Category: Friday Five

Friday Five: personal best for 2009

I’m not gonna lie: I think I wrote some pretty decent blog posts in 2009. Since I’ve already ‘fessed up to my top turkeys of the past year, I’m going to now pat myself on the back and share what I believe are my best posts from 2009.

  1. The fall of U.S. higher ed and what to do about it, posted Oct. 22, 2009. This is my personal favorite, because it attempts to make sense of a systemic problem and gives me a chance to offer solutions that I have no earthly ability to implement, and therefore no responsibility for implementing. It’s always fun to say what ought to be done when it’s far beyond your own power to fix the problem. At least it is for me, because it takes my mind off of all the stuff I ought to be trying to fix that I can somehow affect.
  2. A two-part series on communications planning (3 simple questions for communicators and the follow-up, After who, what and how: testing, then tactics) seemed to resonate with a few of you. I’ve since been building on that post to create a brief document to share with our campus, and I might even turn it into an ebook to share with readers. Stay tuned.
  3. Media relations, taking the long view, and other lessons from Martin Luther King Jr. was a post I wrote last January and inspired by a re-reading of a book by Philip Yancey called Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. Weird, I know. But if you read the post I think you’ll see the connection with higher ed, PR and marketing.
  4. Mediamorphosis: shrinking newspapers, converging networks was a post I wrote last March in response to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s latest resizing of its dead-tree edition. In it, I pull from Clay Shirky, John C. Dvorak and other people smarter than me to make me sound smarter than I am.
  5. Friday Five: Zen and the art of being productive (or not), from last February, was my attempt to explain how I manage a crapflood of stuff day by day.

Whether these are among your favorite posts, I thank you for reading this blog. And if you blog, I hope you’ll undertake a similar exercise. What were your favorites of 2009? Why?

Friday Five: turkeys of the year

Have you ever said something and then immediately wish you could take it back? But you can’t. It’s too late; the words are out there, the deed is done, and there’s nothing you can do about it except hope no one noticed.

But people notice. An awkward silence ensues and perhaps someone politely changes the subject to get you off the hook.

If you blog, though, sometimes you throw stuff out that you wish you could take back. Maybe you posted in haste, wrote about a topic you weren’t well-informed about, or made some obvious error in fact that exposed you for the rube, ignoramus or insensitive jerk that you really are.

These are the “turkey” posts — the ones you should have thought twice about before hitting the “publish” button. But if you’re like me, all too often you hit “publish” and then think about what you should have said or written.

So for today’s Friday Five, in honor of the holiday just passed, I bring you five blog posts that were my “turkeys” of 2009. I own these. Nobody’s fault but mine. But, in my defense, let me state for the record that I was young, I was naive, I was stupid. I’m very sorry.

To the turkeys:

  1. Feb. 4, 2009 – My post of a YouTube video of a Snuggie parody that included the phrase WTF offended at least one reader who took the time to write me an email about it. I probably should have posted that the video was NSFW. But I stand by my original statement that I thought the parody would make a great Super Bowl ad.
  2. Feb. 24, 2009 – In a post titled Mapping the online world, I linked to a fictional geographical map of social media sites that I found on another blog. The map was posted on that other blog just a day earlier. But as I cleverly observed in my post, it “look[ed] like something drawn circa 2005.” Turns out, the map actually was ancient (in Internet time, anyway), as Kyle James and Liz Allen both pointed out in the comments.
  3. April 3, 2009 – I posted my picks for best albums of 2009, first quarter, and I’m embarrassed to see that I included Rusted Root’s digital-only release, Stereo Rodeo. I guess I was still infatuated with the fact that one of my once-favorite bands was attempting a comeback. But the newness of that release wore off quickly. I doubt I’ve listened to it since June. Oops.
  4. June 5, 2009 – I posted a whiny, self-righteous open letter to eMusic, complaining about the online music service’s new pricing structure and their sellout agreement to carry Sony’s back catalog. Guess what? I’m still a member of eMusic, paying more for less, and I’ve even purchased some tunes from the Sony back catalog. So, who’s the sellout?
  5. July 29, 2009 – I posted about the University of Waterloo’s rebranding campaign and dramatic logo makeover (Brave new logo [in a brave new world]), and applauded them for taking such a bold stance. Now it turns out the university has not adopted the new look. smh

Happy Black Friday to those of you who are doing your part to bolster our consumer-driven economy. And happy Buy Nothing Day for those who choose to opt out of the consumption frenzy.