One Degree

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Lots of great events going on!

nextMEDIA is being held in Banff, June 5-7, 2009. Some great folks speaking there like Maggie Fox from Social Media Group and Janet Kestin from Ogilvy.
Search Engine Strategies returns to Toronto, June 8-10, 2009. OneDegree readers get a 15% discount! The speaker line-up is getting looking really good: Tara Hunt, Emanuel Rosen (whose book The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited we'll have a review of soon) and Mitch Joel.
The CMA's National Convention and Showcase is coming up fast, April 27-29, 2009. Hope to see some of you there!

This week's WIR curator is Monica Hamburg. Monica struts her social media stuff at her social media blog, Me Like the Interweb.

Seen Around the Blogosphere

Penelope Trunk's "8 Reasons Why You Won't Make Money from Your Blog" was my favorite post of the week, primarily because I have a brilliant friend who consistently asks me, “So are you making money yet from your blog?” When I try to explain something like, "Well, not directly, I use the blog as a marketing tool" he looks at me as though I had announced I was giving up all my worldly possessions and deciding to run a lemonade stand.

Getting sued - it's not just for real life anymore! Taser sues Second Life over claims it sells "unauthorized virtual versions of its electric stun guns".

David Eaves offers a solid (and amusing) take-down of the Fraser Institute's climate change video in "The Fraser Institute - a case study in how not to engage young people"

If you haven't seen the video - hold on tight:

Watching this was like a flashback blizzard: I was indeed reminded of the terrible PSAs of my youth - and even more by numerous things I've auditioned for that were meant to have “urban dialogue” spoken by a street-wise "African-american/Latino" character, but were clearly written by a very uncool, out-of-touch middle-aged white man. (This kind of thing.)

And, while the Fraser Institute manages to be profoundly awful in production value and narration text as well as insulting to its target audience, it also get bonus suckage points for continuing a pretty painful trend of making people who spend time online appear unjustifiably inarticulate. (I immediately thought of this Courier subtitle when I saw the video.) Further, AAMOF / CWOT?!... The fact that the narrator had to speak the text message abbreviations as complete words, proves they either don’t trust the "yoots" to figure out what the terms are - or they are so obscure that no one really uses them. My vote is for the latter.

Interesting Bookmarks from the Backchannel

Lessons from a publisher: 8 Big Twitter Mistakes We Made and 8 Ways We Fixed Them". (Learning from mistakes? Hey, don't pressure me - I'm working on it.)

"Sponsored blogs come under fire" examines the ethical debate over sponsored content.

Seen on the Marketing-esque Blogs

Ari Herzog's Mashable post, "6 Twitter Search Services Compared", looks at various services that allow you to search for twitter mentions. (Psst: using Twitter Search means a whole bunch of missed tweets.)

The Daily SEO blog discusses "10 Twitter Tools to Effectivey Manage Your Followers (Spoiler alert: scroll to the bottom for one that takes care of everything - except doing your laundry.)

The Buzz Bin addresses how "Reputation Management Means Embracing Your Errors" (Learning from mistakes, again? What do you want from me, universe?)

The Econsultancy blog, with "The power of social media for customer service" looks at how "Naked Wines" dealt effectively on Facebook with an unhappy customer (I wish she had been unhappy about the company name - that would have just made my week.)

Heard on Twitter

"#OK #I #will #start #writing #with #hashtags #and #see #what #happens. #oprah #ashton #cnn #porn #lol #joke @wiseleo #how'm #I #doing?" - singlegirlie

That reminds me: @Oprah joined twitter. Did 'ya hear? (This is another interesting example of a celebrity with a huge following who is technically following almost no one.)

Other Tidbits

I'm doing some social media work for Vancouver Digital Week, and so can't resist mentioning that May 11-14, 2009 Vancouver Digital Weeks hosts a number of very cool events such as Convergence 2009 and The Vancouver International Partnering Forum.

The series also includes New Media BC's 2009 PopVox Awards which honours the best of BC's Digital Media Industry! The awards are presently in the nomination and voting phase. If you know of a great project, please take a moment to submit it - or nominate a peer (or yourself!). And feel free to vote for your favourite project!

This Week's Video Meme
AdRants claims that this video by Kyle Andrews contains "Every YouTube Clip Ever Now in One Music Video". 'Kay, I'll bite.