Alphablogs » General

Sabbatical

isabella — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:29:13 +0000

Just to let everyone know – Alphablogs is on a sabbatical right now. Both Carol and Isabella are involved in a lot of projects, so we have decided to focus away from this blog right now. We’ll start writing here again when the time is right. In the meantime, please enjoy our previous posts!

Produce, Publish and Connect

Carol Sill — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:56:36 +0000

We help our clients to produce the work they need to bring out into the world, and then to share it via the wonderfully connective web of online media now available to us all. Isn’t that what this medium is all about? Isabella and I truly enjoy helping people get the word out, giving them the tools that empower them to take it on for themselves.

If you want to produce, we can help you do that – writing, editing, video, slides, other media, we partner with you to help you make your mark.
We find the best way for you to publish your work on the web, setting up flexible and adaptable websites and blogs.
Next we help you in getting it to the audience you need to reach, and if you wish, we assist your navigation through the maze of Social Media.

Canada 9-5 In September: All About Creativity

isabella — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:00:19 +0000

Welcome to Canada 9-5, the September edition! This blog carnival is about Canadians blogs about business, non-profits, public life and work in general. Somehow, this edition has a distinctive taste of creativity to it. Look:

A Winnipeg Music Blog
… with the great name Painting Over Silence. It tells you all about the Winnipeg music scene, which, like all music scenes, is mostly Indie. And thanks to Painting Over Silence, if you’re an Indie fan, you can now find out about your personality.

A couple days back an enlightening article appeared on the CBC that published the findings of a Scottish University’s study aimed at unearthing the link between musical taste and personality.

Musicians for the Environment
The Lake Ontario Waterkeepers, an environmental group, have a newsroom which contains one of the Great Lakes’ largest archives on environmental law and water quality issues. One of the articles aggregated there talks about Canadian musician Sarah Harmer, who co-founded PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), an organization campaigning, according to Wikipedia,

to protect the Niagara Escarpment from a proposed gravel development which would see parts of the wilderness on the escarpment destroyed. To support the organization, she and her acoustic band embarked on a tour of the escarpment, hiking the Bruce Trail and performing at theatres and community halls in towns along the way. A documentary DVD of this tour was released in 2006 as Escarpment Blues.

A Courier in Vancouver
Bulletproof Courier is the brain – or helmet? – child of Greg Crosby, a citizen journalist documenting news and events in downtown Vancouver. Greg says he also enjoys producing catchy video reports of local events and venues he attends, often through the unique perspective of his helmet cam. I haven’t met Greg (yet – hopefully I will next week) but, well, I guess he is a bicycle courier, and I’m glad I finally found such a blog. Bicycle couriers – don’t you think they’re ideal people to have a blog? They see a lot, both on the streets, in the dark corridors of CorporateLand and in the deep, frustrated eyes of law office receptionists. Plus they have their own rather quirky perspective (or am I stereotyping, Greg). Anyway, to stay with the music theme – enjoy Greg’s video of the Star Wars theme on bagpipes.

Marketing
Staying with the creative theme, let’s move from music to creative marketing ideas. Ethnicomm, a marketing blog, has a post on 7 steps towards becoming more creative . I know, there are lots of blog posts out there but what I found interesting that in addition to the usual suspects (“go against the flow”, “be inspired”) there are also ones that I don’t come across that often, for example

Chatter incessantly.
The more you talk, the more you expose yourself to opportunities to have a conversation with someone. And if you tie this in to point #1 above [“go against the flow”], even better. Just be careful that you’re not always talking to yourself. The barista at your local Starbucks, the cab drive driving you to your innovation seminar, the math teacher at your child’s school, the annoyed and tired looking gentleman on that transatlantic flight can all help with your verbal rapid prototyping efforts.

(Uh – what are verbal rapid prototyping efforts? Is that a new word creation?)

Interior design
Gaile Guevara has a blog that showcases modern furniture and other interior design articles (artifacts?), like the jelly chairs you can see gracing this post. There are a great many links on her blog, which I really like – what I’m missing, however, is a sense for what Gaile does. Does she have a store? Does she offer her services as an interior designer?

Author and Grow Rich! In 12 hours!
I guess we could still put this in the category of creativity although what Glenn Dietz from Sarnia, Ontario, is mostly about is – you guessed it: making money from books. Not just $27 ebooks but something that brings in $10,000. In this post here about – well I guess it’s about market feedback – if I get it right, he talks about flowcharting one’s thoughts. That sounds interesting. I hope he’ll write more about it.

Canucks Blog – Cory Schneider
I have to confess that I’m pretty much in the dark when it comes to hockey and our Vancouver team, the Canucks. (Although, staying with the topic du jour, I think that sports has quite a lot to do with creativity). Fortunately, that doesn’t prevent me from at least trying to get to know about their online activities; maybe I’ll even learn something? Let’s take Cory Schneider’s blog. I like how he just tells his story; it’s almost an old-fashioned type of blog, just a little diary – perfect for someone with fans who are eager to get a glimpse of the lives of a sports celebrity. In this entry, he talks about getting to know the team – and I even about music! His favourite band right now is 3 Days Grace (also a group I hadn’t known, so thanks for introducing me to them, Cory!)

Hardcore Accounting
Ok, finally here’s a blog that has nothing to do with creativity. (Or does it?) Through MBA Explorer I found out about Krupo’s A Counting School – Hardcore Chartered Accountancy
since 1494. I was curious about “1494” and after googling for a moment, was reminded that was the year when the Italian monk Luca Pacioli, “the Father of Accounting” published the first book written on double-entry accounting. The title of this exciting book is “Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry, and Proportions.” A 500-year bestseller. Hey, maybe we can get Glenn, our author specialist, to write something about it!)

At any rate, here is an interesting entry by Krupo, Trainwreck of economic logic. He compares professional services that cost money with those that make money. Krupo just alludes to these concepts, saying that he would not “fisk” the referenced article that spoke somewhat disparagingly of people who “only” cost money. Thus, Krupo introduced me to the term “fisking”. In all this time in the blogosphere I had never come across it but apparently it’s widely used, meaning “a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story”. At any rate, I would have liked to hear more about this; I think it would make for an interesting conversation about all kinds of things, for example, the difference between long-term and short-term economic benefits, something of interest not just for accountants but ordinary folks, too.

That’s it for this edition! 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 October 18, 2008.

Ikiaqqivik means “Internet” and “Traveling through layers”

Carol Sill — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:36:57 +0000

I was so intrigued by the word for the internet that was created by the territory of Nunavut in Canada, that I posted about it here in my personal blog: Ikiaqqivik. I’m re-posting the quote from the Canadian Journal of Communications where this was mentioned. Soukup’s article, by the way, is terrific.

When the time came a few years ago to find an Inuktitut term for the word “Internet,” Nunavut’s former Official Languages Commissioner, Eva Aariak, chose ikiaqqivik, or “traveling through layers”. The word comes from the concept describing what a shaman does when asked to find out about living or deceased relatives or where animals have disappeared to: travel across time and space to find answers. According to the elders, shamans used to travel all over the world: to the bottom of the ocean, to the stratosphere, and even to the moon. In fact, the 1969 moon landing did not impress Inuit elders. They simply said, “We’ve already been there!” (Minogue, 2005, n.p.). The word is also an example of how Inuit are mapping traditional concepts, values, and metaphors to make sense of contemporary realities and technologies. – Katarina Soukup in The Canadian Journal of Communication

Identity, two-bit wit, memes and zen

Carol Sill — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:38:50 +0000

Still talking here about about online/offline identities…and more.

Seems like the theory of who and what we are, wish to be and will be, is being constantly tested and transformed by the myriad circumstances of the world around and within us. There can be no one person in the midst of this change, and the search for that one person or one identity has been the work of mystics and thinkers down through the ages.

So I leave the question of internal or external identity, of internal and external spaces, domestic and public, private and public to the French philosophers (and others).

The only clear definition comes in marketing and politics, where staying “on message” with a 3-point discussion, simplified for the general population brings a brand identity. Solid. Unchanging. Something people can trust. In a world of resonant chaos and constant transformation, this idea is something people dearly wish to cling to.

We give them that, through marketing and a kind of fundamentalism of simplistic thought.

Power point lifestyle – a jail for resonant poetic thinking. Check out this well-circulated example.

| View | Upload your own

Many thanks to Rowan Manahan

Years ago I was “converted” to the McLuhan way of thinking when I went to a seminar sponsored by the association of electrical engineers (IEEE). Here Barrington Nevitt, a friend and collaborator with McLuhan, and Gordon Thompson of Bell Labs gave a great talk on the future of computers. By then they were old men. They compared the synthesis/resonance approach of Chinese characters (as seen in Ezra Pound’s work) with the “Two-bit wit” of computers fragmenting the world into bits.

LHC indeed.

The interplay between their two points of view led to resonant aphoristic discovery. No point and all points. As they say, centers everywhere, circumference nowhere. So given that way of looking, I have to say that the quest for identifiable markers on the path is a bit of a red herring. Even the strongest brands, like mountains, transform over time. And for an individual to consider self-branding, reducing the immensity of being into a 3 point on-message soundbite: well that is the sad effect of two-bit wit.

We have the ability for more nuance and discovery. So I’m opting for that in my exploration of individual online persona and identity. Integration of as much as possible, with the natural variety and unpredictability of life itself, which leaves some areas hidden, yet to be discovered.

Corporate organizations so quickly shut down when faced with the complex reality of social media, which is much more unpredictable. The Mad Men Twitter AMC experience is a good example. I recounted my own brief experience here in my personal blog.

Our discussion regarding civic involvement earlier in this blog also refers to some of these issues: Blog watch.

In the interplay between events, we glimpse themes or memes becoming clarified, but only for a brief moment, before the interplay reveals another flash.

Watch this space: this is where the memes emerge. Pretty zen, isn’t it?

Projects: More Fun than Business

Carol Sill — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:12:39 +0000

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?

Fun with Flip Video

Carol Sill — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:54:48 +0000

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!

SMART blogging goals

isabella — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:57:25 +0000

In December, we took part in a group writing project initiated by Daily Blog Tips about people’s blogging goals for 2008.

Then again, in February, we were wondering how everyone was doing with their goals.

It was nice to see the replies.

Dave from Tailgating Ideas was mentioned in three different newspapers and appeared on a radio show as a guest.

ZParacha had completed some goals regarding guest blogging, and invited us to guest blog. I feel very sheepish for never having replied to that invitation – big apologies, ZParacha! Is the invitation still open?

My friend Jacob from the Job Mob (now there’s a blog where I’ve guested more than once) had increased his RSS readership.

And Thom even wrote his own update.

So … what have we been up to?

Well, guess what happened. All the ones that had a date attached to it – we did them. The ones that didn’t – they fell between the cracks. Now that’ll teach us!

Seriously. Even though we didn’t perform well on this, we have perfect evidence that goals work better when they’re S.M.A.R.T.

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable (and let’s add another A = accountable)
R = Realistic
T = Timelined.

Okay, so here we go. I’ll make a new goal: By August 18, we will post a new “goals” entry with three SMART goals.

How is everyone else doing? Here’s a shoutout to all the others that participated in the group writing project on blogs.

Is there a way we can support each other in reaching our goals?

(Image by Tochis)

Make Your Own Marketing Materials

Carol Sill — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:13:13 +0000

A terrific little site called Brandoozie is a fun 2.0 tool for creating your own marketing materials quickly and easily. Sure you could go into Illustrator and use their templates in a pinch, but this might be all you need.

You can enjoy getting lost just playing with different fonts, colours and packages – the materials are sorted by industry so there are plenty of templates to choose from. You can also upload photos and other images.

It’s fun to watch the little gears turn and to see the materials building themselves before your eyes! Letterhead, postcards, business cards and sales sheets as well as trifold rack brochures, even a 4 page brochure – in minutes, and with high resolution output for printing. It’s beta right now and free to try – give it a test drive!

Research – A Dance of Intuition and Intelligence

Carol Sill — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:17:46 +0000

Okay, Smartypants, you figure it out! Get in there and dig (digg?) – isn’t this what research is all about? Or is it the cool composed review of previously digested information? All you have to do is look for it and list it, right? Well, not exactly.

While working on a research project recently, I’ve been thinking about the nature of research itself.

When I was teaching Research Skills for Writers and Reporters, I shared many tips and tricks of the trade, including the reality of hours of searching that may or may not yield the result that is being sought. A simple research timelog reveals the process. Hours spent in one direction that brings another lead, then several, then the branching out of the mind from item to lead to dead end to lateral correlation to new lead, and so it goes through the windy twisty passageways. Research doesn’t always reveal the answer directly, but through resonance and correspondance leads are found. And sometimes, there is a big pay off! Aladdin’s Cave of treasure: it’s all there for the picking!

I see research as a subtle dance between intuition and intelligence. It helps if your mind has been trained to categorize and make connections. It helps if you can keep track of what you have done, to retrace your steps if need be. And it helps if you can trust a hunch, make a lateral leap of the mind, think poetically to synthesize concepts. Intelligence serves the intuition at that point, and new ideas are formed that make new sense of old information.

The results of research are more than just a list of quotes and places. They are a synthesis of the information. Information is easy to find. The need is to make sense of the information, to be in a position to prioritize that information and to define uses for the most salient aspects of the information. Research is more than finding and keeping, it is a process of sorting and defining that ultimately yields new information that can be acted upon.