Okay, so I admit, this is borderline narcissistic, but when I saw Kris’, I couldn’t resist.

Here’s what you do: go to www.myheritage.com and try out their nifty face recognition tool, and build your self a collage (the site is remarkably easy to use, if you want to have some fun with this).

Anyway, here’s who I apparently look like:

So who do I look more like, people? Dirk, the mighty German or Alicia Silverstone?

Via the Blogaholics, these wind powered moving structures have word of mouth written all over them.

Update: Embedding YouTube videos still isn’t working, so click the link above to feast your eyes on these great ads from South Africa.

At BarCamp this weekend, I sat in on a half-hour presentation on what the presenter, Jason Billingsley (can’t find his name on his site he dropped by to comment, below) called Seo and the Long Tail (with a nod to Chris Anderson).

His message was pretty simple: You have access to only a few meta-tags and description for SEO, so make them count for you. Then, fill in ALL of the gaps with content, by becoming an expert on the topics that are related to your business. And wherever possible, those that are unique to your business. An example he used was that a search time like “digital camcorder” would be impossible (and extremely expensive) to rank #1 on, but a “long tail” term like “the best digital camcorder for scuba diving” will not only be easier to own, but will convert better than the more broad terms.

Just to explain that really quickly, the concept is simple: If someone searches for “digital camcorders,” it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what they want, so there is a snowball’s chance in hell that the first site they look at will have what they’re looking for. Whereas a search term like “how do I get people to tell ten friends about my company” is several steps closer to being a perfect match for the searcher. (Heheh)

At the presentation, there was much discussion among the brains there about the science of SEO, but I think his point was to not lose sight of the “art” of search: use words, publish relevant content, and people will come.

A few examples:

My Alabama buddy Mack Collier is #1 for the search term “why companies should blog.” Lucky devil.

Here’s some terms people used to find me this week:

1. “breakfast social networking toronto” -Huh? Qu’est-ce que c’est?

2. “meet pr guys” -Okay, this one is cool, and proves my point some.

3. “need glasses myspace” -They were searching for a video, and found me. Who knew?

4 “tell friends about products through myspace” -Not a topic I’ve covered, but certainly words I’ve used.

5. “friends of katherine mcphee” -I can’t help but think this one has more to do with my friendship with JD than anything else, (I was a closet Soul Patrol member, after all) which reinforces the importance of links too.

Anyway, I think you begin to get the point. Speak, dear friends, and the world will listen. And I do mean the world. This week, my humble rag saw traffic from Meeandah, Rome, Istanbul, Contern, Theux, Wolfsheim, Alameda, Brittania and one of “the other” Surreys, just to name a few. And I’ve never heard of most of those places. If you’re reading and you hail from any of these wonderful locales (or something equally obscure to a West Coast Canadian), leave a comment and tell us more about your corner of the earth. We’d love to hear from you.

Update: Andre took better notes from Jason’s presentation than I did, and Jason has done a follow-up on his blog as well.

I’ve seen this little tool making its rounds of the blogosphere, and vowed I would waste a minute or two with it as soon as I had a chance. The Monday morning coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, so instead of thinking, I used this to build a new Web 2.0 logo. Tell Ten Friends already has a slick logo built by Rob, so rather than blaspheme his work, I built this one for YoboMedia, the company my wife and I started last year for our various small media projects:

After all this time, we’re still in beta! I saw Sean had tried it last week, and this week it was Joe Thornley who gave it a whirl, and so I figured it was my turn. If your image needs a makeover and you have a $0 budget, why not use this?

People will think you paid a branding company a small fortune for it!

Estimated time to build: 7 seconds.

Well, here I am at BarCamp Vancouver. After some difficulties getting wireless access here at Workspace, (great spot, in Vancouver’s Gastown) we are now live to the world. First I quickly uploaded some shots to flickr, and then I got busy writing. I feel like I’m back in my days as a reporter, taking pictures like crazy and jotting notes to later file my story, except that now the process is instantanious.

(Back of BarCamp Vancouver T-shirt)

It is 11:30, and my friend Nathan is doing a presentation on Ruby on Rails. I’ll give him the attention he deserves and update again in a bit.

And…publish.

12:00 lunchtime, and I’m typing away quickly so I can get up and meet some more people.

A few notes about last night: There was a BBQ at bryght, where I finally met Kris Krug, end enjoyed some free beer courtesy of Adhack. (Thanks James) The count so far: Free beer, free wireless, free t-shirt, free food and free open source presentations from very informed people. Not bad for a suggested donation of $20…

12:30- Back on again. I met Kate! Her blog, mynameiskate.ca is also on the Top 20 WOM blogs in Canada. I thanked her for the link, and she thanked me for the click-throughs she got from mine! (then we joked about how we’re both addicted to our site stats) It’s cool to say thanks for that kind of thing in person, and put a face to the blog.

1:00- SEO and the Long Tail. This is the stuff! Didn’t get his name, but he was preaching the idea of publishing fresh content to access the “long tail” of internet search. In short: blog, and thou shalt be found. Sound familiar?

2:30- Back-to-back-to-back presentations, loved the “Tagging for World Domination” chat. Picked up some great social bookmarking tips, and got a quick demo of ma.gnolia.

Update: At about 4 pm, I started to feel a bit tuckered out, so packed up and headed for home. Wireless was intermittent, and I am only just finishing this post now.

(me at BarCamp, taken by Nathaniel Brown with my camera)
It was great day, and I can’t wait for the next one. Learned too much to be able to process it all, and met come cool “internet folks” like Andre Charland (who was sitting behind me when I saw a picture of him come up in kk+’s feed. That was good for a laugh. Also met Roland Tanglao (whose pics of the event are many), Darren Barefoot and James Sherrett, among others. I have had quick email exchanges with them all, and read “behind the scenes” in the Google Group for the event organizers, so it was neat to introduce myself to the people behind the blogs, the pictures, etc.

(Roland Tanglao photo)

I’m hooked. When is CaseCamp again?

Here’s one of me skiing, taken by Rob Masefield.

I’ll upload more in a few days to my flickr account.

Just one sleep until BarCamp Vancouver. (The Barbecue part at Bryght, anyway) Should be an action packed weekend, and there are 120 Vancouverites attending. Not all will get a chance to present, so I expect to contribute by asking lots of questions and finally doing my first live-blog.

Watch for that, should be fun!

And we just couldn’t be prouder. This is exactly the kind of list that I really want to make. After all, it’s niche, it’s now and it’s, well…Canadian.

Not only that, but being mentioned in the same post with the likes of fellow Vancouverite Darren Barefoot and border-jumpers like Malcolm Gladwell and Tara Hunt is just damned cool in it’s own right.

Let me be the one to say what Sean is too humble to: His is the Number One Word of Mouth Blog here in Canada, such is his commitment to the concept. Glance at the right to my categories and you’ll notice that it’s a topic I revisit regularly, (although the small number of examples since the switch to Wordpress aren’t much of a sample size) but not with the same vigor and attention to detail as Sean Moffitt of Buzz Canuck. Keep up the good work Sean, I’m learning a lot from you, from all the way over here on the West Coast, and I’m glad to know that you drop by the blog from time to time for a read.

Cheers!

And now, I republish Sean’s carefully researched list of the Top 20, in his words, to give us all a bit more Google Juice:

The Top 20 List:

David Jones @ PR Works
Kate Trgovac @ My Name is Kate
Colin Mckay @ CanuckFlack
Mitch Joel @ Twist Image
Michael Seaton @ The Client Side
Michael Ferguson @ Home is Where You Hang Your @
Leesa Barnes @ Podonomics
Ken Schafer & Company @ One Degree
Joe Thornley @ ProPR
Tamera Kremer @ 3i
Darren Barefoot
Susan Abbott @ Customer Experience Crossroads
Jordan Behan @ Tell Ten Friends
Susannah Gardner @ Buzz Marketing with Blogs
Stuart Macdonald
Matthew Ingram
Mark Evans

Canucks Emeritus- well-informed Canucks who’ve fled across the border:

Malcolm Gladwell
Grant McCracken @ This Blog Sits At The…
Tara Hunt @ Horse, Pig, Cow

Of and of course myself, foolish oversight, damn that’s 21 now…

Word of Mouth is alive and well in Canada. Big thanks to Sean for leading the pack.

I’m about to be away from my desk for a couple of days, so you’ll be spared my rhetoric for a spell.

In the meantime, I wanted to invite you to sign up to receive my email newsletter, which should be dispatched shortly after I return from my trip. There’s a subscribe form for you fill out, and each issue will come with an unsubscribe link if you’re not seeing the value you were looking for.

Regular readers might see some cross-over material from blog posts, but it will be fun content nevertheless.

I hope to return to lots of wonderful new subscribers, and perhaps even some suggestions for newsletter content. Thanks in advance, and I’ll post again very soon!

Cheers,

Jordan.

Had a busy day today, started at 7 am with a networking breakfast, and that was followed by another quick meeting and then a consulting session with some clients (a team of three).

I’m a bit tuckered out, but today really drove home the point for me that although you can never reach as many people in person as you can with online tools, person-to-person contact (especially in business, obv.) is still number one. After a long day of shaking hands, meeting new people and making presentations, I feel like it was all time well spent. (I hope my colleagues feel the same way about the time they spent with me!)

I’ve met some exciting new clients these past few weeks, and I’ll be rolling out the result of some of our recent work soon, so watch for that.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a thought: The reason why I felt today was so productive and fun was that I made so many connections with the people I want to do business with. The same principles apply to online networking and marketing tactics, except that the technology makes it possible to make more of those connections.

And speaking of online networking tools: I’ve just done a re-jig to my MySpace page, (thanks to some code from Rob) and it’s looking more and more like my main site all the time.  Had to change my headline on there too, because as Mack points out, MySpace now has over 100 million users.