnibus (or the 501 streetcar, for that matter) to jump in. We can all be famous for 15 people.

In the conversation tonight, this thought also got tied into Second Life - with the point being that the idea of location is ceasing to matter. It's also true that the platform and the technology (while still mattering, to a point) is ceasing to matter, at least in the sense that it's becoming irrelevant and wrong to think of the technology as in any way a hindrance to discussion - it's all about removing boundaries. So the GooTube deal ends up being about conversation and audience as much as it is about disruption of the TV model. Or something like that...

Sorry - I think I did a good job of listening, but a poor job of taking notes. This is even more than usually waffly. Either way, if you're in Toronto, interested in where PR is headed, and you're not marking your calendar with these Third Tuesday events - you're missing some interesting and - yes - even important stuff. Kudos again to the teams at Thornley Fallis and Fleishman Hillard for pulling tonight's session together - and thanks to Mathew Ingram for much good thought fodder. (Oh, and apologies to Chris Clarke that you got saddled with the tab for the room).

Tags: Third Tuesday, Mathew Ingram, Thornley Fallis, Fleishman Hillard

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Two steps forward;                   
(Six steps back)                         
(Six steps back)                         
(Six steps back)                         
(Six steps back)                         

-- "At Home He's A Tourist"
Gang Of Four, 1979

I've been doing even more listening today - following the growing crapstorm over Edelman's rather spectacular pratfall with this "Wal-Marting Across America" blog.

In brief: a rather popular and entertaining little blog, apparently run by a blue-collar couple traveling across the States and parking their RV outside the nearest Wal-Mart every night, was revealed last week to be a complete fake. Turns out, the couple in question are professional journalists, and the blog itself was a creative initiative of the Wal-Mart account team at Edelman. Ouch.

At first, the thing that was troubling me most as I read through the pages and pages of blog posts and comments on this latest "astroturfing" scandal, was the missing words from Edelman's two most visible bloggers: Richard Edelman himself and, of course, Steve Rubel.  After taking a few days to chew the matter over and figure out the Five Ws of the whole thing, both Richard and Steve posted to acknowledge the error of their firm and accept ownership of the screw up.

But the key words I really wanted to see in their posts - particularly in Richard's - were buried just below the rather slick surface, alas. Five simple words: "We were wrong. I'm sorry".  I was concerned that Richard's very carefully worded "mea culpa" was rather too polished - a commitment to transparency, without a clear, succinct, and direct apology.

Now, to be fair, I've had a chance to read through a lot of the other dialogue in blog comments surrounding this thing - and, sure enough, Richard is right in there using the very words I was hoping to hear. Good. 

Would have been infinitely preferable, in my opinion, if he had come straight out with a more human-sounding post in the first instance - but OK: he is, at least, accepting responsibility for the mess, and saying he was wrong and he's sorry. That's an appropriately CEO-like act.

So now that I've had time to think about this a little further, the focus of my concern has shifted to a bigger issue.

The manner, tone, and timing of Edelman's blog response has taken a lot of flak - in the comments to their own blogs and elsewhere. Credit to Edelman that they've linked to their critics, and allowed both trackbacks and comments that are highly critical of their actions to stand.

Flacks take flak; accept it, acknowledge it, apologize, and move on. 'Tis ever thus.

But what I'm still trying to get my head around here is: what the hell were you thinking in the first place?

Were it to have emerged from pretty much any other PR firm, we'd be writing this campaign off as just another clueless attempt to game the social media world - just this year's Raging Cow. But this was Edelman, FFS - the guys who have been exalted by many as the most clueful of all modern agencies, the ne plus ultra of utterly blog-savvy, social media-smart PR firms. So, again: what the hell were you guys thinking?

I guess my point is that, given the extraordinarily high profile the Edelman team have gained in the eyes of the blogosphere and elsewhere, they've ended up - willingly or otherwise - becoming something of a bellweather for this entire "PR 2.0" thing. That whole "Me2Revolution" of transparency, openness, connectedness - the end of PR business as usual, and the emergence of something new, something better, something worth believing in.

Now you could argue the pros and cons of them occupying this particular exalted position, but I don't think it's an overstatement to suggest that, for many observers, Edelman had successfully gained (or maneuvered themselves into) a place of considerable influence in our still-evolving social media world.  For many clients just trying to come to grips with the blogosphere for the first time, Edelman - at least in the US and UK - had pretty much become the de facto PR experts in the space.

And that's what has me so worried.  Given their perceived leadership in this area - given, for example, their extremely important collaboration with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association in developing a Code of Ethics - do they not have an implicit responsibility to hold themselves to a much, much higher standard of behaviour than this?

For Edelman to screw the pooch so visibly here has broader ramifications for every PR firm trying to help clients get some kind of a clue. PR has enough of a reputation problem as it is without one of the perceived centres of a solution suddenly appearing to revert to being part of the problem.

I hope those WOMMA guidelines of transparency have been vigorously reinforced with each and every Edelman employee.

Richard - when you guys blow it like this, it makes us all look bad.

Tags: Wal-Mart, Edelman, Reputation, Social Media, Steve Rubel

By the way - one of the things that's been keeping me otherwise occupied in the last few days has been the complete drive death of our trusty old Compaq laptop. The hard disk has just utterly b0rked for  some reason - it won't boot, won't read, won't nuttin.

I've booted the machine under Knoppix (the amazing Linux client that boots from a CD and runs mostly in a ram disk) - it can see the drive, verify that it's still there and it's the right size, but can't find a file system of any sort to mount it.

So I tried the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (another highly-recommended free emergency boot disk, complete with a collection of outstanding utilities). Alas, still no joy. I can see the drive, verify that it has data on it, but not get close enough to actually be able to read anything useful from it.

Clearly, the thing is banjaxed beyond my limited powers of disaster recovery.

Can anyone recommend a good, dependable data recovery firm in the GTA? I've been half tempted to bring the laptop back in to Staples where we originally bought it, but I'm scared that they could end up doing more harm than good. The moment someone actually tries to write anything to this disk, it could all go even more pear shaped than it already is. I think it's time to call in the experts.

Tags: data recovery, Toronto, hard disk failure, Compaq, disk crash

...I think that's what I have. I have B.A.D.D. and I've got it bad.

I seem to go through phases here sometimes. There are days when I'll post several times a day, other days when I'll post just one enormous feed-choking diatribe, and then days or even weeks will go by without me posting a darn thing - and the urge to write growing stronger every day, and the guilt piling up alongside it.

Doc Searls, counseling Dean Landsman to look at blogging in baseball terms, said: "Think of blogging as hitting. Sometimes you want to hit the long ball. Sometimes you just want to get on base. Sometimes you want to bunt to advance a runner. Thing is, you're the whole line-up. Not just batting clean-up."

In the same post (it's a good one, you should go read it), Doc also calls blogging "emails to the world," and says, "Who worries about emails being too short? Or not deep enough?"

He's right, of course - and yet I do worry. I love that people read this stuff - even after five years, I still get that little tingle when someone says "yeah, I read that on your blog." But I cringe too.

It's not the quality of the writing I worry about so much; I learned to ignore that nagging little inner critic a while ago. Now I just try to write.And I know I certainly don't do it for the audience. All sorts of things motivate me to write here, but if I was out for the traffic I'd clearly have to be approaching this a lot differently. And high traffic comes with its own set of complications - I know, I've been BoingBoinged in the past :-)

Yet part of what I do miss when I've not been keeping up with my own blog posts is that sense of dialogue and engagement in the discussion one gets. The irony is - in a sense it's the engagement that seems to have kept me away from writing for a couple of weeks this time around. See: the problem is, there's just so much darn stuff to read.

I'm a slave to my feedreader. Most of the time I'm able to maintain a healthy, efficient triage system on my email and reading lists - scanning and grokking as much as possible without being drawn too deep into link after link. But when I'm a little (*cough*) under-employed, as right now, the luxury of having extra leisure time to read just sucks me into the bottomless pit of other peoples' ideas.

I'm not complaining - it's a daily joy to have so much wonderful stuff to read; following the thought threads as they hop from link to link. And I am engaging - out there commenting on other people's blogs and joining the conversations in at least one way. But it's a form of B.A.D.D. for sure. I can't tell you the number of times in the last couple of weeks that I've sat down here meaning to blog something, and then found myself getting happily lost in a forest of other's thoughts. By the time I come up for air it's already the wee hours and I'm too tired to write - again, dammit.

All is not lost, however. Via Joe Thornley's blog, I came across this excellent post by HP's Eric Kintz, in which he points out that blog post frequency is actually irrelevant. I love what Eric has to say here - and not just because it's personally reassuring. Among other terrific points, he says: "Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting," and "Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway" - two thoughts I would wholeheartedly subscribe to (yeah, yeah - "to which I would wholeheartedly subscribe". Whatever. Begone, nagging inner pedant - I told you I wasn't worried about the quality of writing any more, dammit).

Ryan Anderson, meanwhile, in a useful post I've been meaning to point to for some time says: "Blog success is based on momentum. Traffic in motion tends to stay in motion, and once it is at rest, it’s hard to get it going again."

I don't know. What is "success" in this context anyway, Ryan? I guess the definition is entirely subjective and personal for each of us. For me, blogging success is equivalent to getting the writing monkey off my back without having to face the fearsome prospect of the novel or business book I know I'll have to hunker down on one day.

So sometimes the feeling of success comes from just writing. Sometimes it comes from the frisson of blogger pride one gets when someone responds to something you wrote. And sometimes, as Eric says - it can be enough to just be participating in the community.

I feel, in other words, a bit like Hilary Clinton - I've been on a listening tour for a couple of weeks.

Sometimes, it's good to just shut up and listen.

B.A.D.D. but good.