A couple weeks ago I stood up in front of a whole bunch of people and explained that I was a failure. I told the story of how one of my online projects had been a complete, total, and epic failure. Is it counterintuitive to expose your mistakes? To be certain.

People like to be celebrated--and I’m no different--so the very idea of “outing” yourself as a failure all seems, at first glance, to be crazy. But think about how all successful communities feature some element of sharing success and failure.

Unlike religious communities, we don’t have high holy days to gather around. Unlike cultural communities, we don’t have a common food, dance, or art to flock to. Unlike geographic communities, we don’t have a physical space we commonly use.

Online people communicate in many spaces. I use my Wordpress blog here, my Twitter, and my Facebook as my three main digital rooms. Others prefer more gated and adaptable communities like Ning or stick-with-what-they-know-music-loving-MySpace.

In the physical space the so-called “social media community” has serialized events or one-off fundraisers. DemoCamp, BarCamp, ChangeCamp, Ignite, Social Media Breakfast, Third Tuesday, Social Media Book Club, TEDx, PodCamp, Twestival, and a whole host of others.

None of these spaces lend themselves to the natural airing of failures at the “actual” level rather than the theoretical or “ideas” level. Which is to say,  a group of action-oriented individuals saw a gap in the Ottawa event-market. A place for informal, serious, yet lighthearted examinations of online communications case studies.

Case Study Jam is the creation of a group of core “doers” in Ottawa, as they call themselves. These are people you see online everyday and attending  tech and “social media community” events.

I was pleased to be able to have a venue to get my personal online communications failure on the table.

The DailyBlogPost account came about as a "free idea" from Julien Smith, the Montreal-based podcaster and co-author of Trust Agents. So, I thought - great idea! I'll register the account. Everything after that went awry. It became a chore, there was no feedback from people, community didn't gather around this one-tweet-a-day account. In short, the idea had a kernel of good, my execution was what was wrong.

Here is how I heralded its arrival on my blog.

The short take on my personal FAIL:

• DailyBlogPost was a very bad attempt at a Twitter account.
• Being inspired by Internet superstar Julien Smith didn’t mean guaranteed success.
• I broke every rule I had learned with my personal Twitter account.
• I gave up. Thirty tweets in; I plum didn’t care anymore. Bad attitude.

You can listen to my whole presentation here (I think I was channeling @Julien that night; my presentations are usually more PG) and read the recap of the whole night lovingly crafted by the team at Case Study Jam.

Also, @DailyBlogPost is up for free again. Want to take it on? Fix my mistakes? Comment below (or just comment to add ridicule and scorn).

Friends of mine of online and off know my love of cupcakes. I started really turning them out after leaving Parliament Hill--Twitter and baking helped pass the time. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would find the San Francisco and Toronto versions of Cupcake Camp and help bring the unconference to Ottawa on March 29 last year. Over 3000 cupcakes arrived at Jack Purcell Centre that rainy spring afternoon and a bunch of money was raised for a great charity.

So, to answer the many tweets and emails: Yes, Capital Cupcake Camp is coming back!

Last year, @Sobbee, @RantingNRaving, and @Snobiwan (Tanya, Nicole, and Andrew...) and I met week-after-week in coffee shops to pull this event together.

A quick Capital Cupcake Camp primer:

• It’s an open source event
• It’s about cupcakes. No more. No less.
• You can bake them, or just eat them.
• It’s a bit chaotic.
• Milk is served.

Click here for the MediaStyle.ca event round up from last years event.

The biggest lesson I learned from organizing an (un)conference experience was: you can never be too ready. This is where you come in. If you aren't planning on baking cupcakes this year and have 10 hours or so to spare: our first organizing meeting for version 2.0 will be next Thursday night in Centertown Ottawa--please email me ian [at] mediastyle.ca for all the details.

Last year we raised just over $3000 for Women Alive--And, in 2010 with the cupcake-scene in the Capital just heating up, I’m pretty sure Ottawa is ready to bake harder than ever.

Rebbeca Flemming wrote a fantastic article for The Globe and Mail about how she wasn’t the start of the Gordon Lightfoot death hoax. You can find it here. She deals with the situation with a fine wit and a literary flare. Although, one portion has slightly too much artistic license for my taste.

Specifically, I feel compelled to respond to this:

“By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink.”

First, it’s not a “witch hunt” when you are trying to explain, analyze, and investigate the start of a hoax.

And, let me be very clear: While I had all of Flemming’s personal information moments after I sorted out she was the first online to declare Lightfoot dead; I only posted her then-deleted Twitter account handle. I also did not allow the posting of her name, GEDS information, or other personal data that was not connected to the @fleminski Twitter account (two commenters referenced the Google cache of @fleminski that revealed her full name). The photo mentioned was her Twitter avatar snapped via the Twitter search.

I received over 10 comments that I didn’t post that day because of their personal nature. Until today, I hadn’t had Flemming’s full name on my blog. Just wanted that to be clear that it’s never my intention to drive people to drink--unless in celebration.

The real story of who is behind the Gordon Lightfoot is sort of like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Each media outlet has a little bit of the puzzle, but there is still a bit of a mystery.

First, Facebook played an unseen role in this drama. The social networking site has become the go-to place for public grief, so it’s no surprise that it helped set off the first alarm bells about the “death.”  The source of the first digital mention? Ronnie Hawkins' wife, Wanda.

From Sean Michaels' article in the Guardian (emphasis mine):

This will have come as a relief to Ronnie Hawkins, the musician whose backing band became the Band. A friend of Lightfoot's, he was quoted in the early Canwest story, confirming the news. Hawkins said he had received a call from his management in Minneapolis, who had in turn received a call from Lightfoot's grandson, telling them the singer had died. "I don't know Gordon's grandson," Hawkins later told the Globe and Mail. "I didn't even know if Gordon has a grandson. I called my wife in Florida and told her, and I guess she faxed some of her friends and now, all of a sudden, it's all over the world. It's terrible. I can't even get hold of Gordon. Holy smoke, it's unbelievable." ... Hawkins suggested they trace the phone call to Minneapolis. "I think they can trace that phone call, maybe, and see who did that," he said. "I'm glad it is a sick joke, but it's bad."

Several sources have now confirmed that the prank call to Hawkins' management set the ball in motion, and this is when Wanda Hawkins took to the phone, fax machine, and Facebook.

This is where our Ottawa tweeter, @fleminksi, comes in. She knows a close friend of Wanda Hawkins. Our Ottawa tweeter's friend shared her grief on Facebook. The Ottawa tweeter in turn expresses her grief on Twitter and concurrently (and unrelated) CanWest is on the phone with Ronnie Hawkins--who no doubt believes his wife--and expresses his grief to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, this confirmation triggers an “alert” to go out across the CanWest newswire and CanWest reporters across Canada start tweeting it.

David Akin has some reflective and characteristically classy words about all of this on his blog.

And as Media Memo’s Peter Kafka says: Twitter didn't kill Gordon Lightfoot, Big Media did.

But say it is true. Twitter still didn’t force Canwest, the big Canadian media conglomerate, to publish a wire report that said the singer was dead. As best I can tell, it was that story, which was picked up by various Canwest newspaper sites, that convinced people that Lightfoot had croaked.

As Kafka says, this doesn’t suggest that CanWest is off the hook for not double or triple sourcing their facts. And, had an editor at CanWest News Service jumped onto the Twitter search, they too could have found--in well less than 30 minutes--that Lightfoot was alive.

Here is the point I think people should be very clear on: while the tweet from @fleminski came first, it certainly wasn’t what set off the nearly 3,000+ tweets in two hours. That is most certainly the fault of whoever pressed the “go” button on the CanWest wire alert.

All in all, only one person should be very happy about all of this: Gordon Lightfoot. His radio play hasn’t been this big in decades and he just successfully introduced himself to a generation of Canucks who thought he was already dead.

Update:  Some added information from a friend of the "Ottawa tweeter" at ThreeSeven.ca

However, it appears that the mainstream media jumped on it. Within half an hour of tweeting, Fleminski received a phone call from a reporter from CanWest (1. holy sleuth work, and 2. boundaries much, media?) asking for the source. She replied honestly: Ronnie Hawkins. The media then called Hawkins who confirmed the story. Believing they had a confirmed story, the media then ran with it.

A vibrant and energetic crowd filled Parliament Hill today where Shawn caught up with the CBC's Kady O'Malley to get her take on the protest and what it's like live-blogging these types of events.

O'Malley on the prorogation protest from Shawn Dearn on Vimeo.

It’s been a busy day. When I wasn’t freezing and tweeting at the Ottawa protest, I was tracking the crowd-counts from across Canada. With 32 communities that I could find tweeted reports on; I estimate that over 25,000 people rallied against the Prime Minister's decision to prorogue parliament. I’ve uploaded and embedded below a PDF with the community totals and my methodology. I'm hoping to continue to add to the list, please comment if you have numbers from cities not listed (or if you have a correction.) Update: as of Sunday at 8:00 am I have added 7 more communities; including New York City and St. Johns. I'm still looking for smaller communities to report. About twenty listed events could push it to over 30,000. Again, please comment with corrections or more information.

Estimated Crowd Attendance for #CAPP Rallies

To provide a visual look at today’s Ottawa protest, this is Gregory Pang’s shots of the demonstration today from Flickr.

And lastly, a quick look at the instant popularity of the #noprorogue hash tag on Twitter.

Two incidents have official Ottawa buzzing about "social media" and the far reaching implications of these new communications tools:

First, the Yes Men pulled off a complex stunt aimed at confusing the Canadian delegation - it worked by leveraging common internet behavior and trust of major media; much of the media focus has been on the hoax itself - thereby drawing attention to Canada’s laggard status on climate solutions. It worked so well, the Prime Ministers press secretary Dmitri Soudas pounced on the wrong environmentalist and made himself look like a fool.

Second, a photoshop contest over at Liberal.ca has gone awry. As Taber and O’Malley report the official opposition site posting a manipulated image of the PM getting shot, well this simply made the Liberals look like fools.

Neither of these stories are really about social media - oh, sure they have aspects where social media/internet communications helped along the story - these stories are really about unforced staff errors. The worst kind of political staffing mistake.

Soudas made an unforced error in screaming at a well known activist. And, the Liberals made an unforced error by failing to see that assassination isn’t funny. Apologies all around and move on folks: social media isn’t the problem. Foolish behavior is.

Jane Taber has reported New Democrat MP Charlie Angus wants to ban Twitter on in the House of Commons.

She reports:

“Charlie Angus wants MPs banned from Twitter just “to save politicians from looking like idiots.” The Northern Ontario New Democrat is serious…”

Later quotes Angus as saying:

“I would like Members of Parliament to put the inane little games away and get down to [the] business of serving their representatives. When I saw that Twitter, I was appalled because I thought it could happen at any of our committees,” he said in the House of Commons.

Suffice it to say the post leaves the distinct impression that Angus want to keep MPs off Twitter.

As most will know, I worked with Angus since his first election to the House of Commons until I left the office a year ago. I was there for some of his most memorable fights: flag pins, the fight for Kashechewan and the copyright fight.

So, needless to day I was a but surprised to hear Angus was the MP behind a push to ban Twitter on the Hill.

Or, wait? Was he? I emailed the copyright freedom crusading MP from Northern Ontario with this missive under the heading: Sigh, a Twitter ban?

Who are you? Where did my old Chuck go? The one who loved his Facebook and directly talking to his people. Don't ban it. Embrace it. Call me if you want me to teach you how. Free. Love, Ian.

Here is his reply:

I don't want a ban on Twitter.

Let the digital masses know I will fight to the death for the right to hear Ujal Dosanjh's digital babble about whether to eat soup or not to eat soup… I just don't want to hear about it during my committee meetings.

This makes me think I might host a "banal tweat of the week" for MPs who are challenged in the relevance department.

I promised on LiVE 88.5 FM this morning a quick-start guide to getting going on Twitter.

I’ve boiled it down to five terms, three key action steps and three strategies you can you to find people to follow on Twitter. As I said on the radio, Twitter is only one little part of what is known as “social media.” If you can update your Facebook status, you can use Twitter.

I’d love to hear your questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. If you are already a Twitter user, I really want to hear from you. What have I missed? Where did you go right/wrong? Tell your Twitter story to the Live 88.5 listeners.

Twitter Primer: 5 key terms

Here are the five Twitter terms you should know:

1. Tweet: the 140 character message
2. Tweeter: you, once you tweet (see above)
3. Twitter Application: a tool (online or off) to manage your tweets and “friends” in some manner
4. RT: re-tweet; the act of “re-tweeting” is almost like forwarding an email
5. @ reply: like in email, again the “@” tells your tweet where to go (i.e.: typing @iancapstick in your tweet will direct that tweet to me)

For a full glossaries of Twitter terminology:

• Huge list of Twitter terms, hint just add “tw” in front of common terms
• Mashable explains 66 Twitter terms
• Business Week’s take on Twitter words

Three Key Action Items

1) Visit Twitter.com; sign up choosing a user name carefully. I use my real name (@iancapstick) others prefer using a handle, or nickname. Using a real photo of yourself and filling in the profile (including linking to your website, or another online profile like LinkedIn will help people get to know you.)

2) Find an application to help manage your tweets

Think of Twitter applications like your kitchen drawer at home.

Some perform only one function - like a gadget that only peels tomatoes - (Twitterfeed is a good example of this, it takes RSS feeds and turns them into tweets.) Other tools are more like a versatile; like a chefs knife. What you are looking for in an Twitter management application is the ability to sort the people you follow into groups; ease in posting links/pictures/video and a stable and reliable platform. I’ve experimented with five applications recently; in order of my preference.

1. TweetDeck; runs on Adobe Air (all platforms)
2. Hootsuite; web-based (all platforms)
3. Tweetie; stand alone; Mac & iPhone
4. Seesmic; runs on Adobe Air (all platforms)
5. CoTweet; web based (all platforms)

3) Use it. The more you invest in Twitter the more you get out of it. Conversations are important. In fact, conversations are the backbone.

Three strategies for finding folks to follow

Overview: When following people this is the one time where using the Twitter.com website may be the most efficient method to use the service (just remember to sort the people using a Twitter application you found in step 2); also don’t start following people until you have put out a few good tweets - show people some links you like; a news article of interest - bottom line: rarely will people follow a blank page.

1) Find friends (Yes, I mean your real friends) look at who they are following. Your friends, family or coworkers have chosen to include these people in their network on Twitter; you probably know some of them; and if you don’t review a page or two of their tweets and decide if you want to follow them.

Find friends using Facebook. It’s pretty clear these days who is using Twitter to update their Facebook profiles; start with those folks. Ask them who else they like to follow.

If you use Gmail, AOL or Yahoo mail you can ask Twitter to search you contacts to see if any of them are using Twitter.

2) Find like-minded people: using search.twitter.com; start typing in key words and see who comes up; before long after reviewing people profiles and tweets - you will create your own informal (or more formal) criteria for who/how you follow

• The more specific your key words the better your results will be.
• Use the Advanced search to narrow your searches even more; or by location.
• We Follow also offers a location based tagging, here is the “Ottawa” tag.

3) Find Communities or companies and connect with them via Twitter, chances are your union or an NGO you care about is using the system; again take a look at who they are following to find new people to hear from

• Mashable reviews the top 15 Twitter directories
• Several directories of Canadian political tweeters exist for political minded people: PoliTwitter.ca; Tweetcommons.com

Todd Defren is a real leader in social media marketing; he created the social media release template (in 2006) and is principal at a ground-breaking creative agency SHIFT.

He is also one of my favourite people to follow on Twitter, but last night he riled me up with a link to a less than complete list of “social media marketing leaders”. Why was it less than complete?

As I responded to Defren: “Gross. 2 of 20 are women. This list hardly seems worthy of your retweet; even if you are on it.”

In retrospect, not the nicest tweet ever. But my point stands.

True to form; Todd responded: “Come up with a better list, I'll happily tweet it like crazy.”

In response to the challenge to balance things out; here are twenty women who are social media marketing leaders:

Who else could be added to this list? Who inspires you in the social media sphere?  Please let me know in the comment section.

Other women suggested by commenters:

Direct from the floor of convention. Think of me as an online colour commentator. Here is a bit more about the MediaStyle NDP Federal Convention coverage plans and how I’ll be contributing to the conversation online and in Halifax:

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