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.

Read on…

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.