Milestone

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.

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.

Sometime between today -- Jan 2, 2007 -- and the 2007 Academy Awards I will be declaring Dreamgirls Week at bradfordgibson.net.

Now for those of you who expect this site to be all about technology, business and podcasting... well it's my personal site too and you know that I have made forays into the musical realm before. I still get a significant number of site hits from the Google search string "I want to write a musical".

Before I dip my toe into the Dream Girls water I need your help. If you want to contribute then please get in touch with me. I'm talking to sound gurus like Derek K Miller (see you at Northern Voice 2007), food/wine/cinema critics like Ethan Johnson (whose simple "wow" is high praise indeed) and media divas like Leesa Barnes. This is my open casting call for essays and scholarship on one of the greatest artistic events of our lifetimes. How about some thought being put to:

Or if you can't hack the academic stuff, try comparing it to other earthquakes like Saturday Night Fever, Les Miserables or the birth of Jazz. If by some troubled route you know it's big but you just don't like it... well okay, I want to hear about that too.

And I'm Telling You, Go now and do your research. I am available by way of comment here, the "feedback" menu choice at the web site or GollyGeeMail... thebradcast... then use the at symbol then type in Gmail period com.

Be it resolved that:

In recognition of the above it's a good idea to;

Have a Happy New Year. This year, every year, every day.

[Content in this post originates from www.bradfordgibson.net.]

I read with great sadness yesterday that a former neighbour of mine in Ancaster Ontario, Angela D'Onofrio, has died after a three year battle with cancer.

I remember Angela as the happiest Mom on the street with the happiest kids in the neighbourhood. Her husband Vince is a big teddy bear of man, who willed his dream of becoming a fire fighter to life after some initial discouragements.

Vince and Angie were a couple of faith, strength, hope, joy and celebration. They never celebrated more than at Christmas time. Planning would begin soon after the kids Hallowe'en display was taken down. Vinnie would add lights in a cacophony of lustrous splendour day upon day, revealing more each night. As voltage plunged to a precipitously low point on the street (we shared the same transformer) Vinnie would stop and the glow in the sky became a beacon for scores of restless families driving around looking for seasonal light displays and -- more likely -- symbolic inspiration.

We moved out of the neighbourhood about 8 years ago to another place about 2 miles away but we always went back to see Vinnie and Angie's light show. Living now half a country away we will not see the lights this year and we will miss them. We will miss Angie too.

So Vinnie and the kids -- who were much smaller when we knew them -- to you we send our sympathies and our hopes. To everyone, we urge that you send some money to your local, regional or national Cancer Society in Angela's name. It will be your best gift of the year. Merry Christmas.

Vinnie; leave the lights on.

[Content in this post originates from www.bradfordgibson.net.]