I recently commented that perhaps heat stroke was affecting a major tech blogger. Bing, bang, click! I don't monitor his feed anymore; no big deal. Sometimes it just makes sense to move on.

I probably monitor as many feeds as Scoble but so what? He could read more too but he has probably stopped reading more feeds than I ever have. I think it's likely that Robert has a low tolerance for feeds or podcasts that don't remain interesting when they originate from strangers or acquaintances. With friends, Robert Scoble is truly more accomodating and forgiving; it's a real measure of the man and I only got a glimpse of that when we spent some time together last February.

In the past few days, my belief system has been tested by another blogging and podcasting original, someone I've come to know fairly well. In a manner that took me by surprise because of its sudden graduality; I found myself stung by a calm and graceless piece on his moderately popular podcast. I was struck by how affected I was at the commentary I was hearing as I drove down the road. I felt chastened by the sense that I had even bothered to download the podcast.

And now I don't because I've stopped downloading from his feed and I've stopped listening. In the back of my mind I knew this was coming and I knew that he was losing an affinity for his listeners.

What I am discovering about my tolerance for opinion is that it should never be disguised by a belief that it is fully substantiated by fact. Opinion should be a sampling of the known and the surmised at a point in time. That makes opinion fungible and it allows regular folks to be able to grow, change and develop. Denying oneself of growth by not utilizing reason and education seems kind of lazy to me. Sure; you will never know everything, but that's hardly an excuse to not try to know more. The thing that really turns listeners on to podcasts is the opportunity to know more -- that's a real winner for audio. Visual media can do that too but the effort requires far more work because great visuals require great poetry and vice versa. That's a rare combination as we know from watching decades worth of TV and films.

Very few things are immutable -- maybe someday I'll even listen to that guy's podcast again -- but it's rarer than a lightning strike that you will get a chance to have a listener come back once they have stopped listening. It's okay to lose listeners by being uninteresting; people change. It's another thing altogether to lead them down a road of contempt and disrespect. If you didn't start podcasting, in part, for the listeners then please get out of the business. If you don't feel a growing respect for your listenership with every piece you produce then consider stamp collecting rather than podcasting. If you really want to know what a tree sounds like when it falls in the forest then don't be around... Your podcast is a crazy rant in the shower if you have no listeners and good listeners are not interested in crazy rants.

I tuned up my satellite dish yesterday so that I could catch Derek K Miller and his wife Airdrie on CBC Vancouver. Derek my man; you made it to Drive Time! That's big.

What could be bigger? Getting through the next few months and beyond. Derek, every day I read your stuff and get inspired. You and Airdrie are leaders and your strength is inspiring. Happy Birthday from Calgary and thanks for making it out for a short night at the last Northern Voice.

Last night we left our porch light on in recognition of National Missing Children's Day. We learned about that by being privileged to attend a fund raising event for the Missing Children Society of Canada in Calgary.

The guest speaker was Melissa Hawach who was there to describe her story and her happy ending. While Melissa chided the TV News Guy MC for the media's sensationalizing of her experience, it is a pretty special tale by a woman who clearly crossed a threshold in her quest to get her daughters back. No doubt, Americans will probably be introduced to her story by way of a motion picture or movie-of-the-week but hearing about the mobilization of her will in person was an experience I will always remember.

From Calgary to Australia and into a chaotic Lebanon, Melissa tracked her children while developing a network of friends, supporters and lawyers to help get them back. It wasn't enough. Melissa took us to the edge of her final decision to get the kids back but she does not talk publicly about her controversial choice to go beyond what lawyers can do.

While Melissa was there to describe her extraordinary happy ending she made it clear that every year scores of children are the victims of parental abductions that remain unresolved. Beyond abduction, the Missing Children's Society helps parents seek run-aways and children who have errantly wandered. It's a good cause and worthy of greater support.

While the headline is a tad Doc Searl-ish in its faux mystique, I'm at the point with my web site changes and infrastructure updates to coin a "new" term: disinfrastructure.

I embrace change for the simple reason that one day I'm going to be dead and I don't want to be taken by surprise. I have to say however -- even as a techie, nerdy, geeky, professional engineer -- that the last month working on my various site, server and content upgrades has been trying to say the least. Apparently, and thankfully, I am still married.

I have managed to consolidate almost all of my domains and have a spiffy new server set-up with a new host. (If all goes well I will give you a referral.) I have tons of bandwidth, a pretty good amount of storage and have the capacity to host dozens of domains. For my friends that are having a hard time with hosting, content management and updating; shoot me a note and tell me your story. I'm also thinking of providing pay-it-forward, free hosting for people I really like that just want to write. The downside of web publishing is the backroom horse-pucky of "content management" -- some people just want to get the words out.

Content in this post is written by Brad Gibson and you should be reading it from www.bradfordgibson.net.

The moral of my experience with my myriad of behind the scenes changes is that continuous change is better than batch change. I had built my media "empire" into a series of discontinuous information islands each with a separate set of management headaches. I had to take the leap to a completely new and well thought out structure so that things would not completely breakdown in the future. But step change or batch change is the hardest change of all. That's why short term dieting or manic exercise campaigns only produce short term results; they are not long term, continuous processes of productive change. The batch change is not a behaviour modifying experience; it's a trial. You get bored, you don't see results, you revert to previous behaviours and then... No change at all.

I was losing interest in my complicated path back to simpler, cheaper, more logical web content management and hosting. I got disinfrastructured. I think I made it through however and from now on you will be seeing continuous, planned change at this site and at my others -- especially currentthinkingradio.com.

Please bear with us as we make some behind the scenes changes here at bradfordgibson.net. You may experience some site outages or find yourself at a mirrored site over the next few days as we tweak some infrastructure and software. My apologies and please stay tuned.

One of the guys I really wanted to meet at Northern Voice this year was Derek K Miller of penmachine.com. Alas, it looks like Derek needs a few more days of rest before he gets back to the normal rhythm and readies himself for the next round of treatment.

So Derek, for me, NV2007 will not be quite the same because I will not be seeing the guy who gives so generously with his music, his sound knowledge and his insights. Instead, Derek decided he had to give something more this year. Now we're all learning in detail what it's like to develop awareness and mastery over the cancer that he, his body, family and doctors are fighting. What a team! Thank you for your leadership, your inspiration and -- even though it can be ugly and unpleasant -- your courage in telling the tale. Our friend Mike beat it a couple of years ago and so can you.

Update: Derek made it out for a few hours after the Saturday session. It was great to see him, Read Derek's post about the night here and see the back of my head in this picture with Buzz Bruggeman and Will Pate.

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As mentioned in my previous post, it's time to say so long to The Bradcast. No tears please -- I will be podcasting over at currentthinkingradio.com (which actually points to www.ctiweb.net). Current Thinking Radio will be devoted to Business, Technology, Leadership.

So say bye, bye and get ready to say hello to a new feed. I will continue blogging here -- we kick off the new Current Thinking from Brad Gibson with Dreamgirls Week tomorrow. Later in the week it will be wall to wall Northern Voice; I will be in Vancouver to cover and participate in one of the best new media conferences in North America. I hope to see many of you there.

brad_gibson podcast NorthernVoice NorthernVoice2007 NV2007 currentthinkingradio

Things are changing here at Current Thinking from Brad Gibson. So here are some news items you need to be aware of:
1) Effective immediately the Bradcast brand is no more. There are too many other Bradcast's out there and since I did not trademark the term when I originated my podcast back in 2004, I cannot get anyone to respect the title. Other Brad's have decided to usurp the name and, frankly, I don't want the Bradcast to become associated with their product. So you will soon be hearing your last Bradcast. Fear not there is something far better that will replace it.
2) Current Thinking Radio is "On the Air". That's right, you can reach my re-branded podcast over at www.currentthinkingradio.com or at www.ctiweb.net. I'll have more to say about Current Thinking Radio in the coming weeks and for you late switchers on the RSS feed, I'll be offering a double-helping of Current Thinking Radio both at the home site and here.
3) Full feeds are probably going to go away. I have been relentlessly pilfered from on a regular basis and I'm sick of seeing my feeds being mugged by sploggers. They are systematically stealing and reposting my content. That, and I have become the target of some pretty predicatable site attacks that have managed to cause my feed to hiccup on occasion over the past few months. If you have any ideas I would be glad to hear them, however I think most of the automated stuff will be easily defeated by going to partial feeds. That will mean you will have to click through to the site to read my full text. If this offends your sense of RSS purity then please unsubscribe. I am also personally annoyed that Google Reader does not count the number of subscribers in its feed, so to get an accurate count, it's time to come and visit the site.
4) Current Thinking from Brad Gibson will be getting more personal, more musical, a little more theatrical and somewhat more friendly over the next little while. I figure a namesake blog should be, well, more namesakeical. What about the tech wit, business acuity and trenchant comment though, you ask? You of course were thinking of another blog. I will still be attempting to put some kind of focus on technology, business and leadership over at currentthinkingradio.com and currentthinking.net. Both of those sites will explore themes that matter to technical business types, tech workers, creative marketers and managers. It's time to break out some of these topics and this little domain was just too small. There are feeds galore at all of these sites so get your feed reader warmed up.

So there you have it -- an early spring cleaning. If you have any ideas or suggestions then please get in touch.