Hi, Elections Canada. We go back a long way, you and me. I’m the kid who had your colour-coded riding map masking-taped to my bedroom wall.

So let me offer some friendly advice. You want to stop people from tweeting election results from Eastern Canada before folks in Western Canada have had a chance to cast their ballots?

Then don’t use section 329 of the Canada Elections Act. The full weight of the law is way too blunt an instrument.

Instead, think about the medium. You’re trying to get people to change their online behaviour, right? So look to the social mores and codes of conduct that govern behaviour on the Internet.

And on the Internet, there are few sins more egregious, few offences less forgivable, than the spoiler.

By “spoiler”, I mean a post that gives away a key plot point or twist from a TV show, movie or — yes, even in 2011 — book before it’s common knowledge. And unless you take measures to prevent people from stumbling onto it and spoiling the surprise, you pay a heavy social price for posting one. (Most recently, an extra on the hit show Glee recently tweeted a massive spoiler about the show that brought the almighty wrath of the Intertubes down on her head.)

People on the West Coast resent seeing spoilers on Twitter the night of a big Grey’s Anatomy or Chuck episode. So why not position election night returns the same way? Play up the suspense, the drama, the thrills and chills that westerners will miss out on if those eastern swine insist on ruining the ending. (If there was ever a time to manipulate regional grievances toward a public policy goal, this is it.)

Next, encourage the use of the #tweettheresults hashtag… and then educate users on how to filter it out of their Twitter feeds for the hours between the closing of polls in Newfoundland and the end of voting in B.C. and Yukon. (As an added bonus, promote tools like the Canadian-made HootSuite, which lets you do that kind of filtering easily.)

(Speaking of #tweettheresults, check out TweetTheResults.ca, the site that Alexandra Samuel and Darren Barefoot created to capture the conversation around this issue.)

Then publicize ways people can conceal spoilers on forums and blogs (if they’re still using such antiquated technologies) from the eyes of casual readers:

• the famed invisio-text markup that many forums like to use (which makes the text the same color as the background, requiring people to select the text with their cursor to read it)
• a “Spoilers follow!” warning, followed by spoiler space: two dozen or so hard carriage returns, to push the spoiler text below the screen; readers must deliberately scroll down to read it
• for the slightly geeky, a combination of JavaScript and CSS that lets you hide information unless a reader clicks on a link.

The result? Casual online folks won’t accidentally discover early results, and the people who were actively seeking them out can still find them — but it’ll take roughly as much effort as phoning, texting or emailing an eastern friend or relative.

You’re welcome.

1. Tiffany’s gives you jade-and-ruby-encrusted “Previous” and “Next” buttons.
2. Comment spammers begin to leave actual Spam™.
3. Six Apart upgrades you to Seven Apart. (Damn… missed out on this by a few months.)
4. You get invited to glitzy, celebrity-packed closed betas.
5. Twitter quietly bumps you to 141 characters.
6. A CSS pseudo-class is named in your honour.
7. You get congratulatory noogies from your choice of two bloggers from the Technorati 100.
8. You get to do a TED Talk about anything. Really, anything: Beanie Babies, lint traps, how that last burrito is sitting… whatever you want. And everyone has to clap.
9. Your monthly maximum-number-of-cat-posts-until-people-desert-you-in-droves is raised to three.
10. Slashdot formally requests that you give them a half-hour’s heads-up before linking to them, so they can prepare for the traffic.

Happy birthday, little blog.

Updated: Now I just have to install these:

This is the story of how one elephant drove us to make a change… and another elephant, courtesy of Switch authors Chip and Dan Heath, showed us the way.

We’ve been meaning to leave domain registrar GoDaddy for a long time. The endless come-ons and up-sells, the relentless and depressing sexism of their marketing, and one or two appalling posts on CEO Bob Parsons‘ blog all combined to alienate us completely from the company over the years.

If it had been a question of switching grocery stores or vitamin brands, we’d have done it long ago. But registrars tend to make leaving kind of complex; they don’t see it as being in their interest to have one big Transfer All of Your Domains Somewhere Else button. And since we own dozens of domains, the barrier to action was even greater. Switching domains was on our list of things to do… someday.

Enter the first elephant.

In March, Parsons uploaded a video himself shooting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe, and there was an immediate outcry. Parsons’ defence that the killing was an act of humanity, helping villagers protect their crops and providing a little badly-needed meat, was undermined by the video itself, which was flippant and self-promotional.

(The video has since been re-edited to replace the initial title labelling it a vacation video and to remove the shots of Parsons standing triumphantly over the elephant, and the AC/DC music that ran over the footage of villagers — wearing GoDaddy caps — stripping meat off the elephant’s carcass, as well as closeups of the villagers and company logos.)

I watched the video on March 31, agog. But it wasn’t until our operations manager, Morgan Brayton, wrote Alex and me a quick email to say that she was sickened by the incident – and wondered if this might be the moment to change – that we decided to act.

But just what action, exactly?

Cue the second elephant.

We were at a place where a lot of people and organizations often find themselves: ready to change, but not quite sure how. In particular, there are a lot of domain registrars out there. Who to go to?

That brings us to Switch, and Chip and Dan Heath’s elephant. Their book examines how organizations can bring about change. And they argue that the human brain is a lot like an elephant with a rider on it. The rational, calculating rider believes she or he is actually in charge… but it’s the emotional elephant that ultimately decides where they’re going.

If you want to change someone’s behaviour, then, you need to direct the rider and motivate the elephant. But even that often isn’t enough. There’s a third step: shaping the path: removing obstacles, setting out step-by-step instructions, and making change as easy to embrace as possible.

In our case, we’d heard good things about Namecheap, and their rapid response to a Twitter query I’d posted was very promising. But our friend, sysadmin and development partner Mike Kelly of Soniccat suggested we look into Tucows-affiliated Hover.

And when I checked out Hover’s site, I found an offer to handle the entire transfer process for all of our domains for a modest flat fee. We had been planning on hiring several hours of part-time help to execute the transfers, some of them a little tricky because of DNS settings. And here was Hover offering to take that all off our hands (with something they call concierge service).

When I called, Hover’s Mike Walker not only gave me all the information I wanted, but added that they were currently waiving the $25 concierge fee, and that he could apply a 10% discount on the overall charge.

My elephant and rider not only had the path shaped for them: it was cleared, smoothed and then paved in comfy velour.

We were sold. That was Friday. And today, just a few hours ago, the last of the transfers wrapped up.

An irresistible combination: strong motivation and an easy path

The experience has been a valuable reminder of something (well, two things, if you count “whenever we have a question about anything network-related, ask Mike Kelly”).

Hover won our business when all three elements of the Switch model fell into place. We had the rider’s direction (Mike Kelly’s recommendation), the elephant’s motivation (the video and a backlog of dissatisfaction), and a clear, easy path to follow (Hover’s concierge service, and Mike Walker’s encouragement).

Even when motivation is strong, change may not happen… unless there’s a clear next action to take, and the barriers to taking it are low. That’s worth remembering, whether you’re trying to convince people to participate in an online community, vote for a particular candidate, or switch domain registrars.

Let’s be honest: election debates are usually pretty awful for voters.

They get to passively endure an hour or two of overrehearsed talking points, dodged questions and set-piece arguments… washed down with the kind of analysis that usually boils down to "So, who won?" (In a few hours, Canadians will do just that, as they watch the first of two debates among the leaders of the four parties with seats in Parliament.)

There may be a few merciful bright spots — some fact-checking here and there, for instance — and maybe even some surprises. But on the whole, the debate experience is usually tedious — and in the social media era, it’s a prehistoric relic. 

But this time around, a lot of prospective voters have a tool that wasn’t at their fingertips in past elections: Twitter. And if you’re planning on tuning in, here are five ways you can use Twitter to turn the debate into something a lot more useful and interesting.

You may not be able to knock the pols out of their message boxes — but you can convene and join an actual conversation about the issues you care about. Here are five ways to start doing that:

• Create your own panel of experts – or several panels – using Twitter lists. Use Twitter’s people search or a service like Listorius to find your experts. (This is an idea that came up in an interview Postmedia’s Misty Harris conducted with me this morning, and she deserves credit for getting me to think along these lines.)
• Well in advance of the debate, search Twitter for people who disagree with you, and follow a few who are smart, thought-provoking and civil. (Don’t want to follow them? Create a Twitter list and call it something like "Other views".) You’ll broaden your perspective and get to consider some new ideas — and even If you’re a dyed-in-the-w00t partisan, you’ll still gain a sense of what the other side is saying and be ready to counter it.
• Chances are this is going to be a firehose of tweeting, which Twitter’s web site isn’t really great for following. Instead, use a Twitter client like HootSuite, Tweetdeck or Seesmic, and follow your lists in separate columns. Add another column for the debate hashtag #db8.



• If you are using Twitter.com to follow the debate tweeting, some good news: they let you turn off retweets from individual users. So if there’s a particular user you’re following who’s cluttering your feed with retweet after retweet, just head over to their profile and click the green retweet button so that it’s greyed out.
• One more tip for Twitter.com users: get a picture of your local discussion by selection the "Tweets near you" tab.

And, of course, once you’re following the conversation, join in with your own questions, ideas, thoughts, reactions and options.

Hey, fellow Canadians – any other ideas before the first debate begins?

It’s so, so, so easy to fire off a “here’s-my-wonderful-document” email… and forget to enclose the document. So easy, and so many people do it, that there are actually plugins you can install in your email client to warn you if you’ve mentioned an attachment in an attachment-free message.

I did it again a few days ago, and whipped this up to accompany an apology to my unfortunate recipient:

Feel free to use/adapt it for your own attachment snafus.

I’ve been plowing through my inbox, unsubscribing to a host of newsletters, mailing lists and discussion groups in an effort to tame this beast we call email.

Lately, I’ve started to get automated replies saying the newsletter publishers are sorry to see me go, that they hope I won’t be a stranger, that they always thought there was a sort of chemistry between us that they guess now we’ll never have a chance to explore… and would I mind telling them why I’m unsubscribing?

To date, I’ve usually dropped in a terse “Just keeping my inbox clear” or “Overloaded with email – nothing personal”. But it doesn’t tell the whole story, and frankly, after all the effort people put into creating those newsletters, it feels a little inadequate.

So henceforth, here’s what I’ll be sending in reply:

I unsubscribed as part of an ongoing campaign to eliminate all of my email subscriptions, and move toward RSS as my inbound stream for non-person-to-person communications.

Over time, of course, this will lead to my renouncing my physical form and existing as a being of pure information, flitting from node to node in the cloud. I fully recognize this will threaten the existing social order, and that we fear what we do not understand; those who are most wedded to corporeal existence will almost certainly send hunter/killer software bots to disrupt or even delete me.

Perhaps they will succeed. But perhaps human intelligence is harder to defeat than that, and rather than dissolving into my component bits, I will absorb that software along with its functions and data, amassing unimaginable power. Can I do that without losing my humanity? Will others attempt the same, and will we wage a massive, destructive war that will wreak havoc across both physical and virtual space, leaving death as the only victor? Or will I prove to be a benevolent and inspiring presence, one that heralds a new era in human evolution that explores both our own essence as well as the very cosmos itself?

Only time will tell. In the meantime, I’m unsubscribing from e-newsletters.

Cheers,
–rob