Belated Thanks All Around

I've been remiss in thanking a handful of folks for recent kind mentions of this blog or of its author in various media outlets. Through the wonders of Google and Technorati alerts and other mysterious technical tools our vast staff has assembled to help us keep up with things, we've noticed a pleasing spike in mentions recently. Sometimes I'm slow to acknowledge these mentions, but I'm nevertheless always thankful for them.

Back in February, Crain's managing editor Scott Suttell, one of the truly nicest guys in the business, had this tidbit on his widely read Editor's Choice blog. A few weeks ago, ace web developer Marc Majers had a nice write-up in the Cool Cleveland e-letter about our Web Association panel event. It's online, but since it's relatively brief and buried deeply in this issue, let me reprint it here in full:

Last Monday, the WA gathered a group of tech-savvy pioneers to discuss the growing impact of social media. Moderated by Jim Kukral of BlogKits, the panelists consisted of George Nemeth of Brewed Fresh Daily, Dan Hanson of Great Lakes Geek and John Ettorre of Working with Words. The panel passionately argued for the business case of this growing medium. In a nutshell, local companies should care about web 2.0 marketing channels like blogs, video and podcasting because they can generate business. Web 2.0 as explained by Dan Hanson is "push-button publishing for people." The Time Magazine person of the year 2006 was "You" because now anyone can post content on the web. John Ettorre stressed that content is "The heart and soul of the Internet" so make sure what you post is valuable. Web users are scouring the Internet for two reasons: a solution to their problem or to have some fun. You need to put your best foot forward with whatever you create to build a community around your work. "Make sure you don't have typos—they are worse than fascism", Mr. Ettorre exclaimed. The increasing bandwidth of the nternet in tandem with this "push-button technology" is causing a flurry of new content being posted in the form of blogs, podcasts and video. Blogger George Nemeth said one overt benefit of blogging is learning something from someone else. Blogs also have direct organic search engine optimization benefits because of the sheer content. Instead of you finding a client, they will find you. The content you are posting on your blog is making you an expert in your field and this will ultimately lead to a sale. Everyone likes getting their content through a different medium; that's why you should offer your customers choice. Some people want to read it, watch it or listen to it. Jim Kukral stressed that video is the next big medium because it is the most effective way to get your point across to busy, attention-deficit web user. He suggested making short 30-60 second "how to videos" to connect to the YouTube generation. As a matter of fact, Google will be adding video results in standard searches this summer. You know when Google does something, it sticks. Social media is setting the table for marketing to make a sale. Marketing is designed to get someone's attention. Blogs, podcasts and videos are just another medium to get a consumer's attention and they work best when you use them together. We are now our own travel agents, insurance agents and journalists, but the quality of the content is key. As Jim Kukral said, "People can lick off or wash off your stickiness." Web 2.0 tools can deliver your message faster and more efficiently and all you can do is get the customer's attention with quality content.

An interesting guy named Gary, whom I've never met, happened to be at that event, and shared this brief nugget of insight later on his fine blog. I'm hoping we get to meet some time.
More recently, and as an outgrowth of a subject that came up during this panel, my friend Dan Hanson, tech editor of Inside Business magazine, quoted me about the "long tail" phenomenon in the current (May) issue, none of which is online. Finally, I happened to come across a truly humbling reference to Working With Words on the blog of a local graphic designer I've never met. I also hope to meet this fellow some day, and thank him for those kind words.

Now go enjoy the weekend, people. You hereby have my permission to begin it early.

Kukral Rides the Wave

We're not supposed to have favorites in this growing community of bloggerhood (my own coinage, because I choose not to use the pretentious and awkward word in wider usage, blogosphere) . But I say to hell with that. The online world of writers and bloggers is the ultimate meritocracy (which makes traditional writers and journalists nervous, cause now they actually have to earn an audience with the power of their ideas and quality of their writing, a truly scary proposition for the lazy and talent-challenged who worry that the masses having access to a printing press waters down their place in the pecking order). Here, the cream quickly rises to the top.

And the cream is all around us. Inspired in part by my friend and colleague Lois and her splendid, grace-filled two-week experiment in guest blogging at her Hearts @ Work site, I'll be periodically highlighting the best of the blogs in the hopes of leading you toward what I consider some of the more interesting corners of the web. And what a surprise: those corners are ALWAYS a direct result of a single person with a fresh, smart, fearless voice. A few days ago I kicked that off with a mention of Marc Lefkowitz's impossibly brilliant Hotel Bruce, which speaks for itself. I've heard from a number of you who found it a really amazing site (a full-blown online magazine, really), as I knew you would. And when I at last get around to retooling this humble corner of web real estate, I'll be sure to put Bruce Blog in a prominent place, where no one can miss it.

But now it's Jimmy Kukral's turn. He's been at this longer than most, having begun with early iterations of blogs that pre-date the efforts of most everyone I know. In other words, he was a leader rather than a follower. At the same time, he's humble to a fault about both his knowledge and the mark he might make. And for me, that's an especially welcome change from the mass of web humanity, where self-appointed gurus typically think they're geniuses without having supplied much evidence to the rest of us. But here's the life-changing power of humility: since he has never (and still doesn't) think he knows it all, Jim has been in the far more productive posture of being an experimenter rather than an expostulator. Like Edison puttering around his Edison, New Jersey labs around the turn of the last century, Jimmy K. simply experiments with what is still really a young medium. He tried some of this and lots of that, and then blew that up and started something else. When one interesting idea failed to catch sustained fire (though after considerable initial buzz), he took a moment to grumble (though mostly to himself), and simply moved on, though having learned something from that electronic test tube.

But his real genius, I think, stems from his extremely unusual ability to both personally experiment with the technology and then put it into words himself at a similarly high level. Those two talents are rarely found in the same person. Years after I first became a fan of the smartly literate Click Z network, a legendary educational site devoted to teaching professional web workers how to do what they do better by providing some of the sharpest, most incisive commentary and tips on various related themes, I learned that he had been a regular contributor when the site was still in its prime (before a merger robbed it of much of its soul). Check his Click Z archive here. He later did some fine writing for a similar site, Builder.com.

Anyway, Kukral as I said has been at the web business for a long time, especially for such a relative pup of a guy. And he's thrived for one simple reason: he seems to understand at a DNA level (as most people to this day still do not) that it's the ultimate stage for constant R&D, a giant moving target which no one, no matter how smart or energetic, can ever begin to master. Instead, this medium belongs to the tinkerers, the innovators and fast-brained, those who are never happy with where things are at or what they've done, but who are constantly looking to improve and build upon what they know and thus what they can do, which is a constant and humbling voyage of discovery for most of us.

But of course it also helps to have a niche of specialized knowledge. And Jim's is web affiliate marketing, something he knows more about than anyone I know. And most importantly, he understands how that important niche fits into the larger web universe, which means he knows how to get things done and even how one might make some money from that knowledge. Anyway, the hits keep coming for Jimbo. He'll soon have a book out about the business side of blogging, which I've been pleased to be a small part of. And earlier this year he wrote a fine piece about the arcane (at least to some) topic of web usability, and it prompted the world's top guru in that field to quickly respond. His latest news, which he's just posted, is this nice write-up on the giant ABCNews site about his efforts to trim a few pounds. It's a sublime case study about the real power of the web: one modest guy, smartly leveraging one little self-authored website in a tiny corner of the universe (Cleveland), can get noticed all over the world, and for all the right reasons. So hats off to Jim. Keep reading him, and you just may learn something important yourself...

Outsourcing at the Tipping Point

In a juicy story that has somehow escaped the notice of Democrats and American political pundits until now, an Indian newspaper reported way back in January that the Republican party has outsourced a significant chunk of its phone fundraising operations to India. The story might well get some traction in coming weeks, in light of the fact that IBM officials were overheard earlier this summer discussing plans to export lots more IT jobs overseas. That development (involving a famous old company that everyone knows, non-techies included), provided something of a "tipping point" in a story that's been gathering steam for some time, as our Jim Kukral well knows. Eagle-eyed ironists might be alive to the rich possibilities inherent in unemployed Americans getting fundraising calls from Indian workers who have taken their jobs. And it's a reminder that it's not simply higher-order IT engineering jobs that are going overseas in alarming numbers, but the even more plentiful and lower-level help-desk and phone bank jobs, too.

Given those dynamics, my friend Gary Baney's new startup, Boundless Flight, offers an interesting (at least I find it interesting) middle-ground value proposition: since we haven't a chance of keeping all the IT jobs here, nor should we really want to, let's keep the higher-order ones while the grunt coding work (rapidly becoming a commodity) is done elsewhere. An IT veteran of KeyCorp and Flashline, Gary has also taught IT engineering as an adjunct prof at CWRU, and he has a legendary ability to stay in touch with a far-flung group of his former students. Out of that network, and the fact that some of his students have since returned home to China, the idea for BF grew. While the BF mission statement neither appears on their site nor in the brief story Crain's did, let me share it with you here:

"Boundless Flight is a 'wholesaler' of software engineering (especially e-commerce and wireless) using CWRU graduates and offshore resources to provide our customers the greatest value possible while keeping 'the best and the brightest' in Cleveland. Additional areas of focus include helping organizations achieve excellence in IT management through augmentation staffing and expert middleware implementation, integration and ongoing management. The net intellectual capital of a population center is not to be measured in the number of software engineers, bio-engineers, chemists, etc. that are employed there. The net intellectual capital of a region is tightly compacted in the minds of the 2% of those technicans that are growing, changing and making a true difference in human discovery and innovation enablement efficiences. The value of a software engineering firm is not reflected by their headcount. It is probably the reverse of that, if anything. It is measured most accurately by their ability to promote, foster and sustain innovation in the companies they evolve products for. If they cannot do that, they have little long-term inherent value to themselves and even less to their customer base. Regions of the country that are viewing the growth of 'headcount' as a mark of progress are going to end up populated by commodity workers unless they can find, nurture and RETAIN the 2% that make a difference. (my emphasis added) That is our mission for Cleveland in software engineering."

What do you think? Is there some wisdom in that? Or is it impossibly elitist, or even simply a high-concept justification for partial outsourcing. We'd be interested in your thoughts...

And Speaking of Kukral. Hard to believe that Google is now celebrating just its fifth year in existence. It seems to have been around as long as the Internet has been here. It was only three years ago this summer, in fact, that Anton, Jack and I, among some other fun folk, were working on a giant venture-funded web project in the waning days of the dot-com bubble, when we came across an eye-opening story in the New Yorker on something with the impossibly cool-goofy name of Google. It was written by the very same Malcolm Gladwell that authored the above-mentioned "Tipping Point". For many people, it was the first introduction to Google. I know it challenged the very fundamental underpinnings of what we were trying to do with that site. And it has never failed to amaze ever since. And so I found it all the more amazing a few days ago when I happened to follow some links from Kukral's writing to an online Q&A he did with a web guru. She proceeded to make the point that as good as Google is, serious web search wouldn't fall apart if Google were to disappear tomorrow. After all, she noted, Teoma and Alltheweb are still around. That caught my attention, since I had never heard of either. So I did a test. I googled myself on each, and you know what--on that evidence, they're both damn close to the vaunted Google in both speed and comprehensiveness. In fact, Alltheweb may have served up slightly more meaningful links higher up than Google. All of which certainly bears further study.

Kukral Flips Out

My friend Jim Kukral begins a semi-daily online show about online marketing and leveraging web video. It's called the Daily Flip, and in his usual over-the-top fashion, he promos it here. Four years ago, I wrote about him extensively here. But I've made at least passing references to him in all these places over the years. Anyway, good luck with the show, Jim. We'll be watching.

Here Are Two Chances to Join Me
For Writing Events in Coming Days

I'll be appearing at a couple of writing-related events around the Cleveland area in the next week, both of which I heartily encourage you to consider attending, should you have the time and interest.

This Saturday morning, March 24th, I'll be giving a presentation on blogging at the 16th annual Western Reserve Writers' mini-conference, at Lakeland Community College. Shame on Lakeland for not harnessing the web better to promote it (their bare-bones listing doesn't tell you nearly enough about it to convince anyone to attend. They've instead relied solely on mailed brochures). So in a moment, I'll fill you in on it myself.

Two days later, on Monday, March 26th, I'll be taking part in a Web Association luncheon panel with a trio of friends, Dan Hanson, George Nemeth and Jim Kukral. I've written about Dan here (scroll down, if you care to, to see all the mentions) George here and Jim here. This one should be a particularly fun event. And doubly so for me because of its echoes of a similar event nearly four years ago, when George and I and a couple of other online writers addressed the then-new subject of blogging to a roomful of about 100 folks. One of the co-sponsors was the Association of Internet Professionals, a predecessor of the Web Association. As it happened, I met Jim Kukral that very evening. He had been blogging for some time even then, and was thrilled to meet others in the region who did, too. So anyway, do consider attending if you can.

Okay, back to the Saturday conference at Lakeland, where I'm happy to say I'll also be joined by some old writing comrades, including Suzanne Alexander and Scott Lax. Here's a quick overview of the morning:

8:30--registration and coffee
9:00--welcome
9:15--Mary Ryan on writing for children, me on blogging, Susanne A. on making connections, and Barbara Snow on coaching yourself to success.
10:30--Deanna Adams on memoir-writing, Les Roberts on book reviews, Malcolm Wood on outlining a novel, and Ruth Fawcett on independent publishing.
11:45--Scott Lax on creative writing for beginners, Nancy Christie on essay writing, Steve Grant on legal issues, and Nicole Hunter on writing dialogue.
Networking, refreshments and author signings to follow.
Cost: $55. For more information: call 440-525-7116.

'They're Cheering for You, Tucker' You, Too, Bill

So much to catch up on, and so little time, at least today. So I'll have to save for another day accounts of two fascinating, catalytic events I've taken part in within the last week. One was my friend Anton Zuiker's phenomenally successful, even mind-blowing blog conference in North Carolina last weekend. The other was a Tuesday afternoon encounter at John Carroll between nearly a dozen Russian journalists from Siberia, in town for a couple of weeks on an international exchange program, and five of us U.S. scribes. We spent nearly two hours helping each other understand the different challenges and opportunities of our respective systems, in the process challenging the lone interpreter's best efforts to keep up with the fast-paced group conversation and help both sides undertand all the language nuances. Let's just say that each of these events was an intellectual delight, and each stretched my understanding in important and complimentary ways. And to have them occur back to back felt like a special blessing.

Even Seth Godin Gets It Wrong. Most people I know who know anything about viral marketing guru Seth Godin, or have read any of his stuff, come away impressed. It's hard not to: he's smart as a whip and on top of so much of what's new and changing in the web-enabled world, while always managing to resist being swept away by the silly and superficial. But even he can occasionally get it wrong in a big way. In mid-January he wrote in defense of an unnamed friend who was being savaged by what he called the "mob justice" of the blogging community (sorry, but I'll keep intact my disfavor for that silly word blogosphere). So far, so good. But then he erred, I think, with this small bit: "...it will blow over. Blogging is about speed, and no news is bad news if you're in the hunt for the easy score..." Sorry, Seth, but blogging is only about speed if you choose to make it about speed. Blogs and blogging are mere mediums, tools or, as Anton Zuiker likes to say, pencils. They're used differently by different people. Can't we ever get off this childish reductionism of attributing all kinds of group descriptions to a simple communications medium that's as customized as one cares to be? Blogs are whatever their authors choose to make them. End of story.

Kukral Elicits an Interesting Nugget. For many, the newest guru to follow in the footsteps of Godin is a New York p.r. guy (of all things) named Steve Rubel, who writes brilliantly about the new media landscape on his similarly brilliantly named site, Micropersuasion. At the end of January, my Cleveland-based pal Jim Kukral, himself a budding micropersuader, posed a question to Steve on his blog, about his apparent policy against accepting advertising. It prompted Rubel to give this unexpected answer:

Jim, when I started this blog back in April of last year I vowed never to accept advertising. I am not in this to make a buck, but to engage in a discussion about the democratization of media and evangelize its possibilities. However, in recent months a few companies have approached me about placing ads on my blog. I am weighing if I will run these campaigns. If I elect to go forward, I will donate all proceeds to a charity to-be-determined that supports medical research for children with brain tumors. Believe it or not, I am a brain tumor survivor going on 22 years now and I would like to give back. If others have thoughts here, I would be eager to hear them. I promise, however, that if I do run ads I will keep the advertising simple, relevant and clean.

Which proves once more (as I like to tell my sons, ad nauseum): you only learn by asking. Hats off to Jimmy K.

And finally, we bring you the heartwarming story of Bill Belichick. When last we Clevelanders left him, Bill was the almost comically sullen, monosyllabic Browns coach. An obvious creep with borderline psychosis issues. What the hell is this guy's problem? we all asked. He has since, of course, morphed into a genius who's rightly being compared to Vince Lombardi, causing any honest person to reconsider their original assumptions about the guy. But this tender little story in the NYTimes just before the Super Bowl, by the dependable beat writer George Vecsey, made me root even more for Bill and his Patriots:

Way beyond the Doctor Doom stereotype, Belichick is a family man, anchored by his wife Debby, and three children. He makes friends, and keeps them. From his days with the Giants, he got to know Ingraham, a sports businessman and fellow graduate of Wesleyan U....when Belichick was settling on Long Island in 1997, he stayed with (the family) , becoming part of the family. Now 9, Tucker Ingraham keeps in touch with his pal Bill via email, and receives almost instant replies saying that he is turning over Tucker's critiques to his coordinators. Last year, Tucker got to play catch on the field before the Super Bowl and, after the Patriots won in te closing seconds, Bill whispered to him, 'they're cheering for you, Tucker.' Think of that when you think of Doctor Doom."

Call me a softie if you will, but that one brought a lump to my throat.

Quick Hits

Worried About an Internet Meltdown? Then by all means, plan to attend this conference in LA later this year. And if you do learn that it's going to go poof, please send the rest of us an email ASAP, so that we can plan accordingly...

GWB's Sorry Scorecard. These sobering stats come courtesy of political science prof Martha Joynt Kumar, who's writing a book on White House communications. It compares the number of solo press conferences that recent presidents have submitted themselves to at the same point in their first term that George W. now finds himself: Eisenhower 78, LBJ 79, Nixon 23, Carter 53, Reagan 21, Bush I 72, and Clinton 40. And our current prez? Just 11, or about half as many as the press-hating Nixon and the overscripted Reagan. Yet another reason that it's time for a change...But don't take my word for it. Check out what Slate's splendid chief political correspondent, William Saletan, has to say about Bush in this fine piece. It includes one of the most ringing paragraphs ever written about our Bumbler-in-Chief: "From foreign to economic to social policy, Bush's record is a lesson in the limits and perils of conviction. He's too confident to consult a map. He's too strong to heed warnings and too steady to turn the wheel when the road bends. He's too certain to admit error, even after plowing through ditches and telephone poles. He's too preoccupied with principle to understand that principle isn't enough. Watching the stars instead of the road, he has wrecked the budget and the war on terror. Now he's heading for the Constitution. It's time to pull him over and take away the keys."

Is CNN's Lou Dobbs Channeling Jim Kukral? You may know him as a pompous, rightward-leaning cable newsreader, the ethically challenged guy who loudly campaigned about the unfairness of Enron criticism after he took thousands from the company for a private speaking gig. But now we have the new and improved Lou, who seems to have undergone a total makeover that would do the Queer Eye guys proud. Now Lou is a crusading populist, ranting about how major U.S. companies are outsourcing all our jobs. His website even lists about 350 of them. But we know who started that momentum: our own Jim Kukral, who got on this kick almost a year ago, before it was considered hip to complain about outsourcing, with this site...

Watching Porn in Robes. Finally, we can't help noting our favorite detail in the river of coverage surrounding the release of the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's papers. You've no doubt come across the famous quote from another justice to the effect that he couldn't define pornography, but that he knew it when he saw it. But what about when you can't really see it? Buried in a Washington Post team report was this little jewel of an anecdote: "Blackmun recounted how, when the justices watched films to determine if they were pornographic, Justice John M. Harlan, who was nearly blind, kept asking his clerk, 'What are they doing now?' Upon being told, Harlan would exclaim, 'You don't say."

A Few Scattered Thoughts

A debate is heating up over what exactly constitutes acceptable journalism, and just where do bloggers and blogging fit in. I've just added a few logs to the fire by responding to a posting from Chris Thompson on George Nemeth's blog. But this recent Wired article adds a few other interesting insights to the debate. "More and more I'm running into myself on Google," reports one Madrid-based blogger. A search-engine optimization guru adds a crucial insight: "The web is the great equalizer. Good content rises to the top of the Internet. It doesn't matter if the medium is a blog or a corporate Web page."

In other words, writing for the web is something of a radical meritocracy, which lots of traditional journalists have a problem with. It makes them really nervous that they might actually have to compete for readership or audience respect solely by the power of their arguments or writing style or how compelling their subject is. You can't coast on the fact that you have a staff job at a well-respected pub and then write crap.

And this new story really points up how hard it's becoming for those in power to enforce the nice rules of silence which often amount to little more than censorship, as long as there are who can directly report on events of interest. Seems that a blogging lawyer and a venture capitalist had a stronger urge to communicate with their audiences than did the well-behaved "journalists" who tamely agreed to stop taking stenography when their patrons insisted, their audience be damned. Said San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor, one of the first high-profile bloggers in straight journalism, said it best: "conference organizers cannot make an event off the record only for the official journalists anymore. The rules of 'journalism,' whatever that is, are changing. This is just one more example."

Enough said about that for now. Suffice to say that we'll be hearing lots more years of self-righteous indignation from journalists who are driven to distraction by the possibility that millions of people who aren't in their profession might actually be able to write better, more compellingly, with more passion and knowledge than they. That's a scary idea for people used to thinking of their professional status as an ID card that mostly serves to keep the hordes out, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Here's a good example for you. Matt Welch is a guy some of you may have heard of. He got his start as a writer primarily on the web, in the functional equivalents of blogs or self-publishing. And yet his profile and reputation have grown incredibly, based on just one thing: the guy can write! Check out this article, for instance. Read this, and then tell me that he's not a first-rate writer and thinker.

On to other developments: Rookie blogger of note. Recently I nominated Kukral for the prize, and his last week of entries have done nothing but confirm that status. His take on Feagler was especially interesting (but in fairness, I wanted to point out that poor, lazy Dick F. could once write like a dream, back when he did some work. Try this heart-tugger, for instance, on the last days of the Cleveland Press. It's sublime. Too bad he hasn't written like this in at least 10 years. Jimmy K. also has a pretty good sense of humor. Check out this little animated head app that he put together on a page that's a take-off on Google.

Anyway, Kukral's successor as the rookie blogger to watch is none other than Bill Callahan, a name perhaps familiar to you if you've been in the neighborhoods movement. For years, he's run programs on the near west side, in something called the Stockyard Association. Bill ran a couple of interesting events around the theme of the digital divide, which he billed as Digital Vision. And he's even received funding from the man himself, Mario Morino, which is all the vote of confidence I need.

Bill's West Side Computer Community Center is even reputed to be increasingly collaborating with Dan Hanson and his Computers Assisting People, which is a welcome development that gives a nice geographic balance (near east/near west) to those related efforts. With all that as background, check out his blog when you get a moment.

And speaking of Dandy Danny Hanson, my heart dropped for him just a moment, when I learned that United Way's Community Vision Council has teamed up with Cleveland Public Library to debut an attractive, well-funded site for seniors. Called SeniorsConnect.org, it comes complete with eye-catching signage throughout the library (motto: "The Web Site for People Who Weren't Born Yesterday"). This will compete directly with Dan's spunky self-funded site, Clevelandseniors, which isn't the most graphically appealing thing, but contains some wonderful content if you know where to dig.
But there's enough out there for everyone. I'm just happy that Cleveland Public (which is actually the third largest public research library in the country), under its energetic, charismatic new director Andrew Venable, is fully living up to its ambitious slogan as "The People's University."

Cleveland's East-West Divide: An Essay

The October issue of Northern Ohio Live, due in mailboxes and on newstands any moment now, will contain a back-page essay I wrote, on the subject of Cleveland's historic divisions between east and west sides. It's a subject I began engaging with in this space last year here, and the reader comments were so enthusiastic and so interesting that I knew I should return to it. As I note, we now have a south side as well, which of course we've always had. But I don't remember anyone acknowledging or talking about that much until recent years. Anyway, thanks to my friend Jim Kukral, the omnivorous Cleveland-based web evangelist, for parking this file on his server temporarily. Also thanks to Sarah at Live, for finally going ahead and taking the dive with a back-page essay each month, an idea I've been quietly agitating about for a few years. But most of all, thank you dear readers, for joining this conversation occasionally, and thus adding to my knowledge base. I couldn't do it without you.

Monday Stuff

Okay, not much time today to write (at least in this venue), so instead I'll quickly share some interesting stuff I've been reading and/or stumbling over.

Dear Team NEO: if you're not ever going to put anything on your online events calendar, maybe y'all should think about just getting rid of it?

My pal Jimmy Kukral (the web guru) works in bursts. How about you?

Putting out an APB (that's All Points Bulletin for those who haven't watched enough old cop shows) for Chas Rich, missing in action since August. At least the archives are back online. Even those have been missing for awhile. Anybody see or hear from him?

Do you still doubt the thuggery of the American right wing? If so, just click on the comments for this entry on a right-wing newspaper, in a story about their bete noir, Valerie Plame, and you'll get a pretty good glimpse into the heart of darkness.

Here's a song that always manages to make me a little misty eyed whenever I hear it. It also reminds me of old flames. When I bump into them occasionally, I always have to stifle the urge to hum a few bars for them.

What a sublimely cute childhood photo of herself my friend Kris Ohlson posted on her wonderful blog back in July. This should be in a coffeetable book somewhere.

The economic development guru Ed Morrison experiments with a pricey premium blog service. Do let us know how that's going, will you, Ed?

Finally, go see the movie Bella, will you? While it's come in for more than its share of bashing from the critics (but also lots of raves from average movie goers, including sophisticated ones, like those who attended the Toronto film fest and voted it the People's Choice). We caught it over the weekend and found it an impossibly sweet story about the power of love and redemption. But you'd better hurry if you're going to see it on the big screen. For Cleveland-area readers, I think it may only still be at the Richmond Mall cinemas. And with the Cleveland.com movie theatre search page apparently down, we can't confirm that just now. Anyway, more about this movie soon.

Let the Finals Begin

Now that one set of finals are over (in our house, that means high school final exams), the decks are cleared for a more pleasing set of finals--the NBA finals, which begin tonight. The Christian Science Monitor does a nice piece on how the league has regained its groove, with a bevy of exciting young stars, naturally including Lebron James. Unfortunately, the piece contains one howler: it includes Denver Nuggets' Carmelo Anthony among the young NBA stars who are role models for kids. I think the writer may have overlooked one important fact: the guy once financed an underground DVD, "Stop Snitching," which counsels wrongdoers, especially drug dealers, not to cooperate with police. ESPN Magazine recounts the whole dreary chapter here. This kind of thing may enhance his street cred with the worst elements of the hip-hop generation, but it hardly makes him a role model.

Thankfully, this clown won't be among those on the big stage tonight. But there will be another clown in the thick of things: Mavs owner and brat-boy billionaire Mark Cuban, who made his pile by selling his start-up, Broadcast.com to Yahoo shortly before the tech bubble burst. His new-age franchise owner's tactics--bitterly waging war on the refs, micromanaging team operations and forever crying about the team's media coverage--are more than enough to convince me to root for the Miami Heat, if Shaq and Dwayne Wade weren't enough reason already.

And while you're at it, if you see my friend Jim Kukral, web guru extraordinaire, ask him about his non-brush brush with Cuban. It's a funny story.

Save This Date, Please

Poets and Writers League Party August 19th. Longtime readers of Working With Words know that the Society of Professional Journalists is one of my special causes. The group is nearly 100 years old, and for most of its life, it has been something of a dowdy overachiever. But it's also been a bit like the journalistic equivalent of your dad's old Buick, fussily worrying about issues of fairness and ethics like a censorious old school marm, joylessly rapping the knuckles of offenders. While parts of me rather like and respect that, I also think it has to grow with the times, and grapple with the far more complicated, grayer issues that are now at the intersection of journalism, citizenship and public affairs. Happily, the Cleveland chapter has, in spades. I'm happy to be a part of that crew of engaged hungry minds in the profession who are tackling all these issue and sparking conversation within the profession, and (here's the real key) increasingly outside it--with readers, citizens, those who are written about, etc. We have a new website courtesy of the talented web designer Jim Kukral which will allow us to reach more people with more issues.

But with SPJ so well entrenched in the civic conversation, I will begin this year to steadily move out into other related and allied organizations, in an effort to continue to try to influence the breaching of walls between all these writing categories. If you don't write yourself, you may not know that the writing community is full of more niches than a honeycomb, and that's just how some jealous guardians like it. There are of course the journalists (and they even contain subsets, such as literary journalists, a category to which I aspire). There are poets; novelists; children's book authors; and writers of mystery, romance and science fiction (often called genre writers by some purists, who never hesitate to add a note of disdain). There are specialists in nature writing and their newer-age brethren, environmental writers. And of course there are bloggers. And on and on it goes. For the most part (or am I wrong here?), denizens of these ghettoes prefer to keep to themselves, buttoned up in their walls, talking only to each other.

Nonsense, I say. We're all writers, and we all have much to learn from each other's disciplines and special interests. Those who write news and are forever being pressured by the market imperatives of journalism to shorten their articles, so they can learn poetic compression from poets. Pure bloggers have much to learn about generating story ideas, doing basic fact-checking and other subjects from longtime writers. And pure traditional journalists can learn a thing or two (or maybe two thousand) from their blogging counterparts about pouring more authentic conversation into their work and being a bit less full of themselves. Okay, so perhaps my ecumenical outreach is driven by a personal mania to bring coherence to my many writing selves. I see parts of myself in all of these specialties. And let me say that there's really no tension between any of these selves. I can't say that I've ever had a moment's hesitation, never felt a second of friction between my roles as writer, journalist or blogger. They all fit together seemlessly. My responsibilities to each are precisely the same: to give sacred witness to my beloved readers, to bring them some news or help them understand some point of view, to spur their thinking, to help them wrestle with some pain, experience some joy or to simply bring them into communion with others. After all, a wiser person than I once helpfully observed that in the end, we really read in order to find that we're not alone.

We have so many wonderful developments popping up in this broad writing landscape in the region. With all of this grassroots energy bubbling up all over the place on behalf of the written word, it seems only fitting that I should increasingly move toward what I consider the grandaddy, the hub of this network--the Poets and Writers League of Greater Cleveland. As the product of a merger between a predecessor poets' group and one dedicated to those who deal in prose, it's already done some knocking down of walls itself. It's the only such group in the region that I know of with an actual physical location--the charming Literary Center, or "the Lit," as it's affectionately known--and a fulltime staff member, the energetic Darlene Montanaro. It offers a wonderful array of classes and keeps in touch with a thousand small and large developments that affect those who write. And so I plan on spending significant time with the group in the coming year.

Anyway, I hope you'll join me at an August 19th evening event, a modest (and I mean modest: just $5) fundraiser for the group, which it's calling Raise the Rent (directions are here). It will be a wonderful way to celebrate summer's end among likeminded word lovers. I'm looking forward to seeing you there.

Scouring the World for Talent, And Licking Magazines

Get a load of this interesting Business Week piece on Google's global hunt for engineering talent. Great world-class companies don't worry about borders when it comes to recruiting talent. Sorry if that depresses my Cleveland techie/geek readers (especially you, Kukral). But of course there's a flip side to this global market: if you work hard, sharpen your skills and intelligently leverage the web to find opportunities, there's a world of work out there for you to land. So get to work...

Rusty Website. Is this the saddest waste of a great web address you've ever seen? Some map-maker on Cleveland's near west side, who was evidently hip to the web pretty early, seems to have locked up the URL for Rustbelt.com and then promptly done...not much of anything with it. I say sell it to the highest bidder on Ebay. He could probably make some real money doing so.

Sarah Loves Magazines. At Northern Ohio Live Magazine's 25th anniversary event last week at Fat Fish Blue the food, drink and music were good, but the people were even better. Live is an interesting Cleveland publishing story. Long considered something of a stepchild of the larger, deeper-pocketed Cleveland Magazine (from which it sprang, in a way, since it was founded by ClevMag alums Dennis Dooley, Diana Tittle and John Shambach), it has struggled financially during its entire life. The couple dozen well-heeled investors who initially threw money into the pot to get it off the ground are said to have grumbled aloud for years to anyone who would listen that they never made a dime off their investment. But, as I've written before, with Cleveland Magazine having gotten away from serious journalism in recent years in favor of a bland, soulless formula, with anorexic cover models and stories catering mostly to moneyed outer-ring suburbanites, NOL has kept something of a small pilot light going for a more serious brand of regional journalism. Not the entire magazine, mind you (much of it is still given over to the same kind of advertorial-style section crap that completely dominates ClevMag), but enough to remind serious readers and writers of how good magazines can be and mostly used to be.

Good magazines are infused with a couple of crucial human elements: savvy and courageous veteran editors who push the envelope with the ad side on behalf of their readers, and a steady stream of younger folk who aren't put off by the industry's low pay and long hours. Live's Managing editor Sarah Sphar is a perfect example of the latter type (click here and here to sample some of her work). I've known her for some time, but she's ordinarily too swamped to talk when I happen to be around sheparding one story or another (I'm a contributing writer there). But at the 25th celebration, I got my first chance to sit for a moment and get to know her. And she didn't disappoint. First, by informing me that she was first turned on to magazines by an old friend and colleague of mine, Bob Rosenbaum, who is indeed an inspired and gifted editor (he's now a publisher at Penton). And then she talked about the visual appeal of a good magazine. A great page, she said, should be so interesting and exciting that the reader "wants to lick the magazine." I never thought of it that way before, but from now on, I probably will. Here's to higher pay and shorter hours, at least eventually, Sarah. And may you have thousands of pages worth licking in weeks, months and years to come.

Iambic Pentameter in Your Wallet

'Money is a kind of poetry.'
--Wallace Stevens, insurance man by day, poet by night

This week's Free Times contains an entertaining ramble of a cover story, by author Tom Kelly, something of a minor legend among local writers and raconteurs of old Cleveland. He's not known for--how shall we put this?--being the most exhaustive reporter, researcher or fact-checker. But he is a mean storyteller, with an Irish blarney kind of flair for dramatic tales well-told. One small but important correction: contrary to his assertion, the Plain Dealer has indeed won a Pulitzer. It just happens to have been for something less easily remembered (an editorial cartoon) and before most of us were born: 1953. Which prompts another thought: how could Working With Words have been so remiss as to have overlooked the chance to note this half-century anniversary last year? Mea culpa...

Blogs/Bloggers We Like III. In past weeks, we've touched our scepter upon the heads of Hotel Bruce's Marc and Jim Kukral, dubbing them the Chosen Ones (of the non-hoops variety, at least). Round three goes to a guy I've never met, but whom I'm increasingly enjoying as a reader. A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a self-described "post-Zapruder film" George Carlin-memorizing trombone player who now lives in Cleveland, by the name of Jerry. He's almost single-handedly threatening to subvert our lazy generalizations about geeks not being literate and well-rounded. We love him for his wide interests and seeming inability to write a dull sentence, for his deft sense of humor and light touch with the pen--or at least keyboard. And we especially enjoy the fresh, unexpected ways in which he invariably puts things. An example? Try this one on, for instance. While a lot of pundits have complained about conservatives' opposition to gay marriage/civil unions, he finds a far more forceful, persuasive argument that they're wrong. To wit: "My old-school, heterosexual marriage doesn't seem to be collapsing due to gays getting married so far. Go figure. Other things not affecting it include last night's Jay Leno monologue, the migration of crabs in the Pacific Ocean, poorly maintained turnstiles in the New York City subway system, Paris Hilton's reading list, Liza Minneli's dating pool, and the Counter-Reformation."

If that's not enough to get your heart racing just a bit, try this stirring post from last September 12th, a poetic explanation for why this Canuck came to and remains in Cleveland. With writing like that, we think Jerry-mania is alive and well, and building momentum all the time...

Catch-Up Day

So much to mention, and so little time...Still, I'll make an attempt to catch up on a few small things.

Mr. Viral. Our boy Jimmy Kukral, about whom I expounded the other day, may or may not be virile (only his wife and hairdresser know for sure), but he's certainly been increasingly viral of late. Last week, the nationally influential blogger Doc Searls briefly took note of his new e-book on blogging, which has prompted several other similarly influential bloggers (including the incomparable e-journalism guru JD Lasica) to also pick up on it. The momentum is slowly building. And closer to home, the PD's Chris Seper (who holds much of the thin reed upon which we put our trust in the PD beginning to get online religion) mentioned him in today's print column as well. The ball rolls on...

February Dad's Column Online. Click here to read.

Somebody Please Put a (Figurative) Stake in Nader's Heart. I heard old lefty grouch with a Jesus complex, a.k.a. Ralph Nader, babbling on NPR recently, defiant as always. As always, he's currently embarked on a Hillary-like "listening campaign," deciding if he's being called to one more run for the White House. Now let me stop for a moment here: Like, one would hope, most progressives, I feel nothing but deep respect for Ralph's decades of fearless work in essentially inventing the American consumer movement. When GM meatheads decided to sic their goons on him to ward off his verbal onslaught against unsafe cars, he became an instant living symbol for the cause. HOWEVER: by his continuing insistence that his personal liberty not only permits but almost insists that he should split the left't presidential vote by running himself, he's become a symbol of something else in his last years: obstinate obstructionism. Ralph was meant for Europe, where multiparty systems rule. Here, for better or worse, we have a two-party system, and third-party insurgencies such as his inevitably get absorbed by the major parties. And sometimes, as in the case with Nader in 2000, they help install lying, duplicitous, ignorant people in control of our government. So it's time to think about your place in history, Ralph. Just do the right thing...

Bush Meets the Press. The NBC/Beltway Insiders buzz network cranked on full bore over the weekend, puffing up the Prez's one-hour date with vaunted Tim Russert as if it were a sit-down with JFK or Martin Luther King come back to life. Mostly, it was ho-hum, with Russert doing his usual schtick: a slick form of faux toughness with those who actually hold power, as opposed to a real toughness-bordering-on-savagery with those who don't, or don't yet (such as Howard Dean). Okay, he did ask some tougher questions than Bush is likely to get in many formats, no question about that. But he also let the Great Prevaricator drone on in appalingly evasive ways after Bush numerous times insisted "let me finish," only to finish with laughably bald-faced lies. And Russert rarely followed up by pointing out that what Bush just said was demonstrably false. The worst example (of many): he let stand an outrageous lie that Bush made about how all of the records related to his military "service" in the reserves during Vietnam were opened during the last campaign in 2000. That's just flatly false. We'll see if the press pack now follows up for the Buffalo Choir Boy By Way of JCU and Cleveland Marshall Law School and gets those records pried open, three years after they should have been in the first place. But like most progressives, I've always known (and written) that Bush is an empty suit. Far more telling were post-interview doubts from two Monday-morning quarterbacks who are ordinarily Bush shills, Andrew Sullivan and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Noonan weighed in almost immediately with a Sunday piece on the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, admitting that "I am one of those who feel that his performance was not impressive," and calling him "almost bumbling." Surprise, surprise, Peggy. As for Sullivan, after arguing in his obligatory see-no-evil-of-the-right-wing fashion that his hero GWB didn't hurt himself in the interview when it came to Iraq, Sullivan writes that Bush seemed "scarily out of touch" when it came to matters of the nation's fiscal health. I'd say that Sullivan is himself scarily out of touch if he only learned that about Bush this weekend.

FCC Chairman Powell Is Not a Breast Man. FCC Chair Michael Powell, trying desperately to reclaim some shard of his reputation, is now on record about something so obscene that even he has to object: televised nudity during a Super Bowl. Only a boob would argue with that, but he'd have earned a tad more of my respect if he could have also summoned some outrage over attempts by a handful of giant companies to turn the American television landscape into a domestic version of the Arab Oil cartel (it's already bad enough--check this media consolidation tool). Instead, he tried his best to grease the skids for further consolidation, at least until an unprecedented citizen outpouring against that scheme finally convinced Congress to act.

But it's probably too late to save a now thoroughly corrupted medium: TV is indeed the vast wasteland that Powell's predecessor Newton Minnow called it a generation ago, and much worse than he could have ever imagined at that time (the early '60s, now a relative golden era). And the FCC, while certainly part of the problem, has plenty of company in the defendants' pen. As the crowded media landscape makes it ever harder for any one person or company to gain attention, TV (aided by the deregulatory FCC) is increasingly a full partner in the spiraling outrageous stunt arms race. If you doubt that, check out this eye-opening piece in Ad Age). "She opened the door for more people to take risks," says one particularly soulless, shameless New York p.r. guy. But I have just one question for Mr. Powell, whose constant refrain in the past when he was met with outcry over crap TV was a plaintive "why can't they just shut it off?" The answer: crap TV is just one part of the larger crap culture that's increasingly engulfing us, and there's no way to turn it all off. Instead, we have to try to change it...

Wow

It took a few days to come back down to earth after that phenomenal blogger ball last Thursday evening at Flannery's. More than 80 writers, bloggers, techies "and random smart people" as one blogger brilliantly put it, showed up to investigate all the noise and/or commune with like-minded folks. Here's what we know for sure:
--Eric Olsen is fast becoming a folk hero for his manic, jazz-like riff, a briliant piece of performance art that electrified anyone who witnessed it. Had it had been taped, it would have had a months-long afterlife bouncing around the web like that infamous minute-long clip of Steve Ballmer madly exhorting fellow Microsofties to eat their young at a company sales event (briefly earning him the nickname Monkey Man). Only Olsen's Ode was perhaps even more calculated--I think he wanted to wake up what was becoming perhaps a too-earnest evening with a visible, palpable reminder of what the energy of the web and blogging--and the writing life--is all about, or at least should be. And like every good writer, he simply ignored, hell, he obliterated, the silly boundaries that had been put before him and got to the heart of the matter at hand. Forget trying to do this in 5-7 minutes, he figured, I'm just going to get up here and give them the 12-gauge shotgun and see what happens. And what happened was magic.

--Jim Kukral gets rookie of the year, for his reconstituted blog. But actually, that's cheating, cause the guy is as experienced as they come, and he'll be welcomed back to the scene, embraced by his peers for his dashing, slashing style and his dead-on observations. We're especially awaiting his observations about business blogging, which is where this is all heading, especially for those of us who subscribe to the principal that our only goal in life is to make it unclear about whether we're working or playing.

--The legend of G will continue to grow, as well as his role as network hub, fed by his manic caffeinated work ethic (he does have a fulltime job, allegedly) and ease of networking with geek and non-geek alike.
--Like a good performer who leaves the stage too soon rather than too late, Don coquetishly (and humbly) raised his skirt just enough to leave us all hungering for more insight on his thinking and his approach. We'll need a night with him alone in order to pull it all out of him.
--Schumann's Toastmaster training was on display, with the clunky opening joke and all. But that only served to endear him all the more to an audience that's long-overdue to hear from him.
--Jim Miller took the unprecedented but welcomed step for an old leftie organizer: he actually did some marketing, preparing a one-sheet backgrounder on his listserv, What's Up in Northeast Ohio.
Here's some WSC (woulda, shoulda, coulda) regrets, the kind one gets as they replay an event tape, and begin thinking about the things that were missed (though there'll be plenty more chances to make it up):
--How could we have overlooked shining the spotlight on the national-class eminence among us, Kenn Louis?
--Or on the ever-quotable Jack R., two of whose books, on collaborative creativity and accidental conversations, serve as something of a theoretical underpinning for the movement in these parts (remember how the old Communist parties had a minister of theory)?

Still, these are relatively minor quibbles, all things considered. Thursday night's real enduring contribution is at least two-fold: it brought together smart, curious people from different industries (that ordinarily don't much talk to each other) into a new kind of network community. Chris Thompson, in attendance that night, may well have been thinking about this when he wrote (or at least posted) the next morning about how Cleveland's various business networks "are comparable to proprietary computer networks with no ability to communicate with other networks...We can complain until the end of time about the closed, conservative nature of Cleveland's business community. Or we can work to reshape and revolutionize it." And as Don Iannone wrote in his stunning new Conscious Living blog, the event helped all of us "to see more clearly the complex web of people in the Cleveland area who search for connectivity with themselves and others."

After last week, I feel hyperconnected just now. How about you?