Month: May 2006

Shitty newspaper? Check. Flimsy propaganda tool? Check.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

This false story that was leaked (and reported by the National Post) yesterday about Iran planning to require non-Muslims to wear badges (a la Nazi Germany…a parallel they’re still drawing graphically even after removing the original story and posting a half-hearted retraction) could be seen coming a mile away. Antonia Zerbisias fills in some detail about the origins of the rumour and how it got planted in media circles, and POGGE sums it up well:

“It’s true that Ahmadinejad is a nasty piece of work. It’s also true that we’re being conned. Again.”

No kiddin’.

[tags]iran, badges, national post[/tags]

The ICB is not filling me with confidence right now

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

As you might be able to tell from past blog postings, I’m in an MBA program that’s done jointly by Dalhousie University and the Institute of Canadian Bankers. I’m almost halfway through the program right now, so I found it odd this morning when I received an email from the ICB telling me that, because I have some credits with them, I could apply for this exciting joint MBA they offer with Dalhousie.

Now, granted, screwups happen like this sometimes. Email marketing’s an inexact science; trust me, I know that from past experience. This, to me, seems like kind of a rookie mistake…like the marketing people just didn’t think to check their mailing list against the list of people who’re actually taking the MBA program they’re trying to pitch. What bothers me is this: the MBA course I’m taking right now is the ICB marketing course.

I find myself questioning their expertise.

.:.

I’m excited that my oldest brother might be flying over to spend some time with us here in Toronto this summer. He’ll be back in Nova Scotia this summer, but between the Montreal and New York trips earlier in the year, the Rockies trip in the fall and the aggressive saving for the condo closing date in April it was just too much of a squeeze for us to make that trip as well. But ifhe shows up here in TO, I’m sure we can get into some trouble.

[tags]mba, dalhousie, icb, marketing, family[/tags]

Drater

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

As funny as his Dilbert cartoons are, and as funny as half of his blog posts are, Scott Adams occasionally asks some damn good questions. Today’s topic: why does the US give foreign aid to Israel?

.:.

More baby-name fun from the Freakonomics guys. They point out a new one — “Nevaeh” — that went from eight babies in 1999 to 4,457 babies last year, and trace it to a single pop culture moment:

“The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. ‘Heaven spelled backwards,’ he said.”

Frankly, I’m surprised Levitt and Dubner didn’t talk more about the influence of pop culture on baby names. For example, the name “Dawson” went from 734th most popular to 175th the year Dawson’s Creek debuted, and climbed to 136th the year after. “Dylan” was always resonably popular, but shot up to 28th two years after Beverly Hills 90210 went on the air. “Wyatt” went from 375th to 197th in the year after Tombstone and Wyatt Earp were released. It’s not just boys either; for girls, the name “Trinity” went from 526th the year before The Matrix was released to 74th the year after it came out. “Alyssa” went from 209th in 1983 to 180th, 130th and 86th in the years immediately following the debut of Who’s The Boss. And, perhaps the most telling, the name “Beyonce” made its one and only appearance in the list of the top 1000 baby names: it was #702 in 2001, the year Destiny’s Child released their multi-platinum Survivor album.

[all data US, from Social Security Online]

.:.

I would like one of these t-shirts, but for the life of me I can’t imagine any situation where it would be socially acceptable.

[tags]dilbert, scott adams, freakonomics, nevaeh[/tags]

Politicians & sales people…apparently I'm feeling masochistic today.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Normally I read ITBusiness for work (natch) but these two articles caught my out-of-the-office interest:

  • Canadians swamp 2006 online census. I filled out the online census last week, and had no trouble at all. The Linux complaints and concerns about Lockheed Martin are valid, but it sounds like StatsCan answered them. Overall, I think the government deserves some praise for putting it online at all. Let’s at least pat them on the back before we nitpick them to death.
  • Sure the gun registry is a boondoggle, but shouldn’t we try to fix it? Did it go WAY over budget? Yes. Is the value of the registry difficult to measure? Yes. Does it completely stop gun violence? Of course not. Does it make sense to get rid of it? No. The cost is sunk; either the registry is valuable (in terms of perceived benefit versus ongoing — not initial — cost) to society or it isn’t. As far as I understand it the RCMP want it left in place, and I’d defer to them on this.

.:.

One final thought on mesh: too many people trying to get rich from blogs and web 2.0, not enough people trying to change the way companies talk to their customers. While I didn’t like the style of her presentation, you can tell that Tara Hunt just aches for the latter. People like her, or Jeremy Wright, or Tom Williams…those were the people with whom I found myself silently agreeing, who left me felt like we could be doing something truly different with this technology, not just extracting the same value from the same people in a slightly different way. The people in the crowd who stood up after every presentation to ask about how they could “monetize” this technology or that…they just gave me the creeps. Either they don’t get it, or they get it and they’re trying to exploit it.
[tags]mesh06, mesh conference, gun registry, census[/tags]

We were no there

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Last night I may have had a chance to get into last night’s Mogwai concert (which Frank from Chromewaves sums up nicely here) but I failed to tap the transatlantic-and-back-again connection to a member of the band that might have gotten me on the guest list. Probably. There was some confusion there. Anyway.

I don’t really know that anything could top my first time seeing them (like Frank, my ears have only recently stopped ringing) but I’d like to give them another chance after 4 years of good work since Rock Action. Some day the timing’ll work.

You can follow the boys in their fabulous driving machine at mr.beastmap.com.

[tags]mogwai, chromewaves, beastmap[/tags]

I KNEW IT!!

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Not dogs…rodents. This makes sense; I generally consider any animal my cats could eat to be a rodent.

A new study proves that the Chihuahua is actually a type of large rodent, selectively bred for centuries to resemble a canine, says The Watley Review. “This is clearly going to raise some eyebrows in the Chihuahua world,” said Peggy Wilson, president of the Chihuahua Club of America.

And really, how does one aspire to become president of the Chihuahua Club of America?
[via]

[tags]chihuahua, rodent[/tags]

Jesus Christ. And so on.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

From Ireland Online: Da Vinci Code provokes protests ahead of premiere.

Christian groups as far away as South Korea, Thailand and India protested against the movie The Da Vinci Code ahead of tomorrow’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. They were planning boycotts, a hunger strike and attempts to block or shorten screenings.

I suggest the protestors read the following:

fic·tion: A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.

You know. Like the bible.

.:.

Skype drops a big one: it will be free for outbound calls to any phone number in Canada and the US until the end of the year. That smell you smell is the telcos and Vonage shitting themselves.

.:.

From the BBC: Apple rival ‘tries to ban iPods’.

Digital music player maker Creative Technology has asked a US court to ban Apple from selling or marketing its iconic iPods in the US. Creative claims that the navigational menu used for finding and playing music on the iPod, violates its patent for its own Zen MP3 player.

I feel like my underdog home team just threw up a hail mary.

.:.

From TSN: Hurricanes GM – Habs were toughest test.

“No disrespect to Philadelphia, Ottawa and New Jersey, they’re all good teams, but some teams are a little better than others and I think Montreal is one of those teams,” Rutherford said from Raleigh, N.C.

Well…that’s some small consolation, I guess.

mesh: day 2.0

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

The mesh conference wrapped up a couple of hours ago. Final thoughts:

Day 2 wasn’t quite as good as day 1, if you ask me. There was more of a marketing focus today (there was a venture capital/PR stream as well, but I ignored that), and it felt like the potential of the conference got a bit lost in the noise of the “blogs are an extension of marketing” vs. “blogs are the end of marketing” debate; yesterday, the “old” media vs. “new” media debate seemed more reasoned and friendly, but today the marketing/PR people seemed to be dug into a trench. Or maybe that was just how I heard it. Anyway…

The first two keynote speakers — Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky — were both great, especially Kedrosky. He’s very funny, and has some great stories about who’s getting funding and why.

By the way, lots of people were liveblogging the keynote sessions, in case you want the summary versions of what was said. Technorati should point you in the right direction.

Of the “15 minutes of fame” spots, my favourite was Favorville.com…even though the poor guy talking to us about it was interrupted by a shrill and persistent fire alarm. It drives me nuts when the security desk comes on every few minutes to tell you…exactly what they told you a few minutes ago. Or to give you useless information like “The fire alarm was triggered on the fourth floor of the south building…that’s the fourth floor of the south building…not the concourse level.” Uh, that’s great; can you clarify for me whether or not there are deadly flames? That I’d like to know. Sheezus.

Tara Hunt was next. Maybe I was expecting the wrong things from her keynote, but I wasn’t wowed. Strange, ’cause if you hear her talk for five minutes, you’d kind of expect to be wowed when she has a whole hour to herself. She’s obviously smart, and I could just tell from her comments and reactions in the afternoon panel (which I’ll get to in a minute) that our brains were in the same place on the topics at hand…but I just didn’t feel like I knew anything new after her hour was up.

After lunch I had three session. The first and third were very focused on marketing, brand, PR…all stuff that I think is the devil, so it was interesting watching the two camps — the old guard who suspect something’s up and keep saying “blog-o-sphere” hoping that they’ll fit in, and the idealists who want to lead a revolution to kill marketing and PR as we know it but keep getting shouted down in their company’s meetings — face off politely. The best point of the day, I thought, went to Jonathan Ehrlich from Chapters.Indigo, who simply stated that you can have the best marketing in the world, but unless you have a kickass product behind it,the marketing’s pointless. To me, this seems like common sense, but some people actually debated him about it. Specifically, they claimed that it was marketing that made the iPod great; Ehrlich’s point was that the product was good first; then came the top-notch marketing. Good product + great marketing = #1; great product + shite marketing = Creative Labs. Their players have more functions, longer battery lives and better prices. Ever heard of ’em? Exactly.

The second session of the afternoon was about corporate blogging. Tara Hunt was back for this one; they also brought up Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil, whose comments were as vapid as her site is godawful. You know when someone gets about 50% of what’s going on (I mean in the grand scheme of things, not just what went on in the session), but thinks they’re an expert, and talks to everyone else — most of whom fully get it — as if they’re the expert? Everyone in the room just rolls their eyes and laughs a little bit? That’s kinda what this was like. In spite of this, I did manage to catch a few useful tips from Jeremy and the audience about how to sell executives on corporate blogging, so maybe I can take another run at mine.

.:.

The conference was a pretty good time, and tomorrow I’ll be pushing some of what filtered into my head out into my work blog(s), but I’ll be curious to see what’s on the agenda for next year. Will there be two days’ worth of new topics 363 days from now? Hard to say. Did I get anything out of it this year? Honestly, I think it may have been worth the money just to get the kind of kick in the ass that the 5-minute speech from Elissa Gjertson of Are You Frank? gave yesterday.

.:.

I arrived home today to find my “Bomb The Blogosphere” t-shirt in the mail, one day after I really needed it. Oh fate, why must you tempt me with tardy vestments?

[tags]mesh06, mesho conference[/tags]

(Many) more thoughts on mesh

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I left halfway through that last session with Dave Pollard (and two others: Tom Williams from GiveMeaning and George Irish from Amnesty International) and popped next door for the session about media with Jian Gomeshi (from the CBC), Andrew Baron (from Rocketboom; sadly, Amanda didn’t tag along) and Amber MacArthur (from TechTV).

After a quick walk, we were off to the last session of the day. I had trouble deciding which session to attend, but settled on “How and Why to podcast” with the afore-mentioned Amber MacArthur, which turned out to be pretty busy. Apparently the “Blogging 101” session earlier was packed too.

In general, it was less geeky/techie than I had originally thought it might be…which is the whole point of the “social web”. There were lots of people there from the business/marketing/entrepenurial side of things, and some from the media area as well. The most interesting session was Michael Geist’s talk on digital copyright law…which, from the title, you would think would be the most boring topic on the planet. But he used his powerpoint well, just throwing up visuals to support what he was saying, and talked about things that affect us every day and just happen to be about digital copyright as well.

Little things:

  • I love, love, LOVE the MaRS space. I’m trying to convince my boss to move us down there. Not that it’s up to him; he’d move us there in a second, I think.
  • I bumped into an old colleague from Delano. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years, so it was good to catch up. His company was just bought by Verisign, so congrats to him.
  • While standing at the registration desk the guy next to me said “Joey deVilla” when asked for his name. Without turning I said, “Hey, the Accordion Guy.” As he said, “Yep,” out of the corner of my eye I looked…and he actually carries a frigging accordion with him. I thought it was just a name, but dude actually straps on an accordion when the leaves the house. Now that’s living up to a reputation. Anyway, I was so dumbfounded for a minute that I didn’t even introduce myself or anything…I just wandered off. I’m sure he wondered who the big rude dick was.
  • My favourite 1/3 of the “15-minutes of fame”: Are You Frank?

There are lots and lots of pictures from the conference up on flickr already, including this one where you can see that I have a blurry bald spot. Lovely.

[tags]mesh06, mesh conference[/tags]

Are you meshin'?

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Since the mesh conference began this morning I’ve heard Om Malik and Michael Geist (both of whom you wouldn’t know unless you follow technology news), and Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne (who you’d know if you read the National Post or Maclean’s respectively). Warren Kinsella (who’s a dead ringer for Bill Murray) moderated the discussion for those last two.

The next session’s about to get underway…funny, there’s a gentleman in the panel who I’ve had lunch with: Dave Pollard. Didn’t even realize he was on the agenda until an hour ago.

Also: the free brownies in the lobby kick ass.

[tags]mesh06, mesh conference[/tags]