Month: May 2006 Page 1 of 2

If you’ve got a client who’s demanding that you perform some magic to help them get noticed in today’s increasingly crowded electronic marketplace, here’s an article that might help.

The Fast Company blog has a short list of 5 tips to help business leaders “Be heard above the electronic din.”

It’s a good list. For example:

#4 – Live By the Blackberry, Die By It
If you’re spending more than five minutes on an email, make it a phone call. Then follow up with a tactical email. A recent study shows that constantly checking email, voice mail, and so on temporarily lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. “Email makes you dumb,” Nelson says. If you want to be productive, it helps to eliminate constant distractions.

The pace of today’s schedule can be nerve-wracking. But for most of us, we have to adapt. Anything that can help us “work smarter” is welcome.

Like a lot of Canadians, I supported Canada’s role in Afghanistan over the last few years. Getting rid of the Taliban seemed like a good idea, so if our troops were able to help the citizens of that country get back on their feet, then it made sense for us to be involved.

But in recent months, the issue has become a lot more complicated, as the fact that Canada is in a war zone became more and more evident. While we might still be there for the right reasons, what is the likely outcome of our involvement in this country – where news reports indicate the Taliban are regaining their influence?

Although there has been a lot more press attention on Afghans recently, it was only this past weekend that I started to feel like I was getting the real story. In an excellent review of the history of the war (I hope it’s still available there) and the current situation, the Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York sweeps away a lot of the fog of war and exposes the truth of what is facing our troops in that country.

The Taliban know they cannot beat the coalition in a head-to-head battle. But they don’t need a military victory. They only need to terrorize the “soft targets” — doctors, teachers, government officials and villagers — and destabilize the country. By destroying the economy and killing any sense of hope, they are creating a potential army of disillusioned young men.

It’s a classic guerrilla strategy, and it’s working. “The conventional army loses if it does not win,” former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger once said. “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

As I read Geoff’s piece, I couldn’t help but think that the writing may be on the wall for this country. It’s hard to imagine a good ending.

Having my eyes opened to the truth by reading a Geoffrey York article has happened many, many times before. I worked with Geoff almost 20 years ago, when I was a reporter in Regina and he was the Globe’s Prairies Bureau Chief, based in Winnipeg.

He had a tremendous ability to find “the real story” when he came to town, often making those of us working there every day look silly for missing it. As a foreign correspondent for many years with the Globe, he consistently demonstrates the same ability to get to the heart of any story.

In his most recent set of stories from Afghanistan, he has brought a freshness to the Canadian angle and a harsh view of the reality of the situation that has been missing. I continue to be amazed at just how good reporters like him are, and how much we owe to these brave men and women who risk their life to tell us a story. (For another example, see Christopher Albritton’s Back to Iqaq blog.)

I’m still not sure what Canada’s future is in Afghanistan. Should we stay or go? I vote for stay for now, because when we make a commitment to the world community, we have a duty to fulfill our promise. But we can’t afford to overlook the disaster that the government there has become. And if it’s at all possible, we need to use our position there to influence and try to make a difference. But Geoff’s stark story demonstrates just what a tough job that is going to be.

Remember that hilarious video I pointed you to back in March about how Microsoft is different from Apple? Well, whoever put it up originally has taken it down from YouTube and the link doesn’t work anymore.

Fortunately, you can still see it here, on John Battelle’s Searchblog. It’s definitely worth checking out. (I’ll wait while you go back and review it. It’s worth it.)

All done? Good. Isn’t that great?

Well, according to Batelle, the video was actually an internal Microsoft video, which makes it even funnier! I always wondered who did it. And I suppose that explains why it’s not up on YouTube anymore.

You’ve got to admit, they did a great job on the video, even if it only underscores the problems Microsoft has with over-doing things.

Tags: Ipod, Microsoft

Last week, I pointed you to an interesting story (The other story that Judith Miller didn’t write) about how New York Times reporter Judy Miller heard information about the Sept 11, 2001 attacks before the fact, but never wrote about it.

In this follow-up post from Media is a Plural, Rory O’Connor  goes a little further into the story and looks at why the story never made it to print.

It’s not quite as interesting as the first item, but it’s of interest to those of us who just can’t get enough of the inside stuff on journalism.

Tags: 9/11, New York Times, media

You know that old saying that sometimes "you can’t see the forest for the trees?"

I think those words of wisdom apply to what’s happening right now with the rise of the Web and the integrated applications that are springing up that are built around it – what we are calling "social" or "Web 2.0" or whatever.

Although there is a lot going on, it doesn’t seem fast enough for some of us (as Lee Hopkins talked about) and we wonder whether the things we expect are not going to happen.

But, like the hiker in the forest who is struggling to see around the trees to find the "forest," the connected future we’re hoping for has already arrived.

Wired magazine has a great article about how yet another established business has had to adapt to the reality of the Web, which has forever changed its market — in this case, it’s the stock photo business. It used to be a pretty lucrative market for professional photographers, but the rise of stock photo agencies circulating images created by "amateurs" has pretty much driven the pros out of the business and forced the companies that used to "own" the business to adapt or get out of it.

The Wired story calls this the phenomenon of the "crowd:"

Welcome to the age of the crowd. Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains. The open source software movement proved that a network of passionate, geeky volunteers could write code just as well as the highly paid developers at Microsoft or Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia showed that the model could be used to create a sprawling and surprisingly comprehensive online encyclopedia. And companies like eBay and MySpace have built profitable businesses that couldn’t exist without the contributions of users.
All these companies grew up in the Internet age and were designed to take advantage of the networked world. But now the productive potential of millions of plugged-in enthusiasts is attracting the attention of old-line businesses, too. For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected to the network.

If I use my own experience as a template, it’s remarkable how much has changed in such a short time. When I was at university, I had a nice, IBM Selectric typewriter that took care of all my essay writing. We didn’t have personal computers. We laid out the campus newspaper with glue and pencils.

I started writing stories for a newspaper on an Underwood manual typewriter. And the office I worked in didn’t have a single computer in the place. All of the phones had wires attached to them and the only way you could go "mobile" was to have a really long cord.

Today, of course, everything has changed. And it’s happening so fast that we’ve come to take it for granted. If something doesn’t work quite right today, don’t worry. Tomorrow, there will be a new version.

When we look back at what’s happened in business communications at the tail end of the 20th and the early part of the 21st century, it’s going to be an interesting read. In the space of a single generation, everything has changed. The "old ways" of doing things don’t even exist anymore – but we might not have noticed because we’re too busy enjoying some of the new stuff.

While businesses will be a bit slower to adopt the "way out there stuff" the speed with which those ideas become mainstream is only going to continue to increase. And I like to think that’s why I’m working so hard to stay ahead of the trend. Because I want to be one of the people that demonstrates how all this stuff adds real value to the business.

UPDATE – Mike at Techdirt has a good post on this story.

Tags: communications, crowd, social, media

Since we’re now set up with a Blog, why don’t we try our hands at Wiki building as well?

I’ve created a Wiki over on PB Wiki (which stands for Peanut Butter, I think.)

If we want to, we can go to PB Wiki and set one up so we can play.

Go on over, set up a Wiki and add a page, post some comments, put up a picture of your dog, whatever you want to do. It’s worth trying.

Then, you can come back here and post about it, and let everyone else know what the password is so we can all go edit it. See how all this stuff starts to work together? Cool, eh?

Since we’re in the communication business, I thought it might be useful for us to test out our very own Blog.

The membership of this blog is limited to those of us in Corporate Communications. If we think it’s useful, we can open it up to others. For now, let’s explore the possibilities of how we might include this new media in our plans.

I’m open to ideas for how this will be used, but I’m sure it will evolve. It may also prove to be a non-starter. What the heck…it only took me a couple of minutes to set up, so it’s not a big deal if we don’t want to use it.

We can also consider setting up similar blogs for individual projects. They only take a minute or two to set up and they can be as “closed” or as “open” as you like. Very useful for tracking status, documents, etc. They work very well as a companion to a Corporate Wiki. (More on that in a bit.)

One option you will find useful is to add this blog’s subscription feed to your RSS newsreader. If you don’t know what RSS or Atom means, I suggest you check out a tutorial, like this one from Wikipedia.

If you’ve never worked with a Blog before, Blogger has some useful articles posted in their Help section.

Now that you’ve accepted the invite, feel free to add your own comments, or your own posts to this blog.

Since it’s a holiday weekend here in Canada, here’s a video from YouTube that’s guaranteed to make you feel good. As the tagline says, The funniest 6 minutes you will ever see! Remember how many of these you have done!

And when you’re finished watching (and smiling) catch your breath and read a great article posted on EnGadget about why YouTube needs to get serious about making money, instead of just growing like crazy.

It’s the perfect holiday combination — a really cool find from the hundreds of videos up on YouTube and then a thoughtful piece that looks at the larger picture and tries to help come up with a way to make the whole phenomenon sustainable.

Happy Victoria Day to you! (Thanks Wikipedia.)

Lee Hopkins is a blogger and podcaster from “The beautiful Adelaide hills” who has gained a measure of fame (at least in my world) through his weekly contributions to For Immediate Release, the PR podcast hosted by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson.

I’ve listened to his posts for awhile, but only recently subscribed to his blog. In a recent post, he talked about a new book he was reading, called The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives, by Paul Ginsborg.

But that’s just his jumping off point. From there he moves into a thoughtful discussion about why the concept of “social capital” raised by Ginsborg resonates for those of us involved in the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon.

For me, the late nights and the many extra hours I put into Web2.0 are worth it, every last second. Because I have made new acquaintances and friends I would have been highly unlikely ever to have made without it; I have contributed to a global conversation that has the potential to reshape how the organisations that rule our lives rule over us; I have put my money where my mouth is and put words out into the digital realm where they can be found 20 years from now and potentially humiliate me with their foolish naivety.

Lee’s words echo a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately, especially in the wake of the Mesh Conference in Toronto this week. I do think we’re in “a time of flux” as Om Malik put it, and the dramatic nature of what is happening will only become apparent in the years to come as we look back and try to make sense of it all. But for me, right now, the on-line community I’m building is as real to me as the brick and mortar one around me — perhaps even more so. Here’s how I put it in my comment on Lee’s blog:

Lee — You’ve hit on a lot of the reasons why the Web 2.0 promise is so alluring. I suspect that much of it is the pleasure of connecting with like-minded folks in far-flung locations. As someone who lives in one city, but has often worked in another and grew up in yet another, I find my on-line community is becoming more “real” to me than the folks who live nearby. That’s kind of sad, but exciting at the same time. In a couple of months, I’m moving from one side of Canada to the other. I’ll be relocating to Victoria (British Columbia – not the other one) at the end of the summer. While it will be difficult to leave a place I’ve been for nine years, I’m excited to be heading to a new home. And the great thing is that my on-line community will effortlessly accompany me. The Web makes us all neighbours, who can chat anytime. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Too bad you’re not going to be in Vancouver for the IABC conference. But we’ll raise a glass in your honour at the FIR dinner!

By the way, the FIR dinner I mention at the end is a great example of the social web in action. Shel and Neville are hosting a dinner at the IABC conference in Vancouver (which they are both attending.) They’ve invited any of their listeners who are going to be there to join them for a dinner. So far, there’s about 7 or 8 of us that have signed up. It will be a neat chance for a bunch of people who share a unique community to meet in person. I can’t wait.