Happy New Year 2007

"For without belittling the courage with men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men...have lived...A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.

- John F. Kennedy "Profiles in Courage"

HealthCare 2.0

Bumped into Sermo the other day. Sermo is currently only for Doctor's, but seems like it is the beginning of what might become an onslaught of social networking healthcare sites. They say:

"Why consult with one colleague when you can consult with thousands instantly?"

and offer functionality such as reviews on prescription meds as well as voting systems.

And their consumer side is coming soon. It should be interesting to watch healthcare get into the game and see if the network collective intelligence is something that ends up being a positive thing for average people trying to get a handle on the already confusing world of treatment.

I have a bunch of Doctor’s in the family, I am going to see if they can get into it (being from Canada and all) and give me more of a poop.

Hottest Blogger Dudes of 2006

For those of you who haven't seen it, there have been some recent blog posting about the most beautiful women bloggers. The first by Amit and then a second by gizmodo (note the comment from Amit at being first…gizmodo, you big copy-blogger!)

So I thought I would do my list of hottest blogger dudes of 2006.

Malcolm Gladwell: Well the picture is a bit disappointing as he doesn't show enough skin, but common - the hair, the intellectual air! He's a hottie.



Rick Mercer: We all know that women find humour absolutely irresistable and therefore who could leave Rick Mercer off our list. The John Stewart of Canada with a bit of height,this Newfoundlander makes the grade. Love the picture of him in army gear...yummy!



Mathew Ingram: Who says that nice guys finish last? Mathew, a father of four, a tech writer and all around nice guy. Had to make the list. (hehe, i can feel him blushing as we speak)



And finally, George Cloony: Well, Ok, he wasn't REALLY a blogger, but his little flog non-posting to the Huffington Post was all the rage for at least a week. Funny George. Funny playful, sarcastic, joke around with your best pal Brad by placing really expensive Ads about each other in the local LA papears, and why not? Your George. Come back to the Blogosphere George, but this time for real. We need you.



Now I think I'll email Kate as she has been blogging for way longer than me and might have some hotties to add that I missed...

Kate's Picks:

Ken Schafer .. founder of One Degree and VP Marketing at Tucows.


Sulemaan Ahmed ... digital marketer extrordinaire for SearsTravel and blogger at the CMA's blog.

Michael Seaton ... Director, Digital Marketing for Scotiabank. He blogs at The Client Side.

The Long Tail of Customer Service: The Niche Market of One Pissed Off Customer

Xmas time always reminds me of what ends up being the best and worst about customer service.

Years ago I ended up in a "discussion" with customer service over @ Amazon when I downloaded one of their ebooks and I couldn't get it to work (and that was even after downloading Microsoft Reader!). I needed the book for a 'work on the weekend thing' and ended up having to buy it at the local bookstore. To make a really long story short, net net, Amazon refused to give me my money back even after I wrote Jeff Bezos and email (a business hero of mine). I was even sent to a seemingly more important customer service person, and was still told that it was their policy that if the book was downloaded according to their computer system, it was mine regardless of the fact that I couldn't get it to work.

Well, I did the only thing I could do. Emailed my network of friends asking them to send a note to Jeff to "give Leigh Himel her $10.00 back or we will never shop at Amazon again". At around email 12 I think it was, I got a lovely note from the customer service lady saying that they had reconsidered and while were not changing their policy, they were going to make an exception just for little ol' me, gave me my $10 bucks and a coupon for another $10 bucks which i have never used (While still admiring Jeff and Amazon, I now shop for books at Powells)

Now I can't imagine how much it must have cost from an OPs perspective to answer all my friends individually (which they did) but I can bet you it was FAR and AWAY more than the cost would have been to credit my card the $10 bucks immediately. But more importantly, one pissed off customer can do a lot more in the networked world than we ever could before.

So that’s why I say, probably one of the most ignored niche markets, the pissed off customer. Make that long tail happy and watch it wag it's way all the way to your bank account. If you choose to ignore it, do so at your own (and their networks) peril.

New Product Idea of the Day

I look forward to anyone who might know of something that can do this:

1. A bookmark saver tool that on one click will let me save all my open tab windows in firefox but only for a specified period of time - say 2 days. I always end up with all these windows open with these great articles i want to read, but then something comes up and I have to go. Leaving them all opened is annoying - bookmarking them when i only want to read rather than save is annoying....I need more an in the moment and then self-destruct kind of bookmarking tool.

The Texture of Memory

The Texture of Memory by James Young is an amazing book. While it primarily focuses on holocaust memorials, the book is filled with brilliance about memories, history and our perception of events in the past from multiple perspectives. As one reviewer put it:

"...the author reminds us, [that Memory] is never neutral or value-free. We do not have instant recall--direct access to the facts as they were. Thus it is not just the future that brings change: the past, too, is always being altered, caught between an originating event and the impossibility of ever recapturing it."

And yet now we have these networks of intertwined memories. How will this change our ability to have a collective interpretation or claim some form of objectivity in the future looking back on our past? Do we now, as we might assume, have direct access to the facts, or is it the opposite with our ability to manipulate the facts that much greater in this networked world?

We appear to trust the network and trust the memory of the network almost more than our own individual memories and that is likely to grow as more and more of us document bits and pieces of ourselves over our lifetimes online.

In a larger context, it means that events begin to be interpreted by the network and it becomes not just something said by one person but by a 1000 or a million and soon it becomes our memory whether it be necessarily so or not.

It will be interesting to watch what the longer term affects that this age of user generated content (or whatever your buzz word you choose to describe it) might have on history and our later historical interpretations of our collective memories.

Fresh Blood: oponia opens a Califonia office (well sorta)

I still haven't recovered my brain quite from the night before, but things are slowly getting back to normal. Since it is almost the new year, I thought I would welcome our new man on campus, Mark Petrovic to oponia. He will be the managing director of our California office (otherwise known as his house) and working hand in hand with Vanessa on the tech side of things. (We now have a Phd in physics to go along with our nuclear engineer...hum.....)

Mark is a total gentleman, informing V and I he likes to send a polite IM good morning in the am not to bother anyone, but to make sure we all stay connected. We all hope oponia goes well, so that we not only get to continue to work together all the time, but as well, we might even get to meet one day. Until then, we will continue to have Mark represented at our events through his likeness that Vanessa printed out and glued onto a piece of cardboard.

To find out more about Mark, go to OReilly here or his blog here