Having dug into the whole idea of Social Media News Releases in an earlier post, I want to take a closer look at the latest product in this genre to have hit the market. It's a long post (again). If you can't be bothered to read the entire thing, here's the précis:

1. Marketwire's Social Media 2.0 product is well-intentioned and forward-looking, but;
   
2. While the concept is OK (subject to caveats stated earlier), the execution is ...er... a bit off.
   

First, the obligatory (although probably tiresome) confessional: I've been wrestling with the idea of writing this piece for a couple of weeks now. I don't think I've ever been openly critical on the blog about one of my clients' competitors before. The thought of it gives me squirmy, uncomfortable feelings I can't quite articulate. But I've reached the conclusion that the points I want to make are all things I'd be saying regardless of my client affiliations. In other words, the opinions I'm about to express have nothing to do with the fact that my firm happens to represent a competitor of the company whose recent announcement I'm going to write about.

For the record, though, here's the important disclosure again:

• My employer, Thornley Fallis, is agency of record for CNW Group – an account which I personally lead;
  
• The topic of this blog post is a critique of a recent new product announcement from Marketwire, a competitor to CNW Group;
  
• I'm naturally feeling a little conflicted about this whole thing, but I'm going to do my best to keep my biases and client affiliations out of it. I guess you'll have to be the judge of how well I manage that.
  

On that basis, then (and administered under the panacea apology-in-advance that it's easier to criticise than create) let me dive into the details of what Marketwire has announced.

The first thing in their product announcement that tripped me up is right there in the headline:

Marketwire Unveils Social Media 2.0: Industry's Most Authentic Social Media Product

Why "Most Authentic"? That I simply don't understand.

I get that successful marketing and communications in today's online world is all about authenticity, transparency, integrity, personal voice. This much we know. But I'm puzzled by the use of the word "authentic" in this sentence.

First, pardon my pedantry, but can one really have gradations of authenticity? Isn't it kind of binary – it's either authentic or it's fake? "Most Authentic" sounds a little like saying something is "very unique", and that's just wrong.

Beyond my pickiness about English usage, however, I did have another, more serious qualm about this positioning. To me, authenticity in communications has nothing to do with the format. A little later in their announcement, Marketwire says:

"Social Media 2.0 transforms a press release into an authentic social media tool by enabling two-way conversation via an in-release comment box that feeds directly into a client-monitored online newsroom."

... but I'd argue that authenticity is not an automatic by-product of enabling two-way conversation. Adding a comment box to the bottom of a news release so that people can tell you directly what they think does not mean that your communications are necessarily more "authentic". With apologies to McLuhan, the medium is not the message – at least in this sense.

If your news release is full of fake, bullish, vacuous posturing and claims of unsubstantiated leadership, no amount of fancy SMNR formatting is going to bestow magical insta-authenticity, I'm afraid.

And while we're on the subject of authenticity and two-way conversation, I find the way comments are being handled in this thing is distinctly odd. I really like the idea of allowing direct comments on online news releases. That's one of the most interesting things about the read-write Web, as implemented on blogs and now on many newspapers' sites too – you can read a story and then immediately see how other people have responded to it in the comments.

If you want to see an example of well-implemented commenting on news releases, check out GM Europe's Social Media Newsroom, where every news release runs like a blog post, with full inline comments. (Disclosure: GM is a client of TFC in Canada, but we had nothing to do with this European implementation).

Marketwire's Social Media 2.0 format includes a box inviting one to leave a comment, but it's not immediately clear where the comments go or how you can see other comments. Clicking on "View Our Newsroom", directly above the comment box, takes you to an external page with some extra info, including a couple of recent comments in a sidebar. It's not at all like the kind of comment box you might see on a blog post, though. There are no date or time stamps on the comments and no identifying information about the commenter.

When you leave a comment, you're asked for your name, email address, and a website URL – just like on a blog. But this information doesn't seem to be pulled through and published, so there's no way to follow links back to the commenter's own site and read other examples of their thinking.

In addition, it's perfectly understandable that comments would be moderated in some way, but I couldn't find any references to a commenting policy that would provide clarity about what kind of feedback might get blocked. For comparison, go back to that GM site for a second – at the foot of every news release, there's a simple statement that all comments are subject to moderation, with a simple link out to a page explaining their commenting policy.

Lacking any such clarity, Marketwire's closed, opaque commenting system is a lot less useful – and actually a lot less authentic – than it might be. It's rather less like a two-way conversation and more a closed "suggestion box" approach.

The Newsroom they've created is peculiar in other ways too. I like the fact that they provide direct email and phone contact details for a real person – that's so much better than the approach seen at too many online newsrooms ("fill in this form and maybe some unnamed person will get back to you some time. If you're lucky.")

They also deserve credit for posting copies of recent coverage, including a piece from Search Engine Watch that is not entirely positive. What I don't like is that the clips are posted in PDF format, rendering them essentially unsearchable and painful to open. Why not just post plain text or permalinks to the actual coverage?

Going back to the main announcement – right after I read the headline, the second statement that gave me pause for thought jumps out of the sub-head:

"SM 2.0 Advances Press Release Format, Content Options, and News Distribution Channels Beyond Traditional Means to Engage More Audiences With a Reach Surpassing 200 Million+ Web Users" (my emphasis)

I've been trying to figure out what that 200 Million+ number means. I have a dreadful feeling that what they're referring to is the entire North American online population. Out of a total Web population of some 1.3 billion users, it looks like around 200 million are based in North America. Could that really be what they mean here? And, if so, isn't that the equivalent of saying (with a certain breathless excitement): "if you put up a web page, anyone with an Internet connection can see it!"?

I hope I'm wrong. They're a lot smarter than that, I know. But where else could that audience reach figure come from? Hoping one of the MW guys will let me know in the comments here.

Moving deeper into the announcement, we learn that:

"Social Media 2.0 provides automatic news availability inside hard-to-reach social networks such as iTunes®, Photobucket®, YouTube™ and Twitter. In addition, Social Media 2.0 boasts the largest Second Life® news channel distribution of any newswire."

Sounds groovy, but also odd. As an aside, I'm not sure I would categorize any of the services listed as "social networks", but without dwelling on semantics, I was also generally confused about what this part of the announcement means. So I checked out some of their recent examples.

I've figured out how they're doing the Twitter part – there's a Marketwire user account at twitter.com/marketwire where they're listing news releases as they go out. That's a little spammy, but could be useful to some info-junkies I suppose. What they're doing with client-specific RSS feeds is a rather better way of achieving the same end.

The Photobucket and YouTube mentions are simple references to the fact that they can post your related videos and pictures to these sites. That's easy and sounds like a good idea, but again I'm not sure I get the point.

Most wire services offer their own photo and video hosting/archive services already, but one of the advantages of social media, of course, is widespread accessibility for the general online public. Posting client content to these high-traffic, popular social sites makes good theoretical sense, from that perspective. Alas, while the idea has value, Marketwire's execution requires a little more thought.

The embedded videos, for example, get posted to YouTube under the Marketwire account name. That's fine if you happen to be searching on YouTube for "Marketwire", but (with no offense to the MW guys) how likely is that?

Earlier this month, they issued another SMNR on behalf of PetSmart. There's a cute embedded video in the release, hosted on the same YouTube account. The problem is that you won't find this video by searching YouTube for "PetSmart". Pretty much the only way you'd know it's there is if you follow the link from the release, so I don't see that their use of YouTube here really adds any extra Googlejuice or other indefinable coolness.

The iTunes mention is puzzling too. It looks like what they're doing is offering a short audio summary of the release as an embedded MP3 file, which will then be rolled into a "category podcast" and submitted to iTunes. Perhaps the idea is that there will be news summary podcasts for a variety of industry sectors, with snippets of all the latest announcements from any given week. I can see how that would be useful.

Alas, I've searched through the iTunes podcast directory, but can't find any Marketwire podcasts. What should I be looking for? It's definitely a cool notion to channel the hip usefulness of podcasting and Apple's iTunes – but I'm afraid I'm missing something here.

As for the distribution offered within Second Life, my only (admittedly snarky) comment would be – how very 2006.

There are a lot of other features they're touting in this announcement, but rather than go through a relentless point-by-point fisking, I'll just highlight a couple of other things that could probably have been implemented better.

To the right of the main news release text is an interesting little box titled "WEBOSPHERE". Cute name. The theory behind this section is terrific. With a handful of links and some quick stats, the idea is to let you see exactly how many people are discussing or linking to the page (tracked through Digg and Technorati), as well as how and where the release has been picked up on some search engines. Clicking on the number embedded links runs the appropriate search to show you instant results. Fantastic idea. But with a few problems ...

Let's start with the Technorati button. One click here takes the viewer to a page of search results on Technorati for that particular release – the concept being that you'll get a quick read of how many people have written something about your news and linked back to it. Caution: this is not the same as media monitoring and is far from a perfect measurement approach, but it could still be very useful in its own right, if it worked properly.

The big problem is that Marketwire's Technorati buttons always take the user to a page of search results for the TITLE of the release. In practice, journalists, bloggers, and other commentators will rarely use the headline you've chosen for your release. Instead, people are rather more likely to write about the news and, possibly, point to the original announcement using the actual URL.

This may seem like a fine distinction, but it's an important one, and here's why:

Starting from their own Social Media 2.0 announcement, clicking on Marketwire's "Technorati's on this release" button (and don't get me started on that bizarre apostrophe placement) brings up this list, which currently stands at four results. So one would naturally assume, if one didn't know better, that four people have blogged about their announcement.

If, instead, we pass the URL as our search term to Technorati, we get this list, which currently stands at 23 – a much better number, although still only the tip of the iceberg.

(It's very easy to track discussions linking back to a specific URL, by the way, through a simple Technorati "bookmarklet" that plugs into the toolbar of your browser and lets you instantly see who's linking to the page you're currently viewing. I use this all the time in my research, it's a very useful little tool).

The point is, Marketwire's attempt to give us a quick snapshot of the amount of traction a news release is getting is flawed here through a simple misunderstanding of the way Technorati (and the blogosphere at large) works.

The same is true of their other search buttons, by the way. Each of the embedded search options offered in their "PRStats" box (Google, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo!) works by passing the complete news release title as an exact string (enclosed in quotation marks) to the relevant search engine.

This is error prone and misleading – it will bring back a list of results where the precise headline of the release appears in a reference elsewhere on the Web, but it won't give you a complete picture of how many people are writing about the news as announced. How often would any self-respecting journalist or blogger use the supplied news release headline verbatim in their story?

This is easily fixed, of course, they just have to tweak their code a tiny bit. While they're at it, they should probably look at the way the search results are being reported too. I don't know enough about coding to determine what the problem is here, but the results as reported in this "WEBOSPHERE" box don't necessarily match the actual number of results. A random sampling of a few of the releases they've put up using this product in the last few weeks indicates that the Yahoo! and Live results number shown is almost always inaccurate.

In one case I found, the total number of search hits reported was off by 1,000. This release, from Diabetes America, currently shows a count for one solitary search result on Yahoo. Click the link, though, and the actual count is north of 1,700. Looking at the source code for the page, it appears they have a simple truncation problem in their code. Again, easy to fix.

My main concern with this section, though, is the fact that it could be perceived by some as a valid way to measure coverage. It's not. The links provided are absolutely a useful and convenient snapshot, but that's all they are.

This PRStats idea is something Marketwire inherited when they acquired PRNN in August 2007. PRNN's founder, Kevin Dill, accurately described PRStats as "a quick birds-eye view of search engine cataloging" – it will show you that your news release has been indexed by three of the top search engines, both on the Marketwire site and wherever it has been picked up by other downstream news aggregation, syndication and regurgitation services. It will NOT give you any clue about actual coverage (i.e. who out there has picked up on the news and chosen to write a story about it). I hope most decent PR folk would instinctively understand that, but you never know.

There are many more things I could dig into with this Social Media 2.0 thingy. Take a look at the way they've implemented their keyword cloud, for example, and see if you can spot the flaw (clue: what's with the Boolean AND?). Another point that doesn't seem to be getting much airtime is that these things are, by their very nature, expensive. That is no reason to dismiss them outright, of course – if the value is there (and I believe it absolutely can be, when social media approaches are combined with traditional media outreach), then the extra cost can be justified. But the costs are not insignificant.

These are topics for a possible future post though. Others have already written more eloquently about the Marketwire announcement, and even I'm growing tired of my blethering, so I'm going to wrap.

So. While Marketwire haven't exactly reinvented the wheel here (the notion of the Social Media News Release has been around in various forms for at least a couple of years), they have taken a decent stab at making the idea their own and updating it. As a major newswire, they deserve credit for being willing to experiment with something that, so far, only the most forward-looking PR practitioners have been doing.

I just wish they'd spent rather more time consulting with some of those practitioners and figuring out what is really of value, before rushing to be first to market with an imperfectly implemented product. Once again, even though these guys are a direct competitor to one of my clients, I hope this lengthy screed will be taken as constructive criticism. If they fix their product, and I hope they do, that can only be good for the entire community.

Meanwhile, if you want a journalist's take on what "Media Release 2.0" really ought to be like, Tod Maffin had a great post way back in October that deserves a second visit. Although, as Donna Papacosta pointed out in the comments on that post: "Gosh, Tod, this will NEVER work. It's clear, direct and intelligent!"

From Scripting News:

They talk about them all the time on the news shows, every day the major Presidential candidates have conference calls with reporters.

It seems much of the real action in the campaign happens here, but we (voters, taxpayers, citizens) have no access.

I listened to an MP3 of one of the calls, with the chief strategist and communications director of the Clinton campaign. It was fascinating, gave me a picture of how the press and the candidates relate that I had never seen before.

Dave is hooked and is trying to find out where he can get more access: "...been asking around, where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters, and so far have come up with nothing."

Dave suggests that the candidates should make the MP3s available as RSS enclosures, so anyone could subscribe to them as a podcast feed. He's even offering to help and host the feed.

I think this is a fantastic idea and would love to see it happen. It's broadly similar, at least in spirit, to the project my cousin Adam has underway, to podcast interviews with every single member of the 30th incarnation of Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament. Love it.

As is often the nature of the Third Tuesday events in Toronto, we find ourselves flexing a little due to schedule demands, public holidays, and the diverse demands of putting together what has grown to become a very successful free monthly event. This is my roundabout way of saying that February's Third Tuesday meeting is not on the actual third monthly instance of the day named for Tyr (i.e. tonight), but on Tuesday February 26^th instead.

Our featured guest this month is Michael McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks, co-founder of the Mesh conference, entrepreneur, Internet marketing expert, and blogger.

I've had a number of conversations with Mike over the last year or so about how Public Relations works in a Web 2.0 world and the kind of services companies such as Freshbooks need from their agency partners. Mike has some very clear ideas and strong opinions about what works and what doesn't at the various stages in the evolution of a company. He's learned how and when to use external PR services; how to tune into online conversations that matter to your company; when and how to join them; and why sending someone in Fiji a box of Triscuits can sometimes get you much more attention than sending out a news release.

Mike's company is also a useful one for agency folk and people in the professional services business to know about. Freshbooks provides an on-demand solution for time-based billing and invoicing - two aspects of the job that every PR person I know loves to gripe about. Mike's not coming to Third Tuesday to do a product pitch, but I'm sure his firm's work with agencies of all sizes has given him some great insights into "the tyranny of the billable hour" as Robert Hishon put it.

So – if you're in Toronto next Tuesday night, come and join us at Fionn McCool's to hear Mike speak about the challenges of creating awareness for a relatively young software company, how PR can help, and the role played by Social Media in the whole thing.

P.S. A quick hat tip to CNW Group once again for their sponsorship – the main reason we're able to keep these events free.

For much of the last year or so, the blogvines (at least, in those corners of the great big blogjungle where the flacks hang out) have been rattling with the idea that we need a new kind of news release.

The concept of a "Social Media News Release" (SMNR) was kicked off by Todd Defren about 18 months ago, to a mixture of praise and scepticism in the PR and broader media communities. Prompted by the announcement from Marketwire of their "Social Media 2.0" product, I've been doing a lot more reading and thinking about this in the past couple of weeks, and cooking up a couple of posts to try to do my thinking out loud in the hope of arriving at some conclusions. In this post, I'm going to wander through some of my overall thoughts on the SMNR concept. I have a follow-up piece in the works in which I'll try to articulate my thoughts about the latest initiative from Marketwire.

Fair warning: the word "wander" above was not accidental. This is a long post, with a relatively narrow focus.

If you want a cogent, reasoned, and much better explanation and discussion of Social Media News Releases, I can recommend this post from Brian Solis, which includes the only point you really need to understand:

"Social Media Releases can complement your outbound communications strategy based on what the people you're trying to reach want to see and how. They do not replace Traditional Releases."

If, however, you're willing to amble along beside me as thoughts of SMNRs tumble through my head, read on. Also, every good amble needs a preamble. So a little disclosure, please:

• My employer, Thornley Fallis, is agency of record for CNW Group – an account which I personally lead;
  
• The topic of this blog post was, as I've just said, inspired by the recent product announcement from Marketwire, a competitor to CNW Group;
  
• This post isn't specifically critical of Marketwire's offering, but the next one might be interpreted that way;
  
• I'm naturally feeling a little conflicted and squirmy about this whole thing, but I'm going to do my best to keep my biases and client affiliations out of it. I guess you'll have to be the judge of how well I manage that.
  

Of course, I know that my best efforts at objectivity here will still be taken as entirely subjective. That's fair and right; I can't claim for a moment to be an unbiased witness. But I would submit that my bias comes from pre-existing personal predilections, and not from client association. Does that make sense?

Ambling on ...

I've been sitting squarely in the "undecided" camp ever since the first SMNR initiative was announced. I instinctively want to welcome the notion of "News Release 2.0" (or at least celebrate the imminent demise of v1.0), but a number of things about the approaches taken to date by my esteemed and learned colleagues in the troposphere just aren't sitting right with me. That's another one of those areas of vague disquiet, which I'm having some difficulty explaining.

Granted, the entire process by which news is currently disseminated is widely acknowledged as broken. It needs something doing to it.

The basic method is over a hundred years old, quite literally. The first news release was dreamt up and issued by the legendary (in PR circles) Ivy Lebetter Lee in 1906. It was a smart thing to do back then, but I'm not convinced that these attempts to resuscitate the format and make it relevant for the Internet age are entirely the right thing to do.

In summary, though, it's not the format or even, necessarily, the method that's broken. As Brian Solis said, in a comment at my friend Stowe Boyd's blog: "It's the substance and honesty that press releases lack. The rest is technology."

Or, even better, as my blog-sister Jeneane has said:

"The traditional press release serves a purpose and always will. For public companies it is more an IR tool than anything else. Public companies are required to release information--and whether they do it through more human sounding language, through some PDF or HTML file with horizontal rules and links to podcasts, OR the usual way, they're not bothering anyone... The call for a social media press release is a straw man. It is easier to fix formatting and links in an OldPR tool than it is to figure out how to bring an old-world discipline into new territory."

Again: the problem most often isn't the format, it's the content. A lot of the news releases that hit the wires and land in journalists' inboxes with a resounding thud every day are just pathetically badly written. At this point, no doubt, someone is going to go hunting through the many thousands of news releases out there that bear my name at the bottom, and hold them up to the light for all to ridicule. In truth, I know I am not without sin, but then I'm not the first PR guy to cast a stone here.

If we follow Todd Defren's inspiration for the SMNR idea back to the source, the root inspiration for the creation of an SMNR is the belief that the whole idea of news releases, per se, is basically hosed.

More than that: certain aspects of the way wire distribution services work are hosed – and the smarter ones know this, btw. OK, so "hosed" is more than a little hyperbolic – but they're certainly challenged to remain relevant, viable, and profitable now that anyone with an Internet connection can get access to news and information from anywhere just about any time. It's a disintermediated, weird wide world. All kinds of businesses have been, or are being, disrupted. That's kind of the whole point.

What's happening is that the entire canon in which we have codified the format, methodology, infrastructure, and assumed network effects of this age-old distribution regimen is becoming increasingly redundant. Hung by the web, drawn by the Cluetrain, quartered by the blogosphere. The extreme view would be to suggest that news releases were, in many ways, sidelined the minute Tim B-L lit up the Web; we just haven't fully realised it yet.

Again, that's a deliberately dramatic over-statement – as Jeneane says, there are still many, many good reasons for issuing a traditional news release (or even a Social Media News Release, come to that). I want to be sure I'm not coming across like some extreme "commie blogger" here, so perhaps I should stipulate a few quick things, for the record:

1. My personal jury is definitely still out on this one – I welcome the spirit, energy, and zeal of the various SMNR initiatives, but I'm hesitant about the results so far;
2. I make my living as a PR guy. I've written and sent out a ton of news releases in my time. In the majority of cases, I'd still counsel clients to issue a news release. Heck - I even did precisely that today. I'll continue to do so, where it serves the right purpose. Does this make me a hypocrite?
3. Like Jeneane, however, I'm a passionate supporter of the fact that "the most social press release is a phone call from someone I respect".

And therein lies the heart of the matter.

What's needed is not necessarily a prettified and RSS-enabled SMNR - that's just slapping a 2.0 coat of paint on the busted up old mechanism.

What we really ought to do is start thinking rather more clearly about the way in which people seek out information and news here-and-now in the early days of this shiny new millennium. I believe there is value in the idea of an SMNR, but not necessarily as a straight format replacement for the old way of doing things. The issue is more complex than that.

One of the things we should remember, while we're blowing apart the whole generic notion of traditional news releases is that, right or wrong, this method has become an integral part of the journalistic process. So now I'm in danger of swinging to the other end of the small-p political spectrum and sounding like a stuffy reactionary, but: as PR people, our creative enthusiasm to change the method of delivery is not necessarily going to influence the media's preferred methods of receipt.

There's certainly growing demand from agencies and clients for some new ways to do things, but I've yet to see really compelling evidence of journalists asking for this stuff. I know of individual reporters who are interested in having media-rich information available to them, which the PR team is always happy to supply, of course – but that's something we only find out through day-to-day media relations; through the truly social act of having conversations with the reporters we depend upon in our symbiotic dance.

As crummy and dull as ASCII text in 10-point Courier is, I still know a lot of journalists who find a lot to like in the format (or lack thereof). They like the "no bells and whistles" approach; otherwise they feel they're being subjected to glitzy influence and bandwidth-hogging branded content. Believe it or not, I also know of a handful of journalists who still refuse to accept email attachments or HTML-encoded messages. They like to get their news fed through their editorial systems.

And there's the social media rub. Newsroom editorial systems are the lowest common denominator in this business, and they're the thing that guides the way we still distribute information over the wire.

ASCII text and the old ANPA 1312 standards – with their inherent unloveliness, line length limits, complete ignorance of hyperlinks, and archaic formatting rules established in a 1200 baud world – those are the base level requirements that still determine how news releases get pushed out onto the desktops, Bloomberg boxes, and Reuters terminals of the world. For online viewers, we can gussy up our news releases as much as we like, but to reach the mainstream media, the wire's still the thing.

Indeed, what Marketwire has announced is actually nothing to do with a wire service at all, in the strictest definition of "wire". A simple fact that seems to be missed by many is that there isn't an editorial system or other wire terminal anywhere in the world that can actually handle the rich formatting, embedded media, and funkalicious web 2.0 grooviness of an SMNR. The news wire distribution networks – even the upgraded digital ones – just don't work that way.

Let's be clear about what we're looking at: Marketwire's new product has nothing to do with a better wire service – it's all about providing better Web presence for your news.

That in itself is a very, very good thing to want to do, and in some ways I think they may be on to something here. The intentions are good, and they're certainly driving hard to bring something interesting to market ahead of others – but I'm very far from sold yet. More on that in my next post.

So, where does this leave me? I know this has been a bit like watching sausage being made, but I think I've got managed to navigate my own convoluted internal pathways through to arrive at pretty much the point Brian Solis already gave us right at the top of this stupidly long post. (Yay! A non-epiphany epiphany).

When we're talking about Social Media News Releases, we have to stop all this lip-flapping about them displacing or replacing the traditional release. That's not happening any time soon.

As blogs are to traditional media, so SMNRs are to regular news releases.

It's a complementary relationship, and one which prompts evolution on both sides. As I've said so often about social media thingies of this ilk, the correct framing is to look at SMNRs in terms of AND or, in some cases, OR logic.

Whether they end up NOTing the whole world of wires and old-skool releases is an open question, but one which would require a seismic change in the way newsroom editorial systems function in order to come true.

Last year, I successfully made it through the whole of Lent without a drop of booze passing my lips.

Well, that's not entirely true - if memory serves I did make an exception on my birthday, which happened to fall a few days before Easter Sunday last year. But other than that one perfectly reasonable exception, I was a good boy.

This year, I can't decide what to give up. Leona's going to abstain from coffee for the full 40 days. Should I follow suit, or is there something else I ought to try...? All suggestions welcome.

For what it's worth, I've been with Obama from the start. I like John Edwards, but he just never really inspired me the way Obama has. Hillary Clinton, to be frank, just scares me. Not that it matters a jot what I think, of course, as I don't get to vote down there in the United States of Crazy.

If I wasn't already backing Obama, the speech he gave on the night of the New Hampshire primaries would have tipped me over the edge. Much has been written about his MLK Day speech and other moments of strong writing and strong delivery, and there have been some fine moments of oratory in the last few weeks, for sure. But it was this direct, simple appeal to hope - delivered on a night when he had just lost to Clinton - that lit up my imagination and made me think for the first time that Obama really might have a fighting chance.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.

We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

Even better than the original speech, Black Eyed Peas front man and producer, will.i.am, has done something remarkable - taking footage of the speech, rounding up a crew of his musician and celebrity friends (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Herbie Hancock, Scarlett Johansson, and others) and weaving an inspiring campaign song around it.

Outstanding stuff.



Yes you can, America. Please - for all of us - do.

Here's a rare interesting article in one of the UK's crummiest daily newspapers (The Daily Mail) about "The Gough Map" - the oldest surviving map of Britain.

Cool, beautiful and unbelievably accurate, considering how extraordinarily old it is.


According to the Mail piece, the map clearly shows "more than 600 cities, towns and villages, almost 200 rivers, and a rudimentary road network marked with thin red lines and extending to some 3,000 miles. Along with countless hills, mountains, lakes, forests - New Forest and Sherwood - and even Hadrian's Wall..."

In classic Daily Mail fact-checking style, the main image of the full map in the article is incorrectly captioned - suggesting that it is the Hereford Mappa Mundi. But I can forgive them this slip, as the rest of the story is a great read.

As a bonus, there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia entry about this map yet - a nice little task for someone who feels like getting their cartographic vibe on.

[UPDATE: Fixed! Ah....crowdsourcing. The map now has a brand new Wikipedia stub, here, with a link to a fascinating interactive Gough Map viewer.]