Restaurant review: Deuce (North Vancouver)

Ianiv and Arieanna took me for dinner to this new place on Lonsdale Avenue (near 16th St) that they had been to before (they mentioned that the restaurant was sourcing only local ingredients, really good food). If you’ve never been to Lonsdale Avenue, it is a really bright, well-lit corridor that goes from South to North in the North Vancouver area. I love Lonsdale, and it’s always a great place to find restaurants, walk along (and do exercise!) Deuce is a really well decorated restaurant, and as Arieanna mentioned, it is an upscale dining place in the North Shore (something kind of uncommon, at least for me – remember, I’m an East Vancouver boy). The best part of it – we had the whole room for ourselves. The music wasn’t overpowering and it felt cozy despite the relative large size of the restaurant. Tables are very well distributed (they have four areas, including a patio, a lounge, a dining room and a bar at the centre of the house).

We ordered a shared plate of Rocket Bottles ($ 10), one of their Shared Plates, and each one of us ordered a Solo Plate (smaller than an average entree but definitely larger than tapas). The whole concept of Deuce is sharing food items, although I wouldn’t say that you can’t go without sharing – the portion size of the Solo Plate is large enough to satisfy one person. We all had each a Solo Plate and we left definitely full (and we didn’t even have drinks!).

I ordered a Deuce Salad (candied pecans, cherry tomatoes, sundried cranberries, Qualicum Sunshine feta, mixed greens, pomegranate avocado vinaigrette) but I wasn’t sure that my order would be enough to fill me, so I chose to add chicken to my salad. I can say that the flavors were excellent and I was quite pleased with it. And of course, I was definitely full by the end of it. Arieanna ordered the Cheeks and Chips (beer battered halibut cheeks, hand cut fries, smoked paprika tartar sauce) and Ianiv ordered a Serious Mac and Cheese (fontina & farmhouse cheddar, pancetta, oyster mushrooms, panko & truffle oil). Given that the portions were more generous than we expected (and here’s a tip to Deuce – don’t change the size! It was unexpectedly larger, which was a very pleasant surprise).

We wished we could have done dessert but we couldn’t really eat much more. Apparently, Deuce has brunch, and just browsing through the menu I was very pleasantly surprised. I am thinking I’m going to organize a North Shorte brunch tweetup here. From the prices I see on the brunch menu, they are on the higher (pricier) side of breakfast (items near $ 10) but if their brunch is anything like their dinner, I’m definitely sold for a high quality breakfast. I was telling Ianiv and Arieanna that they were my lucky try-out dinner companions. Every single time I have tried a new restaurant with them, I’ve had a wonderful experience. The food has been great, the company has been spectacular. And the funny thing is, almost every time we go out for dinner, we try new restaurants. I don’t think I’ve been with Ianiv and Arieanna to a restaurant I had previously tried . My kudos go to Deuce for having great food and service. I look forward to having brunch with friends sometime soon at Deuce. And many thanks to Ianiv and Arieanna for taking me here!

Happy birthday, Gus!

I met Gus about a year ago at a Third Tuesday event, my very first one as a matter of fact. Frankly, at the time I didn’t know we were going to become such good friends. I think you never know the gems that come to your life until you spend some time with them.

Gus and Russ have managed to make me feel part of their family, and both of them (and obviously especially Gus who is the birthday boy) have an amazing array of qualities. Not the least, an appreciation for good food, great friendships and, strangely enough, we like the same kinds of colognes 🙂

Wishing you all the best todays and always Gus, much love, many hugs and have a wonderful beginning of your 20sr, because as you know, 40 is the new 20 🙂

TweetDeck’s flaws – The “You’re now following So-and-So” issue

So, let me tell you a flaw that TweetDeck has (yes, I know that I’ve even given a seminar about TweetDeck and sung its praises). There are two big, major flaws (are you listening out there?)

1) When you add someone to any group, TweetDeck tells you “You are now following So-and-So”. Haven’t tested if they actually get the stupid DM or email “Raul is now following you on Twitter” but if that’s the case, my friends whom already I’m following are going to think “huh? wasn’t he following me before?” – I know – drama.

2) TweetDeck has NO way of recovering closed groups. I accidentally closed my “Focus” group and it’s going to take me hours to rebuild it. Why? Well, because I follow 400 people and I need to distribute those amongst the groups that I have. But I don’t have the kind of patience to add meticulously every person to each group I have assigned. So, now I have to add them on the fly when I see their tweets. And TweetDeck gives me the “you’re now following…” message. Which is stupid and annoying.

Someone needs to fix TweetDeck. And Twitter for all I care.

Happy birthday Pat Zaph

Today is my friend Pat Zaph‘s birthday. I met Pat through both our blogs, and he has been recently a savior when it comes down to taking photos (he’s a really good photographer, whereas me, well, I’m not all that amazing as a photographer!).

Pat is a very smart dude, and we share a common interest in public policy (and blogging, and good food, and great friends). For a number of great reasons, happy birthday my friend. No, I didn’t forget. I was at Women in Film Festival New Media Day!

Women in Film Festival ’09 – New Media Day – Monetize Your Content Panel

Bradley Shende (M2O)
Maura Rodgers (Strutta)
Rochelle Grayson (WorkAtPlay)
Amielle Lake (Tagga/Invoke)

As usual, please press “Watch Now” to watch the liveblog live. You can insert your comments directly on the liveblog window (Cover It Live). All Twitter streams tagged with #wiff09 will also be incorporated

Women in Film Festival ’09 – Bridging Media Day – Social Media How To Panel

My friends Carol Sill, Monica Hamburg, Gillian Shaw and Erica Hargreave are in the Social Media How To Panel – I am also very happy to see my friend Leah Nelson (Giant Ant Media) here volunteering as part of WIFF’09. I think she’s a star, and it’s great that she is here because she is a content producer, videographer and she is very knowledgeable with the technology, so she can maneuvre between screens quite easily.

To read the liveblog live, just press “Watch Now” in the window that CoverItLive shows. After the liveblog is over, I will download the content locally (as HTML) and you can embed it in your own sites, darlings (trackback and attribution of course, very much appreciated). The liveblog is incorporating the Twitter feeds tagged with “wiff09”.

Women in Film Festival – New Media Day – Panel # 1 – Getting Your Feet Wired

Bridget O’Neill
Dennis Chenard
Catherine Warren
Daniella Sorrentino
Moderator/Panelist: Danika Dinsmore

Improvements to my site to increase the bi-directionality and conversation

I have previously indicated on my blog that I’m primarily interested in keeping the conversation up and engaging with people. My personal behaviours (engaging with people who follow me on Twitter and with whom I’ve met at tech events) are also indicative of this pattern. However, I had been remiss for the past few months to implement a few changes that would make interaction much easier.

While many excellent bloggers take a substantial amount of time to customize their sites with relative frequency, I am going to admit that I am, for the most part, somewhat reluctant to go into the techie parts of my site. Uploading plugins, activating them, customizing them, changing the theme, personalizing the site, etc. I know that all of these are things we need to do in order to facilitate and maintain good interaction between me as the blog writer and my readers, and amongst the people who read my blog.

The past couple of days, I decided to do some upgrading, and I’ve enhanced the blog with a couple of plugins. First, now all my comments are CommentLuv-enabled. This means that every time you drop a comment on my blog, this WordPress plugin will try and parse your latest post for display. How is this relevant? Well, it gives you as a commentator exposure as the title and link of your most recent blog entry will show directly underneath your comment (therefore creating link-love).

Second, I have enabled a handy contact form so that you don’t have to use your email client to send me a message. The contact form is in my About Me page. Third, I enabled “Subscribe to Comments” which will allow you as the reader to track the conversation that is occurring on the comments section. Finally, I have managed to install a stats package (not that I care that much about stats per se, but they do give me some sense of what people are reading).

Feel free to drop a comment (I am particularly testing these two plugins) on the blog post, and I hope it is useful for you as a reader!

Virtual water: Should drinking coffee make you feel guilty?

While admittedly my research strength is on wastewater governance, I am well versed on the water scarcity literature. One of the concepts that has gained notoriety in the social science literature is the idea of virtual water. From the World Water Council’s website:

Virtual water is the amount of water that is embedded in food or other products needed for its production. For example, to produce one kilogram of wheat we need about 1,000 litres of water, i.e. the virtual water of this kilogram of wheat is 1,000 litres. For meat, we need about five to ten times more.[World Water Council]

Darren recently wrote about Salt Spring Island Coffee and how much guilt they put into their coffee cup paper sleeves with the phrase “the cup of coffee you’re consuming travelled 20,000 miles to get to you” (I’m paraphrasing). In my comment to Darren, I indicated that this kind of guilt was nothing. I would like to share with you just how much water was consumed in producing that one cup of coffee you can’t give up: 140 litres, according to the latest calculation of the World Water Council. Yes, you heard right. 140 litres of water go into producing each cup of coffee.

People who are unaware of the negative environmental impact of excess water consumption argue that, after all, it’s *just* a cup of coffee and that we have enough water in the world. My question to them is – How much of the world’s water is available for human consumption? Yeah, I told you about that a few months ago, remember? 0.38% – not nearly enough to sustain our current consumptive patterns.

I’ll be the first to admit (disclosure time) that I do enjoy a cup of coffee, particularly when it comes to meetings with colleagues, friends, clients or the like. But I always feel guilty about it, and I try to find ways to diminish my water consumption, all the time. Moreover, a vast majority of my research work is on wastewater recycling and water conservation. Furthermore, I work hard at educating the public about the current state of the world in regards to water scarcity and the need to recycle and reuse wastewater.

The concept of virtual water isn’t new, but it is a powerful tool that helps us understand how negative our consumption patterns are. I just hope that the great work that water-focused researchers (myself included) are doing to highlight the negative consequences of our day-to-day activities and over-consumptive patterns can resonate with the public. Please remember that water is VERY, very scarce, before flushing your toilet, before purchasing bottled water, before taking long showers. Thank you.

Launch Party Vancouver 6: Yet another resounding success!

Well, another set of startups to launch, another fantastic Launch Party Vancouver. Last Thursday, February 26th, 2009, I had the pleasure of attending the superbly organized LPV6 (thanks a million to Danny Robinson and Maura Rodgers for amazing organizational and warm-welcoming skills, and the rest of the crew at Strutta for making me feel so welcome – Jordan, Mike, Steve, Ross – you guys rock).

Launch Party Vancouver is much more than just a showcase of the amazing Vancouver-based tech startups. It’s a tradition and an event that demonstrates that we geeks are social beings who love to have a good time, and we certainly know how to show that we *know* how to have a great time 🙂 Good times indeed.

I’d also like to commend Danny and Maura – I know that they had to field some criticisms regarding how quickly the registration closed, and stuff like that. The event is free, folks (with the exception of a few tickets that were sold at a ridiculously inexpensive price $ 5.00). Not even your first beer is that cheap. I know how hard it is to organize an event of this magnitude (and I am already embarked on yet another event organizational process, with Mental Health Camp).

I have a huge appreciation for what LPV6 is, and quite honestly, I had a fantastic time, and I know that lots of other folks in the Vancouver tech community did as well. After closing down the Landing we ended up at the BootUp Labs/Strutta/AdHack quarters where we played Rock Band (Jules, Jules, Jules – you are SUCH a glorious and fantastic partner-in-crime – Greg and Steve, Rock Band FTW!). Boris, as always, great advice and thank you my friend.

I also launched my Crowd profile, so feel free to friend me there (and also, if you think I should add some stuff to my profile, feel free to provide input). You can read more on the startups that were launched here (LPV site) and Rebecca’s post on the topic here (Miss604)

Women in Film Festival – Digital Media Day warning – I’ll be VERY noisy :)

Dear all, just a quick heads up – I’m one of several Media Sponsors for Women in Film Festival – Digital Media Day (which happens tomorrow), so you’ll see A LOT of tweets from me related to the event (hashtag #wiff09). You’ve been warned 🙂 I would prefer if you didn’t unfollow me, but I won’t take offence since I know that for many people, that pretty much amounts to having full screens with my tweets. Cheers and thanks.

Blogging couples: How do they deal with their online identities?

At Northern Voice 2009 I attended and liveblogged parts of the panel moderated by Julie Szabo (with Darren Barefoot in attendance) and featuring Derek and Airdrie Miller, and Rosemary Rowe and Kate Trgovac. Both couples are friends of mine, as are Julie and Darren, so I figured it was a good idea to attend (despite my singlehood!).

It was interesting to see the conversations that arose within the panel. Issues that were raised included what can be blogged about and what can’t, the issue of readership, etc. One thing that wasn’t touched upon (because all three of the couples speaking DO have blogs) was the question of what happens when one partner blogs and the other doesn’t?

I am very curious to hear about those people who have partners who don’t blog, and how their partners perceive the relationship. I am particularly interested in issues of publicness, openness, etc. What photos can be posted, which photos can’t, etc.

The anthropology of poverty in the Downtown East Side

In recent weeks, I have had several opportunities to have lunch with a few friends (including Nancy Zimmerman, Lorraine Murphy and J. Karen Parker) at various eateries in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver. If you are not a frequent reader of my blog, you may not know that I have a really hard time walking through the DTES. It’s not that I am afraid or anything. It hurts my soul, to be a witness to the pain and suffering, the poverty. I mentioned how I feel in more detail in this post. The good thing, though, is that having had the chance to eat at places like The Ovaltine, Save on Meats and The Only has given me (at least in part) a new perspective on the DTES.

While waiting for Nancy for lunch at Save on Meats, I spent about half an hour waiting right in front of the meat store near Carrall and East Hastings. Not being used to witnessing the day-to-day struggles of people who live in the DTES area, some of which who traverse through a life of drug addiction, sexual abuse, poverty and homelessness, I stood there, leaning against a street light pole, observing the movement around me. While trying to concentrate on not feeling pain, I couldn’t help but reflect on how hard it must be for researchers (particularly anthropologists/ethnographers) to engage in field research in the DTES community. To seriously conduct ethnographies, one needs to immerse oneself in the subject matter to a degree where an in-depth understanding of the issues can be gained.

My time as an observer of the activities that were taking place was brief, at moments overpowering, raw but more than anything, insightful. I was able to recognize my own limitations in regards to the subject matters I feel capable and comfortable of studying. I doubt I will ever feel a competent ethnographer of poverty and homelessness issues, simply because my soul is too sensitive to the pain and suffering of the people who would be my research subjects. I am passionate about alleviating poverty and tackling issues of homelessness, but I think the best use of my research capabilities will be in the public policy realm, not in the field.

One related concept that made me sit down and reflect was the portrayal of poverty in the DTES in the media. I wondered how much of the negative perception of the current state of the DTES is due to the way in which the situation of this Vancouver derelict region is portrayed in the news. I have friends who live in the area who are not only overcoming their challenges but rising, growing, and evolving. Much discussion has been had in the Wikipedia page on the DTES, but I don’t find any conclusive results. So I turned to Google Scholar and found this MA thesis in Communication (SFU) by Kate Rafter, where she finds that the representation of Canadian news outlets of the poverty reinforces beliefs of the paradigm of Structural Responsibility (where socio-economic structures are considered responsible for the creation/maintenance of poverty)

I wonder what the representation of poverty and homelessness in new media is right now, and whether anyone has undertaken an academic study of how poverty is depicted in social media, blogs, etc. Given that analytical tools such as rhetoric and discourse analysis have been applied to traditional media outlets’ portrayal of poverty, I wonder if we could do some content analysis or discourse analysis (anyone need a Masters’, or PhD thesis topic?). I am also curious to know if anybody has read more on the anthropology of poverty. If so, please share.

The Skittles social-media-ification experiment

I knew about the Skittles website redesign and social media campaign through Joe Solomon, who alerted me on Saturday about it. Quite frankly, I didn’t think much about it. I *love* consuming Skittles (they remind me of good times during my Masters’ degree) and simply thought “oh what a cool idea”. That was the end of that.

Today (Monday) I woke up to some blog posts and tweets not liking what the PR people in Skittles did (try to make the site more social-media-like by including a Twitter search when clicking on ‘Chatter’, Flickr for photos, etc.). I am not in the PR business, but I always praise organizations that jump on the social media bandwagon for at least trying. That’s what I tweeted earlier – that I didn’t understand the backlash about the Skittles social media campaign. Even Ian Capstick (whose ideas I like quite a lot) didn’t like the site (as indicated on his blog).

For the naysayers, I’d like to say – how about phrasing your writing in such a way that when the Skittles social media monitors and finds them, they can learn about what they did wrong? Admittedly, as Ian indicates, the Skittles insertion of a Summize search stream doesn’t add much value. I agree. Conversation and bi-directional interaction are key, I’ve said so before. I am not sure the PR team for Skittles has trained enough in social media to understand this. But I’m guessing (and this is just a guess) they are getting there.

For the time being, as Steve Jagger indicated, people are talking about them, and as Shane Gibson mentioned, the early adopters may be trying to dictate rules as to how social media should be done. If that’s the case, then the social media gurus should be providing advice to Skittles RIGHT NOW on what needs to be changed. The truth is, they are achieving things that I’m sure they were trying to achieve (get people to talk about them). Below are two graphs that show the TwitScoop searches for Skittles: As you can see, lots of attention in the last three days.

I don’t foresee the same backlash with Skittles than Motrin had a few months ago, so let’s see where this goes. On my part, I’m quite interested in monitoring what comes out of this.

Painting on a personal piece of canvas

Rarely have I ever felt that people have criticized my blog (with the exception of one commenter who complained about one very specific element of my blog). The main (if very rare) criticism I have ever received has been that my blog has lost a lot of the personal commentary it used to have. Many of my civilian friends (I call civilians those friends of mine who don’t blog) who have happened to read my blog have mentioned that it’s really funny how my blog has become more ‘techie’ or even commercialized (this last one made me chuckle).

I’ve had conversations about the topic with several friends of mine who write blogs that fall more under the category of a diary (the category is usually referred to as ‘diarist bloggers’). I could name a few but I don’t want to leave anyone excluded. In a recent conversation I mentioned that I see my blog as my very own personal canvas. I paint on it whatever picture I want to. Obviously, with the number of events I attend, the kinds of things that get me excited, the environmental and social media issues I want to discuss and think about, my blog presents a rather broad mosaic of things.

I’m sorry if people don’t like this broad array of elements that I try to highlight in my blog, but after all, it is MY personal space. My blog does for me what notebooks do for the rest of the world – it allows me to jot down ideas, reflect, think and produce content that satisfies quite obviously the readers who decide to read my blog, but more importantly, satisfies ME. I don’t write this blog for the fame, the glory, the free tickets to events or the social interactions. I write for myself.

Great brunch, friends’ birthdays and farewells and a bankruptcy

I had the pleasure of attending the farewell for my good friend Phaedra last night, a brunch with Julie Wright, Gus and Russ and I know today is my good friends’ AF and Karen Parker’s birthdays. I just came home to find that I have a gazillion emails to respond, lots of Twitter @ replies and messages, RSS feeds unread and blog posts that I want to write but I don’t have the energy to do so.

Therefore, I hereby declare blogging, Twitter, email and RSS bankruptcy. I’ll get to it when I get to it. If we have something urgent to talk about, I’ll be monitoring my email for those messages, and I’ll still have some content for upcoming events that are rather important.

But other than critical stuff, like Women in Film Festival on Wednesday, I’ll be pretty much MIA. So, please don’t expect a timely response from me unless we’re working on a joint project. I know you all understand because at one point or another, you’ve been there.

Have a wonderful rest of the weekend!

Happy birthday, Karen Parker!

My good friend Karen Parker‘s birthday is today, March 1st, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish her “Happy Birthday”. It’s been a pleasure to get to know Karen, and she’s not only responsible for the very pretty customization of my blog (she implemented the vast majority of the elements on the theme, and took me away from WP.com slavery).

Karen and I have had a chance to hang out this past year and she’s helped me in more ways than you can imagine. She’s been a trusted advisor, a great friend and definitely, a fantastic point of reference and source of information regarding all things tech.

I hope you have a wonderful day today with Dan, Karen and I look forward to a celebration sometime soon! All the best today and always!

Love Shack in 2009 by The B-52’s

Best. Song. Ever. This song can lift my spirits in so many ways, I thought I’d share with you all. I wanted to make sure to find a link to a video of a 2009 performance to demonstrate that, no matter how much time they have been in the business and how old they get, The B-52’s still rock!

My WP theme doesn’t allow me to do lists :(

Darn. I just discovered that my theme doesn’t allow me to create ordered or non-ordered lists (even though I write the code right, the UL and li for the unordered list and the items. This theme is a variant on Deviant Art. Any ideas as to why this is happening? It is VERY frustrating, I might add.

• This is an item
• This is the next item

Measuring influence Part I: Social media

A few months ago I thought of starting a series of blog posts about influence because it is a topic on which I have conducted empirical research, primarily in the field of environmental policy. I have studied how environmental social movements and non-governmental organizations use various strategies to influence governments at all scales. I think you can translate a lot of what I have done to the social media world. This post is, by no means, fully formulated as a research paper or a journal article would be, so I expect to use this post (and any commentary I get from readers) to actually formulate something more refined and analytical. Feel free to criticize and challenge (or complement) my ideas.

The concept of influence in social media has gained relevance lately, particularly as marketing budgets and profit margins shrink. Social media has been touted as one of various strategies to successfully engage with potential customers and consumers. Since undertaking social media strategies wasn’t my day job (it isn’t yet, but I’m doing more applied work now), I didn’t pay a lot of attention to whether I was being influential in social media or being seen as “an influencer“. I will completely disclose that I am human, and sometimes I play along with the popularity contests along the lines of “measure your Twinfluence” or “you’re in the Vancouver Twitter Elite“. Heck, I sometimes even worry about how long I’m going to be able to hold on to my #1 ranking on UrbanSpoon. Ok, end of disclosures. My point is, I don’t claim to be a social media expert nor an influencer.

My perception is (and I could be proven wrong, but this is what my intuition tells me) that influence in social media is a very complex concept and there are very few reliable, quantitative metrics to measure it. As someone who has been trained to have a researcher mind, I find this complexity rather fascinating, but awfully disturbing. Given how much praise has been given to transparency in social media, and how important it is to be fully open and disclose everything in this realm, it comes to me as a bit of a surprise that methodologies to rank individual’s influence (be it on Twitter, on Facebook, across the country, etc.) are quite subjective.

I recently came across the website of Web Analytics Demystified and their analysis of Twitter Influence. When I first saw the site (hat tips to one of my followers who tweeted about my position on the rankings – at the time he informed me, around 4.30pm, I was ranked # 88 and only one of three Vancouverites on the top 100). By the time 1.45 am of the next day came, I was already # 91. My estimation is that this tool to calculate Twitter Influence will be rather influenced (pardon the cacophony) by individual followers and the early adoption of the tool to calculate your favorite social media degree of influence. That is – the more people use it and calculate their own Twitter Influence, the more the results will change. Now, will those additions affect the end result? Maybe. It could very well happen that, as more people know about the WAD TwitCal tool, more people will follow those who are in the top 10, 50 or 100 Twitter influencers in the world.

When I saw the results and came to the conclusion that WAD did a quantitative analysis of a variety of elements to calculate a particular score, quite frankly was somewhat taken aback. I highly doubt that it is possible for me to compare myself in degree of influence to people who actually DO social media for a living.

As a way of an example, several of my friends were nominated, ended up being semi-finalists and finalists in the Profection list of Canada’s most influential people in social media, and four friends whose work I know and admire ended up in the top 10 (Kate Trgovac, Kris Krug, Darren Barefoot and Rebecca Bollwitt).

These friends of mine certainly influence ME, and I am sure they influence a whole lot of other Canadian social media people. And their ranking in the Canadian influencers list came from a quantitative analysis. There are a number of challenges to using quantitative, crowd-sourced data as proxy for influence in social media. I’ll outline off the top of my head a few below.

1.- What happens if the person does NOT do social media for a living? Does he/she have high influence? I read a lot about it and write a lot of blog posts, and I use Twitter and numerous Web 2.0 tools. On a good day, I’m in the top 10 Twitter Elite. Does that make me a social media influencer? Not sure. Admittedly, I am capable of analyzing social media strategies and well, recently I did just that with my talk at Northern Voice 2009 on “How to Use Social Media Strategies to Increase Environmental Awareness”. I argue that influence in social media is more of a “reputation” game than a “numbers” game.

2.- What happens if the figures are crowdsourced? They become skewed towards who has more followership. That was my primary criticism of the calculation of Canada’s most influential figures (and I told this to David Forde from Profection). When influence figures are crowdsourced, the popularity contest begins. WHO you know and HOW MANY you know and how many KNOW YOU are all relevant variables.

The quote below comes from the Profectio site on the methodology.

# Voting was then done by the community for here and here and a score of 0 – 3 was given.
# Postrank rang a report on both list to determine their engagement, and a score of 0 – 3 was given. [Profectio]

The question that remained in my head was WHO is the community? I saw people whom I absolutely deem very influential in social media completely absent from the list. They probably weren’t nominated. AND people who are very influential didn’t end up in the top 10. The problem is always – the rankings game. It is, indeed, a zero-sum game. For every influencer who lands in the top 10, one influencer (legitimately influencer) is left out.

3.- Are we using the right metrics of engagement as a measure of influence? According to Dave Forde from Profectio, they used PostRank, which hypothetically measures engagement by virtue of analyzing how engaged you are in the Web 2.0 world. Truth is, I argue that nobody can really measure engagement in an objective way. For example, according to PostRank you are more engaged as a blogger if you write a blog post in reply to other blogger’s post. But what if I don’t want to link to that blogger’s post because I may have higher traffic and I don’t want to drive traffic to said blogger’s site? This is quite a real possibility.

I have previously written asking the question of whether we are losing the bi-directionality that is supposed to characterize the Web 2.0 landscape. I fear that it’s happening at least on Twitter. In fact, my thoughts on bi-directionality resonated a lot with what Ian Capstick presented at Northern Voice 09 arguing that Obama hadn’t really won thanks to social media (because well, Obama wasn’t bi-directional on Twitter). Heck, Canadian politicians really didn’t do much in terms of bi-directionality! But I digress… back to influence.

At the end of the day, I have to agree with what Nate Elliot said at his Northern Voice ’09 talk – there is a shift in the way influencers behave (Nate calls someone who pro-actively seeks to influence people a ‘new influencer‘). In his slides (which he generously shared with me) he indicates that a new influencer proactively seeks to influence people by providing advice. Nate kindly mentioned me during his NV ’09 talk making reference to me as a trusted advisor in regards to food (thanks Nate! I hope you enjoy the restaurant reviews!).

One point where I don’t agree with Nate (and we’ll have to discuss this in person) is that new influencers “broadcast” their recommendations. I think that, (assuming that people do perceive me as an influencer), the way in which I influence people is through engagement, beyond broadcasting. One of the reasons why I get unfollowed frequently is because I am way too chatty on Twitter. But I find that if I don’t engage with my readers and my followers, the value of the conversation diminishes.

So, am I an influencer in the social media realm? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is for sure, I certainly am proud of what I’ve accomplished in the blogging world. I would like to be seen as an influencer in the environmental field (particularly in my two primary fields of focus, water governance and environmental policy). But in academia, influence is very much a quantitative game. How many citations do your papers have in the Social Science Citation Index? Citations are usually the proxy for influence. My view is that, in social media, we are trying to measure influence in a quantitative way when it also has substantial qualitative overtones. It’s not only how many people you know (and influence) but who you know (and influence). Also, I *really* want to be perceived as an influencer in my research fields. But that’s the subject of another post.

With that in mind, what do YOU think would be good quantitative metrics of influence?

The VRIO framework as an internal strategic analysis tool

When I did my MBA coursework, I specialized in Strategic Management (that’s my minor where my major is Technology Management). Despite the fact that most of my current research work is primarily focused on organizations in all three realms – government agencies, industrial plants and civil society organizations – I rarely examine internal firm strategies (e.g. the business strategies). For those of you arriving just recently to my blog, I conduct research on environmental social movements and their strategies to influence governments, wastewater governance and intergovernmental relationships and urban sustainability under multiple stressors, as well as public policy applied to environmental issues.

Recently, I had a fantastic meeting with Lisa Thomas-Tench (Redwerks) where we both were talking about our MBA coursework and I noticed she had a copy of the book by Jay Barney “Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage”. We share many interests and a very similar training and background, and we even took courses with some of the same faculty members. I was fortunate to have had two of UBC’s best economists (Dr. Helen Michelson and Dr. Tom Ross) as my mentors and professors. Both of them are extremely good at game theory and business strategy, and they both taught me in the many courses I took with them (yes I am addicted to learning from smart people) about the value of both industry (external) analysis and firm (internal) analysis. External (industry) analyses are usually conducted with the models popularized by Michael Porter (the 5 forces model)

Lisa and I both discussed an interesting and puzzling finding – the relative lack of popularity of the VRIO framework (whose Wikipedia page is orphaned because NOBODY links to it). I find extremely puzzling that very few people pay attention to a tool that can be applied at multiple scales and in a myriad of contexts. Admittedly, the VRIO framework emanated from the resource-based view of the firm, and therefore it is mostly used for internal (business) analysis within the organization. However, think about it for a second. I would argue that you can examine entire industrial sectors, firms, products and individual behaviors through the VRIO framework quite easily. Do you want to know if your product will succeed? Examine whether it is Valuable, Rare, Inimitable and Organizationally-exploitable?

(Side note – no, I’m not going to edit any other Wikipedia page to link to it, I DON’T have the time – but if you are a Wikipedia editor and would like to link the VRIO framework to the larger page on Strategic Management and to the entry on the resource-based view of the firm and would like me to publicize that you did it, I’d be more than happy to do so).

I’m of course not a scholar of strategic management myself (at least, at the moment) but as I mentioned, I’m intrigued (and Lisa shares this same curiosity) to know why the VRIO framework isn’t more popularly disseminated. I have found at least 6,300 articles on the resource based view of the firm, but definitely many less on the VRIO framework. I’m probably going to use it again at some point (I used it for my Masters’ thesis on a game-theoretic model of strategic alliances between biotech firms and large pharmaceuticals).

Fourth Annual Women in Film Festival

The Fourth Annual Women in Film Festival happens from March 4th to 8th, 2009. I have been invited to be part of the Social Media Team (would that make me a media sponsor?) for March 4th. I may have one ticket to the Opening Gala and one festival pass to give away. The opening gala, sadly, doesn’t involve two people so I’d be sending you solo 🙂

As part of the 4th annual Women in Film Festival, New Media Day is a full day of panels, applications, interactive exhibits, and networking. A blend of technology, social media, and interactivity from Getting Your Feet Wired to Emerging Technologies and Trends, WIFFBC’s New Media Day will inspire and engage those who want to tell stories in a more interactive space.

If you are interested in attending, leave a comment on this post outlining the reasons why you want to go, and I’ll draw the names of one lucky winner for each pass by Wednesday, February 25th, 2009. I’ll do the draw at the Vancouver Bloggers Meetup so you can rest assured that it will be blogged about 🙂

Related blogs (Speakers AND Social Media Team)

M2O (Tris Hussey)
Vancouver Sun Digital Life (Gillian Shaw)
Media Consciousness Technology Culture (Carol Sill)
Bridging Media (Listing of Speaker Bios)
Me Like the Interwebs (Monica Hamburg)
Women in Film Festival Coverage Miss604 (Rebecca Bollwitt)

A personal story on experiencing bullying first-hand (Guest post by Lois)

In honor of BC Anti-Bullying Day, I am wearing a pink t-shirt today. I encourage you to do so as well. Moreover, I am sharing a story that Lois kindly volunteered to write about. Bullying is wrong, any way you want to slice it. Let’s work together to stop it. Thanks to Lois for opening up with her story.

In the last five years or so I’ve begun to see the public talking about the ways that girls bully and destroy each other. When Reena Virk was murdered in 1997 the media began to publicly question how it was that a bunch of girls could do that to another girl.

In 2003 Rachel Simmons released the book Odd Girl Out: The Secret Culture of Aggression in Girls which was made into a movie in 2005 (starring SpyKids’ Alexa Vega). Simmons’ book, based on interviews with hundreds of women, ranging in age from 8-50, explored the tendencies of girls to abuse each other, not as much physically as emotionally and verbally. Behaviour that used to be dismissed as “girls will be girls” or something to just “get over” because “they probably didn’t mean it” was finally being pulled into the open for what it truly was: bullying.

The book, along with other books, as well as TV talk shows, movies like Mean Girls, and recent studies have examined the ways in which girls bully each other. Most of them are sneaky, underhanded, and very painful for the victims. One of the most frequent is simply gossip. Most people gossip on a daily basis, but in middle school or high school a false rumour can be the end of someone’s reputation which is all you have. The whole point when girls bully each other is to keep themselves at the top of the food chain: to establish themselves as the queen bee. Most of the tactics used are intended to freeze out the victim – exclude them from the social circle.

The problem is, all of these books and movies point to this as being something that happens among the cool kids to maintain their social standing. The movies show that whichever girl had been bullied by the popular kids found a new group of friends who were completely inclusive and welcoming. And while that’s an image I wish were true, my experience tells me otherwise. Even the unpopular kids are cruel: after all, isn’t it better to be fourth from the bottom of the social totem pole than at the very bottom?

For me it all started when I was 10. My family moved back into the community I had grown up in after a year away, but my friends had moved on. They had built new social circles and there was no room for me in them. I was bullied by both the popular kids and the unpopular ones. The popular kids called every hairdresser in town to book appointments in my name, and when I missed the appointments the hairdressers all called my house trying to find out why. They broke into my locker at school and stole my things & when I got a new lock they wrote derogatory comments on the outside of it with permanent felt pen. They spread rumors about me having sex with boys in our class, but most of the time they just didn’t talk to me. Or only talked to me when they wanted something. The unpopular kids wanted nothing to do with me either – the girls made rules about how often I was allowed to be spoken to in a day, how far away I had to sit to eat my lunch, and which days I was allowed to talk to them at recess. They were my best friends and they hated me. Most of the bullying was done in silence – each look from a group of girls meant something. Each sound. These were things that teachers would never pick up on. Teachers who did observe what was happening did nothing to stop it. Instead they concluded that it was somehow my fault – that I needed a course in “how to make friends,” something that only proved to be yet another source of ridicule by my peers.

Things grew out of control – it got to a point where I could not walk through the halls of my high school without someone calling me names. Slut. Fatso. Goody-two shoes. Whore. Each name usually accompanid by a shove, sometimes by girls whose names I didn’t even know. My mother would come to the school at the time of each of my breaks & I would go sit in her car until the bell rang and then head to class late. I was picked up for lunch every day. And yet the girls still found opportunities (the girls locker room was the equivalent of hell). I tried hanging out with the boys, but the boys wanted to date the girls and the girls would use that to get the boys to say cruel things.

Things spiralled until one afternoon there were 25 girls (many of whom I didn’t know) surrounding me, telling me how they were going to gang beat me as soon as Jen (not her real name!) arrived. Luckily for me, she never showed up and the girls finally let me leave. I dropped out of Phys Ed and a few months later switched schools. Things weren’t perfect at the new school, but they were certainly better than what I had left.

It’s been about 10 years since I switched schools and got away from it all, and I like to think that has given me a bit of a greater perspective on what happened. The scary thing for me is seeing the way that women my age and older continue in these same back-stabbing practises. It has taken me years to not see every word as a potential attack, each unreturned phone call as a sign that I am unwanted, and to not over-analyze each look as a signal of whether or not I am still someone’s friend.

In the years since then I’ve been able to forgive these girls for the way they treated me. But I’ve never forgotten how it felt. One of my greatest hopes is that bullying among girls will continue to be recognized for what it is because that is the only way it will be stopped.

Pulling back and the concept of Slow Blogging

I had been thinking for a few weeks now about the concept of immediacy on Twitter, given my lightning speed and my hummingbird-like approach to things. It seems to me as though Twitter has somehow contributed to the deterioration of careful, slow reading and reflection. While I might be (erroneously) perceived as one contributor to this deterioration (because of how often I tweet and publish content on my blog), I’d argue that a vast majority of my writing is well thought out. However, yes, I am guilty of writing a lot, and I can understand if some of my readers could have a helplessness feeling of trying to drink water from a fire hose with a straw.

Northern Voice provided me with a great opportunity to reconnect with Todd Sieling, whose Slow Blogging manifesto is a gem to read and who actually has also written on whether Twitter can co-exist with a desire for reflection and creation of deeper meaning. At around the same time, Kate Trgovac made a reference to Todd’s writing, as did Darren with his reflections on “where is the profound“. So, when several bright minds I admire are all talking about the same concept, I can’t help but stop, pause for a minute, and think about my own ideas on this topic.

I am amazed and also worried about the immediacy of Twitter and how people respond to the whole “fast, fast, let’s tweet, speak, write content” paradigm. In the process of self-examination, I came to realize that I have, for the longest time, promised myself and others that I’ll slow down (in all realms, including how often I blog and how many events I attend) and take better care of myself and not say yes to every-single-tech-event-in-Vancouver (very timely, Colleen just wrote about picking and choosing the events you attend – I give her and everyone else who has learned to take time off and just say “sorry, can’t make it to this particular event, next time”). But I still do it. I still behave in a hummingbird-like way. It doesn’t mean that I don’t sit down and reflect, but at the same time, I don’t seem to put as much emphasis into writing and then letting drafts sit and evolve through time.

First of all, let me make all the admissions and disclosures. I *know* I am very responsive, interactive and chatty on Twitter. For me, it is an instrument to connect me with my friends, not a tool “to add value”. Those who read my blog and follow me on Twitter and have be-friended me know (or should know) this. I also know that I am a fast writer and that I try to get all my ideas out as though I’m vomiting thoughts. I admit it. It’s something I’ve always done. I didn’t get to publish 43 journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and other publications by writing slowly. That is one of the reasons why I am nicknamed ‘the hummingbird’. I also admit that I’m an extrovert and love hanging out with people. At the same time, as David Drucker has mentioned, maybe I’m also somewhat of an introvert and need my down time.

But I have also been reflecting on the idea of Slow Blogging (read Todd’s manifesto here), and I’m coming to the point where I think I need to start slowing down my blogging and my tweeting. I think I am capable of slowing the pace and creating content that is more reflective, more insightful, more processed. At the same time, I also believe in the power of throwing my ideas out there and having people read them over, critique them and respond back. Is fast, back-and-forth reading and writing the *right* way of doing things in this new era where online content creation seems to have an urgent sense of immediacy? I’m not exactly sure it is, at this point in my life.

I am going to begin an experiment and try to devote at least ONE DAY a week to slow blogging. That is, one day a week, come hell or high water, there will be no “ultra-fast-hummingbirdie” content production. I’ll just write a draft post that will be evolving (the same blog post) through the weeks. I will keep that post “Sticky” thanks to the magic of WordPress and will maintain it there so that the conversation with my readers can help me re-shape it and re-write it. This will be actually my draft post.

I am trying to produce content that has meaning to others, but more importantly, I want to make sure that my content has meaning to me. If increasing the meaning means that I’ll have to slow down and reflect more (something I always do anyways with my academic research), so be it. Thanks Todd for bringing back those reflections I’ve been mulling over through the months, and thanks to Darren and Kate for redirecting me to Todd’s writing (I already had come across it but it was good to revisit it).

The first reflection I want to throw out in an interactive way is – if you are a regular reader of my blog, do you actually sit down and read my posts or just skim them and “off I go to my next blog because I have 45 other RSS feeds to read“? Trust me, I won’t be offended if you say you’re only skimming them. I appreciate all thoughts and feedback.

Talking Politics: Sustainable Jobs gathering