Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out. Personally, at this stage, I only care about one thing: that the outcome in Iraq be positive enough and forward-looking enough that those who have actually paid the price — in lost loved ones or injured bodies, in broken homes or broken lives, be they Iraqis or Americans or Brits — see Iraq evolve into something that will enable them to say that whatever the cost, it has given freedom and decent government to people who had none.

Would you say to someone, “Wow, you must hate dogs. You only have one. You enjoy his company and playing with him, but seriously, only one? What do you have against dogs?”.

The shallow assumption of Apple’s buttons is they hate buttons, the deeper conclusion is they love the shit out of a few important buttons. I bet they obsess over the placement, color, label, push-back and feel of every single button on every Apple device.

(The full stand-up routine runs 7:19, and the Blackberry portion starts at 5:03. To start the video right at this point, I used a fine tool called Splicd.com.)

Today is International Women’s Day, an event celebrated for the first time on March 19, 1911:

More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.

However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic ‘Triangle Fire’ in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events.

International Women’s Day is widely-celebrated around the world, and a national holiday in a number of countries, including Bulgaria, China, Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam. But women’s rights are still hard-won in many places, and I thought I’d share this article on the challenges and hopes of female candidates in Iraq’s parliamentary elections. Jenan Mubarak, on the right in the photo above, campaigning in Baghdad, is one of those candidates:

Ms. Mubark manages a construction company and runs the Iraqi Center for Women’s Rehabilitation and Employment, a nongovernmental organization that she said gave her a base of support, both male and female. In her walkup office in central Baghdad, she described her agenda in language that has become familiar to political campaigns around the world. “This,” she said, “is the first step for change in our country.”

Photo credit: AP Photo/ Karim Kadim

Courtesy Erin Scime, DopeData.com.

(Via Predicate, LLC)

At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

The other examples – a place to ask questions, organize the people you follow by topical lists, monitor the output of conferences, and get local updates, like a bridge closing or traffic delay – burst the tired stereotype of Twitter as a TMI-laden place to tell everyone the most mundane details of your daily life.

Odd as it may sound, I want Finnish gas stations in Finland. I don’t want a Starbucks in the Forbidden City (others felt similarly, which seemingly influenced its closure in 2007). I dread the notion of boring, homogenized Budweiser being equated as the “king of beers.”

And explains how the quick decision-making in a small company can outmaneuver the bureaucracy likely to slow down large one:

Let’s say you have a little software company that competes with one of Microsoft’s products. Along comes a new innovation that you choose to implement in your application. All you have to do is get down to work. Sure, Microsoft has nearly 90,000 people to do the same, but do you think it’s really that easy? How many meetings, proposals, surveys, and assessments need to happen before a single line of code is written? It’s like arranging a get-together: a dinner for two is easy, a gathering of 12 friends is no big deal, but planning a wedding for 100? That’s a kind of torture.

But what about big companies? Karjaluoto says thinking small can work for them too, but they have their work cut out for them, especially if they need to change negative perceptions.

Buy the paperback or read online for free (a new chapter is published every few weeks).

Wired reports on TISC, or Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation, a knowledge sharing website developed by the Department of Defense that has served as an online hub for relief organizations working in Haiti:

The system is designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network, its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.

Without another way of collaborating, the TISC platform has become one of the de facto standards for communication among the relief effort in Haiti.There are more than 1700 different users in Haiti, most of them relief organizations of various size and specialty looking for how to get involved, and to coordinate efforts to maximize results. It’s operating on a larger scale than DISA had originally planned, but it’s scaling well, says Jean Dumay, one of DISA’s leads on the TISC project. “The test came early, and it became very real, but we were ready for it.”

Further Reading:

• DISA Supporting Haitian Relief – Defense Information Systems Agency
• TISC White Paper – All Partners Action Network

Image courtesy Defense Information Systems Agency

As part of Social Media Group’s continuing commitment to meet the needs of our evolving client base (and recognizing fully that one of the key things that differentiates us as more than “just” social media marketers or a social PR agency is our holistic approach to organizational change) I’m very pleased to let you know that Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns, has joined SMG as our Director of Enterprise Client Services and member of our management team.

As one might expect from his title, Stewart will be responsible for leading SMG’s Enterprise Services practice group and will work with clients like SAP, ICANN and others to help develop strategy as well as foster and manage the organizational change that is a core part of effective integration of both collaborative and social media tools inside and outside the enterprise.

More on the SMG Blog, and Enterprise Services page on the SMG website.

I’m excited!