I’m a big audio book booster. Like podcasts, they make exercise–walking, running, hiking, cycling–slightly less loathsome for me. I find myself advocating audio books to lots of friends and colleagues, but I seem to generate few converts. Is it the technical hurdle of downloading them to a mobile device? Or is it their ‘books on tape’ reputation, that they’re only suitable for senior citizens with poor eyesight?

I suspect that they’re not as well-understood as they could be. Here, in point form, is an introduction to audio books:

• I’ve also used Audible. I like their subscription model, and in earlier days they definitely had the best selection (I haven’t done a comparison recently). They also sponsor a number of my favourite podcasts, and I want to reward that. My wife and I are  the platinum plan at the moment, which means two credits per month for $23. In my experience, nearly all books are one credit per book. The credits roll over up to a certain number. You can, however, put your account ‘on hold’ for a while, which means you stop paying but you retain your credits. I’ve done this a couple of times, and it’s a handy feature.
• You’ll consume books at a slower rate because you have to listen to every word–speed readers need not apply. Books range from five hours (for The Great Gatsby) up to 40 or 50 hours (for a really long Stephen King book or the latest Game of Thrones novel). I’d say most are in the eight to 15 hour range. Because there’s no way to skim, I find florid writers a little intolerable. I have a love-hate relationship with George R. R. Martin because he cannot resist describing every pigeon pie and quilted violet doublet in excruciating detail.
• I prefer fiction for listening, though well-written non-fiction–Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis, for example–works too. I find that the average business book becomes laborious to listen to. They’re often written lazily, and so they demand too much of my focus to maintain a consistent sense of the text.
• Narrators matter more than you’d think. I never really pick a book based on the narrator, but it’s always nice if I recognize them. I sometimes experience a weird cognitive dissonance when I hear a familiar narrator in a new context. I grew familiar with Scott Brick, for example, while listening to him narrate Justin Cronin’s books. I’m currently listening to the excellent Devil in the White City, and he narrates that one as well. I find myself constantly expecting vampires to climb out of the foundations of the Chicago World’ Fair.

If you dig podcasts, then consider trying an audio book. They’re the same as books, except you insert them through your earholes.

Generally, months in advance. About five months from departure we get an idea of how flights are filling, so we might launch a promotion for sales (say) 6 to 8 weeks prior to departure, which is lower than the ‘default’ lowest fare. Unless you can buy standby tickets, tickets bought late will almost certainly be the most expensive bought for that flight.

We had plans to fly back to Vancouver from France in June, so I decided I’d try to track a couple of flights to see how their pricing behaved. I’m aware that there are sites like SkyScanner that do this automatically, but I had the foolish notion to do it myself.

I picked two departure dates in May, and tracked two flights–the from Air Canada and one from Lufthansa–for each date. I checked the price of the flights every other day. These are the results (click to enlarge)

Here’s the spreadsheet I used to track the prices.

This is strictly anecdotal, of course, and I didn’t faff about with clearing cookies and such. I don’t pretend that there’s much here that we can apply to buying future tickets.

I was surprised to learn that you could have bought the May 7 Air Canada flight the day before you left for just $50 more than if you’d bought it three months earlier. I’d assumed that flight prices generally trended upward as they approached the departure date. Evidently, that’s not always the case.

Until recently, finishing any game provoked a slight sense of satisfaction, accomplishment and relief. Even when my friend Albert and I spent six solid hours beating the Stygian Abyss on his Apple II, I recognized it as a trifle, an unworthy chore. It feels about the same as winning at a recreation sport (assuming you’re not a testosterone-rich toss-pot). It’s worth smiling about and raising a glass to, but that’s about it.

In recent years, though, I’ve finished some games and felt like I’d just finished watching a great movie or play, or reading a good book. You know this feeling. It’s as if you’ve been changed by the work of art, like I’m a slightly different person after experiencing it. Pauline Kael wrote that “good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again”. The Greeks called that feeling catharsis. This is a recent and radical change in my experience of games.

Maybe Games are Art

Though this feels like a tectonic shift in narrative games, I believe that it’s the result of many small improvements in storytelling. These changes, in aggregate, push certain games across a kind of event horizon. What games evoke this feeling for me? The most recent was Mass Effect 3. Before that there were the Portal games (I previously wrote about Portal as the perfect short story of a game) and Half Life 2: Episode 2.

What do these games have in common that are different from others? Great voice acting, for one. The Mass Effect games, in particular, are peopled with legitimate mainstream actors like Martin Sheen and Carrie Anne Moss. You feel the difference. By the standards of games, the dialogue is excellent as well. There are legitimately funny jokes, and, rarely, lines that cut to the bones of a scene. While I do think better ‘graphics’ has something to do with this shift, it’s not really a question of verisimilitude. It’s more that these games pay closer attention to mise en scene. They’re more tonal, in some way, and manipulate mood better.

Like good acting performances, these games have a soul, and there’s truth in them.

Roger Ebert–I mourn his passing–infamously argued that games weren’t art. In truth, I mostly agreed with him. Most games are awful juvenile reveries; I almost never see a sophisticated treatment of a theme in a game, and I’m rarely surprised by how a game’s story plays out. I recently watched Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, and Chris Hecker had a great observation about games. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something like “nearly all games are about power fantasy, which is pretty cheap and predictable. What would a game be like if the objective was to fall in love?” (More on this theme from Chris).

Comparing the history of movies and games, I’d say that games are barely into the ‘talkies’ era. I look forward to the era where being moved by a game is the rule, instead of the exception.

“There-in Lies the” Rub

Ingredients

• Salt
• Mexican Herb mix (paprika, cumin, coriander)
• Bouquet (two springs fresh rosemary, four sprigs thyme, six sage leaves)
• Brown Sugar

Instructions

1. Each ingredient makes up a quarter of the whole mix.
2. Add one quarter salt (or a little less if you don’t like your beer can chicken too salty.)
3. Add one quarter mexican herbs.
4. Add one quarter bouquet herbs.
5. Add one quarter brown sugar.
6. Take a picture, post to Instagram, and then mix together.

The Stuffing

Ingredients

• “There-in Lies the” Rub
• Half-loaf of day-old bread
• 1 white onion
• 2 apples
• 2 big sticks of celery
• Olive oil

Instructions

1. Acquire a big bowl to place all the ingredients in.
2. Cut bread into cubes.
3. Cut onion into cubes or chunks.
4. Dice apple into cubes.
5. Cut celery into big pieces.
6. Add a generate amount of olive oil and mix together in your bowl.
7. Add five heaping table spoons of the “There in lies the rub” Rub (or whatever is left over from your Beer Can Chicken coating. More below.)
8. Let sit until it’s ready to go into the oven.

DB’s BC Chicken Glove

Ingredients

• One five pound chicken
• One tall boy beer
• Olive oil (you’ll need lots so don’t worry if it’s cheap)
• “There in lies the rub” Rub

Instructions

1. Set the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Empty and rinse chicken (remove any of the guts).
3. Take your tall boy beer, open, remove the tab, pour one-quarter out into a glass and enjoy.
4. Punch some holes around the side, high up, maybe six. This is necessary if the top gets blocked and you want to avoid a beer can chicken bomb.
5. Take a cookie sheet or oven pan and cover in aluminum foil.
6. One person holds the chicken by placing their hand in the orifice — just like a chicken glove.
7. Generously pour olive oil over the chicken, on both sides, while the other wears the “chicken glove” and rubs it into the chicken.
8. Start spooning on the rub all over.
9. Let the olive oil and spices catch and drip over the pan. It will only add to the stuffing flavour later on.
10. Place the tall boy in place of the glass. Mount chicken over top. If you’re lucky, the chicken’s legs will touch the surface of the pan to form a solid tripod base.
11. Carefully carry the pan over to the oven–the bird may be tipsy–and put it inside.
12. Add stuffing to the bottom of pan and around chicken at one hour mark (you want the stuffing to cook for about 45 minutes).
13. Cook 5 pound chicken for 1.75 hours or until done. Cooking time may vary depending on the size of your chicken.
14. Once ready, pull out of the oven and pierce the skin between the thigh and breast with a knife. If the juice that runs out is clear, it’s ready to eat. If it’s pink, more cooking still needs to be done.
15. Take a length of aluminum foil and wrap around the standing chicken to keep the heat and moisture in for 15 minutes while it sits.
16. When ready, pull the chicken off the beer can–this part is trickier than it sounds–and carve.

This meals goes nicely with beer, wine, and a beet and goat cheese salad. Appetizers should include French cheese, sausage, and artichokes dipped in mayonnaise.

For the past couple of years, I’ve wanted to convene a similar event for marketers. It wouldn’t be exactly Web of Change, because marketers wouldn’t share the same sense of common cause, but this new event would share a lot of the same goals.

• Mid-level and senior marketers would attend.
• The conversations would be about strategy, not WordPress plug-ins
• We’d build a trust network amongst peers
• Most importantly, it would be non-douchey

So, this summer, we’re launching Fireworks Factory. It’s an intimate, invite-only conference for smart web marketers. We’re holding it on Galiano Island, a ferry ride away from Vancouver. It’s going to be very small in this first year–there won’t be more than 50 people in attendance. We made this video to talk about what the conference will offer:

If you’re a marketer, please check out the conference details and consider attending. We’d be delighted to have you.

Why is it called Fireworks Factory?

I wrote about this on Capulet’s blog:

We lived in Malta for a year in 2007, on the small island of Gozo. Each town on Gozo has a week-long religious festival–Malta is the most Catholic nation outside of the Vatican–punctuated by fireworks and pyrotechnics. These explosives were all homegrown, crafted in a community-owned fireworks factory on the edge of town. Men from the village would spend time there building and testing fireworks, in the hopes of outdoing their rival towns. Occasionally, something horrible would happen.

Still, they were communal spaces where something risky and breathtaking gets imagined and created. That seemed like a good metaphor for the kind of conference we want to run.

Why is it invite-only?

I’ve always been conflicted about invitation-only events. Web of Change vets all of its attendees, as does TEDx Vancouver. We’re applying the same logic as Web of Change: because we want to ensure the right level of people are attending. We’re planning quite a conversational, two-way event, and as such we want attendees who have confronted complex, strategic issues. There are, after all, tons of events for a more general marketing audience. Even that makes me a bit leery, but it’s the simple reality of a small, targeted event. I can’t imagine what filter TEDx Vancouver uses.

The only person responsible for your out-of-control email inbox is you.

You may have seen this email charter that’s circulating around the web. It takes a kind of tragedy of the commons approach to overflowing inboxes. While better email etiquette can’t hurt, it’s only half (or maybe a quarter) of the problem. We all need to own the problem of our inbox.

It’s 2013, and we now have enough tools, tricks and best practices to keep our inboxes under control. Even Bill Gates manages, and he’s probably busier than most of us.

Your inbox is not a to-do list

I was recently talking to a colleague about this, and he asked for my advice on how to better manage his email. This is what I wrote to him. I’ve written versions of some of this advice in a previous post. These recommendations are quite common, so productivity keeners aren’t likely to find anything new here.

1. Your email software is not a to-do list. Maintain a separate task list, preferably a digital one that you can access from multiple devices (like your phone, if you’re in a meeting without your computer). I use a task list called Remember the Milk, My colleague uses one called Things. Try a few and pick your favourite. Incidentally, your brain isn’t a to-do list or a calender, either.
2. Set aside dedicated chunks of time for your email. Maybe 30 minutes to start the day, and a few other similar chunks throughout the day. Try not to obsessively check your email at other times. Train your coworkers that if they need to reach you urgently, they should use instant messenger (IM) or the phone. Incidentally, every office in the world should adopt an IM system. This would significantly reduce the amount of email you receive from colleagues.
3. Your inbox is a loading bay, not a warehouse.You aren’t answering email, you’re processing it. For every email you receive, ask yourself “can I deal with this in less than three minutes?”

   a) If yes, then answer it immediately and delete or archive it.

   b) If not, assign a task to it and, if possible, associate the email with the task. We use web-based email, so it’s easy for us to include an email message’s URL to a particular task in our to-do list.If you need to follow up on an email you sent, create a to-do item on your task list. Don’t leave the email in your inbox.

4. Create rules and filters.You almost certainly get a bunch of email that you never want to read. One of our clients, for which I have an email address, sends a daily email message to the entire head office staff to announce that the deli delivery has arrived for lunch. Speaking of email etiquette, this is pretty irresponsible, as only 10% of staff are interested in the delivery. If you’re not one of them, create a rule that removes it from your inbox and you’ll never see it again.

   It seems like a tiny effort to delete an email every day, but those clicks–and the irritation they engender–add up.Also create rules for any bacn that you want to read eventually, but are not going to deal with immediately. This also goes for email lists and email messages sent to work groups which aren’t essential for you to immediately read. Filters are a key aspect to what separate email experts from email noobs.

5. Do you really need folders or labels? Assuming their email software’s search works well, I discourage people from using email folders or labels unless they absolutely need them. I can search for and find an email 95% of the time. That 5% isn’t worth manually sorting and filing email messages every day.
6. If you’re writing more than 200 words, it’s probably faster to just call. If you need a record of the communication or feedback from more than one person, then author a document in a collaborative tool like Google Drive so that it’s easier for people to collaborate and comment on it.
7. Trust the algorithms. As far as I can tell, we’ve largely defeated email spam. I almost never get email messages from Nigerian princes or erection pill purveyors in my inbox anymore. Likewise, you can begin to trust tools that will do more filtering for you. Gmail seems to be pretty good at sorting by importance these days, and I also use SmartLabels from Gmail Labs to filter my inbox. More than one colleague loves SaneBox, though they’ve been unable to convince me that it’s much better than what Gmail offers.

There are loads of other tips, tricks and tools that will help you manage email, but these are the ones I use on a daily basis.

In truth, though, the essential quality of good email management is discipline: to process email religiously and to adhere to the best practices you discover. I find that email is the first thing that gets abandoned when I get busy, which is ironic, as it’s critical to managing and resolving that busyness.

For the first time in a couple of years, I’ve found time for some side projects and hobbies. Two of those–both collaborations–recently came to fruition, and I wanted to share them.

Weight Watchers for Friendship

Last summer at Web of Change, my friends Tim and Alia pitched me on their idea for a new project. It was a simple, yet strangely radical idea: as adults, we are pretty bad at being friends, and we need to get better. Their idea was to launch a kind of Weight Watchers for friendship, and they called it Lifeboat. Here’s the spiel:

The average American adult reports having only one real friend.Paradoxically, in an age of Facebook and always-on connections, a growing body of science proves what we already feel deep in our gut: we’re actually lonelier and more isolated than ever before. The way many of us use the internet is only making the crisis worse.

The solution isn’t to retreat from the web. It’s to aim higher—to re-think what friendship means in adulthood. Indeed, it’s time to explore uncharted relationship territory—academic research, philosophy, expert advice and our own heads and hearts—for a better path forward.

Lifeboat is a movement of people rediscovering deep friendships. We’re not offering grand solutions or complex schemes, but instead, simple things that work. Here you’ll find our unique content on the art and science of friendship—full of inspiration, learning and practice. It’s designed to help move us beyond fast-food-friendships and become self-assured friendship pioneers!

I think their timing is perfect, and it’s got potential to be pretty huge. And I’m not just saying that because we helped them with their marketing strategy and some content pieces. I genuinely think many people feel profoundly lonely, and are hungry for better, richer friendships.

Regular readers will know that I’m leery of anything that’s remotely woo-woo or overly self-helpy. I wouldn’t have gotten behind Lifeboat if I didn’t know Tim and Alia well, and that their work would be built on a foundation of solid research.

Become a Noble Arsonist

This winter, I co-wrote a free e-book with Julie and Theo Lamb. It’s called The Noble Arsonist, and here’s its spiel:

Download our free e-book full of tips, tricks and hard-earned wisdom on web marketing for NGOs and companies that care. The book includes case studies of campaigns by Greenpeace, LeadNow, Mountain Equipment Co-op and others!

It’s got a lot of the wisdom and best practices we’ve learned and developed after working with NGOs over the past few years. We’re hosting it on a single-serving site (I’m a little obsessed with those these days) that also serves little tips for communicators.

Along came Vine, from Twitter, which is Instagram for videos of up to six seconds. To use an old term, it’s video micro-blogging for the masses. Twitter seems to have undertaken a minimum viable product approach to Vine, as it has a simple user interface with no editing tools or filters.

You can, however, make cuts on the fly by starting and stopping the video. I’m reminded of how we used to ‘edit’ on camcorders, before we had digital tools. You built your video in consecutive order by pushing the red button–on and off, new scene, on and off. Shooting multiple shots to build a six-second video has seemingly become the default behavior.

This act of assembling shots over time–even if it’s only a minute or two–makes Vine a different beast than Instagram. For most users, I think that Instagram is about capturing a spontaneous and fleeting moment. Meanwhile, the emergent behavior on Vine is to construct a narrative over time. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just more different from Instagram than it might first appear. It’s also much more artificial. In order to cut a video together, Vine users must make a more consciously artistic gesture.

I’m almost always wrong when I make predictions like this, but I see Vine finding a humble but sustainable place in the social media landscape. Perhaps like Vimeo, it will have a small, loyal user base and will occasionally get a burst of mainstream attention.

Ghosttown+

Google+ (pronounced Google Plus) remains a really boring ghost town. It’s more like of those half-constructed sub-divisions built during the recession: there’s a little activity but mostly it’s all quiet and weeds. I’ve genuinely tried hard to engage and be engaging on Google+*, but I’ve failed miserably on both counts.

The two most common defenses of Google+ that I hear are:

• It’s not about building a rival network. It’s Google’s attempt to capture your social graph to provide better search results and show you more relevant ads. That’s possibly true, and there’s no question that Google+ can positively impact your site’s search engine optimization. However, most of these benefits are felt by Google, not by the end user.
• Google+ isn’t a social network, it’s an interest network. That’s great, because I’ve never had a place on the Internet to talk about the  Canucks.

Google+ may very well destroy Facebook, but it’s got a ways to go. Consider that publishing and technology titan Tim O’Reilly has been encircled by (meaning he’s being followed by) about 2.2 million people. His posts average about 100 ‘pluses’ (the equivalent of ‘like’s) and about 40 comments. Counting in some shares, too, that means he’s engaging with about 0.0001% of his audience. And I think he’s doing a really good job.

Knowing that people love to use a new medium to talk about that medium, I asked a question about Google+ as interest network yesterday. It was Friday around noon PST, which seemed like a time when plenty of the roughly 6000 people following me might be using the tool. I’ve received one comment, and it wasn’t really an answer to the question I asked.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, it’s a chore for me to go post and interact on Google+. That may change. Google has mountains of money and pretty much unparalleled reach online, so I wouldn’t count them out.

* A tedious footnote: I recently undertook a baroque process to merge my Google+ account with one of my core email addresses. That meant that a year’s worth of posted content and activity disappeared from my account. It was no great loss, but now it looks like I’m a new user. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’ve been spending roughly half an hour on Google+ a week for the last year.

Paying to Socialize

When I was about 23, Julie and I traveled around Costa Rica. It was early December, and we spent a few days at the beach at a near-empty resort. The beaches were beautiful, the grounds were lovely and there were almost no other guests. That’s what App.net feels like right now–an abandoned country club.

App.net is an audacious, rather generic social network that has one unusual characteristic: people had to pay to use it. This was an audacious and controversial idea, but they achieved their threshold of 10,000 users, and so have embarked on a plan to build an advertising-free social network. I felt pretty conflicted about the idea. On the one hand, I’m quite anti-advertising. But on the other, I don’t like the idea of a kind of posh retreat for the technorati.

It’s all a bit academic at this stage. I’m only following 20 friends thus far, and only one of them has posted to App.net in the past week. I gather that lots of the 10,000 users who supported App.net were endorsing the idea of a commercial-free app with their money.

I always think of that verse when I look at the number of times I’ve tweeted. Really? Every idle word? Man.

I recently learned (thanks to Tom) that Twitter now enables you to download an archive of all your tweets. I did so–all 23,201 of them. They come in a tidy HTML archive, as well as a CSV files for every month of tweets. To my dismay, these were my first tweets–the earliest is at the bottom:

I can’t even remember what the project was. It was evidently a wise choice to shelve it.

We are always fascinated by data about ourselves (consider LinkedIn’s recent clever email campaign congratulating users on being in the top 1, 5 or 10% of most-viewed profiles). So, I concatenated all 72 CSV files into one big spreadsheet, and produced an old-school tag cloud. Click to embiggen:

What conclusions can I draw from this?

• I’m pretty sure that 95% of the ‘likes’ have nothing to do with Facebook. Do I have the written voice of a teenage girl?
• My writing is way more informal on Twitter–look at all those instances of ‘heh’, ‘ah’ and ‘oh’ (insert dirty joke here).
• Why is ‘Google’ so prominent? I have no idea.
• I’m pretty sure most of the instances of ‘Thanks’ are me citing a source.
• It’s interesting to see who I’ve tweeted at most.

Those are all fairly banal, but I suppose our own data is like our own dreams–fascinating to us, and boring to everybody else.

It’s a small pity that Twitter doesn’t include any data for number of favourites and retweets. I’d be curious what my most retweeted tweet was.

This program is part of, according to the company, an “unprecedented multi-year charitable program dedicated to the promotion and support of mental health across Canada” amounting to $50 million. It’s a worthy, topical cause. And, of course, companies aren’t obligated to engage in this kind of corporate philanthropy.*

Bell has been very successful in promoting the project. As I write this, they’ve counted about 4.5 million texts, tweets and long distance calls. Promotion is easier, of course, when you own “one of Canada’s largest privately held media companies which owns the Canadian television networks, CTV and CTV Two, along with 30 speciality television channels, Bell Media Radio which operates 35 radio stations across Canada and sympatico.ca”. In any case, if you live in Canada and consume any media today, it’s going to be hard to avoid Bell’s message.

It’s important to be a thoughtful consumer, and to consider what Bell’s motives are for the Bell Let’s Talk program. Consider the following:

• Today, Bell offers its customers extra incentives to use services like texting and long-distance calls, from which Bell generates revenue.
• Bell is paying $0.05 a tweet for brand exposure, thanks to its cynical use of the hashtag #BellLetsTalk. This amounts extraordinarily cheap advertising.
• That advertising is made cheaper by the fact that Bell can write off all of its corporate donations.
• Bell’s charity partners aren’t exactly front-and-centre on their program site. They’re buried at the bottom of a couple of pages, and haven’t been featured on the program’s Twitter account at all.

Make no mistake–Bell Let’s Talk is first about promoting Bell, and secondarily about raising money for or awareness about mental illness. If my experience with similar projects is an indicator, Bell has a fixed amount of money to give, and they’re going to donate that money whether or not they generate an adequate number of tweets, texts and calls.

I’ve worked on projects similar to this, and am familiar with the tensions between corporate interests and charitable activities. Compromises are made, and strings are attached. But, if this is the way forward for corporate philanthropy, then we must play by the rules that the corporations set.

I do wish that Bell had, at the very least, done the following:

• Instead of declaring their very own branded day, they could have run their campaign around the universally-recognized WHO’s World Mental Health Day, on October 13.
• Instead of shoehorning their brand into the hashtag, they could have then used #worldmentalhealthday, like everybody else.
• They could have chosen not to tie funding to services they want consumers to use, like texting and long distance calls.
• They could have made their partner charities the heroes of the campaign, and prominently featured them on their site.

I applaud the other donations and support from Bell for the issue of mental health. They seem worthwhile and wise. Bell Let’s Talk Day is neither.

* UPDATE: Fern Hill in the comments and Marc on Twitter both point out that, in this interest, Bell Canada was obligated to spend money on this initiative as part of ‘tangible benefits’ clause in the proposed Bell-Astral merger.

I was reminded of this when, earlier this month, we traveled to Ireland. Rental car companies have begun renting out mobile Internet (or ‘mifi’) units along with their car. For a reasonable fee–I think we paid about €5 a day–we got mobile Internet access nearly anywhere in the country. You get a little mifi unit that comes with a wall and car charger. We have a similar unit for France, for when we’re traveling within the country or on the rare occasion when our local Internet access goes down.

By the way, it’s non-trivial to sign up with one of those units in the US, Canada or France. It’s not simply a question of buying it and then getting top-up cards. In the US and France when we’ve bought them, there was a fair amount of paperwork. And in Canada, where I had to buy one out of desperation earlier this year, there was no pay-as-you-go option available. I ended up signing up for a monthly plan with Bell, using it for three days, and then promptly canceling it.

Because we’re self-employed, a certain amount of any leisure travel is usually sacrificed to the Gods of Finding the Internet. Can we find a cafe with Internet access (particularly in the off season)? Does the hotel access actually work? A very first world problem, I know, but it’s a routine concern. Happily, this little mifi unit–we named it Dougal–spared us this inconvenience.

But what if we were just visiting Dublin for a week, and not renting a car? Or what if we were taking the train around Europe and traveling on foot? Where would we turn? Most travelers don’t absolutely need web access on the go, but increasingly they want it.

Thus far, the options look kind of dubious. There’s services like this one–that site feels a little sketchy.  They charge $15 per day, plus another $13 or so to ship the device to you. You get ‘unlimited’ data access, except that after you use up 500 MB, you’re downgraded from 3G to a 2G network. Their coverage in Europe looks decent, though interestingly you can’t use one of their devices in Canada. Trustive seems like a similar product. Worryingly, I couldn’t find reliable pricing information on their site. I wouldn’t trust either of these services without a recommendation from somebody I trust.

It seems like there’s a sizable opportunity for somebody with a recognizable brand to step in and own this space. In Europe, I could see somebody like Orange, who has presence in a lot of countries, offering a mifi solution to the city-bound tourist. Or maybe there are solutions on the horizon that I haven’t heard of?

I’ve even rejected some zombie-themed culture. I gave up on Colson Whitehead’s Zone One after about two hours. It read more like a Champions League of preening belletrism than a novel. I was likewise underwhelmed by the first season of The Walking Dead, which was too rote and uninventive to keep me watching.

Maybe my mind’s been on a zombie apocalypse because I live quite close to the only safe place on the planet during the purported Mayan end of days. The little village of Bugarach is just two hours away by car, and for reasons nobody seems to know, is renowned as the only safe haven on December 21. After all, even heads of state are warning us that we may face a zombie invasion that night.

Even if I don’t make it Bugarach on the 21st, there’s still cause for optimism. I’m extremely well-situated to survive an influx of zombies qui manger les cerveaux.

We have a typical French village house. It’s made of stone and concrete, and shares walls with the houses on either side. It’s flush to the street, and has a walled back garden. Thanks to the slope of the land, all of the walls in the back garden are at least 15 feet high. As long as we board up the front door, unless the zombies are unusually limber, we’re in good shape.

Assuming we can bunker down and survive the initial brain-eating rush, then we’re well-positioned to become survivalists. Even for neophyte gardeners like us, it’s incredibly easy to grow fruit and vegetables here, and you can grow food all year long. There are chickens around town that we could liberate, and the vineyards nearby are teeming with rabbits, pheasants and quail (and, you know, grapes).

But all that thinking may prove unnecessary. In the event that the apocalypse happens to be very orthodox, and the zombies rise out of graves in an old-school fashion, we’re in very good shape. Nearly all the graves have a heavy stone tablet on top of the grave site, preventing easy egress for the freshly undead. Are zombies smart enough to dig laterally to avoid the tablet? I’m not sure.

In any case, like many European countries, the French are wise enough to enclose their cemeteries in a high concrete wall with heavy metal gates. Any zombies that clear their graves will be penned in like sheep awaiting shearing. It will be a simple matter for the local hunters to lean over the walls and pick them off.

I, for one, will rest easy on December 21.

I think of the Hall as the first thing I ever created that the Internet liked. It was covered in Boing Boing, and images from the Hall appeared in the great British show, The IT Crowd.

As often happens with Web projects, I moved on to other distractions and a redesign of this site killed the wonky gallery software I was using to run the Hall. It’s been offline for three or four years now.

It occurred to me the other day that Pinterest would make a convenient and reliable new home for the hall. It seems like the natural environment for vaguely-amusing technical drawings and signs. And I found some free time to set up a board and start posting images.

Witness the revival of The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, 2012 edition.

“When boxing up your baby, ensure the lid securely fastened.” on Pinterest

I’ve got about 100 images to upload, so I’ll get the rest up over the coming days. New Hall submissions are always welcome.

UPDATE: Eight years later, Boing Boing wrote about the Hall again. Ah, the circle of geeky life.

UPDATE: I meant to credit the Wayback Machine, which managed to preserve my captions.

This was the first time I’d ever seen a murmuration of starlings in real life. They were a great amoebic mass, and seemed to behave almost exactly like a school of fish. Nature copies itself all the time.

I’m afraid the combination of an iPhone camera and many small black dots against a partially-cloudy sky isn’t exactly a recipe for brilliant web video. But here’s what I put together. And yes, I did get pooped on. Just my foot, mind you, but it counts.

Murmuration of Starlings over Argeliers, France from Darren Barefoot.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t cite the most Internet-famous (and much better looking) video of starlings, uh, murmurating.

The authors discuss whether the same algorithms that banks use to find fraudsters could be used to uncover terrorists. They provide this profile of the 19 terrorists who participated in the September 11 attacks. To paraphrase the terrorists’ characteristics slightly:

• Some of them regularly sent and received wire transfers to and from other countries.
• They tended to make one large deposit and then withdrew cash in small amounts over time.
• They typically used a P.O. box as an address, and the addresses changed frequently.
• Their banking didn’t reflect normal living expenses like rent, utilities, auto payments, insurance and so on.
• There was no typical monthly consistency in the timing of their deposits or withdrawals.
• They didn’t use savings accounts or safe-deposit boxes.
• The ratio of cash withdrawals to cheques written was unusually high.

Hmm…that feels a little too familiar.

Just last night, after buying some flights from a major airline, I received an automated call from the Royal Bank. I use a voice-to-text voicemail service, so here’s the transcript:

This call is for Darren Barefoot from the Royal Bank Security Department. In order to prevent possible difficulties using your card, it is important that you call us back immediately toll-free at 800-711-9946 to verify activity. You may call us back 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is important we speak with you. The number again is 800-711-9946. Thank you for choosing Royal Bank. Goodbye.

Side note: That’s one computer talking to another computer. The latter computer transcribed the call perfectly, including my name. Impressive, yet slightly creepy.

Not for the first time, I had to call the bank to confirm that I had, in fact, bought something online. On other occasions, I’ve had my bank card summarily deactivated by the bank, and been forced to go get a new card.

The bank, of course, claims that it’s entirely for my protection. I suspect that their actions are, in fact, much more in their own interests, and they’re happy to inconvenience me when an algorithm tells them to.

I appreciate that this is a very first world problem, but at least now I have a possible explanation: the Royal Bank thinks I’m a terrorist.

The Globe & Mail published an article last week by Shelley White. Its headline was “Why a 22-year-old shouldn’t be handling your social media“–very similar to the Inc.com story. Despite the Globe’s recent Wentegate controversy, there’s no whiff of plagiarism in the body of the article. White’s article is substantively better than Thomases’, in that Ms. White did actual reporting and research.

But isn’t this a little too cynical?

I emailed Derek DeCloet, Managing Editor, Report on Business Editor of the Business section at the Globe and Mail, and asked him if he was aware of the Inc. article when they assigned their story. He confirmed that they were, writing that “one of the editors saw the Inc.com article, liked it and decided we should do our own version.”

I also asked whether he felt that the Globe had any professional or ethical obligation to acknowledge the original story. He didn’t think so:

We don’t believe such an obligation exists. Nor do we believe that others are required to give us credit when they write original work that is inspired by something we have done. The free flow of ideas, in journalism and other realms, is constant – a given story may be inspired or influenced by any number of things that writers or editors have read or seen elsewhere. It is in no way unethical to write an article on a subject that someone else has previously written about.

Mr. DeCloet did acknowledge that the Globe’s headline was “too similar” to the Inc.com’s headline. “However, both headlines use a very common construction (Why X should/shouldn’t do Y) that you will find in many English-language publications. We’ve since changed our headline, thanks to your letter.”

The story is now entitled “Social media too important to be handled by an intern”. Which, in fairness, is almost certainly a less effective headline.

In our remix culture, I feel strongly that we ought to, whenever possible, acknowledge our antecedents. It would have been easy for the Globe to recognize and link to Inc. in the text of the article (“In August, Inc. asked the question…”) or in a footer at the end of the article. I know this is antithetical to the newspaper-as-authority model of most journalism. But it’s 2012, and we shouldn’t feel obligated to pretend that we develop our ideas in a vacuum, or that we’re the only source of information on a given topic.

On a related note, I also think that the Globe should note that headline change in their article. For all online articles, whether on a newspaper’s site or one like this, post-publish edits should be transparent.

Note: The Inside PR discusses this topic–it’s worth a listen.

If we buy the paper on the right Sunday, we also get the accompanying International Herald Tribune Style magazine. I was paging through it and discovered this profile of a post-Hermoine Emma Watson by Will Self.

I consider myself a reasonably well-read person, but I was delighted to discover no less than seven terms in the article that I was unfamiliar with. Here they are, in order of appearance, with definitions drawn from Dictionary.com (with the exception of ‘Meisser’):

mien: noun air, bearing, or demeanor, as showing character, feeling,

Meisser: The first hard-paste porcelain developed in Europe in the early 18th century.

moue: noun A pouting grimace (rhymes with ‘moo’)

neoteny: noun Also called pedogenesis. the production of offspring by an organism in its larval or juvenile form; the elimination of the adult phase of the life cycle.

bildungsroman noun A type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist. Also known as a ‘coming of age’ story. Examples might include David Copperfield, The Catcher in the Rye and The Kite Runner.

éclat noun Brilliance of success, reputation.

cavile verb To raise irritating and trivial objections; find fault with unnecessarily (rhymes with ‘gavel’).

I can’t really recommend the profile. As with nearly all celebrity profiles, it’s pretty banal. And, as somebody I know pointed out, it reads like Will Self drew the short straw at an editorial meeting.

That said, I am grateful for all the new vocabulary words.

Our backs were to the shore, the beach and Hollyhock beyond. I’d come to Canada to attend another Web of Change–my fifth, I think. It was as challenging and insightful as it usually is–a welcome time for conspiring with colleagues and thinking big thoughts.

The evening before I’d had an eerie walk to a party down a dirt road in the dark. I was arriving late, and so walked over alone. The cedars crowded in on either side, leaving just a narrow band of stars to light my way. Rationally, I knew that death by cougar or wolf attack was highly improbable. My lizard brain, however, is not rational. I walked as fast as I could without running. You know, running like prey would.

I then traded the towering cedars of Cortes Island for Vancouver’s towering glass towers. It’s a cliched comparison, but doesn’t driving down Georgia Street feel like you’re traveling through a great, grey forest?

Coming home is always a little odd. It’s not so much the change of language that feels strange, but a shift in perspectives. I live in a warm, rural place, and now I’m a little chilly (despite the gorgeous Vancouver weather–one’s temperature settings change so quickly) and surrounded by skyscrapers and millions of people. The days are suddenly shorter, and the nights never really get dark in the city.

Home also highlights the little foreign habits one acquires. When I’m walking around our village, I greet nearly every person I pass with “bonjour” or “bon soir”. I actively had to prevent myself from doing this during my first couple of days in Yaletown. Similarly, my mind has now switched so that when I see somebody, I greet them in French. In Vancouver, you do that and you just seem effete.

These differences seem obvious, but they’re the ones that matter. Similarly, my fresh eyes observed just how many cars there are on the roads in the city. In our village, the horses and boats nearly outnumber the cars.  It’s like we risk death every time we step off the curb. This was doubly the case for my first trip back from Ireland. I’d trained myself to look the other way when stepping off the curb.

The longer you’re away, the weirder it is. This is my third trip home to North America since February, so the cognitive dissonance was very manageable. We’re clearly not designed to be removed from one place and plopped, as if by disinterested aliens, on the other side of the world. If you did it to any other animal, it wouldn’t survive the afternoon.

Still, it’s always a pleasure to see friends, family and big trees on the West Coast. I return now to France, my bag full of red licorice, Stanfield’s underwear and over-the-counter drugs for which I don’t know the French name.

UPDATE: I’d meant to credit Sarah for inspiring me to write this post after writing about her own homecoming.

Why do I want to back to school?

• I really enjoyed my undergraduate degree. I liked the academic rigour, the camaraderie and the debate.
• Lots of smart people that I respect have masters degrees.
• I enjoy public speaking and teaching, and an advanced degree would help me do more of that.
• I enjoy living in other places–I write this on a plane over the Atlantic–and getting a masters degree might enable that.

I’m intrigued by the idea in the abstract, but I don’t know what I’d like to study. There’s my core competency: web marketing and communications. I suppose I’m boasting, but I suspect that I’m overqualified for that topic. Having written a book about it, and taught both undergrads and grad students myself, I’d make an intolerable student.

I don’t want an MBA. No offense to anybody who has one, but they seem highly commodified. I think a lot of people get an MBA for career advancement or to increase their pay grade, neither of which is among my motivations. Also, I’ve been the co-owner of a business for 10 years, and there’s some truth to that cliche about the school of life.

I have a notion that I’d like to study something tangentially related to my work. Something around Internet culture or using the web to do good. I can think of questions I’d like to answer, but I’m not even sure what university department they might fit in.

I Have No Idea

But that’s really all I know. I have no idea how one picks a program or how one gets into one. I assume that you can, to some degree, customize your masters program, but I don’t know how much. I don’t even know how to start looking for and evaluating programs, except with some deeply dumb Google searches.

In truth, I’ve been hoping the perfect program would magically appear in my Google calendar. It hasn’t.

So, those of you with advanced degrees, how would I go about finding one that’s the right fit for me?

While updates have been slim around here, I have been doing some writing elsewhere. What’s a more appropriate for a tardy anniversary post than a self-promotional list of stuff I’ve been up to?

• On Greenpeace’s Mobilisation Lab, I wrote up some original research we did around Facebook and NGOs.
• On Beth Kanter’s blog, I wrote a guest post about measuring engagement for a fun client project.
• Capulet is running a series of social media marketing strategy master classes (that’s a bit of a mouthful) over the next few months, starting with one for small business on September 13. I’ll be back in Vancouver for that one.

I do have a few blog post ideas rolling around in my head. Keep, uh, watching the skies.