Pardon this brief familial interruption.

A couple of weeks ago, Charlie - our nine-year old son - wrote a poem for Remembrance Day, which I posted here.

Through a program at his school, Charlie's poem was entered into a literary contest sponsored by the Royal Canadian Legion.

Over dinner tonight, Charlie told me that his piece was selected as the first place selection in the initial round! Woohooo!

According to the Legion site, the way it works is: "Initial judging takes place at the community level by volunteers at local Legion branches and the winning entries progress to judging at the Provincial level. The winning entries at this level are forwarded to Ottawa where they are judged and the National winners declared."

Go Charlie!

Riding the streetcar home from today's conference, I had a moment of minor epiphany.

The conference, as you'll know if you've been following recent posts, was hosted by the Canadian Institute. The general topic was social media. So it suddenly struck me: it's remarkable just how much innovation there is in the social media space in Canada, and how rarely we stop to remember and celebrate that fact.

For example, here's something I completely forgot to mention at any point during my presentation today: it's a fact that one of the very earliest precursors of what we now know as blogs was created by a Canadian. Carolyn Burke, now CEO of Integrity Incorporated here in Toronto, first came to my attention through the pages of a great coffee-table book called 24 Hours in Cyberspace. There was a now-famous photo of Carolyn, in her bathtub with a laptop on her knees.

Starting in early January , 1995, Carolyn kept what is widely-considered to be one of the very first online journals: Carolyn's Diary. It didn't have many of the architectural features we've come to associate with the blogosphere, but it was, without question, a direct ancestor of today's blogs. And it was Canadian.

Also worthy of note is Paul Kedrosky's early leadership in the blogging tools community. As Paul discusses here, his Groksoup tool was one of the handful of free and easy hosted blogging products to arrive early on the market in the summer of 1999, along with Pitas and Blogger (originally Pyra, now owned by Google, and still my tool of choice for this blog).

[Off topic aside: what the hell happened to Pitas? These guys had the first blogging tool on the planet, but who uses their product now? How come they didn't get bought? Just goes to show: first to market isn't always best.]

Then there's Bryght, the thoroughly brilliant content and community management system out of Vancouver, run by Boris Mann, Kris Krug, Roland Tanglao, and a bunch of other geniuses.

Still in Vancouver, but with a truly global reach, is NowPublic - a superb citizen journalism service, bringing together more than 35,000 contributing reporters from more than 130 countries to cover breaking news wherever, whenever it happens. As their corporate site points out: "During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff."

NowPublic is run by two of the most connected and genuinely influential people in Canadian technology circles, Michael Tippett and Leonard Brody. Leonard, quite literally, wrote the book on Canadian Innovation with "Innovation Nation". Excellent bloke.

Oh, and I should mention my great friend Albert Lai, founder of the coolest and easiest photo-sharing service on the planet: BubbleShare.

These are just the first few examples that sprang to mind. I'm sure there are many more. Social Media Innovation: it's a Canadian game.

[UPDATE: Darn it. Such a dork. I actually wrote this post in Qumana - another outstanding example of Canadian social media innovation in action. Completely forgot to mention them. Doh! is me. Sorry Jon, Tris, and Fred. If you want a really good WYSIWYG blog editor you can write in anywhere - even when you're offline - give Qumana a spin.]

Tags: Canada, innovation, social media

Brendan Hodgson of Hill & Knowlton is on a panel here at the Canadian Institute New Media for Communications conference. He just cited an absolute dynamite quote, which I had to scamper off and Google straight away.

Here's the citation and source:

"It’s much harder to distrust a person than it is to distrust a corporation," says Greg Page, Ph.D., FDA life-sciences practice leader for the national life-sciences and health-care regulatory practice of Deloitte.

Amen to that. Sounds precisely the right note on the importance of social media in humanizing corporate communications.

This post is just a pointer to some of the sites and sources I'll be referencing in my talk tomorrow morning at The Canadian Institute's New Media for Communications conference.

If you're sitting in the audience reading this right now, click that little comment link below and say "Hi".

Even if you're not in the audience, it's nice to say hello anyway.

Oh, and here are the sources.

[UPDATE: Just done my presentation. I'm struggling to get my PowerPoint slides up online here, but I'll keep trying. If anyone would like a copy of my slides, please feel free to email me: michaelocc AT gmail.com or oconnorclarke AT thornleyfallis.com]

I'm heading off shortly to the stylish Pantages Suites Hotel to catch the back end of day one of the New Media for Communications conference.

I feel a little miffed about having missed my esteemed co-chair, David Jones, doing his opening spiel this morning, and I've already missed some other no-doubt excellent sessions, including the beautifully shiny Mitch Joel giving one of his stirring, inspirational presentation. Client work and proposal writing took priority this morning. Sorry about that, chaps - but I'm sure you would have made the same judgement call.

Looks like I will at least get to see the boss do his thing this afternoon, and I'm looking forward to seeing my old friend John Perenack who's giving a session on "Blog Frenzy: Reacting to Crises in Blog Time".

I'm hoping I'll get to hang around long enough to listen to Andrew Goodman's session on Search Engine Optimization too - it's a topic that comes up in client discussion all the time, and one I still don't know enough about. It used to be that I could just go to Janet for counsel on this stuff, but it's not so easy when we're both at different companies.

OK, that's quite enough fluffy-bunny, echo chamber, blog love linkiness for one day. Tomorrow is my day as co-chair of the conference, and I still have a couple of thoughts I want to add to my presentation. Hope to see you there.

I'm indebted to Colin McKay for the new "Blogging Since 2001" seal over there on the top right. I'd admired Colin's version of this little widget on his own blog and commented on it. Gentleman that he is, Colin whipped up a custom version for me. Makes me feel old, but I kinda like it.

If you're anything like me, and have that early-adopter recessive geek gene, the chances are you have accounts with a whole bunch of different social bookmarking sites. Keeping all of your various accounts straight, and juggling the overlapping feature sets of all these different services can be a real pain.

Never fear: OnlyWire is here. OnlyWire might just be the only social bookmarking tool you'll ever need.

What these splendid geniuses have done is to figure out how to write a bookmark link to just about all of the many social bookmarking sites out there, including: Backflip , Blinklist, Blogmemes, del.icio.us, Furl, Jots, Linkroll, Looklater, Magnolia, Maple , Markaboo, Rawsugar, Shadows, Simpy, Spurl, and Wink.

Outstanding. Perhaps this will inspire my colleague Chris Clarke to clean up the amazing social bookmark chiclet parade at the foot of each post on his blog :-)

Incidentally, I stumbled onto OnlyWire as I was browsing an amazing new catalogue of Web 2.0 apps that the wonderful people at Tucows have created. Nice.

Only one request, guys - could we have an RSS feed with the full description of each app you link to? Either that, or write better short-form descriptions of each product. The truncated product blurbs in the current feed are pretty useless.

Still - excellent list, and a very useful new service. Thanks.

Marketing consultant, blogging genius, and all-round thoroughly decent bloke, Hugh MacLeod, recently decided that his original "Hughtrain Manifesto" was in need of a makeover. So he re-wrote it and cut the original 4,500 words down to a short, 418-word mini-manifesto.

Inspired by the power of his own brevity, Hugh has also issued an open call for other mini-manifestos, saying:

"Why take 50,000 words [the length of your average business tome] to say what you have to say, when 500 will do? Brevity. I love brevity. We're both in a hurry."

Great idea.

So I've taken the longish, somewhat ranty piece Mike Warot and I penned about a year ago (original here), and cut it down to a more digestable 500-word mini-manifesto à la Hugh.

Presenting, The KillSave Mini-Manifesto (aka fixing a broken software paradigm in 500 words or less):

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

Sit down at your desk and start a new document.

No – forget the computer; actually drag over a sheet of paper and write.

Make sure you don’t put a title on the page, or a date, or your name. Try not to even think about the word “metadata”.

Keep writing.

Now – once you’ve chicken-scratched a page or so of stuff, get up from your desk and walk away. Switch off the lights. Leave the room.

Or, no – go back into the room and, just for good measure, give your desk a good hard kick. Jam your paper knife through the middle of that page you wrote.

Come back to the desk two hours later. Where’s your document?

What? How can it be still on your desktop? And all the words are still there, right up to the last period you wrote? But you didn’t save it!

And you can still read it, even with the paper knife in the middle? Amazing!

OK. Now why does the act of writing in a $200 word processor work less well than this?

If you’ve never lost a document due to a system failure, I want to meet you. I want to know what numbers you play in the lottery. You may just be the luckiest human being alive.

Computers go blooie. Random crashes are a fact of life.

But for a piece of software to lose your work when the lights go out is a flat out failure to fulfill a basic obligation.

If computer automation breaks things that worked well before computers, that’s not progress.

The problem here is a persistent block of stupidity sunk deep into the structure of most file-based software systems. It’s called “Save”.

What is that anyway? Think about it. There’s something so fundamentally broken about the whole idea of the “Save” command.

It’s the application’s responsibility to make sure it never loses the user’s work. Whether they remembered to “Save” or not.

It’s the Operating System’s responsibility to make sure it never loses the files entrusted to it by applications and users.

Requiring users to “Save” is lazy design.

If your hard drive goes crunch, you might well lose data. You should have a backup. Always.

But if a piece of software ever blows up your data because you forgot to save often enough (or in the right way) – that’s just plain wrong.

We’ve got computers capable of handling 2 BILLION operations per second, and your word processor can’t be bothered to properly store about 20K of text every once in a while.

Save is stupid. It needs to die.

So here are Five Easy Theses for all application programs to follow:

• Never lose the user’s work
• Always show the current save path
• Always autosave to a working folder, and alert when this fails
• Allow the user to pick up their context across invocations of the editor
• Random disconnection is a fact of life. NEVER lose work because of it, EVER!

Tags: Hugh MacLeod, hughtrain, mini manifesto, Kill Save

I'm off early tomorrow to visit our Ottawa office and check in at Third Monday. See you there.

I won't have the laptop with me on this trip, so blogging may be even more intermittent than usual.

In the meantime, if you're looking for something to read, we've started to breath life back into my son Charlie's blog - he's just posted the first chapter of what promises to be a terrific adventure story. Check it out.

Also, has anyone else noticed how the Toronto Transit Commission's new announcement chime on the subway sounds exactly like the opening notes of "Black Coffee in Bed"? Or is that just me...?

I want to make sure that I give full credit to the prime mover behind this CNW Group advertising campaign – and also address a concern raised elsewhere.

First, let it be known that my good friend Robert Jenkyn of the outstanding media strategy firm Media Experts deserves full credit for the original idea to approach CNW Group with the concept of advertising on PR blogs. I've known Robert through our kids' schools, football teams, and play groups for something like six years now. I've always thought him one of the wittiest, smartest, most likeable people I've ever known - I now know that he's also extremely good at what he does. If your online media buying strategy is sucking wind, phone Media Experts and ask for Robert (well - when he comes back from holiday in France, anyway).

Second, a little further disclosure seems in order here. One of the other participants in the program, the inestimable David Jones, posted some interesting observations on CNW Group's approach, in his trademark thoughtful manner. Smart bloke, who takes the time to really think things through.

David's post attracted a comment from Judy Gombita (head of communications for the Certified General Accountants of Ontario, I believe), in which Judy questions the value and validity of one aspect of the program.

You can go read Judy's comment and my response over at David's blog. 'Nuff said. One of Judy's points, however, also made me think that perhaps a little extra disclosure might be of use. In responding to Judy's concern, I made the point that this ad campaign, for me, is certainly not about the money.

This is a test - for CNW Group and for the bloggers involved. As CNW's Laurie Smith has reminded me, all of the responses and reactions to this test are being looked on as part of a process of learning, to guide us in the future.

For what it's worth, and if you're really, really interested: I'm being paid $300/month to run this ad, for the next two months - plus I get access to clickthrough reports.

At that level, it should be abundantly clear that I ain't in this for the money, baby.

No - I'm doing it because (as I said at David's blog) I think CNW Group's efforts to engage people like me are interesting and worthwhile, and I'm curious to see how the campaign works for them.


Tags: Canada Newswire, CNW Group, blog advertising, Media Experts, social media

As mentioned a few days ago, my lefthand sidebar does now include my first ever blog-based advertisement.

It'll be interesting to see how this experiment runs. I like the idea that forces within CNW Group are working to drag the wire services into the 21st Century.

Somewhere -- in between the work going on to develop and promote standards for social media releases, and the efforts being made by certain very high-profile bloggers to push the disclosure envelope -- somewhere, there's a place of huge opportunity and enduring relevance for the age-old newswire services.

Carrying a CNW Group ad on my blog, and helping to sell the idea to a passel of other bloggers, is a small step, I know. But I'm taking it as a positive sign of an old-school media services organization working very hard to get with the program.

Incidentally, in the interests of full disclosure (and in order to showcase my own hypocrisy before someone else beats me to it) I should probably draw attention to a certain lengthy rant from a few years ago.

The CNW Group ad in my sidebar is being served by online advertising giant Doubleclick. I really laid into them and their former CEO's thinking on what was the state-of-the-art in online ads way back then in 2001.

My mind hasn't really changed, by the way - that old rant was kicked off by Doubleclick's suggestion that there needed to be more online advertising and that it should be more intrusive. I'm no more a fan of intrusive anything than I was back then.

So - no reflection at all on CNW Group, on this experimental campaign, or on the creative agency who designed this exercise. Doubleclick is merely infrastructure here. But if you think I'm being a complete casuist, I'm sure you'll let me know. I like my little ad anyway, so nyeh.

This is kind of interesting, to me at least...

One of the big public companies I used to work for was recently acquired by another very big public company. I've been wondering how the post-acquisition integration has been going, and I think I may just have something of a clue.

When I signed into LinkedIn earlier today, I noticed something a little startling. Towards the bottom of my LinkedIn personal home page, there's a section headed "Just joined LinkedIn".

As you'd imagine, this section lists individuals who've recently signed up for the service and, in doing so, have listed one of my former employers in their profiles. The LinkedIn system helpfully assumes there might be a connection here, and presents the list of (usually) two or three new people, in case I'd want to add them to my network.

I think it's kind of telling to note that the "Just joined" section today features no less than 50 new colleagues from that certain large public company.

Ouch.

Heading off shortly to the preview schmoozefest for next year's Mesh Conference with the Gang of Five and a crowd of others.

With last night's Third Tuesday event featuring the outstanding Shel Holtz, this will make two social media meetups in two days - both of them happening in Irish pubs. Éirinn go bloggy Brách!

I didn't have my laptop with me during Shel's talk last night, so I didn't capture the kind of notes I might normally have done, but here are a few interesting snippets I did manage to scribble into ye olde moleskine...

If there was a theme to Shel's comments last night, it was that the first purpose of any podcasting initiative should be to build community. Amen to that.

As Shel pointed out, this is something so often missed in the superficial view of podcasting - many businesses approach it as if it's simply a form of niche broadcasting or nifty downloadable audio. Not the point.

It comes up a lot in discussions of this emerging medium, but it's worth restating: if you're going to podcast, host it on a blog. Let people comment, in text or audio. Create a gathering place for the community you're hoping to reach.

Once you've got this going, you can then let your listeners start to drive your content. People will be quick to tell you what they like and don't like - if you only give them the forum in which to do so.

There's a thread here that runs close to one of the pieces of advice I give people whenever they ask how they should go about "breaking into" the blogosphere (eek!). It's a simple, oft-stated point: read first, then write. Or in Shel's words: "listen first, before you jump in". Makes sense.

Shel also shared some memorable ROI examples, in response to a question from the floor. I'm always keen to hear these great stories of blogging and podcasting initiatives driving measurable results - it's a big part of what I do for a living now.

Shel talked about the Butler Sheetmetal company in Colne, Lancashire - very much a traditional bricks-and-mortar (or tin and steel) business, who have been using blogs to drive community engagement with their clients. By their own reckoning, they've seen a fourfold increase in sales - a growth rate they attribute mostly to their blog and other online marketing efforts. I found some more info on the story on Christina Kerley's blog, here. Excellent stuff.

For a more podcast-y ROI story, Shel also mentioned an internal communications initiative at IBM. They have switched from a massive conference call, featuring three senior execs telecasting to 5,000 employees spread out across the globe, to a podcast - allowing employees to time-shift their listening, and really engage with the discussion. Plus - not incidentally - they've saved more than $200,000 per year on conference call costs. Stick that R in yer I, missus.

In short: Shel gives good talk. Genuinely charming, smart, business and PR-savvy, knowledgeable bloke. Loved it.

Right. Mine's a Guinness. I'll be right there...

[This post is mainly for my Mum, who will be really quite inordinately proud and all lovely and smoochy about it if I win.]

Voting opens today for the 2006 Canadian Blog Awards.

This blog has been nominated in the category of "Best Business Blog" (thanks Sheena!).

Voting is open to all, AFAIK, and you can vote once a day, every day throughout the entire first round (until November 23rd).

While trying to decide who deserves your vote, I would like to remind you - entirely in passing, of course - that I just happen to have access to a near-constant supply of high-quality British chocolate (mmmmm...Bournville...Dairy Milk...). Oh, and I pledge never to raise your taxes. Read my lips.

I'm encouraged to note that the voting form for the awards has been created by Diebold, with auditing provided by Arthur Andersen. So that's all good then.

As hoped, I've been able to persuade some of the talented chaps at sister company 76design to help me out with Extreme Makeover: Blog Edition. Stay tuned for a cosmetic overhaul of this groaning old template some time in the not too distant future.

In other news, I'm also going to be experimenting for the first time with a little lightweight advertising in the sidebar. I've never done this before - in fact, I've expressed mixed feelings about the whole idea of blog advertising in the past, and I've never signed up for any AdWords stuff or anything like that, partly as a matter of principle.

But then a few months ago a great friend of mine, Robert Jenkyn, who works with a very smart media strategy company out of Montreal, started picking my brains about an idea he had to pitch one of their clients - Canada Newswire (CNW).

CNW have been looking to foster better relationships among certain "communities of interest" out there, specifically trying to figure out how they should go about engaging in the Canadian flack-blog-o-sphere (aka the troposphere). With a little help from me, Robert approached CNW with the idea of running some custom blog-based advertising, and they bought in.

It's taken a while for this idea to come through gestation, but I've just seen the creative they've produced and I'm really happy with the way it has all come together. So I'm selling out, baby.

I don't think this is the start of a trend for me. In general, I'm still not all that keen on the idea of carrying ads for ads sake. But the CNW Group provides a range of services that are directly relevant to me and my community, so it seems to be an appropriate and acceptable experiment. Oh - and they're paying me, of course. Not a huge amount, but I'm honour-bound to disclose that a sum of money will be changing hands.

Frankly, it's not about the money anyway. The more interesting things for me in all this will be gaining access to the click-through data generated by the campaign, and the feeling that I'm participating, in some small way, in the ongoing reinvention of CNW. As their head of marketing and corporate communications just commented on the phone:

"The times are changing. We need to think beyond the ASCII font of the newswire."

Damn skippy. Been a long time coming, CNW, but it's encouraging to see you running to catch up with your market.

Haven't been able to publish anything to this blog since last Tuesday, dammit. I can see all the posts in my Blogger dashboard, and the files are actually sitting there properly on my FTP server, but they're just not showing up for some reason.

I'm wondering if forcing this small, clean post through the blogpipe will help unb0rk the thing...

[UPDATE: Bloggage cleared. Thanks, once again, to Eric Case and Graham Waldon at Blogger/Google support for passing me the spanners. In the end, I figured it out for myself - but it's always nice to get a response from Blogger support. Yet again, I came *this* close to switching to Wordpress; once again, I've been pulled back from the very brink.]

One of my favourite features of the long-running UK-based e-zine The Friday Thing is their regular "Haiknews" section, a capsule review of the week's biggest headlines presented in 5-7-5 syllable haiku form for the time-challenged.

This week's summary is a classic of the art:

Rummy shown the door
Plans to enjoy his garden
By tending known gnomes.

Scripted sound bites and carefully-crafted messages can be tricksy things.

In the mouth of an accomplished spokesperson, the well-polished phrase can be a potent, resonant thing.

Used ineptly, it's all too easy for those sparkling sound bites to backfire.

The Toronto Star has a brief report this morning on yesterday's visit of U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to Quebec.

Speaking to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations, Wilkins was pressed to respond to a recent EKOS poll, which suggested President Bush represents almost as great a threat to world peace as Osama Bin Laden, Iran and North Korea.

Reaching into his handy bag of officially-sanctioned bon mots, Wilkins commented:

"To be open and candid with you, I must say that I find that personally offensive... I think it's important for all of us to remember that our president and our country did not start the war on terror," (my emphasis).

Um... shurely shome mishtake.

Via a post at Brent Ashley's place, I just came across this terrific, thoughtful discussion of "the power, and weakness, of stories" on Dave Pollard's blog.

I'm fascinated by stories and storytelling in a business context. In media training exercises, I've often spent time trying to get clients to find the stories that best illustrate the points they're trying to get across. Forget about hammering home the dry, scripted message: tell the story.

On my Hugh McLeod "blogcards", I even chose to describe what I do as "Storyteller" (the cards also include the words "Strategist" and "Bullet Catcher". They don't include the words "Pompous Git", which was, in hindsight, a mistake).

Anyway, Dave gives good blog - you should subscribe. Some excellent nuggets in the comments thread there too.

Tags: Dave Pollard, knowledge management, storytelling, Brent Ashley

I should confess, first, that I've been a little sceptical about this whole "Social Media News Release" thing put together by Todd Defren and is firm, SHIFT Communications. I'm still somewhat sceptical, to be honest, but the problem is that, while I've been thinking this through for a while, I'm having some difficulty defining the shape of my misgivings.

And now I've just read something that has convinced me that my inchoate scepticism may indeed be completely misplaced - or that, at the very least, I need to re-visit the idea and think things through properly. What's changed my mind?

I just came across this post on Todd Defren's blog, wherein he describes, with remarkable candour, an all-too-familiar outbreak of cluelessness on the part of one of his clients, and his agency's response to the same.

In brief: one of Todd's clients was utterly obsessed with getting her startup mentioned on Mike Arrington's TechCrunch blog. Sounds like Todd's team went about things the right way, but still didn't manage to get that elusive TechCrunch mention.

Meanwhile, Mike did post a quick note about a competitive company that had just raised an angel funding round and launched (a company which Mike may or may not have had some kind of tangential connection to. Whatever. He's not trying to be the WSJ here).

In response, outraged by what was perceived as bias, the founder of the not-mentioned startup left a bit of a snotty comment on Mike's blog.  After that, things pretty much went downhill. The accusation of partiality was picked up by Valleywag (or, perhaps, it was strategically leaked - who knows). From there, the story made it to Digg, where an anonymous poster (apparently from the same disgruntled startup) really lost the plot with a singularly ugly ad hominem attack on Mike himself. Ouch. 

In the ensuing flamewar, Todd's agency took some collateral damage, from people suggesting that poor PR counsel was partly at fault in this sorry saga.

Watching the reputation of both his client and his agency getting tossed back and forth in the comments, and conscious of the blogosphere's low tolerance for PR screw ups, Todd did something which was, in my opinion, very smart. He gave his client some very strong, clear advice - and then (the best bit) he took the same counsel himself. 

In short, he said: "Apologize.  Publicly.  Now.  Then, step away from the keyboard.  Throw yourself on the mercy of the blogosphere and cross your fingers."

His client took the advice and apologized in the comments at TechCrunch. Todd also posted his account of how things got screwed up, and has continued to noodle the issue in comment threads and on his blog.

It sounds like Todd still isn't entirely sure whether his action here was the right thing to do. In his most recent post, he's running a quick poll to see whether readers consider his approach was appropriately transparent and blog-friendly, or inappropriately indiscreet (i.e. he should have taken one for the team). 

It's a tough call, for sure. It goes completely against the grain for the typical PR person to say "it wasn't me, it was my client!" We're paid to nurture and protect our clients' reputations. Often, this can mean doing all we can to protect them from themselves. 

Todd had to walk a fine ethical line here. He either had to burn his client - at the risk of losing their business - or watch his firm's own reputation as a smart, social media-savvy agency go up in smoke. From the tenor of his posts, it sounds like Todd was able to have a very frank and candid discussion with his client about this - which speaks well to the nature of his relationship with his clients.

In the end, I think what Todd did showed courage, integrity, and class. There are some bullets even the most dedicated flack shouldn't try to catch.

Tags: social media, todd defren, shift communications, techcrunch, mike arrington, crisis communications

For people who want all the cardio and aerobic workout benefits of using a skipping rope, but can't be doing with the hassle of all that actual rope stuff.

JumpSnap - the Ropeless Jump Rope.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Jon Husband points to a wonderful, hope-filled post from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, titled: "Blogging is great".

In it, Sir Tim succinctly and elegantly describes the nature of reputation on the platform he invented:

"The way quality works on the web is through links. It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice."

Perfect. It's like Cory Doctorow's idea of whuffie in Web action.

Not that Sir Tim's comment is a startling revelation for anyone familiar with the workings of the blogosphere, pagerank, Googlejuice, etc. But it's a nice example of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

Almost exactly a year ago, Doc posted a terrific idea that I linked to and riffed off.

The thought, in précis, was that someone should offer massive online storage, backup and hosting services in such a way as to be essentially seamless. It would be always-on, cheap, and completely secure.

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

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

Well Omnidrive doesn't attempt to solve the asymmetry issue, but it sounds like they've gone a long way to nailing the "seamless" part. Read this report from Rafe Needleman for a taste of what they're doing.

Bonus Thought #1: there's a great object lesson for PR folk in Rafe's opening words. This is the glowing product review that almost never happened - all because "A PR person sent (Rafe) a wrong link". Doh!

Bonus Thought #2: My original post about this stuff in November last year, led to me making the online acquaintance of an excellent chap named Mike Warot. Together, we started to work on drafting something we called "The Kill Save Manifesto"- a two-man mission inspired by some simple predicates:

• It’s the responsibility of the Operating System and one’s software applications to make sure they never lose the files entrusted to them by users.
• If your hard drive goes crunch, you might well lose data. You should have a back up. Always.
• But if a piece of software blows up your data, well that’s a flat out failure to fulfill an obligation, of the first order.
• Requiring users to do “Save” is stupid. It’s unnecessary, sloppy, a bad, outdated paradigm. And it needs to die.

I'm afraid I got horribly busy with work and life stuff, and we never quite completed the thought - but it's with me again as I think through the Omnidrive stuff. Hey Mike! Wanna give it another shot?

Just how unutterably dopey is this?

The kids and I are huge fans of a new(ish) series that's been running on Treehouse TV for the last few months. The Wonder Pets - it's a Nick Jr. show, imported from the U.S. featuring (stick with me here) three animated animals - a duckling (Ming Ming), a Turtle (Tuck), and a guinea pig (Linny).

Each episode features the intrepid trio of animal heroes, displaying great teamwork to rescue baby animals in trouble. The real hook of the program, though, is that it's staged as operetta. Trust me on this, it's awesome.

So a few minutes ago, we went to the Nick Jr. site, to see what online goodies might lie in store for these three young (and one not so young) fans of the show.

Here's what you get:


I know my machine meets and easily exceeds all of those minimum requirements. I've checked.

So I'm left to conclude that it's the first of those restrictions that's tripping me up. My kids and I can't enjoy Wonder Pets video snippets online due to an accident of geography.

Ah yes, the World Wide Web.

The even more bizarre thing is that we can play the online Wonder Pets game on the Nick Jr. site. Some online content can cross the border, some hits its head on the mighty cluewall stretching the length of the 49th parallel.

I've been noodling on the dilemma facing BCE in the last couple of days.

Since Canada's Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, dropped his Halloween bomb earlier this week, kicking the guts out of BCE's plans to convert themselves into an Income Trust, there has been a lot of speculation about what BCE should do now.

Almost four years ago, I was asked to help write a little communications strategy paper - helping out some very good friends who were pitching for BCE's annual report business. I know the paper was submitted to a number of the higher-ups at BCE. No idea if any of them actually read it.

I have just re-read it, though (I read me all the time :-) and, while I certainly wouldn't presume to suggest that it holds any wonderful magic formula for fixing such a mighty company, yet it's still kind of personally entertaining to note just how much hasn't changed in the years since Michael Sabia first took office.

A couple of excerpts, just for the fun of it:

BCE's reputation is Bell Canada’s and vice versa. Indeed, with the self-sustained perception of BCE as essentially a holding company, the only reputation the company has is derived from the performance of the various operating companies within the group. Bell is clearly the most significant contributor, in this respect as in others.

Of all the different opinions and perspectives being offered on BCE’s business and marketing challenges, the single consistent thread in the media and investor community seems to be the market’s fervent desire for the company to show better value from its roots. The most important asset that BCE owns, clearly, is the Bell business...

The paradox of BCE’s messaging structure, however, is that the company has apparently dedicated very little energy in recent years to addressing what people should and can expect from this most valuable part of the company’s portfolio. The company’s entire messaging strategy has been kept at the BCE level; the rarefied and externally nebulous holding company, with little clarity and message prominence given to the Bell operations.

And later in the piece:

This seeming lack of definition would not necessarily be an issue, were there a strong and lucidly defined meaning for BCE and a clearly delineated role for both Bell and the other operating entities within the context of the parent. The challenge now is to define and articulate this comprehensive strategy – to establish a credible platform of leadership for BCE while also recognizing and appropriately framing Bell Canada and the other key businesses within the group.

This is a complex communications challenge. An approach to resolving the complexity that appears to flow logically from Mr. Sabia’s recent messages to the market is to refocus messaging around the idea of a fundamentally strong corporate centre...

BCE currently fills this role in a number of ways for companies within the group. It acts as a solid central bank, a strong manager, and the setter of aggressive performance benchmarks – establishing the targets and managing the operating units to drive their success.

The corporate centre looks to integrate and converge business functions where appropriate, but does this between the divisions – as opposed to arbitrarily converging disparate companies into one monolithic whole. This certainly appears to be the way BCE operates; but the message is not clearly stated at present.

It's a little weird to think that, were I called upon to counsel them on their communication challenges right now, I'd probably be approaching things from exactly the same point of view.

And in their defense, one could point out that the Income Trust conversion plan upon which they were engaged was indeed Mr. Sabia's way of returning the company to the ideal of a strong corporate centre, clearly defined around the core telco business.

Michael Sabia commented at the time: "the strategy we have been pursuing over the last three or four years is not about diversification but about focus, with Bell as the centrepiece of that focus."

Makes sense to me. Maybe I've just talked myself into believing that the best course of action for BCE right now is to just push ahead as they were, only without doing it all under the guise of an Income Trust conversion. Stay the course with the focus thing, but be a hell of a lot clearer about communicating that to the market.

Don't worry, I'm not going to start doing a series of painfully self-obsessed "this is me in my shiny new gig" posts, but a quick note towards the end of the first day is appropriate, methinks.

First observation: these guys are as together on the inside as they appear to be on the outside. OK, so they really do pay me to say that now, but it's true.

For example - every time I've started a new job in the past ten years or so, the first day has always been a slightly clumsy and odd affair; much time spent figuring out what I don't know and who I should ask.

Here, though, everything I could possibly have thought to ask (so far) is up on the internal Wiki. Cool! A sizeable chunk of their essential corporate memory has been dumped into a fast, flexible, funky shared space. Lots of the basic stuff I'd need to go hunting for is all there. 'Tis a small thing, perhaps, but it's made a big difference to my first day.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled, non-self-promotional blogging.

What do you call that ever-expanding segment of the global blogging community that is populated by PR people? 

In the past, I've generally referred to PR bloggers en masse as the "flackosphere", but then tonight I had the daftest idea (while ironing a shirt, as it happens. Like Julie, I find ironing can be a great way of "loosening up the neurons").

Perhaps the curious online world PR-people-who-blog inhabit should better be referred to as the Troposphere.

Two excerpts from the appropriate Wikipedia definitions, in a doomed attempt to illuminate the pretzel logic of my reasoning:

1. "The Troposphere is the lowermost portion of Earth's atmosphere. It is the densest layer of the atmosphere and contains approximately 75% of the mass of the atmosphere and almost all the water vapor and aerosol."

See what I mean?

Often considered the lowermost portion (on the same plane of existence as lawyers, I believe); the densest layer, and consisting almost entirely of vapour.

But bear with me, there's another piece:

2. In linguistics, trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e., using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form.

Ah yes; like "collateral damage" or "wardrobe malfunction", for example. Or - even better - "transparency". There's a word all too often used in the PR world "in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form", for sure.

We're all just rolling around in one big, turbulent sphere of tropes here. *cough*

[Note to self: what on earth do you think you're playing at, being so smugly snarky about your fellow flacks, on the eve of taking on a shiny new gig with a highly-respected agency? Must have been the steam from the iron. I think it poached my self-restraint circuits.]