Today in federal IT

Federal Times reports on an Executive Order establishing "controlled unclassified information."

Computer World reports that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has fastracked 115MHz of spectrum for commercial use.

Microsoft's Bright Side of Government blog announces the winners of the Azure Application Development Contest.

Federal Computer Week's Circuit blog reports that Gary Bass is leaving OMB Watch and that Soraya Correa is moving up at the Department of Homeland Security.

Enterprise 2.0 blog is reporting that Infomation Week Analytics are conducting a survey on Enterprise 2.0 applications.

Via Netspective's Fedsphere.

The problem with site analytics

If, like me, your blog uses eXTReMe Tracking, Site Meter, and Google Analytics, you already know what the problem with site analytics is; the three different services give you three different sets of numbers. Clearly site analytics is as much of an art as a science.

This was brought home to me as manager of Warren Mosler's US Senate campaign. My duties included analyzing our web site statistics to, in addition to other things, judge the effectiveness of our online advertising campaign. Where was our traffic coming from? Which advertisements sent us the readers with the highest level of engagement? And how to account for the discrepancy between the reports sent to us by our advertising venue, and our own site statistics?

We need more information by the providers of site statistics and analytics as to how they detect hits and referrals and measure engagement.

What is a Statement of Work?

Why Clients should take a closer look at SOWs

One very important aspect of successful project management is the creation of a Statement of Work (SOW). A Statement of Work can be defined as a narrative description of the products and services to be provided to a client under contract. Basically the SOW tells “what” needs to be accomplished rather than “how” it is to be accomplished, and clearly defines the scope of the project. Getting everyone to agree on the scope of a project at the very outset is important because it helps in minimizing scope creep. Scope creep occurs when new functionalities or requirements not envisaged in the SOW are introduced into the project plan.

I remember a presentation on software process improvement wherein the presenter said that he wanted to write a play wherein the contract officer slew the dreaded feater creep.

It is so easy in technology to become so absorbed with how that you forget what and why.

Warren Mosler

Although this is not a political blog, I would like to talk about what I have been doing for the past four months. Last spring I attended the Fiscal Sustainability Conference and saw Warren Mosler speak about Modern Monetary Theory.

Mosler points out that, as a fiat currency, the United States can never go broke. That is not a case for unlimited spending, merely that the whole debate about the deficit is based on a fallacy. Unlike countries in the Euro zone, the US controls its own currency and we cannot go broke. The federal budget is a spread sheet.

When I learned that he was running for US Senate from Connecticut, I offered my services and found myself running his campaign. I learned a great deal and plan to blog about some of it. I saw online advertising from an entirely new angle and looked at social media in an entirely different way.

As campaign manager for an Independent candidate, I saw our two party system in a new and not very flattering way. The cards are truly stacked against Independents. (I capitalize Independent because Mosler was the nominee of the Independent Party of Connecticut.) Independents are not included in political polls, editors ignore your events, and when the League of Women Voters included us in their debate, the Democratic and Republican candidates refused to come. As far as the press is concerned, I really don't think I can improve upon what Ken Dixon wrote about the gubernatorial debate.

I encourage everyone to check out Warren Mosler's blog, Center of the Universe. You will find it as informative as it is entertaining. I also encourage everyone, especially members of Congress, to read his short but brilliant book, Seven Deadly Frauds of Economic Policy.

Recently President Obama has talked about the possibility of enacting one of Mosler's economic proposals, a full payroll tax holiday. Just doing that alone would pour trillions of dollars into the economy and give everyones sales a much needed boost. I hope that our President and members of Congress will take this much needed step to jump start our deeply distressed economy.

As for everyone else, if the Democrats and Republicans fail to nominate anyone to your liking, check out the other candidates, you might be pleasantly surprised.

To the people of Connecticut, thank you, I had a great time in your state.

On leave

This blog will be on break while the author takes a leave of absence to work on the Warren Mosler for Senate campaign.

Back in November with all the news about IT standards and governance, information sharing, PR, social media, and all things tech, PR, and government marketing.

See you in November.

In observance of the Glorious Fourth

The Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton

What everyone in the software industry needs to understand

George V. Hulme:

Grow up. Business doesn't exist for IT, it's the other way around.

This cannot be said often enough.

Starbucks bows to market pressure

Rob Pegoraro reports that Starbucks has bowed to market pressure and will be offering free wifi. Since all its competitors were doing so, I could not imagine how Starbucks could continue to insist we buy those cards which are good for purchases.

Not only will Starbucks offer free wifi, it seems they have decided to sweeten the deal:

Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz also said the company's U.S. locations will begin offering "a new online customer experience," the Starbucks Digital Network, this fall. Set up with Yahoo, this will provide free or expanded access to such news and entertainment sites as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, Apple's iTunes and AOL's Patch.

My favorite place remains the Luce Center, and failing that, Au Bon Pain in the morning, when they play classical music.

What PR can and cannot do

It seems that Arizona has discovered that its papers please approach to immigration has given it a black eye. So they have decided to spend a bundle on a public relations campaign for the state.

I think so many clients have this idea that our profession can develop some sort of combination of advertising, favorable press, and social media that can magically transform their image without regard to what they are doing.

I suspect that Arizona will discover that their PR program, whatever it turns out to be, will be a giant waste of money. The boycotts will not only continue but even multiply until the law is changed.

There is a limit to what even the most comprehensive PR campaign can do for you.

The digital mob

Shel Israel is calling for Mark Zuckerberg to step down. I have heard this sentiment expressed elsewhere and I don't understand it. Sure, Zuckerberg failed to appreciate the privacy controversy until it had reached the firestorm stage, but in terms of CEO misconduct others have done so much worse.

For example, why do any of the CEO's who were TARP recipients still have their jobs, never mind their bonuses. Why does the head of BP still have his job?

It is difficult to understand why one CEO becomes the focus of digital anger and not others.

Why I founded Presto Vivace PR

I started Presto Vivace PR for editors like Dan Beyers:

Someday someone will explain why so many businesses in the area want to make it so hard for regular folk like -- say, me -- to figure out what they do.

I've also sat through endless briefings about enterprise solutions and information assurance support environments, server virtualizations and system integrators and ... well, you name it.

And that's the problem, we need to rename it.

Clients so often see tech speak in industry publications and their competitors' press releases that they just assume that all those buzzwords serve a purpose. You have to work very hard to get clients to understand that jargon filled press releases, even if you can kid an editor into printing them, will never attract readers because no one can understand what you are talking about.

I think industry analysts are partly to blame. Coining terms and buzzwords that only they understand is a way for them to look like experts. It is also a status thing, understanding buzzwords is an indication that you are a member of the tech priesthood. Except it just gets in the way of customers understanding how your software could help them.

I use a copy editor who does not have a tech background. If my copy editor cannot understand what I am talking about, I start again from scratch. Even the most technical of concepts can be written in plain English.

Stratfor on the Israeli attack on the relief flotilla

George Friedman writing for Stratfor:

Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. And on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate. There is little to be gained for governments in resisting public opinion and much to be gained by giving in. By shaping the battlefield of public perception, it is thus possible to get governments to change positions.

In terms of new product launches for independent software developers, this does not have much relevance. But it lies at the heart of most public affairs PR and lobbying.

Federal acquisition wiki

Alice Lipowicz reports that GSA is testing a Better Buy wiki.

I knew that once the civil service was given the chance they would enthusiastically adopt social media. Collaboration is what government service is all about, so it is just too useful not to be used.

DC Hackathon

RHoK #1.0 – RHoK’s First Global Hackathon

Random Hacks of Kindness is going global! On June 4th through 6th, 2010 RHoK, in collaboration with the Crisis Commons, is hosting its second hackathon. This event is going to be a global gathering of hackers in many locations around the world, coming together in real time for a marathon weekend of coding around problems relating to natural disaster risk and response.

The Main Stage for RHoK #1.0 will be in Washington D.C., where events will kick off with a June 4, 2010 reception at the Department of State, followed by forty-eight hours of hacking madness at the Microsoft offices in Chevy Chase, MD. Simultaneously, hackers will be coming together on every continent for five global satellite RHoK events in Sydney, Australia; Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; Jakarta, Indonesia and Sao Paolo; Brazil.

This international group of hackers will be working on problem definitions contributed by Crisis Commons, The World Bank, the State Department and teams on the ground in Haiti. Don’t miss RHoK’s inaugural global hackathon. Register below for one of RHoK #1.0’s six global locations.

New to me local marketing communications blog

rp3 Agency

Is Facebook more trouble than it is worth?

I am beginning to think so. Everyday brings more stories about Facebook's ever changing privacy policies and the ever more complicated steps users must take to opt out of Facebook anti-privacy default settings.

The most annoying thing is that you have to keep an eye on this and continually adjust your settings to maintain the level of privacy you want. It is very difficult to do business with a company that continually alters their policies.

And that doesn't even include Facebook's continuing problem with security vulnerabilities.

In my industry I am more or less expected to maintain a Facebook account in the event that a client wants my company to build a Facebook site. Otherwise I would probably pull my account. As it is I have taken to posting every Facebook privacy breach story that I see on my facebook account. It is just my little way of telling Facebook that they have a problem.

Note - Pip.io has better privacy settings. If it catches on I am moving my material there.

Edit -
Richi Jennings has an excellent run down of the controversy.

New to me local tech blog

Thinking Clearly, a semantic web blog from Clark and Parisa

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders' meeting

Dan Gillmor makes a good point:

Is there another big public company whose top people sit and take questions like this? #brk2010

My congratulations to their investor relations team who must have spent weeks preparing for this.

Also, some seriously good reporting by Gillmor with pithy comments at 140 characters at a time. Not so easily done.

Records management blogging

Via Digital Landfill we learn that AIIM has launched a Records Management Community.

Ethical organizations do not traffic in stolen property

I am with Jeff Bercovici, Apple has grounds for suing Gizmodo.

It seems that one of Apple's engineers accidentally left his new iPhone at a restaurant and the person who found it rather than than return it decided to sell it to Gizmodo. This is not the relationship of a news organization and a source, it is the relationship of a fence and a thief.

We have seen this over and over again. News organizations would seem to think themselves above the law. Truly shameful.

Edit -
It seems that the Superior Court of San Mateo shares my view that news organizations are not above the law.

Scott Adams comments as only he can.

Uh-oh, San Mateo law enforcement may have overplayed its hand.

Oh my goodness, it appears law enforcement might have had a conflict of interest.

New to me local tech blogs

The DLT Blog


Managing Experience, John Whalen's ideas on User Experience, Social Media, and Persuasive Design from Washington, DC

Everybody is managing editor

John Byrne has a post about how those of us who read news online do not have a favorite news organization. That is certainly true of your humble servant. I have favorite reporters. I even have favorite sections of certain news publications. But I don't have a favorite publication.

I have an RSS reader with feeds from all my favorite reporters, bloggers, etc. I suspect others are the same way.

Every time I go anywhere, I always ask people what their favorite source of technology news is. I am struck by how often they tell me that they simply have a handful of Google News Alerts on the topics that interest them the most and read whatever comes up that day. Press releases are considered very reliable, readers are interested in what companies say about themselves.

Readers have been empowered by the Internet and news organizations have yet to come up with the right business model to profit in the new environment. Those of us in public relations must hope they find a profitable model soon.

My unvarnished opinion

From Thursday's For Immediate Release we learn about Unvarnished, a social media site that lets anyone say anything about anybody. Create an account, create a profile on any acquaintance, and say what you want.

Did someone create a profile about you that was derogatory? Well, just create an account and refute what was said. Persuade your friends to create accounts so that they can defend you. What a terrific business model, what a terrific way to build site traffic.

It would be nice to think that this would be a way for Dilbert, Wally, and Alice to tell the unvarnished truth about their pointy haired boss. It is just as likely as to give the pointy haired boss a chance to trash the reputations of Dilbert, Wally, and Alice so that they can't get jobs at better companies.

Let me bring my very Washington, DC perspective on this; this will quickly degenerate into a cesspool of partisan smear jobs which will go much further down the food chain than is presently the case. I mean if you can damage the careers of every precinct captain of the rival party, or at least the ward chairs, you can go a long way to destroying most of your prospective opposition candidates before they even think about running for office.

The possibilities of dirty tricks are endless. Are you a company who has been attacked in the press? Just create a profile of the reporter and allege that he is the office boor. Is your company being threatened with a product liability suit? Don't just smear the lawyer and the plaintiff, smear all the potential witnesses in the case.

Are you an oil company? Is there an assistant professor at some community college somewhere getting locals all riled up about global warming? Create a negative profile and prevent him from getting tenure.

Are you a hostile intelligence agency? Is there an engineer who is working on a breakthrough weapon that your country is not ready to counter yet? Create a smear profile on Unvarnished and see if you can get his security clearance yanked.

Did someone create a negative profile on you? Presto Vivace's advice would be to create an account and use the facts to refute the negative remarks that were made. Then ask your online friends to write something nice about you, on their blogs, relevant Ning communities, any online community that would be visible to your professional milieu and ignore Unvarnished. Don't give it more online visibility, don't build its site traffic. With any luck the site will fade away as one of those Web 2.0 projects that just did not work out.

Edit -

Todd Defren has a somewhat different perspective, but takes a very similar view of Unvarnished.

Wasily Kandinsky Animation

18 marketing agencies who should hang their heads in shame

YouTube's response to Viacom's lawsuit:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

I am just going to assume that Google would not make such a claim unless it could prove it six ways to Sunday.

In which case we have 18 marketing agencies from the sock puppet school of marketing. Sigh.

Surely all of Viacom's shows have fan clubs; most likely Facebook pages. That is what fan clubs and Facebook pages are for. Before a show you send out Tivo alerts; after a show you send out the links to online video on your own site. You put social tagging on your site, and then you just let nature take its course.

Edit -
It seems that Viacom has unearthed some incriminating internal Google emails.

New to me local PR blogs

bwfpr; the official blog of Brotman•Winter•Fried Communications

CRT/tanaka Blog

Feds launch Smart Grid blog

EETimes reports that NIST has decided to launch a blog to give the public a chance to comment on standards for home-to-smart-grid interface. I trust people will look at it, because now is the time to comment.

State of deployment of IPv6

Command Information has an informative post on this complete with spreadsheet.

Today in content management

Rutrell Yasin reporting for Government Computer News:

The Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information is looking to deploy cloud-based customer relationship and project management software over the next six weeks to its Regional Extension Centers.

The Labor Department is making similar moves.

How to migrate your blog to SharePoint.

Lora Bentley of IT Business Edge interviews Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing for information management solutions at HP.


Welcome to the Real Story Group; also on Twitter.

All from Presto Vivace's Google News: Content Management Systems.

The Kneber botnet and the day's Gov IT news

Jaikumar Vijayan reporting for ComputerWorld:

Security researchers at Herndon, Va.-based NetWitness Corp. have unearthed a massive botnet affecting at least 75,000 computers at 2,500 companies and government agencies worldwide.

The Kneber botnet, named for the username linking the affected machines worldwide, has been used to gather login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems for the past 18 months, according to NetWitness.

Congratulations NetWitness for a job well done.

John Foley of Information Week interviews Casey Coleman, CIO of the Government Services Administration.

William Welsh for Washington Technology: GSA, DISA launch commercial satellite solicitation

WFED's Max Cacas reports on AFFIRM's meeting on cyber security.

William Jackson for Government Computerter News: Second draft of Smart Grid security architecture released for public comment
If you have an opinion about this, now is the time to comment.

All the day's government technology news on the Presto Vivace's Google News Government IT section.

New to me local tech blogs

On Queue, from agencyQ
Bethbeck's Blog
Alliance Interactive
Co-OpTek
Community IT Innovators
Aptify CEO Blog
Spider Bytes, from Spider Systems: an informal mix of whatever is on our minds. We write about all kinds of things, ranging from new product features for our customers to technical tips for other software developers.
QSM, The Intelligence Before Successful Software Projects
Inventory & AIDC Software Blog
Attensity Company Blog
Inside Intellectual Property, from Legal Advantage
Franconnect
Enterprise Content Management - the Indigo Arc Viewpoint: Discussion about Content Management strategies, tools and issues; the overlap between Enterprise Architecture and Content Management.
CYNCZ, your contacts anytime anydevice

There is a limit to what PR can do for you

Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath

Those worries aside, few banks are taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially. Instead, Wall Street is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation. Because of the potential blowback, some major banks are adjusting their pay practices, paring or even eliminating some cash bonuses in favor of stock awards and reducing the portion of their revenue earmarked for pay.

Some bank executives contend that financial institutions are beginning to recognize that they must recalibrate pay for a post-bailout world.

Of course we are not really in a post bail out world, otherwise Congress would not have prepared the ground for an additional $4 trillion bail out.

Angry citizens are already moving their money. Things can only get worse if banks continue to award outrageous bonuses to management so out of control that they require multiple trillion dollar bail outs.

Happy New Year

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Following the Twitter Zeitgeist

Mark Ramskill

Is the person I’m following bringing any real value to me? The million dollar question. It’s very easy to follow someone just because everyone else is, or because you they have a job that gives the assumption that their tweets will be useful. Often this couldn’t be further from the truth.

- Is the person I’m following tweeting unique information and links or are they mainly retweeting stuff I’m already getting from other sources?

- Does the person I’m following follow me and if they do, do they ever communicate with me or retweet what I put out there?

Ramskill has some very good advice. Twitter should be fun, and not taken too seriously (unless you are handling customer relations on Twitter).

For my part I don't really follow any one person. I follow almost everyone in the Potomac region who works in technology. I am interested in the stream of coversation rather than individual people.

Huh?

From J. Timothy Sprehe's opinion piece in Federal Computer Week:

So what does the agency do to achieve integrated information management? It conceptualizes the solution as one of standardizing on a single ECM system toolset.

I have been working in content management since 1994 and I have only a vague idea as to what he means by that. If I don't understand it, there is a good chance other readers don't understand it. The struggle against IT speak is a constant one and sooner or later we all succumb; but if you want to make your point to the general public, or at least policy makers, you have to make your prose more accessible.

Merry Christmas

Botanic Garden Christmas Display - Washington, DC

New to me local writer's blog

Thinking Like A Designer, A site for authors who want advice on preparing to work with designers, and for designers who work directly with authors.

Soros proposes way to fund to fight global warming

Reuters

"I've found a way for someone else to pay ... to mobilize reserves that are lying idle," Soros told Reuters on the sidelines of the December 7-18 conference that will end with a summit of 110 world leaders meant to agree a new climate pact.

Hungarian-born Soros said green loans to poor nations backed by International Monetary Fund gold reserves could total $100 billion.

"This $100-billion fund I think could just turn this conference from failure to success," he said, admitting there were several legal and practical hurdles to unlocking the cash.

From Soros' email annoucement:

In September 2009, the IMF distributed to its members $283 billion worth of SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights. SDRs are an arcane financial instrument but essentially they constitute additional foreign exchange. They can be used only by converting them into one of four currencies, at which point they begin to carry interest at the combined treasury bill rate of those currencies. At present the interest rate is less than one half of one percent. Of the $283 billion, more than $150 billion went to the 15 largest developed economies. These SDRs will sit largely untouched in the reserve accounts of these countries, which don't really need any additional reserves.

I propose that the developed countries--in addition to establishing a fast start fund of $10 billion a year--should band together and lend $100 billion dollars worth of these SDRs for 25 years to a special green fund serving the developing world. The fund would jump-start forestry, land-use, and agricultural projects. These are the areas that offer the greatest scope for reducing carbon emissions and could produce substantial returns from carbon markets. The returns such projects can generate go beyond reducing carbon; there will be non-carbon related returns from land use projects, the potential to create more sustainable rural livelihoods, enable higher and more resilient agriculture yields and create rural employment.

This is a simple and practical idea. There is a precedent for it. The United Kingdom and France each recently lent $2 billion worth of SDRs to a special fund at the IMF to support concessionary lending to the poorest countries. At that point the IMF assumed responsibility for the principal and interest on the SDRs. The same could be done in this case.

I am very curious about what it must be like to handle a major figure like Soros and one of my life's ambitions is to meet Michael Vachon.

Play by the rules

Buzz Bin as a good post on the new FTC rules for bloggers.:

While we don’t have a Sarbanes-Oxley-like law that codifies much of this for “endorsers,” the FTC has greatly expanded the things over which it will exercise influence. Endorsers (and influencers of endorsements) beware!

Beware indeed. Failure to observe the new rules will bring a Sarbanes-Oxley-like law down upon our industry's head.

Adobe GUI FAIL

Simply blacking out information in a Portable Document Format file won't keep data from prying eyes.

TSA officials posted what they thought was a redacted version of the TSA's airport security operating manual on a Web site used by private contractors looking for government work. The problem: the officials didn't actually delete sensitive parts of the document—they just blacked them out using a graphics tool.

That method left the underlying words intact, and they were exposed when readers cut and pasted pages from the document, "Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures," into a new file. The vulnerability isn't technically a bug in Adobe's product, but its existence shows how those handling secure information should be fully trained in the software they're using.

The end result of the foul-up was that highly sensitive information about TSA screening methods, interviewing procedures, X-ray machines and other terrorist prevention tools became easily available to millions of people on the Web.

This is just another case of the user failing to distinguish between a graphical blackout and deleting information. There have been many such incidents and Adobe invariably blames user error. But the Adobe design is completely counter intuitive. Adobe needs to correct this before someone gets killed.

Great moments in timing

sponsorship

The cover line: "10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger."

You have to feel for the editors of Golf Digest. Under normal circumstances this would be a fine article for a golf audience. The Golf Digest website makes no reference to their ill timed cover.

I think International Management Group bears some of the blame for the PR fallout. When you create an image for your client that is as odds with reality, and when maintenance of that image is dependent upon the press turning a blind eye to the obvious, it is only a question of time before the whole thing implodes. It would have been much better to give the public some inkling of your client's feet of clay. Then they would be prepared when his weaknesses became obvious.

A pyrrhic victory for the financial sector

The return of the plutocrats

So the plutocrats, it seems are going to win. They had a nasty couple of years, by plutocrat standards, and in a handful of companies operating under de facto state control they don’t quite have the free rein they would ideally like. But the system as a whole hasn’t changed, and those who thought that it might can’t quite believe how naive they were.

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

Any victory that leaves you so fearful that you feel the need to pack a weapon is no victory worthy of the name.

Do I have any readers who do not understand that this is a tragedy waiting to happen? What happens if some jittery banker shoots some homeless person who shouts at him? How is the public likely to respond to the spectacle of a banker shooting an unarmed homeless person? putting aside the resulting prison term.

What if an entire office panics at the sight of demonstrators and opens fire? Because that worked so well for the guards at the Bastille.

Goldman Sachs, and any other financial institution going down this dead end, needs to put away the guns and hire themselves an experienced conflict resolution team.

Happy Thanksgiving

Bernman Fine Art

The difference between telling and showing

This post is a text book example of how not to write a post for a public affairs blog. Americans are bombarded with the world is going to end rhetoric. In order to be credible you need to show rather than tell.

In the case of net neutrality, you need to explain example by example what the practical consequences would be if the point-to-point architecture of the Internet were to be compromised. You need to cite specific examples of Internet Service Providers limiting access to demonstrate that this is a serious issue. Most of the time Save the Internet does this. This post fell short of their previous standard.

Tom Gutnick at CPCUG

Tom Gutnick gave a most informative tour of open source application software. One thing that interested me was his characterization of ubuntu as open source for humans, by which I took him to mean that ubuntu was the best Linux distribution for those of us who are not technology experts.

A complete list of the software his discussed is at his web site. I am thinking of trying the open source office software, as well as GNU Cash, and possibly the project management software.

How to get your company noticed

Newspaper ad sales fall again

With the depressed state of the overall economy, newspaper ad sales fell 28 percent in the third quarter.
Ad revenue totaled $6.4 billion, according to figures from Arlington-based Newspaper Association of America. It was a narrower decline than the previous period.

With advertising at an all time low, the surviving advertisers stand out. An ad that runs now will capture far more attention than an ad running in boom times which has to compete with all the other advertisements. Futhermore, an ad that runs in hard times automatically creates an image of financial strength.

Simple test for search engine visibility

Do a search on your company's name. Does your web site come up in the first page of results? If not you are in trouble.

Fixing this is very easy, but you do need to fix it. More and more customers are finding companies by searhing on the Web. If they can't find you, they can't very contact you.

I am constantly surprised by how many well established companies fail this simple test.

Chosing free beer over free speech

The post could also have been entitled he who pays the piper calls the tune.

More and more I see it suggested that musicians look to corporate sponsors to fund their tours and not even try to make money from recording their work.

In such a world corporate sponsors will have even more power to determine who is a star and who is a starving artist. Where will the next Bob Dylan come from? Who will write the songs which speak truth to power if everyone is auditioning for their corporate sponsor?

The future for the individual preformer never looked worse.

Recording Potomac tech events

Ross suggests that we find a way to record local tech events and put the result online. I think it is a great idea, but am not sure what I can do to advance it, save link to it.

Part of what I have tried to do with this blog is highlight local tech events. I think our local tech scene is greatly under valued and our contribution to technology goes unrecognized.

New to me local tech blogs

the agile approach, Phase2's insight on the buisness of web

Bojanglin

Publishing Transformation Blog, A Blog created by David Case, Business Development Consultant at Apex CoVantage. Thoughts and news about Publishing Transformation through workflow engineering and technologies.

The method in Murdoch's madness

I wrote off Murdoch's latest threats to remove News Corp feeds from Google News as so much blather until I read Boing Boing:

So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

The problem with the deal to give Google the exclusive right to index MySpace is that it cheats the users whose postings create the value of MySpace. If I am a musician who is obliged to give my music away for free on MySpace to presuade fans to come to my concerts, I want the widest exposure possible. As Google is by far the largest search engine, I might overlook this limitation, or I might not. I might find a place to post my music that was visible to as many search engines as possible. Murdoch simply does not understand the online economy.

Edit -
Looks like Microsoft will to oblige NewsCorp.

The problem with KickRSS

I wanted to create a public RSS reader of all the local tech, marketing, and PR blogs. I wanted one where the new posts would automatically float to the top, so readers could track the local zeitgeist.

Alas, my Tech on the Potomac KickRSS list does not seem the work that way. It appears to favor the blogs most recently added to the list rather than the most recent posts irrespective of blog. Can any of my readers suggest an RSS tool that would do that? If you remember the old Blogdigger tool, you will know what I am talking about.

Nominate your customer

The 2010 Federal 100 nomination form

Federal Computer Week is now accepting nominations for the 2009 Federal 100 awards program, which recognizes individuals in government and industry who have played pivotal roles in the federal information technology community.

Deadline: Dec. 11.

If your customer looks good, you look good.

Did the stimulous reduce EHR adoption?

Shahid Shah thinks that the "bill probably has frozen more customers into waiting than encouraging them to buy." Software Advice is conducting a survey on the subject.

Which vendor not to choose for your EHR system

The Washington Post: Electronic medical records draw frequent criticisms:

Legal experts say it is impossible to know how often health IT mishaps occur. Electronic medical records are not classified as medical devices, so hospitals are not required to report problems. Many health IT contracts do not allow hospitals to discuss computer flaws, say Koppel and Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Anytime a vendor wants you to sign an agreement that you will not discuss flaws in their system, that should set off a warning bell not to go near that vendor.

A more citizen centric FCC web site

Arts Technica reviews the new improved FCC web site:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a big step towards becoming more accessible on Friday, with an impressive upgrade of its Electronic Comment Filing System. The new EFCS offers far more searching capability, formatting flexibility, and bookmarking power than ever before. The system offers text searching and RSS conversion, and it makes it easier to comment on proceedings. EFCS 2.0 still doesn't go quite as far as we recommended last year, but it's another example of how the Commission is turning fcc.gov into a true public resource.

If the other agencies follow suit the collective impact will have an enormous effect upon a citizen's relationship with their government. I wonder if pubic affairs PR practitioners understand that.

How to publicize your Firefox extension

Today was spent listening to Steve Auerbach’s interesting presentation on Firefox extensions, and I got to thinking, how would a developer publicize their Firefox extensions?

Firefox lists extensions in order of number of downloads, and it shows the average ratings and links to reviews. Clearly you need to get your Firefox extension reviewed before users will try it.

The only thing I can think of is to send the link to any discussion list you participate in, and to members of any relevant user group you are a member of.

From customers to community

I am reading Chris Anderson’s insightful book, Free, and am stuck by the repeated references to community. Those of us who spend a significant amount of time online are conscious of the importance of building community, whether it is as simple as comments on blogs or as complicated as building an international network of user groups. Communities build and sustain markets in a way that nothing else can.

It is not a new phenomenon; there have always been hobbyist groups. It is simply that the Internet has given communities an opportunity to thrive as never before. Success in marketing communications will more and more be defined by the ability to cultivate communities.

Mark Warner’s address to the Grow Smart Business Conference

Senator Warner began by saying “It is OK to leave your cell phones on, to me it sounds like money,” to appreciative laughter. Warner said his work at Nextel and Columbia Capital gave him some perspective on financial and business matters.

He began to describe where he thought the economy was at. Warner said we needed some financial re-regulation. He described himself as a new senator who “just got hired,” and that it had been a wild nine months. He characterized the recent actions of the federal government as extraordinary, and that few appreciated how close we came to a complete financial meltdown. Ugly and blunt instruments had halted a world wide recession. Warner said that never again should Americans hear too big to fail. While the stimulus was necessary, Warner said that it had been “mis-marketed.” On third of the stimulus is tax cuts, one third relief for the states and the remaining third is spending that offers a lot of opportunities, especially for small business.

Warner pointed out that while Virginia is one of the few remaining states with AAA bond rating; without the relief from the recent stimulus package Virginia’s finances would look like California. The economy is that bad.

Warner explained that the spending part of the stimulus consisted of grants and other incentives for smart grid, build out of broadband, high speed rail, and health care IT. He said that he was “disturbed” that the administration has not been faster in getting those dollars out.

Continuing to speak about the economy, Warner said that we had avoided complete disaster; but that we were not out of the woods. He repeated his earlier assertion that we need financial re-regulation; he did not appreciate how much excess and abuse there had been in the financial sector until the recent hearings before senate banking committee. While a fan of free market capitalism, Warner said that we need rules.

He said that small business faces tough times to get financing and that he would welcome ideas as to how to rebuild small business financing. He said that 89% job growth will come from small businesses if they can get financing.

Here, Warner began to talk about health care and said that both from a moral and economic view, “we have to get it done.” He predicted that without reform our health care system will collapse.

He jokingly described a town meeting in Fredericksburg, Virginia with “1800 of my closest friends.” He said that he had told the town meeting attendees, “You know Medicare if a government problem,” only to hear “NO it is not!” The senator lamented that you “can’t make progress with people like that.”

He said that we have to decrease out federal deficit; and that, “I hope that we can find a private market solution” to our health care problem. He expressed hope for a bipartisan solution but that he was a “little disappointed with colleagues on the other side” and that even in the absence of bipartisan support, “We still have to act.” .

The senator began to talk about health care IT, observing that technology has revolutionized every industry except health care. He said that the federal government needs to establish standards, going on the observe that federal standards had made the cell phone industry possible and that we needed federal standards for health care IT.

He reminded the audience of the obvious, that we need more transparency in health care. List prices have no real relation to what people are paying. Warner said that we need wellness and prevention programs. Some very large employers have wellness programs. The senator said that we should take the best practice models and make them more available. He suggested that large businesses should be able to open up their plans to their suppliers.

Warner said that tort reform should be part of the health care reform mix.

He reminded the audience of his work for the Virginia Health Care Foundation. It is devoted to helping those who cannot afford insurance, but whose incomes are too high to qualify for any public assistance.

Warner said that it was “important to make system work”,
observing that too grand a package could be too expensive. He said that we needed to change financial incentives. Our present systems rewards hospitals with high readmission rate. He said that instead of fee for service we need to move to a health care system that rewards value.

Video of Warner’s remarks.

Chris Anderson's address to the Grow Smart Business Conference

Chris Anderson gave the keynote address, characterizing our time as the golden age of small business. He considers that the Internet has so changed the distribution system, that niche markets have a chance to develop in a way that was not previously possible. By way of example he talked about watching Gilligan’s Island as a youngster. The show was such a huge hit that it was difficult not to believe that this is what Americans really wanted to watch. But as Anderson pointed out, this was the twentieth century’s confusion with supply and demand. Broadcast TV’s distribution system limits choice. The Internet shows that we are more diverse.

Anderson pointed out that the Internet has infinite shelf pace. Everything is out there and small businesses have the opportunity to appeal to long tail niche audiences. Consumers are not satisfied with what is on the shelf at Walmart, they want more choices. Markets are global and your customer can be anywhere.

He said that most of us live in both the head and the tail. Appealing to niche audiences can make you more profitable. Anderson observed that the Italian economy has excelled in producing small boutique companies with global impact.

He said that companies exist to minimize transaction costs; they aggregate people, supplies, and distribution. He called the twentieth century the era of big companies. The Internet has lowered transaction costs.

Here, Anderson began to talk about his experience as an entrepreneur. He pointed out that the Internet offers us the opportunity to find the smartest people in the world. He offered his opinion that the passionate amateur was more valuable than the bored professional.

While working on his robotics company Anderson searched the Internet to discoverer everyone who was writing about robotics. He discovered that the ideal candidate for his company turned out to be a nineteen year old high school drop out, describing the young man’s expertise as a Google Ph.D.. He said this illustrated the “meritocracy of the Internet.”

Anderson allowed that big companies do some things magnificently. He said that small companies can move quickly; but have trouble scaling up.
The moment you go on the Internet, you are a global company. With Paypal you can accept business from anywhere, you can, as it were, box above your weight.

He said that the Web is a good place to do business with suppliers. Three guys with laptops can be a hardware company. He offered the sad tale of the man who invented intermittent windshield wipers as an example. He was in the middle of building his factory when he discovered that the Auto companies had stolen his idea from him. Nowadays you would simply use the Internet to locate a manufacturer and get your order for wipers before risking your capital.

At this point Anderson began to discuss the evolution of the free economy. He told the story of Jello, how the manufacturer had given away free cook books filled with recipes based on Jello and then took product to the local store and persuaded the local store owner to stock some Jello, based on the demand the cook books were sure to generate.

Anderson said that the “power of free” allows consumers to experience products for free. The minority pays for majority. Google takes profits from one product (advertising) to subsidize its free products.

He said that freemium is the inversion of old free sample give away. The freemium model gives out 90% of the product and charges for 10%. Freemium sells itself; the consumer experiences the product before they pay and is sure they want it. The challenge is to properly define the free/paid divide.

Microsoft enterprise software is free to small business and paid to big business. Clearly, the idea is that as the small business grows to a large business it will pay for Microsoft because it likes the product.

Microsoft got the idea from Chinese pirates. Microsoft realized that in a developing country like China, if software pirates were going to steal software, it is better that they steal your software. The music industry failed to understand this, and lost the opportunity to control their industry. The video game industry is moving to the freemium model, and here Anderson described his son's fascination with the Club Penguin. Anderson suggested that the freemium model could work well for health care IT. We could have information driven health care, only going to doctors for the big things.

Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

Network Solutions Grow Smart Business Conference

Congratulations to the entire Network Solutions team for putting on one of the best conferences ever. The conference was devoted to small business and it was full of practical tips. As befits an Internet company, much of the discussion surrounded the ways small businesses can use the Internet.

Clearly designed as a product launch, the conference introduced Network Solutions products and services for small business. Wisely, Network Solutions commissioned a survey of small businesses to discover their problems, and how successful companies were solving those problems. Network Solutions took that data and built a product based on their research. Having built their product, they designed a spectacular conference as a launch vehicle (this is the sort of thing big business can do well if they so choose).

Network Solutions’ small business package will be available at end of October. It will provide professional looking websites for a very competitive price. I predict they will do extremely well with it.

Roy Dunbar opens the conference.

The net neutrality debate reconsidered

I spent the morning at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation at their symposium, Designed for Change: End-to-End Arguments, Internet Innovation, and the Net Neutrality Debate.

The presenters discussed net neutrality from different perspectives, but they all, to one degree or another, characterized net neutrality advocates as religious and even according to one of the speakers in the dark ages.

All the speakers characterized insistence on net neutrality as a threat to the sort of innovation necessary to manage the ever increasing traffic loads on the Internet.

The ITIF is engaged in a high risk strategy. If they succeed in characterizing advocates as hysterical and anti-science, they can marginalize them and control the terms of debate. If they can succeed in goading advocates of net neutrality, or even a significant number into extravagant flaming they will score a great victory in their effort to marginalize them.

On the other hand, this strategy could backfire. It wouldn’t be so difficult for advocates of net neutrality to characterized the ITIF as engaging in ad hominem rhetoric and failing to address their concerns about equal access. There was a certain amount of anti-government rhetoric, nothing over-the-top, but plenty of unsubstantiated allegations of how the FCC might stifle innovation if they insist on net neutrality. By engaging in the rhetoric of insult they have precluded any sincere dialog with advocates of net neutrality.

There is a new player in this debate. Let’s see how they handle themselves.

Edit -
Rob Pegoraro: The Internet has grown and prospered because of a principle built into its core design -- it's open to your imagination -- and that principle is worth defending.

Astroturfing may become a federal offense

FTC Ready to Cut 'Astroturfing'

The controversial promotional practice of "astroturfing" -- flooding the Internet with bogus product reviews -- is about to hit the dirt.

The Federal Trade Commission is apparently on the brink of updating its 29-year-old guidelines on product endorsements. While that threat has been looming for more than a year now, advertising lawyers say final rules are expected to be announced before the year is up.

And the FTC, lawyers warn, will be making one thing clear: Phony online reviews will not be tolerated.

Some of us in the industry have been saying for years that astroturfing must go. Now that the Federal Trade Commission is saying it the industry will have to pay attention.

Online press room FAIL

I received an email from World Wide Conventions and Business Forums, so I decided to check out their web site. Check out their press room. You have to fill out a form with your name, business, complete contact information, and so on before you can even glance at their press releases. What reporter is going to bother? There are so many other companies to write about. Why create that barrier?

This company is not ready for basic media relations, never mind social media.

Technology is not a religious subject

Jason Perlow

I suspect that this is the case for the majority of enterprises and end-users, in the world where folks just want stuff to work.

Once a developer becomes psychologically invested in a technology logic goes out the window and it becomes a religious discussion. Which technology is easier from the perspective of end users becomes irrelevant.

Anyone who does not believe this is invited to read Slashdot or any other forum where developers gather to discuss technology and review the ensuing flame wars.

Shashi Bellamkonda at CPCUG

I had the pleasure of seeing Shashi speak at the September meeting of the Entrepreneurs and Consultants SIG of the Capital PC Users Group. I would guess there were around 50 people there, a great turnout for what was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon.

Shashi opened by saying that he has be attending CPCUG meetings since he was a student at Montgomery College. He went on to suggest that those twittering the event use the hash tag #cpcug09. I would observe that this is a great example of using social media to extend the reach of an event. Just by presenting to CPCUG Shashi was doing great work for Network Solutions; but by suggesting the use of a hash tag he extended the reach of his presentation while simultaneously promoted the group that had invited him to speak.

He went on the give and excellent overview of social media tools and some of the ways businesses are using them. He emphasized the impact of social media on search results and said that one of the benefits of blogging is gaining visibility in search results. I don’t think that can be said too often.

Shashi Bellamkonda’s account of the event

Slide Presentation

Pictures from the event.

More pictures from the event.

Small French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec The Artist's Dog Flèche, c. 1881. National Gallery of Art

This painting by a teenage Toulouse Lautrec may be my favorite in the exhibit. It has a tenderness that is absent in all his other work and shows a very different side of Lautrec. The Trap, also by a young Lautrec, shows a hunting scene from what I presume was his home. We see the view of a lady's back with her hair done up in a chignon that was to be a central feature of so many of his later paintings.

Edouard Vuillard's Breakfast bears a remarkable resemblance to your humble servant at her breakfast, while his Conversation reminds one of a Thurber cartoon.

Small French Paintings is part of the permanent collection and well worth seeing.

New to me local business and tech blogs

ribbonfarm.com, experiments in refactored perception

Transition to Digital Television DTV Outreach in Motion, Transition to Digital Television with the inclusion of the Underserved Communities

Chaos to Clarity

Waxing UnLyrical, personal, possibly poetic, musings on public relations, media, communications, and everything in between

Work, Wine and Wheels

Mobile is the future

I finally got a cell phone (202/492-1520). Within 24 hours of getting it I wondered how I survived so long without one. It is indescribably handy.

The experience has brought home to me all the ways people are using their phones, for many it has become their primary source of information. Riding the 30 bus coming down Wisconsin Avenue I noticed every single one of my fellow passengers was studying their phones with close attention. Surfing the internet or checking email? Impossible to say.

Clearly we have to rethink our communications programs for mobile compatibility. At minimum our clients need to have a mobile version of their website which can be easily discovered and accessed by the browsers that have been developed for mobile computing.

Tom Murphy has a good post about this.

The myopia of the Australian Financial Review

Margaret Simons has an item about the proposed ethics policy for reporters for the Australian Financial Review. It is a ghastly throwback to the days of command and control and a total failure to comprehend the power of the new tools of social media.

I have the pleasure of following many journalists on Twitter, and it is obvious that they use it to test reader interest, fish for information and hype stories. It is a good medium for a naturally gabby community like journalists.

Weirdest of all is the proposed restrictions on books:

Full time AFR journalists are prohibited from working outside Fairfax, including on books or by accepting speaking engagements. The Editorial Director can waive this prohibition – which presumably will come as a considerable relief to noted AFR authors such as Neil Chenoweth.

Considering that they only reason I have ever heard of the Australian Financial Review is the work of Chenoweth, I would think that they would want to encourage their reporters to publish books. It is the cost effective way of increasing brand awareness while increasing the prestige of the brand. What is Fairfax management thinking?

No sector of English speaking news media is better poised to profit in the online world than the Australian news media (with the obvious except of New Zealand). The Australian Financial Review truly does have tomorrow’s news today and could use Twitter to hype breaking news in the Pacific market, where they will invariably beat their British and North American competition. It is incredible that they would toss away such valuable tools.

Thank you Maria Baibakova

Baibakov Art Projects to be Lead Sponsor of Landmark Kandinsky Retrospective at the Guggenheim

MOSCOW.- Baibakov art projects is to be a lead sponsor of the forthcoming Kandinsky exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (September 18, 2009 – January 13, 2010). Maria Baibakova, Director and Founder of Baibakov art projects, Moscow, will also be co-chairing the 50th Anniversary Gala event for the museum on 16th September, which promises to be a most glittering occasion on the New York cultural calendar during the opening of the fall season.

I going to try to get to New York City for this.

Jody Powell, 1943-2009

Powell Tate

Jody Powell is one of the reasons I went into PR. I was part of the Carter campaign in 1976, going back to when it was Jimmy Who. I never met Powell personally, but everyone in the campaign got to know him through the stream of memos that went out to campaign staff and volunteers. He was quick to alert volunteers to negative press articles that were about to come out. It is easier to maintain morale if you know what is coming.

Powell's book, The Other Side of the Story, is one of the most illuminating on media relations. This book was the first warning I had about the how the abuse of anonymous sources was corrupting our media and political culture.

One of the giants of our industry has fallen. He will be missed.

The New York Times obituary can be found here.

Edit -
Powell Tate has created a page for tributes.
Capitol Communicator's obituary.

Edit ii
Associated Press

Dale Leibach, a longtime friend and business associate since their days in the Carter White House, said the ex-president went to a nursing home where Powell's mother lives to tell her of her son's death before she heard it on the news.

It is so indicative of Carter that he went personally to tell Powell's mom of the death of her son.

Edit iii
MikeMartinez's tribute.

I don't do link exchanges

Legitimizing social media

WFED's Jason Miller has a story about the GSA's guidelines for social media. I predict it will have an effect far beyond the civil service. Federal guidelines on almost anything have a way of becoming de facto guidelines for the whole society.

For all our anti-government rhetoric, the federal government is still regarded as the objective and authoritative source for standards.

NAWBO DC: Getting the most from your website

I will be covering this event for this blog:

Ask the Expert: Getting More From Your Website
September 10, 2009 | 3:00 - 7:30 pm
Westwood Country Club, Vienna, VA

They will have a team from Network Solutions there to answer questions, so it should be a great event.

The Organization of Legal Professionals

Via Gabe and David, we learn about the Organization for Legal Professionals.

We had naively assumed that there was already an organization that certified legal support standards. Not so it seems. This then is a welcome development.

Judith Leyster, a convivial look at the Dutch 17th Century

Judith Leyster exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, June 21–November 29, 2009

I went to see the Judith Leyster exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. She is unlike any of the other Dutch Masters. Unlike the marble stillness of Vermeer, or the severity of Rembrandt, Judith Leyster's subjects are enjoying life.

Almost all of her pictures portray musicians preforming. Most of them are clearly enjoying Holland's fine beer. The exhibit is well worth seeing, it is Dutch Masters as you have never imagined them.

Call for Nominations: Science Public Service Award

From my in box:

2010 National Science Board Public Service Award

~ Honoring Service in Public Understanding of Science and Engineering ~

Call for Nominations

The National Science Board (NSB) Public Service Award honors individuals who and groups that have made substantial contributions to increasing public understanding of science and engineering in the United States. These contributions may be in a wide variety of areas that have the potential of contributing to public understanding of and appreciation for science and engineering – including mass media, education and/or training programs, entertainment, etc.

The NSB Public Service Award is given to one individual and one group recipient in May of each year. Past recipients include: NUMB3RS, the CBS television drama series; Ira Flatow, Host and Executive Producer of NPR’s "Science Friday"; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Bill Nye The Science Guy; and NOVA, the PBS television series.

For nomination instructions, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/awards/public.jsp. All inquiries about the award or nomination procedures should be directed to Jennifer Richards, National Science Foundation (jlrichar@nsf.gov).

Deadline for Nominations: November 4, 2009

--------------

The NSB is the 25-member policymaking body for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and advisory body to the President and Congress on science and engineering issues. Drawn from universities and industry, and representing a variety of science and engineering disciplines and geographic areas, NSB members are selected for their eminence in research, education, or public service, and records of distinguished service. For more background on the NSB and its current composition, visit: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/about/index.jsp.

Stalker marketing is an unsustainable business model

Information Week has an article about a coalition seeking greater protection of consumers' online privacy. Push back is coming from those with a vested interest in stalker marketing.

Apart from the fact that we want the freedom of surfing the internet without corporations tracking us, lack of privacy is a security vulnerability. Now is the time to put in place regulations that protect our privacy, before we have a trillion dollar industry with a vested interest in spying on us.