First day back from a two-week hiatus, and already exhausted... so here goes:

First off, congrats to Niall on the birth of his daughter Tabitha... even as a father of twin girls, it's impossible to describe the pure pleasure of parenting... so I won't, and rather leave it to everyone to either agree, or find out for themselves.

Nice to see another list of Canadian marketing/WOM/PR bloggers. Kate and I chatted briefly about this a while ago... so kudos to Sean for his efforts... (with 5 bloggers hailing from Canada, maybe we'll see an H&K name up there one day... best get writing...)

The debate between Colin and Joe on Astroturfing is an interesting one (which I sadly missed jumping in on), and definitely requires serious consideration given our role in helping clients to galvanize grassroots support around a given issue. I, for one, support Keith Jackson's answer (given on Paull Young's blog) to Joe's question "Where is the line between artificial manipulation and legitimate grassroots mobilization?" The difference is, indeed, transparency. Grassroots mobilization, by its very nature, is manipulation of the masses to take a specific action. "Artificial manipulation", or astroturfing, however, implies the improper use of information, or lack of it, to mislead those masses - whether it be information that identifies the source, or information to convince us to take action. All of which reinforces the importance of transparency. But do we even need to worry? The ease by which individuals are now able to "follow the money" makes it, in my view, virtually impossible for an organization to astroturf on a widespread scale, intentionally or no. We (and our clients) have no choice but to be completely transparent. Those who attempt to be anything but will, as we're already seeing, be flamed and suffer the consequences to their reputations and their business. This is, I'm sure, only the start of the debate.

I spent the last two weeks in cottage country about an hour and a half north of Ottawa, near the town of Gracefield, without laptop or crackberry, where I'm currently in the process of building a small cottage with friends and family. For nearly 10 days, I lived a very small town life and found myself enjoying the simple pleasures of chatting over coffee and breakfast in local diners, dropping in unannounced on friends and friends of friends, and speaking with people face-to-face versus on the phone or online. There is certainly something to be said about the power of the web to enable communications... but I do believe that there is also something we lose when we extract ourselves entirely from the face-to-face experience.