Kind of appropriate that, on the eve of Mesh - Canada's premier Web 2.0-y event - I was interviewed yesterday for a piece about the enterprise application of social networking and other Web 2.0-type tools. The resulting article is in this morning's ITWorldCanada feed, here: Why companies may want to take advantage of Web 2.0

As is often the case, I was less articulate in my conversation with the journalist, Kathleen Lau, than I'd hoped to be. Thoughts that seemed so crystalline and intelligent before I picked up the phone dissolved into disappointing fuzziness during our discussion. Still, it was generous of Kathleen to quote me several time throughout the body of the piece: proof once again that saying just about anything with a British accent helps to make it sound smarter than perhaps it is.

Meanwhile, I'm busy prepping for tonight's massive Third Tuesday event with our special guests, the Mesh Conference founders. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of CNW Group we've been able to book our biggest and best ever venue for tonight's Third Tuesday.

We kick off at 6pm sharp at Live@Courthouse at 57 Adelaide Street East in Toronto. Registration for tonight's Third Tuesday event is, as always, completely free. We're expecting a great crowd tonight, with a number of Mesh attendees and conference speakers adding to the usual assortment of friends and influencers from the GTA's vibrant social media, PR and marketing scene.

Hope to see you all there.

I'm pretty proud to be the father of three such wonderful children, even on regular ordinary everyday days.

Yesterday, though, I had moments when I thought I was surely going to burst open with pride.


Our charming, funny, level-headed baby girl made her First Communion yesterday, along with a record crowd of some 70-odd classmates and friends (St. John Church was absolutely jammed - standing room only, as you can imagine).

We're all exhausted today, but blissed out too. What a magical, beautiful day. The weather was mean to us, hammering rain for a good part of the afternoon, but no one cared a sou (or a sou'wester, for that matter), and it didn't disrupt the party anyway.

The morning opened quietly with the last minute arrangements, Leona ferrying Lily off to the hairdresser for her first fancy party do. It's a credit to Leona that so much of the organizing and running around had been done in the days and weeks leading up to the big day, such that our Sunday morning was remarkably calm and relaxed.

Once the spread for the party was mostly laid out, the coolers full of drinks for old and young, and everyone scrubbed, polished and dressed up to the nines, we rolled over to the St. John school gym for the official photos and the start of the day's ongoing parade of stunning young boys and girls in their immaculate suits and perfect white and ivory dresses. It was like the gym had been invaded by giggly doves.

Easing into our regular pew in St. John's (Dad had been dropped off with a good book earlier in the day to sneakily save our seats), the anticipation of the morning really started to take hold. I was suppressing the urge to giggle with excitement all the time we were sitting there, waiting for the grand parade down the aisle.

Words can't easily frame the shivery thrill as the long line of perfectly-prepared boys and girls marched in regal procession down the main aisle. It sounds daft, but at first glance I literally didn't recognize Lily as she passed our seats. I'd seen her all morning; even helping her into her perfect little Irish linen dress and the rest of the matching ensemble. But as she walked - glided - down that aisle, she was transformed in my eyes.

The only way I can describe the feeling is to compare it to how I felt when the doors of St. Joseph's, Valleymount, swung open nearly 14 years ago, and Leona walked through with her brothers on either side. As with Leona then, I fell in love with Lily all over again as I watched her approach the altar.

The ceremony was mostly a blur from that point. One moment stands out in bright detail, though -- when Lily stepped up behind one of her classmates to deliver her part of the Prayers of the Faithful. I'm biased, I know, but everyone else also commented that her diction and enunciation was the very best of the bunch. She just blows us away sometimes.

After the ceremony, and cake and further helpings of giggliness back at the school gym, we headed home to host a big group of friends, neighbours, and loved ones for what turned out to be one of the best parties I've ever enjoyed. By the end of the afternoon, the weather had even cleared up enough for us to let the kids onto the trampoline at the end of the garden.

Perfect.

I'm not often at a loss for words, but there's just no way to describe quite how I felt all day yesterday, watching our stunning girl move through the crowd, lighting up every face around her. Though the words fall short, the pictures help capture some of Lily's extraordinary magic. She's one in a million, and I thank God for bringing her into our lives.


I love you, Lily Aine. Thank you for an amazing, joyous day.

Bit of a blogdrought the last few days. Sorry about that.

Breaking radio silence for a minute here to report on my fine cousin Adam's excellent efforts to change the way political reporting happens in Ireland.

The Irish Election takes place tomorrow. Traditional broadcast and print media regulations in Ireland mean that there is usually a complete blackout in the day before an election, with politicians mandated to refrain from giving interviews in the 24 hours before a vote.

The broadcasting legislation hasn't kept pace with the Internet, however. The complete moratorium on media interviews in the day before the election doesn't include online and podcast interviews.

So Adam, and a merry group of like-minded Irish freelancers, have been busily running around all day doing interviews with some of the Election candidates, and posting podcasts of the results to a group blog at IrishElection.com

Outstanding!

Adam and his friends are also going to be using Twitter to post regular updates of the vote counts all day tomorrow - you can sign up to track the progress by following http://twitter.com/IrishPolitics

Nice to see that the group's blog is currently the top Google-ranked hit for a search on "Irish Election" - there's the SEO power of the blogosphere at work again. Blog, as we all know by now, really stands for Better Listing On Google :-D

[UPDATE: Oh, OK - so I'm understandably rather proud of my excellent cousin - but as Adam points out, full credit for the idea behind the Irish Election blog really goes to Cian O'Flaherty - the guy who runs the site and first asked Adam to contribute. Still - Cian's never bought me pints, so I'm biased.]

I seem to be blogging rather more about client work these days than I ever have in the past. Take this as a signal that I’m really engaged in my work here at TFC. I’ve always tried to keep overt client pitchery to a minimum here, but every now and then my enthusiasm for a specific client project froths over. I’m hoping long-time readers will indulge my little moments of uncontrolled excitement.

After two intense months of long hours and terrific effort from both the TFC and 76Design teams, our first major project for Sharp Electronics of Canada went live this morning. The coolest thing about this, on a personal level is that the program we just launched is the original program we pitched when we were competing for the business.

When we were doing our research to get our collective heads around the Sharp account, one of the things we discovered is that the company has made a genuine commitment to action on climate change. They’ve set themselves a goal to achieve “zero global warming impact by 2010”, and they’re deadly serious about this. There are lots of companies jumping on the Green bandwagon, but Sharp is clearly walking the talk – and have been for some time.

So this got us thinking...

Green is the new black (as a friend and colleague once said). Everywhere you look – on TV, in magazines, and on the news – environmental awareness is the story of the year. Given the chance to work with a client that is clearly doing their part, it makes sense to throw some light on this aspect of their business.

The problem with environmental awareness is that while most people acknowledge the issue, getting people to change their habits can be hard.

A story on CBC Newsworld the other day illustrates the point here. Ontario’s Environment Minister, Laurel Broten, announced the Province’s plan to cut plastic bag use by 50%. In the TV coverage, CBC interviewed a bunch of different people who all agreed that they hated plastic bags and only continued to use them out of habit. The reporter on CBC suggested that people are willing to change, but they need something to spur them into altering their accustomed behaviour.

With this kind of thought in mind, and playing around with the details of one of Sharp’s latest TV model numbers, my creatively-talented colleague Tamera Kremer came up with an idea. What if we created a national online Eco Challenge, that would encourage Canadians to do the right thing for the planet and give them a big incentive to do so?

And so, the AQUOS 1080P D82 Challenge was born.

The idea: take 80 Canadians, from right across the country (all 10 provinces, plus Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut), and have them compete to reduce their carbon footprint. Winner gets to go home with a beautiful 52” AQUOS “Green TV”.

10 Provinces; 80 People; 82 Days to make a difference – hence, 1080P D82.

We figured on two stages: a recruitment round, open to all Canadians, to get people signing up to take part. Then we sort all entries by location, and randomly select 80 participants to be entered into the actual 82 day challenge. In stage two, each of the 80 challengers “weighs in” is set up with their own online journals, so they can record their progress as they work to reduce their personal burden on the environment.

At the end of the program, all participants are winners; they’ve saved money, helped save the planet, and we have a stack of great Sharp goodies for them to take away. Groovy – doing good, and winning big.

We built a full site mockup and a plan for how we’d launch this program for our final presentation to the Sharp team and, well, I guess they must have really liked it. We won the business, and now we’re actually getting to execute the program we pitched.

The 1080P D82 Challenge site just went live. Now we’re into pitching till we’re hoarse.

Again, pardon the full-frontal client and employer ego-fluffing here, but this really is cool stuff. This is the kind of campaign that makes me utterly love my job.

Here's a great little case study we might get to dig into during the panel I'm involved in at Mesh later this month. The topic of our session is: Is Fake the New Real? Transparency and Trust, and I just found some excellent fuel for that particular fire.

One of the hottest videos rising up the ranks at YouTube right now is this one (below) in which two aging hipsters pull off a series of goofy tricks, tossing and catching a pair of sunglasses by face:



There's been some debate in the comments as to whether the video footage is real or faked, but who cares? It's funny, clever, and has all the ingredients of something that's destined to go viral through blog posts, forward-to-friend links, and cross posting on other video sharing sites (evidence: it's already been posted to or picked up by Metacafe, Grouper, GoFish, IFilm, DailyMotion, even the infamous eBaum's World).

As of this writing, the original video on YouTube is sitting at over 918,000 views, more than 6,000 comments, and it's been "favorited" (ugh - nasty expression) more than 5,700 times.

Here's the thing though: it's an advert.

The sunglasses used in the video are a classic pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. At the end of the 90 seconds or so of film, you see the shades-catching dude sitting in a car that has the words "Never Hide" scribbled into the dust on the window. That just happens to be the tagline for a current Ray-Ban campaign, as featured on their website.

The guys at AdRants have the scoop on this, as they were apparently pitched directly by Feed Company, the agency responsible. The video was posted to YouTube by a user named "neverhide". A quick Google search shows that they've been all over the place with this one. They've even got the requisite MySpace page.

So. It's cool, it's popular, but it's fake. Or, not "fake", perhaps, but certainly not an authentic piece of "User Generated Content".

Feed Co.'s "About" page describes the agency thus:

"Feed Company is a video view optimization company in Los Angeles, CA that helps advertisers and entertainment companies get their video exposed on popular blogs, social video networks, and P2P services."

What we have here is a piece produced by a professional firm, designed to look kind of amateur, grungy, and user-generated. And - yes - it's really well done. But are we OK with that?

I'm ambivalent.

If there are agencies popping up whose entire raison d'être is to "feed the monster"(as Feed puts it) of the UGC and social media space, well that's kind of weird but understandable.

If paid, professional work is presented as though it's something done by enthusiastic dilettantes - that's lying.

But it's a fuzzy line.

Anyway, look forward to getting into this with my fellow panelists when we're Meshing in a couple of weeks.

One of the people I met at the recent AMA Panel on "The Future of Branding" was Ron Kunitzky of Geyser Marketing Group.

In an email discussion following the panel session, Ron kindly asked if he could interview me for his company's blog. The resulting three question interview is up over at the Geyser Marketing Blog, here.

I'm indebted to Ron for asking smart, interesting questions, and hope my responses were reasonably coherent. Anyway, you can judge for yourself. Thanks Ron.

If you're going to be in town for the Mesh Conference at the end of the month, come and hang out with some of Toronto's brightest and least annoying PR folk at the next Third Tuesday meetup on May 29th, the night before Mesh opens. Think of it as the pre-Mesh Mosh.

We're fortunate enough to have roped in the founders of Mesh (aka The Gang of Five) as our special guests for the evening. This is your chance to find out everything you ever wanted to know about Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Stuart MacDonald, Rob Hyndman, and Mike McDerment.

Sign up for Third Tuesday, here. Venue details coming really soon.

Tidying up the living room tonight, I picked up our battered old digital camera from a side table and the DVD remote that was lying alongside it. This triggered a memory of something I've heard or read somewhere recently, so I had to try it for myself.




Explanation here.

And yes, I do know I have the perfect face for podcasting.

A lovely 4.75 hours recovering from the latest hard disk crash on our main Dell laptop. Joy, oh joy.

Thanks to the good backup counsel of Brent Ashley, a call with a helpful Dell service tech, and a good deal of patience, I managed to resist the urge to take this laptop up to the top floor windows and teach it to fly. All is now working again, TG.

While waiting for the machine to restore from backups, I dipped into the opening chapters of David Weinberger's new book.

Still too early to provide any kind of thoughtful response or review, but a thought struck me as I was happily paging through the prologue: David has become, simply, the foremost philosopher of the Internet age.

Every paragraph sets me thinking. So much so that I've found I have to lower the book every now and then, to let my thoughts pursue the path David's words open up. A book that really charges my brain up and sets it running. This is going to be good...

Nice surprise package in the office this morning - my copy of David Weinberger's new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, just arrived.

Obviously, I haven't had the time to give it much more than a cursory glance so far, but I have a couple of tiny, immediate observations:

1. The publisher's letter included in the package opens with: "Dear Michael, We have made a mess." I thought, at first, that this was a reference to the fact that a bunch of the complimentary copies they'd shipped out had somehow gone missing in transit, but it's actually a segue into their blurb for the book: "We have made a mess. In the past, everything had its place -- its one category or shelf..." Accidentally appropriate.

2. I think I may have described in the past one of my rather unusual talents ("quirks" might be a better word). When I look at a page of text, if there's a single typo or spelling error, it seems to jump out at me before I've even read the page.

My eye is magnetically drawn to mistakes on the page - in anything but my own writing, anyway. I always manage to miss my own typos, even if I read the page five times over.

It's a rather strange little skill, if that's even the correct word for it. I've often thought I could always get a gig as a proof-reader, if all else fell through. Back when we were doing the IPO, in rooms full of bankers, accountants and lawyers, I always seemed to be the first to spot the rounding errors and data entry cockups in the columns of numbers. I completely suck at number-crunching, but the errors on a page just sing to me.

So I slide David's book out of the padded envelope and the very first thing I see on the back of the book is this quotation from Jimmy Wales:

"Just when I thought I understood the world, David Wei nberger turns it upside down..."

The cover design is all shiny and lovely, and they've done something very clever with the printing, giving the text on the front and spine an almost 3D quality. Shame to find this silly and utterly trivial little glitch on the back.

Pointing this out, btw, is in no way a reflection on the book at all. It's an incredibly trivial and picky thing to draw attention to; says more about my curious typo-sensing radar ability than the quality of the fine tome I hold in my hands.

With about three weeks to go until the second Mesh Conference, the Gang of Five, have posted the current schedule for the two days of the event. Delighted to be able to blog about this now, as I'm quietly tickled to have made the roster for the second year in a row.

I'm on a panel session at the end of the second day with Stuart MacDonald, Dr. Jones, and Rachel Clarke of JWT New York. I think it's going to be simpler if just call everyone on the panel "Clarke" - save confusion. And we can ask my TFC colleague Chris Clarke to take notes.

Topic of our panel: "Is Fake the New Real? Transparency and Trust"

Should be a hoot. This could be the kind of panel that lends itself well to a social media drinking game, though - you get to take a shot every time one of us mentions Lonelygirl15, Bridezilla, Wal-Mart, Raging Cow, character blogs, or that Sony PSP thing.

The rest of the conference line up is looking great - check it out for yourself. Hope to see you there.

Since posting my snarky diatribe about a less-than-satisfying experience dealing with the vendor of a new PR service, I've had a continuing email dialogue with the founder.

Good news - in a message earlier today, he said:

After discussion with my business partner, we have decided to lift the 2 day trial limitation in favor of a limited number of searches. So, all trial users will be given 10 searches with a limit of 25 results per search. By doing so, we hope to avoid the same issue you ran into with our trial.

Thanks again for your direct and honest feedback. As I wrote before, we are open to new ideas and we will see if this improves the user experience.

Yay! That's a very positive and happy result. I'll be trying out the service in the near future. Looking forward to it.

Here's an interesting move.

Ragan Communications has just launched MyRagan - a social networking service (or "YASNS", in danah boyd's memorable coinage) designed specifically for PR people and professional communicators.

Ragan is a 35-year old, family-owned publishing business, organizers of a renowned series of conferences and, not incidentally, sponsors of a Webinar series run by friend-of-Thornley Fallis, Shel Holtz. I mention that last point simply because it's a leading indicator that Ragan, as an organization, clearly has a clue when it comes to the evolution of social media and the impact on the PR world.

Through their newsletters, awards programs, conferences and many other online and offline initiatives, the Ragan organization has, in a sense, always been in the business of building communities.

They've established themselves as a vital part of the connective tissue that joins the disparate practitioners of all the many flavours of professional communications and PR. The ideas and stories that appear in the pages of publications like The Ragan Report often become part of the water-cooler vernacular of the PR trade.

It's good to see them extending their community-building into the social software world.

I've only just signed up and started to experiment, but it's looking promising so far. They've used the SNAPP development platform to build this, which is kind of a rapid application development service for YASNS (Instant Communities: just add water!).

There are some positive indicators, even in the first five minutes of using MyRagan, that this SNAPP thingy is a well-thought-through piece of kit.

For example, as you're signing up for the service it reads your IP address and does a quick lookup, so that the City, State, Country fields are autocompleted for you. Slightly spooky, but a nice touch. It's something that's just about brain-dead simple to do, but always a nice surprise to see that someone's taken the time to make the first couple of screens as usable and friendly as possible.

Looking forward to exploring this further. For now, a polite little ripple of applause for Mark Ragan. Smart move.

During the working day, I usually have one of my black notebooks close at hand - wherever I am. When not at work, I often have a pocket-sized one handy, for scribbling down shopping lists, random notes, and moments of bloggy inspiration.

The pocket-sized journals tend to last a lot longer than the bigger versions I use several times a day, every day. Which explains why, turning a page in the current pocket journal the other morning, I came across a piece I wrote almost a year ago and had completely forgotten about. For some reason, I'd scribbled this little piece into the centre pages of my journal - perhaps just so that I would surprise myself on finding it weeks or months later, which is precisely what happened.

Still seems blogworthy, so I thought I'd capture it here, before I move too much deeper into the notebook and forget about the piece again, until I sit down to do my annual thumb through of the year's completed journals.

Here, then, a little story about Ruairi, our youngest, who would have been three and a half at the time.

Ruairi never fails to surprise and delight us. They all do, of course, but I think it's entirely reasonable to admit there's a certain unique bond we have with Ruairi, different from the others, only because of the trauma of his early weeks. (Long story, covered in detail on BlogSprogs
- archives there look to be busted at the moment though, so until I can fix them, here's the short version: he had an e. coli infection in his blood at six weeks old. It was rough. Really, really rough.)

He's a special kid. Naturally charismatic, considerate, big-hearted. Funny too. And a thinker.

How to describe Ruairi (or any of them) in mere words?

Last Monday night - the Victoria Day holiday - we were both flopped out, upside down on the bed in our master bedroom. We were lying heads down in the darkened room, the curtains open, so that we could watch the fireworks burst and crackle in the deep blue twilight.

A single point of light stood out in the the darkening sky, and Ruairi, ever observant, constantly chattering and questioning, fell silent for a moment as he searched for the label to apply to this static sparkly something in the midst of all the firework frenzy.

"Is that a star, Daddy?"

"Yes darling."

A pause. Maybe half a minute...

"Is that... the first star, Daddy?"

"Yes Small, I think it is."

Excited now: "Make a wish, Daddy! Make a wish!"

Huge smile: "OK, sweet boy. And you too, OK?"

We lay there a minute longer. Then quietly, slowly, he started to sing. A soft, thin descant, gently
whispering...

"Star light... star bright... first star... I... star light... I see... I wish tonight... I wish I may... I wish..."

His voice slipped away as the lump grew in my throat. Rolled my head towards him - God bless the mite, he'd fallen asleep.

I love you Small. My Ruairi. I always will.