Tim Russert We Will Miss You

Life - and death - move so quickly in the Internet age. Consummate American political journalist Tim Russert , best known as host of Meet the Press, died suddenly several hours ago of a heart attack in the Washington DC offices of NBC News.

The news was instantly all over Twitter, the social networking / micro blogging platform.

If you had any doubt that "new media" possesses as much gravitas as established MSM, take a look at his Wikipedia page, already updated in the past tense. He will be sorely missed here in D.C. as well as around the world.

Useful Link

More on the magic of Twitter (as it relates to Tim Russert) by Steve Gillmor

When Amazon.com Goes Down... Shouldn't This Be "Top News"?

Update: Amazon is back up as of 3:40 PM Eastern.

Just saw via Twitter that the Amazon.com site is down (click on Web page message at left).

Strangely, this seems like very big news. Yet when I click on my Google home page (see below), there is no mention of it under all the news tabs.

Wow. Kind of like the Internet shutting down.

Update: Here's what Amazon just put up. OK this feels better. They haven't disappeared.

Have You Tried Searchme.com? Very Cool

A digital marketing strategist at a Global 100 company just put me onto a new search engine called Searchme.com (yes, these corporate types can be surprisingly plugged in!).

It' s still in beta, so go to http://beta.searchme.com/ and type in your name, company name, brand name, etc. You can choose "all" or ask for results based on advertising & marketing, radio, non-fiction and blogs. I assume they'll be adding more categories.

Up comes a visual "stack" of pages you can click through and mouse over. The results remind me of Apple's Time Machine. Cool, huh?!

And appropriately, the Searchme folks have created a demo video and put it up on YouTube. For those interested in the power of viral video, note that the video has been watched 63,588 times since it was posted to YouTube on March 9, 2008. Here it is:

Bill Gates Called This Morning and Woke Me Up... Now He Wants to Twitter

Update: this was lame as an April Fool's. But hey it worked the first time.- DW

What is it with this guy? Bill Gates called me exactly two years ago about starting a CEO blog. This morning, at the ungodly hour of 4:47 AM PST, he called again. He doesn't sleep?

Anyway, this time it's about Twitter. He wants to learn how to Twitter, he said.

Bill, it's simple really. Just go to Twitter and set up your free account. Name it www.twitter.com/billgates (oops, I don't think this is you, Bill). So maybe use twitter.com/bgates. If you need help, of course I'm willing (not that I am *the* expert on Twittering). Just send the plane and I'll hop right on.

As for why you want to Tweet? Well, here's my take on it...

 

Epiphany: Twitter Puts the "There" There Back Into Social Networking

I've been Twittering for a couple of weeks now after resisting for months. It finally came to me... why Twitter (some call it micro-blogging as you're limited to 140 characters) has taken off and what need it fills.

Twittering puts the "here" back in the "there"

Cf Gertrude Stein's "there is no there there."

It fills a need we have not only for connecting with other like-minded folks, but for locating them - and ourselves - in an actual, earthly place and space.

Reading the Tweets of those you "follow" gives you tiny jolts of temporal/spatial awareness: exactly what are your colleagues or friends doing, and where are they? Now you can find out.

Not every Tweet, of course. Some of the updates are pointers to blog posts or other timely references.

Ultimately, the vague sense of "we're all online" and "in the cloud" together" is disconnecting and can make us feel more lonely. (Studies have shown this.) In contrast, the more tangible "It has finally stopped raining" (Kristen Munson aka Social Media Mom ) or "tea break" (Sun Zhifeng twittering from Shanghai) is comforting. Hey, we're all real people.

Above is an example of a Tweet this morning from newmediajim (aka Jim Long) who updates us all day on his doings as a freelance TV photojournalist. He's often at the White House or on Capitol Hill. 

It's Cherry Blossom week in Washington DC and apparently the downtown streets are jammed with tourists. Thanks for the update, Jim.

Useful Links

How I use Twitter, and you?

9,000 Twitter followers: what does that mean?

Alltop's list of Twitterati

Check Out Guy Kawasaki's Alltop for All the Best Stories, News & Blogs on the Web

Well I'm thoroughly tickled to be included on Alltop Social Media. Alltop is Guy Kawasaki's newest venture. Start here and check out the categories on Career, Dads, Moms, Science and Twitterati. Of course there's also News and Politics.

P.S. Full disclosure: I know Guy from some years back (and I'm an unabashed fan). I emailed him and asked if he'd consider adding my blog. He freely admits on the About page that he does *not* "choose what's on Alltop with...

"a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford."

According to the site, the Alltop team "relies on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us."

What's slightly odd to me is that while Alltop relies completely on RSS to syndicate -- or pull in -- the feeds to all the blogs it displays, you can't subscribe to the Alltop Social Media page or any other category. In other words, the site itself doesn't offer any feeds. Very retro.

Why I'm Changing to Initial-Caps Titles for Blog Entries

I hope the Blogging Grammar & Style Police are not out sniffing around today. They might quibble over this change. After using a lowercase style for my blog titles for the past three and a half years (with an initial cap on the first word), I've decided to switch to what looks to be the more standard initial-caps style for every word.

I'm doing this primarily because I think it looks better - and more authoritative - in RSS readers. Below is a snapshot of some of the feeds I look at in Google Reader on a regular basis. They're all using initial caps, including CopyBlogger which is ranked #31 in Technorati's Top 100.

Except for Seth Godin. But then he's Seth and still uses the TypePad address for his blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. As his blog is currently ranked #18 on Technorati (out of 112 million blogs) I think he can pretty much march to his own beat.

Whew... got that news off my chest.

Business Week updates its iconic 2005 blog story with a new title 'Social Media Will Change Your Business'

Full disclosure: I'm way behind in blogging while my offline move to a new house (and office) continues to unfold. Feeling very guilty about it. But it's a temporary hiatus. Or is it? See below for for a few thoughts about Twittering.

In case you missed it, Business Week has updated its by now iconic May 2005 article: Blogs Will Change Your Business. The new version is called Social Media Will Change Your Business.

Writer/editors Stephen Baker and Heather Green spent a month updating the article, re-interviewing some of their sources. In an appropriate crowdsourcing tactic, they also asked readers of their Blogspotting blog to weigh in with suggestions.

Bookmark the updated article and then brew up a pot of coffee and sit down for an online read. Be sure to click on the little blue "info" icons. You'll get pop-ups that give you updates on stats, trends, phenomena, etc.

Here is some of what you will learn:

- There are now 120 million blogs (according to Technorati), instead of 9 million. But only 11% of those have posted in the past two months. Interesting.

- According to once uberblogger Steve Rubel, twittering is a better way to stay in touch and to communicate. He's got over 3,900 "followers" for his 140-character Tweets.

Why Twittering is significant

During his re-interview for the updated article, Rubel tweeted "Sitting with Steve Baker of BW, wants to know why tweet?" Within 10 minutes, 20 responses came in. Baker was so inspired he's now twittering himself.

BTW, I tried to find this tweet (and the responses) on Steve Rubel's Twitter page. But apparently you can't search for past tweets, unless I'm missing something.

Update: Here is Steve Rubel's tweet (mentioned above), written while he was sitting with Steve Baker. I found it through a Google search: "Steve Baker" site:twitter.com

But I don't have time to track down the 20 responses. All by way of pointing out that tweets, technically, are searchable and findable via Google (each has a unique URL). In practice, however, they are ephemeral and synchronous.

It's much harder to reconstruct later the give and take of tweets and responses. At this point, it's easier to "follow" a conversation on a blog, where the comments stay attached to the original post and where they can be posted asynchronously.

Useful Links

Howard Rheingold on Why I'm Hooked on Twitter

Twitter Etiquette

Got a Six-Word Motto for the U.S.?

The authors of Freakonomics announced a Six-Word Motto Contest for the U.S. on their New York Times blog yesterday. As of this writing, they've gotten 607 comments with suggestions.

Here's mine:

"Where Anything Is Possible... Go Giants!"

What's yours? Click here.

Lost in addendums... back soon

Well, after the mammoth declutter of our house, where we've lived for 20 years, we put it on the market and were lucky enough to sell in less than 48 hours. So we're buying a new place. Meantime I'm awash in addendums (addendi - ?) and other offline details. Back soon...

P.S. If you're thinking of selling your house, decluttering really works. Our house looked twice as big! (Great before & after photos in Decluttering to Make the Sale from HGTV.)

New Year's clean out: uncluttering, digging down and uncovering who knows what...

After 20 years in our house we decided recently it was time to declutter. Clean out. Pare down. We started yesterday in my home office and quickly realized that "cleaning out" was far too polite an expression.

It's an archaeological dig. (At left, uncovering the Pyramids.)

Found the original copy of my college thesis

I was down in the basement rooting through an old file cabinet. I found the original copy of my undergraduate thesis for Harvard. It's not in digital form so I decided to save the bound copy. I've always been rather proud of it: A Comparison of the Poetry of Stéphane Mallarme and the Paintings of Pablo Picasso. I kid you not.

A complete documentation of my children's childhood

Moving on... I found that I took motherhood *very* seriously. I have three children and for years I maintained a file for each of them for every single year of their lives, well into college. During the early years, of course, the files contain those awkward drawings and misspelled stories you can't part with. Their report cards. The slip from the pediatrician with their height and weight. And so on.

But I'm severing the umbilical cord(s). I'm shipping boxes of files to each child. Let them have fun on a rainy afternoon sifting through their childhood. I'm movin' on...

Luckily, client files also live on the computer

And more... today I tackled client files going back almost a decade. I threw out most of the paper folders because I have (to my immense relief) digital folders on my old computer dated neatly, 2000, 2001, 2002, etc. Yes, I've also put them on a back-up drive.

Oh and I forgot to mention newspaper articles - crammed into bulging folders - that I wrote in the 1980s and early 90s for The Atlanta Constitution, Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau and Roll Call. I'm tossing most of those out but keeping a few yellowed clips for old times sake (none of the articles seem to be online, as far as I can tell).

Declutter your office and your brain... let the clutter live on the Web

Thanks for listening. Now let me make this little brain dump relevant to corporate blogging and social media.

I read a great article in Wired several years back that pretty well sums it up: We Are the Web. I highly recommend printing it out and reading if you didn't catch it in August 2005. It starts out with Netscape's IPO in 1995 and does a year-by-year analysis of the Web up until 2005, calling it "10 years that changed the world" and "a decade of genius and madness."

There is also a side-bar on the birth of Google, of course, written by John Battelle.

Author Kevin Kelly refers to the Web as the Machine. The Machine will do a lot of the work for us, he posits. It may do some original thinking; that remains to be seen. But it will certainly do almost all the remembering and cataloguing and keeping track of stuff. As he puts it:

A riff from Kevin Kelly's article on how the Machine (aka the Web) will become our memory...

The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves [my italics]. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

-- from We Are the Web, Wired (August 2005)

Anyway, I find this comforting to a degree. Also a little scarey and Big Brotherish. But as far as feeling free to throw out all that "stuff" -- phew, I couldn't be doing it at a better time. And now for the closets... the endless T-shirts, mismatched socks, prom dresses that will never be worn again, etc.*

The business corollary... if you're worrying about where to put all those bits and pieces of information you run across that you might use on a company or organizational blog or stats you need to back up an assertion or images to illustrate a blog entry, no need to fret. Whatever it is you need, it's stored on the Web somewhere. And you can just leave it there til you really need it.

Your thoughts? Your New Year's Resolutions??

* If I'm not online much for the next week or so, it's because I'm offline and thigh deep in heavy-duty black trash bags.

The controversial issue of ''data portability" (or what we used to call "privacy")

A brouhaha involving the temporary shutdown of the Facebook account of popular tech blogger Robert Scoble sparked discussion recently of a new issue for 2008: data portability.

Scoble tried to export the names, email addresses and birthdays of his close to 5,000 "friends" on Facebook into a beta version of Plaxo (the address book updating service).

His Facebook account was shutdown but then quickly reinstated when, presumably, the Facebook folks realized how powerful he is in the blogosphere. (Scoble's blog is currently ranked #36 on Technorati - so Top 50 - out of over 100 million blogs.)

There is no privacy

Translated... there is no privacy. If you're using any kind of online service, your "data" -- your name, your username, your email address -- can, potentially, be passed around (scraped is the geek term) between these networks.

So if you're using gmail or yahoo mail or Flickr or Delicious or YouTube or belong to Facebook or LinkedIn or another of the popular social networks, you've given up complete control of your personal information. You don't, so to speak, "own" it anymore. Surprised?

But there is trust

Don't be. Just don't forget that your personal data may also include your photos and videos and your carefully assembled networks of contacts and their information. And if an online service decides you're persona non grata, your stuff / data / digital trail is gone. Erased (as Scoble put it).

I guess we all know this on some level. It's part of the bigger and more thorny issue of privacy. With so many of us living so much of our lives online we are trusting both that our "data" won't be misused and that it won't disappear.

Silly us. But what can we do? The utility of these online services outweighs their risks -- at least for most of us.

The issue of privacy is one I will be exploring in 2008. I'm fascinated by it. I've had my own hiccup with being more visible online than I'd like to be (and being judged and criticized by folks who don't know me). Not fun.

I wonder sometimes... if I decided to crawl into a closet and "disappear," would it be possible? While I love my life online -- and the wonderful interactions and discussions with smart and interesting people around the world -- I sometimes long for the old days of no computers, no social networks, no email, etc.

Useful Links

dataportability.org

Forget Facebook and Twitter... you can still turn yourself into a dancing elf

Office Max is at it (meaning viral marketing) again this season with a microsite, elfyourself.com, where you can turn yourself into a dancing elf. (New this year: you can add three colleagues and create a quartet of dancing elves.) Don't feel elfish? No worries. You can choose to Scrooge yourself instead.

Flash animations seem very retro in these days of Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the rest of the social networking alphabet. But that's just the point. Outside the tight circle of techno-geeks that some of us inhabit there are real people who have yet to embrace social networking.

They just want to have a bit of fun and they don't care what's cool and what's not. Of course, you can send the link to your dancing elf to all your colleagues -- even if you don't have a Facebook page to post it to.

As publicity guru Joan Stewart put it recently in her e-newsletter:

Some of the names look like typos

"I don't know about you. But when I read about all the opportunities to do social networking, I feel like a rat in a maze.

It's all I can do to keep up with the emails and invitations from my MySpace and LinkedIn friends.

Then there's Twitter. Gather. SmugMug. Wetpaint. StyleHive. ShoutWire. Furl. MeetUp. Frappr. Flickr. 43 Things. Ma.gnolia. WikiHow. Del.icio.us. Reddit. And Ning.

Some of them look like typos. Others I don't know how to pronounce. My eyes glaze over just reading the list."

- Joan Stewart, publisher of The Publicity Hound (Oct. 30, 2007 issue)

Where do you fall on the scale of dancing elves vs. twittering? Do tell.

Where is your "white space" for getting real work done?

Loved this article in the New York Times: You Won't Find Me In My Office, I'm Working. It's about those of us who choose anywhere except our desk or office to get "real" work done. Real work meaning it involves thinking, writing or being creative.

Where is your white space? Not very original but mine is often the Starbucks across the street. Sometimes it's sitting in my car. And stuff (ideas / headlines / titles) always come to me when I'm taking a power walk. Not much happens in the shower. How 'bout you?

P.S. Speaking of thinking and writing... I'm way behind on stuff I want to blog about. Meant to post this last week. A bunch of unfinished posts are lined up on the back of this blog.

Some end-of-year Top Ten and Best Of lists to come, as well as some holiday cheer. Stay tuned.

You know you're living a Web 2.0 life when... you get your Happy Birthdays via Facebook

Today happens to be my birthday (nope, not telling my age). How do I know? Well, Dec. 11th* is part of my Facebook profile and some of my Facebook "friends" are sending me Happy Birthday messages. I'm not complaining. It's very nice to get birthday wishes.

But the truth is that I don't know many of these "friends" very well. We have a virtual -- albeit warm -- acquaintance. Often I've met them face-to-face at conferences or other engagements, but not always.

Facebook birthday wishes drive home that we're living in a wild wacky world where privacy is a thing of the past, your latest social networking contact knows more about you than your neighbors and... "authenticity" is, well, perhaps not as authentic as it used to be.

I'm hoping my children will remember my birthday. They usually do. So far no messages from them on Facebook. But thanks Jessica (my son's girlfriend)!.

Update: all three of my kids have called / emailed in private. And my husband wrote me a romantic note - on paper no less. (He's not into gifts except occasionally, when they're very grand). So it's a wonderful birthday. Thanks everyone.

*Note: some folks include the "year" of their birth in this section of a Facebook profile. Others don't.

Useful Links

How to create a Facebook profile

Why should we care about privacy? (Nov. 23, 2007 in The Guardian)

Stellar 'Unreview' of Geoff Livingston's new book: Now Is Gone

I just got back from lunch with Washington's PR and social media impresario, Geoff Livingston, who's a pretty funny guy. He is also author of the newly-published Now Is Gone. He twittered constantly as we talked; I laughed; I told him to stop; he twittered my request. We laughed some more. You get the picture.*

We were planning BlogPotomac (blog site will be up soon!), an advanced-level Unconference on social media to be held in Washington DC in 2008.

Anyways... I've got "un" on my mind. And this blog is social media. It's real; it's passionate; it's in-the-moment. It's persuasive. No sugar-coating and nicey-nice. Oooh Geoff is getting nervous now...  heh heh as Scoble would say.

* Er, what is Twitter? Also see page 118 in Now Is Gone.

So think of the review below as a giant twitter. It's an unreview; it's a bit upside down.

Nine (out of 10) stars for Geoff Livingston's Now Is Gone

First and last, rush online and order this book. It's a gotta-have for your book shelf if you want to understand social media and how it fits into the new marketing mix (and yes, it does).

Heck, put it right next to your computer and stop twittering long enough to read it right now, yes today. It's well-written and a good read. Does Amazon have same day delivery? Can't remember.

Best things about the book

The best things about Now Is Gone are... remember, this is an unreview so they're in reverse order:

• Great cover (love the yellow and black and the swoosh image)
• Lightweight paperback that fits easily in your pocketbook or man-purse or whatever
• A quick read at 194 pages
• Short Acknowledgement
• Includes The Corporate Blogging Book in Recommended Reading (OK, just kidding)
• Well-organized (explains in a logical - and provocative - sequence why social media is being adopted, the impact on business and the challenge of integrating and executing social media strategies)
• Makes the key point (articulately and persuasively) that it's not your customers, it's your community
• Includes clear steps to determine whether your company is ready for social media
  
• Includes numerous well-written case studies. A sampling: GM, Coca-Cola, the Red Cross, Southwest Airlines and many smaller organizations
• Has a companion blog
• Includes a good introduction by Brian Solis on PR 2.0
• Includes Kami Watson Huyse's Seven Categories of Social Media
• Best chapter is Think Liquid - Geoff's last chapter, about what comes next and how to think about it, is provocative and lucidly written. I won't give away the ending.
  

Why not 10 stars?

Nit-picks... hey the book is terrific, OK?

The books suffers slightly by including sections written by different authors. I found it disconcerting to shift from one style of writing to another.

There is no index.

Finally - and this is a mistake Geoff can easily correct - he is too shy to say Buy 'Now Is Gone' NOW in big letters on his Now Is Gone blog and company home page. So you have to hunt a bit to find the Amazon link. There is a clickable thumbnail cover of the book but it's too discrete.

P.S. About the photo of Geoff

Run your cursor over the photo...

Mitch Joel & Twist Image win the first ever Canadian Marketing Association award for digital innovation

I don't normally write about awards but can't resist pointing out that Mitch Joel and his team at Twist Image last night won an award  for Digital Innovation from the Canadian Marketing Association.

I hung out with Mitch and other bloggerati in Montréal [my new favorite city] this week, where I gave a keynote on corporate blogging ("It's a revolution") at Webcom Montréal.

Huge congrats to Mitch! And merci encore to the bloggerati I met, especially Michel Leblanc, for their hospitality and warmth.

Below I chat with Mitch after his presentation at Webcom.

USA Today pop culture blogger Whitney Matheson gets over 1,800 comments on a slow day

Flying out to Las Vegas from D.C. yesterday (to speak at BlogWorld Expo) I found myself sitting next to Whitney Matheson, USA Today's (hugely popular) pop culture blogger. Whitney's Pop Candy, if you're not familiar with it, is the paper's most popular blog.

She covers the "indie" side of things which means her blog  "unwraps pop culture's hip and hidden treasures," according to the tagline. OK, so this blog is waaay cooler than People Magazine. (It's up for the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Culture blog tonight.)

Whitney's got a cold today and is feeling under the weather... so she's only posted once so far. But not to worry, her fan base of thousands will do the talking for her. As of this writing, there are over 1,850 comments on today's entry.

And the connection to corporate blogging is... how in heck do you cultivate a community of passionate, devoted (er, fanatic?) readers? Southwest Airlines' blog (on my panel today at BlogWorld) is doing a good job at this.

But there is no exact formula. You have to fill a need. Whitney says her readers, who mostly have "boring, awful" jobs, tune into her blog several times a day. Listen to Whitney below:

Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Workweek, on "cultivating selective ignorance," the futility of "results by volume" and more

Interviewed new celeb author Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) after he delivered his keynote at The New New Internet in Reston, VA last week. This guy is no slacker even though he's figured out how to outsource just about everything, including looking for a girlfriend.   

Tim comes across as super serious in this video. Too bad because moments later he took off his jacket, looked much more relaxed and started chatting up some geeks while eating his delayed lunch. 

I love his outsourcing ideas (some are obnoxiously appealing; for example, getting a personal assistant based in India to email your spouse or significant other) and only wish I'd remembered to bring my copy of his book for him to sign. I ordered multiple copies and sent them to everyone in my family last summer.

He's also got a great blog and writes knowledgeably about stuff that I'm really interested in. For example, How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour.   

I asked him if he thought his idea of "cultivating selective ignorance" was striking a chord with readers overwhelmed by email, cell phones, voicemail and the like. Here's his answer:

Update: Here's to life outside of the inbox!

I emailed the link to this video to Tim's assistant Amy, per instructions from him: amy@fourhourworkweek.com.

Here's the response I got (very clever, I thought). Of course, I don't have his phone number but presumably some folks do. So he's telling them, please don't email me:

Hi All,

In an effort to actually get work done, I am checking email once every 2-4 days.  If you need a response soon and have my number, please call me.  I actually prefer phone for quick decisions.  My assistant will be reading your email in the meantime.

Cheers, and here's to life outside of the inbox!

Tim

P.S.  I read all e-mail personally, but I cannot always reply, especially with involved how-to questions.  Thanks for understanding, and I appreciate your e-mail!

--
this email is: [ ] blogable   [x] ask first  [ ] private

I'm wondering where he got that last line (bloggable has two "g's, BTW). I got it from Seth Godin and it's also in the Resources section at the back of my book.

Let me play with your iPhone, please...

Back home in D.C. and fighting a wicked case of jetlag. OK, you don't have to feel sorry for me. My two-week trip to China (sponsored by Edelman) was mind-blowing. China is big, new and shiny. Or at least the China you see in Beijing and Shanghai. I realize things would look quite different outside these two major cities. China is also complicated and nuanced. See my pics here. (I'll try and label more of them.)

I met some amazing people, both Chinese and expats. The latter are a special group; really smart and committed. Many speak fluent Mandarin. See my list of must-reads about social media and Web 2.0 in China.

In the meantime, I was reminded of my silly addiction to the Internet by the Dilbert cartoon below. I saw it in the IHT while I was in Hong Kong on the way home. My sister-in-law has an iPhone and let me play with it recently. I have to say that as cool gadgets go... it's really cool. I love what you can do with photos (squeezing the screen with your fingertips to modify the images, etc.)

I'm tempted to get one and not use the phone part. (AT&T has terrible coverage here in D.C. as well as other places I frequent.) But I'll stick with Verizon for the time being. And no iPhone. Sigh...

The end of the U.S.-centric Internet? ICANN to experiment with domain names in native scripts

Riddle: they're a global phenomenon. But most of them are in English and in Roman characters. What are they?

Answer: You guessed it; domain names like www.debbieweil.com. 

The U.S. has long been accused - rightly so - of digital colonialism. Interestingly, the technology for creating multilingual domains was created ten years ago. But it's never been put to the test.

This week ICANN decided to start experimenting with domain names written entirely in native script or characters. So instead of reaching the Google China blog by typing in www.googlechinablog.com you would type in: [Chinese text].[Chinese text].

I'll try and post a URL typed entirely in Chinese characters when I get to China. Can't do it from here.

[via A Script for Every Surfer - The Washington Post, Oct. 11, 2007]

Useful Link

The ICANN blog on new top-level domains

Mixing it up with Washington D.C.'s (female) bloggerati

I'm really glad that local blog celeb Geoff Livingston, author of the soon-to-be released Now Is Gone, inspired me to attend last night's kickoff for A Spoonful of Sin. ASOS is a monthly subscription service, founded by Kelly Harman, that delivers "tastings" of decadent desserts by Washington DC's best chefs.

Former White House Executive chef Roland Mesnier was on hand, as were a good number of local area women executives, some of them bloggers. I had the chance to chat with Qui Diaz and Kaitlyn Wilkins (both work for Ogilvy PR).

The party was held at the very cool Flashpoint Gallery in downtown D.C. Yes, we have a cool downtown. It's informally known as the Seventh Street arts corridor. It's also near Chinatown and the Verizon Center.

And you thought Washington was only about Capitol Hill...

P.S. Geoff, where's that great photo you took last night of us lady bloggers?

Why I'm blogging less

Because I'd rather be planting my garden. Or picnicing with Lucy, age 3 - see feet at left. And as Hugh Macleod puts it: "Believe it or not, some of us have better things to do... "

That includes client work, reading and savoring the last few days of summer. Back soon...

P.S. Meanwhile, some of the most prolific bloggers (Steve Rubel, for example) have taken to Twittering in favor of blogging. Some call it microblogging. I call it, if not written as tightly and meaningfully as haiku, TMI (too much information). I may change my mind but I'm not using Twitter much yet.

Useful Links

Some Bail on Blogs In Favor of Twitter - Steve Rubel, March 13, 2007

When Less is More and More Is Less - Steve Rubel, July 30, 2007 (on why he'll be Twittering more and blogging less)

Why We're All Blogging Less - Hugh Macleod, Aug. 12, 2007

Marketers Twittering, But Not About Second Life - The New York Times (July 16, 2007)

Steve Rubel on CEO blogging on Canadian TV's Squeezeplay

A producer from Canadian TV network BNN contacted me yesterday asking if I could do a live interview about CEO bloggers for the 5 PM EST edition of Squeezeplay. Unfortunately I couldn't, as I'm up in Maine.

I suggested Richard Edelman as a CEO blogger. Richard was busy so Edelman senior VP Steve Rubel went to BNN's studio in New York to do the interview. Asked if all CEOs should blog, he replied (as I would have), "probably not."

Apple's Steve Jobs is too "secretive" and likes to "control the message,"  Rubel said. But Chrysler's Lee Iocacca would have been "a great blogger." You have to be able to speak with "both passion and authority." Great job, Steve.

Useful link (today only)

Watch the interview with Squeezeplay's Amanda Lang and Kevin O'Leary (scroll down to 5:00 PM)

There is no blogosphere here

As author Gertrude Stein famously said, "There is no there there." (There, in this case, referring to Oakland, CA where she grew up.)

Well, I'm delighted to report that I'm on the coast of Maine and... there is no blogosphere here! Hardly any cell phone coverage either. Slow blogging for a while.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen says write articles, not blog entries

Writing in his latest Alertbox column, Jakob Nielsen says:

"Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value."

- Jakob Nielsen (July 9, 2007)

Hmmm... yes and no. Blog entries don't all have to be like this one.

The best blogging strategy (the one that reaps the most rewards as far as establishing yourself as a thought leader) is to mix up your blog posts. Some should be short and reference another article / site / blog.

Others should be longer. Call them blog essays, call them articles. They'll be more "findable" by Google by virtue of being posted to a blog. And what about the great feedback you get from readers on a blog?

Be sure to read Nielsen's loooong article (complete with histograms and a chart). It's provocative: Write Articles, Not Blog Postings. He gets into paid vs. free content and makes the point that you shouldn't care about 90 percent of your readers anyway because they'll never buy anything from you. Yup, that's probably true.

Thanks to Jon Greer for the pointer.

Useful Link

See Robert Scoble's post about Nielsen's column (and the 89 comments in response) 

Are you Jotting down your thoughts via your cell phone?

This is sooo cool. Check out jott.com. You can send yourself voice notes through your cell phone. Draft blog posts, anyone?! Jott turns them into a text email. And also an audio file. Amazing.

Thanks to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing for the pointer. And grab a copy of John's excellent new book about small business marketing. Highly recommended.

P.S. It really did take only a minute or two to set Jott up with my cell phone and email.

Corporate blogging interview on NPR's Marketplace

I was interviewed yesterday for NPR's Marketplace on the topic of corporate blogging. Google's recent blogging gaffe was the jumping off point but the interview was on the more general topic. Trekked down to the Marketplace studio in downtown D.C. in 95 degree heat... wow it's hot here. And they hooked me up with Bob Moon in L.A. Fun!

Audio replay (podcast) and transcript here.