Sometimes the best part of a speech isn’t the one with the brilliant metaphor, the side-splitting joke or the devastating retort. It’s the part where the speaker makes a case plainly but eloquently, and where the drama comes from the clash of ideas instead of from cranked-up rhetoric.

President Obama’s best moment tonight may have been this one. I don’t think it took anyone’s breath away at the time… but I’ll bet you see this language repeated in speech after speech by Democratic candidates and incumbents in the coming months:

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right.

Jump ahead to the solution to my problem

Every Sunday, when my cartoon gets posted on ReadWriteWeb, I head on over to have a look and join whatever conversation’s going on.

Today’s visit was much the same thing… until I noticed a little wonkiness: a sentence that stopped dead just before the cartoon. Worse, it was a linked sentence… and worse yet, it was the sentence that links from ReadWriteWeb to Noise to Signal.

I clicked on it. Good news: I landed on RobCottingham.ca. Bad news: I was on a 404 page. Because I forgot to include a closing quotation mark in the link to my cartoon site, that link points to:

http://robcottingham.ca/cartoon%3ENoise%20to%20Signal%20cartoons%20here
%3C/a%3E.%3C/em%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cdiv%20style=

No surprise it doesn’t go anywhere useful, right? That’s kind of a big deal, because a) I don’t like people getting frustrated when they click on my links, and b) a lot of people drop by my site every Sunday thanks to that link.

I dropped my editor a note apologizing and alerting him to the issue (apart from everything else, it also broke the layout on that page). Which is a start, but there’d be a few hours until he saw my email (remember, this is Sunday). And in the meantime, there’d be a lot of people clicking and saying “Wha’a?”

What I wanted them to do was click and be taken instantly to the original link. To do that, I needed to set up what’s known as a redirect – an instruction to my web server saying “If anyone tries to load that screwed-up address, take them to the real address instead.”

And ideally, it should be a particular kind of redirect — a 301 redirect, to be technical — that tells search engines, “This item has permanently moved to this other location.”

I could have done this by editing a file in my site’s folder named the .htaccess file, which has a series of instructions for the server covering everything from memory allocation to redirection. There are plenty of great tutorials on how to do exactly that.

But that’s a little cumbersome (especially because this happens just infrequently enough that I have to relearn how to do it every single time). And as a WordPress user, I’ve grown accustomed to talented programmers creating great plugins to solve nearly every technical issue that might come up.

Which brings me to John Godley, and a great little plugin called Redirection.

The Redirection plugin allows me to deal with a whole slew of issues. Had to change my permalink structure because of a plugin update? I can take care of it with a few clicks and keystrokes, permanently redirecting traffic from the old URLs to the new ones. Discovered a bunch of frequent 404 errors from someone’s mistyped URLs? Fixed! And I can see all of my redirects at once, group them however I want, and see just how much traffic each one has diverted (read: “just how much traffic Redirection has routed to the right destination”).

It’s great, it’s free, and it saved a lot of people from thinking ill of me tonight. Check it out.

Recently, a team of skilled Internet (small-e) explorers set out to find some trace of well-known adventurer, bon vivant and conversationalist Mail.app. After chasing down several false leads (one of which ended with a grisly discovery: the frozen, lifeless body of Eudora for Mac OS X Lion), they found this tattered journal, buried under a simple cairn of stacked BCC messages.

July 15: Setting off today on greatest adventure yet: traversing the fabled Mailbox Hierarchy. This mighty peak is the tallest I have scaled yet, and is known for its treacherous queries and unnavigable tables. Can’t wait to change the flags up at the top!

July 17: Slow moving so far. But I’ve just found a lost message, and I really think I should try to recover it.

August 2: Still trying to recover that message. I know I can get it, but it’s wedged into this crevasse really tightly.

August 16: Just replenished supplies and updated to 10.7.1. I wonder if I wedged my penknife in between this outcropping and that message if it would come loose?

August 19: Discouraged. Instructions relayed from user at base camp say to stop trying to recover that message. Fine.

August 20: User has now told me seven times to stop trying to recover the message. OKAY. WHATEVER. Moving on.

September 4: High enough now that I’ve finally crossed the spamline. Huge drifts of the stuff. Just spent three days rerouting to avoid a cornice of weight-loss messages.

September 9: Will have to connect with that Exchange server on the other side of this neve field. Checking all my equipment three or four times over. Nervous, but excited.

September 10: Incredibly frustrated!! Connection to server failed, and I slid down about 60 metres over rough ice and crashed. Filters are broken, and this inbox is getting jammed.

September 16: Supplies are running low. Many obstacles in way that aren’t marked on the IMAP. Altitude sickness setting in, and occasionally delusional. Maybe I should try to recover that message again?

September 25: Maybe footwear is the problem? Will reboot.

October 18: Have subsisted for more than a month on thawed spam and old phishing messages. Weighed down with mailing lists and Facebook notifications. Can’t go up, can’t go down, and can’t go on like this much longer. Shrouded in the Cloud for days.

October 21: For a few minutes, the Cloud went down and all was clear. Magnificent – beautiful – found myself meditating again for first time in years. Revelation: seems my whole life has been a struggle to free myself from attachments.

October 24: Decision made. Will attempt last-ditch maneuver: rebuild mailboxes while deleting everything older than two months. Could lose everything. Will let you know if I make it. Either way… see you all at Inbox Zero. 221 Bye.

We can only assume Mail.app’s desperate risk ended in a painful and most likely fatal bounce. 

If you haven’t checked out Storify yet, you’re missing out on a treat. This curation service allows you to seek out Tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, blog posts and more – and then weave them together to tell the social media story behind a particular topic.

Storified by Rob Cottingham

Wed, Jan 11 2012 16:17:01 ·
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Storify for WordPress – brought to you, apparently, by Gina Trapani and me

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If you haven’t checked out Storify yet, you’re missing out on a treat. This curation service allows you to seek out Tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, blog posts and more – and then weave them together to tell the social media story behind a particular topic.

1. Storify makes that whole process ridiculously easy – downright fun, even. But the process of publishing a Storify story in WordPress? A little less so. Which led Gina Trapani to post something yesterday, and me to chime in:
2. Share
   “

   Finally tried @Storify, like it a lot. Want it built into the WordPress editor. My 1st story on tech journo drama: bit.ly/xICu0N

   Gina Trapani

   Tue, Jan 10 2012 01:38:47

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   “

   Oh, HELL, yes. RT @ginatrapani: Finally tried @Storify, like it a lot. Want it built into the WordPress editor.

   Rob Cottingham

   Tue, Jan 10 2012 01:40:17

   ReplyRetweet
4. Well, guess what flashed across my HootSuite screen this morning, not 12 hours later.
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   @RobCottingham You’ve been quoted in my story: “Now you can create Storify stories from the WordPress dashboard” sfy.co/U1T

   Storify

   Tue, Jan 10 2012 13:51:09

   ReplyRetweet
6. My god, I thought. So the people at Storify see Gina Trapani’s tweet, then they see mine, then they notice I say not only “yes” but “hell yes”, and they haul their development team out of bed and say, “Build this! Build this right now!“

   (Either that or it was already underway and was going to be launched today anyway. I suppose that’s possible. I kind of prefer the scenario where my tweets wield the power of life and death over the tech industry, but if you have to burst that bubble, fine.)

7. Share

   

   Now you can create Storify stories from the WordPress dashboard

   Storified bystorify

   You asked for it. We heard you. Now you can now create Storify stories for self-hosted WordPress blogs from directly inside the WordPress dashboard.

   Now you can create Storify stories from the WordPress dashboard

   Storify
8. The plugin creates a Storify tab on your WordPress dashboard; from there, you can build a Storify post and then add it to your blog.

   The response has been pretty happy –

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   “

   So happy about idea of Storify as a WordPress Plugin, that I do that “Dance of Joy” youtube.com/watch?v=GfPg5L… #perfectstrangers

   Ben Rimes

   Tue, Jan 10 2012 19:42:50

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10. – although Mat Wright points out a not-insignificant hiccup:
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    @robcottingham surprised to see the WP Storify plugin does not support Firefox for Mac

    Mat Wright

    Tue, Jan 10 2012 19:50:44

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12. And indeed, while it worked just fine in Chrome, the Storify plugin’s interface was only 100 pixels or so high when I loaded it in Firefox on my Mac. I found a workaround in Firebug, but it didn’t work for Mat. Fortunately, the good folks at Storify swooped in with breathtaking speed to reply.
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    @matvic Huh! It seems to be a small CSS bug; if I change the height of the iFrame to 600px, it works fine. /cc @Storify

    Rob Cottingham

    Tue, Jan 10 2012 20:29:51

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    @robcottingham this is what I get simply trying to open WP Storify settings in the dashboard on Firefox ow.ly/i/puLC

    Mat Wright

    Tue, Jan 10 2012 20:32:31

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    @RobCottingham Glad to see that did the trick. @matvic still having problems? Just in Firefox?

    Storify

    Tue, Jan 10 2012 20:43:54

    ReplyRetweet
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    @storify thanks for replying! Issue is just in Firefox 4.01 for Mac. OS 10.6.8 – works fine in Chrome and Safari cc @robcottingham

    Mat Wright

    Tue, Jan 10 2012 20:47:36

    ReplyRetweet
17. We’ll see how that turns out — I wouldn’t be surprised if Storify’s developers had a fix before sunrise tomorrow.

    Update: And so they did.

    The big question is whether this – terrific as it is (and that’s plenty terrific) – will be as far as Storify goes with WordPress integration. The plugin basically loads an iFrame with the Storify interface; deeper integration would involve turning Storify into a content source for the WordPress editor, perhaps with a sidebar widget containing the Storify search and results box. (A little like Zemanta, except with manual, intentional search and striking visuals instead of Zemanta’s text analysis and simple text links, related posts and images. Say, has anyone mashed those two up..?)
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    Zemanta – blog publishing assistant: related images, articles & posts for bloggers

    Zemanta blogging helper suggests images, links, tags and related articles while you write your blog post and promotes your content. Avail…

    

    Zemanta
19. You would then have all the bells and whistles you’ve installed in your editor, including access to your blog’s media files, plus whatever custom functionality you’ve added over the years, but you’d also have the power of Storify’s impressive interface. And instead of the Storify post appearing as an iframe inside your WordPress post, with its own fonts and style attributes that may not match yours, it would blend seamlessly into your blog.

    The technical questions involved aren’t minor, but the larger issue for Storify is probably the loss of the content and social activity that users are currently generating on their site.

    Of course, it’s in the nature of us end users to tell a company that’s just created something really cool “That’s nice. Now here’s what I want next…” And this is really cool, and I suspect it will make me use Storify a lot more often here.

    As you can probably tell, I built this in Storify. I did it in Firefox, too, using my little Firebug hack, just to be ornery.

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It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking what we do online isn’t real, and doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t help that we’ve developed the acronym IRL, In Real Life, to refer to the offline world. 

But why shouldn’t we regard our online lives as just as real, just as valid and just as meaningful as our offline ones? That’s the question Alex posed a few months ago at TEDx Victoria, proceeding from a blog post she wrote last year for the Harvard Business Review.

The talk, titled “Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for your Online Life”, just went live. And if you’ve ever wondered why a valued online friendship doesn’t count as “the real world” while a trip to the mall does – and, more to the point, what you can do about it – you’ll want to watch.

One of the most seductive things about social media is the way it allows us to quantify things. I have more friends than she does – I must be more popular. That blog post got more hits than this one, so that one’s more effective. We have more Twitter followers this month than last month, so we’re on the right track.

Numbers are lovely that way. In a world where everything seems open to interpretation, numbers offer certainty. Five is bigger than three: end of argument.

Problem is, a beautiful number can hide an ugly bunch of oversimplification. Trying to quantify the complexities of human interaction in a multidimensional matrix of influence and activity in a few simple numbers is next to impossible (although potentially very attractive to venture capitalists).

Which is why, despite a valiant effort, social-media-analysts-turned-political-prognosticators fell so heavily on their virtual fannies in trying to use online metrics to predict last Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucus.

The good folks at Trilogy Interactive summed up how woefully short those predictions fell in a handy infographic. (Only one prognostication came close – eerily so – until a glitch in the data it was based on got corrected, and then it fell into line with the others.)

So why are retweets, likes, mentions and follows such poor predictors of electoral success? As Trilogy points out, it’s partly because of the difficulty of focusing that information geographically. And it’s partly the way those numbers confuse conversational buzz and notoriety with support. Micah Sifry puts it well:

Saying simple, stupid things that lots of people want to tell their peers about can get you tons of followers and retweets. But it doesn’t mean anything definitive about grass-roots support. Otherwise, right now we’d be talking about Herman Cain’s amazing victory in Iowa.

More fundamentally, the information that Twitter, Facebook and other platforms can offer us about our relationships to brands, candidates, ideas and each other is still pretty crude. And it would take a far more subtle, sophisticated and complex reading of the things we say to each other to infer anything very meaningful from those blunt-instrument statistics.

Which is worth remembering the next time you find yourself or your organization getting hung up on the number of followers, fans and subscribers you have. Those numbers can be useful… but they couldn’t predict Newt Gingrich’s future, and they shouldn’t dictate yours.

Hi! It’s you, a month or two from now. I’m traveling back in time with an urgent message.

No, no, not “invest in TriMegaMutual”. Not “don’t believe the polar bears when they learn to talk”.

It’s this: “back up your hard drive.”

See, in about a month or two, your (my) hard drive’s going to fail. And you’re (I’m) going to smack your (my) forehead and say, “Why the hell didn’t I back up? If only I could go back in time to the end of 2011, when I had all that free time.”

And then you’re (I’m) going to build a time machine, and go back in time to warn yourself. Except you won’t have to… if you start backing up now. Right now can be the then when you wish you’d backed up, except — hurray! — you did. If you follow.

Here are three things you can do, right now, to make sure your most urgent data is there when you need it:

• Buy yourself a nice big external hard drive (there are plenty of sales on right now) and use a simple backup program with it. If you have a Mac and a recent version of OS X, you already have one: it’s called Time Machine (yeah: spooky, right?) and it came free with your operating system. Just open up the Time Machine preference pane in System Preferences, and configure from there. If you’re using Windows, Backup and Restore comes free with Windows. And if you’re using Linux… well, you’re probably already backing up with something like fwbackups.
• Sign onto a service like Dropbox, and use it to back up your most critical 2 GB of info, free of charge. This could be your active work documents, for example. It’ll mean you can keep working on the most important stuff on another computer while you’re recovering from the hard drive failure.
• Start using a networked notebook like Evernote to store notes from meetings, to-do lists, software serial numbers and other key info. Password-protect any info you’d particularly like to keep from prying eyes. You’ll be able to access it from other computers and mobile devices while your computer’s getting back up and running.

Of course there’s more to a solid backup regime than this. (I actually had a visit from the us of late 2012, warning about floods, earthquakes and fire, and suggesting we look into a] an offsite backup and b] the whole Mayan calendar thing.) But with these three steps, you’ll be way ahead of the game in a month or two.

Thanks. I’m hoping that tell you all this won’t cause some kind of temporal paradox that winds up causing the universe to collapse. But trust me: compared to what losing all our data will be like, it’s worth the risk.