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We’re doing some work with Porto Cupecoy, a luxury ‘marina village’ resort on St. Martin in the Caribbean. Well, technically it’s on Sint Maarten, the Dutch half of the island.

At the moment, they’re running a fairly awesome contest, and it’s dead simple to enter:

In 140 characters or less on Twitter tell us why you really need a week in the lap of luxury at the Porto Cupecoy luxury resort and marina village on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean. Be sure to start your tweet with ” Dear @pcupecoy” so we can find it.

Don’t tweet? If you tell us on your blog why you need a Porto Cupecoy vacation (just include a link to http://www.portocupecoy.com and we’ll find you) you’ll be entered into the draw too. You can both blog and tweet for two chances to win!

Prize
The prize includes:

• Round trip airfare for two from US, Canada, or Caribbean (up to $2000)
• One week accommodation for two at Porto Cupecoy during 2010
• One water sports activity to be coordinated through Porto Cupecoy (up to $250)

Porto Cupecoy is on Facebook and Twitter, if you’re so inclined.

It’s become commonplace for responsible bloggers to disclose their allegiances, investments and interests. For example, Tim Bray does it all the time, and here’s Jennifer Leggio’s disclosure statement.

On this site, I prefix client-related stuff with ‘Client Plug’, or indicate something similar in the opening paragraph. I also try to make it clear that I was invited to an event for free or received something for review. This whole blogger disclosure discussion became particularly important with the advent of sponsored posts and links.

But what about Twitter? There are plenty of reasons to like the 140 character limit, but it hardly encourages transparency. There’s rarely enough space to disclose one’s interests. On more than one occasion, I’ve witnessed people tweeting about projects with which they’re affiliated without making that association obvious. The most common scenario is when Person A tweets about something, and Person B replies with “wow, that’s a fantastic thing, good luck with that thing” when Person A and Person B in fact work together.

I’m certainly guilty of retweeting client projects without disclosure. Here’s an example from today:

As I mentioned, we’re working with ActiveState on a new project. And you’d see their name on our client page on our company site. Yet a casual Twitter follower might have no idea of the formal, financial connection between myself and ActiveState.

Unicode to the Rescue?

A common solution here might be a hash tag, such as #clientplug or #disclosurepending or something. That would do, I guess, though it already takes up a fair number of characters. If you’re interesting in seeing a message spread, then space is already at a premium.

Here’s a silly idea. What if there were a generally accepted unicode character that you could add to tweets to imply that you had a personal stake in the message? A kind of disclosure shorthand that people could follow up on if they had questions. Maybe it’s ☍, as in “I have strong connections here”? Or maybe ☝, as in “I’m promoting this organization”? Or maybe just ♟, as in “I’m a tiny pawn in this giant corporation”?

What do you think? Does disclosure on Twitter even matter?

We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:

• ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
• We’ve been helping the folks at the BC Healthy Living Alliance with understanding this whole social web business. Last week they ran a little event entitled “The Politics of a Healthy Neighbourhood”, and a bunch of local social media types attended. They even created this custom Google Map showing the route of our walk, and the associated services in the neighbourhood. I shot four shaky minutes of video with bad audio.
• Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.

In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 - just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).

This week I got a new iMac. It’s the first machine I’ve had that’s running OS X 10.5 (that would be Leopard for all you cat-lovers), the current version of Apple’s operating system. I thought I’d ask on Twitter about the Apple desktop apps that the cool kids are using. Here’s what I heard back. I expect that Apple power users will be familiar with all of these.

UPDATE: If this post interests, you might want to check out part two as well.

1Password - A password manager and form completer.

Adium - The popular all-in-one instant messaging client.

Bento - “Personal file organization and database”. I’m a little unclear on why I’d want this. Anyone?

Boot Camp - The app that enables you to run Windows on my iMac. Assuming I can acquire a copy of Windows, I plan to install it for running Windows-only games.

Caffeine - “Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back.” I gather this is for when you’re watching longer web-based videos, where the screen goes dim without inputs after a while?

ClicktoFlash - A Safari plug-in that turns all Flash elements in a web page to gray boxes until you click them. I’m a Firefox user myself, so FlashBlock looks like the equivalent.

FileVault - Software for encrypting one’s files. Boris assures me that I “can ignore FileVault — it’s for encrypting your home directory. Only uber nerds use it.” I am not an uber-nerd, so I’ll take his advice.

FileZilla - An open-source FTP client. I’ve always used CyberDuck, for no particular reason. They both have incredibly goofy names.

Fluid - Make site-specific browsers for your favourite web apps. I’ve been using Google Gears to get certain web app icons in my desktop’s dock, but this will work better.

HandBrake - “An open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multithreaded, DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.”

KeePassX - Another password manager. Yes, I’m troubled by that creative spelling of “key”.

Layers - If I understand it correctly, it enables you to build multi-window screen captures? Seems kind of like a nail in search of a hammer, but who am I to judge?

Mailplane - This is kind of a custom email browser for Gmail that makes the web-based email app act more like desktop software. I’ve used this on my laptop for a while, but lately (probably due to Gmail, not Mailplane itself) I’ve found it rather sluggish. So these days I’m giving Apple Mail a try.

PersonalBrain - A mind-mapping tool, from what I can gather.

Quicksilver - Hard to describe, so here’s Wikipedia: “allows users to use the keyboard to rapidly perform tasks such as launching applications, manipulating files and data, running scripts, or sending e-mail.” I’ve had this installed on my laptop for some time, but I barely ever think to use it.

Skitch - The very handy, exceptionally usable screen capture and quick illustration app.

Snackr - An Adobe AIR app that, I gather, turns part of your desktop into a kind of CNN news ticker, powered by the RSS feeds of your choice.

Storyist - A word processor designed for novelists and screenwriters.

TextMate - A fancier TextEdit. I used NotePad++ on my Windows desktop–I must check to see if there’s a OS X version.

Things - Task management software. Boris, if I recall correctly, described the Areas of Responsibility feature as a ‘game-changer’.

Ted - Combines RSS and BitTorrent to automagically download the TV shows you specify. I’m familiar with another app that does the same thing, TVShows.

Time Machine - Apple’s fancy backup system.

Tinderbox - “A personal content assistant that helps you visualize, analyze, and share your notes.”

VideoLan - The workhouse, almost-never-fails video player I’ve come to know and love. Nowhere is Apple more irrational than in its ridiculously narrow native support of video formats.

Yojimbo - Yet another information manager.

Thanks to Avi, Ian, Chris, Miranda, Graeme, Andrew, David, Kerry, Derek, Chris, Ryan, John, Danny, Martin and Masey. Apologies if I referred to you as a geek if you are, in fact, a Normal Human.

That’s a good start. What favourite app would you add to this list?

As it happens, we’re running not one, not two but three contests (or, rather two contests and a survey) for clients at the moment. Let me run them down, in case they’re of interest:

1. Jiibe Connection - This is a fun video project for Jiibe, kind of eHarmony (or Lavalife, if you prefer) for jobs. It’s hosted on Strutta’s new contest platform, and Giant Ant Media made one of the videos. Watch the job seeker’s video, then each of the employer videos, and match the seeker with the appropriate employer. All of the employers are from Vancouver companies–you might recognize them. One participant will win an iPod Nano.
2. Bear Your Soul - We’re running a photo contest in a Flickr group for the Save the Great Bear project. It’s easy to enter, and there are tons (well, twelve) of great prizes.
3. DreamBank’s Giving and Getting Survey - An 11-question survey about your gift giving and receiving practices. Again, there’s an iPod Nano up for grabs, or an equivalent donation to your DreamBank dream.

This qualifies as a client plug, I suppose, but it’s a cause that’s really close to my heart.

We’re doing some work with Greenpeace Canada, Sierra Club of BC and ForestEthics on the continuing campaign to save BC’s Great Bear rainforest.

The Great Bear Rainforest is a huge swath of the land–the size of Austria–on BC’s central coast. It’s home to three kinds of bears, six million migratory birds, 3000 genetically distinct salmon stocks and many species of plants unique to the region. Most importantly, it’s the largest tract of intact coastal temperate rainforest left on Earth.

As you may recall, there was a landmark agreement in 2006 among various stakeholders–the provincial government, logging companies, First Nations and environmentalists. They agreed to a new approach to resource planning developed by an independent team of scientists, and committed to its implementation by March 31, 2009. But we’re not (ahem) out of the woods yet. From the petition:

A couple of years ago, Premier Campbell made a very specific commitment to preserve this precious rainforest. The final countdown is on for the BC government to make their promise a reality by the March 31, 2009 deadline. Premier Campbell needs to hear from you.

We are down to the wire. Unless all elements of the promise are kept, the ecological health of the rainforest will be in jeopardy once again. We’ve come so far towards the rare success of having a vast unspoiled forest safeguarded, let’s not undermine all this good work by not reaching the finish line.

Give Me an Early Christmas Present: Sign This Petition

If you can spare 37 seconds, I’d really appreciate it if you would sign the petition urging the government of BC to keep their promises regarding this precious region. You don’t have to be from BC, either–support from other parts of the globe really helps.

If you’re keen to help beyond signing the petition, consider any of the following:

• Digg the petition.
• Email the link to the petition to your friends. Here’s a shortened URL for that: http://bit.ly/QnOJ
• Join the Facebook group.
• Submit your photos to our Flickr-powered photo contest (sweet prizes therein)
• Blog, tweet, bookmark or otherwise spread the word on the campaign.
• Watch, favourite and share this two-minute YouTube video about the project:

Thanks to Emily, Raul, Monique, Rebecca and everybody else who has written about the campaign thus far. We’re making good progress, but we’ve got a ways to go.

At BarCamp last month, Julie and I shot video of a bunch of people answering that question for DreamBank. If you’re in and around the Vancouver tech scene, you’ll probably recognize a few people in this video:

That X-Wing fighter was pretty frustrating.

I guess this is technically a client plug. But if I hadn’t written a guest post on it over at the CI Sense blog, I’d have written it here. We generated some reports for trademark filings associated with the American presidential candidates. I went through them and pulled out 21 of the weirdest products and slogans. Here’s a sampling:

• Bearack Obama - Allegedly to become a future teddy bear. We googled for some samples, but only found this eager ursine Democrat and this creepy blog.
• Broccoli Obama - We wish we were kidding about this vegetable dish.
• Obama Llama - Yep, that’d be a stuffed toy. And, of course, the unrelated theme song.

My favourite is probably all of the incredibly lame versions of what ‘O.B.A.M.A.’ stands for.

In this site’s past, I would periodically post ‘link round-ups’. As my blogging habits changed, I stopped doing this.

Lately, I’ve been so busy that I’ve had less time to devise fully-formed blog posts in my head. As such, I’m going to occasionally lean on the link round-up crutch. Also, I get pitched much more stuff these days, and some of it seems noteworthy. I might have more to say about these topics, but I don’t have time to say it.

Standardized testing fail - This Wall Street Journal article received a lot of attention on the web last week. I’m unsure about the validity of its arguments, but fresh perspectives on education are always welcome. It reminded of of this great half-hour talk by Malcolm Gladwell, which apparently draws from his forthcoming book. He would, I gather, strongly disagree with the WSJ piece.

TravelMob launch - TravelMob just launched, which seems to be a group travel planning site–a bit like TripHub. Julie used the latter for a holiday last year, and sung its praises. I suspect there’s a market for planning aids of this sort. A web design note: they should host their blog on their own domain, to enjoy increased SEO benefits.

Kickin’ it EE style - Friends Hop Studios and Boxcar Marketing are sponsoring the Expression Engine Roadshow, in Vancouver on September 26. It’s at Havana, where the old theatre company Julie and I managed used to perform. I know almost nothing about Expression Engine, except that it seems to inspire Applesque ardor among its users.

Allergies and Tide - Jason writes to point to this message thread on Tide’s marketing micro-site MyTalkingStain.com (launched with this slightly-amusing Super Bowl ad). I can’t access it at the moment, but he notes that “P&G has (seemingly) ignored but a decent number of people are coming across it when trying to determine why they’re breaking out in rashes from new detergent”. Assuming the site hasn’t been permanently removed, I’ll be curious to see how (and if) Tide responds to these consumer concerns.

Mini client plug - DreamBank has commissioned a 60-second video commercial from the AdHack community. The winning ad gets CAN $1000. If you can make the video in a day, that’s pretty good money.

CI Sense is a Montreal-based start-up that we’ve been working with for a few months. They were a Nitobi client, and Nitobi is our client, so you can see how that worked out. CI Sense is a trademark watch service with a slick, Ajax-powered app at its core. The target audience is marketers and brand managers who want to keep on top of competition. Here’s the blurb:

By tracking trademark filings you can keep an eye on your competitors, find new competitors, and identify emerging industry trends. You can even concoct new product ideas. At CI Sense, we’ve built an early warning reporting tool to easily and cost-effectively monitor new trademark filings. From a comprehensive trademark search to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis, CI Sense is your crystal ball into new brands and products headed for the market.

And here’s a quick screencast we made:

CI Sense - Trademarks & Competitive Intelligence from tev kofsky on Vimeo.

Finally, we’ve been working on some neat stuff for the CI Sense blog. We made this slider thingie that displays the prominence of sundry terms in Apple’s trademark application filings for the past ten years.