Berlin is surely the coolest city on earth. Erika La Tour Eiffel (AKA Erika Mauer) was my next-door neighbor for a while in Berlin.  She is an Objectum Sexual and here is her story! (You can watch all of the episodes here):

Don’t let the unique nature of her sexual orientation to turn you off to her.  She’s a badass and have accomplished amazing things in her 37+ years. She is coo, she is creative, and she is unique, for sure! I like her, she’s cool and doing cool things and definitely living her life her way.

Erika “Aya” Eiffel is authentic, amazing, and a world-class Olympic archer and was trained in Japan in the art of the Samurai sword and was actually conferred a world title in Soga-Ryu iai-batto-jutsu, san-dan (3rd level black belt) in Toyama-Ryu iai-batto-jutsu, and san-dan in the Zen Nihon To-Do Renmei:

From Erika “Aya” La Tour Eiffel’s Bio

I always had a fascination for weapons. Strange you say? Strange enough, that it lead me to start martial arts. I wanted to learn to use the Japanese katana. My plight eventually took me to Japan to study with the true masters of Japanese sword fighting. A few years ago my back nearly won the battle but after seven months of rehab, I returned and won a World Title and became the youngest instructor in the art of Soga-Ryu iai-batto-jutsu. I continued my love of the Japanese sword and earned the rank of san-dan (3rd level black belt) in Toyama-Ryu iai-batto-jutsu and also achieved san-dan in the Zen Nihon To-Do Renmei. I know, I know, I need start a webpage just dedicated to my other life as a swordswoman in Japan!

How cool is that?  Amazing!  Well, it doesn’t stop there… Erika “Aya” Eiffel transitioned away from swordsmanship to becoming an Olympic archer using her beloved recurve bow, Lance:

Archer Spotlight on Aya La Brie By Steve Ross

Having only started her archery career four years ago in 1999, Erika “Aya” La Brie had a tremendous year competitively in 2004. She was part of the Women’s Compound Team that took home a gold medal and new world record at the World Target Championships in New York City this past July. At the NAA Nationals, she shot both recurve and compound taking 10th and third place respectively. Aya also shoots the modern Longbow, traditional Japanese bow and is skilled in martial arts. I managed to catch Aya during an archery “holiday” due to a mountain bike accident.

USAA: I heard you recently had a serious mountain bike accident. What happened and will it impact your archery plans for the rest of the outdoor season?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: Well, I prefer to commute on my mountain bike as a form of cross training for my archery and last Wed. was no different. I was crossing a street on the walk signal and a truck came from the outside lane and turned in front of me. He sent me sailing when I tried to veer and brake. I flipped twice and crashed in a heap in the middle of the street. He paused only long enough to see if I was alive and sped off once I sat up.

I ended up with three mashed ribs, elbows, knee and ankle and large scrapes on my back. Fortunately, I always wear a helmet, which cracked. Otherwise, I have no crippling injuries. However, it did put a damper on the IBO Worlds, which I had to fly to the next morning followed by a five-hour drive. I managed to shoot but was in a lot of pain the whole weekend. Since my return, my training has been put on hold for the next few weeks to let my ribs and knee heal. I have never taken more than two weeks off from training and will have to rely on mental imagery until I can shoot again. Mental training helped me earlier this year when I was hospitalized for two weeks. All the experience gained from this year will help put together a good regimen until I’m ready to hit the range again.

USAA: I’m glad you’re ok and will only need a short break. You have had a fantastic year; shooting on the women’s compound team that shot a new world record must have been great.

Erika “Aya” La Brie: “Fantastic year” is more of an understatement to describe the year I’ve had! I started archery with recurve in 1999 and shot for one year before an injury forced me to shoot with a release if I wanted to continue shooting. So I picked up compound and shot for a year until last year when my hand healed and I could shoot fingers again. I switched back to recurve and made the U.S. World Field Team and alternate for the World Indoor Team. However, after shooting the Vegas Shoot this year with compound and recurve I decided I wanted to shoot both bows for NAA ranking. I had already decided I would shoot both bows at the Target Nationals, so I needed to divvy out the USAT events between both to meet the requirements. Indoor Nationals was the first step for my compound and decided the AZ Cup would be the second. The rest of the season would be recurve. Famous last words…

USAA: Tell me about shooting at the World Target event; do you treat it any different than just a normal FITA event?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: I was still in a dream-like state when I arrived in New York after making the U.S. Compound Team. I never ever imagined I would win the FITA and OR at the Arizona Cup, Texas Shootout and Gold Cup! Now I was standing on the shooting line at the World Target Championships!

All my FITA’s up to that point, I had trained myself not to fear the consequences of my shooting because I shot only for me. If I shot poorly, surely I would not shrivel up and die. Now for the first time I felt the weight of being on a team and representing the USA. My teammates were all experienced veterans and after having some difficulties on the first day of the FITA, I was afraid I would not be permitted to shoot the team round as the coach and other members questioned my experience. I pushed myself even harder and achieved several personal bests in the FITA and the matches. Now I felt that I had to prove myself to my team and to my country. To my greatest relief, the coach chose me to be the starting shooter in the team round. Since I was a rookie and had no expectations other than to shoot my best, I feel very blessed that I share a world record and have a gold medal.

USAA: Did you do any special training?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: Two weeks prior to the World Target, I moved to the Archery International Training Center in Carbondale, Ill. I worked on my backup bow and practiced shooting matches and having to deal with equipment failure etc. Good thing because I had to use my backup bow for one of the team matches. But not all my training was for the Worlds. I also had to train for the ESPN Great Outdoor Games, which was held just prior to the worlds. The Games required a speed setup and also a considerably faster shooting style than I use for target.

USAA: I don’t know of many archers who in the matter of just a few years are competing at the level you are. Do you credit some of this to your background in martial arts?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: I have made two world teams in four years with two different bows. I guess it is not common, but I have always felt my archery was a continuation of the martial arts I started many years prior to picking up a bow and arrow.

USAA: From what I understand you were a serious student of Japanese swordsmanship and Kyudo (Japanese archery). Can you describe this training?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: When I started martial arts, I quickly realized that contact martial arts was not a field I should explore if I wanted to preserve my kneecaps. So it seemed reasonable that I should fall in love with weapon’s work. The Japanese sword became my top choice from an arsenal of amazing traditional weapons. Along with training to draw, block and cut, I learned the value of becoming “one with your weapon.” This approach to fighting is where I found the most valuable tool for the mental game I currently use. Being so in tune with my katana definitely facilitated my way to winning the World Cup seven years ago. The katana was not a choice weapon for women. The training was rigorous and dangerous as we used live blades and actually cut in practice. Ask me how dangerous someday!

When I started Kyudo, I found myself getting very frustrated because of a handicap in my right shoulder. Regardless of how much I practiced, my shoulder refused to relinquish the flexibility I needed for certain motions in the shooting sequence. I shot four hours every day on a rooftop range at a Shinto shrine in Kamakura with my Japanese bow (yumi). Six months later I beat my entire school at a dojo tourney. I also was the first female non-Japanese to be inducted into the Ogasawara School of Mounted Archery. However, I knew that the beauty that made Kyudo an art would never be found with the imperfections in my form. I never even cared if I hit the target. I only wanted to shoot with beautiful style and form. I most definitely credit my training in martial arts to my advancement in archery. My bow is NOT equipment but an extension of my own being, just as my katana and my yumi were. My form, also unorthodox in many ways, is a style of my own and one that I am committed to.

USAA: You shoot Olympic style recurve, FITA compound, and various traditional bows. As for tournaments, you participate in NAA, 3-D, FITA and NFAA. Am I missing anything?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: I am still new to 3-D but have competed in a couple ASA and IBO tournaments each. I would like to shoot more 3-D but most are on the other side of the Mississippi. Since moving to Colorado, I have enjoyed shooting in CSAA (Colorado State Archery Association) tournaments and have broken nine state records since last December with all three bows. I am also new to the NFAA this year and was surprised to find a whole different organization with a different approach to target and field shooting as compared to the NAA.

USAA: Do you find it difficult switching between styles?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: This is the most frequently asked question. I learned recurve from a coach in Japan, but I taught myself to shoot compound and recently, modern longbow. Strange enough, my styles are so different from each other that I do not find it hard to switch, even in the same tournament and on occasion, the same shooting line. I find it a challenge to shoot all three bows at the same event, kind of like an archery triathlon.

USAA: Do you have a personal coach?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: When I started recurve archery in April of 1999, I had a wonderful coach for six months: Tastuo Nobori. He was my only coach and was very strict about mental and physical conditioning. But the foundations that he laid, I still use today. I’ve never had a compound coach. I just wanted to continue shooting so badly that I figured out how by applying what I learned with recurve to compound.

USAA:What is your training schedule like?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: I try to shoot four hours every day with focus on repetition of my shot sequence. At the end of training I usually do stamina exercises with my bow followed by a short run. I also cross-train by riding 30-50 miles or more a week on my mountain bike. I also jog 5 miles/run, a couple times per week. Every night just before bed I take a hot shower and stretch for 20 min. NO exceptions! I also do a lot of visual training using former pressure situations as the model.

USAA: Would you like to mention anyone in particular for giving you support this year?

Erika “Aya” La Brie: I never dreamed I would have the support that I do in archery. My greatest being from the Lord above. My sponsors are TechnoHunt, Doinker, Sure-Loc, Golden Key Futura, Carter and Specialty Archery. I would like to thank Hoyt USA for making great compound and recurve bows.

USAA: What are your compound and recurve setups?

Compound: 60# Hoyt UltraTec XT3000 Cam 1½, Easton X-10 500 Spin Wings, SureLoc Supreme, Specialty Super Scope 6X, Doinker² Stabilizer,

Recurve: 44# Hoyt Avalon+ and FX Limbs, Easton ACE 570, SureLoc FITA Extreme

She is also on the 2009 National Team for Archery, Recurve Bow:

The 2009 Senior USAT Team includes:

Recurve

Men       Women

Dan Schuller – Mercer, PA   Karen Scavotto – Enfield, CT

Joe McGlyn – Floral Park, NY  Erin Mickelberry – Bothell, WA

Jason McKittrick – Holton, IN  Stephanie Miller – Naperville, IL

Dakota Sinclair – Ridgecrest, CA  Lori Cieslinski – Howell, MI

Ted Holland – Westminster, CO  Kendra Harvey – Rio Rancho, NM

Jake Kaminski – Edgewater, FL  Erika “Aya” Eiffel – Suisun, CA

Timm Hines – Kent, WA   Amanda Nichols – Cheyenne, WY

Tyler Domenech – Holtwood, PA  *Jennifer Nichols – Cheyenne, WY

*Vic Wunderle – Mason City, IL  *Khatuna Lorig – Los Angeles, CA

Here are some more newspaper articles you can check out:

Woman with objects fetish marries Eiffel Tower

Erika La Tour Eiffel, 37, a former soldier who lives in San Francisco, has been in love with objects before. Her first infatuation was with Lance, a bow that helped her to become a world-class archer, she is fond of the Berlin Wall and she claims to have a physical relationship with a piece of fence she keeps in her bedroom.

But it is the Eiffel Tower she has pledged to love, honour and obey in an intimate ceremony attended by a handful of friends.

She has changed her name legally to reflect the bond.

Before returning to Paris for her first wedding anniversary, Mrs La Tour Eiffel visits the Berlin Wall, where her affection for what many Germans see as a symbol of repression leads to an uncomfortable encounter with a member of the staff at the Checkpoint Charlie museum.

She explained that she feels an affinity with the wall: “I am the Berlin Wall. Hate me, try to break me apart, but I will still be here, standing.”

‘I married the Eiffel Tower’

Imagine a world in which people seem hostile while inanimate objects appear friendly – even affectionate. Imagine dreading the touch of another human but longing for a passionate encounter with a large public structure. This is the strange world of the “objectum sexual”– a group of people, mainly women, whose intimate lives revolve around objects with which they say they share romantic and sexual love.

As a documentary film-maker passionate about exploring psychological aspects of human nature, I have made films about bigamists, domestic violence and co-dependent anorexic twins. Modern society is a never-ending source of these stories. It is still exceptional for a father to lock up his daughter for 24 years in a cellar, but scratch the surface and it seems that good personal relationships are rare. To fill their emotional needs, people are increasingly turning to a variety of substitutes: from internet virtual reality and food to… well, objects.

On first meeting, Erika La Tour Eiffel appears extraordinarily ordinary. An ex-US Army soldier, the 36-year-old lives in San Francisco. She is also a former world champion in archery – propelled to success, she believes, by her love for Lance, a bow. She now claims to be married to the Eiffel Tower, following a ceremony with friends last year in Paris, at which she promised eternal love to the iron monument and changed her name legally to reflect the bond. “There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object,” she says sadly. “The issue of intimacy – or rather lack of it – is forever present.”

She is currently married to the Berlin Mauer, which is why her name has changed to Erika Mauer.

I got trained up in marketing and evolved into PR and there is a convergence going on. Not just between PR and marketing but also with advertising and … SEO (yes, I said it). David Hargreaves of Bitemarks agrees that there is a strong convergence — and so does the originator, Jeremiah Owyang:

Jeremiah Owyang produced an interesting piece earlier today asking what will happen to PR firms in a recession based on research among 200 PR agencies. I must confess I am not surprised to see that a small majority of firms are predicting that PR budgets were smaller than they were in fiscal 2008, but then if you if you look at any operating cost, I would be surprised if this wasn’t pretty much tracking the downward pressure on all operating costs.

Having said that I think cost reductions fall into two categories: reducing costs because in this climate ‘you can’ and ‘you need to be seen to’ and then there are those companies that are having to reduce costs because ‘they must’. I wonder what if the PR budget reductions are greater or smaller than comparable ad budgets?

I both agree and disagree with the second point Jeremiah makes when he says that “things don’t look too rosy for the PR industry.” If you are a traditional PR agency doing the same old stuff then I would be worried. However, if you accept that the world has changed and embracing social media is neither an option or an add on to your traditional offering then the world looks rosier.

By putting social media at the centre of what we do, we have a fantastic opportunity to extend our remit more broadly into the world of online marketing. Far from being gloomy, as someone who has been involved in the PR industry for 20 years and who has always embraced technology, the future for the industry has never been more exciting.

Metro has been Verizon’s bitch for as long as I have known.  I wonder if the following means that the DC WMATA is opening up the cell phone network to other networks — let me know if that is what it means.

There’s been talk of this for a while, but WMATA announced a little more of a timeline today: Twenty of the busiest stations will have cell phone service by the end of this year, and the entire system will have it by 2012.

While I certainly have no interest in listening to a train full of people shout to be heard over the tunnel noise, I look forward to actually being able to text and use Twitter from the train- many has been the time when the people I’ve been on my way to meet have tried to reach me, only to be thwarted by the Metro Cone of Silence. (Via We Love DC)

I have an AT&T and a T-Mobile handy right now and neither of them are Twitter-worthy when on the Metro, which is a drag.  I got completely used to being able to use my phone in any way I pleased while running around Berlin and the rest of Germany is the U-Bahn, deep under ground, in the S-Bahn, deep into the suburbs, and on the I.C.E. train hither and thither.

So, what’s the news here in Washington, DC?

One thing that I am not is touchy about the fact that I love what I love. And I love Moleskine notebooks.  And I love manual typewriters, especially the Hermes 3000, and I love quite a lot of other like-minded stuff.  Well, Moleskine notebooks are #122 in the list of Stuff While People Like. Sad but true.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days.  Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community.   In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked:  typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

Let’s see what else I like that white people like — the bold ones I feel especially strong about:

• #122 Moleskine Notebooks
• #120 Taking a Year Off
• #119 Sea Salt
• #115 Promising to Learn a New Language
• #108 Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music
• #107 Self Aware Hip Hop References
• #106 Facebook
• #99 Grammar
• #98 The Ivy League
• #92 Book Deals
• #90 Dinner Parties
• #88 Having Gay Friends
• #81 Graduate School
  
• #80 The Idea of Soccer
• #79 Modern Furniture
• #78 Multilingual Children
• #77 Musical Comedy
• #73 Gentrification
• #72 Study Abroad
• #70 Difficult Breakups
• #61 Bicycles
• #58 Japan
• #57 Juno
• #56 Lawyers
• #55 Apologies
• #54 Kitchen Gadgets
• #53 Dogs
• #52 Sarah Silverman
• #51 Living by the Water
• #50 Irony
• #49 Vintage
• #48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
• #47 Arts Degrees
• #46 The Sunday New York Times
• #45 Asian Fusion Food
• #44 Public Radio
• #43 Plays
• #42 Sushi
• #39 Netflix
• #38 Arrested Development
• #37 Renovations
• #36 Breakfast Places
• #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
• #34 Architecture
• #25 David Sedaris
• #24 Wine
• #23 Microbreweries
• #21 Writers Workshops
• #20 Being an expert on YOUR culture
• #19 Traveling
• #18 Awareness
• #16 Gifted Children
• #14 Having Black Friends
• #13 Tea
• #8 Barack Obama
• #7 Diversity
• #6 Organic Food
• #5 Farmer’s Markets
• #3 Film Festivals
• #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to
• #1 Coffee

Holy fuck, I am pretty darn white!

Earlier this week, I guest lectured on digital PR at the American University and reported on the experience, Public Relations and Communications’ Future is Bright!. I said that I would not write anything nice unless someone sent me a thoughtful email from the class.

Well, I received two nice notes, one from Juliana Serafini (who promises to email me again next week) and one from Kari Elam, who had a lot of great question.  I will not expose her questions, but the long story short is that Kari is writing for music, culture, arts, and society blogs and wonders if that it good enough as a way of writing herself into a smashing agency job in PR and I told her that while it couldn’t hurt, it is also essential for her to go a little further.

Well, here is the ‘sage’ advice I give to Kari:  Kari, what you’re doing for your current blogs is more editorial writing.  While editorial and column-writing might very well help you with a publishing career in the future — and doesn’t hurt your portfolio — I must underscore the fact that while blogging about music — being a blogger — is super-important when it comes to being a respected part of the community — the “who the hell are you?” factor, there is another more important blogging strategy to pursue if you want to end up in a top-ten national PR firm.

What you need to do, in addition to blogging is “meta blogging,” — blogging about social media, about digital PR, about public relations, about advertising, etc…  It is really important to make sure you’re always taking a step back and think not only about the what of social media but also about the why and how.

What this could look like is a blog about your studies of PR at AU and what you’re learning and how it contrasts with what you’re learning at your PR Internship. If you’re interested in music, society, the arts, and culture, explore it in the context of the Internet, of online branding, ads, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and even television and radio.  How do you see what you’re learning about traditional PR dovetailing into social media marketing and digital PR?  Can you see a continuum?  Can you maybe help the fogies of traditional PR find their way to digital PR?  If you can light the path and maybe even map the way, you’re golden.  Move to NYC and start shopping for apartments, you’ll be on Madison Avenue in no time.

However, don’t forget the basics. As a PR consultant, you will be required to know how to not simply consume content (read blogs), not only produce content (blog), but analyze and understand how to conversation works, how best to leverage and participate in conversation, and also how best to manage conversation and manage reputation.  Being a PR professional is about knowing how things work behind the curtain. And, since you are young and “cyber,” people assume that you have a valuable and important insight into the future.

PR firms are beginning to realize that “all kids get the Internet” may be true, but not in the way they thought — that “kids” get the Internet with only the level of sophistication that people from 35-50 get television — as a source of entertainment and information.

So, it is your job to publicly and prove, on a daily basis, on a blog, that you get what’s going on, that you’re current with the movers and shakers, that you have a passion for that space, and also that you will be able to prevent the future from blindsiding your PR VP and your client by keeping on top of technology, social media, new PR, and new and important channels through which you need to use to promote and protect your clients.

Your music blogging and your trend blogging and your other blogging means that you can now think like a blogger and that you’re accepted into the blogosphere — which is an important first step.  The second step is proving you can strategically and even tactically make the Internet work for your clients and your agency.

Not to insult us marketing, advertising, and PR bloggers and blogs but there is a lot of room in the Power 150 for more voices, that’s for sure.  If you start today, you may very well shoot up the list. A new voice is always welcome. Also, don’t be intimidated by what this sort of blogging means.  You don’t have to act out of your focus.  Take what you already love and then just spend some time getting meta on it — spend some time playing.  Spend some time taking the articles you’re writing elsewhere and slice them and dice them a little academically.  Do things like create your own case studies and give away the sort of campaigns you might recommend yourself.  Feel free to critique or compliment campaigns and brands and firms and agencies — especially the ones you’d like to work with.

I swear to God, you can write yourself into this business.  You can write yourself into a very fine career as a PR professional. You’re good as gold if you can prove that you’re both someone who has been trained in traditional PR and who gets digital PR; that you’re someone who gets both theoretical social media as well as practical social media.

And, good luck to you, Kari!

Jonathan Trenn popped this insightful article about Yelp over on Marketing Conversation, The contorversy about Yelp (and be sure to check out David Gelles’ article on a similar topic over at the Financial Times, Yelp rejects claims of extortion):

Ah, controversy.

Now, it’s with Yelp, the mega online review site.  On Wednesday, the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper that covers Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, published a very provocative article , “Yelp and the business of extortion 2.0″ on the sales operations and tactics of Yelp.  The paper made some very pointed accusations, some of them seemingly legitimate while others sounding too nebulous.  They state that Yelp is both maniupulating the placements of restaurants reviews as sales tools and then using scare tactics to then solicit advertising sales from these same restaurants.

The accusations are alarming but, because I think the article was poorly presented, it’s left me thinking that Yelp perhaps had a major sales problem in one office as opposed to a company wide sleaze factor policy.

Yelp’s initial response, written on the company blog by CEO Jeremy Stoppleman is inept and insufficient.  He’s likely satisfied that his blog posts are enough…and it may appear to be just that for the time being…but controversies such as this, be they true or just speculation, have a way of undermining a company’s integrity in a hurry.  Especially a site that 1)  is about user generated online reviews, and 2) has trust as a hallmark of its standing.

Oddly, the Yelp blog doesn’t allow comments.  That’s not a good idea…especially for a site that’s about online reviews and citizen participation.

Here’s the gist of the article.  Writer Kathleen Richards talked to “dozens” of business owners over the “past several months” and found that six of them said that Yelp sales reps promised to remove or move bad reviews if the business chose to advertise.  And these businesses would often get sales calls from Yelp reps soon after they mysteriously started getting a rash of negative reviews.  The theory here is that Yelp employees would start to or enlist others to write negative reviews on a company, those reviews would then appear at the top of a company’s page, and the company would get a phone call from a rep looking for an advertising by so those reviews can “go away”…usually to the tune of $300 a month.

For those that declined, positive reviews seemed to begin to disappear.  For those that did manage to buy, negative ones began disappearing.

This is pretty damning stuff.  If true, it shows a coordinted effort between people in sales those on the back end tech team.  It made some establishments feel as if Yelp was acting as if it was the “mafia” in that Yelp was threatening establishments to pay (advertise) in order to not be damaged.  That’s called “protection money” in organized crime.

But as I red between the lines I ended up scratching my head.   Over several months, after talking to “dozens” of businesses, Richards found six restaurants that felt that either they were being offered a quid-pro-qo for advertising to reduce or eliminate bad reviews; or some felt that this extended to manipulative threats of the placement of poor reviews and the elimination of postive reviews.

“Dozens.  “What does that mean?  36?  60?  84?  How did Richards find these restaurants?  Did she talk to one and then ask the owner/manager if he or she knew of any others that had similar stories?  Both questions are important.   The first because it leads to how widespread the problem actually is in the Bay Area and the second, because if there is a lack or randomness to all this, then the sample restaurants are self selected by the reporter.

The article relies on the how some of the restaurant owners “feel”.  These feelings may be completely legitimate.  But it is hard to counter a “feelings”e of another is the one with the feelings remain anonymous.  I fully believe in using anonymous sources, but there should be greater evidence used.  That is, if one is trying to prove that this is a consistent sales tactic used by the company as a whole.

And speaking of as a whole.  This article seems to be focusing soley on the East Bay restaurant seen.  True, it is an East Bay pub, but the article is written as if it is a widespread problem and the issue here is “the business of extortion”.  It fully damns the Yelp based on a small sample of local business’ feelings.

Stoppleman has since written a few more blog posts, but he could use a change of attitude.  There’s been enough discussion on the net about this article denigrating Yelp.  Hundreds of tweets on Twitter, negative mentions on Technorati, and articles in substantial online pubs.

The reason why I say that Stoppleman could use a change of attitude is because he’s treating all of this as an illegitimate attack.  The accusations, regardless of their veracity, at least sound reasonable.  And his defensiveness doesn’t really address the issue.

He does have on post that does work, at bit, in my opinion.  “Nine Myths About Yelp” is designed to negate what he feels are falsehoods.  The most important one he lists is #3 (it should be #1, but he doesn’t seem to realize it).  It is stated here:

Myth #3: Yelp salespeople manipulate reviews for prospective advertisers (for example, offers to remove a negative review if a new client signs up, or a threat to remove positive reviews if the business owner does not choose to advertise with Yelp)

Reality: We have every reason to trust the smart, hard-working and ethical salespeople who work at Yelp.  Beyond this, to avoid even an appearance of impropriety, we’ve taken several steps to ensure no member of our team is tempted to game the system.  Specifically:
1. Yelp salespeople do not have access to the system that deletes reviews; only a few members of Yelp engineering and user support team have this access, and they literally work on different floors within the office.
2. Every Yelp salesperson signs an agreement that s/he will not write reviews of any business while employed by Yelp.  We trust our teammates in sales to live up to this commitment.  We also have several monitoring systems in place to ensure nobody (accidentally or otherwise) crosses this line.
3. Through our vigilance, we once did find a salesperson who encouraged a friend to write a positive review for a prospective client (that the friend had actually patronized). The salesperson’s role at Yelp ended that day.
4. When a new advertiser signs up with Yelp, the relationship is handed off to an Account Manager.  The Account Manager then takes the client through a 30 minute phone training session — and confirms that reviews have nothing to do with advertising.
5. After the training call, the Account Manager sends a follow up survey that asks each client how much s/he agrees with the following statement: “I understand that Reviews are completely separate from the Yelp Ad Program, and that there is an automated filter that may suppress some of my reviews whether or not I am a client.”  Any client who does not click “Completely Agree” in this case gets yet another follow-up call for clarification.

Myth #4: Yelp removes positive reviews from businesses its staff does not like, or from businesses that do not pay for advertising

Reality: A review you may have seen on Yelp previously is no longer there; this happens.  The review in question may have “disappeared” for one of three reasons:
1. The review may have been suppressed by Yelp’s automated Review Filter, which is always out there looking for suspicious reviewing activity (like those anonymous rants and raves you see on other sites).
2. The writer may have removed her own review; she has the right to do that at any time
3. Another user believed the review violated Yelp’s Review Guidelines and sent it to our customer service team for review. The customer service team agreed, then manually removed the review.

Both our customer service team and the Review Filter work exactly the same way for advertisers as they do for non-advertisers.

This is how he should have addressed the issue at the very beginning.  Blown opportunity and his company has suffered and will continue to suffer as a result.  And he has to go beyond stating that the sales people and the tech people with access to placement of reviews work on different floors.

My guess is what happened is that a few sales reps in that particular office would scour the reviews on Yelp, and when they found some recent newly written negative ones, they then picked up the phone and made a sales call, offering the package that places a selected postive review on top – one that is visibly marked as being sponsored.  Some pitches probably went far beyond this…saying that they could make the negative one “disappear”.  Sales people will say sleazy things.  Stoppleman should understand this and not discount this.  He should then conduct some sort of internal audit that would show the public that he is trying to address the problem and root it out if it exists.  Retrain.  Resolve.

Now is it possible that some sales types had relationships with the tech people.  Absolutely.  Different floors – HA!  So the problem may have been more than a poorly written article.  Yelp needs to look into that because, as Yelp knows, online reputations matter.

And to Jeremy Stoppleman…you should allow people to comment on your blog posts.

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

If you Google the name of our President and COO, “Chris Abraham“, you will see what it means to dominate the search engine results and own a position as an expert in a field.  We can do the same for your key staff.

Methods: Blogs — Yours & Others: Dominating the Online Space as an Expert & Generous Contributor. We will get your blog infrastructure and your content production policy established. This involves installation, set-up, and design of the blog software. To drive SEO it is important to get the relevant social bookmarking, ping server, etc. accounts and plug-ins set up and installed.

To further drive SEO, a powerful additional methodology is to mirror your blog content across multiple other blogs on highly-ranked blog hosting sites like blogspot, wordpress.com, etc., or under additional aggregation blogs you may set up under your own domain names.  This process will be automated at the outset and run without human effort thereafter.

Blog Content Creation Policy
We will help your team get the blogging policy right, following best practices in line with the informational guidelines of your company.   There is a clear culture of blogging and respecting and adhering to its norms and expectations will make the difference between you being welcomed as a respected contributor and being mocked as a soulless corporate shill (or an embarrassment and danger to your company).

It is essential to have a clear policy for your company’s bloggers, particularly in terms of outlining and reserving their freedoms as writers.  With a clear understanding by the blogger and by the company of what freedoms are allowed, you avoid cramping, overly-careful, stuffy-sounding, self-censoring while also avoiding cringe-inducing embarrassments of inappropriate disclosure and language.

Blog Content Creation System
The best system of content creation is to have the key staff members whose reputations are to be built writing the blog content themselves — that leads to the most honest, transparent, and bi-directionally informative information exchange. However, sometimes those key staff members simply don’t have the time, inclination, or writing talent to create that content.  In that case a content creation system and methodology must be put in place:

• Hiring or assigning professional bloggers or staffers with good writing abilities to produce the content under their names or
• Establishing a ghost-writing system where topics are suggested (by the writer or the key staffer), concept outline given by key staffer, posting written by the professional writer, posting edited and approved by key staffer, posting proofed by editor (optional), and article posted.

If this route is taken, there are workflow blog softwares that can be put in place and set up to manage this process.

Appearing on Others’ Blogs
By generously contributing to the community via bloggers in your spaces, you can get broad coverage and enjoy the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of these influencers.  We would help you get these content contribution requests by executing a Blogger Outreach. This is done by:

• Giving of yourself in the form of interviews, etc.
• Interviews are excellent relationship-builders that give you direct, personal access to the bloggers and builds up a connection for the future.  Interviews can be given via:
  • Email
  • Chat
  • Phone
  • Podcast (voice)
  • Vlog (video — either onsite or via video VOIP)

This list is by order of “live-ness” of the interview with email being very asynchronous, allowing time to reflect and gather info and Vlog interviews being very live.

Guest blogging by the key staff
Guest blogging is very warmly welcomed since it gives bloggers good content that they don’t have to write themselves, and it makes them look good because they are being honored as a valued platform.

Being a guest blogger gives you coverage on another site, increasing the number of locations you are appearing while giving you total control over your message and while driving your SEO by adding link-backs. Additionally, you get the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of the blogger in front of his readership.

It is important to be writing interesting, engaging content as a guest blogger and avoid presenting something that sounds like a callow pitch.

If the key staff member is not interested or capable of doing the guest blogging, then the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed

Podcasting and Vlogging (video blogging)
Podcasting is very much like blogging, but in audio format.  While it is not as SEO-friendly as text-based blogging, it has a stronger “star-quality” effect, as the listeners develop a stronger human connection to the podcaster.    The lower SEO-friendliness can be counteracted by posting transcripts of the podcast along with the podcast itself.

It can be done very simply, but generally it is good to have quality raw audio, a polished intro and outro, and good tone balancing so that the podcast sounds somewhat professional and is auditorily a pleasure to listen to.

We can guide your staff in setting up the recording mechanisms, get your intro/outro composed, and have the raw audio balanced and cut into a finished podcast.

It is also good to have clear, interesting concepts to speak about and an effective style of delivery.  It’s easy to be boring or irritating.

While the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed, much more responsibility lies on the key staff member who is recording, since it is a very “live” experience — you cannot read a pre-written article and come across as a compelling Podcaster.

The staff of Abraham Harrison, LLC, can get the transcripts written and assist in the posting of the podcasts and the maintenance of the podcast blog website.

Vlogging follows the same rules as podcasting in regards to production and quality, but the pressure on the “star” is that much more intense.

Abraham Harrison’s staff can guide your staff in getting the recording and production infrastructure set up.

An advantage of vlogging is that it has the even higher “star” effect upon the key staff member doing the vlogging, and the videos can be posted on all the video-sharing sites (dozens) to get more coverage and dominate search results.

We at Abraham Harrison can handle the video asset distribution for you, or train your team in the method.

Contact Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, for more information

The following is a transcript of the inaugural poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander, as provided by CQ transcriptions by way of the New York Times:

Praise song for the day

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

Abraham Harrison has been at the forefront of the Twitter phenomenon since its public offering, successfully leveraging the power of micro-blogging for many of its clients. (Via Abraham Harrison LLC)

Services include:

• Twitter Consultation: Abraham & Harrison often works with clients to help them understand what micro-blogging means, the impact it can have within their industry, and the ways in which it can be utilized to implement customer service, improve customer loyalty, promote the brand, and protect a company’s reputation.

• Twitter Profile Creation: Abraham & Harrison has successfully created and populated Twitter profiles for a number of clients. Profile creation includes:
  • Twitter Brainstorming: An initial consultation with the client that outlines the goals, challenges and Twitter strategy prior to profile creation
  • Profile Creation: Abraham & Harrison will create a Twitter profile that mirrors the branding, marketing, and messaging currently utilized by the client. All messaging “tweeted” through Twitter will mimic that of the company’s branding.
  • Constant Population: Once the profile is created, Abraham & Harrison will either train or populate the Twitter profile with valuable information that connects with fellow users on Twitter. Population will include daily “tweets” throughout the work week to boost followers and community engagement.
  • Valuable Team “Retweeting”: Not only will a skilled team member help with the population of the Twitter profile, but the entire Abraham & Harrison team will be behind the client, “retweeting” their content which in turn means an exponentially larger audience seeing the company’s message. For instance, Chris Abraham, Abraham & Harrison’s President and COO, who is known as one of the top Twitterers of Social Media news (having over 2,700 followers) will “retreet” every client messaging. What does this mean? A Twitter veteran will be promoting your company, brand, and message…and people will listen. At least three Abraham & Harrison team members with high profile Twitter profiles will be able to retweet each client “tweet” at a time.
  • Continual Re-Evaluation: Abraham & Harrison will continually connect with each client to ensure the messages disseminated on Twitter stay fresh, valuable, and relevant.
• Abraham & Harrison Twitter Case Study: A fantastic example of Abraham & Harrison’s knowledge of Twitter is illustrated by our work with the client, The Fresh Air Fund, a non-profit agency providing free summer vacations in the country to more than 1.7 million New York City children from disadvantaged communities.
  • Twitterers Who Will Change The World: With Abraham & Harrison’s help, The Fresh Air Fund created a Twitter profile to communicate with other NPOs, current volunteers, potential families interested in The Fresh Air Fund, and donors. In just three months of tweeting, The Fresh Air Fund Twitter profile has over 600 followers and has reached thousands of individuals who they otherwise would never have been in contact with. Not only does Abraham & Harrison help guide The Fresh Air Fund on how to best utilize Twitter in a respectful and value-driven way, Chris Abraham is also eager to help “retweet” The Fresh Air Fund’s Twitter content, meaning that over 3,000 users are seeing this non-profit’s messaging, creating a critical relationship with The Fresh Air Fund that results in support of the NPO. Even more impressive, The Fresh Air Fund was recently nominated to be a part of the “Top Ten List of Twitterers Who Will Change The World” — a fantastic feat for an NPO who has only been a part of the Twittosphere for three months.

Photo by my uncle Jack Abraham

Happy holidays! I am writing to you from the Hackenscher Markt Starbucks here in Berlin. The mayor called Berlin “poor but sexy”, a perfect description for this place. Recent news for me is that I’m blogging for the AdAge Global Idea Network about global culture, trends, brands, ideas. I’d like to blog and guest blog more in 09 so let me know if you’d like to give me a shot.

Business-wise, my firm, Abraham Harrison, is going into its third year, doing online brand promotion focusing exclusively on earned media. We routinely earn over two-hundred blog posts per client outreach. If you’d like to know more about my day job, ping me. I don’t want this to become salesy and lame.

I am still in the AdAge Power 150 (122!) with my personal blog and am always up for hearing about interesting stuff to write about. On that note, you can also pop me stuff via Twitter where I am active and @chrisabraham.

I hope you’re having an amazing holiday season. Sure, German druids may have invented the Christmas tree but there’s just something about being home for the holidays so I’m heading to DC for Christmas for a proper experience. I plan to be there from Christmas through January and would love to meet-up if you’re on the East Coast. Hell, I’ll train it to meet. And make sure to let me know if you have any plans to be in Berlin anytime in 2009, I’ll show you around.

I go to Berlin Hauptbahnhof almost every day. Bahnhof is German for train station and Hauptbahnhof is German for the main train station. Every city has one. DC’s Hauptbahnhof is Union Station, for example, and in many ways comparable.

The Berlin Hauptbahnhof houses my local coffee shop, my local grocery story, etc. To be honest, there is always something going on there. And everything is a promotional or is branded. This is one of the rare train stations that have become a center for children and their families.

German “Hauptbahnhofs” and “Bahnhofs” are known to be dens of prostitution — however, Berlin Hbf is far from that. It is a destination. Also, because there are weird laws that prohibit retail stores from opening on Sunday, everyone comes to the Bahnhofs because only train stations and gas stations are licensed to do business on Sundays.

So, these stations are packed with all sorts of stores and are packed on Sundays by the people who want to do some shopping on the Lord’s Day.

I am sitting here in Berlin, Germany, listening to NPR on 104.1 FM (yes, we have National Public Radio on-tap in Berlin, it is true), and I am rooting for Barack Obama. I have to admit that I voted Republican in the last two elections, in 2000 and 2004, because I was appalled by both Gore and Kerry. I was passionate about Bill Clinton during his eight years in office and preferred anything to Gore or Kerry, to be honest. That said, I want Barack Obama to win because the world wants Barack Obama to win.

After church yesterday, I got to talking to my fellow parishioners and they want Barack Obama. These are not your traditional European communists you hear about, they’re devout Christians — born again — who are probably considered pretty conservative in the context of Europe. However, in the context of America, even a right wing wingnut European is still relatively liberal by American standards.

When Berliners look at Barack Obama, they don’t see someone who will set race riots afire, they don’t see someone who will turn America into a Marxist-Leninist stronghold, they see a man who is sophisticated, education, trained, has a brain in his head, went to the best schools, has explored the world, cares about civil rights, and who will most likely be willing to span the broken bridges across the Atlantic to Europe and Russia and try his best to rebuild them and begin to regain the trust, admiration, and even envy that much of the world had fifty-years ago.

To them and to me, Barack Obama will be able to return the United States to the hands of the rational. A United States with a better separation between Church and State. Maybe even a country in which Jesus Christ is the co-pilot and not the pilot any more. Where saner, more peaceful, minds prevail. A nation willing to put away its herald and sword, stop with the Christian Crusades, the preemptive strikes, the unilateral military conquests, and the obsession with being Exceptional. Exceptionalism is the most dangerous aspect of the George W Bush and Neocon White House.

“When the United States looks abroad, it does so from an assumed position of moral and spiritual strength. For as long as the United States has existed, a perceived sense of its exceptionalism has permeated the way that Americans view the rest of the world . . . this view has been reinforced by the material reality of US economic and military strength. The essence of American exceptionalism is a celebration of the uniqueness and special virtue of the United States. It rests on the belief that the United States has a special role to play in the world, and unique qualities to bring to this role . . . The roots of the concept stem from the Puritan vision of America as a ‘shining city upon a hill’, a society designed to serve as a moral example to mankind.”

The idea that America is any better-suited than any other nation to lead based on some sort of Divine Inheritance or Plan is ludicrous and very insane, especially when no one else in the entire world agrees. I am a big fan of Mike Signer’s concept of exemplarism:

“Exemplarism is the principle that the United States could best serve the spread of liberal democracy by being an enviable example to the world—the shining light on the hill, the beacon. Being a good example requires strengthening the institutions that assure individual liberties, the rule of law, and the prosperity born of industry and commerce. Adherents to exemplarism would find themselves in agreement with Kant’s principle of noninterventionism into the affairs of other nations.”

Telling yourself and everybody around you how amazing, brilliant, noble, moral, and generous you are when you’re the biggest and meanest and best-armed and best-outfitted man in the room is hubristic and kind of pathetic. Delusional, actually, and certainly not the best way for a man — or a country — to be. America is kind of being an International douchebag.

I must admit that I have a special weakness for exemplarism’s belief in the “principle of noninterventionism into the affairs of other nations” even if you don’t like the way other nations are running their households. There is a certain amount of independence and internal liberty associated with being sovereign. Sovereignty, to me, is holy. To me, exporting culture, policy, morals, or any concept of character or politick is poor form, especially when it is at the tip of a sword.

What scares me about American Exceptionalism is that it allows just about any behavior based on the premise that we can do no wrong. That any move we take to help is helpful, that any gift we have to give is welcome, that any feeling a foreign nation could feel is grateful.

When America thinks the entire world is so “insane” and “drunk” that only America cane make the important, sober, choices, then it is in fact that America is the Nation suffering from mental illness. You know what they say, right? If you think the entire world has gone mad, that the entire world is against you, that the entire world is violent and full of unrest, the unappealing truth might just be that you’re severely paranoid and might be the most mentally ill in the room. There is no way that the entire planet is conspiring again the United States — unless, of course, we have gone one step too far.

I am told that we have gone one step too far; however, Europe and most of the world is willing to let bygones be bygones because we’re loved by the world, at least mostly. Berliners no longer trust America but they’re willing to give Barack Obama a chance — they’re not willing to give John McCain a chance, sadly.

They see in John McCain an angry, malicious, foolish man — which is fine; however, in Sarah Palin, they don’t even seen some harmless vice presidential candidate, they see a very dangerous indicator that the McCain/Palin ticket will more assuredly take the United States to an even darker, more jingoistic, more conservative, descent into fascism.

When I tell people these things, especially on Twitter, I get the strangest response, even from the Democrats: “America is the best country on earth.” “America may not be perfect but there is no better country on earth.” “I am proud to be an American — I am patriotic, surely.” Alternately, I also get, “I think we have gone too far as a nation — we have descended into a self-centered feeding frenzy rife with elbows and short-sighted land-grabbing.”

To me, I am somewhere in the middle. I love the foundation of the Nation. I love the literature, the heart, the soul, the worlds, the music, the history, the compassion, the Faith, the persistence, the curiosity, and confidence, the optimism, and even the cocksureness! I love the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. There is a reason why many nations worldwide have patterned and even plagiarized our Constitution, to be sure.

Hell, Europe loves the idea of America! Basically, we are a nation that, in its source code, has embraced all that is liberté, égalité, fraternité; however, the world had not been able to enjoy our uniquely American version of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all the foaming at the mouth and the bared fangs! There is a fear that this mad-dog may have gone too far into its rabies and is too far gone.

In Barack Obama, they see that maybe what America has been doing for the last eight years as been a sort of postpartum, post-911, depression. That the Nation, all big and clumsy, hung over, and feeling a little sick, is finally reemerging from darkness into light — luckily, just in time, when the world needs a leader in the community and not just a dangerous paranoiac who lives in the dilapidated house at the edge of town.

The rest of the world has not given up on us as Americans or as America. Have we as a nation give up on ourselves?

• Survivor Corps – Peer Support
  (tags: ping.fm)
• Charity Folks | Online Auctions
  (tags: ping.fm)
• Netvantage Marketing Blog
  Let’s face it, we’re in a recession. In the past five weeks, the stock market has tanked, the credit market has dried up, and a very large rescue/bailout plan has seemingly had little effect. Companies are now cutting back and employees are being let go.
• Daily Herald – Before and After
  On Oct. 2, 2006, Capt. Scott Quilty, 26, was leading a foot patrol in Rustimullah, a town south of Baghdad. An improvised explosive device, or IED, detonated near him. He lost his right arm and right leg.
• DEFENSE STANDARD: Wounded Not Broken
  Her husband, Capt. Scott Quilty, lost an arm and a leg and spent two years at Walter Reed recovering. She wants the patients she sees to live the life her husband now enjoys.
• Before and after Iraq – Los Angeles Times
  On Oct. 2, 2006, Capt. Scott Quilty, 26, was leading a foot patrol in Rustimullah, a town south of Baghdad. An improvised explosive device, or IED, detonated near him. He lost his right arm and right leg.
• * photo op at Walter Reed – pics – Democratic Underground
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, Friday, March 30, 2007. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
• KarlfromNH.com Weekly Columns
  This interview was followed by yet another inspirational young man on my June 1st radio show. Captain Scott Quilty, a Francestown, NH native and son of friends of mine, related his experiences in the military
• Briefing on the importance of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
  Scott Quilty, Program Manager for Survivor Corps; and Anne Somers, Policy Counsel for the American Association of Persons with Disabilities.
• Organizing Committee Contacts
  Survivor Corps
  Contact Scott Quilty 202.250.3946 squilty@survivorcorps.org
• Johns Hopkins University | Today’s News
  Capt. Scott Quilty, a rifle platoon leader with the 10th Mountain Division, had been in Iraq for two months on Oct. 2, 2006, when he stepped on an improvised explosive device while on patrol near Baghdad. Surgeons amputated his right arm below the elbow and his right leg below the knee.
• Bush Issues Apology Over Conditions At Walter Reed | National Security Network
  At Walter Reed, Bush awarded 10 Purple Heart medals and chatted with patients. In a physical therapy exercise room, he shook Lt. Scott Quilty’s prosthetic right hand, hopped onto an elliptical exercise machine next to Staff Sgt. Gregory Robinson (who lost a leg) and admired a naked woman tattoo on Sgt. Mark Ecker’s left shoulder.
• ON EDUCATION; Graduating Into the Real World, And Preparing to Take Up Arms – New York Times
  These 17 had entered R.O.T.C. for different reasons. Cassandra Crosby could not have afforded college without the program’s scholarship. Benjamin Keating had absorbed ”the idea of citizenship” in his classics courses. Scott Quilty and Megan McGrevey embodied the third generation in military families.
• Survivor Corps – Survivor Corps Staff
• Welcome to New Hampshire and to the homepage of Karl from New Hampshire.
  On June 1st, 2008, I was joined in the studio by Capt. Scott Quilty of Francestown, NH.
  Capt. Quilty suffered the loss of his right arm and leg, below the elbow and knee, respectively, while gallantly serving his country in Iraq.
  He is now involved with SurvivorsCorps, a non-profit organization based in Washinton, DC which is developing programs to reach out to other injured veterans to help them realign their lives.
  Scott currently lives in Maryland with his wife, also a veteran.
• Iraq Today: War News for Friday, July 04, 2008
  Scott Quilty, 28, lost his right arm and leg in October 2006 to a roadside bomb while serving in Iraq.
• June 3rd Briefing on Capitol Hill | RatifyNow.org
  Scott Quilty, U.S. Program Manager, Survivor Corps; Disabled U.S. Veteran
• At Ease!
  Scott Quilty, a 28-year-old Iraqi war veteran who lost part of an arm and leg while on foot patrol in Baghdad, presented the award to Lee Woodruff, who said she accepted it on behalf of all caregivers, parents and wives of those who have been injured in war and on behalf of anyone serving in the military.
• M?u Thân 68
  Ba tháng sau l?i tiên tri toán pháp này ?ng d?ng vào ??i úy Scott Quilty, 26 tu?i; anh d?n trung ??i ?i tu?n ti?u t?i Rustimullah, m?t th? tr?n phía Nam Baghdad, ngày mùng 2 tháng M??i 2006. Quân Iraq cho n? m?t qu? mìn, anh b? m?t tay m?t và chân m?t.
• ??? PoEnglish: Bush Apologizes for Poor Conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit to Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, 30 Mar 2007
• Bush Apologizes for Poor Conditions on Visit to Walter Reed Army Hospital «
  March 30: President Bush shakes hands with 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit to the Walter Reed Army Center.
• \jeff{krimmel} » Blog Archive » Americans Dying at Alarming Rate in Ira
  First Lt. Scott Quilty, 26, had to have his right leg amputated below the knee and his right arm amputated below the elbow, his father told The Sentinel.
• Nashuatelegraph.com: Benefit bake sale rescheduled
  MILFORD – The bake sale to benefit the family of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty has been rescheduled to this Saturday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. It will be in front of the Toadstool Bookshop, Lorden Plaza, Route 101A, Milford.
• President Bush shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty · Scaz.Net
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, Friday, March 30, 2007.
• Today in Iraq
  Lieutenant Scott Quilty, a native of Francestown, was injured in Iraq Sunday night when an improvised explosive device was detonated while he was on a dismounted patrol with the Army platoon he led. As a result of his injuries, Quilty, 26, had his right arm amputated below the elbow and his right leg removed below the knee, according to his father, R. Scott Quilty, who said he had not been told where in Iraq the attack had occurred. A state lawmaker stationed in Iraq has been injured.
• Bush Apologizes for Poor Conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit to Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, 30 Mar 2007
• LJWorld.com / Bush apologizes at Walter Reed
  President Bush meets Army 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, D.C. Quilty has a prosthetic arm because of injuries suffered during his Army service.
• reaching out «
  March 30: President Bush shakes hands with 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit to the Walter Reed Army Center.
• Before and after Iraq — O Papel dos EUA no Sistema Internacional Pós-1989
  On Oct. 2, 2006, Capt. Scott Quilty, 26, was leading a foot patrol in Rustimullah, a town south of Baghdad. An improvised explosive device, or IED, detonated near him. He lost his right arm and right leg.
• U.S. Programs Office of Survivor Corps
• Roadfood.com Forums – For a Debt That Can Never Be Repaid
  On Oct. 2, 2006, Capt. Scott Quilty, 26, was leading a foot patrol in Rustimullah, a town south of Baghdad. An improvised explosive device, or IED, detonated near him. He lost his right arm and right leg.
• Survivor Corps – Programs – United States
  Scott Quilty
  Survivor Corps
  2100 M St. NW Suite 302
  Washington DC 20037
  Ph: 202.250.3946
  F: 202.464.0011
  squilty@survivorcorps.org
• Acinetobacter Baumannii in Iraq the Casualties
  First Lt. Scott Quilty
  “Doctors had to amputate a portion of one of Quilty’s arms, and part
  of one leg.
  He is really battling infection, so he has a very high fever. He is still
  in critical condition
• BLOG.DEFENSESTANDARD.COM
  For Quilty, the motivation to come to work each day is intensely personal.
  Her husband, Capt. Scott Quilty, lost an arm and a leg and spent two years at Walter Reed recovering. She wants the patients she sees to live the life her husband now enjoys.
• Untitled Document
  Brotheres, Just finished reading the 31st. Inf newsletter. I was disconcerted to find out that, on 9/19/o6, Spec. Bobby Callahan from Jamestown, N.C was killed in iraq, when the vehicle he was in turned over. On Oct.1st.P.F.C Satieon V “T” Greenleewas killed by sniper fire in Baghdad, he was from Pemdleton, S.C. Also on the 1st., Lt. Scott Quilty lost an arm and leg (improvised explosive device) while on dismounted patrol. These men were and are with A/4/31, the unit, since 2001, has had four combat tours. Our’ brother Polar Bears are still under the hammer. With deep regret, Ed. Pro Patria.
• Military & Veterans: Politics for the deserving: 5/11/08 – 5/18/08
  On Oct. 2, 2006, Capt. Scott Quilty, 26, was leading a foot patrol in Rustimullah, a town south of Baghdad. An improvised explosive device, or IED, detonated near him. He lost his right arm and right leg.

  The best worst injury

• Photo from AP Photo by Gerald Herbert – Daylife
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, Friday, March 30, 2007.
• President George W. Bush watches U.S. Army 1st Lt. Scott Anthony Quilty of Francetown, N.H., demonstrate his walking abilities Friday, March 30, 2007, during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Standing with the President is Lt.
  President George W. Bush watches U.S. Army 1st Lt. Scott Anthony Quilty of Francetown, N.H., demonstrate his walking abilities Friday, March 30, 2007, during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Standing with the President is Lt. Quilty’s wife U.S. Army Capt. AnnMarie Dora Quilty. Lt. Quilty was later awarded the Purple Heart by President Bush. White House photo by Eric Draper
• President Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, Friday, March 30, 2007. At center is his wife Annmarie Quilty,
• President Bush watches as 1st Lt. Scott Quilty goes through his exercises as he visits with patients
  President Bush watches as 1st Lt. Scott Quilty goes through his exercises as he visits with patients in the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, Friday, March 30, 2007. Between them is his wife Annmarie Quilty.
• Bush Apologizes for Poor Conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
  President Bush, right, shakes hands with the 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit to Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, 30 Mar 2007
• The UNH Connection: An Electronic Newsletter
  PROUD VETERAN
  In 2006, while serving in Iraq, Scott Quilty ’04 (pictured with President Bush at Walter Reed Army Medical Center) lost his right arm and leg in a roadside bombing. But he didn’t lose his commitment or his hope. He tackled his rehabilitation process with determination, married his high school sweetheart, AnnMarie Dora Wilcox Quilty ’03 (also pictured), and today is leading a pilot program that will help train other survivors of traumatic injury. Focusing on his blessings is a poignant exercise for Quilty, whose close friend and UNH roommate, Ben Keating ’04, lost his life while serving in Afghanistan. “Knowing that for whatever reason I was still here and a guy like Ben isn’t — who was my better on every measurable level — kind of solidified within me that I needed to, regardless of the situation, push through the darker periods to rise above being a victim of it all,” Quilty says.
• The long road back for a wounded warrior
  There were dark days, but a retired Army captain who was injured by a roadside bomb feels lucky to be alive. First of two parts
• Soldier wounded in Iraq bombing
  FRANCESTOWN (AP) – A Francestown soldier serving in Iraq was seriously wounded over the weekend in a roadside bombing.

  First Lt. Scott Quilty, 26, had to have his right leg amputated below the knee and his right arm amputated below the elbow, his father told The Sentinel.

• A Need to Take the World Seriously
  Capt. Benjamin Keating ’04 and 1st Lt. Scott Quilty ’04 began their UNH journey together in 2000, when they enrolled in the Army ROTC program. They participated in countless early morning field exercises, spent many a late night studying for exams, and, as seniors, became roommates. By 2006, they had something else in common: both were assigned to serve in war zones, Keating in Afghanistan and Quilty in Iraq.
• U.S. Programs Office of Survivor Corps
  Survivor Corps and the global consulting firm Booz Allen Hamiliton are hosting an Initiators Conference on the Community Reintegration of Service Members and Veterans in an effort to bring together the leaders of key government, business, nonprofit, and academic institutions currently engaged on this issue. Booz Allen Hamilton, which has a long history of commitment to America’s service members and veterans, has joined us in this effort, bringing their extensive experience in helping leaders and organizations collaborate to address complex issues across sectors.
• Scott Quilty with George W Bush — PHOTO
  Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed on Friday.
• Bush promises vets a better Walter Reed – USATODAY.com
  Bush, right, shakes hands with the prosthetic arm of 1st Lt. Scott Quilty during a visit with patients at the physical therapy wing of Walter Reed on Friday.
• Rockingham Ambulance Online – News
  Two Stars of Life proudly represented Rockingham Regional Ambulance, Inc. this year. EMT – Intermediate Scott Hurst and Operations Center Coordinator Scott Quilty were selected by their peers and managers to represent both Rockingham Ambulance and the State of NH at this annual event.
• LSN – Landmine Survivors Network – Bios
  Scott Quilty – U.S. Program Manager
• UnionLeader.com – New Hampshire news, business and sports
  Capt. Scott Quilty, center, and his wife, Capt. AnnMarie Dora Wilcox Quilty, pose with President Bush during Scott’s Purple Heart ceremony at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. (COURTESY)
• PC World – Unlocked G1: Not (Yet) Worth the Effort
• Scott Quilty ’04 – UNH Alumni Association
  In early October 2006, Scott Quilty ’04 was seriously wounded in a roadside bombing in Iraq. Read more
• Facebook | Scott Quilty
• Neighbors Working To Help Family Of Injured Soldier – New Hampshire News Story – WMUR Manchester
  Neighbors are reaching out to help the family of an Army soldier from Francestown who was seriously injured in Iraq.

  First Lt. Scott Quilty was on foot patrol near Baghdad last week when he was taken down by an explosion. Doctors had to amputate a portion of one of Quilty’s arms, and part of one leg.

  “He is really battling infection, so he has a very high fever. He is still in critical condition,” said Raisa Marshall, Quilty’s neighbor.

• A MEMORABLE MEMORIAL DAY – KarlfromNH.com Weekly Columns
  On October 1st, 2006 after being in Iraq for just six weeks, Scott was struck by a roadside bomb while on patrol. He was a platoon leader, 30 men, and he had trained at Fort Drum in Watertown, New York. They were members of the 10th Mountain Division, a Combat Infantry Unit. At the tender age of 26, Scott was to lose a leg and an arm. He was lucky to have survived at all. Flown first to Germany, and then later to Walter Reed, he is still in rehabilitation there. Not once, through any of this ordeal, did he complain or regret his service. His family stood by him for months as he underwent over 15 surgeries. Skin grafts, closing of wounds, countless procedures undoubtedly painful beyond reason, and still never even a hint of “poor me”.
• Does the board wish to help out? – Viper Alley – Dodge Viper Forum
  Neighbors are reaching out to help the family of an Army soldier from Francestown who was seriously injured in Iraq.First Lt. Scott Quilty was on foot patrol near Baghdad last week when he was taken down by an explosion.

  Doctors had to amputate a portion of one of Quilty’s arms, and part of one leg.”He is really battling infection, so he has a very high fever. He is still in critical condition,” said Raisa Marshall, Quilty’s neighbor.

  Quilty is now at Walter Reed Medical Center. His mother and father have rushed to his side. Quilty’s mother quit her job at a New Hampshire Inn, anticipating his need for care when he returns home.”It’s time for the community to step up.

  It’s time for the community to take responsibility, help take the burden off of Janet and Scott’s shoulders so that they can focus on their son, not worry about the electrical bill,” said Marshall.Marshall decided to help by writing a compelling letter outlining financial needs.

  The letter was emailed to dozens of peo

• GI SPECIAL 4J5 – 5/10/06
  Francestown Soldier Injured In Iraq

  Lt. Scott Quilty, 26, a UNH graduate, had his right arm amputated below the elbow and his right leg removed below the knee.

  Oct. 4, 2006 By STEPHEN BEALE, Union Leader Correspondent

  Lieutenant Scott Quilty, a native of Francestown, was injured in Iraq Sunday night when an improvised explosive device was detonated while he was on a dismounted patrol with the Army platoon he led.

  As a result of his injuries, Quilty, 26, had his right arm amputated below the elbow and his right leg removed below the knee, according to his father, R. Scott Quilty, who said he had not been told where in Iraq the attack had occurred.

  “He had only been there six weeks and they have been moving him around,” Quilty said today in an interview. “He didn’t have any permanent station at the time.”

  Quilty said that his son was initially taken to a hospital northwest of Iraq and then transported to a military medical facility in Germany on Monday. He is scheduled to arrive a

• U.S. President George W. Bush Visits Walter Reed Army Medical Center | Article from Getty Images (by Event) Individuals | HighBeam Research
• Francestown soldier injured in Iraq
  Lieutenant Scott Quilty, a native of Francestown, was injured in Iraq Sunday night when an improvised explosive device was detonated while he was on a dismounted patrol with the Army platoon he led.
• Shindig benefits injured GI’s family
  Go back about a month ago, for instance, and put yourself in the shoes of Scott and Janet Quilty, well-known residents of the tiny Monadnock village of Francestown. Early one Monday morning, some of that dreaded news found them: Their son, Army First Lt. Scott Quilty, 26, a college scholar who’d gone to Iraq just six weeks before, had been seriously injured when a roadside booby trap blew up his platoon.
• Survivor Corps US Program Update
  Last week was a busy one for the Survivor Corps US Program. On August 18th and 19th, Survivor Corps hosted a round table discussion for organizations serving the recovery and reintegration needs of US Veterans. Participants discussed the value of connecting newly returned service members and veterans with other veterans who had been through the same experience for support. This type of relationship helps both individuals to overcome traumatic experiences and participate in community.
• A Day in the Life of President Bush (with the troops at Walter Reed): 3-30-07
  A Day in the Life of President Bush (with the troops at Walter Reed): 3-30-07
• The long road back for a wounded warrior
  Scott Quilty has always been a leader who shows us how to beat our own doubts
• Hosted by Siteleader.com
  (tags: ping.fm)
• Roger Wolfson: Why Obama Supporters Need to Do More than Vote
  (tags: ping.fm)

I don’t think that anyone can explain anything to Sara Palin. Does anyone know what her IQ is? I know that the United States sees a rugged individualist out fighting bears and wolves in the wilderness whenever she looks at herself in the mirror. Ignorant ruffian is not the source of our Constitution or our Bill or Rights.

None of the founders of this country were ruffians and all fancied themselves to be both men of letters and of the people. Diplomacy, freedom, liberty, and self-determination are things that came from the foundry of Enlightenment.

Americans mis-remembers their history: the founders of our country were not the same people who settled the continent on the shoulders of Puritanism, they were revolutionary humanists! The were men who valued the rights of man above anything else, believing men to be worthy the responsibility of being stewards of both a Nation and each other. Worthy of a democracy!

I don’t know what people think smart is, but I don’t count street smarts when it comes to world politics and diplomacy. Are we in an anti-intellectual, anti-thought, anti-rational US now? Is being a maverick better than being wildly capable. I value intellect, education, training, capability, creativity, compassion, altruism, generosity, humanitarianism more than most.

You know, good rational thought. A good sense of logic and fairness. A deep background in philosophy, history, civics, poetry, literature, and the law. We always forget — or fail to state — that Barack Obama is a Harvard-educated civil rights lawyer! This is a blessing in a world wherein we, the United States, are single-handedly dismantling the same rights, protections, privacies, and freedoms that our founding fathers, soldiers, and Americans have been fighting and dying for since we were born as a nation.

One’s mind is only knowable through the things one expresses, be it in writing or spoken word. After taking a bunch of multiple-choice tests, one’s left only with one’s capacity to communicate.

I really don’t know what to say except there are even brilliant people in my career who have trouble writing a good sentence. In communications and PR, well-written messages, conveying complexity, simply, are so valuable yet so under-valued. While I have not yet read The Age of American Unreason, we’re too close to our own dumbing-down and have become what we fear in other countries: intolerance.

We don’t even see that our own personal behavior as a country, supposedly protecting us from tyranny and “wrong-doers,” is making us tyrannical!  We’re sacrificing many of our freedoms of a perception of safety.  Safety from what? After 9/11, there is not been a brutal follow-up of discotheque bombings, the like of which marred 1980s Europe. We have not had to suffer any of what the UK needed to suffer under the IRA. We have not needed to avoid city buses the way Israelis sometimes do during real and present threat.

Since 9/11, nothing’s happened.  Nothing. And don’t even suggest that our democracy is 100% sealed against such things and that our military intelligence, our domestic intelligence, our federal and local police, our FBI, and our special operations commandoes can protect us were there another bold and well-funded attempt against any place in our continent. Impossible! Nothing’s happened.

And yet, our civil rights, our freedoms, and our personal privacy is constantly being eroded and threatened just because people are scared out-of-proportion to the real and present threat. Hell, we’re not being stolen from, we’re actively pursuing perceived security at whatever cost is necessary. Egad.

Back to writing. Back to communication. Back to anti-intellectualism. The problem is: people don’t know what “bad,” “wrong,” “imprecise,” “inarticulate,” or “confusing” writing is. I don’t buy the “anti-East Coast” thing. Mid-West universities are some of the best. There’s Rice and Austin even in TX! I see people pissing and moaning about how they need to use “SMS shorthand” on Twitter because Twitter keeps your microblogging posts under 140 characters. Well, I am “restricted” by 140 characters, too, as are we all; however, I use complete sentences, never blaming Twitter’s 140 limit!

I agree that one needs to read and read to become a better writer. It is like that in everything, including painting and photography. My dad was a shooter. He told me, “to know good photography, one must both shoot, shoot, but also look, look, look!” When your job is to communicate, “knowing social media” isn’t enough. We win gigs because we can communicate exceptionally. I don’t know German yet. I would never consider doing PR in Germany unless I hired exceptional writers and thinkers.

In America, yes, but around the world, subliteracy abounds. I love Frank Luntz’ tagline: “It is not what you say, it’s what they hear.” Understanding comprehension is key to controlling the message. When I started on USENET in ’93, it was still an ivory tower in many ways. You would win or lose argument threads through precise argument.

If I didn’t think my USENET post through, I would have my argument — my post — picked apart. The argument is every bit as important to communication and persuasion — the process and proof — as is the truth you’re trying to convey.  Not being able to think through one’s own political or esoteric argument as well as being incapable of parsing and comprehending another’s argument is what is getting the United States into such a mess.

If you can’t map historical context, rigorous research, and experiential perspective to current events, you’re liable to be manipulated or persuaded against your will based on your emotions or fears instead of logic or reason. Yes, there is a sucker born every day, and it is my passion to do my best, day by day, to avoid being that sucker.  I recommend that we all try to check the facts, the history, the recommendations, the logic, and the reason of all of the news and political discourse that we’re listening to right now, in these few days before the U.S. General Election.

Are you thinking things through or are you carrying someone else’s ideas, convictions, or beliefs?  Do you even have your own?  What do they even look like?

On behalf of the International Medical Corps and Abraham Harrison, thank you so much for all of your support over the last four weeks to get the vote out to help get the International Medical Corps into the top-five of the Members Project and then for securing the $100,000 from American Express, to be used to feed hungry children worldwide. Here’s a thank you video blog entry from Paige Strackman, who was the PaigeS who submitted IMC in the first place under the title, Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children.

Here’s the official, final, press release you can read, directly from International Medical Corps:

International Medical Corps Wins $100,000 Grant from American Express to Save Malnourished Children

October 14, 2008, Los Angeles, Calif. –International Medical Corps (IMC) has been awarded $100,000 through the American Express Members Project. The grant will be used to treat malnourished children worldwide. IMC is one of five organizations to receive funding in the nationwide campaign where American Express Card members submit and vote for projects that are meant to bring people and organizations together for positive change.

The funding will be used to implement the project, ‘Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children.’ Submitted by American Express cardmember Paige Strackman, the project focuses on treating malnutrition through nutrient-rich, ready-to-eat food, which International Medical Corps provides to more than 35,000 children every month through a network of 215 supplementary and therapeutic feeding sites in some of the world’s most food-insecure environments, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia. The project was selected by an elite panel out of 1,190 others and received more than 14,000 votes in the final round of competition.

“I submitted this project because, as a mother, I cannot ignore that five million children under five die every year due to malnutrition,” says Paige. “This funding will save thousands of malnourished children around the world who otherwise may not have been reached. I am so grateful to everyone who supported this project and helped make it a reality.”

While the project was submitted by one individual hoping to make a difference, it gathered public momentum. The project’s message was shared in the media from Los Angeles to New York, on nearly 200 blogs across the Internet, through thousands of emails and on social networking sites, including Facebook, My Space and Twitter.

The grant from American Express comes at an opportune time when rising food costs are driving millions deeper into poverty everyday while trying to afford basic staples. As a result, hunger and malnutrition kill more people each year than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.

“We are incredibly grateful to Paige for not only submitting the project, but also for fueling it with the passion to make it so successful,” says Rebecca Milner, Vice President of Institutional Advancement. “There are approximately 178 million children around the world who are malnourished and only 3 percent get treatment. This funding makes it possible for International Medical Corps to reach more of those children who desperately need our help.”

In Democratic Republic of Congo alone, International Medical Corps’ supplementary feeding centers admitted 3,500 new children in the past two months. At one center for severely malnourished children, IMC has a 35-bed capacity, but is accommodating 82. Another 30 children await treatment. This trend is symptomatic of the food insecurity affecting East Africa and much of the developing world. The World Food Program estimates that 15.7 million of those in need are in East Africa, and another 8.6 million are in Afghanistan.

With a mission that focuses on training, International Medical Corps works to empower individuals and communities, providing education on how to treat malnutrition, identify warnings signs, and intervene before malnutrition worsens. Health care workers and parents are educated on proper diet and hygiene, and communities are equipped to grow their own food and reduce their vulnerability to rising prices.

*The ‘Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children’ project can be viewed here: http://www.membersproject.com/project/view/OZH1P1
**Videos of children’s dramatic recoveries from malnutrition can be seen on International Medical Corps’ YouTube Channel: http://ca.youtube.com/user/IMCMembersProject

For more information visit our website at www.imcworldwide.org.

Also, thank you to every single blogger and social media maven who was so generous as to help us spread the word out and get as much attention as possible for both the Members Project as well as for International Medical Corps as well. You were all more than generous and all of us at IMC and AHLLC would love to thank you for being so generous and selfless.

• Help Feed Hungry Children via Danny Fisher.
• Help Save Kids via Three Sons and a Princess.
• Seeking $1.5 million to feed malnourished children via http://www.cabraham.com/node/693.
• International Medical Corps Matched With Top 25 American Express Members Project, via The Colombo Times News Blog.
• Altruism – For Whose Sake? via Jakartass.
• Cast a Vote, Help Save a Child via The Blog That Ate Manhattan Goes to Italy .
• Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children via Here There and Everywhere.
• International Medical Corps Matched With Top 25 American Express Members Project Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children via Samotalis.
• International Medical Corps responds to the food crisis with emergency nutrition programs, food relief aid, agricultural assistance, and training via Holly’s Fight to Stop Violence.
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• Russia using cluster bombs and humanitarian efforts for children… via Glass City Jungle.
• I’ve got this via E-Mail To Publish on this site, For the sake of children via The Triple Gem!.
• In This Election, The Winners are the Children via The Blog That Ate Manhattan.
• International Medical Corps via Christefideles.
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• International Medical Corps Matched with Top-25 via Jumping Monkeys.
• Banner on Site via Nerds Eye View.
• Fabulicious Friday #26 via cookienotes.
• Sharing Saturday – AmEx and Int’l Medical Corps via My Life as a Hot Professional.
• Cause Everyone Needs to Eat via Grassroots Activism.
• International Medical Corps via Yoga and Judaism Center.
• Radyo Inteligentaindigena-09-20-2008 via Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo.
• Help IMC save the lives of malnourished children in Africa! via A Romanian in Africa.
• Fighting Deadly Malnutrition: This Time, A Morally Imperative Rescue via The Cogitamus Blog.
• Fighting Deadly Malnutrition: This Time, A Morally Imperative Rescue via litbrit .
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• This won’t take a minute. via Miss Cellania.
• People Watching in Lipscani via Writers Bloc.
• A Good Deed via My Boyfriend is a twat.
• Corporate do-gooding: Vote for the best ideas that American Express is sifting through via Religion Blog: Dallas News.
• Please consider voting via Living in shkoder Albania.
• Banner via Andres V.
• Help Save the Lives of Malnourished Children via Progressive U.org.
• International Medical Corp via Jaden’s Journal.
• We Get Stuff via Winds of Change.
• International Medical Corps, Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children via Art of the Possible Online.
• Banner via Postcards From Across the Pond.
• Another AmEx Submission… via Fat Doctor.
• Up to 5 million children a year die of malnutrition – with one mouse click, you can help via Shakesville.
• Help International Medical Corp Save Starving Child With Just One Click via William K. Wolfrum.
• International Medical Corps Needs Your Vote via The Rotten Word.
• Give ‘em a vote via Army of Mom.
• Int’l Child Relief NGO Needs Our Votes…1.5Million At Stake via The Democratic Daily.
• Members Project by AmEx is amazing. Vote to send their money to help children here. via Craphammer.
• Reaching Out in the Love of Christ via The Day of the Lord.
• Do you Hear the Cry? via Christs Redeeming Passion.
• Compassion that makes a Difference. via Passion that Redeems.
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• banner via The Legless Blog.
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• Dora, the sheep droppings explorer via The French Mountain Dweller.
• Int’l NGO Needs Our Help To Win $1.5 M For Starving Children via Daily Kos.
• Thank You Bloggers for Blogging about International Medical Corps via Memes.org.
• Thank You International Medical Corps Bloggers via Abraham Harrison.
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• Members Projects via OBVI.
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• Thursday, September 25, 2008 via Island In the Pacific.
• Your click could mean $1.5 million for malnourished children around the world. via Fresh Motivation.
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• Vote to make a difference via Onlinefundraisingblog.
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• International Medical Corps Matched with Top 25 American Express Members Project, ‘Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children’ via Bio-Medicine.
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• “The International Medical Corps: Please Consider This Good Cause” via Working With Word.
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• Things I should have avoided whilst pregnant via Whitterer on Autism.
• American Express Members Project: Join me in voting for the project, “Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children.” via Make College Pay Off.
• Interested in Saving a Child From Malnutrition? via Reservoir.
• Go Vote for the International Medical Corps via Christian Spirituality w/ Edges.
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• Tela’s Finds via Working Moms Against Guilt.
• Save Lives with Your Vote via Servant of Chaos.
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• One Day Left – the AMEX Members Project via A Mom a Blog and the Life In-Between.
• widget via Psychiatryforpublic.
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• Help Save the Lives of Malnourished Children via Progressiveu.
• A Little Charity Is All It Takes. via Anchor Rising.
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• Vote to Feed Hungry Children via Looney Bin 4 Sure.
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• IMC project: Saving the lives of malnourished children via Motherscribe.
• Nobody likes to go hungry – especially kiddos. via Jelly Mom.
• HELP FEED CHILDREN via Smart Christian.
• International Medical Corps via Mama Speaks.
• International Medical Corps–Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children via This Mom.
• I don’t usually do this, but… via Non-Essential Equipment.
• Before I Forget (Again) via Drye Portents.
• Haiti Update via Gonna Make a Change.
• Vote to save hungry children! via Make it Happen.
• Please vote via All 4 My Gals.
• Att: American Express Card holders via Writers Bloc.
• Hey..Vote Again via ZenZine.
• Vote For These Guys and Save Some Children via Intuittech.
• Widget via The Disenchanted Forest.
• Vote for the International Medical Corps! via understanding the effects of unresolved abandonment issues.
• Help the International Medical Corps Feed Hungry Children via Danny Fisher.
• Help Save the Lives of Malnourished Children via Progressiveu.
• Saving the Lives of malnourished children via The French Mountain Dweller.
• Last chance to Save The Lives of Malnourished Children via Simple Green World.
• International Medical Corps’s Good Deeds Triumph!! via Three P’s in a Pod.
• Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children – NEWS FACTS via Ontario.
• $1.5 Million For Malnourished Children Around The World Possible – Your Vote In The American Express Members Project Could Help This Happen via Medical News Today.
• International Medical Corp Vote Now! via Holly’s Fight for Justice.
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• Part II Vote to Help Hungry Children via Dad Talk.
• Continue Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children via What’s Delmer Look Like?.
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• Banner via Earnest Parenting.
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• Food Charities via Grasshopper New Media Presents….
• That good deed that some of you did …. via My Boyfriend is a twat.
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• Can Social Media Make the World A Better Place? via Digital Podcast.
• Vote to Feed Hungry Children via South Africa.
• Members Project Submissions Due 8/19 via The Drew Blog.
• Help International Medical Corps Save the Lives of Malnourished Children via International Medical Corps.
• Help International Medical Corps Save the Lives of Malnourished Children via Chris Abraham.
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• Vote AGAIN!!! for “Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children” via finding joy in Liberia .
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• Calling All American Express Cardholders via Everything Finance.
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• Its Easy to Make a Difference via Baer This In Mind.
• Hello guys! via Halo Scan.
• Help Feed Hungry Children! via Friends of the World Food Organization.
• International Medical Corps now in American Express Members Project Top 5, Vote Today via Yubanet.
• American Express Members Project Contest: Support the International Medical Corps via The Human Trafficking Project.

CHALLENGE: This was a two week, high pressure campaign focused on getting International Medical Corps (IMC) into the final five of the American Express Members Project $2.5 million giveaway competition. 1,190 projects were nominated for participation in the competition, Amex cardholders could vote for their favorite project, and the top five projects receive a portion of the $2.5 million in grant money.

The challenge that Abraham Harrison faced was to take IMC, a relatively low-profile $100MM per year organization that gets all its money from government grants and had essentially no support base among the general public and activate a mass wave of support and votes for the organization – in two weeks.

International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training, relief operations, and development programs.

STRATEGY: Abraham & Harrison has developed strong relationships with a large group of bloggers interested in humanitarian issues who in turn act as influencers in their communities of readers. The goal, as with all online influencer outreaches, was to earn these bloggers’ support and their willingness to act as repeaters and amplifiers of our client’s message, get their implicit or explicit endorsement, and motivate their readerships to action – in this case to vote for IMC in the Amex Members’ Project competition.

Abraham & Harrison was in constant consultation with the client, advising International Medical Corps on their message copy, their use of widgets, their posting of banner ads, and guiding their broader strategic decisions.

TACTICS: Abraham & Harrison reached out to close to 4000 bloggers across a spectrum of demographics. The Abraham & Harrison team reached out to these bloggers multiple times over the course of two weeks directing them to the Members Project website and the helpful, blogger-friendly Social Media News Release that made blogging on the topic an easy cut-and-paste action. http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us/

Abraham & Harrison also turned to its strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, and several other social networks, building groups and messaging followers as well as the broader Abraham & Harrison community. To drive SEO and further traffic, every one of the over 190 blog posts was posted on Digg and several other social bookmarking platforms.

RESULTS: Within two weeks the team at Abraham & Harrison had achieved close to a 10% response rate to the outreach emails, leading to over 190 blog posts with more trickling in daily. Millions of impressions were made, and given the permanent nature of blog posts and the resultant presence on the search engines, impressions will continue to be made into the future.

International Medical Corps was able to fend off challenges from those organizations in 6th and 7th place, finally finishing in the top five, guaranteeing them a portion of the $2.5MM in grant money.

"Abraham & Harrison has been a tremendous asset to International Medical Corps during our American Express Members Project campaign. Their online strategy and outreach helped introduce International Medical Corps to many new audiences and raised our visibility during this time-sensitive campaign. International Medical Corps was written about in more than 170 blog posts.

"Abraham & Harrison brings a unique approach to online public relations. The worldwide web is a vast space, yet Abraham & Harrison has found a formula to reach out to target audiences, effectively raise awareness and get online readers and activists to take action.

"The entire Abraham & Harrison team has been fantastic. Each team member brings creativity and passion to the cause. Without a doubt, International Medical Corps would engage Abraham & Harrison for another campaign."

Rebecca Milner
Vice President, Institutional Advancement
International Medical Corps

If you have not been keeping on top of all of the great comments streaming in to the AH Poll entitled “If John McCain died or became incapacitated, would Sarah Palin be competent to be President?” you are really missing out! Some of them are the most insightful, thoughtful, and brilliant collection of thoughts representing the best and the worst of the right and the left! Roll up your sleeves and batten your hatches because you’re going to have one hell of a ride. Oh, also, these comments are in reverse-chronological order so the most recent are at the top. If you want to keep track of them live, please go visit them where they love and breathe. Read below for the most amazing Sarah Palin comment thread of the Internets!

And, here’s an embed of the poll, if I’ve piqued your interest by now:

Firstly, please vote now for the Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children. Secondly, I really want International Medical Corps to do as well as possible in the American Express Members Project. IMC has an amazing worldwide mission, “dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training and relief and development programs.”

My team and I have been working with the IMC team for the last three weeks. After the first two weeks, we all were were able to collectively get IMC into the top-5, which was an amazing feat since there were quite a few organizations who were really hot on our heels!

The project? Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children. Now that the Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children project has made the top-5, we’re all pushing for the last 5 days and we need your vote! We’re currently in 4th place, which guarantees $100,000; however, if we are able to secure number 3, International Medical Corps would receive $300,000; then, if we could make it to second, IMC would receive $1,000,000. Making first would mean $1,5 million dollars to help feed hungry and malnourished children worldwide, saving the lives of malnourished children.

If you want to learn more about the project, Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children, feel free to check out the Social Media News Release we created for this campaign. If you wan to learn more about the International Medical Corps, please check out the IMC web site and their about page:

About International Medical Corps

International Medical Corps (IMC) is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training and relief and development programs.

Established in 1984 by volunteer doctors and nurses, IMC is a private, voluntary, nonpolitical, nonsectarian organization. Its mission is to improve the quality of life through health interventions and related activities that build local capacity in underserved communities worldwide.

By offering training and health care to local populations and medical assistance to people at highest risk, and with the flexibility to respond rapidly to emergency situations, IMC rehabilitates devastated health care systems and helps bring them back to self-reliance.