Though I don’t always tend to this space as much lately–mostly thanks to Twitter, which has stolen away most of the precious few moments that I devote to this sort of thing–it was a nice surprise to hear that at today’s Vancouver ChangeCamp a post from my blog was referenced during one of the sessions. Very cool.

The post was one about the BC Government’s new Spark! collaboration site.

Sounds like it was a good day in Vancouver. Would have been great to be there, but instead I followed along via–what else?–Twitter. The hashtags #vcc09 and #vanchangecamp kept me informed and up-to-date.

I tweeted this yesterday, but I wanted to mention here that Amy Mengel at Mengel Musings has a good post linking to three social media ebooks. My favourite so far–though I’m not yet done them all–is Brink. They all are valuable, and Amy provides a useful quick rundown on each of the books. Well worth a look.

Yesterday on Twitter I received a tweet from crushlovely saying that they were “Enjoying the mix at http://thru-you.com.” Well, Thru You is the most fantastic and talented example of remixing I’ve come across online. The artist, Kutiman, has taken a variety of YouTube video clips and pieced them together to create original music that is, frankly, incredible. Now, the style might not suit everyone–I personally love it–but the effort and talent is unmistakable.

What’s wonderful about this effort is how it illustrates what’s possible today. The web becomes this massive repository of user-generated content–which is itself a huge shift from previous modes of mass communication–and then artists take this a step further, remixing and reinventing, along the way creating original content that, in this case in particular, far exceeds the quality of any one individual piece.

Thru You is inspiring. I can’t remember that last time I was so blown away by something I experienced online, so taken aback that I could feel my pulse quicken and excitement and wonder flow throughout my being. This is creativity, vision and execution perfected. Riveting. Beautiful. Genius.

Do yourself a favour: Check it out.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, was on the TED stage talking up his booming business. He’s a little nervous, but overall the presentation is decent and informative–not exactly one of those stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks TED talks, but interesting nonetheless. I really liked how he used great visuals to support sample tweets; would make Garr Reynolds proud.

Amazing, fun soccer skills. Just had to share this one.

(Found via somethingwhacked)

So here is my winning video for the 2009 Victoria Film Festival’s MyVictoria competition. Below the video is a clip from the A Morning news program where they aired the clip on Tuesday. As you’ll see at the end of the news clip, my video had a pretty profound impact on host Astrid Braunschmidt!

And now the A News clip. Unfortunately they had some audio problems at the beginning–and even throughout the entire video.

The Victoria Film Festival just wrapped, and I was notified yesterday that my submission to their MyVictoria competition was selected as the winner for the “best family” category!

My short–which will be available online soon–tells the story of my daughter and the support she receives from the Queen Alexandra Foundation for Children (QA). My daughter was born without a right hand and forearm, and has been getting help from Queen Alexandra from an early age. They’ve been helping her at every stage of development with things like crawling, balance and muscle development and, more specifically, with her prosthetic arms.  The arms are surprisingly heavy for a baby/toddler, and she recently received a myoelectric arm, which requires a lot of training and support. Through it all she’s been fantastic.

So this year, I committed to myself to produce an entry for the film fest’s video competition and my wife proposed I do something about QA. After some brainstorming and some sketches and simple storyboards, I finally settled on my approach: I figured since it was going to be mostly about a 2-year-old, then the video should feel like a children’s story. So I wrote a poem, which became my script, and started shooting. I then arranged with two of my daughter’s therapists from QA to let me video them working with her. Finally, my wife agreed to read the poem that would become the voice over and she also played an old children’s song on the piano, which I recorded and used as my soundtrack.

Being my first entry into a video competition, I have to say I’m quite happy to have won. It was a gratifying little project regardless, but it’s always nice to be recognized.

Now I’ll just have to wait to see if my recent Gold Quill Award submission for the Municipal Pension Plan video series I produced does as well!

Guy Kawasaki has a great post on the power of Twitter. It’s full of good advice on using Twitter for more than your typical friend updates, complete with useful links.

This post comes at a valuable time for me as I get more seriously into Twitter myself. I’ve been following Twitter’s development since its inception, and have had an account for some time, but I never really took advantage of it. At first I saw it as one more way to communicate inane comments about day-to-day trivia. Incidentally, in his post, Guy talks about this exact use of Twitter, saying:

If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

But as the use of Twitter’s matured–along with social media in general–it’s real power as a tool is becoming clearer.

Just yesterday there was a post on VentureBeat about how Twitter has made Dell $1million. And I managed to come across this story because of a person I follow on Twitter–Ann Handley of the fantastic MarketingProfs.

Internal communications I think is one area where Twitter–or perhaps better yet,  a corporate Twitter-like tool like Yammer–would really shine. Even small organizations typically suffer from internal communications challenges, and integrating a tool like this has the potential to really break down barriers.

Homepage of Spark

The BC Government launched a new social media Intranet site last week called Spark. The site is meant as a place for staff to share ideas with colleagues which can then be voted on by other users of the site. Of course comments are enabled, allowing for some development of a particular idea within the context of its post.

While I’m actively participating in the site I’m left wondering how effective it will be in the long term. It’s being pitched as a Web 2.0 site for government employees, and it’s an encouraging step in that direction. But in my use so far, I’m not sure there’s enough there to get users coming back and continually participating. Possibly out of pure curiosity staff might return to check in on what ideas are being posted. But it’s lacking a mechanism for building community.

For example, I posted an idea about trying to get similar-minded communications and web workers in government to

Spark post page

come together to share ideas, best practices, etc. My idea was “voted” a few times and garnered a few comments. Okay, not bad. Then today I noticed that my idea had been given the status of “Run with it,” which, in the scheme of the Spark site means the administrators have looked at my idea and have given me the go-ahead to move forward since it doesn’t technically require any input or immediate support from them for me to make it a reality (it’s not like I’m suggesting government change a financial policy or something).

But now I feel suddenly alone. There’s no mechanism–at least from what I’ve been able to discover–for me to use the Spark site, or even the broader government intranet site in general, to move forward with my idea. If I’m interested in pursuing things, I need to go back to more traditional means, like email, to setup a connection with the people who commented on my idea. This seems like a big flaw in the system.

If an idea gets the go-ahead, it would be great to suddenly be given a space within the Spark site to collaborate. Possibly a wiki tool, for example, so that interested parties can begin sharing ideas in a centralized collaborative space. This is especially important given the government’s broad user base. Users could be anywhere in the province of British Columbia! I’m assuming those who commented on my idea are in Victoria, but they may not necessarily be here. And even if they are, my physical office is located out at the relatively remote Selkirk Waterfront, far enough from the hub of downtown Victoria to make quick meetings impractical.

So extending the purely idea-based structure of Spark into a place where the ideas themselves can begin to take form would make it much more useful, and give it more of the Web 2.0 credibility I think the site creators might have been shooting for.

However, I’m encouraged by this development, and will continue to follow it to see just how far one good idea can go.

I’ve been spending a large portion of my work life lately working on a redesign of website for my organization’s largest client. Well, not exactly a redesign–originally the scale was smaller, but it’s become apparent that what we’re actually working on is essentially a phased redesign. As a colleague and I work through the process of squeezing the most out of the old site as we can while trying to reorganize the new site, I keep thinking about how a user might interact with our site and who we are designing for.

We have a lot of information on the website for basically three different audiences. A quick spin through the current site reveals that there are a lot of areas that could be improved. So we’re making design decisions based on what we think needs help and where the site’s greatest weaknesses are. This is a worthwhile exercise, but ultimately without testing our assumptions, we’re just guessing. The guesses are educated and are informed by a combined 20 years of web design experience, but they are guesses nonetheless. That’s why I’ve been advocating usability testing. Usability tests would provide us with the data we need to be confident we’re hitting the mark in terms of what our audiences need. And if you’ve read Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think,” you’ll know that usability testing doesn’t have to be overly complicated to be effective.

In any organization there are competing interests and of course stakeholders who hold more sway than others. And when it comes to design–or communications in general–everyone believes he’s an expert. But designers, particularly of user interfaces, need to champion the needs of the audience. They, ultimately, are the only ones who matter. If the design suits a board member or your CEO, that’s nice, but if it doesn’t serve your intended audience, well, it doesn’t much matter what your stakeholders thought because, unfortunately, the design has failed.