Goodness, what do we call it: a vidblog? a vodcast? a vlog? Write your ideas on a sheet of paper, wrap them around a large brick and send them flying in my general direction…

It’s boiling hot outside, hence an interior shot today, with the blinds drawn to keep the heat out.

Today’s 7-minute soup de jour:

• Anshe Chung projects revenues from Second Life will hit around US$2.6m for 2006. Not bad; she even intends to double her employee numbers to 50. Mind you, we still don’t know how the ‘Donald Trump’ of Second Life feels about having more realistic hair…
• My new ‘best blog of the week’, CleverClogs by Marjolein Hoekstra, not only gives me a fantastic new way of organising my RSS feeds, but also points me to a free 5gb online hard drive and personalised filing system. Cool!
• Tool tip: Password Master 4.0 for Windows PocketPC
• Today’s brilliant vid clip comes from the ‘What Women Really Don’t Want For Christmas’ Department
• Thanks to Donna P for her lovely card

Enjoy!

Download the Flash file now (28mb) and save it to your pc, or else watch it below (except it’s not showing up! grrr… more work to be done at click.tv to get this to work on my blog, methinks) Or of course you can subscribe to my podcast feed and pick it up whenever I record a new vodcast… err, vidblog… err, podvlog… err, vlibvlob… err, schlobolob…

UPDATE: grrrrr…..! I had to re-convert my wmv file into another Flash flv file (it took over 1 hour!) and upload it, so the filename had to be changed because the other was corrupt. The download link above is now the correct file. Sorry. And I still can’t get click.tv to work — everytime I try and load the code in the post the whole blog just goes haywire. Sheesh! New technology, huh?

UPDATE 2: grrrr double grrrr….!! Now the Flash file won’t play in any flash plug-in on my browsers. Argghhh!!!! And I can’t get any technical help from ClickTV. Right, then — large 45mb wmv file now being uploaded.

Filed under: Second Life
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If you use a feed reader to keep up to date on your information gathering/research and I strongly suggest that:

1. you do; and
2. you use GreatNews,

then after a while your feeds will become unmanageable and unwieldy, leading to lowered productivity, frustration and stress.

I am a repeat offender/victim of this, so I devised a 4-part categorization of my feeds:

1. Cappucchino - those feeds I read daily
2. Darjeeling Breakfast - I try to get to them once a week
3. English Breakfast - I try to get to them once a month
4. Green tea - I try to get to them

However, this self-imposed categorization has its limitations — including that every new feed I come across I automatically pop into my ‘cappucchino’ collection, whether it deserves it or not (the ‘new’ always equals ‘better’, doesn’t it? {grin} — see point 3 below)

Imagine my joy, then, when I came across the CleverClogs blog, run by Marjolein Hoekstra. In the inspiring and very clever words of Marjolein:

So, here’s my list of RSS reader housekeeping secrets for you to drop or adopt:

1. Categorize feeds by topic or project. If you lose interest in that topic, that branch is easily pruned. If necessary, assign multiple categories to feeds. Find experts for each group of feeds so that you know whose writings are mostly considered authoritative.
   
2. Use techniques like feed filtering, feed digesting and smart feeds to obtain chronologically ordered lists (river of news) of highly relevant items. These techniques reduce the number of feeds that you have and they improve the quality of the ones that you do decide to subscribe to.
   
3. Create a separate category ‘Evaluate’ where you keep candidate feeds. After a few weeks you’ll notice how quickly your interests have shifted. You’ll find that it’s a delightful relief to swiftly erase feeds you thought were indispensable a couple of weeks before.
   
4. Tag, rate and annotate your feeds so that you know why you added them in the first place. Edit your feed titles to make them meaningful, for example add the name of the blogger to the feed title.
   
5. Sort your feeds by rating within each category. This will allow you to focus on the feeds you rate highest when you’re on a time budget and it makes the actual chore of pruning feeds a snap.
   
6. Use different update notification mechanisms depending on the feed’s rank: IM, ticker tape or system tray pop-up notification for urgent messages, email for intermediately urgent messages, and your feed reader for the remaining items. This way you’ll know for sure you won’t miss the most important items.
   
7. In your mindset redefine the meaning of ‘unread’ vs ‘read’ items: the read ones can usually be skipped on the next round of feed reading, so turn these off. Be real: the ‘unread’ items don’t hurt you. Feed reading is fun and informative. Don’t spoil it by forcing yourself to race against the clock.
   
8. Be brave enough to close your feed reader every so often and do stuff that might help you to relax.
   
9. Keep a copy of your feeds by exporting them to OPML. You can save the file to your hard drive, then delete them from your reader. There’s also a possibility other people consider you an authority on that particular topic. Offer your subscriptions through an OPML browser on your blog. This encourages you to finetune your list of feeds because you know others are keeping an eye on the quality of your work.

Many thanks for an inspiring set of secrets, Marjolein, and your blog is now in my cappucchino feeds!

If you are interested in seeing who’s in my feeds at the moment, you could do worse than visit my ‘others to read’ page. It’s not completely up to date, but I’m not yet organised enough to risk putting my current OPML file out there for you to import…

Technorati : Marjolein Hoekstra, feed reader, news reader, productivity

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I recently added a stack of new articles to my main website, including:

• “Muzzling the motor mouths” by Bill Lampton

• “Does your marketing plan need changing?” by Joy Gendusa

• “Communication: who is in their right mind?” by Kevin Dwyer

• “Practice makes perfect: changing your communication habits one step at a time” by Judy Ringer; and

• “Why Corporate Identity is a Very Powerful Communication Branding Tool” by Thomson Chemmanoor

Why not stop by and read the articles for yourself?


Technorati : communication articles

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Vogt from eBay about internal communications.

Peter is the Director of Internal Communications for eBay and is responsible for communicating with eBay’s 11,000+ employees, personally running a team of 16 communicators worldwide. eBay stole him from Microsoft, where he was the Head of Internal Communications worldwide.

eBay has three companies: eBay itself, PayPal, and its most recent acquisition, Skype.

A PR graduate, Peter has enjoyed 20 years as a ‘Communicator’ and along the way gained a phenomenal amount of insight and knowledge into employee communications — I cannot recommend this interview highly enough if you want to get an insight into the challenges and successes of a highly successful communicator.

Some of Peter’s great comments include:

“You should only work for companies you are passionate about”

“Mark my words: within 5 years Skype will be the leading company within the eBay group”

“Engagement has evolved, but we haven’t evolved with it”

“When your cheese moves, move with your cheese” (in reference to the phenomenal best-seller Who Moved My Cheese)

“Are you wedded to your career as a communicator, or are you wedded to the company? In my experience rarely do the two actually ’sync’ up”

“This [communications] can be an extremely exciting industry to pursue — I have found that internal communications has the ability to really make a difference in many ways, and when done well it can be the true ‘leader’ and ‘lead’ the change. I encourage anyone in this industry to think of new ways of engagement and think of themselves not as simply writers, or not as simply conduits, but actually people who can be catalysts in and of themselves”

Download the interview (21mb; 47 minutes), or subscribe to the CommsCafe rss feed to have all of the interviews delivered to your computer or mp3 player.

{A word from our sponsor: Online meetings made easy with GoToMeeting: try it free for 45 days - use promo code “Podcast”.}

Technorati : ebay, employee communication, internal communication, lee hopkins, microsoft, paypal, peter vogt, skype

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Melcrum have just released a new report on Employee Segmentation, featuring such luminaries as Angela Sinickas, Carol Kinsey Goman and Shel Holtz.

In the full report you can read case studies on

• AstraZeneca: Segmenting at a global level
• Dow Corning: A four-quadrant approach to segmentation
• Avaya: Segmenting by hierarchy and geography
• Royal Bank of Scotland: Segmentation from an HR perspective
• Intel: Segmenting by countries and business groups

amongst many others.

The Executive Summary (11 page pdf) includes interesting insights when you shape your message according to Engagement Type and Employee Demographics. For an example of the latter, here’s an interesting quote:

The implication, of course, is that if a significant portion of your organization’s workers are in their 40s, 50s, 60s or above it’s wise not to rely solely on electronic communication. But those 20-something employees are very interested in being communicated with electronically, especially if they can participate (think blogs, wikis and two-way video) the way they do outside work

The full report is AUD$845 (using the discount given at the back of the Summary); the Summary is free and I recommend you download it to get a ‘feeling’ for why segmenting your audience is such an important issue.

As Allan Jenkins and I noted in a recent ‘Chat‘, the days of ‘one size fits all’ messages are gone (or at least should be). If you are not segmenting your audience and taking into account their different needs and message handling capabilities, you are wasting your employees’ time (and your own) by transmitting the wrong message in the wrong way.

There’s also an audio file you can download and listen to as well.

Technorati : employee communication, melcrum

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Call me ‘thick’, but I am finding it hard to imagine how bomb-sniffing bees could be of much value.

Consider this. The ABC report says:

The scientists used Pavlovian techniques on the bees’ natural response to nectar, a sticking out of their tongue, or proboscis extension reflex. By rewarding them with sugar water, the scientists taught bees to give the same reflex action when they were exposed to vapours from explosives such as dynamite, C4 plastic and TATP (triacetone triperoxide), often used by suicide bombers.

Call me ‘thick’, indeed, but how can you tell if a bee is sticking out its tongue unless you are really, really up close and personal? The poor bugger peering closely to see if Mr Bee is sticking his tongue out is likely to have his head blown off.

There’s an mp3 file if you are interested enough to hear more…

Technorati : abc, bomb-sniffing bees

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News reaches me from the ABC that one of our television stations has sacked one of its long-serving and popular presenters, just after she returned from maternity leave.

And they did it by email! Nice touch.

After 14 years at the network, Tracey Spicer joins a growing list of female presenters who are past the age of 30 and are possibly seen by male network bosses as ‘tired and in need of a younger, prettier replacement’.

She joins an impressive list of female presenters that are no longer around: Jennifer Hansen, Jana Wendt, Jenny Brockie, Jennifer Byrnes, Maxine McKew — and it seems that Naomi Robson won’t be fronting a very popular program, Today Tonight, on Channel 7 from next year.

You have to admit that the anodyne, sterile and robotic replacements — such as Sandra Sully and her ilk — are younger. But prettier? More intelligent? Wiser? More knowledgeable? More comfortable in front of a camera? More adept at handling a live audience or live interview?

Jana Wendt was probably Australia’s equivalent of Jeremy Paxman, the UK political presenter who politicians feared to be interviewed by because he would savage and humiliate them publicly as they dug their own holes and were hoist by their own petards.

I miss Robbo — who brought comment, satire and innuendo to late night news decades ago. And the news was all the richer for it!

Now all we have is, as Jennifer Hansen says,

“Someone who has that newsreader helmet style hairdo, that doesn’t have a hair out of place, and talks in a monotone voice and dares not show any personality or have a life, because that would just be outrageous,” she said. “Actually, a robot is probably what they want.”

Robbo’s wit was popular with audiences, as letters to the ABC reflect after Robbo was removed from their Classic FM breakfast slot:

ABC’s originality takes a dive with the loss of Clive

The ABC has done it again. Why on earth remove the non-bland, provocative and daring-to-be-critical Clive Robertson from the Classic FM breakfast slot (”Clive’s coda: Classic FM host fades to Bach”, Herald, December 11-12)?

The usual platitudes about “mutual agreement”, etc, do not conceal the strong feeling that the ABC bureaucracy is not comfortable with someone as, dare we say it, entertaining and intelligently different as Clive. The start to the day will not be the same.

Harold Hanson, Wollongong, December 11.

—–

Kate Dundas, national head of music at the ABC, has not renewed Clive Robertson’s contract. Thanks a lot, Scrooge Dundas. You’ve ruined our weekend, our Christmas and our new year, doubtless in order to soothe the effete silvertails who have whined about not getting enough Wagner.

Of course, the rot set in when the rumours flew around concerning the heart-stopping fact that the great unwashed (even common labourers, my dear!) had been caught enjoying the benefits of Clive’s wit, musical knowledge and, most importantly, his ability to entertain, thus drawing in all manner of folks listening to and appreciating good music.

Patricia Ellercamp, Caves Beach, December 12.

—–

With Robbo now safely out of the way, “our ABC” can concentrate on broadcasting noice light musical comedy, and interviews with pompous theomaniacs. If the ABC is nothing else it is consistently dull these days, a symptom of an entrenched committee management by a bunch of overpaid, mediocre bureaucrats who have never had an original thought in their sad lives.

Clive might take some comfort in the probability that if J.S. Bach was appointed head of music at the ABC, he would only last a day. Vale irony, eccentricity, whimsy and wit.

John Smeaton, Maryville, December 11.

—–

Note to ABC management: find Clive Robertson another job at the ABC so as to staunch the flow of intellectual blood from the national broadcaster.

Note to Margaret Throsby: I am deeply saddened to hear that you have lost your old sparring partner and equal to your genius.

Note to Clive: thank you for three brilliant, confounding and compelling years. Sob, sigh and c’est la vie.

Andrew White, Glenhaven, December 11.

Technorati : clive robertson, jana wendt, jennifer byrnes, jennifer hansen, jenny brockie, jeremy paxman, maxine mckew, tracey spicer

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What happens when you marry high-quality advertising photography with ascerbic, cheeky copy?

You potentially get a series of award winning ads.

The print ads for New Zealand’s 42Below vodka are gorgeous — but it is the sublime copy that goes with the sublime images that make them so brilliant.

As we antipodeans are often noted for, there was no ‘pandering’ to the PC police, no worrying if ’someone might take offence or get upset’. Instead what you get are superb vignettes of sarcasm, satire and precise targetting to a particular young male market, which 42Below’s Marketing folks must have researched beforehand (one would hope) and discovered their particular viewpoints and humour.

Click on each of the thumbnails below and carefully read the copy that comes with them — guaranteed to bring a wry smile to your dial.

The lovely thing about these ads is that they mirror exactly the subversive branding of the vodka and the company on their website. As the awards section of their site says,

we’ve won more medals than you’ve had hot women

Their site is built entirely in Flash, but don’t let that put you off — it is a superb site, downloads quickly and even has some kitch/cool music to go with it.

Technorati : 42below, vodka

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