Pulling an All Nighter

Our Maximum Leader pulled an all nighter in her outdoor biology lab and decided to study her electronics by osmosis in the morning.


For more studious felines, visit this week's Friday Ark, Carnival of the Cats and the Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos.

Blogworld Expo 07 - Milbloggers, the DoD and the Media

I'm here at Blogworld Expo this week and will be posting notes from the sessions I attend. This one was about how milbloggers are changing the way wars are reported. It was a mediocre session, but the panelists were great. Later in this post I snark about what the DoD and the White House guy had to say, but let me be clear. The kinds of things that are interesting as you work out CONOPS for supporting milbloggers are not interesting to a general audience. That was the problem, not the panelists or the moderator.

Furthermore, those of us who love the milbloggers and folks like Michael Totten and Michael Yon were hoping to hear more about what they saw as the future of milblogging vs. the horrific reporting of the traditional media. There was a bit of red meat for us at the end, but for the most part this was a "how did the policy come to be" kind of session. That just isn't very compelling stuff.

Here are my notes from the session. I'll be happy to respond with greater detail in the comments of this post if anyone is interested.

Panelists included Blackfive, Michael Totten, a DoD blogger outreach fellow and someone from the White House. I'll track down the names later. In the meantime, here are my (occasionally snarky) notes.

• The DoD was interested in outreach to milbloggers because there were many stories that needed to be told that didn’t get the attention of the MSM. This topic is bureaucratic and kind of slow.


• If you really want to know what’s going on in Iraq, look at the aggregate of the blackfive interviews with the reconstruction teams. They have made an effort to reach out to people on the other side (what does that mean?), but they have not responded.


• Michael Totten went over as an individual and was given access to all kinds of things and his visit was not managed.


• This session drags from time to time with bureaucracy-speak and name dropping about this general or that. In any talk, organizational charts are death whether they're verbal or displayed.


• The administration and the DoD were looking for independent witnesses telling the soldiers’ stories. I’m looking for caffeine. Military journalists are less trusted because they’re, well, military journalists.


• Update: In retrospect, I clearly did not understand the purpose of the session. This is a key point right here. In a previous post, I complained about the staged nature of the CENTCOM press releases and videos and compared it to the YouTube work of the soldiers on the ground. Both the Bush administration and the DoD saw this same thing and that's why they're working with the milbloggers.


• There’s a long discussion about how the idea of allowing milbloggers into the mix was sold to higher authorities like the military brass and the administration. The resulting incredibly dull conversation is an excellent argument against big government. Government meetings and government decisions are about as dull and slow moving as one can imagine. Here we’re talking about private citizens going into a shooting war and it couldn’t be duller if we were discussing how paint is mixed at Home Depot.


• These folks met with President Bush to discuss the role of milbloggers in getting the word out about what the troops are doing in the field. Blackfive was a part of this and experienced all kinds of trouble afterwards, being accused by left wing commenters of being a tool for the administration. However, the families of the soldiers and the soldiers themselves really appreciate their blogging.


• The biggest problem with the traditional media is that they don’t embed. Many of the journalists are not allowed to embed by their editors. Totten saw all kinds of things while he was embedded, but very little violence. It’s not the kind of thing that the AP would publish. Michael Totten met the people of Iraq and the soldiers themselves. You can’t make headlines out of this. Instead, the MSM stays in the hotels in the Green Zone and uses Iraqi stringers to collect data so that they can create a story every day. Stories of people aren’t published on a daily basis by the AP. They’re looking for explosions and death every day because that’s what the newspapers publish.


• Blogging, being liberated from such requirements, gives the blogger insights. Reporters also don’t like to embed because they get too close to the soldiers to write objectively.


• Analysis a day later: The underlying fear is that the reporter will grow to morally differentiate the American soldiers helping the people Iraq and the insurgents and terrorists blowing up civilians indiscriminately. This is a problem with the underlying philosophical foundations of modern journalism, that they deny the existence of good and evil and instead cast everything as differing, equally valid points of view.


• The reporters write about what goes on outside the wire when they never go outside the wire themselves.


• Now we’re back to talking about the administration. No! Help! I can’t take any more! Milbloggers were important to the President because he, too wanted access to the troops without a barrier or interpreter. That was interesting. Why did it take 5 minutes to say this?


• More bureaucracy talk. I’m surfing the net thanks to the free wireless connection provided by blogworld expo. I think it’s time for a cheezburger.


• The DoD guy is telling a story about how a Marine Corps general wasn’t able to get his story out about what was going on in Iraq until he held a bloggers’ roundtable phone conference. The quality of the questions asked by the bloggers were way past anything the Washington Post was asking. The WaPo took the transcript of the conference call and wrote stories out of it.


• The traditional media freaked out over the bloggers having a meeting with the President and the interviews with the Marine general.

There. That's it for this workshop.

Blogworld Expo 07 - Corporate and CEO Blogging

I'm here at Blogworld Expo this week and will be posting notes from the sessions I attend. This one was about how to manage a corporate blog and how to get the CEO to blog, if you can. It was an outstanding session.

Here are my notes from the session. I'll be happy to respond with greater detail in the comments of this post if anyone is interested.

Note: I will come back and clean this up this evening and add the links to the sites mentioned.

• We’re being moderated by the woman who wrote the Corporate Blogging Book. I wish I’d brought my copy to get an autograph.


• Executing a corporate blog takes a lot of work. How to manage it, who to blog, how to deal with legal issues and so forth. Corporations are afraid of exposing themselves on blogs because they don’t want to face the criticism.


• Corporations are also afraid of losing control of the blog.


• Kodak blogger was present. She is an information designer and had been blogging for some time as a private person when she was chosen as the corporate blogger. The idea came out of the PR department. Their management chain agreed to it and they launched right away. They use an external host for their blog so they could focus on the content and not the system. They don’t do a CEO blog, instead they blog about the regular people who work for Kodak. It’s all about the stories of the photographers within the company. A Thousand Words is the name of their blog. It’s a big group effort.


• They have touching stories on their blog such as a new mother who saw her premature infant for the first time through a photo as she recovered from emergency surgery. It’s all about the stories represented by the photos.


• HP runs several blogs, from everyone like their LaserJet VP to folks in their R&D labs. HP provides the platform to their people and lets them blog. They have to deal with information distribution issues such as intellectual property and maintaining a positive image


• The blogger in chief of Cisco was here. Everyone in Cisco is challenged to use the web to extend the reach of the company. All of their bloggers are public policy experts in their fields. They need a PR person attached to each of their blogs who is ultimately responsible for the content and the conversations that go on in the comments. Cisco has an op-ed strategy overarching this effort. They aren’t heavy handed in the management of the content. Their CEO is active and vocal, but is not a typist. He’s not going to blog, but they tried to capture some of his speaking at conferences on video. That didn’t work too well, but they moved to doing a once a weekly vcast. These vcasts are scripted via a set of questions and it takes about 5 minutes to capture the vcast. It’s quick and painless and works very well. They embed these videos within their corporate blogs. They have about 15 external corporate blogs now. They ask bloggers to post at least twice a week.


• Bloggirl and blogboy from Southwest airlines spoke. Nuts about Southwest is the name of their blog. They had both done blogs before. There’s a theme in this. The corporate blogs are being written by people who have blogged on the outside before. Blogboy is an exception to this. He was a PR or marketing person first. Southwest values transparency within their organization and so the blogging was a natural fit. They have a team of 30 employees who blog from all areas of their company including mechanics, pilots and so forth. It is a major time commitment to keep this going. It gradually became a piece of their lives, but that adjustment was non-trivial. They’ve seen a big response in the media. They’ve discovered that their blog became an immediate focus group for their customers. Issues like assigned seating were addressed on the blog with a huge amount of feedback from their customers.


• Southwest discovered that sometimes the comments get personal and they’ve had to grow a thicker skin. They’ve used their blog to keep anti-Southwest publicity from getting out of hand. Their blog is moderated and managed to protect the corporate brand.


• Essentially, each of these corporations have picked management or marketing types that are responsible for the tone and the content of the blog. They keep the reins very loose and pretty much let things go as they will. They step in when the discussion becomes personal or abusive. Other than that, these blogs are all about giving a personal and human face to the company. Most of them mentioned how important it was to blog personal stories that represent the role the company has in society.


• All of these companies treat external bloggers as valued partners. They interact with them and give them heads up about things are coming up. The extra attention they give the private bloggers pays off in big ways. Bloggers are writing about them already, this gives them a chance to cooperate (not co-opt) private bloggers. Southwest has even exchanged links with the Delta Airlines blog.


• You have to have an inside evangelist to get this kind of thing going. Everyone is contributing to these efforts from their IT departments to their PR department to management to the bloggers themselves. HP is doing a significant push on internal blogs to use as a collaborative workspace.


• Blogging is not going to change your corporate culture, it’s going to expose it. If you have an unhappy or dysfunctional company, blogging isn’t going to change that, it’s going to reveal it to everyone else.


• Management was convinced when they saw how other companies were blogging, like GM.


• Southwest has not had to get their legal department involved much at all. It has yet to be a big problem.


• The ROI on their blogs has been the comments from the public and links from other blogs. They don’t worry that much about traffic counts. It’s all about the interaction. This is kind of the same argument that I’ve used trying to convince people at my work to blog. It’s not getting everyone to read your blog, it’s about getting the right people to read the blog.


• How do you get internal blogs going and change the culture? Cisco just made the tools available and did not ask individuals to blog. It’s not generational as much as it is personality-based. Some people are natural communicators and some people aren't.

If I can, I'll find links to other bloggers who attended this session and post them here.

Update: Rachel over at Fiat Lux blogged her session notes as well.

Update 2: Nancy over at RRW Consulting took great notes on this one and posted them on their blog.

Blogworld Expo 07 - Thursday Keynote

Thursday's keynote was given by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress. Here are a few (snarky) notes.

WordPress representation was huge here. The majority of the audience were WordPress users.

WordPress has 350 servers and one server admin. 100M unique hits per month, supported by 18 people. That’s probably not a perfectly accurate analogy as they are not content creators. They hire very deliberately, looking for the ultimately productive. This mirrors what I heard at the Branding Conference I went to last year where Starbucks shaped their company through the hiring process.

OK, I quit. This is just two guys yakking at each other about one of them. It's not very interesting. The blogosphere has shown that while some people have great talent and are great to listen to, no one is great to listen to as they talk endlessly about themselves.

Blogworld Expo 07 - Blogging and Your Brand

I'm here at Blogworld Expo this week and will be posting notes from the sessions I attend. This one was about brand management in the age of the online community.

Here are my notes from the session. I'll be happy to respond with greater detail in the comments of this post if anyone is interested.

• The panelists asked what everyone was interested in discussing before they began the session. At a later talk, a different panelist made the shrewd observation that the act of the panel having a discussion with the audience was the essence of online communities. It's not a broadcast, it's a conversation. In any case, in this session there were several suggestions. How do you keep a consistent Public Affairs message coming through your corporate bloggers as they blog? I asked how individual employees could use blogs to brand themselves within the organization in order to promote themselves and their own skills.


• It’s all about making connections; it is no longer about selling and telling. Communications are more bidirectional.


• From an external point of view, the blog allows you to respond to the posts and news and consumer reviews of your products. It allows you coordinate your organizational message because you have an online presence that can be inserted as URLs into the discussions on other sites and forums where you are already being discussed.


• Marketers and publicity departments can no longer control their brand, they can only help guide the discussion.


• The ROI is difficult to measure for online community participation compared to traditional marketing. (I thought it was really the other way around because you can track referring URLs for visitors to your site.)


• Individuals on the outside have an easier time creating content about you because they do not have an approval chain to go through.


• The Internet has already surpassed television as the “most essential” medium by people 12-44 - Edison Media Research. For example, Sermo.com is an online group of 31,000 MDs sharing information. Wow!


• "Whether or not we choose to be a part of the dialogue, the dialogue is going to happen” – Coca Cola’s Tim Kopp.


• Because the engagement is a dialogue, the discussion has to be an honest one. You can’t maintain a relationship and continue as a total honk for your organization. You have to recognize and be able to discuss your shortcomings.


• The 80-20 rule applies here, too. 20% of all content authors cause 80% of your problems. Dealing with the 20% who are natural grumblers can end up as an isometric exercise. Some of these grumblers inhabit blogs and forums and you just have to live with their rantings. You can't let them blast you on the Internet with impunity, but you have to recognize that there are those who will never be satisfied with you no matter what.


• The speakers showed a pretty cool social network connection map of blogs discussing your products and gave them red, yellow and green icons for a measure of how positive they were about the stuff. I need to find the link to that and insert it here.


• By blogging you are increasing the number of people who will be talking about your products. Imagine this as a project that you are trying to sell. By having a lot of people know about it, you can generate buzz about it at many levels and many locations.


• Check out the Autodesk communities website. They’ve got some great communities going on.

For me, the theme of this discussion was that you cannot control the discussions about you, you can only guide and correct them. If I can, I'll find links to other bloggers who attended this session and post them here.

Blogworld Expo 07 - Integrating the New Media into your Marketing Mix

I'm here at Blogworld Expo this week and will be posting notes from the sessions I attend. This one was about how you can make use of the new media for marketing. It was an outstanding session.

Here are my notes from the session. I'll be happy to respond with greater detail in the comments of this post if anyone is interested.

• Interest precedes spending. You need chatter and buzz before people open their wallets. For example, it's unusual for sponsors to fund your proposal if others aren't telling them it's a good idea, too.


• Using web 2.0 technologies is not the same thing as having an online community. Your communications have to be bidrectional. For example, Bearing Point uses an internal wiki for collaboration. It allows for the spontaneous creation of project teams. Their wiki will be supplanting their current knowledge management system. They are able to upload documents and make them searchable on their wiki.


• Corporate wikis are not there to replace Wikipedia, but to fill in the descriptions of projects and acronyms peculiar to you.


• Bearing Point went on to create a wiki for marketing purposes. It looks cool and you can find it here. 50,000 people have participated on their wiki in the past 6 months. Wow.


• Everyone agreed that your IT department has got to be heavily involved in all of this.


• Social Media Group was next. They are working on a global social media effort for Ford. They also showed how social media marketing worked for Firefox.


• Social Media Group tried to do this same thing for Harlequin for a series of vampire novels. They created a MySpace page for the main character. They ran it for 16 weeks and then stopped. The demands from the MySpace community never stopped and Harelquin didn’t have the person to continue the interaction. People got unhappy about not being able to connect to the lead character because no one was listening any more. That’s an old media approach. The marketing campaign has a finite duration in the old way, but these days it is an evolving, infinite conversation.


• Andy Beal of the Marketing Pilgrim blog spoke next. He was great. “Radically Transparent” is his new book. Nike is doing it well by developing communities on line to keep track of progress and compete with others. Sounds cool!


• Andy said that Apple doesn’t get it. They are a totally closed group. They don’t need it because they have a group of insane fanatics as customers. Apple’s customer service ratings are down.


• One of the panelists mentioned how important it was to use your own products. The original users within their company helped to guide the development of their products.


• It's crucial to note that you are not building a community, you are joining one that already exists. What a great statement!


• The companies that have a strong social marketing presence are the ones that have been turned over to the employees.


• In the case of companies whose products are torched on blogs, they need to engage the blogs in a discussion. The conversation is going to happen with or without you. If people are saying bad things about your products you need to know about it and get involved.

Like I said, this was an outstanding session. Comments and questions are welcome. If I can find other bloggers who went to this one, I'll post their links here.

George Bush vs Harry Reid

George Bush.

Harry Reid.

Ron Paul is Using iPhones to Send Porn to Iraq

Ha! Take that you iRobots, Ronulans and lefty peace-creeps! You all came over to see what this was about and found nothing at all. Har har har!

Muuhahahaha! I've created the ultimate post! It simultaneously irritates every fanatical religious group in the blogosphere!
Feel free to get your primal scream therapy over with in the comments, losers. Maybe you could all combine to tell us how if we went to the gold standard, shiny toy phones would be cheaper and would help us negotiate with a lot of maniacs who slather themselves in Semtex before going to the shopping mall.

Update: I couldn't think how to insert impeaching Chimpy McBushHitler into the title and not have Blogger cut it out of the URL.

Just Because People Stand in Line Doesn't Mean the Product is Great

In the comments of yesterday's smash hit post about gPhones and iPhones was this nugget.

A relatively-inexpensive gPhone is going to take market-share away from the notoriously-pricey iPhone? When people were lining-up ahead of time - at the original price - for the iPhone?

People lining up for a product only indicates scarcity, not overall popularity.

In the Soviet Union, people lined up outside of stores, too.
At work, a blogger friend of mine posted about standing in line for the new OS (Leopard?). He talked about getting his t-shirt to go with it. Had the OS been sold at every computer store in the counntry like Windows is, he wouldn't have had to stand in line.

There. I think that's enough rattling iRobot cages for one day.

Next up: The mother of all posts. How iPhones make it possible for Ron Paul to send porn to Iraq! If that doesn't skewer every Internet nutjob's sacred cow, nothing will.

Getting my Daughter to Make a Budget

...only required that I deny her an advance on her allowance.

I am doing my best to teach my kids how to take care of themselves financially. With both of them, I required that they read The Kids Money Book prior to receiving an allowance or spending any money received as gifts. (This rule did not apply prior to an age where the book was readable.) Additionally, the allowance was predicated on them maintaining an account book and putting half of their money into savings.

My son read the money book instantly and began receiving his allowance as soon as he was able. My daughter put off reading the money book for three years and repeatedly had to deal with my refusals to allow her to spend her money. She finally got around to reading it early this year. She now maintains her account book and is doing very well with that. She also spends her money almost before it has a chance to settle in her pockets.

Recently, she and I took a bike ride on the boardwalk in Pacific Beach. There are some very nice stores there and my daughter decided to stop and shop in one of them. While I watched the bikes, she went in to look for a hat. She came back out and excitedly told me about a hat she just had to have. Unfortunately, it cost $2 more than she had available. She begged for a loan.

I almost loaned her the money. I had been firm with her up to that point, but I started thinking about how responsible she had been and how long it might be before we came back, but I decided to turn her down and live with the sulking just to see what would happen.

She was very disappointed, but didn't sulk. She went back into the store dejectedly to see if there was anything she could buy with the funds she had. In the end, the storekeeper sold her the hat she wanted at a $2 discount. She was elated and I wondered what effect his generosity would have. Would she learn that begging paid off?

Nope. A few days later, she opened her account book and in the back of it wrote a list of the things she wanted to save for. She very seriously told me that she intended to save her money so that things like the near-miss on the hat never happened again. My one little "No" changed her from a spending maniac into a saver.

She still falls off the wagon from time to time, but she acknowledges that these events are her own doing and understands the effect it has on future purchases. That's about all a dad can ask for.

For more posts of families and finances, visit this week's Carnival of Family Life, Festival of Frugality and Carnival of the Capitalists.

Google's gPhone About to Blow the iPhone Away

Today's Wall Street Journal has a page one article about Google unveiling their new operating system and business partnerships to create a generation of open systems phones.

After months of anticipation, a group including Google and a number of mobile-handset makers, cellular carriers and other technology companies plans to make new software available -- free of charge -- to power mobile phones that will start hitting the market in the second half of 2008. The move paves the way for mass-market cellphones that will bring consumers' experience on the mobile Web closer to that of personal computers. And Google is betting that its ad revenue will surge as a result.

It sounds like a winner for both companies and consumers.

Google said it would likely share revenue from ads with wireless carriers; the carriers then could reduce the cost of handsets or wireless fees for consumers. Google also could make money in other ways, possibly by getting a share of monthly revenue from carriers or selling a rate plan for a package of applications.

Google is counting on the many developers who build applications for PCs and the Web to start making products for the phone. Google said the Android platform will make it easy for developers to write applications that meld different data sources, such as a service that shows users where their friends are at any given moment on a map. For U.S. consumers, Android could speed the arrival of advanced applications already available abroad, such as multiplayer gaming.

Elsewhere, it looks like Mac addicts are whistling past the graveyard.

Two days ago, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, Marissa Mayer commented on the iPhone, highlighting how well Google applications worked on it, and admiring the rich user-interface features.

Obviously, Google executives have a very high admiration for the iPhone, and it’s common knowledge that many of their top engineers are also devoted Apple computer and iPod users.

Some have opined that the proposed Gphone could be intended to compete with the popular iPhone, but there’s some reason to not believe that speculation.

The iPhone is pretty so Google won't kill it?

The assertion that this is not competition for the iPhone doesn't make much sense for me. It looks like this is the Mac-PC competition of the 80s all over again. More from the post referenced above: only two second-party applications have been allowed on the iPhone thus far, and Google built both of those: Google Maps and YouTube for the iPhone. Meanwhile, Google is partnering with 30 or more other companies to produce applications and hardware for these phones and that's just the start.

If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that we're about to see Apple get its brains beaten out all over again and for exactly the same reasons. Other than the iRobots who would buy anything Apple sells, this is going to provide cheaper and more flexible non-iPhone handsets for everyone. I've played with a couple of iPhones. They're very nice, but their web browsing is too slow and their price is way too high. Give me a cheap, open source mobile IP platform and I'd consider buying it. An iPhone? No way.

Update: This post was linked at some Mac fanatic website and now all the Ron Paul maniacs iRobots are rushing over to bludgeon me to death. Um, guys? You're in second place in the PC world. Not first. You do not have the largest market share there. It's for a reason. A lot like this one.

Personally, I'm still running XP and I really like it. I can do everything I want to do on it. And yes, iRobots, I can even edit videos and music! No, really! I can! Anyway, Google's model is a lot closer to the one I eventually see myself adopting. My next machine will most likely be a Linux box because it will do what I want to do and it will be cheaper. Cheap is good.

Update 2: I did a follow up post to this.

I Hate the Seattle Seahawks

I had a pretty good week in my football pools this week. I might have even won the money, I did so well. I might have, if it had not been for the Seattle Seahawks.

Seahawk games are always a coin flip. It doesn't matter if they're playing St. Louis, Indy, New England, Detroit, anyone. Every game is a 50-50 proposition with them. They're all coin flips and I always get them wrong. I took them against Cleveland this week and they managed to bungle two opportunities to win the game at the end only to lose in overtime.

Mike Holmgren yelling at one of his players. We're doing the same thing the whole game.
Sickening. Just sickening.

Marques Colston Has Another Great Game

My unoffical client, Marques Colston, had another outstanding game yesterday as he caught 10 passes for 159 yards in the Saints 41-24 win over Jacksonville. After an 0-4 start, the Saints have now won four straight and are just 1/2 game out of first place in the NFC South, trailing only Tampa Bay.

The Jaguars saw a whole lot of this as the Saints rolled right over them.
Here at the 'Post, we never lost faith in either Marques or the Saints.

Fred Thompson on Abortion

Here's another reason why I'll vote for Fred.

Several things to note.

1. He answers the questions directly.

2. He is intellectually consistent.

3. He is not trying to be the moral police one way or the other.

As a pro-life Catholic, I can live with all of that.

Want.

Want.


Explanation here and here.

October Sunset

I took this picture a few days ago before I left on another business trip. Enjoy!

My Son

Some people have wondered what my kids look like. I've been reluctant to publish their pictures on the Internet, but after blogging for a year and a half, I finally feel like we're friends and I'm comfortable publishing some family photos. Here's my son in his Halloween costume.

Isn't he a handsome lad?

Breaking Bread in the Feline Theocracy

This week I had a business trip to Houston. While there, I managed to get some time to drive up to Beaumont and break bread (tortillas, actually) with our Official Artist, Justin. It was really cool to put a real person with a blog.

Muchas gracias, amigo.

Dr. Muhammed Al-'Arifi on Proper Woman-Beating Techniques

Our friend Wollf over at Howling at the Moon posts a very sharp piece about Dr. Muhammed Al-'Arifi's advice to muslim men.

"Beating in the face is forbidden, even when it comes to animals," he explained. "Even if you want your camel or donkey to start walking, you are not allowed to beat it in the face. If this is true for animals, it is all the more true when it comes to humans. So beatings should be light and not in the face."

Thank you, you piece of human debris, for clearing that up for us "Infidels". Oh, that we were as "enlightened" as you...

As I understand this, we are not to debase our wives, read women, by beating them in the face, thus treating them with LESS respect than we would our Friggin' donkey? Wouldn't want to do That...Make SURE, gentlemen, to treat your female friends with the SAME respect that you would any other animal.

It is NOT one World, One People out there, students.

Emphasis mine.

Wollf obliterates the entire foundation of multiculturalism in less than 500 words. Well done, sir.

John Edwards Whacks Hillary with a 2x4

I'm not fan of My Little Pony (John Edwards), but this ad his team created is utterly devastating.

H/T: RedState