I was very sad to read of the death of Irish Blogger Dave Stewart. We met briefly at the first bloggers' get together organised by Gavin in Dublin way back some time in the early part of 2005 I think. It was clear from our brief meeting that he was, indeed, a giant in the Irish Blogging Community. My deepest sympathies to his family and friends, may he rest in peace.
Damien started an interesting discussion about widening the number of bloggers available to speak with journalists on blog related issues. In principle it’s a good idea…but like my previous post (and the comment thread) there’s now a debate going on over who’s an “expert” and who gets to decide. (Sounding familiar?). I guess the first rule of any club/association or event is who can’t be in.
Then EirePreneur stepped in and offered a list of expert bloggers and lo and behold who can’t be in was amply demonstrated – women. Not a single woman blogger appeared on the list. Mary called this and came up with her own list of women bloggers (on which yours truly appears). But when I hear that age old refrain about “why are so few women blogging” perpetuated by a small group of bloggers who talk to an unknowing media I’ll know the answer.
This raises a much wider issue for me concerning gatekeeping in the Irish blog community most of which is done by men. I’ve nothing against men, in fact I rather like most of them but it’s perpetuating the mythology of blogging being a male related activity which I am increasingly uncomfortable with. If something as simple as Damien’s suggestion can so quickly exclude a whole swathe of the Irish blogging community and instantly set up a male/female dynamic then perhaps there are bigger issues to be tackled here.
On a simple level a person’s blogroll gives you an indication of the shape and size of a blogger’s world but if you’re not constantly reaching out to extend and change that it becomes self-referential and fixed. Blogging may have belonged to the boys in the past but it’s certainly not true in the present as evidenced by Mary’s list. How long before more women start occupying the gatekeeping seats?
The Irish Blog Awards will be announced in Dublin on 3 March 2007 and Interactions is sponsoring the Best Personal Blog category. I won this category in 2006 and it only seems appropriate to do some giving back this year when I will be ineligible to enter. I do hope however that Interactions will be a nominee in another category when the nominations open next week so watch this space.
Nominations are now open for the Irish Blog Awards. Nominations will close at 11.59pm on 26th January and then a public vote will occur to narrow the nominations down to 5 blogs per category. Details of how to nominate a blog are here and the nomination form is here
I'm hoping this blog will be in the running in the Best Business Blog category so don't forget to vote early and vote often.
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Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world
I've become such a lurker over at Post Secret. It's a community arts project where people mail in a secret on a home made postcard to the author. Some of the images and sentiments are extraordinary. Coming, as I do, from a predominantly Catholic country, and as a therapist, the confessional nature of both is familiar to me but there’s something so powerful in the visual representation of unmentionables...more powerful than words alone, more creative than confession and absolution.
Hat tip Psychoa
Interactions has been long-shortlisted in the best business blog category for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards, so if you like what you read here then I'd appreciate your vote. (Voting will reduce this long short list to the actual short list from which a panel of judges will select the winners). The voting form is here and the full list of nominees including links to their sites is here. Voting closes on Friday next 16th February at 5pm so don't procrastinate too long :) The awards are a great opportunity to find new blogs and get a flavour of how blogging is developing in Ireland - so head over to the list and cast your votes soon!
Interactions is also proud to be the sponsor of the best personal blog category and the line up is really strong in that section so I'm looking forward to seeing who wins on the night.
Only 45 hours left to the close of voting in the Irish Blog Awards so if you haven't voted yet take the opportunity to head over to the polling booth. Voting closes at 5pm GMT on Friday. The very best of luck to everyone who's waiting to see if they make it to the short list.
Haydn Shaughnessy is writing a piece for the Irish Times to coincide with the Irish Blog Awards on 3 March and is looking for opinions on some interesting questions:
The line I’m thinking of taking is Irish blogging has had a great year, expanded in numbers, diversity and talent but has it all come a bit late?Has blogging in Ireland finally found its feet just as the radical edge of blogging seems to have disappeared?
Can we realistically expect now that Irish bloggers bring about change and if so where?
My own view is this:
"but has it all come a bit late?" For whom? is the answer I would add. Although I've had many conversations with people about blogging my experience is that we have a very long way to go in Ireland before blogging as a term is even hovering close to the mainstream. There are so many organisations and interest groups out there who, on the face of it, should be blogging as a direct way of getting their message across but who simply don’t know of the existence of blogging as a methodology. Arts and cultural organisations continue to amaze me at their lack of tech literacy in this regard – what better way of starting a conversation about a piece of contemporary art or dance or theatre piece than by blogging or podcasting? But I can count on two hands the number of organisations who are even getting to grips with the concept. I think there’s also a generational issue at play here too because many of those organisations who could embrace blogging as a useful and productive tool are “too old” and I use that term advisedly. The majority of those who attended the Irish Blog Awards ceremony last year were under the age of 30. Thankfully there are a few of us OAPs out here blogging but until the under 30 generation are the policy makers and key decision makers then blogging will hover out on the edges.
The platform requires an opinion and in an age of “me too” and "cookie cutter culture" there’s no point unless you have a point.
Congratulations to the short listed nominees in the Best Business Blog Category of the Irish Blog Awards. Unfortunately Interactions didn't make it this time but we'll be there to cheer on those who did. Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for Interactions. Check out the short listed blogs for yourself:
Interactions is also the proud sponsor of the Best Personal Blog category and the short listed nominees there are:
Hope to see you all at the awards ceremony on 3rd March and well done to Damien et al for the incredible work to date.
Online life these days seems predicated on the advantages of the knowledge economy, the value of knowledge management and the assumption that social networking and sharing is a great idea. Ellybabes has a very interesting post (and accompanying PowerPoint presentation) on Death and Divorce in the Digital World. In which she says:
In this new technological age, we are only beginning to notice some recently emerging issues caused by deaths and divorces amongst both geek and non-geek couples and singles.Nearly everyone these days has large amounts of personal information stored online, whether this is their own websites and complex businesses down to simply e-mail and internet banking at the lower end of the spectrum.
In previous days, when a loved one died it was simply a case of notifying the relevant businesses (banking, service companies, etc) and details of savings and other important possessions were most often held with a solicitor or detailed in the person’s will.
She's asking some interesting questions about the difficulties presented by having so much of our lives online. In the case of death accessing password protected files and accounts can be hugely problematic. Adversarial separations can sometimes result in compromising material being published in cyberspace as an act of revenge.
Ellybabes gives a snapshot of the kinds of digital information that may need to be managed in the event of a separation (of either kind) and they include:
Shared e-mail accountsOnline calendars
Online subscriptions
Expensive PC’s and Display Screens
VOIP numbers
HTPC recordings / VOD accounts
Online DVD rental accounts
Blogs – Advertising revenue
Digital Photographs
Gaming Console profiles (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)
Intellectual Property
I'm quaintly old fashioned in that I keep passwords for online accounts etc in hard copy format (remember those quaint things called notebooks!). But I haven't seen too many articles and blog posts on the difficulties presented by so much private activity now taking place in encrypted environments. I'm wondering what provisions you have made in the event of an untimely ending?
The latest edition of the Blog Carnival of Management tips (to which I've contributed this post) is over at Mabel and Harry - there are some great posts and I'm realising what a great idea carnivals are for gathering like minded bloggers around communities of interest. Carnivals are where
someone takes the time to find really good blog posts on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a "carnival".
There are Carnivals for every conceivable topic and the site is a great place to meet new bloggers, gather creative ideas around a specific topic and hopefully have some good conversations along the way.
I've just come across a superb blog from Mark McGuinness called Wishful Thinking. Mark coaches creative professionals and his blog is a fabulous resource of articles, posts and insightful thinking about management in the creative industries. Mark is undertaking a Masters Degree and he has posted a lot of his research material (interviews etc) here and it's a very generous resource waiting to be tapped.
I particularly liked this quote from Mark about why he works with creative professionals:
So if the special “creative person” is a myth, why do I focus on working with creatives? Having worked with professional artists and creatives for over 10 years, as well as with many other types of client, I would say there are basically three differences between them and many other people.1. They think of themselves as “creative”. I’ve come across many people who are perfectly capable of coming up with original ideas - but who keep blocking themselves by saying “I’m not creative”. Even when it is pointed out to them that they have done creative things, they resist the label, and clearly feel uncomfortable with it. The “creatives” on the other hand, are quite happy to think of themselves as creative, and don’t create this kind of internal obstacle to their natural creativity.
2. They love doing creative work. Because they enjoy creative work more than most people, they spend more time doing it. Which means they get better at it. Which means they enjoy it more. Which means they do more of it… and so on. This is not to say they don’t enjoy money, status, recognition or other rewards, but these are not as important to them as the pleasure of creativity itself.
3. They put themselves in an environment where creativity is encouraged. I once ran a seminar and set a group of managers the task of finding the “second right answer” to a question (based on Roger von Oech’s excellent creativity book A Whack on the Side of the Head). A couple of minutes into the activity, I noticed they were looking very uncomfortable. When I asked them what was wrong, they said it felt very unsafe, as they were constantly told by senior management that mistakes were unacceptable and they had to get things “right”. No wonder their creativity was inhibited! Creative types on the other hand, gravitate to situations where creativity is not only encouraged but expected of them - art schools, ad agencies, design studios, artists’ quarters, writer’s colonies, film sets and ‘clusters’ of creative businesses. By surrounding themselves with others engaged in creative work, they immerse themselves in the latest ideas and developments in their field - and some of that creativity rubs off.
These three factors help them develop their raw creative talent into accomplished skills. This is not to deny that some of us are naturally “gifted” with more talent than others, but this is a matter of degree rather than kind - and talent is nothing unless you put it to work.
I plan on being a regular over there..
Qualitative research, doesn't tell us what is going on, at best it gives us some ideas about what might be happening. And it does this in a way that may help to trigger a new way to define or crack a problem in the planner's mind but is laughable as a means for making critical business decisions.
I don't often come across posts that make me splutter and mutter at the screen but this post from Adlierate (via The Art of Conversation) had just that affect on me. Has Richard looked at the differences between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies? Is he a subscriber to the adage that if you can't count it, it doesn't count? A central concern of a quantitative approach is the generation of findings which are generalised, replicable, test theory and privilege objectivity. A qualitative approach to research views data as emergent; privileges primacy of interpretation; facilitates hypothesising in the service of theory building and seeks to generate theory from data.
I'm currently researching a Doctorate using the principles of Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) a research method in which theory is arrived at through the data. The data I'm generating are very different from and yet aligned with those collected by quantitative researchers in the same area. I'm interested in looking at the meaning that is made of the phenomenon in business life, not only an academic definition of a theoretical concept. In my mind there's no competition when it comes to which methodology works best for the task at hand. My approach is conversational, semi-structured, flexible in order to include as many types of data as possible and most importantly reflexive - I take account of my intrusion into and impact on the study by virtue of asking the questions.
So from now on I am going to reserve the name research for the real deal - actual data that reports on reality.
In a comment on this post Richard says
I should explain that my issue is not with qualitative research though, in a sense it got caught in the cross fire - think of it as polemic collateral damage.
Well I don't think this is acceptable - too often qualitative is thrown around like it's some subservient methodology and as a short hand for "not good enough"...Of course it's not good enough if you don't really know what you're talking about in the first place. Perhaps the issue here is with good and bad research not quantitative and qualitative. In scapegoating the latter what's really being avoided is poor research conducted from a quantitative perspective. Could I respectfully suggest that Richard's post may be suffering from a little of that itself?
Welcome to the March 19, 2007 edition of emotion at work. (The first edition in fact) and thanks to everyone who submitted a post. I'm fascinated to see what a topic like "emotion at work" has evoked - there are really interesting and different approaches to the topic here that echo much of the management discourse around emotion as something that needs to be valued in its own right (my own view) or controlled in the service of organisational harmony. I'm also curious about the fact that no women submitted posts around this topic and wonder what might be going on there that's interesting.
Mark McGuinness presents 7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm posted at Wishful Thinking. Mark talks about tapping into your natural enthusiasm and how reconnecting with your curiosity is a critical first step in banishing procrastination and keeping the creative juices flowing.
Erik Mazzone presents Deciding to Quit your Job posted at Erik Mazzone's Blog. Erik advocates tapping into your feelings as distinct from your rationale when you have to make a decision to stay in or quit a job.
Alan presents There is always a way posted at Made to Be Great. Alan advocates stillness as a way of connecting with the sense of what’s possible and he also talks about reframing problems as potential solutions (something I’m a huge advocate for).
Charles H Green presents Trust Tip 35: Reciprocity, Sales and Suicide Hot Lines posted at Trusted Advisor Associates. Charles talks about the centrality of trust and how active listening is a key part of developing it. Something I've written about before.
The Positivity Blog presents 5 life-changing keys to overcoming your fear posted at Henrik Edberg. Henrik offers some strategies for overcoming fear which are useful for work and personal life beginning with a non-judgemental approach.
Noel Kuhlman presents How To Destroy The Lazy Drones In Your Team posted at Self Help Can Be Fun. Noel offers some no nonsense approaches to co-dependency in the workplace. The title is challenging but I think he’s addressing the way in which we enable people to adopt less than helpful roles in the workplace and he asks us what our part in that is.
Craig Harper presents A Letter to all Blokes.... posted at Renovate your life with Craig. Craig invites blokes to reconnect with their emotions in a witty and “bloke-friendly way”. I'd like to hear Craig's view on the relationship between blokes, their emotion and the world of work as I imagine he'd have an interesting take on that subject.
The Silicone Valley Blogger presents Work Place Drama Ends In More Money at The Digerati Life which is an interesting piece on how the organisation in the mind (or the boss in our mind) is very often out of kilter with the external experience and how our emotions are central to that experience.
Scott Young presents Introduction - Emotional Mastery (Series) posted at Scott H Young. Scott offers an introductory blog post on the "secrets to emotional mastery". The rest of his series focusses on the issue of control and emotion.
That concludes this edition. Thanks to everyone who submitted an article for this first carnival. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
I'm currently at the Guardian Changing Media Summit in London. So far I've learned that:
Twitter is soooo passé
The Guardian doesn't have wifi
The Chatham House rules don't rule in an age of changing media
It is possible to have a PowerPoint free conference
and now I'm wondering if I should pay attention to the conference proceedings or adopt a more post modern approach and read the posts of bloggers who are reporting on the proceedings....(Unlike Antony Mayfield I haven't yet interrupted proceedings with my loud typing.
PS: This is the scariest and most impressive conference I've ever been to in terms of punctuality. Every single session (including breaks and lunch) has started and ended on time..Brilliant!
**Update** Oh the mortification ... somewhere during the day my mobile phone has gone missing..of all the places on the planet to lose one's mobile...a media conference..
Like so many other bloggers I am shocked to read Kathy Sierra's post on the death threats she has received. We can lull ourselves into a false sense of security around the touchy-feely niceness of social media, the value of connecting online and the wonders it brings but once in a while a salutary lesson comes along about the darker side of this activity. Secrets and abuse live in the shadows, I salute Kathy for speaking out in this attention economy age- she has my respect and my good wishes. I hope the people behind this abuse are brought to justice in an appropriate way.
Welcome to the April 2, 2007 edition of emotion at work. I am publishing the submissions that directly relate to emotion at work - many more were received but had very little to do with the topic in question - so check out these posts and enjoy the contribution these bloggers are making to the issue of emotion at work.
Neal presents Brain Fitness: Shift Happens posted at SharpBrains, saying, "How a Head Coach can help us navigate through difficult emotions"
Alexander Kjerulf presents The Feel Factor - Why no workplace can afford to ignore what people feel posted at The Chief Happiness Officer.
Chris presents Conflict Resolution: A Casualty of Non-Violent Martial Arts posted at Martial Development.
Karen Lynch presents Butterfly posted at LivethePower, saying, "Negative emotions are the gift of directions. We need to pay attention."
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page
Oh I couldn't have said it better myself. Apologies for the radio silence here on Interactions - as Damian says, normal service will be resumed shortly.
I've added a link in the side bar for those of you who would like to subscribe via email. If you add your email address you'll receive a daily update of postings to Interactions.
For any of us who subscribe to mail lists or internet discussion groups this should ring a few bells.
How Many Mail List Subscribers Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?
Answer: 1,331
1 to change the light bulb and to post to the mail list that the light bulb has been changed
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs
53 to flame the spell checkers
41 to correct spelling in the spelling/grammar flames
156 to write to the list administrator complaining about the light bulb discussion and its inappropriateness to this mail list
109 to post that this list is not about light bulbs and to please take this email exchange to another list
203 to demand that cross posting to other lists about changing light bulbs be stopped
111 to defend the posting to this list saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts *are* relevant to this mail list
3 to post about links they found from the URLs that are relevant to this list which makes light bulbs relevant to this list
306 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique, and what brands are faulty
27 to post URLs where one can see examples of different light bulbs
14 to post that the URLs were posted incorrectly, and to post corrected URLs
33 to concatenate all posts to date, then quote them including all headers and footers, and then add "Me Too."
12 to post to the list that they are unsubscribing because they cannot handle the light bulb controversey
19 to quote the "Me Too's" to say, "Me Three."
4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ
48 to propose new change.lite.bulb newsgroup
47 to say there is already an alt.light.bulb newsgroup
143 to ask if anyone ever did change the lightbulb
Yesterday I attended a workshop on blogging and podcasting organised by Theatre Forum and presented by Susan Hallam. I was there with a couple of hats on – for a start I was the only blogger in the room and as you know, I’m an advocate of blogging for the arts sector. I have written before about the minimal activity in this area for this sector in Ireland but I was really there for selfish reasons to learn a bit about podcasting. The podcasting section was brief and to the point and I got some useful starter material to think about.
The workshop was aimed at Ireland’s performing arts companies and was a basic introduction to the nuts and bolts of getting up and running with blogs and podcasting. Hallam is an advocate of Blogger as a publishing platform because of its integration with Google (makes a lot of sense in terms of SEO) but less sense when one of our main broadband providers can simply drop the connection (as Twenty Major discovered recently). Many of the people in attendance were very new to the whole area of blogging and seemed to get great stuff out of it.
However – I was surprised at Hallam’s stance on commenting.
Hallam doesn’t believe in allowing comments on her own blog (apparently the comments were from competitors critical of her work) – and she disagreed with me that commenting on other people’s blogs should be a part of your blogging strategy. I was genuinely surprised by that stance. Blogs are conversational media and conversations involve at least two people. If you don’t allow comments on your own blog and you don’t deem it to be important to comment on someone else's then the conversation on your own space is a monologue, not a dialogue - and if you're not reading other blogs you won't even know if the conversation has moved. Far too many businesses in my view simply use the blogging platform to update static websites with press release material under the guise of blogging. Hallam’s view of conversation seemed to fall into two categories – the “talk amongst yourselves” forum type of conversation where audience/customers/users discuss their views on a forum of their own - separate and distinct from the originator of the work - or the monologue variation described above.
I’m all for a third way
• One which leaves room for blogs to be informed and influenced by what readers think.
• One that is open to the possibility that our readers and users have an intelligence that’s useful for us in conceiving work.
• One that suggests that the audience is a critical part of the creative process and that conversation is a key way of opening up that creativity in the service of great art.
• One that sugests that our readers are peers, not only purchasers of a product
• One that decides to take on and engage with critical responses to art in a way that can lead to richer conversations about this sector.
or to quote Tom Raftery
Businesses are made smarter by receiving the kind of direct, candid feedback that focus groups and market research surveys rarely succeed in providing
or Bill Gates (courtesy of Tom Raftery)
Another big phenomenon is building communities around Web sites, around products. And virtually every company ought to have on their Web site the ability for their customers, their suppliers, various people, to interact and their employees to see the dialogue taking place there and jump in and talk to them and help them.
Art and culture are never created in a vacuum. The social architecture of the sector is key to its success – not only the “bums on seats” argument (which is such a reductive way of quantifying this community) but the qualitative experience of having access to creators and consumers in equal measure.
Capitalising on the various communities of interest would seem to me to be an enormously important part of that discussion – but then again, maybe some organisations aren’t interested in the immediacy of that conversation?
Of the 20 odd people who were in the room yesterday I think many will go away and assume that setting up a blog is a smart marketing strategy (and they would be right), but I think they may miss the other ways in which blogging makes sense for arts and cultural organisations – as genuine tools for connecting with audiences as active contributors to a community of interest, as peers and as co-collaborators. In an age when most arts organisations are being asked to invest time and resources in “audience development” (oh how I hate that term) blogging is one of the most useful (and one of the the cheapest) mechanisms for addressing that issue. The only real marketing question that matters is - "would you recommend this to a friend?" Arts organisations don't need to sell tickets they need to convert evangelists who will gladly spread word of mouth about their work. Waiting for "them" to come to "us" has proved to be a limited strategy in the world of arts presentation - more and more organisations have outreach and education programmes to connect with new communities of artists and audiences - commenting fulfills the same function in the blog world. You can't passively wait for someone to discover what you're about - you have to engage in a bit of your own outreach by entering into other people's communities and making your presence felt.
I’m all for marketing but if you don't want to be part of a conversation – why use conversational media?
Disclaimer: I have written an article for Poetry Ireland on blogging for the arts community which will be published in their upcoming newsletter.
I attended a Tribeca Talks panel discussion this week on Cinema 2.0: Me, Myself and iPod – essentially a discussion on the impact of social media on the production of art (notably cinema and literature). The line up of panellists included
Jonathan Lethem (Author)
Brent Weinstein (Head of the Digital Media Dept. at United Talent Agency)
Jerry Paffendorf (Futurist with The Electric Sheep Company and his blog is here)
Charles Leadbeater (a leading authority on innovation and creativity, ex Financial Times and Independent. The wiki for his current project We Think - The Rise of Mass Creativity is here ) - great TED talk here.
Kathleen Grace (Director and Producer of The Burg a web based drama set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
and moderator Georg Szalai (NY bureau chief and business editor at The Hollywood Reporter)
There were a lot of pertinent points raised about the relationship between the old, the new and the vast space in between.
I can’t do justice to the 90 minute discussion (and subsequent questions and answers) but I did capture a few points which I think it’s worth mentioning here – particularly in the context of Irish arts and cultural organisations – some of whom are out there using social media, many others of whom are ambivalent about the impact on the production of their artistic artefact.
The panellists addressed the issue of giving work away for free, particularly if you’re struggling to make a living in the first place. Kathleen Grace and her crew have created a soap opera about Williamsburg which is viewable free and online. They decided to forget about pitching to the studios at the outset and are hoping that it will be picked up (before they drown in credit card debt I imagine). It’s given them a direct outlet for the creation of their art and an instant audience for the work.
Novelist Jonathan Lentham created The Promiscious Materials Project which was specifically designed to distribute his work (at the cost of $1).
I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling.
Lentham described his online activity as an “analogue gesture in a digital cloak” because he is very clear that he creates the artefact and then allows it to be discussed, modified, mashed-up etc once that creative act has taken place.
Leadbetter posted 11 chapters of his book online and sought feedback and comments – he is incorporating some of those into the final draft and will credit those whose work he includes.
The panellists were in general agreement that creativity is a collaboration, and while the origination of the artefact (book, sculpture, video etc) may be the work of one person – the conversation that surrounds it (both before and after) is the way of entwining both spaces and expanding on the relationship between artist and community.
There was a lot of discussion about the future of the business of social media, particularly from Futurist Jerry Paffendorf (whom I could have listened to all evening and who focusses on ROA Return on Awesome rather than ROI..) on how online worlds are evolving and changing (virtual worlds are increasingly “opt in” and the mantra is “Don’t have sex with Google”) and and notably Brent Weinstein who heads up a division at United Talent Agency that specifically handles artists working in/with new media. There is money to be made and business models are evolving but Paffendorf described it well when he said
The currency we are using doesn’t know how to quantify what we are making
I really enjoyed the discussion, it got my own creative juices flowing and I came away with the following which I think are going to be pertinent issues for Irish arts and cultural organisations.
1 There’s no going back. An active, updated, interactive online presence is a must if you are a creative and it’s about driving traffic to where you will get paid even if in the short term it’s unlikely that you are making money.
2 Circling the wagons and adopting a defensive approach to creativity is self defeating. In the old days (6 months ago as Weinstein suggested) retaining and restraining may have worked – in this new era of social media community is where it’s at.
3 As one producer (in the Q & A) described it - people are in control of their ipod screens, their computer screens, their TV screens and ultimately their cinema screens. This model of drag and drop cultural consumption is only going to increase and impact on all other areas of media/cultural production. If creatives aren’t driving that traffic then they’re going to get stuck in a traffic jam that’s going nowhere fast.
4 There are no residuals on the internet so new ways of creating work and more importantly commissioning opportunities for this medium are going to have to evolve, particularly in countries like Ireland where we have a grant-aid culture.
5 Commerce, community and creativity co-exist in an internet age – the challenge for many creatives is how to make that relationship work for them.
The Tribeca Film Festival broadcasts a daily webcast on Youtube
Interactions was featured in the Sunday Business Post's "So you want to be a blogger" on 6th May. It was good to contribute to a piece about the value of blogging for business in Ireland and to be in the company of my blogging colleagues Sinéad Gleeson, Ice Cream Ireland and Beaut.ie.
I was invited to contribute some thoughts on the value of social media to Poetry Ireland's bi-monthly newsletter Poetry Ireland News. The paper is also available here as a pdf download. I will be running a workshop on this area for arts/cultural organisations in June - stay posted for details.
There are 71 million blogs and a new Blog is created every half second. 499, 760 of those blogs (at the time of writing) mention or refer to poetry. All over cyberspace poets and poetry lovers are engaged in passionate conversations about the work. Why is it that so few Irish arts organisations and artists currently recognise the centrality of an online presence as part of their development strategy?
If you are an artist, then you want an audience. If you are an artist working in a niche art form area then that audience may be small and diminishing. No amount of investment in marketing strategies, audience development, outreach and education initiatives will impact on the size of that audience in the short term. How do you start conversations about your art form? How do you get critical feedback about what works and what doesn’t? How do you talk to your peers? Meet new ones? Make a living?
You give your work away. Yes…..you heard me correctly…Blogs and other social media platforms such as Wikis and Podcasting are essential tools for artists wishing to connect with an audience. Blogs are curated and conversational spaces designed to share ideas, expertise, creativity and opinion with a community of interest. Blogs are based on giving stuff away. If you can’t bear the idea of sharing your ideas then blogging isn’t for you. However if you imagine for a moment that the audience and community for poetry is global and not geographically bound by the rim of this island then blogging starts to make complete sense as a way of developing the conversation. Online life is full of great writers, fabulous opinions and now, a mechanism for publishing. Blogging puts you in a conversation with people who (a) have something to say and (b) care about what you have to say. It’s a totally different relationship with peers and audience than can be created in any other static medium.
Blogging, like all conversations, requires commitment. You need to show up, you need to participate and critically you need to have something to say. Publishing your thoughts and ideas is one side of the conversation – making space (through a comments thread and commenting on other people’s blogs) is the other. The technology provides simple ways (through RSS, Tagging and Aggregators) for you to be found and to find others with whom you want to converse. Of course there are questions and issues – copyright, freedom of speech; time spent reading and commenting; technical stuff about how to get online/maintain a Blog and not to mention the dreaded “Blogger’s block”.
In a media savvy society – shouldn’t you be aware of what people are saying about you? Shouldn’t you contribute to or start that discussion? Here are 10 ideas to get you started.
1. Release podcasts presentations of poets reading and presenting their work
2. Release the soundtrack for a show as a download (as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company did in 2006)
3. Start a discussion about contemporary art in advance of exhibitions as a gateway for newcomers to the art form
4. Create podcasts by experts to assist audiences engage with your work
5. Let a picture do the talking
6. Allow audiences into the art making process with regular posts about the rehearsal process from the perspective of various members of the company e.g. designer and choreographer etc. Record conversations, make transcripts available—trust that this will increase curiosity about your work.
7. Publish your work online and get feedback as the process progresses
8. Create word of mouth on a performance by asking readers the only marketing question that matters “would you recommend this to a friend?”
9. Use the virtual space as a gallery or curatorial space and commissioning/presentation arena for artists of all disciplines and practice areas
10. Ask readers how they want to engage with your work – online discussions with artists? Advance notice of booking options? Use the medium as an idea generation space.
A version of this paper was published in the May/June 2007 Poetry Ireland News by Poetry Ireland.
I've just created a Library page on the site that includes PDF copies of papers that I hope will be useful to clients and readers. You can reach the library via the link in the sidebar or from the main page of the website. Enjoy!
Over the next few weeks I am going to re-publish some of my earlier entries to bump them up a bit on the blog so watch out for the re-runs! This is partly because I can't figure out how to get Feedblitz to read older entries (even though my blog is configured to show 100 or so posts) so I can choose which posts to include in my newsletter. If anyone can help me out on that I'd be grateful.
Yesterday’s New York Times had a nice story from Clive Thompson about musician Jonathan Coulton who in
September 2005, quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife’s guarded blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter. He set a quixotic goal for himself: for the next year, he would write and record a song each week, posting each one to his blog
The piece goes on to say that
More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.
Continue reading "Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog from the NY Times" »
I've signed up for the trial pro version of Feedblitz. My requirements are very simple I want
A customisable email header
The flexibility to choose from blog posts - I don't want everything I blog to go into the newsletter
The flexibility to send email on demand - I do not want to bore my readers to death with daily email
On the face of it Feedblitz offers the above but I've had nothing but hassle since I signed up less than a week ago. The user interface in Feedblitz is awful - utterly unintuitive and you can't access your dashboard without using the "back" button consistently.
The most annoying thing is that I have set the service up to send on demand (in my case I want a weekly email of selected blog postings sent to my list) but the service is still sending a daily digest as well as the "on demand" mail. I've had unsatisfactory communication from tech support. Firstly my email ended up in their junk folder (which seems odd considering it's the one I'm using to access my service and the one they are using to debit my credit card), then I was told that the daily digest on top of the on demand "can happen if you’re subscribed to your blog multiple times" (which I'm not...and even if I was why am I getting the on demand email with 4 posts included and the daily with only one?).
The attractive thing about the service (in theory) are the three things I am looking for (which cost $150 a year or thereabouts) so the fact that they aren't working (and that the Knowledge Base is returning a 404, the FAQ is pretty limited in its scope and tech support doesn't appear to offer any solutions) is not encouraging at this point.
I've a week to go with Feedblitz before my credit card payment kicks in and unless I can get some satisfaction on this unwanted daily digest then I'll be scrapping Feedblitz's service and going elsewhere.
There simply has to be a reliable rss to email service that can deliver what I want out there..If anyone has any suggestions I am all ears...
Apologies to subscribers who have received unsolicited mail over the last few days I am attempting to rectify the situation...
Update: If this weren't so serious I'd be laughing. Even though my settings are set (and I've checked) to "manual delivery" in the "turbo update" in Feedblitz, this post was emailed to the list just over an hour after it was posted...I've suspended my feed untill I hear back from Feedblitz...
I want to pay a tribute to bloggers – yes, gush alert – you have been warned. I was invited to chair the Irish Business Women’s conference in County Mayo this weekend and talked a few of my blogging colleagues into participating and as a result Irish bloggers played a pivotal part in the conference proceedings.
Conn recorded speakers for a series of podcasts which will be aired over the coming weeks (two recorded before the event are already online); Claire weaved in and out of the speakers and talks, camera in hand documenting everything, including the all important chocolate fountain on the Thursday night.. (The first set of shots are already up on Flickr); Keith liveblogged and has a superb summary of the speakers’ presentations on his blog. I stayed well away from technology apart from my time keeping equipment (a large brass bell).
One of the exciting thing for me about the event (and there were others!) is that it’s the first time I’ve seen these bloggers "do" what they “do” in real life. We were all there as professionals who happen to blog. I’ve never seen people work as hard as my three colleagues did on Thursday and Friday – Claire, camera in hand, even managed to ask a pivotal question in the Q and A which captured people’s attention and then went back to shooting photographs. I invited Conn to the podium to do his “elevator pitch” about podcasting and he hosted mini workshop sessions during the breaks to encourage people to listen to podcasts. Keith participated as a delegate and made the content available to all via his blog. None of my colleagues were being paid for their work (Claire and Conn were sponsors of the event); I think Keith may have paid to attend as a delegate.
When people ask me what’s the difference between blogging and just participating on a forum or being out on the “internet” I try to talk about the “givers get” mentality that I see so frequently amongst bloggers. Bloggers (and these bloggers in particular) are some of the most generous, egoless people I’ve ever met. Yes, blogging can be an ego trip but giving back what you know and making what you know available in a freely accessible medium is a really generous act. These bloggers are committed to spreading the word and in each of our own ways we tried to keep the communication flow moving within the conference boundary and without so that as many people as possible could have their say and take something away from the proceedings.
I also didn’t realise that pizza is pivotal.
More than one speaker alluded to developing their business idea over a pizza and a bottle of wine…after the event Claire and I collapsed into comfy chairs in the company of Coronotion Street and pizza. I thought that there was such a great array of speakers that it would be a shame to let them get away without facilitating some kind of discussion so I decided to postpone my presentation and use the time to bring the speakers back for some interaction leading to an extended Q and A - I wrote up my offering which captures some of the points I would have made called Anyone for Pizza? – now if that’s not the collective unconscious at work I just don’t know what is.
Disclaimer: Unlike my blogging colleagues, I was paid for my services on the day
Can you fake being personal?
In our rush to offer solutions to clients’ problems we often (too often in my opinion) eschew the personal and embrace the professional. We really don’t get the value of being “ourselves” because somewhere along the line we’ve learned that to be ourselves is to not be good enough. I’m of the firm belief that there are no differences. What there are – are boundaries. People hire people because after they’ve assured themselves that you have the skill set to do the job, they want to be in a relationship with someone they like, feel comfortable with and ultimately feel safe with. All of that requires a large degree of self awareness and an ability to manage boundaries. It also requires that we be ourselves. You can try faking being personal but it won't work. It never does.
I have a number of questions I ask myself when working with clients to make sure I’m “being myself”.
Those basic questions help me to keep connected to myself and more importantly, they ensure that I bring myself to the relationship. Tricks and tools are great and important sometimes, but if I’m not sure of what I’m feeling and when, I can’t reach for what I need in the service of my clients. Unlike the customer in the advertisement above, I want to feel personally connected to my clients and it’s only in that frame of mind I can grasp how best I can give them value for their money.
Congratulations to the Arts Council of Ireland for being the first of the National Cultural Institutions to install an RSS feed on its re-designed website. The feed doesn't appear to be working at present but hopefully that's a minor technical hitch. I hope it's not going to be too long before the rest of the members of the CNCI follow suit - some of the websites of these major institutions are very poorly designed and I gave up trying to navigate through the National Library's site in an effort to find out more about their series of talks (I saw a printed brochure about them) but there's nothing on the site for an interested ticket buyer or if there is, it's buried somewhere very secret. Look instead at the New York Public Library's site with 8 different feeds for various areas of its activities...A quick scan of many of the websites of smaller Irish arts and cultural organisations reveals the same thing ... all this great activity going on, in secret, buried in the bowels of dusty websites ... let's not make it so difficult for interested people to spend their money on what you have to offer!
And for those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about here's a brilliant explanation of RSS in Simple English from Common Craft.
There's a transcript of the video here
Do you kiss on the first date? so asks Darren over at ProBlogger in a great post about how to "court" readers for your blog. So many business blogs are the "hard sell" - giving readers nothing more to digest than recycled press releases highlighting problems you didn't know you had and solutions you didn't know you needed. Darren suggest that the rules of courtship should apply
I came away from the blog feeling like a stranger had walked up to me and asked me to give them a kiss......While I’m sure plenty of good relationships do start with a kiss (and more) on the first date - most dating advice experts would argue that if you want to grow a sustainable, ongoing relationship that the best time to take a relationship to the next level physically is when there’s other aspects of a relationship already in place (ie some emotional connection and time spent together getting to know one another).
And of course this is the dilemma for many businesses (and one I hear frequently from smaller organisations) how much of myself do I "put out" there and how much do I keep back? How does a small organisation maintain a personal presence that's compelling and interesting while also maintaining a company view?
I think it's less about what you reveal and more about the kind of relationship you want to build with whomever you want reading and engaging with your blog. Yes you have to be willing to chat a bit about what you do and who you are - but like most relationships - once people chat back and the discourse is respectful of boundaries and there's give and take on both sides then it becomes easier to continue the conversation. I liken finding good blogs to dating. You have to go on a lot of coffee dates to find the person you want to see over dinner - and not everyone is going to qualify for an extended conversation..but you can't keep changing your personality to appeal to the next coffee dater - you have to remain true to who you are and be confident that your authenticity will draw the right kind of reader. So balancing what's authentic with what's interesting for your audience is the only way to go and you can only find out the latter if you're listening to them when they're talking back.
A final word to Darren on this one
Help your reader to get to know you, build trust, get to know them and show that you’re interested in more than a quick sale and you could just end up with a lasting relationship.
If you are an artist, arts organisation or work in the creative industries in Ireland and are interested in blogging then sign up for the Poetry Ireland seminar on Tuesday 12 June, 11 - 2pm in Dublin where I'll be running a seminar on the arts and blogging. We'll be looking at why artists and arts organisations should consider blogging and podcasting as tools for production as well as promotion and there will also be time to talk about the basics - like "what's a blog?"; "podcasting??"and "how do I start?". I'll be joined in the endeavour by blogger and podcaster Conn O'Muineachain from Edgecast Media .
Admission is free and you can book by calling 01 4789974 or emailing management@poetryireland.ie. If you're going to be there drop me a mail or leave a comment.
Another great entry over at Andrew Taylor's archies. about measurement in the arts. How do you measure quality? creativity? value for money etc? Taylor has this to say:
During the recent Grantmakers in the Arts conference in Boston, the issue of measurement continued to rise and fall in various sessions. After all, if arts grantmakers are in the business of positive change (or sustaining positive things), they inevitably wonder how they're doing in delivering on that promise. Such evaluation requires both a target and a measure of progress toward that target.The challenge is in applying existing metrics (dollars, headcounts, activity, test scores) to such complex and hazy goals (truth, beauty, pleasure, wisdom). To this task I humbly submit the following metrics, already spinning around the world for other purposes.
• hedon - a single unit of pleasure, already used in ethical mathematics (don't ask, I don't know)
• milliHelen the amount of physical beauty required to launch one ship
• warhol a unit of fame or hype lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Some useful multiples from the Wikipedia include:
• kilowarhol -- famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric "nine day wonder."
• megawarhol -- famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years. The type of person your parents talk about all the time, but of whom you've never heard from anyone else.
If we really hunker down, we could suggest a USRDA for each of the above (U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance). And each cultural production could publicly post the detailed value of its contents: ''Tonight's performance of Romeo and Juliet contains 250 hedons, 950 milliHelens, and 14.9 megawarhols.''
It got me wondering about what other kinds of sector/industry specific measurement tools could be invented..I particularly like this piece from that WIkipedia entry
Vodka indexThe Vodka index is the relation between the price of a liter of standard vodka, and the mean price of a hardbound book in a particular country. While somewhat jocular, it is purported to evince how well literacy fares in a given country.
Today's workshop on Blogging, Podcasting and the Arts hosted by Poetry Ireland and delivered by myself and Conn was great fun. There were nearly 40 people in attendance in the theatre at the College of Surgeons who waited patiently while every piece of technology available failed to work for us in the 30 minutes proceeding the event. All of the sites we wanted to use were initially blocked by the college's firewall and when we got them up and running the projector died, then we lost internet access again and finally, 15 minutes later than scheduled, we were up and running.
Conn and I did a whirlwind introduction to what's a blog? and what's a podcast?; where you can find them and more to the point demonstrated the ways in which artists and arts organisations are embracing these platforms for both the production and promotion of work. I also took the opportunity to introduce TED and used Rives' If I Controlled the Internet as my opening salvo.
We had a number of bloggers in attendance including Omani, Dermod (who's review of the Crucible at the Abbey is number 1 in Google right now); ; Bernie McAdam; Deirdre Eustace (who is looking for some help to move to wordpress so if anyone is inclined - please drop her a line); Eoin Purcell (and there were others - so if you were in attendance today please leave a comment and I'll include a link to your blog here).
Lots of interesting issues came up including the challenges of how to fund artists wishing to create and present new work using these platforms; how publishing online impacts (positively and negatively) on offline book and journal publishing and how bloggers can spread word of mouth about your work if you're not within the reach of the Irish Times. I think if Conn and I tried to do anything it was to instil a sense of confidence in people to give stuff away.because what goes around comes around.
The full list of sites and resources we used (and a few more besides) are listed on this page and I'm looking forward to progressing many of the topics raised in future workshops.
This was the first time Conn and I had presented together. We designed the session via email and over the phone and several people said to me that we looked as though we had been doing this for ages (is that a good thing?). I guess we know each other's work and interests from blogging and I'm thrilled that translated into "real" life this morning. I'm looking forward to catching up with what other bloggers made of the day and if there are suggestions, comments or ideas for future workshops please do get in touch!
I was delighted to attend an event in Dun Laoghaire last night where Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council launched their first published arts strategy. I have to declare an interest here as I worked with the arts office to design and manage the consultation process that informed the shape of the strategy.It's always satisfying to see a final document after a long and complex consultation process, particularly in this case as great care has gone into the design of the plan which includes a series of commissioned photographs by Ros Kavanagh. I was really impressed by the way in which the arts officer Sharon Murphy acknowledged the work of previous staff of the arts office by naming them and inviting others to contribute written material to the documentation - she placed the current plan in a context that is wider and richer than the period of time that she has been in post at the local authority. I am also delighted that Sharon has become the most recent recipient of the Jerome Hynes Fellowship and will take up her role as Clore Fellow from September onwards.
So much of the work we do as consultants is "confidential" and does not result in public documents which can make it challenging to talk about the work with new and potential clients in the absence of something "tangible". That's one of the reasons I started a blog and increasingly I am bumping into people who are reading even if they are not commenting. I'm wondering how other consultants find this issue of the absence of publicly available "evidence" of their work?
I will post a link to the pdf of the plan once it has been uploaded to the DLR site
Damien flew on SAS and his bags took a different route. He blogged his frustrating experience of dealing with Sky Handling Partners who were less than courteous in their dealings with him check out the original post here. But this morning's developments are truly scary
This morning I noticed someone snooping around my website after coming to the site with the search “sky handling partners”.Just before lunch I started getting email confirmations from dating sites, including gay ones saying my account for their site has now been created. Seems someone was creating profiles saying I was looking to meet men and had rather interesting profile descriptions. One of the emails disclosed the IP address where the person submitted the details from:
62.77.175.251
A quick reverse DNS shows that the IP allocation of this eircom customer is:
inetnum: 62.77.175.248 - 62.77.175.255
netname: CITYJETHLING
descr: City Jet Handling Dublin.City Jet Handling is the former name of Sky Handling Partners.
Apart from the utter stupidity of doing such a thing from a company website - the fact that anyone would respond to a legitimate complaint about shoddy customer service by using a person's personal data and their sexual orientation to plan revenge is simply beyond belief. Omani asks a question over at his blog
Imagine you’re an employee of a big company. Your boss comes to you and asks you to do this. What would you do?
Which assumes that this is someone low down in the food chain but I wonder, I really wonder about this. Supposing this act was undertaken by someone further up the food chain? What is to be done in this case.
Sky Handling Partners picked the wrong person to mess with (Damien's original post is number 2 in a Google search for them) - and a cursory search on Google would have revealed that Mr Mulley wouldn't take this lying down - but what if you are not as connected? and what if you don't have an online presence as a way of highlighting something like this? If this teaches us anything it's the importance of knowing what your digital footprint looks like even if you don't think you have one. Just because you don't blog or hang out on various web forums doesn't mean you aren't out there by default or through the actions of someone else.
I will watch Damien's progress with interest and more pertinently, the response from Sky Handling Partners...As an aside, I'm flying with SAS Airlines on Monday next...if my bags don't arrive on the same flight as me I may just have to brandish my blogging credentials as well. Good luck with this one Damien.
I've just returned from Stockholm where I attended the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations annual symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for those of us working in a psychoanalytic way with organisations to meet and share knowledge about this area of practice.
There were numerous interesting papers and one in particular on a group relations conference conducted via the internet caught my attention. I have to admit to being mystified by how a group relations conference that didn't deal with the territory (i.e. cyberspace) would work. The consultant presenting the case paper bravely stepped into the project and fed back his experiences of how it was managed and conducted. The detail of that isn't of particular interest here. But what did interest me is how systems-psychodynamics needs to be applied to working on the web. There is a whole body of literature at this stage (particularly from psychology and systems thinking) about operating and working on line which I think systems-psychodynamics needs to attend to and build on, not merely replicate. Working on the web seemed to be a very new idea to many people who were at the conference and to some extent mirrors my experience of therapists and consultants who work psychoanalytically, many of whom have a sometimes neurotic attachment to being "in the room" and privilege this as the primary way of generating the transference. (As an interesting aside, of the 14 people who attended this workshop only 2 of us were women...I'm not sure what that means but the gender imbalance was more pronounced here than at any other event I attended).
Some of the thoughts that occurred to me about this..
1. The web doesn't exist - it is a wonderful manifestation of the collective unconscious - everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
2. The web is a boundary less space and many of the conversations (particularly in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident) about placing boundaries on it have resulted in strong reaction and an acknowledgement that formal rules simply won’t work in this space which means it’s ripe for persescutory experiences and a regression to primitive drives.
3. The only thing that stops any of us committing an “offence” online is our own conscience or sense of what is right and wrong. So our internalised boundaries and how those boundaries are negotiated and made meaning of, are of primary importance in this space.
4. The absence of the social clues that assist us make meaning of, and interpret, relationships offline are absent online so this heightens the transference and counter-transference in a way that can be persecutory. This is why I’m mystified as to how a group relations conference that doesn’t address the territory can operate with integrity in this space.
5. When a conference finishes we have our experiences of the people who attended and how we entered into relationship. When contact online ends we have that, minus the physical presence of people but we also have the written correspondence. What happens to the text afterwards? And how are boundaries around text negotiated? We all know that once something is out there in cyberspace it is never coming back so the archiving function of the web is something that has to be looked at?
I'd love to hear from any psychodynamically informed practitioners working online about their own experiences of this area..
Matt tagged me so here goes with eight random things about me:
1. I was born by caesarean section which means I have a fanatical attachment to doing things on my own schedule - not anyone else's.
2. I am always on time
3. I am a qualified massage therapist although I haven't practised in years. It made me very popular with my friends way back then though.
4. I can knit (enough said)
5. I love to travel and I’ve visited Russia, India, Japan, Thailand, France, England, Scotland, Wales, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, The USA, and Greece amongst others…I have yet to visit the southern hemisphere. Sometimes you have to go away in order to come home again.
6. My favourite place in Ireland in Leitrim
7. I started to blog 4 years ago as a distraction from writer’s block. My Masters thesis got finished and I’m now doing a PhD and looking for a suitable distraction “just in case”.
8. My Irish DNA is deficient as I don’t like beer (Guinness included) or whiskey
The rules....
-Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
-People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
-At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
Ok, so I tag
and
Synchronicity is at work once again - Finola Howard is doing something I've been thinking about for a while - Paying it Forward. It's a simple idea - you do three good deeds for people unknown to you in return for each good deed done for you. Lots of people (many of them complete strangers) have gone out of their way to help me over the years whether it’s been in business, personal or blogging life and this is a nice way of saying thanks to them and offering something back to others who might benefit from some of my accumulated wisdom.
I’m offering free executive coaching sessions or consultation time on one day a month (starting on Friday 3 August) to anyone who wants a space to reflect on their role or on relationship management issues at work. The three hour-long sessions will be free of charge and your only commitment is to pay it forward to three people you don’t know after we've finished. We can work in person (in Dublin), via Skype or phone.
Finola is a marketing consultant based in Carlow and she is offering a free clinic on the third Friday of each month. If you have a marketing question, dilemma or issue, phone her on +353 59 9183206 and book in for one of the three hour-long slots. IT consultant Colm Whelan of Rockfield IT has also joined the movement and he can be reached at colm.whelan@rockfieldit.com (he’s based in Carlow also) and if anyone else is taken by the idea to sign up then let me know and we can start building a community of practitioners interested in paying it forward.
The Irish Independent has a piece featuring my good self, Claire at Gingerpixel, Jason Freid and Krishna De on web applications for business. I had to think really hard when Marie Boran asked me to talk to her about this because so much of what I use has been seamlessly integrated into my work and my initial reaction was - I'm not a tech person - well, it appears I kind of am. When I did reflect I realised that I use the following on a daily basis
Firefox
Google
Google alerts
Gmail
Zotera
Google Scholar
Skype
MSN
Bloglines
coComment
Stumble Upon
My website and blog
Online library at the University
Endnote - particularly its ability to download searches and bibliographies from the web into my library
Meteor text messaging online
Delicious
Feedburner
Feedblitz
Technorati
Then there's Flickr which I use from time to time and do newspapers count if you don't pick them up via RSS?
I still haven't taken the leap to Facebook or MySpace and I don't have a Twitter account - I'm ambivalent about them and maybe I'll write a longer, more considered post some time about my ambivalence.
And I'm also sure that as soon as I post this I'll think of a bunch of other applications I use that I take for granted...
I am Northern Rock customer - I'm not sure whether to be scared, bemused or angry right now. With all the media hype about bail outs and share prices plunging you'd think that somebody, somewhere would think about communicating with customers. 
Northern Rock's website is no doubt under siege and their home page assures us that there are a few delays but no problems. Attempts to log into accounts are then met with this announcement which is effectively blocking access to my account and my money. Phones are ringing out and there seems to be nothing that resembles a customer service or communications strategy to deal with the rising level of anxiety about where our money is, whether it's safe and how we go about getting access to it.
As Johnnie rightly points out
Good grief. Here's a bank who's shares have plummeted 30%, with customers lining up at branches this morning. Do they have no clue about damage limitation? Do they not get that by not really acknowledging what's happening and talking to customers about it, they make the situation worse?Now if they'd had a corporate blog, they might have had someone in there with the wit to write something in plain English that could have been reassuring. But no, it's the stony silence of denial. That just adds to my sense of their incompetence.
and I'm in total agreement with him. With all of the banking scandals we've had in this country over the past 10 years you'd think that Northern Rock would see an opportunity here do do things differently - Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Update 16 September
The following was posted on the Northern Rock website when I tried to log in today: and here's a link to a Q and A posted on the site.
Dear Customer
May I begin by offering you my sincere apologies for any inconvenience you have suffered in dealing with Northern Rock during the last few days. Customer service is of paramount importance to us and due to the circumstances that surround us, you have been let down. Thank you so much for your patience, particularly when using our website which has been running very slowly due to the number of people working online.
Let me now reassure you. Your money is safe with us and if you want some, or all of it back, then you are perfectly entitled to it. Whilst you may have to wait a little longer than usual to receive it, you will get it. However, your savings are secure and there is no need for you to withdraw your money based on our recent announcement, and the widespread media coverage that has ensued. The Bank of England has agreed to provide a funding facility to enable us to manage through the current global liquidity crisis. They would not have done so, if we were not a solvent, adequately capitalised, well run bank. I hope this helps to reassure you.
Your custom is very important to us and I sincerely hope you choose to stay with us along with the vast majority of our customer base.
Yours sincerely
Adam J Applegarth
Chief Executive
16 September 2007
It has been a long while since I've been so WOW'd by a business model as I've been this morning. Simply put, this is the BEST template I've seen for building a home-based practice from, of all people, a physician
So says Matt Homann about Dr Jay Parkinson a Brooklyn based physician who's breaking all of the rules. He has a web based practice where you can sign up for appointments (click here for his schedule) .. not only that but you can reach him via text, chat, email or phone. From his website:
• I AM A NEW KIND OF PHYSICIAN.
• I strictly make house calls either at your home or work.
• Once you become my patient and I've personally met you, we can also e-visit by video chat, IM and email for certain problems and follow-ups.
• I'm based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My fees are very reasonable.
• I'm extremely accessible. Contact me by phone, email, IM, text, or video chat. Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM. 24/7 for emergencies.
• I specialize in young adults age 18 to 40 without traditional health insurance.
• When you need more than I provide, I make sure you wisely spend your money and pay the lowest price for the highest quality.
• I've gathered costs for NYC specialists, medications, x-rays, MRIs, ER visits, blood tests, etc...just like a Google price search.
• I mix the service of an old-time, small town doctor with the latest technology to keep you and your bank account healthyl
Matt is recommending this model for lawyers, I can see myriad applications for a model like this and I wonder how it might work for the medical community on this side of the pond if they were brave enough to take the leap? I wonder does Dr Jay do cyber based consultations with people outside of the United States...lots to think about here particularly for the 'helping professions.'
Last week Johnnie Moore, Matt Moore and I had a conversation about the shadow side of organisations. Part one of this is available as a podcast (click here) - show notes will follow and thanks to Johnnie for all the technical work. I hope you find the discussion interesting and do leave comments and feedback.
Update: Johnnie has written up some extensive show notes from the podcast which I am republising here:
Here are the show notes. Warning: These are unreliable. The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.
The elephant in the corner
0.00 Introductions and what this is about: the Elephant in the Corner and things that don’t get talked about
0.50 Annette asks Johnnie what prompted his focus on this? Why now? Johnnie describes a client conversation that may have pointed to his own shadow side… the “deep sense of ranklement” that suggests that there’s something for him to work on…
3.25 …and prompts Annette to look at how this might also be seen as a shadow on the client side “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?” Why does the shadow need to be hidden? Do we collude in scapegoating people inside organisations, or consultants that advise them?
“Difficult” people: scapegoats and clowns
