Consolation Champs

Here’s a wonderful story. Terry Fallis is one of the founders of Thornley-Fallis Public Relations, one of the most social media-savvy PR firms around. Terry wrote and self-published a political satire last year called The Best Laid Plans. Not only did he publish it himself, but he used the book’s web site to market and […]

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I’ve been a very bad runner of late. Brooke and I started running to keep fit back in 2003, and for the first few years, I was motivated. One of the tools that helped me was a great heart-rate monitor watch I bought from Sports Instruments. That watch is now on its last legs, and […]

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Tonight, I attended CaseCamp for the first time. Inspired by the original BarCamp “unconference,” CaseCamp is a marketing event where people present case studies and lessons learned, and the crowd can comment and ask questions. Pioneered right here in Toronto in 2006 by Eli Singer, the event is now in its seventh iteration, and has […]

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UPDATE: All fixed now. Pay no mind.
My friend Neil just let me know that my RSS feed is, in his parlance, “borked.” The problem is that it seems to have happened just over a month ago, at the confluence of a few different events. First, I added the Disqus plugin, changing my entire commenting system. […]

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I’ve been thinking about the wonderful world of work again, and the more I think about the way we “get” our jobs, the more bizarre it seems. We go to a meeting where someone asks us about our skills and about what other jobs we’ve had, and then, based on that, and more than likely […]

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It figures that I received a package from Amazon UK today with a whole bunch of Region 2 DVDs that I bought on sale. You see, I’m in the thick of HotDocs, reviewing a bunch of films over at my film blog Toronto Screen Shots. Nevertheless, I can’t wait to check these out over the […]

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Kevin Kelly is at it again. And all I can do is link.
Borrowing some ideas from Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, Kevin postulates that to make a decent living, an independent creator (musician, artist, writer, whatever) need only amass a thousand “true fans,” defined as people who will buy whatever the maker creates. The challenge, […]

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I’ve always been a big supporter of the BarCamp concept (a free self-organizing “unconference” where everyone is expected to contribute or participate), although the original BarCamps are way too technical for me to understand, never mind contribute. So I was happy to find out that CaseCamp Toronto is happening again on April 29th. CaseCamp is […]

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Brooke and I have run the Harry’s Spring Run-Off 8K each year since 2004, but this year, I’d done next to no training. To make things worse, my watch battery died a few weeks ago and I hadn’t replaced it. And then Brooke and I were placed in different “corrals” at the beginning since she’d […]

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I’m barely 40 pages into Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and I’m already feeling jealous. Not of his talent for comic writing, though he has plenty of that. I’m feeling strangely jealous that I’ve never been able to go on a solo road trip with 600 CDs like he’s doing. You see, I’ve never […]

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