Clippings from Mr Frosty’s garden

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can even subscribe by email! Thanks for visiting!

Blimey, it’s brass monkeys weather here in the Adelaide Hills!

Mrs BetterComms, the hounds of the Baskervilles and I go walking at 5am and it’s warmer then (-2C) than at 7am when we walk out of the house and make our merry ways to the working day (-5C).

But I’m here in my chauffered Volvo (aka ‘bus’) on the way to a client site and have my ears full of Status Quo’s ‘Forty-Five Hundred Times’ from the ‘Live’ album thing. I sit at the front of the Volvo because its the only seat that gives one enough space to open up the notebook (it’s as bad as travelling in cattle class, hey, Nev?!). Thus the rest of the bus get to wonder what chemicals I am on as I bounce up and down in my seat. Tee hee.

The notebook is one way of keeping warm — it’s nice to have something warm on your lap in winter, isn’t it? — so it’s a good opportunity to wander through my feeds and have a gander at what’s occuring in our world.

Of course Scoble is the topic du jour, which is to be expected. Some have said that he’s adding legitimacy to a nascent industry the same way he added credibility to blogs; others say he’s a madman to move to something so risky.

Ahhh, but is life not a series of calculated risks? Besides, I bet he had a few shares tucked away at the bottom of the mattress. And I reckon that he’s such good PR value that even if this latest venture goes belly-up he’ll still find something worth his while to move to.

Scoble aside, I was fascinated to see:

• Trevor notes that that Aussie PR folks are happier than ‘lawyers in a courtroom’. Probably because lawyers have the sort of credibility and social love normally reserved for politicians and used car salesmen. He also points to a fact noted by the Beeb, that our mighty Socceroos are the only side in World Cup history to score three goals in the last seven minutes. “They think it’s all over… it is now!”
• Shel (the handsome one) points to a free chapter from a $395 report/book on social media and intranets. Nothing new for us evangelists and regular readers of this and other PR/Marcomms blogs, but worth pushing up the food chain to senior managers.
• I got an email last night from one of the three chappies behind some recently-released directories on Aussie bloggers and podcasters, announcing the beta version (what isn’t?) of a News2.0 service that aggregates a whole stack of aussie blogs on one page. Worth checking out, but no RSS feed yet (although apparently it is coming soon).
• Bryan suggests that podcasters get an occasional ‘air check’ to see where improvement lies. Good idea — any suggestions on who would be the judges, Bryan?
• Ron apologises for the paucity of recent posts, but he’s now a media daaarling and no doubt will be showing Oprah how to cook a snag and a few shrimps next… (actually, we Australians don’t cook shrimps on the barbi, but don’t let the facts get in the way of a good joke!)
• Neville has been blogging using the Word2007 beta2. I can’t get the blighter to work, but Nifty Nev gets his to work with his WordPress blog. I can’t get the connection engine to connect to mine, so can’t configure it. It must not like Aussie blogs
• Kami warns us all about the danger of the bad press that won’t go away — blame the Google effect.
• Heidi gets all quivery over Garr Reynolds. Well his blog, anyway. Both conclude that infection and enthusiasm are contagious.
• The Freakonomics guys look at the World Cup and wonder if stars are born or made
• Donna P’s post on presenters who cannot present and communicators who cannot communicate struck such a resonance with me that Allan and I chatted about it last night.
• It’s an older post, but Stuart ‘the’ Bruce says what many in the rest of the world find annoying about a minority of North Americans but are too polite to say
• Chris Pratley lets us in on the fantastic news that my beloved OneNote will be bundled not just with the ‘full monty’ version of Office2007, but also a new incarnation: ‘Ultimate‘. He also points us to another OneNote blogger, program manager Dan Escapa.
• And lastly, my almost equally beloved Nova Spivak encourages us to look at a fun series of images that help us visualise very large numbers, and a Fox video of a man who converts water into fuel. Says Nova, “What is most strange to me is that although his welding torch can generate enough heat to burn holes in rock, the tip of the torch stays cool enough to touch.”

And that’s enough reading for one morning!

Tagged as: blogging, humour, podcasting, tools