Peer1, the excellent colocation provider — Yankee runs out of its colo facility in New York City — has a blog. All Internet Service Providers should have a blog.

Which reminds me: Kevin, can you please set up an RSS feed of this page (probably only accessible if you’re an ISN customer)?

Roy Neel, the new CEO of the Dean Campaign writes a very interesting post about where the campaign will go from here. After seeing three of the seven candidates in person, I would have voted for Dean in New Hampshire. I still might do so, logistics willing, in the New York Primary in early March.

Several years ago I was called to participate in a session at Holland College where a new e-commerce course was being developed. As is the tradition at the College, various industry people joined with various educators to develop the curriculum, with an emphasis on the practical.

During the introductions, several of my industry colleagues described their professions in such an acronym-laden way that I had no idea what they did: ERP, MIS, EDI, CRM and the like. I protested, and suggested that we all endeavour to not use acronyms for the rest of the session. The reaction to this was not positive: you would think that I had asked people not to talk at all.

People who speak in acronyms claim that they’re a “handy shorthand” that allows conversation to proceed more efficiently. While that may be true, what goes unspoken is that they are also used, whether conciously or not, to construct a wall between those “in the know” and those not.

You’re at the hospital and your doctor orders a “CBC and Chem 7.” What does it mean? Who knows? The doctors and nurses are speaking a foreign language, in plain hearing of those most deeply affected by their mumblings, and this acronymania, while it lets them zip around more quickly, serves only to further elevate their position as all-powerful medical gods. Which isn’t good for anyone.

I remember talking to a colleague several years ago during “IT Week” on Prince Edward Island. She had been telling her mother, over the weekend, that she was going to be presenting at an “IT Week special event.” Her mother wanted to know what “it week” was — what was the “it” she was talking about?

People in Government are fond of talking about the RFP (Request for Proposal), the RFQ (Request for Quotation), the RFI (Request for Information). They rattle off these terms like they know the difference between them. I once asked someone what the difference was, and they couldn’t tell me. Apparently nobody actually knows.

The worst offenders here are my friends in the federal government: during a trip to Elections Canada in November, I sat back and watched several colleagues there have a conversation that consisted almost entirely of acronyms. When I asked them to speak in plain language they reacted much as my Holland College group did: “that’s just how we talk!”

So here’s my humble request: if you’re an acronymaniac, take the next week and try and speak acronym-free. Treat it as a game if you wish: see if you can actually pull it off. I think what you will find is that you can speak to a much broader range of people, with greater clarity and understanding, than you ever imagined.

Let me know what happens.

Sitting in the lounge at YHZ, waiting for a flight to YYG after leaving BOS this morning after a week in NH at YPI where, in my off hours, I revelled in the games of the DNC. Looking forward to seeing CLM and ODLR.

CBC is reporting that “Island heritage activist Catherine Hennessey forced crews to stop cutting down an old tree in Charlottetown Thursday morning.” While this is technically true, it was, in fact, my very own consort Catherine [Miller] who spotted the tree about to be felled, called Catherine [Hennessey] and the media and ran over (leaving Oliver in the care of my mother) to spiritually chain herself to it.

Catherine would never seek credit for this herself, of course, and credit isn’t really what’s important. The tree is among her favourites — we look at it right out our front window — and she merely wanted to ensure that if it was going to be cut down it was for a valid reason. That still isn’t clear.

Oliver is being well-schooled.

Because of Air Canada’s new “lean and mean” schedule, it’s no longer possible to leave Boston late in the day to fly to Charlottetown — the last flight out is at 2:20 p.m.

As a result, I’m leaving Dublin this morning at 9:00 a.m. for a day of seemingly endless travelling, including a very special 2-hour layover in the Halifax airport.

Next time I fly I’m going to see if Prince Edward Air’s new Charlottetown to Halifax service can link up with Delta’s Halifax to Boston service; if it prices out about the same, the mere fact of being able to avoid Trudeau (nee Dorval) Airport in Montreal would be worth the additional complications.

Back on the Island tonight at 7:30 p.m. Can’t wait.

Have you ever talked to anyone who’s worked in a call centre? They universally describe their call centre jobs a ones with low pay, high stress, and few prospects. And the latest news about call centre layoffs in Bloomfield, and Montague demonstrates just how secure these jobs are.

Industry types call call centre work “intense.” Take a quote from this story for example:

“Call centres have a high turnover rate, due to the intense nature of the work. The search for employment and rewarding work keeps many working in call centres always looking for new opportunities,” says site administrator Luc Theriault.

And PEI’s wage rate is euphemistically called “competitive,” as in this snip from this HRDC publication:

The provincial government continues to support the development of the call centre industry in P.E.I. This, coupled with a wage rate in P.E.I. which is very competitive, could attract new business and provide a favourable economic climate for existing companies to expand.

And yet call centre jobs are promoted as “IT jobs” and the naive public is led to believe that answering the phone for Reader’s Digest is somehow akin to writing code to guide the Space Shuttle home to earth.

And our tax dollars are given away — $292,000 to Souris, $70,000 in Charlottetown, $1 million in Charlottetown, $490,000 in Wellington, for example — to lure new call centres to the Island.

While some might say that it’s elitist to look askance at any new jobs on Prince Edward Island, surely to continue to invest in these transitory jobs is foolish: let’s invest in high-value, sustainable IT jobs rather than throwing our money away to build more digital sweat shops.

The CBC introduces its first RSS feed. It’s an RSS feed about the CBC, mind you — top story at this moment is “Speaking Points for Robert Rabinovitch at the World Electronic Media Forum, Geneva, Switzerland.” — but it’s a start.

Although I can’t begin to explain (or even understand) the myriad ways in which delegates to the Democratic Convention (who ultimately select their nominee to run for President) are choosen, it is interesting to note that according to this page at CNN, Dean’s delegate count, even after Iowa and New Hampshire, is still the highest, with 133 delegates to Kerry’s 94. Watch that page.

My colleague Sherin and I, along with Sherin’s friend Susan, drove up to Manchester tonight to try and participate in some of the Primary Night fun. We headed for the so-called “Center of New Hampshire,” which is not, despite its name, in the centre of New Hampshire, but is rather the large Holiday Inn convention centre in Manchester where the media is concentrated, and where John Kerry held his Primary Night rally.

We arrived just after 7:00 p.m. (the last polls close at 8:00 p.m.), and wandered around drinking it all in. Media were everywhere — BBC, ABC, Comcast, and CSPAN had studios well in evidence, and there were vast curtained off areas behind which who knows what media deeds were being done.

Eventually we found our way to the Kerry rally, and because of our early arrival I was able to partake of the free vegetables and dip on offer (the only free food of my entire Primary experience). Inside the main ballroom Kerry supporters milled about looking happy and content, and an ever-growing collection of TV crews — I counted 50 tripods by the time we left — pointed at the stage from the back of the room. In the corner a large-screen TV projected the local TV station’s coverage, which resulted in odd parallaxes where a reporter doing a stand-up from the media area would, in turn, be projected on the TV screen in the corner. 3D house of TV horrors.

Next we wandered over to the on-location studios of 96.9 FM Talk, a Boston-area talk-only radio station. Starting at 8:00 p.m., the station’s signature hosts Jay Severin, Margery Eagan and Jim Braude held a special primary-night broadcast. We ambled in and sat down and watched a couple of acts (they are all very talented talk-radio personalities, and it was interesting to see them work as a team). During a break Sherin and Susan went up to the broadcast table and snagged a T-shirt signed by Jay.

By the end of the second act of the radio show, it was clear that Kerry had won the night, and so we headed back to the Kerry rally in the ballroom, which by this time was jam-packed with people. One interesting aspect of all of the events I attended is that there is very strict screening at the door — not for guns, drugs, or alcohol, but rather for hidden signs that might be used to deflect or distract TV coverage from the candidate.

The place was so packed that we lasted only 10 minutes before we had to escape for air.

A little more wandering — including a surprise encounter with Margery Eagan in the hall — and we headed back off into the New Hampshire night.

Over the lunch hour today, I drove up from Dublin to Keene to the house of Nat Stout, who is a colleague here at Yankee, and active in the Dean campaign. Nat’s house was home to a “get out the vote” effort for Dean, and there were a gaggle of young Dean supporters from across America there on the phone, and coming and going to and from polling locations and strategic “visibility” locations where they could hold large Dean signs.

I spent about an hour at Nat’s, watching the action, sharing some pizza, and learning about what Nat called “the nitty gritty.” At 1:00 p.m., I taped a piece, by cell phone, with Matt Rainnie for CBC Prince Edward Island’s Main Street on my Primary experiences. And on the way back to Dublin, I swung by the polling location nearest to Nat’s house and took some pictures: