The year 2008 is just 4 hours away and Podcasters Across Borders 2008 is six months away.  To ring in the new year and give PAB2008 its identity, Nico has unveiled the new look on podcastersacrossborders.com.

Remember to use the PAB2008 tag on anything related to the 2008 edition of Podcasters Across Borders.

I recently subscribed to CBC’s Search Engine and I’m making my way through the back catalog of episodes so I admit this post may be ill timed. I’m Long Tailing.

Today I listened to the September 20th edition of Search Engine in which host Jesse Brown spoke to Stockwell Day about the Public Safety Commission’s consultation process for a law that would allow police access to individual personal and private information from Internet Service Providers with as little as an unwarranted phone call.

Minister Day’s responses to Jesse’s questions sounded and felt like a series of well rehearsed platitudes and deflections, largely aimed at the Liberal government that had started the process. Minister Day’s focus on blaming the previous government (which was his job as the opposition, by the way) reminded me of a project management joke.

A new PM (Project Manager for the purpose of the joke, not Prime Minister) took over a program. He showed up to find three envelopes and a note on his desk. The note was from the previous PM and read “You will probably run into problems. When you’re stuck for an answer, open envelope number one.”

The new PM put away the envelopes. After a few months, a major problem came up and he opened the first envelope.

“Blame your predecessor. When the next major problem occurs, open envelope number two.”

The PM went to his boss, explained the problem, blamed it on his predecessor, made some changes and carried on.

A few months later another problem arose that was worse than the first. He opened envelope number two.

“Reorganize. When the next major problem occurs, open envelope number three.”

The PM reorganized the project. That fixed the problem.

Eventually more problems surfaced and the PM opened envelope number three.

“Prepare three envelopes.”

I just learned that The British Royal family expanded the colony this past month with the launch of TheRoyalChannel on YouTube.

According to a CBC.ca article, Queen Elizabeth has gone from never using a computer a few years ago to being something of an Internet junkie.  She even has a Blackberry and an iPod which Prince William gave to her as a gift.  That brings so many images and situations to mind, really.

The elevators in the building in which I work have computer screens that entertain passengers with advertisements, building and office news and an array of information from cbc.ca including news headlines, weather, sports and stock tickers.

Eight months ago one of the computers failed. Ever since, that elevator’s screen has proudly and loudly displayed a DISK BOOT FAILURE message. I alerted the security desk several times in the weeks following the initial appearance of the problem.

Nothing happened.

Nothing has happened.

That boot error persists today.

A few months ago, one of the elevators on the seventh floor stopped dinging and lighting up when it stops to pick up and drop off when going down (it works fine going up). I alerted the security desk about that, too.

Nothing.

Last week, another elevator screen was hit with an error. Microsoft Internet Explorer crashed and displayed the famous “…has encountered a problem and needs to close” pop-up.

Fortunately, that problem was corrected pretty quickly; the same day, I think.

As I consider these individual and slightly humourous incidents, I wonder if these problems are isolated and irrelevant.

Or, are they symptomatic of a larger problem?

At what point should I and the rest of the building population become concerned that elevator maintenance is an afterthought, here?

Earlier today, Jeff Pulver asked the question “Where Have all the Comments Gone?” on his blog.

I tend to comment on blogs in waves. It really depends on my availability to not only read the post, but the time and attention to comment in a way that contributes to the conversation.

I prefer following blog communities over those in closed systems (read Facebook). To me, a blog is like a home; it’s where the content creator is inviting me as their personal guest. I don’t have to jump through hoops to participate. I can either go to their site (one click) or open my Google Reader and then follow the link to the post I want to comment on (if I want or have the time to comment). On the other hand, Facebook communities require an account, a profile, a friendship and/or a membership in a specific topical group. There are far too many procedures to join the conversation and then to return to participate. It’s far too impersonal and inconvenient.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Seth Godin’s trackback-limited approach, particularly after Mitch Joel put some context to it in a recent episode of Six Pixels of Separation. Seth has disabled the comment feature on his blog, preferring to encourage trackbacks. The premise is that commenters should extend the conversation to their own blogs and connect everything through links (isn’t that what the Web’s about). That seems like a more natural way to grow the conversation and add voices to it — and everyone can do it, publicly, on their own terms.

Blogs have been around for many years and likely will for many years to come. In Internet terms, they’ve stuck. Facebook, like many other social network sites, will eventually be trumped by yet another bigger and better service that we will all flock to and build from zero, again.

So, Jeff… please keep your ‘home’ open and active. It’s a great hangout.

Capitalizing on the popularity of Austin Powers, TimeStep Corporation (a company I worked for) launched a campaign with a character named Awesome Powers.

Awesome’s job was to protect data from his nemesis (whose name I forget at the moment) using TimeStep’s IPSec Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology, and like his inspiration, save the day. His tagline was “Email me, baby!” Yeah.

Sadly, TimeStep, it’s incredible product line and Awesome himself are all historical accounts on the Internet time line. Its website — and Awesome’s — has been scooped by a click-through company.

The image in this post shows both sides of Awesome’s business card, which I found while cleaning my office.

My home office has become an unnavigable mess. I have piles of marketing collateral from conferences, stacks of music and promotional CDs I’ve received, a collection of backup CDs (some of which date back to 1999) and a pile of books that don’t fit in my bookcase.

There comes a point when reorganizing and purging has far greater returns than charting a path from the door to the chair to forge ahead on personal and professional projects. I finally accepted that reality yesterday and tonight I started what I figure is going to be several days worth of work over the next few weeks.

It will be nice to have the space back, especially the recliner in my reading corner that has served as off-floor storage for the last few months.

Back to work!

Part of following a digital conversation means going wherever the conversation goes. While RSS is a great tool for that, closed systems such as Facebook still require a login to see what’s going on inside.

Last night I was introduced to spokeo.com. For the time being I’ll call it a social media aggregator. It does the legwork for you by trolling the various social media sites for the activities of your community (based on email addresses) and organizes the information for you. Spokeo pulls activity from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc… You can add websites and blog URLs to the list and organize the information in groups, by user and even drag and drop user-related resources into your own structure.  It’s the flexibility and ease of organization that makes spokeo a unique and powerful tool in this space.

As with any digital tool, there are many opportunities for unscupulous use. For community-minded individuals that live in Web2.0, Spokeo is an invaluable tool.

If they could only build in trending…

Andrea and I like to monitor the stats of Just One More Book!! It’s like going outside in the summer to see how our vines are doing and how many Morning Glories have bloomed — we like to watch it grow.

Today we served our 250,000th download of 2007. Unfortunately I lost most of our 2006 stats so I don’t know what our overall total is. No matter. It’s nice to know that so many people value our podcast and that our reviews and interviews have an impact in people’s book shopping and reading experiences.

I met Brian Conley in September at PodCamp Philly. It was one of those meetings and conversations that you always remember because the person is so passionate, so committed to making this world a better place. Brian is one of the forces behind Alive in Baghdad, a video podcast that’s helping to raise awareness of a situation that the world is being misled on and, in many cases, choosing to deny. Brian is also a force behind Alive in Mexico.

I spoke with Brian on the phone as part of my research for one of my Defining Moments columns in Podcast User Magazine. This edition of my Sound Connections podcast features most of that conversation.

Please consider supporting these amazing projects.

Photo: gpiper

 

 Conversation with Brian Conley [19:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download