2/ He grew up in San Fran, worked with the Oakland A’s baseball team and dreamed of being a professional player

3/ He has a 4 year old who wears hammer pants (and is obviously ruling)

4/ He has a desk top in his bathroom

5/ He has 1,6o0,oo0+ Twitter followers and is the 14th most influential person on Twitter

6/ He has been blogging for 6 years

7/ He is a big believer in the law of attraction

8/ He is bigger than you might imagine and wears awesome finger bling

9/ If you’re negative and don’t add anything to the conversation, he’ll block you

10/You and I can’t touch the concept of Hammer Time

Thanks Hammer for an great talk at the Social Media Club this week.

Dunno, but that’s what I’m calling it.  Between the Stellar* Blog, The Punch, Mumbrella, the Blogger PR Meet Up, and my continued consumption of online information, I did too much, I went too far, and I blogged myself out!  After retreating to my mental fortress (and Byron Bay) for a couple of months, I feel like I’m finally ready to re-engage. Well, at the very least I’m going to migrate my posts over from the Stellar* Blog.

In a new post on the Stellar* Blog I outlined some recent examples of the PR industry getting slammed.  As I explained in this post, rather than scrapping it out school yard style or engaging in a long, complex and futile argument, I’ve outlined a new manifesto for PR - what I and we at Stellar* will endeavour to live by. 

Why not put a stake in the ground and stand by something?  Why not be part of the solution?  Why not try and be better? 

The full manifesto is in the post.  My favourite point is number 1.  We promise not to be idiots or self important show ponies.

I’m interested to see how the manifesto is received.

This online Wall Street Journal article titled America’s Newest Profession:  Bloggers for Hire by Mark Penn reported some pretty interesting stats on blogging in America:

“The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click…”

The figures seemed quite amazing, almost too good to be true.  I kept thinking about them so I went back for another read and noticed that there were 40 comments listed.  Almost all comments rubbished the figures presented by the journalist and a couple of comments rubbished the journalist:  ”Mark you’re an idiot” was my personal favourite.

The counter arguments were well informed and although the journo explained his stats in a subsequent post his credibility was left in tatters as the saying goes.

Aside from being a juicy read, it was great to see lots of people challenging these apparent facts and publicly calling the journo to account.

Now, imagine that this article wasn’t online but printed in a traditional newspaper and distributed widely.

Without any counter arguments listed alongside the article, the majority of the population would have eaten this story up without question.  Some of the more switched on members of the population might have read it and questioned it but then what?  Write to the editor?  Maybe, if many complained, the newspaper would print a correction which would be buried somewhere on page 60.

Whatever the case, the article’s ‘facts’, being quite remarkable, would have been the centre of many conversations and the misformation would have been spread.

Not so online, and it’s about time!

There was a time when I assessed that I was pretty gifted in the intelligence stakes; probably in the higher percentile of the population (aim high, right?) and by all accounts, looking at a very bright future.

However, with the advent of blogs and social networks like LinkedIn I am now able to truly see how ordinary I am and how many smarter and more talented people there are out there - and not just in Australia, but on a global scale!!

Ok, so it’s one thing to ‘imagine’ that there are millions of people out there that could be better than you and it’s another to get hard evidence of their existence on a daily basis.

Belonging to a few groups on LinkedIn I have been explosed to literally hundreds of intelligent, articulate people all with more impressive titles than mine (particularily the Americans) and seemingly more knowledge.

But what can you do?  Well, then you can go home, jump on Facebook, and see that the world is made up of millions of people who are also better looking.  Awesome.

So thanks internet, thanks for nothing!

I clearly remember the first time I heard the term Web 2.0. I was shocked and confused. ”But I’m just doing Web.  What the hell is Web 2.0 and how did I miss Web 1.0?” I thought.  Likewise when I heard that PR 2.0 was the real deal when I was still fumbling around with plain old PR.

Sometimes I wonder when the 3.0s will arrive and who will decide when they do?  And in 10 years will I be doing PR 8.0?

Seeing as decimals are so hot right now, and seeing as we’re in the ‘getting to know you’ phase, being my first post on this fine looking blog, I though I’d summarise my life in decimals:

• Blogger 1.0: Started in October last year and love it. I write this blog, a work blog and there’s a wine blog on the w ay. I would be a professional blogger if someone paid me.
• Career 2.0:  Have been in PR for a while but moved focus into new media primarily because I’m not that fond of traditional media (…did I just say that out loud?)
• Thinker 2.0:  When I finished high school my UAI was so bad I never told my parents the score.  I just said it was best they didn’t know and they agreed.  Later I went to university and was awarded the Sir Asher Joel Prize for Public Relations at UTS.
• Relationship 3.0:  I’m coming up to three years with a nice young man I once hired as an office junior.  His last name is Tooth and he has some pretty excellent skills.
• Mortgage 1.0:  The aforementioned young man and I are the first year of owning our own place and I  now fully realise the meaning of the words mortgage stress.
• Fitness -1.0:  Is it possible to regress the decimal system?  I’m a shadow of my former fit self.  In the glory days I paddled outrigger canoes around Hamilton Island a number of times and completed two 42km  open ocean outrigger races.
• Snowboarder 3.0:  Have been at it for 14 years and have travelled the world in search of powder, boarding in places like Canada (Lake Louise/Banff, Whistler), New Zealand (Mt Hutt) and in Japan (Niseko, Hakuba and Nozawa)
• Food & Wine Lover 3.0:  A lot of research has been done here.  Many, many hours spent ‘in the field’ as they say.  I have drunk my way around most of Australia’s wine regions and have eaten my way around most of Sydney’s restaurants.
• Friend 1.0:  I’m not very good at being a friend sometimes, mainly because I suffer from ‘out of sight, out of mind’ syndrome and I don’t like talking on the phone.  I’m trying all the time though.
• Giver 1.0:   Yeah I’ve been stingy.  Now, thanks to the social web, I can share, share and over share.  So this year I’m sharing and I’m ‘paying it forward’ as some wanky agency people like to say.