I don’t make a secret of the fact I work from home. A client calling in is, for example, quite likely to hear me rattling around and making a cup of tea, or notice the television in the background when I’m walking through the living room on the cordless. However, given that homeworkers are generally perceived as being less professional, I generally try keep as invisible as possible facts like:

• My husband has hauled me out of the shower to take critical calls, leaving me standing naked in my living room, dripping water all over the carpet while getting verbal agreement to sign for a project;
• I occasionally take calls in bed, or go lie on the bed in the dark of the bedroom when really trying to focus on what someone is saying;
• My normal business attire is pajamas.

The dog, however, has no such respect for business clients. She also has no concept of telephone calls, so when I’m pacing up and down the hallway talking to someone, she tends to think I’m talking to her. Delighted, she races up and down behind me, wagging her tail and bouncing off the occasional wall.

On this particular evening, however, the dog stopped her racing around to join me on the bed, where she proceeded to roll around on her back while I talked and listened and talked some more, every now and then giving her a little pat to send her off into another spasm of ecstasy.

And at some point, the following conversation took place:

Client: So what do you think?
Me: Really interesting. The only issue is that it’s going to be… oh my God, Eimear, did you just pee on me?
Client: (pause) What?
Me: Sorry, my dog just… peed on me.
Client: (pause) Well, that’s the height of professionalism.

To be fair, it wasn’t that much pee.

Apparently the fact that Steve Jobs is an ego centric jackass is somehow news. It’s been highlighted lately by his rejection of a fan’s request for a photo while Jobs was out on the MacWorld floor:

Thinking a girl — in this case, a fangirl, me — will never get anything if she doesn’t ask for it, I lightly touched his arm and said “hi”. He looked at me, and I blushingly asked if it would be okay for me to ask if I could take a picture with him… He told me curtly, flatly that I was rude. And turned his back to me.

Every nerd boy on the internet is running around shrieking ZOMG, Steve Jobs is rude! (like that’s news) and totally missing the real story. The real story here is not the Steve Jobs is rude, it’s that Steve Jobs is gay.

Because the woman he turned down? Is Violet Blue. Not only is she the web’s leading “open source sex” blogger, vlogger, and podcaster; best selling author of titles like The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus and The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sex; sex columnist for the SF Chronicle and a UC Berkeley lecturer…

…but seriously, have you seen this woman? If she asked for a piece of chewing gum from my mouth, I would give it to her. And weep with gratitude.

Steve Jobs doesn’t know what he’s missing. Because Violet, she likes the geek boys. A lot.

While leading an internet-only life has numerous advantages, there are some drawbacks to getting all my news via RTE tweets, Mulley and Twenty Major. While they are all excellent news sources, they occasionally miss out on the most important stories of the year.

I woke up this morning fully intending to blog but having absolutely no idea what to write about. As it turns out, John Collins at the Irish Times has solved this problem for me by doing all the writing himself: there’s a very nice write-up of sabrinadent.com in the Blogspot spot of the Business Section. As I stopped consuming dead trees some time ago, I had no idea until Ina told me.

So if you’re popping by via the Times, dia duit. Please note that I can spell but not pronounce that, so as Mr Collins points out, I am indeed not very Irish. However, as I apparently also have an “irreverent style” and am “unafraid to pin my colours to the mast” perhaps I can be forgiven for this lack.

Speaking of forgiveness, I’d link you to the article online, except the Irish Times will charge you €2 for the pleasure of reading terribly nice things written about me. Normally, of course, I’d bitch about this but that seems downright churlish given the circumstances.

Instead, I’d like to invite you to simply cut out the middle man and give me the two quid instead. After all, I’ve already given them €2 for today’s paper (technically, the paper is only €1.70 but the queue was long and I couldn’t be arsed to wait for my change) so I think we’re all even there.

Is that suitably irreverent?

I was watching an episode of Criminal Minds last night where there was a montage about a physicist who was a brilliant theorist because he could see string theory in action, literally visualise it in action in front of him. It reminded me of (and was clearly lifted from) A Beautiful Mind, in which John Nash has a similar visual relationship with Group Theory. It is possibly worth noting that both of these guys, whilst brilliant, were also schizophrenic.

I am neither particularly brilliant nor particularly schizophrenic, but I can relate to the mind-mapping experience as depicted on film because I have a similarly uh, active imagination when it comes to organising information. This was particularly useful when working with vast government clients who had tons of information to distribute online; left alone in a conference room with a stack of notecards, I could break it down their information and lay it out in a flow of information architecture that was intuitive to the eventual site visitors because it was intuitive to me, even if wasn’t the way the organisation itself visualised or organised it’s own data. Mapping it mentally took no time at all; it was the writing out and physically arranging the notecards bit that could take hours.

In my little schizophrenic way, I have a handy knack for seeing, visually, how information should flow, to whom and from where, where it should enter and where it should leave.

It occurred to me this morning that this is there’s a kind of related intelligence businesses need when they enter social spaces like MySpace or Facebook - but rarely seem to have. The problem is that a lot of marketing people catch on to the latests buzz, like “everyone is on Facebook” and simply follow the herd. They turn up, create an account for their brand, and have no clearcut strategy on what they’re going to do there. I assumed, for example, that Ben & Jerry’s - an extremely personal brand ripe for Facebook - would have a storming Facebook strategy and a massive Facebook entourage. When I went to add them as a Friend, it was clear they had no strategy at all and, accordingly, 82 followers.

Needless to say, I didn’t add them as a Friend.

Contrast this with Greenpeace USA, which is working Facebook like a hooker on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. They get that people come to Facebook to interact with their friends, and that to have friends on Facebook, they need to give people something to interact with or something to do. In their case, they’re providing lots of video to watch and photos to share, plus posting on their own message wall. They are also participating in a viral giving campaign, and while they’re not raising a ton of cash, I’m pretty sure this campaign will be “shared” heavily on Facebook, effectively working as a native viral to increase the numbers of their 1,000+ friends.

The thing is, a strategy for Ben & Jerry’s on Facebook wouldn’t have been hard to formulate if they’d actually looked at how information flows inside that space. They didn’t, or if they did, they failed to understand what they were looking at and made some critical errors right off the bat.

• I love Ben and I love Jerry; they are my friends and I have consumer allegiance to them as personal icons of a brand and product I love. So where are the photos from the company’s history? Where are Ben and Jerry? Come to think of it, where is the ice cream?
• Their account is called Ben & Jerry’s Prudential. Prudential is an insurance company. I do not want to be Facebook friends with an insurance company, thank you very much. Thank God they didn’t call it Ben & Jerry’s Prudential Unilever…
• Their profile’s Information section is straight out of their annual report. It is totally corporate and utterly impersonal; it is the opposite of what Facebook is about. It fails on the platform.
• The only part I can relate to at all is the statement that “Ben & Jerry’s is founded on, and dedicated to, a sustainable corporate concept of linked prosperity.” OK so where are the eco news headlines, where is the sustainability campaign I can get behind?

With a brand like Ben & Jerry’s, you could have amazing viral reach on Facebook. A couple of grand invested in developing an app that lets people give each other free Ben & Jerry’s scoops or build each other ice cream cones would find a home on my Facebook page. They could help undo some of the brand perception damage from being associated with Unilever by creating a fantastic sustainability campaign on Facebook. They could do all kinds of positive things for their brand if they had half a clue about the space they’ve entered.

But they don’t. Ben & Jerry’s is lame. And they have no friends.

Registration for TechLudd is now open. The first event is on 24 January in Dublin, so if you’re interested in start-ups, funding, free beer, cool people, Paddy’s Valley, showing off your stuff or what have you, come along.

Go register already. Go. Shoo.

As British Telecom used to say, “It’s good to talk.” Especially when people are listening. Yesterday I wrote a blog letter to my new internet boyfriend, LuckyOliver, and the very same day Oliver wrote back to me, in the person of founder Bryan Zmijewski:

“Jesus, fine, I’ll pay for the popcorn. Stop nagging me, woman!”

No, actually, it was a great email and he was very cheerful and receptive to what I’d had to say. People who are able to be positive about criticism, assess it rationally and use it as an impetus for change (either internal or external) deserve a lot of kudos.

The internet means people are going to talk about your company, out loud and in public. As the Cluetrain told us way back in the day: you can’t control the conversation, so you’re better off just being part of it. When you try to control the conversation or spin the message, the internet will point at you and laugh. Out loud.

It’s awesome.

I don’t have a magic formula for making websites. I just have a few things I try to make clients understand in the “How To Make the Internet Not Hate You” process. And while I would love to make The Cluetrain Manifesto, for example, required reading for everyone I’ll ever come into contact with, I would also like world peace and a pony for Christmas. Of those three things, the pony is the most likely.

There are a handful of people out there who seem to really understand how the web, and websites, work. While I don’t always agree with everything Jeffrey Zeldman says, I always take away something useful when I read him. Recently it was this:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

That’s as good a definition of web design as I’ve ever seen. It’s also about a million miles from how most clients see it. People who want web sites made (or, increasingly, re-made) tend to almost universally see their site as a sales or marketing channel. They see nothing beyond that, and critically, they see only themselves. They don’t even really see the “customer” they’re trying to attract.

So my approach is to try to show companies how their goal - flagrant self-promotion and sales, sales, sales - is interwoven with some of the other key elements that go into building a website that does not suck:

Explaining things like conversation and transparency is really difficult, especially in a 30 minute beauty pageant corporate pitch. “Flow chart on a Power Point slide” is probably the method that kind of audience likes best, but I prefer a nice hand out they can take away so they can remember how you’re going to revolutionize their website.

There are about a million concepts and practices that are being shorthanded in a wheel like this one, but if you can get buy-in for this, it can help guide the whole process. Clients (at least smart ones) can see that if they don’t arrange content the way customers see it, they’re not focusing on their customers or promoting their company and products as well as they could.

The wheel actually works starting at any point and moving in any direction, but generally it works best to start with “Promote yourself, your company and your products well” because that is where your audience’s most immediate self-interest lies. How can they promote best? Moving in one direction, by focusing on their customers to arrange content intuitively, and speaking to visitors in a human voice instead of marketspeak. Moving in the other direction, by arranging content in a way that is accessible to visitors, and by making themselves accessible - often a much harder sell, but an easier one (I believe) when you can see how it helps the whole wheel hang together.

The sad truth is that sometimes you just won’t get buy-in from the client for a big-picture web project like this. At that point you can either take the high and mighty approach and walk away, or churn out yet another HTML corporate brochure. There isn’t no value to the brochure approach, it’s just that everything on the site except the contact page is normally of value only to the client. And, of course, to you, in the form of the cheque you cash on delivery.

My hope for 2008 is that we’ll see more big-picture web launches and fewer cheque cashing ones. I’m not really sure what’s required to push this kind of small revolution forward, but whenever I have the chance to present this idea, at least I’ve got a Power Point slide to back me up…