Disqus - Latest Comments for michaelocc

Re: Why Facebook will become the most dangerous company on earth

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:58:19 -0000

Having lived through an IPO in the mid-90s and then worked in the exec teams of two large, widely-held and actively-traded public companies, this post really resonates. I remember turning to our CFO the night we closed the IPO and saying "Wow, that was intense - I'm glad the last few months is over." He was a lot older and much more experienced than me and replied simply: "Are you kidding? Now the real work starts."

Once you go public *everything* changes. "More, higher, faster" is exactly right. Product quality? Screw product quality. Innovation? Forget it. Creativity? Nope. It's all about managing the street, managing expectations, hitting the number. And the next number. And the next number... by any and all means necessary.

Re: Closed – Paprika Contest

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:30:50 -0000

Found a linky to a recipe adapted from the Moro book. I prefer my Bravas sauce a wee bit chunkier than this (so I'd use chopped tomatoes in place of passata), but it's still nomtastic:
http://canalcook.wordpress....

Note: even though Moro is run by the lovely Sam and Sam Clark, and I'm also a Clarke, and Lex is a Clark - there's absolutely no connection at all. Honest.

Re: Closed – Paprika Contest

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:38:11 -0000

Of all the many, many different tapas I've tried, I always end up coming back to my first love. Patatas Bravas. Nom! I have a great recipe for the sauce in my Moro cookbook - but man it takes time to prep!

Re: Does it Pay to Buy a Twitter Following?

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:33:49 -0000

I accidentally stumbled across a service that does this kind of thing but on an even bigger scale. Pardon the self-promotional link, but rather than bog up your comment thread with a lengthy story about this, I'll just point you to my investigation and rant about this over here: http://ow.ly/7pSbO

Re: Social Media Influencers Suck

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:09:34 -0000

Thougtful, useful and just fundamentally *right* Zach. Thank you for this. It occurs to me you might enjoy Mary Hodder's wonderfully snarky "Personal Hype Quotient": http://personalhypequotient...

From the About page: "We are the heirs of the internet's true love: creating hype without any real purpose other than to sell sell sell ourselves. Whatever that is. It's certainly not to make anything of value..."

Re: Movie Trailer of the Day - The Daily What

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:38:32 -0000

WARNING: if you see posts offering free clip of the new Twilight movie, DO NOT CLICK. It links to... awwww whatever.

Re: A slideshow of sunsets and “skypainting”

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:13:37 -0000

Nice work. What kind of camera are you using for these?

Re: You’ve Been Warned

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:52:21 -0000

*cough* http://twitter.com/#!/micha... *cough*

Re: Tweet of the Day - The Daily What

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:49:54 -0000

My life is now complete.

Re: http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/07/18/xplornet-asked-me-not-to-write-this/

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:46:53 -0000

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Jesse - you're one of the best and most courageous journalists we have in this country. Keep it up.

Re: Fox News won't touch Murdoch story with a "ten foot turban Durbin"

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:01:37 -0000

345 people on Facebook seem to know exactly what a 10 foot turban is, and they have done for over a year: http://en-gb.facebook.com/p...

Re: A quick recap of Social Media Day Toronto

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:11:17 -0000

Hey Kole, thanks for the write up. I know the venue presented challenges for some, but frankly I kinda liked the blend of music, chat and presentations. As one of the speakers, I didn't have an issue with the level of background noise - it seemed to kinda fit the spirit of the event itself, in that it was much more social than your typical dry conference session. It was certainly different, anyway.

BTW, pardon the quibble, but my actual name is Michael O'Connor Clarke. I know it's a mouthful, but the last part of my name is particularly important to me, for all kinds of arcane and complicated reasons.

Re: Ten Kinds Of People I HATE On The Subway

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:22:48 -0000

Random stoppers drive me utterly nuts. I can't understand how some people seem to have no personal radar - they'll just stop dead in their tracks, right in front of you, usually in the stupidest places. How do they not know someone's hard on their heels?

Re: Yeah, Well Your Agency Is Killing Unicorns

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:27:58 -0000

Nicely put, Dave.

I think a lot of the heat that is still being generated around this old issue is a combination of friction and chemical forces as the dissimilar objects meet and start to meld.

In many ways, PR firms are having to become more like Ad shops, and Ad agencies, in turn, are becoming more like PR firms. As the two things rub against each other and characteristics of each side move across the boundary, the boundary itself becomes increasingly blurred and noise and heat are thrown off as byproducts of the sometimes explosive reaction.

And that's more than enough high school chem class analogies for one morning.

Re: Change, Change And More Change

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:55:33 -0000

Congrats squared, Mr. Fleet. Caralin is clearly insane - make sure you pin her down to a date FAST before she has time to change her mind :)

And congratulations to the Edelman team - the social media consulting equivalent of a master Pokemon trainer (gotta catch 'em all!). A good fit for them and a great opportunity for you. Well done.

Re: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/16/site-outage-strands-intuit-customers/

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:48:50 -0000

(For the record: I work for a cloud-based app vendor, so I may well be a little biased).

I agree 100% that any SaaS vendor needs to ensure business continuity plans are rock solid - at the very least, it makes sense to have mirrored data centers in two different physical locations with full failover protection. Things will fail; the key thing is to ensure they fail elegantly with minimal impact to customers.

To call this a big setback for the entire SaaS industry seems harsh, though. Yes, this was a major outage, impacting stacks of customers, and they were down hard for a long time. And yet it was just an outage. It certainly reflects on the vendor, but SaaS is still a much better and more viable option for many, many businesses than trying to ensure complete resilience on a local computing basis.

In practice, many small businesses storing critical data on their local hard drives are likely to be at much higher risk of failure than someone who puts their faith in the cloud. Personally, I've suffered enough major hard drive crashes in my life to know that I'm happier relying on someone whose business is predicated on not losing my data.

And let's not forget the joy of having to install and manage local software upgrades, wait months or years for new code updates to be released, and move all your data between systems every few years when your hardware starts to crumble. Ack.

I'm not saying this major outage isn't an issue, but I don't think this incident should lead people to question the entire SaaS concept. People just need to invest a little more time looking into the uptime record and security/reliability safeguards of vendors before switching.

Re: The Best Accounting Software for Bloggers – Freshbooks

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:05:59 -0000

Hey Mike. We've done a lot of work to improve our handling of multiple currencies over the past few months. You'll find some details here and in our multi-currency FAQ.

Right now, I think we do a pretty solid job of multi-currency billing, including stuff like magic exchange rate lookups right from within the invoice editor.

We handle all expenses in a single currency (the "home" currency of your FreshBooks system), which does require you to do the conversion before logging your expenses. This seems to work for most people, as they're recording expenses in the common currency they're taxed in.

If you'd like to talk this through in more detail, we're always happy to chat. Our support lines are manned by real human beings, or you can save the long distance $$ and ping: support@freshbooks.com - we'll gladly call you back.

Re: The Best Accounting Software for Bloggers – Freshbooks

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:58:17 -0000

Thanks Erica. On it!

Re: Freshbooks – An Experiment

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:04:32 -0000

Thanks again Eric. Looking forward to following the results of your experiment, and I'll reiterate the offer of help here. Would love to know if there are ways we can help you hit this goal: "Now, I wonder if Freshbooks will help me find enough clients to make it worth the $79.95/month." :)

Re: The Best Accounting Software for Bloggers – Freshbooks

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:30:09 -0000

This is awesome, Erica - thanks so much for the kind words about us. I think you pretty much nailed it.

If you don't mind, I'd add to your "It's Online" point the fact that we also have 3rd-party mobile apps at our add-ons page (for iPhone, Blackberry and Android smartphones), so even if you don't have your laptop close to hand, you can still track time and even send bills!

Again, many thanks for this. If you ever need any kind of help with your FreshBooks account, just let us know.

Re: No Power – No Problem in The Cloud

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:08:59 -0000

Heartily seconded, Ron.

This is a great thumbnail case study of the benefits of cloud computing. Thanks! We've clearly been drinking from the same well in the last couple of days - I posted some thoughts about this same topic to our own blog this week too: http://www.freshbooks.com/b...

The security concern comes up fairly often, but having made my own transition to the cloud for all our home stuff, I'm inclined to agree with your view: I'd rather trust the security and resilience of my data to experts whose entire job it is to look after this stuff than try to keep on top of everything myself. As this issue becomes increasingly complex, it definitely falls into the category of "stuff I willingly pay someone to do" rather than "stuff I want to worry about myself."

And from a business perspective, we're also confident that the service providers we've selected take all the necessary steps to safeguard our customers' data. There's some details about our many-layered security provisions here: http://www.freshbooks.com/s... - I imagine you'd find pretty much the same kind of controls in place at any decent SaaS company.

Re: Hitler "Downfall" video meme is DMCA'd

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:28:02 -0000

Obligatorily obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: What Marshall McLuhan Knew About Social Media

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:57:36 -0000

Superb stuff, Suze, and exceptionally well summarized. I've been opening presentations with a slide of McLuhan for a while now - calling him "The Father of Social Media". I agree that if he was around today he'd no doubt be nodding sagely and smiling a knowing, "told you" kind of smile.

Would be fantastic to know what he'd be projecting for the next generation of media consumers, were he only still around to tell us. Even extrapolating from some of his ideas through to what we have now is enough to boggle my mind completely.

Thanks for this.

Re: Freshbooks is an Awesome Invoicing System

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:34:06 -0000

Chris, this is awesome. I run marketing communications at FreshBooks and just wanted to post a quick note to thank you for this glowing praise. It's great to know that you've had such a good experience with the product and the FreshBooks community. Don't hesitate to let us know if there's ever anything you think we need to improve on.

For anyone else, if you're thinking of signing up for your own FreshBooks trial, you might want to visit Christopher's personal referrals page at: https://cfoundas.freshbooks... - that way, he'll get referral credits in his FreshBooks account :-)

Re: Boing Boing readers' charitable giving guide - the best of your picks

Michael O'Connor Clarke — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:33:45 -0000

+1 on Child's Play. Hadn't heard about that until the comments here. Awesome.

Also, I'd heartily second the mention of Kiva.org above. Fine, fine people doing a wonderful thing.

Oh, and many thanks for lifting up the HoHoTO link too. Yay!