This story is getting a lot of attention, at least in Ottawa and Canadian political circles today. I encourage you to read the whole thing, including the online version.

But here’s a précis. Tom Spears is the science writer for my local broadsheet, the Ottawa Citizen. In March, he saw a news story that suggested NASA was flying research planes into snowstorms near Lake Simcoe, and that our own National Research Council might be involved.

You’d think this would be a good news story, right? Back in my time in university media relations, this sort of story was our bread and butter. But you’d be wrong. In some quarters, it feels like an annoyance that must be smothered under a pile of wet wool blankets.

As Spears recounts, his inquiry generated a 52-page trail of e-mails (which he obtained using an access-to-information request) among 11 people. At the end, Spears received an e-mail message that actually doesn’t mention snow, but explains where on the NRC plane the radar devices were located. Here’s the story that resulted.

I’ve embedded the whole sordid tale, but if you want to see his question and the eventual answer, here it is: 

The whole chain is in this Scribd document: A simple question, a blizzard of bureaucracy

Spears has chronicled (and I’ve chronicled his chronicles at least once) the misadventures of Canadian government communicators in the past. He’s talked about how government communicators wouldn’t take media calls for FIVE HOURS after a major earthquake that affected Canada’s capital city, and how they issued a media advisory for a briefing 25 minutes after the briefing began.

So what’s going on here?

• Some bloggers are fulminating about the culture of top-down control that they argue has created a culture of paranoia within the public service. Spears’s fellow Citizen writer Dan Gardner has related this case to his ideas around open and closed government. I think there’s likely something to that.
• I think there’s also a level of fear and loathing in government around getting something “wrong”, about making a “mistake.” In university media relations, the fact that our faculty had academic freedom insulated us. If the expert we found for a journalist said something outrageous, we wouldn’t get in trouble. If someone at the NRC said something untoward, there would be much kerfuffling, as can be seen by the comments in the Scribd doc around the omission of the Canadian Space Agency. So you copy the world on e-mails. You ensure that the higher-ups and the highest-ups sign off on everything. 
• There’s also the tradition that ministers speak for departments and that public servants do not. While in the past that hasn’t prevented scientists within the public service from speaking about their work, there have been rumblings that this is no longer the case. One of the  most prominent public calls for change came from the Canadian Science Writers Association during the last election campaign.
• But I also wonder if, for the political masters who set policy for departments and agencies, if there’s no upside from showing what government does RIGHT. It may be that there’s a spoken or unspoken belief that showing good stuff the government’s doing might lead people to think government agencies are valuable and/or worth preserving, which would fly in the face of our current government’s budgetary direction. If your ideology tells you that small government is the way to go, why show off success stories?

I suppose it’s not surprising to me that as I read this, I felt as much sympathy for the government communicators as I did for Tom Spears. They are likely as frustrated by the process as he was. Certainly, I noticed one of my Facebook  friends who is a government communicator wincing about the story.And my recent quest to find out information about the government using social media to monitor conversations about the seal hunt led to a similarly unsatisfying response e-mail from a communications officer, several DAYS later.

The saddest part of the email trail comes when the communicators begin to talk about a media visit to the facility next summer. Yes, let’s invite the reporter we just annoyed and treated poorly to come to look at our snowstorm research plane. In the summer. When it’s 40 with the humidex, and the last thing anyone want to think about is snowstorms, and the last story that an editor will accept is a story about snowstorms.

By my count of positions in the government’s electronic directory, there are more than 40 people working in communications at the NRC. I’d bet that if you set those folks free, told them to court people like Tom Spears — not with boozy lunches or junkets, but with really good stories — and make good news happen, they could and would. We did that when I was working in the university sector. It worked. Who woulda thought that if you give journalists good story ideas, they’ll pick ‘em up and run with them?

It’s unfortunate that ideology, bureaucracy, paranoia, or something is handcuffing our government and its employees and keeping them from doing so.

On April Fool’s Day, I was one of a bunch of people who announced that we had created a spoof site called PinPal, which promised to match up similarly Klouted and Pinterested people for loooove.

Hahahaha, right? April Fool! Well apparently the joke was on us.

Tawkify  is apparently a quite serious site, created by someone named “E. Jean Carr”, who writes for Elle magazine and someone else. Here’s their manifesto:

“Your Klout Score—which measures your online influence from your social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and Google+ —is just another way to calibrate your awesomeness. It’s a hipper, newer, fresher, more authentic, more modern, more romantic way to match your allure. Your Height? Your Weight? Bah! Soooo superficial. A Klout Score over 17 reveals that people find you so appealing that you inspire them to listen to the Adele song you just recommended or to share your comments about Jeremy Lin.” 

I think Jimmy Addison is hunkered down in some San Francisco law office right now getting some papers prepared for service. As if Klout didn’t have enough mess on its hands already, does it really need to be offering up a tacit endorsement of an online dating service on its corporate blog?

One more reason I’m happy to be happily living in sin.

So. I’m of an age when some hair begins to gray (and other hair begins to grow in unexpected places, but that’s another blog post).

Now, I don’t have two adorable little girls, and I’m in a relationship. So what do I make of this:

Or this:

Or this:

Shaving gear ads don’t get much better.

The gold standard, it seems, for razor ad storyboards is: guy shaving, guy shaving, graphics shot of razor cutting, product shot, shot of an adoring woman caressing the guy’s face and somehow magically implying he’s going to get the best sex of his entire life RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

Now here’s how they deal with shaving ads in another culture:

Notice the difference? The lack of ponderousness, the spoofing of popular culture memes (the Mortal Kombat video games), and even a subtle satire on sex roles (please say that three times quickly)?

Here are two images from the Just for Men website. The others are of a guy with a football, two guys in polo shirts having drinks…

I’m not writing this to slag off brands or to start a war. And, I’m guessing, brands like Just For Men or Gillette have research that tells them ads and imagery like this are effective. (Surely you advertising folk have the same expectations imposed upon them to demonstrate ROI that social media folk do… right?)

But it’s unfortunate that brands feel so compelled to associate themselves with such ridiculous and stereotyped characteristics, and to sell their customers so short.

In the same way that I observe these commercials, I see commercials for comparable women’s products. L’Oreal’s hair colour products use the tag line “Because we’re worth it.” Natural Instincts from Clairol: “discover just how gorgeous you and your hair can be!” Venus razors: “Discover the Goddess In You.” Seems to me that the commercials for women’s products focus on reinforcing positive images of the potential customers, while the products for men just make the association that if you use our hair dye you’ll get laid.

Why don’t some smart brands start to use the far more subtle messaging available in social media to actually converse with real men, who are able to comprehend arguments more complex than “If you shave with this razor, you’ll get a blow job?”

The backlash is burbling against infographics. For the last couple of years, these visual depictions of information have become more and more frequently used on the web. Seems you can hardly find a news release, a website, blog, tumblr, or whatever without seeing piles of infographics.

Sites such as Hubspot or Social Media Today have made near-constant use of them to illustrate various stories — or to tell the stories .

And that’s perhaps where the backlash begins. Katie Paine has identified bad infographics as her “Measurement Menace of the Month”, calling them “the Kardashians of measurement.” My friend Doug Haslam has created a Pinterest board called “Infographic Crimes Against Humanity” (and, to his chagrin, seen people re-pin the “crimes” as great infographics).

I think what’s happening here is a cycle of usage that I’ve seen happen a number of times in my time as a computer user / online denizen.

The cycle goes like this:

• A tool or communications medium is introduced. It’s expensive and/or difficult to do. (Think traditional page layout in the 1990s, early illustration programs, making presentations using transparencies or actual slides, word processing in the 70s, hardcoding HTML…or creating infographics)
  Implication: only specialists create using the tool. 
• Innovation and technology make the tool less expensive and easier to use.
  Implication: a small group of people start “playing” with the tool.  
• Some early adopters use the tool with great success, touting the “HEY! I DID IT ALL BY MYSELF!”
  Implication: people think “If that shmuck can _____, I can!” 
• Everybody jumps on the tool.
  Implication: some truly heinous things are created. 

• Backlash.

See:

When it comes to infographics, the current darling, it would be useful to remember that there’s a reason great infographics are great — it’s because skill and thought are put into their creation. Tools like Visual.ly don’t do the hard work of thinking through the information, any more than Pagemaker or Printmaster actually DID the design work, or Geocities or FrontPage created beautiful graphics.

I’m not against infographics. I love them. As long as they’re good. If they aren’t? Don’t use ‘em. If you can’t make good ones — either learn how, or pay someone who can. BREAK THE CYCLE!

I disagree with the Government of Canada on many things. So many I couldn’t begin to list them here.

So it’s with some surprise that I find myself… defending at least one of their actions.

A flurry of attention got given in my FB and other circles to this story recently:

“OTTAWA (NEWS1130) – The Harper government has been monitoring political messages online, and even correcting what it considers misinformation. One local expert says the government is taking things too far.

Under the pilot program the Harper government paid a media company $75,000 to monitor and respond to online postings about the east coast seal hunt.

UBC Computer Science professor and President of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, Richard Rosenberg, says it seems unnecessary for the government to be going this far.  “The government has a lot of power, that it feels the need to monitor public bulletin boards, or places where people express views and then to respond to that, seems to me going beyond a reasonable action the government should be taking.”

Rosenberg says knowing that the government is monitoring certain topics online could result in people being more careful with their identities when they’re posting about political issues on the internet.

He says it’s the first time he’s heard of this happening in Canada.”

There are 20 pages of comments on the story. Most are along the lines of this: