July 16, 2005

Jesse knows...

...what a sinus infection feels like. This pretty picture is me! It neglects the painful teeth though. And the cough I'm now sprouting thanks to the post nasal runoff.

It's wet enough around Georgia now to grow sinus infections from the earth, on little vines, waiting for noses to happen by and inhale them like jasmine.

Everything changes even while we're sick. The net stands still less and less often these days. I think that when we die we'll be summed up and remembered and forgotten before our bodies touch the earth. We will be vintage in 5 years or less. The age of an online antique reduced from 100 years to ten.

All the while, infectious agents will hold fast to the insides of sinuses everywhere.

Mama PR, Don't Let Your Good Bloggers Get Away.

Especially right now.

It's an odd thing. Besides my finger injury, which is now better thanks to all the funnies and encouragement you left me in comments, I'm sick. I know the routine by now, after all of these years. I get worked up over something incredibly important that's being discussed online, I try to make a difference, I realize I can't, and then I get a sinus infection.

Works like clockwork.

Does this mean that blogging makes me sick? Well, not blogging per se, but the twisting of blogspace by powerful non-participators who have not a clue what it means to be here--that makes me sick. The command-and-control oriented who don't know what it means to talk as people who happen to work in companies large and small, or for themselves, in the U.S., and globally, but as people first. Blog posers who use out terms like 'dialogue' and 'conversation' but don't understand what having one feels like. These folks make me spend my co-pay, and that gets me cranky.

The first step for the blogging clueless: Admit your are powerless.

Would it be so difficult, for example, for a company like Ketchum to admit that they've missed the blog boat but are correcting that by, say, encouraging their employees to blog, listening to what bloggers within the organization already know--striking up conversations (not defense arguments) with people outside the organization? To understand that the "PR Blogosphere" is not the some place out in the ether separate from the rest of the blogworld? To cop to the fact that it isn't just PR bloggers who think they've behaved stupidly?

To admit they have a lot to learn from others with commitment and caring and years of living in the blogosphere? And that they're ready to engage that expertise?

That some of these experts are the very ones they have systematically ignored within their own organization for years on this very topic?

To understand that blogging is about lowering yourself to the level of your market--to take off your PR Holy See robes and listen up? Not by "putting a blog up," necessarily, but by at least being interested?

And to help their clients understand this?

I could go on and on and cover old ground, talk about the conversations I had with my colleagues on blogging at a time when eKetchum barely had its "e". Back when I had Chris Locke, Gonzo-Marketing fresh, ready to talk with them about how they could leap forward in a largely undefined space by participating.

That's when Anthony Parcero and I were blogging from the inside, and even after I left, and blogging became "bigger," Anthony remained a participating-if-semi-secret-ketchum voice encouraging Ketchum, and PR as a whole, into the blogosphere--for the most part, without any sign that Ketchum was listening to its own clued employee.

Compare Ketchum's recent defense messaging with what Anthony has written in the past--someone who, as a technologist, is not at the top of the hierarchical PR food chain. From what I can tell as an outside observer over the last few years, Anthony kept his ketchum connection mostly behind the scenes. The reasons for that are his to write about or not. But his voice did not go unnoticed. Maybe even now noticed by Ketchum, as they scramble to catch up.

Compare and see if any of Ketchum's recent press sounds vaguely familiar to what one of its past blogging employees has been saying for a long time:

Kind of similar to the blogsong Ketchum is singing now. Except, Anthony's not there singing it anymore. It'll be interesting to see if Ketchum can learn to carry a tune. Won't it?

The fact is this: Ketchum needs to catch up quick and stop using the positioning that "blogging isn't always the right strategy" to explain its lack of presence in this space over the last five years.

Ketchum may need to take a page from the Edelman playbook and engage the services of a real live blogger (like David is for Edelman), to play devil's advocate and put a hand up when it's time to call bullshit bullshit.

It's a lot less messy than letting the blogosphere play that role for you.

Now excuse me while I go expel the toxins from my system.

July 14, 2005

typing without pointer...

With all the football i played as a kid, with all the horses I fell off of, with all the times my brother stuffed my clothes full of pillows and beat me to a pulp, with all the stairs I fell down, I must have never sprained anything. I know this because no appendage has caused me such discomfort in all of my God-given injuries.

This pointer finger thing (see below; linking is too much work) is not so good and it's swelling and I can't move it so good. It's not broken I'm pretty sure because I can bend it and the pain is down low, near the part where the knuckle bends, but I don't WANT to bend it because it hurts. Four Advil Bad. Jeremy told me to take six. He just wants me off Global PR Week because I jabber during conference calls. I wish I could link--i'll come back in tomorrow and link. Right now my injured finger wants to stay stiff and sort of curled, like a claw finger, and george said no no make sure you keep moving it but put ice on it, don't let it stiffen up, but now it's 1:24 and i would kind of like to sleep.

I am learning how to send my middle finger in to do my pointer finger's job on the keyboard. He can reach all the way to "t" and "b" now, but it slows me down.

This means my fuck-you finger has to work harder and reach farther, but hey, he's never been shy before.

Traffic Jam

Damn, that traffic jam...how I hate to be late...hurts my motor to go so slow...time i get home my supper be cold...i say damn, that traffffiiiic jam. (name that artist).

So, I'm driving through more cobb county and north fulton FLOOD WATERS today, doing I don't know what with my steering wheel, maybe it was when I called Tom, maybe not, and then BAM somehow I had jammed my left hand pointer finger into the steering wheel in a way that made no sense, and the bottom line is, I've never had a finger issue like this.

Luckily, I can curl it into a typing position. However, DAMN it hurts and I can't move it side to side, as in wagging, as in baaaaad Ketchum, and I'd link over to Constantin but really this finger dilemma is making things quite difficult and i feel like halley suitt with her cocksyx or whatever it's called bruised from falling down, except i wasn't skating or anything, i was simply steering a car.

what on earth is up with that.

July 12, 2005

When We Are Hypocrites

I've been writing a lot about Technorati and its recent identity crisis ("I'm a portal! No, I'm a search engine! No, I'm a portal! No, a search engine! No, I'm a mess!") lately. I just don't understand how an essential tool in a specific space -- i.e., blogging -- can become virtually unusable after a round of publicized enhancements, supposedly tested out on beta users like me. I don't understand how Technorati's full-scale search failure over the last several weeks can go unexplained.

And don't get me wrong. I love(d) Technorati. I use(d) it for clients and for my own blog travels. I paid the money. I joined the party. I expect more.

And I'm getting a little miffed.

Because when it's someone like Dell that fails to deliver, more brick than click, the bloggerati jump up and down and demand satisfaction. They call in the legit media and launch a feeding frenzy.

But when it's me and the folks who comment here about Technorati's weeks of non-usability, you hear a lot of wind. Is that because we're supposed to all be friends? Not bite the hand that ranks us? Because Dave Sifry's busier launching Live 8 sites and sending bloggers backstage, and announcing top 100s, than he is making sure that we can search beyond the new Technorati wasted-space homepage?

Is it okay to take Dell to the matt while making sure one of our own is immune?

No it's not.

So what is it? Why no word from on high? Is it the price point difference between a Dell Notebook and a Technorati Watchlist? Is it a loyalty on the part of the Top 100 that Technorati has appointed that buys silence?

I have tried to search more than a dozen times in the past month. I have gotten an error message every time I've tried to go beyond first-page results. I've blogged about it. I've included screen clips. When I'm lucky enough to arrive at an actual page without an error message, it is taking upwards of a minute or more. Today, I didn't even make it to the first page results. Instead I got the old error message again.

You see, I don't like the big colorful icons and links to things I don't care about taking up space and costing extended loading time. I'm not a teen, I'm not a tween, and I'm not a twenty-something, so get over all the FUN you're trying to make me have, Technorati. Just cut it out and fix your product.

I don't know about you folks, but I'd like a few answers. I'm not sure who Technorati's PR folks are. Maybe I should snoop around.

And maybe Dell should stop making computers and start making blog search engines. No portals. No search engines. No portals.... They'd have it a whole lot easier when they screw up.

July 11, 2005

Priestcasting

AKMA's On! He posted the mp3 of his sermon and a comprehensive 'sermon report' from St. Lukes. I've been waiting for four years to go to AKMA's church. Amazing. Stunning. I have met the man as a friend and a blogger, and now I've heard him at work, executing that about which he is most passionate.

Now, if we can get some video behind it, and bring other denominations on board -- to podcasting, to videocasting, to places like Odeo and Kaneva -- if we can bring Baptists and Born Agains, Friends and Lutherans, Unity and Unversalists, then virtual congregations can do a kind of inter-denominational shape shifting, breaking down church walls and exclusive doctrines to attend services without the barriers of geography and ritual.

In secret or in the open we can commune.

God willing, a new "flatter religion" is waiting for us there.

July 10, 2005

quotes of the day

Shelley: I'm not writing news; I'm telling a story.

Dave Winer: Now when they fuck us, we have a way of giving them a black mark. A little more metadata, and it'll start showing up on their bottom line.

Denise Howell: It's only taken me 40 years to stumble upon my epitaph, but this morning one spoke to me with perfect clarity: "She never took enough pictures."

Ray Sweatman: ...to where the morning doesn’t break but unfolds softly in a bloom

Broken Fema

Well sweet Mary, I want to get the good federal benefits and paid-for-PPO insurance that come with the tough job of wrting FEMA's communications. I could bring much clarity ot the process. I am even proficient in translating FEMA's instructions into Internetese: U R SOL, LOL!

Be well, Tom, and all-a you Floridians and neighboring southeasters.