Archive for the ‘how to’ Category

Zap Brannigan, nobody's idea of a strong leader. Except his.

After I posted my little rant about social media ideas last night (Sunday late-night posting bad for traffic? IN YOUR FACE), there was some Twitter talk, including this from Scott Monty: “Au contraire. Social media *leaders* need to be strong enough to withstand criticism. #socialmedia”

I agree. Let’s test this: Scott Monty, YOU SUCK!!! Just kidding.

I think that Scott Monty and I are actually in agreement (as you’d expect from a guy who does a Sherlock Holmes podcast and a guy who does a Stephen King podcast), but that we’re coming to a place of agreement from two different directions.

While I argued that ideas must be strong enough to stand up to criticism, I read Scott’s tweet as saying that those who make the ideas must also allow their ideas to stand on their own merits.

There was a medeival French philosopher named Michel de Montaigne. He once apparently wrote “We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship.” 

True, dat.

When you’ve worked to develop a concept, a program, a web site, something — it’s hard to hear it criticized. The natural tendency is to protect it. And sometimes, the most accurate critiques are those that sting the most. We clutch our ideas in our metaphorical arms, desperate to keep them from harm. And we sometimes lash out. Or, in the case of social media, our friends lash out on our behalf.

I think we need to ensure that if we’re the target of criticism, we first take the time to recognize whether the criticism is of us or our work. Then, be courageous enough to decide whether the criticism has a basis of truth. If there’s something in it, then USE it. If there’s nothing, then choose whether to ignore it or to respond.

I think there’s one more post in me about this — about the rights and responsibilities of critics in social media. Maybe today, or possibly tomorrow.

I’ve seen it. I’ve suffered from it. I’ll bet many of you reading this have too. I call it… launchitis.

It’s a terrible malady, suffered from by those who toil in the trenches of the social media salt mines. The symptoms include depression, burnout, hair loss (from people tearing it out by the roots), uncontrollable anger, and addiction to Dilbert cartoons.

Here’s how a typical case of Launchitis usually goes:

1. an organization gets super-duper excited about some online social media tool or trend that involves interactivity — Foursquare, communities, bulletin boards, Facebook pages, augmented reality. Yay!
2. They task staff to put the project on the to-do list.
3. Staff get moving. Sometimes they hire consultants to help out.
4. The project creeps. Let’s do THIS TOO! And this! And let’s make it glow in the dark!
5. People start getting tired. Deadlines loom. Sometimes budgets start to get dicey.
6. The project launches with attendant hoopla. Ribbons are cut. News releases go out. Everyone congratulates each other, whether or not it was on time or on budget.
7. The landscape is then suffused with the gentle sound of crickets. Nobody posts in the community. Nobody joins the page. Those who do don’t say much. Nobody checks in.

What’s happened here?

The organization forgot that it’s not enough to launch. It’s easy to believe that  all you have to do is build the tool and it will rise like Frankenstein’s monster and live. But to keep on with that monstrous metaphor, Frankenstein didn’t just assemble the parts — he added electricity. That belief is dangerous to the success of your projects.

If you’re a communicator and you’re tasked with a new project, do yourself — and your organization — a big favour. Write an element into the project charter, the project plan, the communications plan and any other document related to the project that identifies the resources that will be necessary to nurture the product through its early life. That might be a month or two, it might be a year; it might mean part of someone’s job, or hiring a contractor to manage the product.

If it’s blog-related or relies on written content, ensure part of the plan coming up to launch is pre-writing content that will either get finished and posted in the early days; if it’s video-based, have some video ready. You get the idea.

And don’t stop talking about it the whole way through the project. The best way to ensure that your project will survive the launch is to keep people focussed on the fact that the goal is not to LAUNCH something. It’s to BUILD something. Social media sites should not be envisioned in Ray Kinsella mode, as in: “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like George Burns mode: “I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.”

You should also think about adding in measures in your evaluation plan (you HAVE one of those, RIGHT?) that make it more likely that you’ll nurture the project post-launch.

Preventing the spread of launchitis is a great way to make the likelihood of your social media initiatives succeeding greater. Thinking past the launch is important. Don’t miss out on the chance to scream, just like Dr. Frankenstein, “It’s alive. It’s ALIIIIVE. AAALIIIIIIIVE!!!”

And now for something mostly unrelated to launch-itis, a little LOVE-itis from the J. Geils Band:

A tip of the hat to Ottawa Citizen blogger David Reevely, who inspired the thinking behind this post.

A KWTV picture of a flyer for the lost computer

My head is still spinning a little bit in the wake of reading about University of Oklahoma researchers Ralf Janknecht and Shin Sook.

Having spent more than a few years in campus communications, part of me has been thinking about what is happening at the University’s communications shop this afternoon, in the wake of the revelation that a car breakin that occurred while the researchers (who are also a couple) were eating has left them without years’ worth of research data on prostate cancer.

The data were stored on a MacBook not unlike the one I’m typing this on. According to the researchers, there are no backups of the data.

Obviously, this is a tragic turn of events. While I don’t think the media hype on the story is necessary — CURE FOR CANCER LOST — who’s to say that the data in question isn’t valuable? Certainly not me. The tragedy here is that the data need never have been lost. I’m a single person office, and I have two separate backup systems going. When I’ve worked in institutional or corporate settings, servers were backing up data each night.

The failure of the researchers to do either personal backups or to have housed the data on a university network where it would be subject to backup is a stunning piece of bad judgement. It was also, for what it’s worth and according to my reading of university policy, a contravention of the IT policy in place at OU. Given that the university’s IP policy states that all discoveries are property of the university, they’ve also acted rather cavalierly with university property.

Here’s my Friday marching orders to all you communicators out there:

• Take this unfortunate incident as an opportunity to open up a discussion with your IT department and research office.
• Develop a plan to promote the responsible use of backups.
• Educate your researchers as to why this is important.
• Work with your IT department to make it easy and fast.

Even if there’s a 1 in 10,000 chance that the data lost contained a cure for prostate cancer — if it’s never recovered there’s a 0 in 1 chance that it will do us any good.

UPDATE, January 18: Somebody pointed me to another similar case in Louisiana. In this one, a Tulane University employee took a laptop home to work on tax forms over the Christmas break. The laptop was left in a locked car while the employee was out of town. The car was broken into and the laptop — with “W-2 information, names, Social Security numbers, address and salary for every employee, including student and part-time employees and anyone who will receive a 2010 W-2″ for 10,000+ people on it in unencrypted form — is now in the wind. Access to the laptop is password protected, apparently, and the university is offering a year of credit monitoring to all those affected . Still, another example of how data security is crucial.

UPDATE: The 92nd Street Y has apologized to Martin and Solomon, and posted the apology on its blog. Here it is:

We know there have been a lot of stories in the media over the last couple of days about our evening at 92Y with Deborah Solomon and Steve Martin and our decision to offer gift certificates to our audience.

We realize now that offering a refund, especially without consulting with our guests who graciously gave of their time, was disrespectful.  We have learned our lesson, and this will not happen again.

For what it’s worth, this is good apologizing. It’s specific, it doesn’t weasel, and it’s not too long. Well done on that front.

END UPDATE

I’m watching with train-wreck fascination as New York’s 92nd Street Y seems to tick off every party involved in a recent event.

For those not in the know, the 92nd Street Y, or 92Y, is not a Y like we Ottawa folk might envision, with a small pool and a weight room and an aerobics studio and a couple of change rooms. Like most things in New York, it’s a LOT bigger. It’s got annual revenues approaching $100 million. Their speakers list includes names like Salman Rushdie, Carol Bartz, Tony Blair, Dan Rather… It’s a giant-sized cultural centre, performance space, and a health centre TOO.

So. One recent event at 92Y was a public conversation between Steve Martin and New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Soloman, held November 29. Soloman does Q&A interviews for the Times, and is a frequent target of satirical website Gawker for her style.

The conversation, held in front of 900 people who paid $50 a head to attend, apparently went off the rails. How badly? It’s hard to judge, since there’s no video available (yet), but  badly enough that an organizer brought out a note to Soloman halfway through. One twitterer (The COO of Newsweek, not that that matters for this purpose) wrote:

Incredible sight: interview w/ witty & charming @SteveMartinToGo botched by boorish & blundering NYT writer @92Y. Audience almost hissing.

The note asked Soloman to move the conversation away from art (the subject of Martin’s novel An Object of Beauty) and towards his movie and entertainment career. Neither was happy, apparently, and likely a bit embarrassed. Especially when Soloman read out the note and the audience cheered.

And the Y folks apparently weren’t happy to boot. The executive director of 92Y sent an e-mail to ticketholders the next day, saying (according to reports): “We acknowledge that last night’s event with Steve Martin did not meet the standard of excellence that you have come to expect from 92nd St. Y.  We planned for a more comprehensive discussion and we, too, were disappointed with the evening. We will be mailing you a $50 certificate for each ticket you purchased to last night’s event. The gift certificate can be used toward future 92Y events, pending availability.”

That move displeased both Soloman and Martin. Martin tweeted:

So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.

When twitterer @Brilliantbooks noted to Martin that “Y billed it an evening with a star. Not a talk about art” he responded “Then they lied to the audience. They knew what it was.” He’s since moved on to making jokes about interrupting sex with his wife with “book chat” and her demanding a refund.

And like most things in the fishbowl of celebrity and New York, it’s a media story. To my mind, it’s the biggest interview-fiasco story since the 2008 Lacy-Zuckerberg kerfuffle (credit to Holtz and Hobson)

So what’s to be learned here?

• Know what you’re getting before you go public. Martin says 92Y knew what they were going to get. And it was he, not the Y, who asked Deborah Soloman to be his conversational partner. Yet the Y billed the event as: “Steve Martin with Deborah Soloman. Steve Martin is a celebrated writer, actor and performer. His film credits include Father of the Bride, Parenthood and The Spanish Prisoner, as well as Roxanne, L.A. Story and Bowfinger, for which he also wrote the screenplays. He’s won Emmy Awards for his television writing and two Grammy Awards for comedy albums. In addition to a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, he has written a best-selling collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel and a best-selling novella, Shopgirl. His most recent novel is An Object of Beauty: A Novel.” I have no idea whether the organizers knew what Soloman and Martin were planning to discuss. And I have no idea whether Martin saw the promo copy for the event. But there was a disconnect, and it hurt.
• When you’re in the middle of an event, don’t try to pull a 180. A number of years ago, I was at a “Newfie night” fundraising event for a church-related fundraising project at a church in Ottawa. The headliner for the evening was Greg Malone of CODCO fame. Malone came out and did some humour that was sharp-edged, dark, and a bit blue. Halfway through his routine, people started leaving. Then someone stood up and heckled him. And then an organizer came out and whispered in Malone’s ear. “I guess I’m done,” Malone said, and stalked offstage. It was, to put it bluntly, a disaster. Would it have been worse to let Malone finish? Was the best course of action for the Y to have sent out the note? Ummm, no. In a Stephen King novel, a character says “done-bun-can’t-be-undone.”
• Be careful with your apologies. I’m not convinced the refund was the way to go. I’ve been to some stinko plays in my time; I’ve attended boring readings. But how bad does something have to be to offer a refund? Again, it’s hard to know how bad THIS was without having attended live or via satellite, but jeez. Was it THAT bad?

So now the 92nd Street Y has a disappointed audience and offended presenters, one of whom has 399,000 Twitter followers. Let’s go over the lessons for event organizers once again:

• Make sure EVERYONE involved in an event knows what the event is.
• Even if it goes off the rails, it’s almost always too late to try and pull it back onto the rails in the middle. You have to rely on the people on stage.
• If it has gone wrong, be very careful how you make amends.

In Ontario, new mayors and councillors are settling in for a four-year term that began last night.

Here in Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson was sworn in, along with the 24 city councillors, 10 of whom were new to council. That’s a big turnover in municipal politics, where incumbents are generally thought to have a great advantage in election races.

The ceremony was marked by a couple of interesting symbolic actions. First, instead of City Hall, the ceremony was held at the Shenkman Arts Centre, a new city-owned arts facility in Ottawa’s suburban east end. And second, rather than a wine and puff pastry reception, Watson ‘called a friend at Tim Horton’, and the ceremony featured donated coffee, cookies and donuts from the company. Apparently that saved taxpayers $25,000. Yay, I guess.

Eric Darwin of the truly excellent West Side Action blog attended the swearing-in ceremony. One paragraph way down in his post about the ceremony really caught my attention(emphasis mine):

While chatting with a new councillor and a few other residents, someone pointed out I wrote the West Side Action blog. The conversation then turned to the blog, recent posts, the value of the micro-reporting on neighborhood affairs … and I noticed the councillor had drifted away, no longer centre of attention. Conclusion: Councillors, start a blog today, blog daily, if you don’t write it yourself get a staffer to do so, and write in plain English and not bureaucratese. Get someone who can spell better than me.

Compare this with some similar advice given to Carleton University by David Reevely, the “Greater Ottawa” blogger (also truly excellent, by the way) at the Ottawa Citizen yesterday(again, emphasis mine):

People want to talk to people, not to Carleton as a corporate entity. There are no people [on Carleton's new community engagement site]. It’s just an empty room. Maybe Katherine Graham could blog. Just her — no committee approving the posts and making sure they all align with Carleton’s strategic plan and have enough Latinate words in them. Just be a human being talking about work she’s proud of.

Sensing a theme here, folks? Is it a sign of a collective failure that 10 years after Pyra Labs launched Blogger, this advice still has to be given? And attention Rob Ford: it’s not free, but it’s pretty close, and I’m sure we’d all be entertained.

There was a time when I pointed to the Transportation Security Administration as an example in social media, like this:

Hey, if the TSA can start a blog, what’s stopping other government agencies?

But I have to say that they’re fumbling badly with the introduction of their new Advanced Imaging Technology machines and the “advanced patdown” – also known as the “Don’t touch my junk” patdown.

I don’t need to tell you how much attention all of this is getting and how many gaffes and incidents are getting attention now.From women being asked to remove breast prostheses to children being patted down to an amputee having to run her prosthetic leg through the luggage x-ray machine to a woman doffing her duds and trying to be patted down in lingerie to (and this one hit home for me) a bladder cancer survivor having his urostomy bag broken by the pat-down and having to board his plane with pants soaked with his urine.

And tomorrow seems like it’s going to make things even worse, with “National Opt-Out Day” encouraging US travellers to opt out of the scanners and allow themselves to get groped.

The TSA’s response? In part, this video:

Not Blogger Bob.

Ouch. The lameness burns.

UPDATE: The very smart (and very good on how to work with video) Ike Pigott has taken a run at why the Pistole video doesn’t work in his very worthwhile blog Occam’s Razor. Check it out.

TechCrunch has pointed to the mysterious “Blogger Bob” as having the most unenviable job in social media — that of running the TSA’s social media presence. He’s at the former “Evolution of Security” blog and he’s running the one official TSA Blog Team twitter account. And man, he takes a lot of heat.

But the problem with TSA isn’t their social media activity. It’s that their social media activity isn’t matching up with their real-world actions. Blogger Bob is trying to do his best in the time-honored Dell model, but it doesn’t feel like TSA is doing what Dell did to re-engineer their business and to better meet their customers’ expectations and demands.

If I use TSA as an example in a future, it is going to be more along the lines of:

Don’t start down this road unless you’re willing to actually CHANGE based on what you hear. Just saying you’re listening only gets you so far.

So to Blogger Bob, I wish a happy and stress-free American Thanksgiving. To all those travelling, I hope your trips are free of horror stories.

To the TSA, I hope that you’re soon better able to balance the need for security with basic human rights.

And finally, if that video by TSA administrator John Pistole has left you with a bad taste in your mouth, here’s something that’s about airport security, but also a bit more entertaining: webisodes from the Gruppo Rubato production of “Airport Security”, starring buds Kris Joseph and Nancy Kenny, among others.

I had a quick chat with Robert Janelle yesterday, who was writing an article for the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce‘s member newsletter about social media for business.

One of the things I talked about was learning from others, and building on their ideas. In folk music, that’s “the folk tradition.” But given that you can’t copyright an idea or a concept, there’s no reason that businesses embarking on a social media initiative — or any sort of communications, for that matter — shouldn’t learn from others.

And case studies can be a powerful way of doing just that. Conveniently enough, there are good people who are compiling lists of case studies online. Some of these lists are in wiki form, so you can easily add your own; others are more conventional sites. Either way, use them. Why not save yourself making the same mistakes others made, and find brand new mistakes to make! As Samuel Beckett so famously put it: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Here are some places to find useful case studies in social media:

Penn Olson’s 30 social media case studies

Web 2.0 examples in Canada wiki

Peter Kim’s list of over 1000 social media “examples” (the inspiration for Web 2.0 examples in Canada)

Tod Maffin‘s Case Studies Online site

UPDATE: If you prefer your case studies in the live and in person format, and you’re in Ottawa, you should check out Case Study Jam, a little meetup that I’ve been helping to organize with a cast of ones, including Joe Boughner, Amy Boughner, Melanie Bechard, Della Siemens, and Nick Charney. You can get a sense of what a CSJ is like from Robin Browne’s handy-dandy audio playlist!

And one more thing to think about: If you have an example of how your company or a client did something interesting, why not write something up about it and submit it to one of these lists? Sharing is caring.

Photo credit: The Cake Engineer on Flickr, licenced via Creative Commons

The Ottawa Fringe Festival, one of the seemingly dozens of annual events that make life in Ottawa in the summer fun (and sometimes exhausting) has been holding a series of lunchtime events that have ranged from bloody debates on the future of theatre to… an Ignite event.

With the help of theatre and communications guy Ryan Anderson, the Fringe folk put together a roster of artists (not including me) and business types (yeah, that was me) to do Ignite presentations with the loose topic of the intersection of art and business.

For those of you not familiar with Ignite, it’s a movement where people put together 20-slide presentations that are the visuals for a five-minute talk. The slides advance mercilessly, every 15  seconds, so it’s like “The Pit and the Pendulum” for speakers.

The good news is that  all the presentations were great.

The presenters were, in order of appearance:

Tyler Cope, co-founder of Overlay.TV, a local tech startup and general good corporate citizen in Ottawa
Nancy Kenny, a peripatetic young actor, writer, and marketing guru
Sterling Lynch, another hyphenate (actor-writer-only-guy-wearing-a-tie).
Ram Kanda, creative director at Fuel Industries, a seriously big advertainment and online company here in Ottawa
Me
and Barry Smith, a Colorado newspaper columnist here with a show called “Every Job I’ve Ever Had”

Anyway, I thought that since I’m in the business of shameless self promotion, I should record my audio and match it up with the slides for you.

The presentation, which I called “If your art falls in a forest was it really art?” is only about five minutes long, so at the very worst you won’t have wasted much time.

I’ve put up the audio from the presentation, as well as a PDF of the slides. I tried to marry the slides with the audio, but sad to say, couldn’t get the timing to work the way I wanted it to.

UPDATE: Or… you could just wait a little bit for the enterprising folks at Ottawa Tonite to put up the video (which I thought was just being streamed). I’m really not that smart.

Last night (Tuesday, May 25), Ian Capstick, Erik Hagborg and I were the panelists for a hugely fun (at least for me) panel discussion on social media and its effects on more “traditional” communications. The discussion was part of the Cafe Scientifique program. This discussion was organized by The Canada Museum of Science and Technology and the Canadian Museum of Nature. Particular thanks should to to Isabelle Kingsley, who organized the event.

Here’s roughly the entire evening in audio format. It’s about 100 minutes long, and it ranges from the future of cursive script, to the “art should / shouldn’t be free” debate, to the fundamental disadvantage of the e-book (hint: “Hey! Read this!”) to how we preserve the important things in a digital age that doesn’t preserve things in tangible format.

Apologies for any rough audio — it was a big room and I was recording only with my Edirol. Mostly pretty good, I think. The audio begins with Erik Hagborg’s opening remarks. Download it here, or use the player below.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/CafeScientifiqueOnSocialMedia/cafescientifique.mp3]

• 00:00 — Opening statements. Erik takes us back to the beginning of communications with the run at Marathon, then moves on to the four questions of the evening: Are we conducting too many of our relationships via tech? Why do we choose to use technology to communicate? Does tech facilitate or impede face-to-face communications? Are technology and f2f interactions complementary or exclusive? (Bonus from Erik: The difference between a “friend” and a “good friend”?)
• 05:45 — Ian Capstick talks about his earliest experience with technology and F2F communication, when he was a teenager and met online friends in Ottawa at a choral conference.
• 09:20 – Ian’s train of thought is briefly interrupted as his dinner arrives.
• 11:40 — Ian recalls the phone phreakers as one of several examples of how humans hack technology for good and ill.
• 15:25 -- Bob acknowledges that concern about social media is fair, but fear is unreasonable. People will use technologies in the ways that best suit them, and that one of the tension points with social media is that they are changing and growing so rapidly that our collective, unconscious agreements on what’s proper — the norms of using the medicum — are being left behind. Social media killed geography as the defining limit of friendship.
• 23:00 — I inform the audience that Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots (as is Ian Capstick)
• 24:00 – Discussion kicks off with an anecdote from moderator Isabelle Kingsley about texting as distraction
• 26:00 — How to sift through “all the crap” on the Internet, and whether there’s more crap on the Internet than there was before, with a slight detour into Internet dating
• 34:00 — Ian recommends Andrew Potter’s “The Authenticity Hoax“
• 37:00 — Discussion about the idea of digital legacy, in which I deftly pimp out PAB 2010. Adele McAlear and Derek K. Miller, come on down to pick up your name-checks! Ian argues that the problem won’t be a lack of information left behind but TOO MUCH.
• 40:00 — Erik talks about the craft behind communication — the calligraphy and the content of handwritten letters, for example. We won’t lose the CONTENT; we’re going to lose the style and soul. Ian counters by saying “the pen stole oral history,” polls the audience on the use of cursive handwriting, and nominates Isabelle Kingsley as the leader of the future handwriting guild.
• 46:00 — Where will obsolete media be preserved? Punch cards, 8-inch floppies, 5.25s, 3.5s… Erik suggests most technologies will be backwards-compatible and that this is not a huge worry. He also admits to, as a child, ruining his father’s punch-card programs on their home mainframe (parenthetical note: Erik had a mainframe in his HOUSE?!)
• 49:00 — Bob shouts out to Project Gutenberg and Librivox as examples of how people are preserving ‘outdated’ content
• 51:00 — Do people have opinions on e-books? Ian is conflicted and thinks there’s a generational shift involved with the shift from paper to pixels. Bob hates the DRM, the lack of pass-on-ability and marginalia and mourns the loss of craft in e-books as well as the LP-CD-MP3 transition.
• 55:00 — Erik jumps on a DRM soapbox and ventures the “art wants to be free” argument, to be countered strongly by Ian and audience members, and weakly by house-concert presenter Bob (yes, I’m shamelessly whoring myself; it’s my blog.) Erik maintains that examples of commercial success exist.
• 59:00 — Ian begs to differ and betrays his proud socialist heritage by arguing creating content has to be valued and compensated (shoutout, Cory Doctorow)… “we must find alternative funding models!”, and takes a run at Robert Bateman (f-bomb warning)
• 1:06 — Discussion of the power of social media tools to connect people and to foster awareness and action internationally, with references to Iran, to Burma, Michael Jackson, balloon boy, and to the local experience of Ian and my blogging about Cornerstone.
• 1:16 –  Does reliance on specific ways of communicating leave you excluded from some people because they don’t use the same channels? Discussion of how to get out of your “comfort zone”, how Bob’s next-door neighbour reached out using Facebook to make the introduction (thank God), and how Ian met his condo-mate at a ChangeCamp.
• 1:27 –  Does the desire for texting / tweeting / constant “communicating” mean people miss out on genuine interactions?
• 1:30 — The difficulty of sloppy communication, and how interpretation of communication tells as much about the  interpreter as about what is being interpreted.
• 1:34 — after an awkward jump-cut where I muffed the recorder, Ian gives his online parenting advice, which incorporates a story about his own adolescent online adventures in the land of shirtless men. Bob talks about tailoring communication media to the audience, whether family or not.

Errata: I talk about Librivox at about 48-49 minutes in. But I screwed up: it’s Hugh McGuire, not Hugh MacLeod, who created Librivox. Hugh MacLeod is also a great human being, but for other reasons.

Links:

Erik Hagborg is a VP at RealDecoy

Ian Capstick is the owner of MediaStyle

Canada Museum of Science and Technology

Canadian Museum of Nature

Librivox

Project Gutenberg

ChangeCamp

Cornerstone

Changecamp

From the Canadian magazine The Walrus, a pioneer woman demos Twitter.

Twitter for Beginners: So Simple A Pioneer Can Do It from twitter howto on Vimeo.

Odd, but compelling. Or is it me?

By the way, if you have a recipe for starch (other than buy a can and press the button), you might want to follow Pioneer Girl.

Ciao,
Bob.