Alphablogs

Recently isabella mori and I participated in a stimulating discussion about blogging and civic engagement, and these are some of my thoughts since that discussion. (Apologies for long posting.)

How can a city use web 2.0 as an effective tool for citizenship? We know that apathy is one of the greatest problems of our time, and that a city thrives through the involvement of its participants. Particularly culturally, a city’s life comes through the active engagement of everyone involved. It’s just not enough to live here and pay taxes.

But there are serious issues that block the use of Web 2.0, mainly legal exposures combined with unfamiliarity with the process - despite the fact that blogs have existed for over 10 years now. There is a reluctance or resistance to opening the virtual doors and letting everyone have a say. Control and liability exposure could be the biggest hindrance, from a city’s side. From the public side we have to ask, “Who needs it?”

Most publications and media outlets and even websites now have blog capabilities, but people only connect to issues (or trivia) they care about. That is not apathy. A blog about your cat wearing cute hats is more relevant than a city notice of a proposed development on a building site.

The microtargeting of the long tail might be a good place to start here, as we know that neighbourhood issues are often important to residents. My own Carrall Street Journal is a contribution to the hyper-local phenomenon. I could envision a city fostering, hosting and housing many such hyperlocal blogs, going deeper than even neighbourhood blogs; we could have more such hyper-local blogs based on streets or even parts of streets.

Civic events and issues are now crowdsourced news via vehicles such as NowPublic, a fantastic Vancouver-based company with a global reach. This coverage could be encouraged by any city with a hyper-local network. It would then be natural to extrapolate the kind of sharing we see on Facebook and other social networking tools to also include civic sharing, information exchange between cities on an unprecedented scale. Areas developing through the arts in Portland (such as Alberta Street) could connect with similar activities on Main Street in Vancouver, for example.

It all comes down to attention. If I pay attention to my own personal life, I may not be really participating in the civic process or in my own community. The process affects me but I don’t add my voice to it. It is easier and more fun to put a hat on my cat, take a photo and reach my friends on Facebook.

Another impediment to civic involvement via web 2.0 is that it may not love you back. As someone mentioned, you put out your images and words - but how much comes back to you? Even well-intentioned sites such as Change Everything, VanCity’s brilliant model for personal and public engagement, could lose its community if it doesn’t include a true potential for response. Once everyone has poured out their desires to help and vows to change, is there follow up, connection, or to put it more simply: does it love you back? Well, that’s one thing your cat will do, so the cat in cute hats blog just may be more satisfying and have more power for you. Saatchi & Saatchi understand this intimate relationship we have with the people, places and things we can’t live without. They see our need for love, intimacy, depth and satisfaction perfectly, and demonstrate it through their crowd-sourced site, Lovemarks: the future beyond brands. A city could take heed of these web-community examples to create something that could bring out the heart of the city, reveal what needs to be preserved, what can be developed, and how people can be engaged.

We can all see our place in our own city via Google maps, it’s another point of view that reveals our connection. While guerilla gardeners look for little bits of untended land to plant seeds in, any one of us can look our our windows and set up a free blog about the place where we live. Remember “block watch”? We can call it “Blog Watch” - hyper-local citizen journalism.

The issues are not limited to any one city - but as these memes play themselves out in the place where we live, we have an opportunity to create dialogue around them on a local and meaningful level.

The question is how to engage a population of individuals each wired into their own private and specific network - texting, wearing earpieces, going through public space in private bubbles. What is meaningful enough to create engagement?

A city that finds this answer would be a bold leader, one of the first in civic engagement through the new web/mobile technologies, beginning to create a place where every citizen can make a difference. As people we need to connect about what makes us care: creativity, culture, business opportunities, support, schools, classes, parks, festivals, you name it - all the aspects of a city that are part of our lives, and bring life to our communities.

(This post was included in the All For Women Blog Carnival) 

The blog of the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition is a good example of how a blog can serve exactly the same function of a “normal” web site – and more.

In fact, if you’re the average internet user, you probably will not even be able to tell right away that this is a blog. The first thing you see is a full navigation bar, directing the reader to exactly the kinds of information they’re looking for – news about skateboarding, skateboard parks, links to more information.

It’s a great communication tool, perfect for an association. It has

• information for the casual looker like me, whose interest in skateboarding stems mostly from our blogging friend Tina, who used to be very involved in the community
• information for skateboarders who may be visiting or new to Vancouver
• information and news for the existing skateboarding community in the area, including information about volunteering
• private communication capability for members
• images
• video

They’re up-to-date, and they offer lots of ways to contact them.

Ideas for improvement would be to put some information in the “events” and “donations” area, or, alternatively, take those links off until the information can be posted. Also, there could be a few more categories.

All in all – I really like this blog. In fact, I’ll recommend it to VanCal, a new blog about inexpensive entertainment in Vancouver.

technorati tags: vancouver, skateboards, events, communities, parks

Welcome to the first edition of Canada 9-5 – a blog carnival that presents you with Canadian blogs that talk about work and business. Mostly we’ll be featuring blogs by small business owners. However, we’re also interested in other topics, such as people blogging about their work, blogs published by associations, and probably all sorts of other topics that we haven’t even thought of yet.

So here we go – our first edition!

Becoming a Successful Consultant
Consultant Journal by Vancouver marketing consultant Andrea Coutu takes advantage of a specific niche: not only does she know about marketing, but she takes it one step further, by sharing her knowledge about how to market consultants of all striped. And even there she specializes: Writing sales proposals is something that she discusses frequently in her blog.

Home-Based Businesses
Barbra Sundquist from Vancouver Island is someone who I’ve come across quite a bit here in the blogosphere. She obviously knows how to get her name out. Her specialty is home businesses. On her blog, HomeBusinessWiz, the article How One Woman Went from Olympic Champion to Motivational Speaker tells the story of how Lori-Ann Muenzer, a Canadian cycling record holder, two-time Olympian, and gold medalist at the 2004 Athens Olympics became a professional speaker.

Money Coach
Nancy Zimmerman is a money coach here in Vancouver. She has fabulous, down-to-earth tips on turning your financial life from worried drudgery to confident prosperity. And she practices what she preaches.

Real Estate
I like the tone of the Saskatoon Real Estate Centre Resource Blog - fresh, with pictures, interesting and entertaining topics, such as Dude, where’s my house? Winnipeg man charged with theft after house disappears.

Canada doesn’t do much business blogging yet. It’s not easy to find business blogs that are not directly related to technology.

I think that needs to change.

Not that we don’t want to feature technology bloggers – but we’re not going to concentrate on them, mostly because there are already lots of other avenues that do that, and there are many tech bloggers. We’re interested in who else is blogging.

If you have or know of a Canadian business blog, let us know here. The next edition will come out on September 8.

technorati tags: blog+carnivals, canada, canadian+blogs, canadian+business+blogs, small+business, corporate+blogging

The other day we were talking about why arts organizations should have blogs. Most of the reasons go for any organization.

Here is one more reason: blogs are a great way to report on past events. We all have very busy schedules and at any given time, we may have to choose between two or more things to do.

Just as an example, my friend Monica had already bought the whole weekend ticket for this year’s folk festival when she received an invitation to a fundraiser by another mutual friend, Haedy, for her Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk - so she just couldn’t make it to Haedy’s event. However, she has been a staunch supporter of this fundraising campaign for years and would really like to know what happened. She wants to be kept up to date.

This is not an isolated example; it’s probably happened to you before.

So – for those of you who weren’t there, and to show what such a report might look like, here’s a little recap of what happened at Haedy’s party on Sunday

One thing you need to know about Haedy is that she is a fabulous cook – and, let’s face it, a fanatic cook. So here she is, very, very sick, and what does she do? She cooks 100 cabbage rolls, 60 pieces of fish, 60 sausages, a gazillion devilled eggs, a bucketful of salad, 2 huge casseroles, 6 strudels – and the list goes on. Of course she had help, as usual, from Timmie and June – but still. Boy, Haedy, you’re crazy. And of course the food – all of it Hungarian, to celebrate her ethnic background – was mouth-watering to the extreme.

It wasn’t just a celebration of her background – it was a celebration of her whole life. Just because things aren’t looking good for her health doesn’t mean she can’t have a great party. So there was music, and Haedy dished up her sidesplitting stories, one after the other. As she was playing Pink Floyd’s The Wall, she told how as a teenager, to drive her mother crazy, she’d put it on full blast at 6 o’clock in the morning: “We don’t need no education …”

More sidesplitting happened when a friend of Liz’s led us through a 15-minute session of Laughter Yoga. Who is Liz? She is “the other grandmother” – last year, Haedy became a grandmother to her son Nick’s daughter Kiera. As I was looking down at Kiera from the podium – it was my job to be the bumbling MC – I realized that among the crowd, there was a distinct group of people in the room: five grandmothers, whose children had given birth to six grandchildren, every single one with Haedy’s help.

Yup, Haedy sure knows how to celebrate life.

technorati tags: arts+organization, associations, fundraisers, vancouver, weekend+to+end+breast+cancer

Wall Street Journal’s Happy Blogiversary article commemorates 10 years of blogging with brief blips of info from some a-list bloggers, and an interview with the creators of Blogger, among others. There’s an interesting slideshow of blog history, and the whole feature adds to the current ongoing chronicle of the mainstreaming of blogging.

The interview with the Blogger folks focused on the majority of their bloggers as individuals with only a few readers for their blogs, people wanting to post family photos and connect with only a few others. This is the general picture of the blogger, and one which has a definite place in the world of electronic communications, but it is only a small part of the picture. As Dave Watson pointed out in his recent Dot Comment article in the Georgia Straight, there is a wealth of useful niche-information out there, powered by passionate (dare I say obsessive?) people who blog directly and completely on their topics of interest.

The WSJ interviews also included a variety of known bloggers, each with their particular bent, all indicating the wider range that blogging now encompasses. Ultimately, blogging is here to stay, and is another aspect of the communication cornucopia (or is that dystopia?) in which we now function.

A friend sent me the WSJ link over the weekend, and I hesitated to link it to this posting as these things are often not available for long. Already the video component of the site has come down - but here’s a link to the text - try it and see if it still works.

(Aside: My friend had sent over this link because of my McLuhan interest. In the article, Tom Wolfe, blog curmudgeon, said: “One by one, Marshall McLuhan’s wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective “news” reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.
And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.”

Fair enough, but is this really a problem? Redefine “objective” as we redefine “news”.)

technorati tags: wall+street+journal, marshall+mcluhan, media, blogosphere, journalism, objectivity, news

At the last blog workshop we held, with members of the arts community, we found there were various levels of blog awareness and engagement. Some had blogs of their own, a few had helped start blogs for others, and some were only now becoming aware of blogging as a marketing tool for arts organizations. In our individual half-hour follow-up sessions with participants, we’ve found that many who had started one posting at the workshop haven’t yet taken the next steps to keep blogging.

Busy Carola Goetze of the JEM Gallery here in Vancouver has been playing with her blog, and her upcoming Gallery shows and events give her a nudge toward frequent posting. Go here to check it out so far, and while you’re there, sign in to her guest book, just to give her more encouragement.

We are looking for great things from Heather Bray from the Dance Centre, and Mirae Rosner at Neworld Theatre, and can’t wait to see what the Arts Council of Surrey comes up with when they get down to adding a blog component to their site.

Kim Lear, who had already started the blog, Write to Speak, for her communications services, is definitely ready for the next step into the linklove that Isabella touched upon during the workshop.

I won’t mention all the workshop particpants and their projects in this posting, but hope to see some of them at the upcoming Blogger Meetup next week. One of the aspects of our workshops is a welcome into the community of bloggers, and we do try to offer as may connections as possible to help the new blog get started.

We could call it “jumpstarting your blog” - helping an individual or an organization begin. But unlike the auto association tow-truck that comes, gives you a jumpstart and leaves you, we make sure you actually get on the road and start driving. Plus we’re an email or phone call away if you run into any further problems.

technorati tags: blogging+workshop, artists, arts+organizations, writers

Shuna Fish Lydon’s blog, Eggbeater, is an exemplary blog by a professional.

• Crisp, fun pictures that make your mouth water
  Shuna includes her personal voice (look at her poetry!)
  She talks directly to her readers, inviting them to participate:

Come on, how often does a baking class take place wherein real, hands-on dough epiphanies can occur, just as Pacific Northwest berries are hitting the scene in droves?

• She gives readers tips

I guess she wasn’t the food blog winner for nothing!

If I were to change something on this blog, I would make it a bit less busy – but I have to say that’s a very personal taste; lots of people seem to like it. Also, I’ve noticed that she goes back and forth between using normal capitalization and all lower case.

In my professional blog, I use only lower case – have been doing that since I was fourteen and it feels like it is my personal voice – so I think I understand her conundrum. I guess it all depends on how important consistency is to your brand. For Shuna Fish Lydon, it may not play such a large role.

What do you think?

technorati tags: food+blogs, chefs, professionals, foodies, gourmet