The Garage, the Switch and the Two Year Old

If there was another author by the name of Lewis, the Garage door opener would of been some outrageous gateway where Charlotte and I get to grow up and play with swords. Reality today was an early am trip to Home Depot, replacing garage door openers and dancing to live music at the Farmer's Market. As Charlotte picked up a piece of pizza and started swaying to an accordionversion of Pink Floyd, I realized without an i-phone, digital camera, and or a ipod that moment was mine alone to enjoy, no way to let everyone know with a quick shot and upload to FB.

That tension to share and be externally connected versus reveling in the moment, being present with everything and everyone around you increasingly draws my focus. After many days reviewing my personal brand with Bonnie and Melissa, the distillation reads like this:

Now his vocation is sharing his passion for global exploration of cultural and mountain landscapes and believes in building community through shared experiences of immersion in raw nature, which offers the one of best teaching environments.

There is more yet the essence it right there, which brings me back to that tension, without the shared experience can that really express why I do what I do? Another reality check came from a google alert(Sauron's Eye?) letting me know when my name appears on a website on a profile website called zoominfo. I clicked on the link and I saw fragments of a few jobs I previously held, my university degree and a professional membership. It actually asked me if I wanted to claim this profile, did that just imply anyone could of claimed that profile? I did not set it up, it was information swept up by this site found around the web, so I claimed it to avoid having my personal brand taken out of my hands.


I will claim the domain for my BGI beat, Travel Sustainably as it is a passion of mine and fits into my Marketing and Entrepreneurship projects. I am still figuring out my blog peers, which keeps me engaged with topics to write about as each new peer inspires new ideas. I feel a little closer to claiming my professional brand through this blog, my company, BC Adventure Guides and the company blog.

My question to the BGI peeps, does my brand reflect who you know and see, if not where does my branding need to go?

Branding and so on..

I have a confession, I hate tags and tag clouds. I watched TED's Jill Bolte Taylor talk,'A Stroke of Insight' and realized two important points on how I deal with information and the internet. First, I am a left handed, epileptic who suffered from a drug induced dyslexia and sensitivity to artificial light, the cat is out of the bag now. The results in my audio oriented information preferences, using podcasts and some video and a habit of listening to them outside. I also tend to use a few sites frequently and perform random searches when necessary. I know Google Reader and Delicious serve a purpose, yet they serve a certain set of people as well. My question, is system meant as a one size fits all? If I tag and filter will that make me use it more?

Bonnie brought out some points about my profiles I was not aware of from a branding perspective. She noted my attention to community and relationships as well as my passion for mountain culture and environment She also commented that my brand was closely linked to my profession and it should evolve into something larger than my job. For a long time I was identified with the company I used to work with and a year and half later that is finally starting to happen. What I am finding is the need to unwind my personal from my professional online brands and Bonnie was spot on with that assessment.

This made me re-examine the tags other people gave me: curious strength, holds safe space and thoughtful questions jumped out at me after letting them sit for a few weeks. This process is slower that I thought would be possible, I think my daughter will potty train herself by the time this makes sense to me. I am making strides and will roll out some surprises this week! One thing I did not do is create a bgi id simply because my brain is too small for multiple accounts let alone multiple personalities. 'The Avatar' makes me think of Dungeons and Dragons, which I struggled with as well and just stuck with comics. Again I stopped short of talking about characters as if they were real people. The comic fans that did made me feel uncomfortable, as if the van with traquilizers and strait jacket would arrive to take them away to a quiet place....

We are in trouble now.

After watching Danah Boyd about the digital divide in social media and the political oppression elsewhere, I felt a bit apocalyptic. I certainly felt like I literally was up a creek without a paddle given the scope of both problems and the limited reach social media currently has for real social change.

I fell a bit better now, with the paddle store and all.....buenos noches!

Google Sidewiki entry by Matt

Makes the expression head in the sand seem more relevant.

in reference to: The Associated Press: Saudis ask for aid if world cuts dependence on oil (view on Google Sidewiki)

Glen Plake and Personal Brand

I first saw Glen Plake in the Greg Stump Film, Blizzard of Ahhs. That experience showed many skiers the world of skiing steep, big mountains, which cracked open my reality and inspired me to turn skiing into a vocation as well as a passion. Glen provides a great example of personal branding with his signature mohawk, trademark american flag on his jacket and skis as he plays ambassador for the sport of skiing and K2 skis around the world. now he is the most recognizable figure in the sport.

As for branding, this has been my ongoing project since quitting my previous job at Mountain Madness and trying to separate myself from MM.My Twitter ID is serial skier, a play on words. While a serial killer repeatedly commits his or her crime, the serial skier commits to his or her passion as frequently as possible, hopefully with friends. I believe this works because it is the only thing outside the bedroom that gives me pleasure rain or shine.

For my blog, I chose Sustainable Skier meets...., recognizing my current direction life while alluding to the idea of a future fork in the road, not sure what that outcome would be.

For my company, BC Adventure Guides, the name took me a very long time to figure out. I played with my initials, different words for snow, travel, alpine and found the letters BC meant more than one thing. This was important to me as the connotation for most people's first impression was British Columbia, which I found useful since that was a positive image and a place most people I work and play with want to go. The denotation is back country, which is the destination for almost all the activities I sell my services for. The letters BCA also come from a popular brand of snow safety and travel gear which I haved used for many years and felt that alignment would help me with name recognition for a quality product.

Youtube now makes everyone a film-maker and twenty years later Glen and legendary Chamonix guide, Remy Lecluse, ski the peaks of Peru, my heroes! Am I creating the right identity? I feel comfortable with it so does Youtube fit in with this branding exercies? What about audio clips?


Enjoy the footage!

My New Beat-Sustainable Travel

I seem drawn to irony so naturally I chose Sustainable Travel as my BGI beat. It currently is a failed internship I attempted to do with a group called, Sustainable Travel International. They developed a certification program for sustainable travel practice for the entire travel industry, hotels to travellers themselves. They facilitate carbon offsets, help connect people with philanthropic groups to help while traveling. While they offer many services, the general public has little concept of what sustainable is or looks like. My attempted internship project was to create a social media campaign to make the genreal public aware of the tenets of sustainable travel and whatthey can to do minimize their impact while roaming the globe.

The dam broke and washed away my attention

Last week, I experienced a tsunami last week that took my time and attention span out to sea, now on its way to Hawaii. I actually found myself getting anxious with every visit to the channel, as I struggled to find readings, appropriate announcements and responses as well as missing both eluminate sessions due to work.

We need a google reader for the channel, standard syllabus formatting, a work scale to balance classes with each other, blah, blah, blah.... So I clocked out, forgot to answer my phone, read comic books for 24 hours and went to a college reunion. Nothing to tag or twit (do not worry I am aware there is a different verb) with which gave me sense of freedom to roam and anxiety about the mounting work load washing into my inbox.

I finally found my way back to school and read The Dunbar Number, which I felt comfortable with. My background in organizing groups in remote settings helped me feel like our inner primate still kept us from getting bogged down in big groups. Gifford brought up the optimum number in a creative session of seven which Chris spoke to when discussing Unstructured Trust. I believe there are many more factors why groups size is hard wired for survival and performance.

Like the arbitrators of social web knowledge, information as well as people seek flat organization that allows for autonomy and ownership of shared purpose. Teamwork at this scale does not require a single leader, just leadership. I see certain numbers repeat themselves in many contexts, 3,4,6,7,8 & 12 are used in every religion as a way to order important concepts, such as 12 disciples, 8 noble truths, 7 deady sins, 4 fold path and the holy trinity as just a few examples. What I see this as is unveiling our human software in the digital world, these numbers are what Dunbar helped with survival of groups.

I learned how Twitter creates back channels, which sound like a side conversation while another conversation or presentation is going on. The example used at a conference how the audience redirected the interview via back channel tweeting and eventually gave the interviewer questions they wanted answers to.

Power to the people, however the tags I added to delicious last week spoke to the other side of this activism, oppression for that same action by the governments of Moldova, United States and Iran in response to twitter feeds helping activist organize rapidly and mobilize to avoid police. A dangerous precedent which I have not seen a good response to. This seems like the creative commons has its head in the sands talking about good business practices, while the paranoid guys from the x-files are being arrested for using this technology for trying preserve what little bit of democracy is left.

Leaving political oppression via technology behind, the term, hashtag, presented itself in one of our Twitter Commons videos. While I followed the meaning of creating a tag that could help develop into a trend by aggregating more common words from tweets to a single tag. I could use some help here, how is this really different from another tag that catches the right word to help organize other tweets?

Will of Sustainability

William is simply a role model of will, if you want to do it, that is enough to get to work.

Personal versus Professional Branding

Interesting point that I have been struggling to commit to until now.

My professional brand is BC Adventure Guides, an intentional reference to British Columbia, while actually meaning Back Country, which believe it or not in my circle most people understand.

My personal brand is a little harder to pin down. I have thought of myself as a brand, just my professional life until now. I have not written down the list from class, which I misinterpreted the first part of the exercise so I am not sure if will actually align.

Circle-a space for change

A safe space in real time offers rich opportunity for experimentation. The Social web may possess the tools to accommodate these experiments. Let's break out the components:

• Moments of silence
• Appreciations
• Announcements
• Problems with Solutions
• Hopes and Dreams

Can online real time activity help anyone of these? We can link to projector and use the large screen to post information to the community, will this serve the same purpose, allowing other voices to speak on a more personal level? Let announcements became virtual, on screen for one or two circles simultaneously while allowing greater exploration of community appreciations, cpt, puzzles with solutions.

In a large class we can have a screen where students post their comments via google docs eluminate white board to questions while other students voice their answers so everyone can say something if they want.

I have more questions than answers. Will people take the introduction of a screen and media as an intrusion into personal space?

Intensive Moments

The voice in the community is just a little harder to hear now, it that true for the internet? Can BGI look at social media concepts to make sure we all heard? Can there be online appreciations on screen as well as real time? Can announcements become virtual and appreciations stay offline? Maybe two circles, one online connection?

Another issue for me, is the source the new generation of bloggers using information from word of mouth, wikipedia, footnotes? What constitutes an online footnote? This is not as simple as a link, since content changes or the material disappears over time leaving the source altered or gone. If one uses information directly from a source then that source should be cited so others can review the evidence.

Is this really an academic exercise or a way to create a baseline set of ethics? I see alot of soothsaying disguised as expertise.