that canadian girl

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic at Pepperrell Mansion, and I realise personal updates have been few and far between (as my mom regularly reminds me).

About three weeks ago, we had Tommy, Trisha and little nearly-3-year-old Emma over for a week from deepest darkest Scotland (not really, somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh. They even have electricity there.) We went to Colchester Zoo, Andrew’s parents’ house in Kent, and had numerous BBQs to take advantage of the good weather.

Somewhere during that week, I attended Fuel Conference, organised by the fab team at Carsonified where I met a whole new bunch of new people, saw some great friends and got many new ideas I need to start acting upon.

Then last weekend, we popped down to the inlaws’ house to see our adorable new niece Evie, who’s a few weeks old yet kicks like Beckham in his prime.

On Wednesday night, I hastily packed my suitcase for a whirlwind visit to Amsterdam on Thursday and Friday, attending the Mobile Social Networks & UGC Conference with a few work colleagues. And yes, we walked by the red light districts and saw “coffee shops”, and no, it’s not really much to see so don’t get over-excited.

On Friday night, I dropped my suitcase and swapped my stuff around to head off to London early on Saturday morning (by which point Andrew has started greeting me with “hi, do I know you?”) I attended MediaCamp London, an event organised by Chris Hambly at the SAE Institute.

If you’re wondering what happens at BarCamp-style unconferences, Nic Butler aka Loudmouthman (and yes, he lives up to his name) Qik’ed a few videos (including Steve Lamb’s presentation on social media in the entreprise) so have a look. Here are all the photos taken by Chris as well.

Met some great people there, Ben, Vicky, Jof, Judith, Melinda, Nic (and many more, I need to dig out the biz cards we swapped).

SpinVox sponsored the event, and made quite an impression, with many people asking existing users (such as myself) to show off the rather awesome service.

So today has been a braindead, chill out and tidy up spend time with Andrew day. A simple BBQ for dinner, and now, time to watch Juno on the Apple TV while sipping a mandarin and mango cocktail.

Ciao!

MediaCamp is an unconference for us social media geeks to network and meet like-minded people (and many with whom to disagree!) today in London.

Some of the presentations are being streamed here by Loudmouthman so have a look even if you couldn’t make it to London. More updates later!

The wonderful team at Wikio gave me a sneak preview at the July rankings for the UK Tech blogs. Amongst the ranks are some of the usual suspects and, just off-the-podium, yours truly coming in at #29 30 this month - up by a smashing 81 places from last month!

Fingers crossed you’ll see That Canadian Girl in the Top 20 next month.

Wikio Top 20 UK Tech Blogs

[Update: Wikio even gives That Canadian Girl a mention in the July top blogs review. What an honour, thank you Wikio!]

I’m a bit torn.

Poke, a digital agency in London, created this funky campaign for Orange mobile’s Pay As You Go tariffs - you know, the raccoon, camel, canary and dolphin balloons? Yeah, well, if you see a camel called Vero fly by, don’t adjust your medication - it’s just me floating by.

The campaign involves floating from one website to the next, in a StumbleUpon random-new-site manner, using your air canister to boost yourself along. You pick up stars, more air canisters and rainbows along the way. All this nonsense for the sake of an Ibiza holiday for the winner.

It’s cute, it’s entertaining, but my one gripe is that the entire site was developed as a gigantor Flash animation. I’ve been known to whinge about Flash before, and I’m just not a fan of sites that have no deep-linking or easy ways to navigate. Plus, it makes my Mac whirr itself into a frenzy!

But I just can’t help it, I keep on travelling! So go on, Boost my Camel, baby!

Quick post to tell readers that things do happen up here in Cambridge, interesting things!

If you’re thinking of coming to Cambridge for this, get in touch and we’ll make an evening of it.

A few moments ago, I subscribed to the 4mations “Keep me updated” mailing list, out of curiosity of what it’ll turn out to be (how did I get there anyway?!)

I’ve got a past in email marketing so even though that subscribing should, in theory, be fine, I hesitated. I’m aware of how dodgy or how careless/naive some senders can be - recently, it took me a battle with an agency that shall remain nameless before they acknowledged that I’d requested repeatedly to be unsubscribed, so things like that peeve me off.

But I subscribed. And it was immediately followed by the familiar green tick mark from Campaign Monitor confirming I was subscribed.

And you know what? I definitely had a fuzzy feeling inside thinking “yup, I can trust this sender. Even if they write total rubbish, I’m confident I can unsubscribe, should there be a need.” I bet you I would’ve bypassed the hesitation had the subscribe field been accompanied by the Campaign Monitor tick. Think that could help increase subscriptions or give users confidence?

What brands do that for you? What logos give you the confidence to hand over money, personal details or your precious time?

Woke up this morning to discover I’ve been described as a SOB by a fellow blogger - a Successful and Outstanding Blogger. Liz Strauss regularly publishes her list, which I really enjoy readging, so it’s an honour to be added to it.

Thanks Liz, and most of all, thanks whoever you are faithful readers since 2004.

This evening, I came across a post where I couldn’t help but think that I had to share with fellow bloggers.

Darren Rowse, pro-blogger and six-digit-salary man, tells bloggers to get rid of their inferiority complex, and I could not agree more! He gets loads of emails from bloggers asking for tips or advice (why don’t I get more mail from you readers?!) with many self-deprecating comments, claiming they’re “no A-list blogger” and “don’t write as well as they do…”

So this is to tell you, my fellow bloggers, to take pride in what you do. It doesn’t matter if all you write is a weenie little blog to track your child growing up, your BMI going down by preparing for a half-marathon for charity, or a technology rant.

Think positive, be proud of the fact that you’ve braved the wild world of blogging. You may not realise it but you’re boldly going where most of people around you won’t have. So grab that blog by the horns and be a sassy self-promoter. Whether it gets you a job, helps you find like-minded people for a project or just gives you an outlet to blow some steam off, enjoy the fact that you’re still more cutting edge than you might think.

Anyone who’s witnessed a typical weekday for me will have noticed my slight addiction to Twitter, a service that simply can’t be explained and has to be experienced.

But in my attempt to justify the thousands of updates I’ve posted on it, I’ll highlight a few amazing ways Twitter has helped me and those around me this week.

It helped me discover how other bloggers felt about being accosted by PR agency, resulting in an article for The Blog Medic called “Marketing Ethics: Ten ways to piss off a blogger”. An ad hoc conversation led to a friend getting a job offer, and the entire conversation up to scheduling an interview call happened over Twitter. It allowed me to find a couple of new contracts for Pepsmedia redesigning blog templates & site launches. Since SXSW, I’ve managed to stay in touch with many of the lovely people I met there without going through the usual “ok I’ll reply to that email later”, where later becomes never. By keeping it bite-sized, Twitter makes it easy to stay in touch. I’ve found amazing support for the idea of SocialMediaCamp in London in July through fellow Twitter users who are interested and can provide skills and contacts I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. A few people offered sound advice with regards to the process to setting up a limited company, again calling on the experience of others. It was the fastest channel through which I heard about Russell’s decision to stop developing Mowser on Monday night. It’s a great way to swap kitty photos with Mel Kirk

So there you go, it’s a business resource like no other, a great communication tool and an entertaining place to have water cooler conversations with like-minded people.

A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

Anyone got a better idea?

A short word of advice to fellow WordPress users. Not only is WordPress 2.5 so awesomely great that you should upgrade immediately, even if it was just for the beautifully refreshed admin area (after years of staring at the same old UI, it’s so good to see a new one!) but you should upgrade if you want to keep appearing in Technorati.

Good ol’ Technorati, one of the largest blog directories on the web, has announced that, due to some security issues with older versions of WordPress, you need to upgrade to the latest version in order to continue being indexed.

This will be interesting to watch, seeing as even large blogs like TechCrunch haven’t gotten around to updating yet. Many less techy users will have to wait until their hosting’s control panel updates the Fantastico scripts to contain the latest version of WordPress. Considering the millions of ghost town blogs currently listed on Technorati, I wonder whether this will become a huge Spring Cleaning of all the unloved, dead blogs across the web. This might just turn out to be a good thing…

So, go on, get off your butt and upgrade WordPress to the latest version, and tell those around you to do the same!

I find it hard to believe that this blog is now four whole years of age. It certainly wasn’t my first blog - the first would probably trace back to around 2000, but was a poor excuse for a blog. It was, however, the first WordPress blog where I actually bothered buying a real domain name rather than a borrowed subdomain on someone else’s dodgy hosting, and it’s the first time I made an effort to scrap some thoughts together on a somewhat regular basis.

The first post was something to do with There.com, an early sibling of Second Life, the kind of avatar-based online world I’ve never had much interest in. A random start, but a start nonetheless.

Now, four years on, I can hardly imagine my life without blogging. It’s shaped much of what my career has become, giving me the fun experience of writing for Shiny Shiny a few times and resulting in getting headhunted to become a corporate blogger for Taptu a year ago.

Since those days, blogging has become pretty mainstream, both to my pleasure and dismay. It’s great to see so many people picking up a hobby once reserved for nerds who knew how to clunk together some HTML and update pages manually. Unfortunately, so many people also get the wrong end of the stick. I can’t judge personal bloggers, because it’s entirely up to them to write how they like and when they like. It’s the marketers, the CEOs, the business people who’ve decided to pick up blogging - I wish I could lend them a hand, help them make sense of blogs, which are so much more than just an online marketing platform.

But at least, at the very least, they are picking up on these new technologies. You gotta start somewhere, after all. You fall over the first few times you ride your bike, but you learn. Hopefully, I can help these marketers stop falling off their bikes. (Oh now that was a funny mental picture for me. Was it good for you?)

So, four years then… I might not be willing to raise little sprogs of my own any time soon, but my blog, that’s my baby. Happy birthday, little one!

Looking back:

Gary Vaynerchuk, for those who don’t yet know him, is the guy behind, in front and all around Wine Library TV. He’s a raving looney, a totally loveable geek but most of all, a rough diamond of community relations amongst the world of overly polished marketing bullshit. He says things as they are and has marked me enough during SXSWi this year that I’ve got a couple of things he’s said up on my board of inspirational quotes in the office. (Thank you Gary, genuinely!)

He also agreed with me that making your own wine is a bad idea, mmmkay dad?

PS - I want my own WLTV sweatband bracelet thinger!

These aren’t the tidiest notes, and I even failed on jotting down exactly who was speaking but there are a few useful points in there… Thanks to Lionel for the insight on how Dell dealt with feedback in the early days.

The Future of Corporate Blogs
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South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.

Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?

Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.

So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.

I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?

[* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]

With the beginning of a new year comes a brand new look for our Pepsmedia website.

We’ve been so privileged to have the opportunity to work with interesting, open (and sometimes challenging) clients in recent months, and they have kept us so busy that we’d neglected to update our own portfolio.

I’m looking forward to seeing what 2008 will bring!

This week, it is my honour to be hosting the second Travel Blog Carnival, launched last week by Darren at Travel-Rants. Last week, Europe a la Carte’s Karen hosted the first carnival. Without further ado, here are my favourite submissions this week.

First, brand new blog J Top Ten publishes the Top 5 biggest comparisons between South California and North California. Having never been, I was surprised by the seemingly significant differences in culture between what’s known to a geek like me as Silicon Valley in the North and the much-caricatured Hollywood further South.

Next, the Travel Advice and Guides in the Nordic Region blog confirms my suspicion that the Swedes are a bit mad. “Local officials have now given permission for construction of the worlds largest Elk.” Yes, you’ve read this right. An elk, towering 45 meters tall, containing conference rooms, exhibition halls, a restaurant, with an outdoor cafe on top of the antlers, to top it all off. Please, please tell me the exit isn’t at the rear…

Hole in the Donut’s Barbara Weibel writes this week about her experiences in street crossing across the world. From the madness of Indian streets where there simply are no rules to the unbelievably organised Singaporean roads. I’ll certainly be following her advice when I find myself on a new street corner; “When traveling in unfamiliar places is to watch the locals and do as they do, because they’ve definitely figured out the order of things.”

And finally, Foxnomad makes his predictions on what 2008 will hold for travellers. Rising airline prices, the advent of greener travel and third-world trips becoming more attractive are only some of his predictions. Only time will tell how close Foxnomad will be! All I hope is that he is wrong about his prediction on the likely increase in terrorist activity on tourist destinations.

Want to take part in the next Travel Blog Carnival? You can submit any travel related posts which you’ve written in the last 7 days to blog.carnival(at)gmail.com.

As first entry for my infamous Blog Topic Challenge, I thought I’d begin with an elementary and logical first step.

James Whatley, SpinVox blogger and great friend of mine, suggested that I should “write about your job and everyone you have ever met in your niche industry…” Great suggestion, but there are just too many awesome people I’ve met so I’ll split this into two entries, concentrating on the “write about your job” part first.

From one day to the next, I wear many hats… and wigs… and tiaras. By daylight, I’m part of a great team at Taptu. It’s my first time taking part in the early days of a startup and I’m really enjoying it. There are new challenges every day, which is a refreshing change from previous jobs where tasks were repetitive to say the least (could YOU spend 52 weeks a year sending email newsletters that always say the same thing? I couldn’t.)

These days, there’s blogging, attending events, handling search engine optimisation (which I love), researching new ideas for the search engine, speaking to our mobile search users as well as our Facebook app users to get their feedback (which I love even more!) and planning future super-secret projects which I can’t tell you about yet… unless you ply me with shiny gadgets, at which point I might just crack. Or not. (But you can offer me shiny gadgets anyways!)

My job also entails making copious amounts of coffee every day and occasionally teasing Bob about his taste in movies and Lynsey about her Scrabulous choice of words.

All in all, it’s exciting and challenging. And no, you can’t have my job!

Blog Topic Challenge: Want to suggest the next topic for me to write about? Leave a comment here and I’ll tackle your topic soon!

If you’re going to South by Southwest in March, let it be known. Add yourself to the wiki list started by Colleen and Adele, two Twitterers I’m following.

It’ll be a first-time for me, so I’m open to any opportunity to plan to meet and hang out with other bloggers or Twitterers!

[Update: Durr, forgot the wiki link the first time around. Thanks Mark for pointing it out…]

This blog has always been fairly adhoc in terms of topics, with the only running threads being technology, marketing, customer service or personal family stuff.

As an experiment beginning on Monday, Jan 7th, I’ll write a post a day - every day including weekend - on a topic of my readers’ choice. Depending on the topic, I may write a short ten liner post, or go ahead and do some full-on research if it looks interesting (and, realistically, if I have the time), but my challenge will be to post on that given topic every day without fail.

It can range from topics I’ve already written about where you want to know more, topics you’d bet your hat I know nothing about, or questions about me. Serious, silly, techy, non-techy, it’s up to you.* I’m putting my blog in your hands for a month!

To some people, 31 posts in 31 days seems like nothing, but this will most likely include some research on bizarro topics if people I know read this blog are anything to go by.

Make your suggestions for my first few posts in the comments for this post and I’ll begin the Blog Topic Challenge on Monday.

[* Please don’t make me write about rugby or cricket though, I just can’t understand those sports…]