that canadian girl

A few days ago, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 to you and I) had a catastrophic failure. The world kept turning, but unfortunately, the third-party collaboration/SVN tool we use was on the affected East USA zone where the issue started on Thursday. It wasn’t until late Sunday night that we regained access to our [...]

A few months ago, Twitter published a State of Twitter Spam blog post. It claimed to have reduced spam from fake accounts to little more than 1%, lowering the number of offers for prescription drugs, dodgy online scams and invitations from busty babes. We complain about Twitter more than we praise them, but this deserves [...]

In the past year, I’ve been providing in-house training for companies who are approaching blogging and social media with excitement, but need some guidance to ensure they do things right. I’m now opening up the “Intro to Blogs & Social Media in Business” training course to the public, with a few dates in September and [...]

This year’s must-have accessory for any business or marketing team seems to be a community manager. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had nearly a dozen emails – either direct or via LinkedIn – from companies who were calling upon my network to find Social Networks Managers, Community Relations Executives, etc. [If you're of the [...]

I had to resist the urge to use the first post name that came to mind for this one, or it simply would have been “What the f*ck is the government thinking?” But then that would have been too vague, and probably applies to at least two baker’s dozens of its recent policies. The reason [...]

As more businesses start peppering their marketing plans with social media projects, activities that previously were reserved for the geeky early adopters are now coming under scrutiny when used for commercial endeavours. With all this new media growth, there’s no clear rule book yet. We’re writing it as we go, and just like the Bible, [...]

It’s been radio silence on that canadian girl for the past few weeks, but certainly not because I haven’t had anything to say. These past few weeks have been some of the most eventful ones of my life, in fact. Just over a month ago, I officially became my own boss, kicking my social media [...]

What is a BarCamp? Wikipedia’s description is “BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.” Got your head around that one? Yeah, it’s a bit dry. [...]

As I’ve just mentioned on the Taptu blog, if you’re in London and you like the mobile world, there’s only one place to be this evening: Mobile Geeks of London (and here’s a non-Facebook link!) It’s an informal evening gathering of people who work in mobile or simply enjoy geeking about with phones. Good company, [...]