that canadian girl

A short word of advice to fellow WordPress users. Not only is WordPress 2.5 so awesomely great that you should upgrade immediately, even if it was just for the beautifully refreshed admin area (after years of staring at the same old UI, it’s so good to see a new one!) but you should upgrade if you want to keep appearing in Technorati.

Good ol’ Technorati, one of the largest blog directories on the web, has announced that, due to some security issues with older versions of WordPress, you need to upgrade to the latest version in order to continue being indexed.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

This will be interesting to watch, seeing as even large blogs like TechCrunch haven’t gotten around to updating yet. Many less techy users will have to wait until their hosting’s control panel updates the Fantastico scripts to contain the latest version of WordPress. Considering the millions of ghost town blogs currently listed on Technorati, I wonder whether this will become a huge Spring Cleaning of all the unloved, dead blogs across the web. This might just turn out to be a good thing…

So, go on, get off your butt and upgrade WordPress to the latest version, and tell those around you to do the same!

These aren’t the tidiest notes, and I even failed on jotting down exactly who was speaking but there are a few useful points in there… Thanks to Lionel for the insight on how Dell dealt with feedback in the early days.

The Future of Corporate Blogs
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I wasn’t so hot on this panel, found there was a lot of navel-gazing and not enough direction. Also, I don’t know what world these guys live in but do they not also have to contend with marketing, business dev, crazy bosses with wild ideas? There was no discussion about how to integrate the real-life demands into collaborative processes. Nice people, but rubbish panel.

Creative Collaboration: Designers and Developers working together
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For this panel, I ditched the laptop and only used pen and paper so my notes are less than clear. In fact, I’m lucky if I can read my own handwriting, but the highlights for me were finally meeting the lovely Tara Hunt, a fellow Canadian expat and inspirational blogger.

My notes might be a bit garbled but sue me, I was too busy listening.

“Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing” panel notes
Panel: Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh McLeod, David Parmet
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The notes from this panel are pretty thorough - it was one of the first panels I attended and I was pretty enthusiastic with the typing. Interesting findings, but the main takeaway for me is that these kids are clever and pretty discerning, we need to give them a whole lot more credit than we (or I) currently do!

“What teens like online and on their phones”
Panel of teens from age 11-17, based in the Austin area and of different levels of interest in technology, music, etc…
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Cognitive Seduction 4.0: 20 ways to woo our users
Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

For this panel, I’ll admit my notes were a bit patchy and I relied on a few other ppl’s notes to improve them. I was too mesmerised by Kathy’s talk to worry so much about notes. But read on anyways…

I’ve also borrowed a few of Kathy’s images to illustrate for those who weren’t so lucky as to attend. They’re completely her copyright, ownership and what not. (They rock!)
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Since I attended SXSW last week, I thought it’d be the right thing to do to share my notes from panels. They’re incomplete, I’ve probably interpreted some statements wrongly, there are probably plenty of typos. But I felt I’d be a complete shmuck if I didn’t do the community thang and shared my notes.

So if you’re not interested, apologies about the next few posts, which will each summarise a panel. At the end, I’ll try to add links to other (better) coverage of the same panels to give the bigger picture. If you’ve taken notes or have something to add (like videos!), just leave a comment and I’ll include it in my post.

First off, the “A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?” panel notes…
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South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.

Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?

Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.

So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.

I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?

[* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]

“Thousands of homes face losing phone lines after cable thieves struck. Police were alerted today at 9.30am to the theft of high-value cables near Cambourne. […] A mobile police station has been sent to the area and high-profile police patrols have been mounted in a bid to reassure residents.

BT engineers are working on restoring the lines but it is not known how long this will take. DS Chris Balmer said: “We do not yet know the exact number of homes which have been left without phone lines however we believe it could be a few thousand.

“BT are working as quickly as possible to restore the phone lines. If you area aware of any elderly or vulnerable residents please check on their welfare. If anyone saw any suspicious activity around manhole covers please contact me. Scrap metal thieves who rip up telephone cables were warned by police they are putting lives at risk”, reported in the Cambridge News.”

Seriously, what’s that all about? No phones? No internet?

However, to lighten the tone, I thought I’d accompany the news with some interesting archeological findings, also reported recently.

“After digging to a depth of 100 meters last year, Russian scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years, and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network one thousand years ago.

Not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, American scientists dug 200 meters and headlines in the US papers read: “US scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibers, and have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Russians.”

One week later, the Kenyan newspapers proudly reported the following: “After digging as deep as 500 meters, Kenyan scientists have found absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5000 years ago, their ancestors were already using wireless technology.”

[Disclaimer: I realise the last thing I should be doing is giving this guy more visibility and mentions on the web, but his original article, as well as his follow-up REALLY rubbed me up the wrong way and I need to vent it out.]

When I took on my first marketing role, some years ago now, I quickly realised that the term marketing, like sales came with a lot of negative baggage. Since then, I’ve met enough marketers who fit the awful cliché to see why the name has been sullied for good.

I’ve made it my personal goal to never, ever fit in with the stereotype of the marketer who is willing to lie, cheat and sell his firstborn child for the sake of hitting some haphazard target numbers set by a boss in an executive leather chair in a clinical office boardroom. I want marketing to be about a great product and an honest passion for the community to whom it brings a solution to a problem. I only want to work for company directors who have visions I can agree with, and marketing managers who have their heart and their ethics in the right place. Call me idealistic or naïve, but that’s how this girl rolls.

This morning, I came across a TechCrunch guest post by a guy called Dan who claims his viral video marketing agency can take average videos and shoot them into the viral fame sphere. He candidly starts with this introduction:

“Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.”

Now, I’m not new to paid blog posts, fake forum users and spam comments encouraging users to go view videos. I know very well how much money some companies will pay to get some of that hard-to-get attention time from viewers. In fact, I’ve been asked in the past to take part in every single one of these types of grey-area tactics, and have held my position. The Internet is polluted enough as it is, I won’t be adding to the spam that goes around by lowering myself to talking to myself on a public forum, pretending to be some teeny bopper who loves whatever product I’m asked to market.

What rubs me the wrong way is the apparent pride with which Dan talks about his agency, while knowing very well that what he’s doing is a. ethically wrong, b. taking the lazy route, c. quite likely to one day blow up in his face.

In his follow-up post, Dan apologises for the tone he took in his article and does a 180 degrees on his claims of spam tactics. His attempt at saving face with the sudden claim that he does not spam or manipulate people is pathetic and pretty damn weak.

There are two scenarios that could’ve led Dan to require that second mea culpa post:

• Either he does use dirty tactics and was a bit too honest, which makes him a moron for not foreseeing how others, with more ethics than him, would be incensed and angered by his post. If he can’t foresee consequences this obvious, do you really want him marketing your product?
• Or he’s being a gusty bastard and did this specifically to get a rise out of people for the sake of some publicity, spicing his article with a few sensationalistic techniques he doesn’t necessarily always use. If that’s the case, he’s still an idiot for claiming to use frankly spammy techniques.

Either way, Dan, it still makes you an ethically-twisted little shit.

Unlike me, Ian Delaney doesn’t get his knickers in a twist, and focuses on the positives in Dan’s post, and highlights the things we can learn from successful viral videos.

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

So while there’s a bit to learn from Dan’s posts, I just hope everyone remembers that there are plenty of ethical, community-centered and honest people in the marketing world who will agree that dodgy spamming and paid links just isn’t fair play. While dirty tricks might work short-term, you can’t build a community through it, and in the long run, that’s what matters.

I’m at the Future of Web Apps in London today. So far, I’ve attended the intro keynote with Om Malik and Michael Arrington, followed by Heather Champ & Derek Powazek on “We’ve got this community: Now what?”. I’m now in Tony Conrad’s “Future of Search”.

The main running thread of all talks so far is quite clear: Nobody knew what would happen next after launching their app. And in fact, few ended up where they expected to go. Someone this morning said that the real work on a web app really begins after you launch (see, I was listening, but didn’t take note so not sure who said this…) You need to listen intently, watch your users and see what they make of it. Odds are you’ll notice that they’ve hacked your app and use it in ways you would never have imagined. That’s your cue to harness their creativity and evolve accordingly.

Sometimes, Web 2.0 big names can get a bit cocky about success, but I think this is one point everyone agrees on: You just don’t know what’s going to happen next when you launch a startup.

Both Andrew and I are used to having friends, acquaintances and outright strangers asking us for advice on buying their next computer. However, in recent months, I’ve been amazed at the sheer volume of people who have been asking whether they should switch to Mac.

In many cases, the answer is an easy one: “Most definitely! Get your skates on, let’s go buy one now!” But despite the fact that I have Apple juice running in my veins and that if you gave me open heart surgery, I most likely have a Mac Mini instead of a heart, I still strongly believe that Mac isn’t for everyone. In some conditions, OS X just isn’t right.

So here are the questions I think anyone on the fence about switching to Mac should ask themselves before giving Steve Jobs their credit card details…

1. Do I use any particular Windows-only software on a regular basis?

• If your answer is yes, then look into Mac alternatives. The best solution isn’t always necessarily an OS X port of your fave Windows apps. In fact, it most likely isn’t. There are tons of great Mac apps out there.
• Can’t find an alternative? You can always run the app in BootCamp or Parallels on your Mac, and this will suit almost anyone.
• Still not sold on this solution? Then this is where you should probably stick to Windoze.
• Don’t need any Windows software? Attaboy!

2. Do I have anything to worry about compatibility-wise?

In 99% of cases, no you don’t. However, if you use very specialised software, again, do your homework before the Big Move.

3. Will it take me time to get used to the difference in user interface?

Yes, it will. There’s no way around it.

It takes some time to get used to a new way of doing things. You’ll need to think differently, far beyond simply going to the other corner of Firefox to close a window. Shortcuts are different. The way installs and uninstalls are handled is different. Using the hardware itself is different: For example, with a Mac laptop, you’ll hardly ever need to turn it off, as shutting the lid sends it to sleep so comfortably that I only turned mine off once since Christmas, and rebooted a handful of times for updates.

You’ll also need to get used to… things just… working! Plug a peripheral in and it works. Add a printer to the network and there it is. Your stress levels will definitely go down.

It’s a complete mentality shift and it will take time to adapt. So give yourself time, have patience and be ready to relearn. Once you get up to speed, you WILL love it, I promise!

This is one of many reasons that, for example, we didn’t encourage Andrew’s parents to move to Mac. Their use of computers is pretty simple: browsing, email, photo management. They know their way around these features in Windows. There was simply no benefit in shifting them into a whole new environment.

4. Will it cost me a lot more than a Windows machine?

Actually, it probably won’t. Sure you can buy Dell’s loss leader at £395 and be sorted for a few years. But if you need to spec up your Windows machine to a similar level to what’s the bare minimum offered on Mac, you’ll find that the prices are similar.

This can be argued, and I’m sure my smart ass friends will come disagree with me on this point, but as far as personal research goes, that’s my observation.

5. Will I get special treatment and a secret handshake?

No. That’s fanboy nonsense.

Ten years ago, meeting another Mac user was a revelation and a bit of a dirty secret. I certainly didn’t know any other Mac users my age. They were all middle aged men, usually my dad or grandpa’s acquaintances.

Today, well… Show up at a conference and count the laptops. Odds are a vast number of them will be Macs. In fact, somewhere between 15 and 20% of all laptops bought in the US since March are Macs. It doesn’t get a second look anymore, and in a way that’s good.

Hopefully that’ll send the fanboys away to play with a different new shiny toy. Hopefully…

6. Am I doing it just because all the other cool kids are doing it?

Yes? Then piss off, I have no interest in giving you support.

In summary, Macs are probably a good solution for Chantal, a graduating student who’s living space is limited and who wants a fast, reliable machine. It’s also a great solution for my dad who’s still living in the 90’s using OS 9.2 (that’s a hint, dad! ) but it might not be the best solution for, say, my sis-in-law Lisa who just wants a bog-basic laptop to use a couple of times a week to check email.

To each their own, pick whatever you feel most comfortable with!

One last piece of advice. Oi! Here! Pay attention or it’ll cost you!

The new OS X operating system, called Leopard, is coming out within the next three or four weeks, so my advice is to wait until it comes out to buy a new Mac, to ensure you get the latest OS.

[Update: Leopard came out in late October, and it’s fantastic. So go ahead and upgrade now if you’re ready!]

Apparently they can. Aaron Stanton started writing and posting videos on CanGoogleHearMe.com less than two weeks ago, yet he’s an overnight celebrity at the Googleplex.

Aaron had a business proposal, but his attempts to contact Google via phone or email did not work. So he decided to fly to Google, sit outside Google for several days, until someone at Google would agree to meet with him. He reportedly got that meeting and is running high right now.

He flew out on the 11th February, and had his first appointment with Google on the 14th, with some generally positive feedback leading to future meetings and NDA’s. Details of his Big Idea aren’t publicly available but Digg rumours* point to “a powerful tool for writers. By analyzing published novels and breaking them down into detailed statistics, then graphing those statistics scene-by-scene, we allow authors to better understand their craft in a way never before possible.”

Now, we have no idea whether his idea is any good, and whether it’s anything to do with the above, but Scoble deemed Aaron important enough to take his 13 year old son Patrick to meet him. He and I both love this guy’s attitude - He followed his dream, even if it took a few little online self-publicity stunts to get there.

Some have compared his overnight success to the Red Paperclip guy, Kyle MacDonald. But even if Aaron’s success compares to Kyle’s, and it doesn’t turn him into a multimillionaire for an idea he sells to Google, he’s an inspiration to all young people with an idea. Don’t sit around, and most of all, don’t use typical channels like the Google idea submission form, but instead, make noise, get yourself heard, make a video, talk to the right people to create a buzz, and then, maybe you’ll get through!

[* No, I don’t take Digg seriously, not even as a source of rumours, but thought interesting to include what some people appear to have dug up]

The well-publicised campaigns by Apple to promote the Mac as an enjoyable platform to use at home was recently crowned off by a dig at Vista’s security system.

I’m a Mac fangirl through and through. You can’t get your first Mac at the age of something like five, and not be a natural Mac user all your life. However, the past couple of days, some anti-Mac comments have really tickled me and made me laugh. One was a genuine, gotta-love-these-videos kind of laughter: Videos made in the Mac vs PC style but turning the tables around. “Are you high?”

The other giggle was provided by an article by Charlie Brooker of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, subtly titled “I Hate Macs”, which tickled me in a different kind of way. I’m not sure whether Charlie is dense, close-minded or just looking for a quick traffic spike to his blog. What do you think? Either way, I’m not terribly impressed by his argument, and I feel that one can happily use both Mac and Windows on a daily basis without the need to cause a widespread online crisis.

Why do people have such an urge to stick to one camp or the other? I feel they each have their value (for example, I’ll openly admit that Office on Mac is lacking in certain areas… Like Excel translating date fields incorrectly and telling me we’re in 2011, forcing me to put together some reports on Windows. Or Entourage feeling like I’m dragging a dead elephant along, yet Mail.app not being robust enough for the purposes of 10 squillion subfolders)

It doesn’t matter which OS you use, computers will never be faultless. As long as they get me through the day and there’s some new shiny things to look at, I’m happy enough.

No, don’t worry, I’m not announcing we’re having a baby! We’re having a bunny!

That’s right, Keira, my Nabaztag/tag has been with us since before Christmas, but only recently has it become usable. First there were all the server issues at Violet in Paris. Then there was the unavoidable busy times with the holidays, Pepsmedia and well, being sociable for a change?

But yesterday, I was working from home and gave a work colleague instructions on sending messages to my bunny. I later found myself in fits of laughter when Keira started humming Jingle Bells Rock for me.

I’ve yet to write any clever services for it (read: Get Andrew to write them) but it definitely has potential in that area. In the meantime, it’s just a nutty entertaining talking clock, who occasionally also does a bit of Tai Chi, and loves to sing Philippe Lafontaine - Coeur de Loup when given the opportunity!