Alphablogs

Integrating my various “lives” – online and offline – is something that apparently is very important to me. I say apparently because sometimes I try to keep them separate and it just causes stress, annoyance and disinterest. In many ways, I am and want to be, an open book. For example, all my Vancouver blogger friends know that I just became a grandmother for the second time and my twitter pals know that I just had a wedding anniversary. On my other blog, Change Therapy, I talk freely about a lot of things – sexuality, religion, etc.

Mind you, that’s just my way of doing it. For some people, keeping the different aspects of their lives separate is important, works well, and is even enjoyable. There are all kinds of people who, for example, get a lot out of anonymous blogging; and I’m not talking about blog scrapers, trolls and porn bloggers here – just people who have chosen to stay anonymous, like Waiter Rant, Patient Anonymous or Going Private.

(Sidebar: Even whether one decides be highly transparent and integrated or private and compartmentalized, is a decision that’s influenced – maybe even determined – by one’s personal background, experience and personality type. Which explains why one does not have to be an extrovert to be transparent, or an introvert to be more private; such decisions come informed by many of the mind’s strands).

Carol, in her last post, was talking about integrating one’s online persona. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a way that really works for me. In terms of pulling all the information together, of the ones I use, MyBlogLog and Facebook are probably the most comprehensive. But I really, really don’t like their layout; if I use such a social media tool it needs to look and feel comfortable; it needs to be a bit of a living room. Both Facebook and MyBlogLog have a bit of a mall feeling and I guess I’m of a generation and persuasion that doesn’t find malls particularly inviting.

I know there are many more such tools out there but I feel very unmotivated to try them out because so far, all of them have me disappointed (with a possible, very lukewarm exception of FriendFeed). Ideally, I’d like to see something that is

• comprehensive in terms of pulling together all my online presences (and actually does it; Tumblr, for example, promises to pull in my Twitter feed but doesn’t)
• easy to use
• responsive
• relatively hacker-safe
• fast (how much of a time delay would i put up with? 5 minutes maybe?)

and has

• clean layout that I can easily change
• tagging ability
• the ability to post extra material, ideally all the way from text to video (a la Tumblr, which, by the way, I kind of like – but see above)
• an FAQ that talks about more than just the very obvious
• easy, friendly and time-sensitive help (please NONE of that farmed-out help, for example like the one on Twitter; I really like the model that Dreamhost uses for support)
• ideally, the sort of follower-sorting that TweetDeck has
• public/private settings
• favouriting
• whatever back-end structure that’s needed to keep the thing working a good 90%+ of the time

Is there something like that out there? And would I/you want to pay for it? How much? Would it be okay to have advertising on it?

Or, here’s an idea. I was just wondering what the “meatspace” equivalence of such an online space would be. A sort of plaza, perhaps, or a park. It’s infrastructure.

What if governments started building such sorts of infrastructure?

Or should it be more like Wikipedia?

Enough questions for now?

Image by mike (el madrileño)

As Isabella mentioned in her last post, we are both busy women with active lives that include and lately seem to preclude keeping up our blog here.

Aside from our personal blogs, we’re also taking care of our clients, and are involved in other projects of our own as well, leaving our flagship blog waiting at the harbour to be loaded with content cargo and information passengers! Yet it’s more than just being too busy. When we said that Alphablogs isn’t giving us what we need - we meant it isn’t giving us back what we need to make us want to keep up with the postings, so we applied some of our own advice to ourselves. Make it fun, and make it real.

My experience in producing weekly radio programs is useful here. (Even if it was long long ago when the earth was cooling.) I’m not talking about the technical radio part - I want to talk about the experience of producing. I can contrast two experiences, both with CKUA. One was a program that involved edited interviews with artists, broadcast on a weekly basis. The interviews with artists, the putting together the weekly program, the sending it out for broadcast: all that was great. But I felt more lonely being in the “communications” industry than I ever had in any other type of work. I think it may have been related to pouring my work out onto the impersonal sound waves, expanding into space until eventually disintegrating into the emptiness of the void. (A mite dramatic, but you get my drift.) Even my friends didn’t listen to the shows. And I was never in contact with anyone who did. The other program was also weekly, but was just plain fun. Why? because I enjoyed working so much with another broadcaster. We spelled off each other, and just winged it with readings and music, laughing and letting it be as natural as possible. So I didn’t have that sense that little or nothing was coming back, because it was created in joy and fun. If people listened, that was great, but the act of creating it was already a good “give-back”. That’s what we’re going for here now at the Alphablogs blog.

As Isabella mentioned, we aren’t marketers, per se, yet we do know how to market, and are experienced in that realm. We just want everything in balance, in integrity and in harmony with the direction of the world today. Sustainability, honest human relationships, truth, beauty, you know… all that.

I had a great talk with a publisher friend the other day who said that we are really only making projects, it’s not actually running a business like widget sales (oh hey there are such things as widgets - but they’re virtual), but rather a series of fascinating and interesting projects. That model works very well for me.

Loving everything that Isabella mentioned about connection, creating and nurturing community, democracy of open source: all that and more is a beautiful way to see how we are flowing in this environment, what we value about it and what we need to keep in mind whenever we are engaged in any of our projects.

I tend to wax on theoretically, but here are the old brass tacks:  I’m with you, Isabella, on the weekly conversation posts, the Oct. 18th check in, and the SEO tasks too.

Within that aspect of our goals, I remain flowing in this electrified environment. And in keeping with something else we discussed, about integrating many of our online activities, rather than holding them separated,  I’ve just added the alphablogs feed to my tumblog: My Electric Persona which includes my Twitter feeds and my Carol Sill personal blog.

What do you think? Is it better to have separate identities online, or to integrate them? I think there is a purpose to a certain amount of privacy, but what are your thoughts here?

Yes, I’ve been really enjoying my new Flip Ultra - even though the Mino is the big deal these days, it’s not available in Canada and somehow I got the fever: “Must get Flip video camera now!” So we got it today, from Wal-Mart and I’ve been merrily fooling around with it all afternoon. Don’t believe what they tell you about the Ultra not working with the Mac - no problems at all. And as to importing to iMovie: yes; seamless.

Here are all the colours, but I went for the black - only because it was all they had, and I wanted it Now Now Now.

Watch this space for some of the Flip experiments. Yes I know they aren’t 16:9, but it’s so much fun to use I just don’t care. And compared with lugging around my old big Sony…. well, there’s no comparison. Especially when it comes to price. What a great toy!

Carol and I haven’t spent as much time on Alphablogs as we’d like to. We both have and look after other blogs and lead busy professional and personal lives – but hey, how difficult can it be to write a post a week?

So, motivated by the promise to come up with three timed blogging goals by today, we sat down to talk about that.

“Alphablogs,” Carol said, “is a bit like a house plant that we don’t care for very well.” We also realized that like everyone else, at some level we’re selfish creatures – and Alphablogs is not giving us as much as we’d like.

Since this blog is our own creation, we really needed to remind ourselves that we can do with it whatever we want. I guess sometimes that’s a startling realization.

What, whatever we want?

Yup.

Okay then. What do we want?

We are not marketers. We know something about marketing – actually, quite a bit – but we’re not professional marketers. What we are is two women with lots of passions and interests, and when they are not expressed, we get cranky and lose our oomph.

So the obvious solution is to inject as much as possible of this passion and interest into Alphablogs.

We are both passionate about Web 2.0. About the immense possibilities for connection and creating and nurturing community, about the democracy of open source, about using the word, images and sounds in ways that are not only entertaining but truly meaningful.

Why don’t we write more about that? Because that’s another passion we share – writing. So … let ‘er rip!

We also figured that we truly enjoy having conversations with one another – so why not do that here on Alphablogs? Chances are others will enjoy our conversations, too.

So … these are our goals then:

1. To start a conversation and follow it, with at least one conversation post each a week, for two months, starting today, August 18.

2. To check in again on October 18.

And, since we’re so excited about the “fun” part of this, we both felt we could also do something that doesn’t seem so much fun –

3. For each of us to spend 30 minutes towards one item on our SEO “to do” list, by September 18.

Modest goals? Perhaps. But they are goals, and we’re committed to them.  Watch our Alphablogs plant grow!

Canadians blogging about business, non-profits, public life and work in general – you can find them all here at Canada 9-5.

A warm welcome to the August 2008 edition! As I look back, I see that we’ve been doing this for a whole year now. It’s one of our proudest accomplishments; there’s really no site that gathers these types of Canadian blogs all in one place.

Today we have a blog by a sales professional, a jazz music site, a blog written by the owner of an online dating community, a blog by a librarian and an online community site for seniors.

Sales: The Perfect Customer Service Experience

Let’s start with an excerpt from one of Shane Gibson’s Blogathon articles. Shane is a sales professional.  Other than these blog entries, he also has quite a collection of podcasts. Here he features a guest blogger, Neil Godin, sharing his thoughts on a perfect customer service experience. In my opinion, that’s a perfect example of using a blog – for telling a professional story:

The Situation
New York Times business writer Joe Nocera was at the receiving end of a mind blowing customer experience—and wrote to tell about it. Four days before Christmas, he realized that a $500 PlayStation gift for his son had not arrived. He tracked the shipment from Amazon and learned that it had been delivered and signed for—but not by him. Ouch!

The Idea
If you want customers to become your brand ambassadors, you’ve got to go “way” overboard on satisfaction. Amazon did. Satisfied that he did not receive the package, they sent a replacement immediately, and it arrived on Christmas Eve. Naturally, Nocera has been talking, and writing, about the experience ever since.

The Risk
The risk here is perceived, not real. Even if one or two customers went to great lengths to rip you off, you’d be ahead in terms of your investment in customer loyalty.

Jazz!

All About Jazz is an absolutely fabulous site which, I believe, originates in Canada; at any rate, it has an enormous amount of information on Canadian jazz. This intro to their site shows the fantastic rage of information to be had:

We strive to serve both the jazz newbie as well as the jazz aficionado. Listeners who are new to jazz may profit from visiting our Building a Jazz Library section; those with more of an established interest will find our extensive archives of reviews and interviews helpful. And everyone should get a chuckle out of our humor section.

The internet is a great place to find information, and we maintain stacks and stacks of it: about jazz festivals, radio stations, upcoming releases, and much more (just look under the “guides” section of the menu bar).

Throughout the site, we have emphasized an interactive approach. The jazz timeline and “This Day in Jazz History,” for example, allow readers to check out the major developments in a year, month & day of their choosing. We organize our reviews so that you can home in on a particular style that you prefer (or wish to investigate). We provide multiple forums for you to express and exchange opinions on all sorts of issues relating to the music and the musicians.

Finally, we make an ongoing effort to stay current. We constantly update our news section, and we offer cutting-edge interviews among over 40 featured columns. Each month we review 150-200 new and reissued CD’s, giving you advance notice so you’ll know where to look when you visit the record shop. For the latest happenings at the site, visit our monthly greeting page.

In addition to this, you can, of course, also listen to music. Today’s offering is Chasm’s Blue Bamboo, which you can listen to for free just by signing up with the site.

Online Dating

This innocent-looking blog, Paradigm Shift, is the blog by Marcus Frind, owner of Plenty of Fish, the largest dating site in the English speaking world and the largest community site in the US not owned by an American company. Most of his posts are about internet and social media news directly related to dating sites. At the beginning of the year, Marcus got philosophic and shared his technological predictions:

[In the next 100 years] In the scientific world I could see computers creating a virtual world for you that looks like a dream. Other people can then enter the dream and change things at will.

Think of hundreds of people working together to design something, but instead of using tools like Autocad its done with your mind connected to others as well as computers.

I wonder if i’ll live to see any of that… In the next 5 years I think the next major thing on the internet will be a site that helps convey emotions in some way.

Canuck Librarian

A site with a nice, fresh voice, like in this review here of Michael Pollan’s much discussed book In Defence Of Food:

I think this book is another case of common sense that just ain’t so common anymore. Like he writes, his book really boils down to seven words “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. If you truly understand that then you probably don’t need to read his book. But if you’re like me you may be wondering what he means by those few words, and that is what he explains.

Communities: Seniors

Finally, over on the other side of the country, The Grey Zone, a site for seniors, is one of the two dozen community blogs at myConnect.ca, a community place hosted by The Halifax Herald. The blog is written by Alex Handyside CSA (that’s “Certified Senior Advisor” – just found out about that designation). He says that seniors

often feel that they no longer have a voice, or that their voice no longer counts as much as it once did. And that’s what this blog is for. To get the word out about elder issues, and to get the discussion flowing.

I liked the title of this post, We celebrate Elder Abuse Awareness Day?? No…we educate! I’ve often wondered about events like “Cancer Awareness Month” – what are you supposed to say, “Happy Cancer Awareness Month”? That sounds a little strange. But phrasing it in terms of education rather than celebration – yes, that makes sense to me.

Gathering all these blogs together is a lot of fun. It’s interesting to see how slowly, slowly, Canadians are starting to see blogging as a valuable an important part of their communications strategy.

As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. The next edition will be out on September 18, 2008.