Marc recently visited Cuba, and over at Get Real he breaks a story about Cuba's huge educational investment in la Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, or UCI, a key part of Castro's plan to make Cuba a future high tech powerhouse.

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At Get Real, we have outlined three reasons to get involved in the True Voice (Business of Blogging) seminars, over and above the immediate value of attending the seminar:

1. We are launching a 20 Questions project, involving our extended network of bloggers, to whittle down to the core 20 issues in blogging, and a myriad of contrasting answers to them. Attendees will have access to the project, and will receive a book developed from the project.
2. After each seminar (26 Jan 2005 NYC is the first of 5 planned), we will support a 6 week virtual workshop, providing each attendee with on-going feedback on design, development, production, and other areas.
3. Following each seminar and its virtual workshop, the True Voice team will select a single participating company, organization/group, or individual to work with in a more strategic way. For example, we might select an individual blogger to become a Corante Contributor, or work for a day with a company on its internal blogging project, or help a non-profit launch an issue-oriented blog.

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Seth Godin

[from A Little Like Francisco Franco]

The number of new micro-brands is exploding. [...] If we define brand as a shortcut for a set of commercial attributes, emotions, stories, whatever, then any blogger with a following has a brand.

[...]

Doc Searls and company would have us believe that markets are conversations. This is a great conversation-starter and a useful piece of agit-prop. But the reality is that many many brands are actually monologues, not dialogues. That doesn't mean a conversation won't create a better, more robust, more useful brand. But, alas, most organizations can't handle that truth. So they do their best to do it the old way.

I said sometime last year (see here) that brands are no longer promises, as the conventional wisdom has held for so long; they are now invitations. This means that successful brands will engage markets in rich and complex dialogue, and those that don't will fail or falter.

It is true that many companies will continue on doing what makes them comfortable, even if it is ineffective. As Eric Bonabeau once said, in a very different context, ""Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't fully understand or control."

As this press release explains, we're launching a multi-city seminar series called "True Voice: The Business of Blogging." The series, to be sponsored by Silkroad technology and designed and produced by me (Stowe), Greg Narain and Suw Charman, will have us running a comprehensive one-day event that will examine the business, political and societal implications of social media and the impact of this burgeoning communication medium on the future media and business landscape.

So some big picture stuff, but also very much an exercise in discussing and imparting lots of practical and pragmatic advice on the nuts and bolts of blogging with a program that will include interviews, case studies and a whole lot of interactivity and ongoing dialogue.

More at the press release as well as stay tuned for a related blog that'll go live in the next month or two

Jason Calcanis posted a piece yesterday which is the outgrowth of an ongoing, email back channel discussion arising from Mark Canter's Heresy (see Marc's Heresy, II, III, and IV). I hate to say it, but I almost agree with Jason:

Jason Calcanis

[from More on bloggers trying to justify selling out - The Jason Calacanis Weblog - calacanis.weblogsinc.com]

No one is saying running advertising makes you a whore. Boingboing added traditional advertising units that are clearly labeled. I think that is great and I’m psyched that the hard-working team over there is covering their costs and getting paid for putting together a very unique product.

What we’re saying is that if you mix advertising into your editorial, and have the writers getting paid to promote products, you are a whore.

There is a line, and we shouldn't cross it. "Whore" may be a bit strong, but I agree with Jason's perspective.

Our own Strange Attractor appeared on the Guardian Newsblog today, in what looks like their blogroll: