Disruptive Conversations

Seems the students didn't quite like the new logo their school came up with - and took to Facebook to mount a campaign against it! Today's Burlington (Vermont) Free Press ran this article: "Middlebury Facebook revolt contributes to college logo revision".  Unfortunately, the online version of the article doesn't include the graphics, (Huh?  Free Press staff - why couldn't you put the logos there?) but the dead tree version that I got this morning did... and I can see the students concerns.  The new logo, shown on the right, is much more "corporate" and looks like something more Canadian.  But I'm getting ahead of myself... here's the background from the article:

In fall 2006, as they began to plan for a major fund-raising drive, college officials thought about coming up with a new logo. A review committee was formed, 10 design firms were considered, three finalists were interviewed, and the winner -- the New York firm of Chermayeff & Geismar, which boasts a portfolio of prominent corporate and university brands -- set to work.

The ultimate design -- a stylized double leaf outline, reminiscent of maple -- went through customary reviews. Like any proposed logo, it drew different reactions -- some people liked it, some didn't, but on balance the reaction was favorable, said Mike McKenna, the college vice president for communications who spearheaded the process.

This summer, as college officials were getting ready to order new stationery for the next academic year, the new logo was "unveiled" to the campus community. What happened next took McKenna and just about everyone else by surprise.

Students weren't very happy when the new logo appeared on the website and so they started a Facebook group called "Just Say No to the Middlebury Logo".  From the article:

Hundreds signed on to register their scornful, amusing comments about the double leaf. Some complained it looked too corporate, others that it was too much like Canada's national symbol, or even that it evoked a marijuana leaf.

At least three students designed T-shirts parodying the logo, and Franco, who also runs her own blog, posted their images on July 11. Two played off the Canadian motif, and one -- designed by student Alex Benepe, who helped Franco with the Facebook project -- worked the logo's "M" into an entirely new college insignia, "LaMe."

Benepe said Franco's creation "grew faster than any Facebook group I've seen."

"In seven days, 777 people joined," Franco said. That was about the time, she said, when the college administration changed course and withdrew the new logo for general use.

McKenna, who already had received plenty of feedback on the logo, said he hadn't expected the Facebook reaction or the numbers. Roughly one-third of the college's students signed on -- in summertime, no less.

So one-third of the college's students joined the group - in the summer! 

In the end, the Middlebury administration went back and revised the existing logo a bit. As the article says:

While the college administration would not make policy based simply on people going online to express their opinions, McKenna said, the opposition couldn't be ignored, either. What he found heartening, he said, was the strength of students' institutional commitment, along with the favorable comments about the college's traditional, Latin seal.

The college decided to keep using a slightly updated version of the school's traditional "latin seal-style" logo on stationary, official documents, etc.  The new logo will be used on their 5-year fund-raising campaign that is going to reach out to the wider community.  (More information is available in Middlebury's page on their Graphic Identity System and specifically their "About the process page".)

Kudos to the Middlebury administration for working with the students - and somehow I expect we'll see more of these type of stories coming out of Facebook activity!

Jeremiah Owyang continues to demonstrate today why Forrester hired him with a great (and lengthy) post called "Web Strategy (Advanced): Applying a Social Computing Strategy to the entire Product Lifecycle".  Excerpting from the post doesn't do it justice, so I'll just point you over to the post.  I will include his warning and his intended audience:

Warning: For Advanced Strategists only
This is for the advanced only, not a company that is still trying to answer “what or why”. To gauge the sophistication of your organization, see this chart. Deploying this strategy without grasping the foundations of social media, the cultural changes it implies or testing trial programs will likely lead to failure.

You: A Social Media Strategist
You’re responsible for the direction of your online strategies for your company or organization, specifically using social media and computing tools to reach, connect, and build communities around your brand. Most folks at your company know this space is important, but don’t know how to do it, they are relying on your expertise to think holistically, integrated, and strategically.

It's a great post... thanks to Jeremiah for putting it together - and for sharing it with all of us.

Courtesy of a tip from Neville Hobson, I learned that Scott Kingery at "TechLifeBlogged" has released a version of Windows Live Writer that works off of a USB drive.   As Scott writes:

This past February I posted a launcher for Windows Live Writer so that you can take it with your between computers and retain all your settings. Today I am releasing version 2.0 of the Launcher. Much has changed with Windows Live Writer and I have learned some new techniques for making it portable. This is a much cleaner implementation and it plays better with Windows Vista.

I don't personally have a real need to be able to do this, but I do think it's a cool idea.  I like the idea of being able to use WLW on any given machine.  Fun stuff!

Congratulations to Terry Fallis on the publishing of his novel, The Best Laid Plans!  He also notes that the book is now available on Amazon.com!

For those who haven't been following Terry's work, he started podcasting his book out chapter by chapter back in January (scroll to the bottom to see how it began).  Each week (all the way up through May) , we tuned in to hear the latest wacky exploits of Daniel, Angus, Muriel, Lindsay and the two punk-rock campaign workers named Pete.  Even if you didn't understand all the nuances of Canadian politics, it was a fun story to listen to and you definitely found yourself cheering on Angus and Daniel all the way up to the finale when Angus......... well, I can't really give that away, can I?  You have to listen yourself - or now you can buy the book!

Starting in March, Terry began taking us along on his journey into self-publishing, and it was interesting to read over the months how that has all gone.  In the era of Amazon.com and other online bookstores, self-publishing sites like iUniverse.com and Lulu.com have gone far to disrupt the traditional gatekeepers of the traditional publishing business - and also done much to remove the stigma traditionally associated with self-publishing (what used to be called (and probably still is) "vanity publishing").  It's definitely a fascinating dynamic and one that I'm certainly considering for some ideas of my own.  Sure, you don't necessarily wind up in bricks-and-mortar bookstores as you would with a traditional bookstore... but in the online era, does that matter? (or does that matter as much?)

Anyway, congrats to Terry and it's great to see it finally out.  I look forward to seeing a copy myself.

The challenge of now having multiple weblogs... a friend pointed out that when I posted yesterday about my impending change of employment status over on my Disruptive Telephony blog, he missed it because that's one of my blogs he doesn't subscribe to.

So yes, it's true, the great time I've had at my current employer ends on September 21 after I finish a number of transition issues. I'll be in Los Angeles next week at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo doing one final speaking gig (and admittedly networking about what's next) and then I'll be up in Ottawa probably on the 18th and 19th... and then my time is done.

I'm obviously interested in opportunities that might be out there in the social media space... or other interesting areas of disruption.  (My other post talks a bit more about that.)  Please do drop a note if you know of such options.  Thanks!

As I mentioned recently, it seemed like a new version of Windows Live Writer was imminent, and indeed, on Wednesday Microsoft released Windows Live Writer Beta 3 (I would have written about it then, but I was a wee bit distracted). You could download it from that announcement page for from the main Windows Live Writer page.  Reading Joe Cheng's blog post about the release, it sounded interesting so of course I downloaded and installed it.

The first annoyance was that it's now integrated into the full "Windows Live" installer and so when you go to install Windows Live Writer, the installer will also by default install a bunch of other Windows Live apps, ranging from Messenger to Mail to a search Toolbar and a "family safety" option.  Now, you can thankfully de-select all of these options and simply install WLW, but it's something you have to pay attention to.  I understand Microsoft's motivation.  They want to make it easy for people to install all  the Live apps, and they see it as a way to "upsell" people on the other apps (which are all free).  Get people hooked on their apps and search versus those of Google.  I do understand... and I can't really complain because MS is giving us the really incredibly useful Windows Live Writer tool for free.  Still, it was slightly annoying that I had to un-check all those boxes just to get WLW.  (But yes, a small price to pay for WLW.)

The major annoyance, though, was the screen that greeted me when I launched it (once I found it!  My old QuickLaunch icon no longer worked and I had to sort through my Programs menu until I finally found it under the "Windows Live" sub-menu...).  The screen prompted me to start using WLW by adding a weblog! Huh?  What happened to the six weblogs that I already had configured WLW to work with?

Gone.

All the configuration data seems to be gone.  All my weblogs were no longer configured in WLW.  Now, this probably had something to do with the changes to registry locations mentioned in a recent WriterZone blog post.  Still, it was a rather unexpected and definitely annoying outcome of doing what I thought of as an upgrade!  (And yes, I realize it is "Beta 3", but I'm sorry, I would have expected an upgrade to pull across config info.)

Now, the process of adding a weblog is relatively trivial.  Just go to Weblog -> Add Weblog... , fill out the blog URL, username and password, confirm the results and you're done.  Maybe a minute to do it.  Still... it was an unexpected step to have to take.

The good news is that all my drafts still seem intact (even all those drafts for weblogs which are no longer added to WLW), and the couple of plugins I use seem to still be there... so I seem to be set to go.  Now, maybe I can check out the new features...

 Hmmm.... first this note in the Writer Zone on August 29th:

In an upcoming release of Windows Live Writer, we are...

and then Mary Jo Foley writes in ZDNet yesterday "Microsoft to unveil Windows Live suite this week":

The Times is unclear whether Windows Live Writer is in there, too. But it looks like it might be.

pointing to a New York Times article out on Sunday that says this:

The release, though it includes the Windows Live Writer blogging application, carefully avoids cannibalizing two of Microsoft’s mainstays, the Word and Excel programs.

(which would seem to me to be NOT "unclear" about WLW!)

All in all, this would seem to point to an impending release. Perhaps even the "1.0" release??   We'll see....

Here's some humo(u)r to start your week back after the (North American) holiday.  Since I know from comments that a number of my readers are Canadian, I thought I'd just pass along to a link to a piece I posted last Friday:  "How to talk like a Canadian - a 12-step program".   It came about after a fellow podcaster said he wasn't sure about going to a conference in Canada because "his Canadian was rusty".  A number of Canadians actually helped me improve it a bit.  It's posted on my old "North of 45" blog that I used to chronicle our time living in Ottawa from 2000-2005 (north of the 45th parallel).

Enjoy!

If you are looking to get started in "social media" - or are interested in how others survive and thrive in the world of social media - Chris Brogan's post today, "My Social Media Toolkit", may be of great help to you.  I use most all of the tools Chris lists myself, although being on Windows versus a Mac, I use Windows Movie Maker versus iMovie.  I also don't really using Upcoming.org although I've been considering using it more as a way to somewhat automate the list of events that I am attending.  In the comments to Chris' entry, I also added the following sites/services/tools that I use as well:

• del.icio.us - I use http://del.icio.us/ to bookmark and tag all the various sites I find in the course of daily work.  My del.icio.us feed is then a sidebar on a blog, posted to a link blog, etc.
  
• Feedburner - I use http://www.feedburner/ (now owned by Google) for all my RSS feeds, both for the stats and also to add links ("FeedFlare") to the feeds so that people can post my items into other services.
  
• Windows Live Writer - I'll second the comment made (in Chris' comments) by Connie Benson that Windows Live Writer truly ROCKS for an offline blog editor (if you are on Windows).  It has *greatly* increased the ease and speed with which I can post blog entries.
  
• Screen captures - A recent addition to my tool set has been SnagIt from TechSmith. It lets me (on Windows) very quickly grab a section of the screen and copy it to the clipboard - which I can then paste into Windows Live Writer.  It has again greatly accelerated the speed with which I can make blog entries that include graphics, logos, or other parts of a screen. (Here's an example.)  There's also a plugin for Windows Live Writer, although I found that just the copy/paste worked much better/faster for me.  (I'm all about speed for posting, because blogging is something I just fit into random short moments of the day.)

Anyway, those are some of the additions I would make to Chris' great list.  Hopefully this all will help folks use social media that much more effectively.

In recent weeks, it has become increasing clear to me that someone out there is paying people to spam blogs at LiveJournal. As readers probably know, I've had dyork.livejournal.com for about 4 years now and although it's not my primary blog anymore, I still use it for writing that doesn't fit in anywhere else.  I am notified by email when a comment comes in and lately they have pretty much all been short spam messages along the form:

Very exciting story! I like snow skiing and i practise it regularly, so i
completely understand you! <URL-related-to-skiing>

I of course removed the URL as I'm not going to help the spammer.  This particular comment was to a post of mine back in February about the blizzard we had and the only real reference to skiing was the very last line.

This kind of spam has been increasing for me lately with the same basic idea.  A very short comment that is tied into the text of the post.  One spammer even ends the entries with a name, as many other real commenters might do.  In fact, the comments look real, and often are the kind of thing I might very well let stand as a comment.... until you hit the URL and realize that this is just someone trying to sell stuff.

It's an interesting change at LiveJournal.  For so long LJ was "protected" from all the usual crap blog comment spam that plagues all my other blogs by the way commenting works at LJ.  To comment on a blog post, you have to either be a LiveJournal user, or you can leave your comment as "Anonymous".  However, if you leave your comment as "Anonymous", you can't leave a URL associated with your name (as you can do on this blog and most others out there).  This lack of a URL for commenters was actually one of the reasons I chose to leave LJ as my primary blogging platform.  I wanted to know more about the people who commented.

However, this "lack" of a URL turned out to be a great anti-comment-spam feature.  Spammers who were leaving comments with their spam site in the URL field were basically useless on LJ. I'd often laugh because I'd see the same blog comment spam showing up on TypePad (where I could see the URL) as I did on LJ - only on LJ it was ineffective.

It would seem, though, that someone out there figured out a way to make blog comment spam work.  It would appear as if someone is paying people to go around finding quasi-relevant blog entries on LJ and leave comment spam - with an appended URL.   It was probably inevitable... but it's also quite sad.  And it means more work for someone who just wants to write.