Another quick drive-by post, slipped in between the long bouts of writing.

Yesterday was the kids' last day at school. For the last few days, they've been shipping home giant bags full of project work completed over the course of the year. Leafing idly through Charlie's pile of stuff while on the phone, I came across a folder titled "Charlie Autobiography".

The entire work is a thing of absolute joy, guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat - for his parents, at least. I'd love to get the whole thing scanned and up onto Charlie's blog at some point, and I will do when time (and Charlie) permits. For now, here's one quick taste of the piece.

At the front of the Duotang binder, right after the wonderful illustrated title page, Charlie has inserted a short poem, written at some point in the past school year. I know I'm in danger of gushing with parental pride here, but seriously - he wrote this at age 10:

A drive-by post, fired into the ether between bursts of proposal writing, to say three things:

1. Roy Greenslade is absolutely right. This piece in today's Guardian is precisely what I've been trying to say for the past seven years of blogging, here and elsewhere. Amen, Roy, amen.

2. Delighted to hear that Doc is out of danger, out of hospital, and blogging up an insightful storm.

3. Never, ever feed the trolls. You're better than that.

I'm not a very good Catholic, not even a terribly good Christian. It's hard for me to find the faith some days under all the doubt. Fleeting moments when I feel it; great long arid stretches of time when the inner skeptic is winning. I try.

So whether the prayers of a skeptical Catholish optimist will amount to a hill o' beans, who knows - but I'm fervently offering them up tonight as they're all I've got.

My old friend, inspiration, and blogfather, Doc Searls, is in hospital right now, fighting pancreatitis brought on as a miserably unlucky side-effect of an ERCP examination.

How he got there is a long story, which you can read back through his recent blog posts to piece together. In short: he's not well.

The good news is that he's managing to blog from his hospital bed - and not just stuff about the various tests, diagnoses, symptoms, and other indignities he's suffering through.

A couple of days ago he posted one of the most thought-provoking pieces on the state of the 'Net I've read in a long time - proving that his mental capacity has been in no way dimmed by his body's debility.

Reading stuff like this from Doc, or his contributions to the Cluetrain Manifesto, essays such as World Of Ends, his Linux Journal articles, his scores of blog posts, or any of the fantastic (and still remarkably relevant) pieces archived in the Reality 2.0 category at Searls.com - I'm struck by what an immeasurably dumber place the world would be without him.

It's fitting that one of the world's leading advocates for keeping the Internet stupid (in a good way) is one of the most luminously intelligent people we have on the side of light.

So get well soon, Doc. We need those neurons firing for a good few years yet.

Just a quick note for those of you heading out to tonight's Third Tuesday with CBC Search Engine's Jesse Brown - we are still in the same venue as always, Fionn McCool's at University and Adelaide, but they've kindly offered to move us into a bigger room for tonight's event.

If you come in the front doors, from Adelaide, don't head right and up the stairs to our usual room - turn left into the City Bar section, where you'll find all of your usual Third Tuesday friends (and more).

Other than some issues with the sound system (which I believe we've resolved for tonight's session) the one other piece of slightly negative feedback we've received about recent events is that it has been getting kind of crowded. This is a good problem to have, of course. I'm hoping that this lateral move into a somewhat bigger room will make it more comfortable for all.

Also - if you haven't signed up to attend yet, you don't need to worry about the fact that the Meetup page has been showing us as over-subscribed. We now have rather more space to accomodate everyone.

See you tonight!

We're big fans of the CBC Radio One show Search Engine here at TFC, and of the host, Jesse Brown's, dry wit.

So I'm absolutely tickled that Jesse has agreed to be our guest for what will be the last of the 07-08 season of Third Tuesday Toronto meetups (before we go on hiatus for the Summer months).

Here's the writeup we posted to the main Third Tuesday page:

Jesse Brown is the host and one of the producers of the CBC Radio One show Search Engine. A journalist and humourist, Jesse has worked in many different forms of media, including print, television, and radio.

Since its launch in September, 2007, Search Engine has won praise from followers of Internet culture, in Canada and worldwide, and has attracted a thriving, engaged community of listeners with an interest in the social, political, and cultural impact of technology.

Designed as a collaborative, open source radio show, Jesse and his colleagues at Search Engine utilize the show's blog to communicate and collaborate with listeners. The radio stories feed off of opinions or information gleaned from listener commentary, and feature stories on the show typically spill over into healthy, sometimes heated discussion in the blog comments. Jesse also openly encourages listeners to suggest improvements and changes to the show itself, and continues to tune the show format based on listener feedback.

Jesse broke into media at the age of 17 by founding a city-wide underground student newspaper. He was honoured by Ryerson University with their Udo award, "for noteworthy contributions to the field of Journalism," and remains the youngest recipient in the award’s history. His radio program The Contrarians ran as a summer replacement series on CBC Radio One. His satirical column The Experiment ran for two years in Saturday Night Magazine and won a National Magazine Award for Humour.

Come out and hear Jesse speak about the ideas behind Search Engine, the power of the community, and the future of open source broadcasting.

I'm particularly grateful to Jesse for agreeing to do this session, as he'll be fresh back from a flying visit to China, reporting on the "Great Firewall" for the CBC.

If you haven't hooked into Search Engine yet, I can highly recommend it. Along with Spark, Ideas, All Things Considered, and Quirks & Quarks, it has fast become one of my favourite radio shows - and one of the select few podcasts I always listen to. You can get the podcast or listen online, here.

The audience for our Third Tuesday events in Toronto has been growing strongly over the past few months, so sign up now if you're interested, before all the spaces are filled.

We're meeting at Fionn McCool's, 181 University Avenue (entrance around the corner on Adelaide), starting at 6:00 next Tuesday, June 17th.

And if you can't make it in person, but have questions you'd like to put to Jesse, drop a note in the comments, below.

It's terrific to see how Third Tuesday has grown in the space of just 20 months. There are Third Tuesday events running from coast-to-coast, in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and now even New Brunswick. (Next season, we really need to look to the Prairies, I guess...). I think a big part of the success is the simple fact that these are all free events, pulled together by enthusiastic volunteers.

Of course, we wouldn't be able to keep Third Tuesday growing without the support of the sponsors too, so a quick and entirely justifiable plug for our friends at CNW Group is in order. They've been our national sponsor for the whole of this past season, and we're immensely grateful for their support in covering the hard costs of the sessions.

Hat tip, also, to Third Tuesday Montreal sponsor, Massy Forget , and Third Tuesday New Brunswick sponsors, Radian6 , propelSJ , YourTeam Online and Evolving Solutions. Thanks to all of you for supporting the community.

The splendid Todd Defren makes an excellent point, here, about the right way to look at the Social Media Releases as a communications vehicle.

Thought I'd cross-post and expand on my comment to Todd's post here...

Through my firm's relationship with CNW Group, I've had the benefit of an extraordinary education in the inside workings of a major international wire service. In addition, given the amount of work we do at Thornley Fallis in the social media universe, I've looked at countless examples of Social Media Releases, and worked on more than a handful myself.

From this perspective, it strikes me that Todd's observations are absolutely right.

In summary, Todd contends that communicators should not be issuing Social Media Releases over the wires. He says:

While I sincerely applaud how far the wire services have progressed in all-things-social, I am unconvinced that “distribution” is the Big Issue for Social Media Release adoption. It’s not about distribution, it’s about empowerment and conversation.

Amen. There's nothing particularly social about the act of distribution - no matter how one chooses to tweak it. Making a news release more social doesn't mean spamming it out to more people via wire, via email distribution, or via ads in RSS feeds.

It means opening up the format to encourage more interactivity, engagement, creative repurposing (or what one might call "coverage") and, yes, conversation.

Hence, hosting SMRs on the firm's own social media newsroom is precisely the right thing to do.

If a well-crafted SMR can be considered an "opening statement" or conversation catalyst, you want to set yourselves up as a magnetic centre for that conversation, and encourage the juice to flow around your conversation starter as people add to, comment on, applaud, detract, or otherwise embellish and extend your statements.

At the same time, much of this stuff is still terra nova for professional communicators and their clients and employers alike. There's a lot of cautious exploration and experimentation, lots of hedging of bets while people watch to see which way the various standardisation initiatives are going to go. Things will settle down somewhat within the next year, as the IABC Working Group on the Social Media Release (of which I'm a member) gets its collective teeth sunk into the issue and comes out with some solid recommendations.

For now, Todd's point about issuing a traditional release that links off to a more social artifact makes awfully good sense. That's certainly what we've been advising clients to do. At the same time, however, I think the wire-based SMR will still play a role for many clients, as a good middle ground - and it will evolve into more than that over time.

One of the challenges faced by many of the clients I’ve been dealing with is the extant gap between their Web operations and their communications function. The corporate and agency PR folk, quite often, just don’t have any sway over what happens to their Web newsroom, or much of the rest of their online activities for that matter.

Yes, we all know that’s broken and wrong, but it is still very often the case. The frustrating reality is that they may not have the budget or ability to quickly change their existing newsroom into something more social. One of my favourite clients, as an example, is still fighting with their corporate Web marketing department to stop them posting news releases as PDFs (ack).

Setting up a standalone, blog-based social media newsroom that links back to the corporate site is a great interim option, for sure, but it’s far from ideal. To accrue the maximum benefit from any conversational karma and Googlejuice created, that newsroom really ought to be a core part of the main site. If your website isn't social enough, don't fix it by slapping up a lean-to social site next door: build a better darn site.

This can be a frustrating discussion to have. With any reasonably large corporation, there’s a good chance that the newsroom will be one of the most frequently-updated, content rich, and search engine-friendly parts of the site. Any right-thinking webmaster would surely want to look at the newsroom as a great engine for driving link traffic and organic search results. Sadly, the discussion doesn’t always go that way.

So for firms who don’t have social media newsrooms or who lack the budget or ability to change their existing newsroom in the short term – the wire-hosted SMR still makes good interim sense, as long as there are a lot of links to drive clickjuice back to the main corporate site.

Meanwhile, comparison Todd (and Jeremiah Owyang before him) draws between the function of an SMR and FriendFeed is a good one, and I wholeheartedly agree with his point that its "Social Media aggregation and engagement prowess" is something any SMR provider should hope to emulate. I think Todd and I are also in agreement that Jeremiah's prediction ("...the Social Media Press Release, will reincarnate as Friendfeed") is a bit of a stretch. The two things may achieve similar goals, but they start from entirely different points of origin.

One last, quick, fairly obvious observation – when we’re all talking about "wire distribution" here, we are, of course, really talking about online "distribution" (i.e. posting) on the newswire service’s Web site. There ain’t an actual wire in the world that can handle much more than standard ANPA-formatted ASCII text right now, although things are certainly evolving apace in that world too.

This seems like a pedantic distinction, perhaps, but I often find myself having to point out the difference between what an actual wire service does and what email/downstream Web distribution models are all about. One of these things is not like the other, but all of them will end up being entirely different from the way they are now - and increasingly similar, no doubt. That's a good thing, I think.

One of the big factors that makes mesh ("Canada's Web Conference") such a success is, of course, the founders.

It almost goes without saying that this thing wouldn’t be even a fraction as good as it is, year over year, without the passion, energy, and intelligence invested in it by Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Rob Hyndman, Stuart MacDonald, and Mike McDerment.

And yet, other than the one Third Tuesday group hug we managed to pull off just before the mesh conference in 2007, there really hasn’t been an opportunity to get the five founders up on stage together and have them share some of their insights into the state of the Web in Canada (and things of that ilk).

They’re a group of really smart, experienced, plugged-in, and genuinely interesting chaps. Without any cheesey attempt to blow smoke up their fundaments, it would be great to see a big panel session with the five founders at mesh next year, perhaps as a way to wrap up the whole thing.

This year, as in previous years, the last panel sessions of the second day came to an end in their respective rooms, and people then hung around, not wanting to let go of the buzz, eventually wandering off in groups to the various after-parties. It felt like it needed one last group session to bring everyone back together again, in an attempt to summarize or group-grok the overall conference before ringing the closing bell.

Logistically, this might be difficult - it would require opening the big conference space at the MaRS centre back up into one big room after being divided into three separate spaces for the main body of the conference - but I'm sure that would be doable somehow. Perhaps rejigging the agenda of the second day, to put a 15 minute break in after the last panels...?

I get the impression the mesh founders feel more comfortable acting as foils to their headliners, rather than playing the role as frontmen themselves (which is a credit to them all, of course) – but this just seems like an idea that wants to take shape.

Heh – call it the mesh mosh. Throw the five guys up there in front of the assembled hordes and try to get one huge closing conversation going. I think it would be a terrific way to end what is already a great conference.

Take one trampoline and one regular garden sprinkler. Add kids.

I keep getting these promo messages from Streetcards, trying to entice me to order a new set of Blogcards at super, extra discounted prices.

I’m very happy with my Thornley Fallis cards, and not convinced I really need or want to restock my old Blogcards, thanks.

They can be fun to hand out at bloggy meetups. And they were kind of useful back in the summer of ’06, when Jeneane Sessum, Chris Locke, and I put together the world’s first (and shortest-lived) Gonzo PR Agency, just so that we could help launch one product on the unsuspecting American masses. On a whim, I'd ordered a batch of Blogcards with the name of our virtual agency - damn skippy - and I've still got a few of them lying around.

On the commute home the other night, I thought of a new card I would like to create, though. Except that I'd be far too chicken to ever actually use it.

Still, the idea's not doing any good rattling around the back of my head. Best I purge it and offer it up to anyone who's feeling snarky enough to do something with it.

Picture yourself stepping off a crowded subway car, and passing one of these to the stranger next to you, just before the doors close, parting you forever...


(click for biggy version)

Mathew Ingram posts an insightful commentary on the Wall Street Journal's fascinating piece about the Ballmer-Gates transition at Microsoft, and Michael Kowalchik chimed in with some excellent comments of his own, and a repeat of one of his earlier posts that is well worth revisiting.

As I commented at Mathew's blog, I lived through a very, very similar nightmare a number of years ago, while working for what was, at the time, one of the biggest software firms in Canada, a darling of the TSE.

We’d been blisteringly hot for a few years, having risen to the top of the market on the back of the corporate shift to Windows 95/98 and client-server networks. Our main competitor had got stuck supporting an old, DOS and Netware-based product and a big installed base. We were the nimbler, more innovative company that had its Windows-native product out first.

Somewhere around about the middle of ’98, though, a few of us were starting to get really worried. Almost 40% of our annual revenue was coming from maintenance contracts at that stage. We were comfortable, in other words; too comfortable. The company had developed something of a bloated, complacent, bureaucratic feel.

Our biggest concern, from a product perspective, was the rise of the Web. We had been trying to squooge our product into something vaguely Web-ready for a while, but it was basically a trainwreck. We learned the hard way: you just can’t slap a new coat of Web paint on a clunky old piece of client-server code. Remember when software firms used to describe their products as “Web-enabled”? Yeah, that was us.

There was a big 2-day management off-site meeting that year. At one point, in the midst of a lengthy debate in which we were trying to come to consensus around precisely how screwed we really were, I floated the suggestion that a solution to our problem might be to take some of our best people, fund them, and cut them loose to hire a brand new team and grow their own thing.

Get them to start up a completely new company, unencumbered by any of our problems but with the experience, knowledge, and collective expertise we had developed over 15+ years in the market. The core of my idea was: let’s create our own best Web-based competitor. Let’s cannibalize our market share, before someone else comes along and drinks our milkshake for us.

Alas: much argument, no agreement, and – in truth – not enough corporate cojones to commit to such a madcap scheme.

Meanwhile, one of our very best resellers – a company that had built their entire (very successful) business by developing add-on tools and custom solutions around our core product, was secretly developing a pure, Web-native competitor to our cash cow. They did precisely what I’d proposed – setting up a separate, arms-length company to launch this thing once it was built (keeping their hand in the whole thing well hidden from us).

Then they took two years to slowly slim down (and ultimately close) their original business, with almost all of the people they “downsized” coincidentally getting hired by this new kid on the block. Before we even realised what was happening, they were kicking our arse in every client pitch.

You can guess the rest. We slipped slowly into the doldrums, only to be put out of our misery a year or so later through an acquisition.

The upstart competitor went on to greater and greater things, ultimately converting a sizeable chunk of our former client base to their much shinier new product. They were, in their turn, also acquired for an almost indecently large amount of money, and the founders all got very rich.

Meh.

Mathew and Michael's posts also put me in mind of another rather lengthy diatribe I posted way back in the very early days of this blog and, heck, if one Michael can re-run old posts, so can this one...

I mentioned this Marketing Aforethought piece to yet another Michael - Thornley Fallis colleague, Mr. Seaton - a couple of days ago. Just re-read it and pleasantly surprised to discover that I still agree with me, seven years later.