Alphablogs

Heeeeere it comes!

The February edition of Canada 9-5. Canada 9-5 presents the crème de la crème of Canadian business bloggers, people who use the power of blogging to showcase their professional and business expertise and to better get to know their customers and clients. We’re concentrating on non-IT bloggers; for IT people, blogging is second nature - it’s people whose business isn’t in IT already who, we think, need some help seeing the magic of blogging.

Today we have a virtual assistant, an expressive arts facilitator, a blog that helps with bankruptcy issues, a foodie blog, a small business blogger, and a personal coach right here from Vancouver.

Take it away!

Virtual Assistant Looks At Iceberg
I like the 30 Days of Resources project by Business Services Etc., a company of virtual assistants. In this project, BSETC features 30 products that will make the life of any business person easier. This one is about Icebrrg

Have you ever been wanting to add custom forms to your website or blog but weren’t sure where to find one or how to program them just so? Fear no more. I have found you a service that resonates well with me because (a) it’s easy and (b) it’s name reminds me of the snowy part of the planet I currently live on.

Introducing Icebrrg… The instant (and easy) form creator. It’s a wonderful little web-based program that you sign up for (they have a free account) and once registered, you just follow the prompts to create your web form. It also generates the HTML code for you to place on your blog or site.

I like it! I think I’ll try it out. This blog is a great example of showcasing expertise and paying it forward by providing the reader with valuable information.

Bankruptcy In Canada – What’s A Consumer Proposal?

Are you:
· Having trouble paying all your bills, even though you have a good job?
· Thinking about filing bankruptcy, but not really wanting to?
· Simply looking for more information about ways to deal with your debt?

That’s where a consumer proposal might be a good solution. What’s a consumer proposal? Bankruptcy Canada explains it in this three-part discussion. Part 1 is entitled How a consumer proposal might be right for you. There’s also a video you can watch.

A Foodie Blog – Buying Local
As an avid CBC radio listener, I’m quite familiar with Don Genova, a journalist and broadcaster who used to regale West Coast listeners with yummy tidbits of BC food stories. I remember once he listed all the goat cheeses to be had from Saltspring Island. So this here is his blog. (The things you can learn from a blog: Apparently, until the end of last year he was in Parma – yes, the home of Parmesan cheese – where he studied for a Masters of Food Culture at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. What an intriguing field of studies!)

The entry we’re sampling here is about buying local food

a visit to a Culinary Tourism Conference yielded some interesting info on companies and individuals trying to make it easier for consumers, chefs and other food service operators to get access to local produce and value-added products. … Most of these programs match you up with a farmer who will deliver a box of goods from their gardens throughout their growing season. … Don’t forget farmers markets. Some run year round, others will start in the spring.
You can listen to the 6 minute documentary by going to Don’s blog.

Dancing, Drumming and Children
Barbara Karmazyn’s site is a repository of information and images about the expressive arts. Dancing, drumming, storytelling, singing, crafts – all these are things Barbara brings to children, teachers, parents, seniors as she draws them together in magical circles of joy and creativity.

Barbara Karmazyn uses blogging mostly as a content management system; it looks more like a “normal” web site than a blog. Most of her material is on static pages, like this one about personal development playshops.

Small Business – Email and Customer Service
Selling to Small Business is a blog by Torontonian Evan Carmichael. This post here reminds us that we ignore email at our own peril. Love the title: Killing Your Brand Softly.

Personal Development – What Happens When we Get Sick?
One Man Can is the blog of a personal coach here in Vancouver. I like his open, honest voice; he’s not one of those coaches who continually tell people what to do. Example:

periods of stress that affect the physical body often lead to short bursts of illness. So, watching the signals from the body sooner can allow corrective action sooner. Myself, I like to think I’m invulnerable sometimes and let things get the better of me. Just took a temperature of 102…. oops.

Back to bed.

That’s from his post, Illness of the Body.

***

And that’s it for this edition of Canada 9-5. If you have or know of any interesting Canadian blogs that talk about work or business, send them in – you can use this form.

The next edition will come out April 8, 2008.

Good night and good luck!

Just before the Northern Voice conference last weekend, I recorded this brief clip discussing some of the reasons why we started Alphablogs. I didn’t post it right away because I needed to get up to speed with the new interface for iMovie. (Which I now love, once I got over missing the timeline.)

Listening now to what I said then, there are some changes I’d like to make, but, hey, that’s videoblogging for you. What you see is what you get.

What would I add or change? Mainly the emphasis on the word blog. I actually think more in terms of site or blogsite. That will definitely be the topic of my next video dispatch.

Just came across this info recently, in Media in Canada. They say:

Teens not so cyber-obsessed after all - but they’re more social than oldsters

Judging by the results of an Ipsos Reid study released yesterday, Canadian teens aren’t the Internet hogs they’re generally assumed to be.

Findings from Inter@ctive Teens: The Impact of the Internet on Canada’s Next Generation - include the eyebrow raiser that the average weekly time spent online by the 12-17 demographic is a mere 13 hours - a number that hasn’t increased since Ipsos last measured online teen behaviour in 2004. By comparison, Canadian adults are logging onto the Internet for an average of 19 hours per week.

Find out more here at Media in Canada.

One of the themes at Northern Voice this last weekend that stood out for me was wikis.

OK, what’s a wiki?

A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It is astonishingly easy for people to jump in and revise pages – it’s even easier than blogging. The advantages of wikis are

• Good for writing down quick ideas or longer ones, giving you more time for formal writing and editing.
• Instantly collaborative without emailing documents, keeping the group in sync
• Accessible from anywhere with a web connection (if you don’t mind writing in web-browser text forms).
• Your archive, because every page revision is kept.
• Exciting, immediate, and empowering–everyone has a say. (Thanks, O’Reilly)

One of the most successful wikis I’ve used was for planning an event with people who usually only use email. Most of them were people who were not very tech savvy at all and yet the wiki worked perfectly, making this volunteer-run event run smoothly and collaboratively. I’ve also used wikis as online document repositories when using email was not useful (e.g. because multiple versions of a document needed to be accessible to a number of people). Wikis are wicked!

Matt Mullenweg, the “inventor” of WordPress, the blogging software we’re using here, had lots of inspiring things to say in his keynote speech on Saturday (go here for the full audio version, or here for a quick text taste of it). What stood out most for me, however, was when he said that collaborative open source efforts like wikis should be our vision for the future – not just for our technological future but for so much more.

What if, he said, every new bill of law that is passed goes through a wiki process, where citizens collaborate on law and order? Wikis offer a possibility for true demoracy.

That got me to wonder. Are there governments using wikis for true citizen collaboration?

Quite a few people write about it (e.g. “Government 2.0 comes to Ottawa”). Not many of them link to examples. And most of the examples are dead links. However, there was one that I found, in New Zealand, thanks to Open Innovators. A Police Act review was done with the help of a Wiki. This is part of the ParticipatioNZ project. On Monday, I emailed the project asking them for access to the wiki to see what’s going on inside but haven’t heard back from them. So far it looks very interesting though. I’ll keep you posted!

(Image by kbaird) 

We’re here at Northern Voice, the blogging conference I’ve been looking forward to for weeks. I haven’t done a lot of live blogging so I figured to get myself into the groove, I’ll start with asking participants to sign this online guest book:

Simon Koldyk - ScribbleWiki - WOOT! NORTHERNVOICE

Richard Eriksson - Just a Gwai Lo - Northern Voice 4 Life!

Alex Waterhouse-Hayward It’s a weblog

Pete Quily Thanks for running the Vancouver blogger meetup Isabella!

Jan Karlsbjerg Roedgroed med floede

Erica Hargreave - Always good to see you and get a hug Isabella!

Megan Cole - not the stripper from Louisiana… the *other* Megan Cole.

Arieanna Schweber - Swearing at the **** servers.

Ianiv Schweber - Taking pictures of Arieanna swearing at her blogs.

Tim Bray - happy to serve as the human foghorn at the live-sculpture session.

Carol Browne - and blogger for the Vancouver Metroblog - first time attender at this event. So far, so good!

Gene Smith - T minus 3 hours until I present

Luke Closs - Hells yes!

Ingy dot Net - I couldn’t get the umlaut.

Greg Andrews

Tim McAlpine (my blog)

Mary Brennan

Tzaddi Gordon

Beth Snow

See guys… I told you the sun shines sometimes in Vancouver! Thx for comin’ to Northern Voice. - kk+

Ahoy from UBC - Moosein’ along and stoked for the learning - DaveO

at nv - enjoying the moment and clicking through - superNova K

nv is why the web is beautiful - markmayo

Loosing the Moose for 4 years — James

More moose! Travis Smith

I am enjoying being at the conference. Being a blogging network was my favourite so far. mmccrae@yahoo.com

The Moose is definitely loose! - Mike Kelly

Northern Voice is a living community indicator and lives in the culture of love. Where else can you find the intersection of geekdom and love? Go NORTH! - Nancy White

Looks like a great spread for lunch. I hope they have a plan for the leftovers including Foodrunners or composting. Al Pasternak

Lunch at Northern Voice was nothing short of phenomenal! Jim Benson

Such an interesting crowd here, all twittering live! Megan Moser, megan@thinksalmon.com.

So inspiring… so many interesting ideas and people… MJ Ankenman

So glad to be back with the Moose! Inspiring and lots of great new ideas! Carol Sill

Glad to be Smarter than the average blog and blogging from Northern Voice Dumont Walker

I love events like this, and signing this guest book is a wonderful example of fresh thinking. Thanks Lloyd Budd.

Tak for alt! Tinfoiling

Yule Heibel — great to be at this conference, I get to meet Roland, yeah!

Werner Bahlke — es ist wunderbar wieder in Vancouver zu sein!

Rahel Bailie - enjoying my first Northern Voice conference. It’s a new conference model for me, one which I find refreshing.

Tanya (aka NetChick) - Loving seeing everyone! Great to see you, too, Isabella. Go blogs!

We’re doing more research through Alphablogs, but here I wanted to share this fun toy with you, just for the hell of it!

There are lots of online tools for this, and here’s a free one that’s easy and engaging.

We offer much more indepth research services, as both Isabella and I have strong research backgrounds, so contact us if you’re interested in finding out how we can help you design research to position your work and engage your audience.

I am so looking forward to our yearly blogging conference here in Vancouver, Northern Voice. I had lots of fun there last year. Nancy White’s ideas, particularly on technology stewardship, really stand out, as well as Zak Geant’s human blogging sculpture. I might actually help out with such a sculpture this year.

What else is on tap this year? As usual, on Friday we’ll have Moose Camp, a self-organizing “unconference” that also includes an Internet BootCamp for beginners. Participants are encouraged to lead or participate in spontaneous sessions and go to the sessions that make sense for them.

Saturday starts with a keynote address by Matt Mullenweg, the guy who started WordPress, the blogging software used for Alphablogs. He’s one of those super-young dudes who are making internet history. While I’m generally not a big fan of keynotes (aren’t they terribly boring sometimes?), I am looking forward to this one.

And of course I’m also very excited about a Frozen Pea after-conference drink event that the Vancouver Bloggers Meetup (of which yours truly is the organizer) and Voxant, all the way from New York, are planning for Friday night.

You remember Frozen Peas, don’t you? It’s the breast cancer fundraiser started for and around Susan Reynolds, famous Twitterer, social media mamma and very artsy artist.

You may wonder why I keep harping on this frozen peas idea. Well, there are a number of reasons. In my personal life, three close friends of mine have been touched by cancer. One of them is not around anymore. Another one is holding her “I can’t believe I’m still alive” party this weekend. Another one just found out that she has breast cancer. Also, in my academic life, in my work on transformative learning, I have met quite a few people whose lives were irrevocably changed by cancer. So cancer has been very much in my face lately.

And seeing a fellow artist and fellow social media enthusiast dealing with her experience with cancer in such a creative way, seeing her surrounded with so much support - it is really very moving.

That’s why I can’t stop writing about it.

Meet our new dog, we’re trying him out to see how he fits with our approach here at Alphablogs. We think he’s fun, and he has a lot to say!

Do you want to have a dog too? Or a “person”?

Click on this banner to find out how.
(Apologies for the voice that just comes up on loading. I’ll try to fix that next pass.)

Nettie: Your Emotional Blog Advisor

Dear Nettie,

In the past two months, I’ve discovered via social network stuff Things I Wish I Didn’t Know about people I’d formally respected. One guy posted some videos on facebook that I thought were lame-ass and offensive. Another guy started posting ‘Hotties’ every monday on his blog, which is entirely unrelated to the content of his blog.

These are both people who could impress you in person (and did, me) but not so much thanks to social web.

Any thoughts on how much is enough versus how much is too much?

And are we as a culture going to have to get used to Too Much Information and carry on the business relationship (I x-nayed both, but don’t have replacements!)

Signed, Argh!

Dear Argh,

well my dear. I know what you mean. In fact, I’ve become totally jaded about it. To prove how idiotic all these videos, slide shows, pictures and whatnot I get on Fun(???)Wall, SuperWall, GrowYourGnome and HappyHappyFriends or whatever all the three gazillion applications on FaceBook are called, I sneeringly went to the next unopened “gift” in my Inbox and. And was riveted by a video sent on by my friend Troy – The Tale Of Two Brains.

Ooops.

Okay, there’s a few good ones among them and I’m sorry if I’ve missed them.

To come back to your first question – how much is too much?

Most of it is too much. If in doubt, leave it out. Even that video I just enjoyed – I don’t think it’s essential to my life. It’s kinda neat, yes, like the 50,875 other things that are kinda neat. Imagine this: if all of those neat things on the internet were furniture, or nah, even just knicknack, you’d have to live in a castle and you’d still have to hire half of Mexico to keep it all dusted. (And, by the way, if I were modest, I’d confess that I collect tons of internet bric-a-brac myself.)

But more particularly, you’re not talking about all the neat info – you’re talking about lame-ass and offensive stuff. You know what, there should be some kind of locker room on FaceBook where people can air their sweaty, smelly jokes and videos all they like without bothering the rest of us.

Do we have to get used to it? Nah. I say if you don’t like those sapless jokes, obnoxious videos and braindead invitations, tell the other person – politely, I guess – that this is not your cup of tea and to please stop sending it. If they don’t stop, throw them out.

Or you can just ignore all of it, like you would someone sitting beside you at a business dinner passing gas.

Nettie

If you have a burning question or concern, send it right over to Nettie using the simple form on our Just Ask Nettie! page, or add it to the comments section below.

A few days ago, I had the great pleasure to interview Svetlana Gladkova from Profy.com, a new player in the blogosphere that has gained attention everywhere. Here is what Profy does

Profy, a new player in the blogging arena, provides users with a one-stop web platform for all things blogging. The Profy solution provides a single point of comprehensive access to the full range of activities involved in blogging, from reading and sharing news to publishing posts and networking with other bloggers and readers. Profy’s vision is to provide bloggers with all the creative tools they could possibly want - in one place.

Svetlana and I had been chatting casually in cyberspace for a little while (you won’t be surprised to hear that we talk on Twitter and StumbleUpon, will you?) and had been sympatico right away. The interview was just like that - a warm and friendly chat on Skype, all across the oceans and timelines: Svetlana in Siberia, I here in good ol’ Vancouver.

We talked about culture, learning, the IT gap and other things. Here is the interview:

It’s not about location

IM: What’s it like to be a netizen (“blogospherian”, Anthony said yesterday) in Siberia and be so much at the pulse of leading edge in social media?

SG: This is the only question people are ever interested in asking me usually though I still love answering it again and again

As far as I know it is only after getting to know me at least a dozen of people bothered to take a look at the map and find the city of Novosibirsk, which they otherwise never heard of before you know, it is not very difficult to be a web 2.0 person now, I think - all it takes is a laptop, some place to work, and flexibility because to be able to talk to people you need to be online either early in the morning, or late in the evening (preferably both which I rarely manage myself :)) After all, Internet is available in the majority of towns and even small villages here in Russia

It is not exactly about location, being a geek is more a state of mind - as I’m sure you know yourself better than me

Networking: A Different Culture

IM: Last night we had our monthly bloggers meetup here in Vancouver. I really like meetup because it facilitates the “social” in social media BOTH online and face-to-face. Do you have any opportunity to be social with IT people/geeks in your area?

SG: Well, that’s a tough question. You know, Novosibirsk actually is a very big scientific center and we have lots of web developers graduating every year. But the best of them prefer to move to Moscow looking for higher salaries - thus people that stay here usually prefer to establish their own small businesses, like web design studios - there are dozens of them here but they do not have any common interests and goals.

I only know 2 web 2.0 projects (besides Profy) here in Novosibirsk. Other IT people specialize in software development outsourcing - thus they have even more different goals than we.

And this lack of common interests affects negatively the offline communications here. Only recently we have had the first meeting of a Novosibirsk web club - mostly intended for people to finally get to know each other here. But I cannot say it was successful - people are much less open here than in the Western communities. Besides, we are not as good in networking - the habit of networking is only emerging and people often feel uncomfortable with lots of people they don’t know.

And nothing of the Open Coffee type exists here - I tried to offer this format for meetings but it is very difficult to bring bloggers to the same place for a talk - mostly because bloggers often prefer to stay anonymous and use nicknames here.

IM: So it’s a different culture?

SG: Yes, very different culture - very young and only emerging. The IT people mostly started as software and web design outsourcers - things as social media, professional blogging and networking are extremely unusual here.

I guess this is mostly due to the fact that we are pretty much behind you in terms of time - we are here where you used to be some 10 years ago so it is only starting here. So internet is still a rather geeky place in Russia and general mainstream users are only arriving now

IT in Siberia

IM: So what does this do to your sense of location? Where does most of your life take place?

SG: Well, I am mostly here in Novosibirsk - this is where Profy development team is located so my place is here as well. But as any marketing person I love travelling and participating in various events. For example, I thouroughly enjoyed Le Web 3 last December and now that we have launched Profy in alpha I’ll be traveling a lot this year. But still most of my work happens either in the office or on a sofa at home

IM: I bet there’s lots of people in Siberia who don’t know that there is such a thing as a blog and don’t even have email.

SG: You are not particularly right here there are tons of people that have never heard the word blog (imagine how difficult it is to explain to my older family members what my job is) but all the internet users here start by creating an email account. mostly mainstream users use internet for 2 things: checking emails and searching for something.

The IT Gap

IM: You’re obviously quite the pioneer. Were you always like that?

SG: well, now that you ask it, I think yes - though I never considered myself to be a geek here. Though I really was the first among the students of my faculty to buy a cell phone (when they first emerged here in Russia), then I was the first to start using a pocket OC, the first to buy a laptop, etc. This does not mean it was because I had more money than my counterparts - I just preferred gadgets to clothes at the time. Not a very girly behavior

IM: … and how do you explain to your older family members what your job is?

SG: well, I use some traditional categories - like publishing news on a website for blogging and giving people the place to create their own blogs (here I usually need to explain what a blog is finally) for the Profy blogging platform. But usually I prefer to explain that I have an internet business that is pretty difficult to explain

IM: The reason I’m asking this is because I’m quite fascinated by the very wide range of experience and interest people have in IT; this is an issue here, too. Have you ever successfully explained to someone at least the rudiments of what you do, and if so, do you remember what you said?

SG: yes, I once had a whole free evening in a country house and the entire family gathered together. So I used an hour explaining 1) what a blog is and why people blog, 2) how a blog can be a job, 3) how you can create a website for thousands of people to blog, 4) how we are going to make money off it. So it took about an hour but I finally managed to explain it to the entire family all at once. I don’t think there is anything extraordinary in this - provided that you use simple common language and have enough time for explanations. After all, if I don’t explain this to my mother, she will never know what a blog is. And I have so many older online friends from US, Europe and Canada that I think my own mother deserves understanding

IT People Are Lifelong Learners

IM: What’s the most out-there, futuristic thing you’ve ever done, even in IT terms?

SG: I don’t think I have ever done anything extraordinary in IT terms myself (at least nothing that would seem extraordinary to any reader from North America). But I remember once I learned how to edit videos to produce TV commercials using some very complex software I don’t even remember the name now. It took me about a month and I was absolutely happy I learned it - though it turned out I soon changed my job and never used the skill again

IM: I guess that’s part of being a pioneer - being willing to put lots of effort into something that you don’t know whether it’s going to pan out. A lot of IT people are like that, don’t you think? Learn lots of programming languages, applications, etc. - and you end up using only a few. It takes a certain personality for that - what do you think?

SG: I think you are 100% right here - IT people are very different in their willingness to learn constantly. You can always see a developer (even a successful one) reading new books, looking for useful information online, studying new languages, discussing new approaches in forums. Chances are they will never use many of the skills they gain in such a way but if they ever get a chance to apply them, they will feel superior and they won’t need to spend some extra time learning. This is a very special type of mentality - the learning developer

IM: Okay, very last thing then: what’s your learning edge right now?

SG: Well, right now I am too focused on marketing and networking (alpha launch, after all) to be able to get myself any time for learning anything I don’t need right now. My major learning now is in terms of marketing - I read books and blogs focused on internet marketing and promotion and consume tons of information that I need right now to do my job well. But when I do have some free time for learning, I think I would have preferred some offline activity for a change - learning Spanish language, for example. Nothing very geeky

And honestly, I hardly even know HTML, let alone any complex programming languages and tools: I consume web 2.0 as a user and I understand it mainly as a user

IM: Wow, that was an interesting revelation, Svetlana! Is there anything you’d like to add before we say goodbye?

SG: no, I think I would only like to thank you for asking me about the interview. In fact, for me web 2.0 is all about people (not AJAX) - people and the closeness it allows. I have lots of friends around the world I would never have met otherwise and to many of them I actually talk much more than I do to some of my real-life friends. This is what really is precious about web 2.0 and the tools it provides - we are all so very close now it is absolutely amazing. So thank you very much!