B. Mann Consulting

I went over to Elastic Path in the pouring Vancouver winter rain yesterday and did a podcast with Dave Olsen and Jason Billingsley. We talked about blogging for retailers (white paper), which Elastic Path has put together a ton of information for online retailers on what they need to know about blogging.

Luckily, I had just been reading A VC's post on Why I'd Make Every E-Merchant Become a Blogger, which covers lots of the same ground.

I really enjoyed doing the podcast with Dave. Looking back, I've thought about and written on these topics for many years now, and it feels comfortable and natural to be sitting around talking about them. More podcasts. How? Not sure :P

Elastic Path is an interesting company here in our Vancouver back yard. They're doing very interesting stuff, with more on the way. How are they doing? Well, their demo site ranks so highly for waterproof cameras that they had to plaster it with notices to make it clear it was a demo. Combine that with a blogging strategy and you could sell a lot of whatever widgets you're selling. 

Today is the last (extended) day for speaker submissions for Northern Voice 2007. We'd love to have your thoughts and submissions -- the last minute rush to enter submissions has led to a fabulous selection that is going to be hard to choose from.

The organizers are meeting next week to fight tooth and nail for their favourite entries. In the mean time, registration is open, so you can go ahead and get your tickets now. We've got slightly more room than in past years, but we've sold out every year so far...

And what about Boris' traditional Northern Voice crazy plans? Well, we're still debating, but I might get to put together a geocaching / GPS adventure. We'll start it as one of the last sessions of Moose Camp, and end the day wandering the UBC campus with GPS in hand. Ideally, we'll have some photographers along to document the process, and we'll be able to combine GPS timelogs with photos and see it all on a map.

Do you know someone that knows all about geocaching? I'd like to talk to them...

Recall the rant I had on guest posting. I was recently looking at my GigaOm subscribtion again, and was preparing to get all pissy about not being able to subscribe just to Om Malik.

Except, of course, since they're using Wordpress and have actually set up separate authors, it's actually built in functionality.

So, if you want to read all posts by Om, just subscribe to this feed: http://gigaom.com/?feed=rss2&author=om-malik

I feel so much happier now that I can have Om delivered just for me. That's not to say that postings by Liz Gannes et al aren't good (quite the opposite, in fact). But in my mind, the mixing of author posts was diluting the "voice" that I heard from Om. Not having interacted with the other authors as much, it will take me more time to recognize their voice and style as belonging to a particular person. Otherwise, it's just news.

I've been a long time user of NetNewsWire -- the best desktop news aggregator app on any platform. But I'm switching to Google Reader.

Reason number one is portability. Forget synching...it just doesn't work reliably, and I don't like NewsGator's online version at all. I'm now on my Nokia E61 phone a lot, and the mobile version of Google Reader works great 

Reason number two is that I want to share. My delicious postings are one of the main ways I've been sharing lightly -- light blog posting in general, except for brief spurts like today. I think that Google Reader will make it easier for me to share. For example, here are all the postings I've gathered in my "bryght" folder. It's not ideal --  I can only tag, star, or share items, without leaving any commentary as I do in delicious -- but I expect it will get better.

The big downside of Google Reader? No authenticated feeds. I have many beefs with Google and the way they're dealing (or not dealing, as the reality is) with identity: this lack of support for authenticated feeds seems another aspect of this. 

I made some comments today during Steve Rubel's Gnomedex session. Steve asked, what are PR and marketing professionals doing right and wrong? What do people who blog want/need from such departments?

After much arm waving I got Steve to notice me, and I answered with three P's.

1. Permalinks: folks, this is such a simple one. Don't make your press release page be "press.php" and old news be "archive.php". Have a single, unique link for each press release, news story, product, or (*gasp*) blog post you make. This means not trying to make me figure out a crazy javascript or Flash navigation system, but simply having a clear, single link I can use to directly get to information. URL schemes like /news/2006/07/01/bigstory or /products/coolproduct/model-vw83 are some good examples.
2. Product Info: I like product info. I like permalinks to direct product info. I like tech specs, and I like easily grab-able (and even better, friendly licensed) product photos. Heck, encourage me to hotlink images from your corporate server. Include copy/paste code that includes the permalink and a caption that I can drop into any system that groks HTML. For bonus points, make a little Flash/Javascript/rotating GIF widget that I can put into a post.
3. Personality: yes, I want personality. This one is last, because a lot of corporates just can't get past legal, or want the community to bring in the personality. If you're not going to blog, perhaps upgrade your press release writer to someone with a little more human in their blood, or give me a contact that I can talk to/interview to get more of a human face to the information you're presenting.

It seems so simple. But I know how difficult this can be. Many marketing and PR departments rely on a chain of consultants, contractors, or other folks to manage their web presence somewhere down the line. PR types need to become actively vocal about the needs they have. The three P's might be a good place to start.

Tools never change anything. It is people seeing opportunities and grabbing them with those tools that change things. Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Three years ago today...

This is a great quote from Ton, as he posts on the three year anniversary of blogging. I'd like to think that I'm interested in making tools that make it really easy for people to see opportunities. That flexible tools can help people. But without the people, the tools can do nothing -- we are not like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, with dancing brooms toiling away. In man vs. machine, I am on the side of man....except I still try and build a better machine, and delete in the tinkering involved. Every new bolt I add, I see a new opportunity open up, and hope by making those tools available, people's opportunities will expand.

Happy anniversary, Ton. May every tool you choose open new opportunities.

No, really, we want people talking. Northern Voice 2006 is pretty much right around the corner. The official deadline is tomorrow* next week, Wednesday, Nov. 16th. So apply as a speaker. Remember, this is a very "open tent", not necessarily über techie conference. Come and share stories with us in Vancouver. It's going to be the same shareable size -- about 250 people give or take, except that day 1 is Moose Camp -- an open day for special interest groups or just old friends to take over the space. This is not a complete unconference -- maybe you want to organize a mini conference of 10 or 20 people that are all interested in the same subject. Head over to the wiki and self organize (and let us know, and we'll help make sure the word gets out).

I may actually extend this conference and try and gather people together for the week preceding Moose Camp/Northern Voice -- a gathering of open source CMS/Blogging tools to talk about cross platform issues and working more closely together on standards and interoperability. Watch this space for more info (think Vancouver/Whistler in February: how could you NOT want to come?). At the very least, there will likely be a DrupalCon Vancouver 2006. Moose Camp will be the culmination of this event, hopefully as fun as the BarCamp Amsterdam event I attended at Mediamatic. What can I say, I might just be addicted to these things...

So, after completing the previous post about storing video and other large files, I did go off and buy my AudioBlog.com membership for a year (you can try a 7 day free trial as well).

Over on my personal site, I posted my first moblog: I called into the AudioBlog phone number with my cell phone, recorded, and hit publish. I had previously set AudioBlog up with all my blog details (I have 4 set up so far -- this site, my personal site, Bryght, and Urban Vancouver), and you punch a code into your phone identifying the blog to which you want to publish. You can also just record and handle the publishing details later on through the website.

Everything went pretty easy, minus a few things I had to fiddle with in Drupal to get things working seamlessly. The two things you need to know here are 1) choose MovableType as your blog type...the Drupal one falls back to using the Blogger API, which doesn't even support titles, never mind categories; and 2) AudioBlog uses an iframe to display the Flash audio player, which won't display unless you have Full HTML and/or iframes not filtered by default.

I'm testing out Blog Flux -- they still have to come by and manually approve my blog (maybe that is just for the directory?), so we'll see what happens.

Colin mentioned an excellent use case for microformats to me: a standardized way of displaying information about music, most likely a direct one-to-one relation in XHTML of the ID3 data that is embedded in MP3 files today.

Since audio files are binary files, in many cases quite huge, having basic crawlers parse them to get this ID3 would introduce a ton of overhead. Having this available in a human-readable way that is also parse-able would be great.

I'm sure Colin will expand on this mini-post (nudge, nudge). Update: He did - Micro formats and audio = peanut butter and chocolate