Peter Shankman provides the gritty details about a very expensive marketing and communications consultant getting into hot water with a client for bad mouthing his home town via a global, networked, communications platform known as Twitter.

Further evidence that people don’t get punished for blogging (or tweeting in this case). They get in trouble for having poor judgment in what they write online.

The lesson for us all in using social media today is that privacy does not exist for personal commentary you chose to post online. Even things that you have restricted to just friends have a way of wriggling into the public sphere eventually.

Be careful out there and be prepared to back up what you post.

On the other hand, I do think the staffer at the client overreacted a wee bit to what was a rather innocuous, if stupid, comment of less than 140 characters. So he doesn’t like Memphis, life goes on.

Here are a couple of interesting programs coming up from people I know.

Andy Steggles with RIMS is doing a presentation on December 17 about how his association used a virtual world for a conference. The entire conference was in the virtual world, to be specific. Demonstrating the key concept of eating your own dog food, Andy is doing this presentation in the same virtual world. Registration form from the New York Society of Association Executives. Looks to be free and no info page up, but you can sign up now via the form. UPDATE: Here is a page with full info on Andy’s program.

Angie Katselianos is holding a very exclusive workshop in Milan Italy next May on Image Building for Professional Success. I met Angie this summer in Rhode Island at a workshop for professional speakers. She has an impressive approach to style and communication and the workshop described on her web site sounds like a wonderful life experience.

Robert Scoble recently posted this photo of the first web server. This was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s computer that he used to invent and deploy the first web site.

I love that there is a sticker on it to prevent the entire world wide web being turned off inadvertently!

Personal trivia: I once missed a tour of the CERN facility by about 30 minutes when I was an exchange student in Switzerland. I sat for an hour outside the birthplace of the web, waiting for my bus ride home. This was about two years before Berners-Lee had set up this server.

Jennifer and I had our second daughter this past weekend. Lily Lowe Gammel entered the world at 5:20 a.m. on Sunday, weighing in at 6 lbs. and 11 oz. Jennifer and Lily are both doing great. We’re slowly remembering all of our baby skills from when Ella was a newborn.

The rise and fall of the “bus plunge” story. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine

This is a great story about how the New York Times developed an internal cultural bias toward publishing stories about buses plunging off of cliffs anywhere in the world. It all started as a artifact of needing to fill up random empty spots in the layout of a newspaper page.

I have been absorbed watching the Katrina news the past couple of days. I fear that New Orleans may be gone forever, at least in its current incarnation.

The Katrina Wikipedia page is a great resource that is updated live (about every 3 minutes today) by many people sorting through hundreds of news sources. Check it out if you haven’t already.

If you sent me an e-mail last Friday and I haven’t responded, please send it again. My web host had an extended outage that had the site down for about half the day. I’m caught up on messages I received late last week, so if you haven’t heard from me I didn’t get it.

For my own future reference:

Tim O’Reilly checked with Cory Doctorow who checked with Lorna Toolis who checked with Barry Wellman who checked with Ren Reynolds and Ellen Pozzi who point out that there’s an NPR Talk of the Nation broadcast from 1999 where Gibson says, “As I’ve said many times, the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”

The actual citation:
NPR Talk of the Nation
30 November 1999
Timecode: 11min 55sec
Link: discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1067220
Also: http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgld=5&prgDate=30-Nov-1999

(Via Brainstorms.)

I like this definition of the purpose of coaching from the Management Craft blog.

Coaching in a business setting has four purposes:

1. Coaching should improve client coachability.
2. Coaching should help the client get unstuck and moving toward his or her goals again.
3. Coaching should enhance client self-awareness.
4. Coaching should facilitate breakthroughs.

That last one seems to be the real purpose in my mind. If not that, why do it?