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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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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As if updating my blogging software wasn’t enough of a hassle, it turns out that for most of today, my site was unreachable. It was the bad hangover of what looks to have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Wow, that makes me feel kind of important. Over the weekend, some malicious freaks […]

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Well, a few hours of updating, uploading and customizing later, I have a freshly upgraded copy of WordPress 2.5 running Consolation Champs. I had to also update my current theme, Cutline, and then re-add all my customized header images, which also needed to be resized. So, these things never go as smoothly as advertised. A […]

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I’m trying out a new commenting system for a little while. Disqus is an external commenting system, but before you start screaming, it’s not another Haloscan. Disqus actually integrates pretty well with blog entries but what it promises is to free comments from the pages they’re on and weave them into a fuller conversation. I’ve […]

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I’m here in Austin for my eighth consecutive South by Southwest Interactive conference. I’ve come to look at this week as an essential creative reboot each year. The weather in Toronto combined with the months of near darkness always leave me drained in inspiration. And then I come to Texas and spend a week with […]

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It started with a well-meaning post from Joe Thornley, of Thornley-Fallis Public Relations, one of the savviest PR companies around. Their embrace of social media cheers me up immensely, and Joe writes interestingly and often about how blogging and other social media tools can be used as part of an overall public relations strategy. But […]

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I spent a very educational evening tonight at the Talk Is Cheap “unconference” on Social Media, held at Centennial College’s slightly inaccessible Carlaw campus, the Centre for Creative Communications. It was a free event that brought together around 200 people, mostly public relations and corporate communications practitioners. As such, it wasn’t directly related to my job, […]

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From the November 2007 Harper’s magazine:
From a summary of recommendations in Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, a 211-page report released in July by the RAND Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute, under a $400,000 contract with the United States Joint Forces Command.
HARNESS THE POWER OF INFLUENCERS: Businesses […]

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Something very odd happened in July. My site traffic slowed to a trickle. Admittedly, most of my “visitors” are people who arrive at some ancient entry through the magic of Google search. But my unique visitor count went from 4,430 in June to a measly 642 in July. August continues the trend. Does anyone out […]

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