this is mikel.org

Must Read

2008-06-18T21:19:31Z

Whether it’s real or not (and I have no reason to doubt it), Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter to Yahoo is a must-read.

Creacamp May 2008 [Flickr]

2008-05-03T19:19:17-05:00

mikel posted a photo:

M-C kicks off Creacamp [Flickr]

2008-05-03T19:19:16-05:00

mikel posted a photo:

Creacamp goodies [Flickr]

2008-05-03T19:19:15-05:00

mikel posted a photo:

Profile pic outtake [Flickr]

2008-05-03T19:19:13-05:00

mikel posted a photo:

Canadian culture.ca being shuttered

2008-04-30T15:36:00Z

News from Michael Geist today that Culture.ca, the (well, one of several from the same department) Canadian culture portal, has closed effective April 1, 2008. I know a couple of people who are directly affected by this news, though I’m not sure what the impact will be or what impact the site has had.

What’s going on

2008-04-25T13:36:47Z

I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.

At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.

It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.

Freelancing as a career

2008-04-21T14:58:01Z

My friend Craig Silverman has written a post with some great advice for freelance journalists trying to develop their career in difficult economic times: Freelancing the future. He came to this in response to a post by Adrian Monck, who has been making the case recently that journalism is not at fault for the decline in newspapers.

Monck is almost certainly right, and Craig’s advice is really good advice - not just for freelance journalists but for any independent consultant-type person trying to get things going. But it’s the business side of the news media business that has and continues to screw everything up, IMO. When the net came along, they said, “look, blogs are great, everyone wants more opinion and context” and went ahead and gutted their news reporting function in favour of more opinion, more columnists, more of what the blogosphere was doing very well from it’s inception.

The problem is - that was the exact opposite of the bet they should have made. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one - and no one gives a damn if it’s some “journalist” (whose publisher likely sold him/her out long ago) who has written the opinion piece. On any conceivable subject, I can go out into the blogs and find at least one if not a dozen writers with more experience, more context, and more knowledge about a subject than any journalist has.

What we need - and by “we” I mean society at large - is honest, exhaustive, factual reporting. Newspapers should have (and should be) increasing their reporting budgets and decreasing their spend on columnists and opinions. I do want more opinion and context - but the last place I want to go to get it is a newspaper.

Tungle Launches in beta

2008-04-16T13:35:44Z

Montreal’s Tungle has lauched into a public beta and has received good coverage from Montreal Tech Watch (as you’d expect - Heri does such a good job of covering the local scene) and TechCrunch, among others.

Saunders on Canadian data rates

2008-03-31T17:42:42Z

Alec Saunders has written a long post comparing the rates for data plans and carrier revenues internationally called Talking Turkey on Canadian Data. Alec brings out the numbers behind the point that I’ve been making based on instinct for some time now - the problem with exorbitant data rates isn’t just that people WANT more data or somehow deserve it - which is how it’s usually portrayed. The problem with high data rates is actually that the carriers are leaving huge revenues on the table over (it seems) some kind of “we DESERVE to be able to meter every byte” principle. Canadian carriers are not acting in the best interests of consumers or their shareholders by being so intransigent on this issue.

“Social” is now the default - or should be

2008-03-31T17:31:15Z

Thomas Purves has written a great post suggesting - correctly, in my view - that It’s time to take “social” for granted.

Here’s the news. [Social media] is no longer interesting. It’s time is done. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s still vast areas of everyday business, enterprise and government that still need to be beaten severely with the Web2.0 stick (even the Web1.0 stick would still help in some places). Rather, it’s now time to think of socialness and 2.0ness as “business as usual” in the IT industry. The substantive battle is over, this is a mopping up operation. And there’s a ton of rolling up the sleeves and value to unlock left to do in almost any vertical industry.

I’ve been working on crossovers between social media and mobile for over a year now (from time to time - consulting gigs) and from my perspective mobile has already arrived. I think it’s almost irresponsible to consider a “new media” strategy without considering the social and mobile options that can be baked in, and not as some kind of cute bolt-on strategy but integrally to the whole thing.

Disable Snap

2008-03-31T16:17:22Z

From Blork, a great follow-up to my complaints about Snap.com the other day: How To Disable Snap Shots on Blogs. Step-by-step instructions about how to spare your readers from this annoying “feature”.

Centralizing the social map

2008-03-30T15:30:02Z

Loïc Le Meur has written a nice succinct post about social networks and software and decentralization: My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog. It’s pretty clear to me that this is where all of this stuff is going to have to go - partly for convenience, but also because that’s where the really interesting data/service mashups will most easily originate, I think. One thing I’ve been thinking about, though, is what this looks like on someone’s blog. I thing part of the barrier to this kind of thing is that the current state-of-the-art - widgets in someone’s sidebar or rich footer - is pretty marginally usable and definitely not scalable.

An open message

2008-03-31T16:14:58Z

Dear users of Snap.com,

Please stop!

It is annoying, provides me (your reader) with no benefit, and in fact makes it radically less likely that I will read your post - the stupid pop-up windows obscure your text and make it difficult to read the pearls of wisdom you are trying to communicate.

Best,
Michael

The latest for the “open archives” list: SI

2008-03-23T01:16:07Z

The most recent member of the “our archives are more valuable open than closed” group among the traditional media is Sports Illustrated, which has opened the SI Vault. You can now read 54 years of Sports Illustrated history at your leisure.

Lebkowsky on the Economist article on SocNets

2008-03-22T20:26:13Z

Jon Lebkowsky has written a response to The Economist’s article on Social Networks, Everywhere and Nowhere on the Social Web Strategies blog. Money quote:

For months I’ve been saying that Facebook is the next AOL - a gated community that works for a while, but ultimately can’t be open enough to sustain prominence. This is probably true of MySpace, too… at the moment, both systems are growing and capturing mindshare… will this last?

Some bloggers are made, others are born

2008-03-14T14:26:21Z

One thing that few know about me is that I am wild about fantasy baseball. One of my longest-standing and best fantasy baseball friends recently confirmed what we’d all suspected for a long time: he has entirely too much time on his hands.

Just kidding! But Jason has been blogging for the past few months - It is about the money, stupid and doing a very very good job of it. He’s taken to the form like a fish to water, and if you follow baseball even a little bit, you’ll definitely enjoy it.

Fail!

2008-03-14T12:06:42Z

Like many, I’m pretty skeptical about big network led efforts to bring their TV and other content online, but still kind of optimistic. So it was with interest that I read John Battelle’s post Hulu Is Up at Searchblog. His conclusion? “This is a big step.”

A response, in three screen captures:

Because not everyone gets it…

2008-03-12T01:38:25Z

The nice folks at Common Craft have posted a video that explains Twitter in Plain English - and does so very very well. (Appropriately enough, I found this via Julien’s tweet a few minutes ago).

Losers Even After Forty Seasons [Flickr]

2008-03-04T19:36:37-06:00

mikel posted a photo:

A Leafs T-Shirt I saw in a store here in Montreal.

Distribution > Destination

2008-03-01T21:45:53Z

Avenue A | Razorfish’s Garrick Schmitt has written a great post in the Digital Design Blog that riffs on information from their Digital Outlook report: Does the Home Page Still Matter?: Why Distribution Trumps Destination Online. Most of the web folks that I know have been working on this basis for some time now, but it remains important to underline that the old “get people in through the homepage” model is broken (and likely always was, it was just harder to figure out before).

Trying to force people into a specific usage pattern is a recipe for failure - trumped only by the mistake of trying to predict where users will come from in the first place. What does this mean in practice? Many things (and the conclusions in the post are right on), but two immediate things spring to mind:

Deep links have to provide context within the URL itself (i.e., be readable)
Don’t hide content in non-machine-readable formats that people can’t link to directly (and that Google can’t grok)

The online yellow pages sucks (not a surprise)

2008-03-01T19:51:23Z

Just now I was trying to find a printing company near my house whose name I didn’t remember. So I did a search with the information I had and got a Pages Jaunes (i.e., Yellow Pages in French) listing: impression Montreal. It’s pretty obvious that these people are fighting like mad against the very nature of the web. First problem: though it was the only listing that in any way matched my search, what came up in Google was a terrible listing page, not their direct company page. So I searched the page for the street and finally found the listing and clicked through to it. And then it got worse.

The second problem? No web link. The company HAS a website (about which more later), but you’d never know that by looking at the Yellow Pages online listing. Third? They’ve disabled select-and-copy of text on the listing. Of course it was trivial to view source (though not via right-click) and get around this limitation, but c’mon, it’s 2008 isn’t it? Using silly javascript tricks to try and stay sticky is so 1997!

Unfortunately it got even worse once I had the name of the company and did another search in Google. The site only came up in the first page of listings when I searched for “Ipso-Facto Impression Numerique” rather than just the company name - and then when I finally got through to the link I found out why - their site is a craptastic flash-based site with background music and everything. Eek.

Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

2008-02-22T18:14:47Z

Alexander Wilms wrote an interesting post called The Trouble With Web 2.0 at Boxes and Arrows, to which Jon Lebkowsky wrote a lengthy response on the Social Web Strategies blog. Wilms is generally optimistic about the adoption of new online strategies in the enterprise, and where he sees barriers, Lebkowsky challenges those very effectively in his response.

Lebkowsky is right on when he writes,

The question is, how do you promote a different set of values within the corporate environment, so that cooperation is favored over competition, in at least some contexts? A company may lose valuable potential for innovation if leaders within the organization don’t work to support collaboration. Again, this is something we should at least be willing to consider.

It may not be comfortable, but I think it’s important that companies embarking on “Web 2” projects understand that it’s just as much about their corporate culture as it is about technology or what have you.

There’s another fundamental problem underlying Wilms’ article, though, which is the assumption in a lot of discussions on Web 2.0 and the enterprise that embarking on such projects is an OR not an AND proposition. There is nothing better for a company embarking on an an internal blogging project than an existing (underused, over-priced) KM system - and the reverse is true as well (x 10).

Twitter Web Traffic Stats

2008-02-21T21:40:22Z

The nice folks at Twitter have started to publish a bit more information than has been available about their usage. Today Biz wrote a post on the Twitter blog about Twitter Web Traffic Around the World which is very interesting.

A couple of interesting things pop out at first glance. First of all, 60% of (web) traffic is non-US in origin. This might seem like a high number, but when we compare that figure to published stats from sites like Facebook, Twitter has a relatively lower number of international users. Secondly, and most interestingly to me, if you eyeball the percentages in terms of the population of each of the “international” countries represented in the top 10, I imagine that Canada would jump right to the top of the list.

Considering that this is just an assessment of web traffic, not overall traffic, I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from that relative to mobile usage in Canada (usually said to be very low relative to European countries and others), but unless Twitter’s mobile roots are in fact insignificant compared to web usage, the numbers do suggest that things aren’t quite as bad in Canada as most of the other stats portray.

Lessig for Congress?

2008-02-20T17:06:43Z

In the past couple of weeks there has been an increasingly organized movement to draft renowned copyfighter Lawrence Lessig to run for Congress in the California 12th district. Lessig himself is considering it and says, “that decision will be made soon.” One of the more interesting aspects of his possible run is that Lessig recently committed to switching gears to deal with governance and corruption issues instead of focusing on copyright and related issues. It goes without saying that I and thousands like me would love the idea of a guy like Lessig in Congress. There are many fine Congresspeople, but still relatively few that have a real handle on some of the most important issues of the day.