At tonight’s reception here in Budapest, I had the honor of meeting Etienne Chouard (left – click photo to enlarge), a French citizen who has a very influential, anti-EU Constitution referendum weblog. See this BBC News article from last year for some background: Bloggers take on European elites.

I couldn’t attend his panel session today (“One Man, One Blog, One Constitutional Crisis”) because I had my afternoon presentation at the same time. But he attended my morning session and told me that, unlike most everyone else at the conference, he could understand my English. Another plus for How to Talk Minnesotan.

Griff: “So, Etienne, do you think a lotta guys could learn to blog like you, then?”
Etienne: “You betcha.”

I’ve pulled back on my small business blogging consulting for now and I’ve removed references to it from the sidebars on Leadershipblogging.com. Most of my work now is focused on leadership blogging and citizen journalism. I’ve also removed references to my attempts to write a book on leadership blogging for now, as well as the pages there where I’ve maintained references to leaders who blog. Too much happening now to maintain those efforts. More changes to come.

It’s not as detailed a blog as I’d hoped (and may never be) but our Cinque Terre weblog from our fall trip is finally up, along with a gallery of 150 carefully selected photos.

Today, I created a podcast for my NCO executive director weblog and made five “shows” — each a rehash of a previous blog post. I used my $5/month account at Audioblog.com to record them and publish them. They take care of the iTunes publishing, too. See this blog post there for more details.

I have a new part-time gig as Executive Director of Northfield Citizens Online, the non-profit in my hometown of Northfield, Minnestoa, USA, just south of Lake Wobegon. (We maintain a citizen journalism/civic blogosphere website called Northfield.org.)

I’ve created a new weblog for this new role. I’ve been teaching the art of leadership blogging for the past couple of years. Now I have to actually do it. Oy.

As I explain in this post, “…to help myself get better at my own leadership blogging skills, as well as to have another way to teach others as blog coach, I’ve created these weblog categories to help illustrate the art of civic leadership blogging.”

In other words, nearly every blog entry will be assigned one of these “leadership blogging” categories in addition to other traditional categories:

• Chronicle a decision or current unresolved problem
• Illustrate your values, mission, goals, strategies
• Leverage your media diet
• Point to website changes
• Promote your organization
• Provide recognition
• Reveal aspects of your non-work life
• Teach about a service, program, project, dept.
• Teach about the complexities of an issue

I got an email today from a longtime colleague, Ed Vielmetti, informing me that this blogsite comes up #1 in a Google search for “weblog coach” I then checked MSN (it’s #1 there) and Yahoo (it’s #2 there). Cool.

In yesterday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press business section, reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata has a story on Buzz Bruggeman, founder and CEO of ActiveWords.

It’s titled, Hitting it big in the blogs: ‘Connection king’ gives tiny firm global reach.

I met Buzz back in Feb of 2004 at Cecily Sommers’ PUSH conference in Minneapolis (where I took the above photo of him). And I’ve know Julio since my days at gofast.net in St. Paul in the late nineties.

I’ve emailed some questions about the piece to Buzz. More to come, maybe. BTW, I’m quoted in the story:

Business blogging is vital because it lets company leaders engage in “storytelling,” said Griff Wigley of Northfield-based Wigley and Associates, a consulting and blog-coaching firm. “It lets them capture little incidents from their days and weeks in which they exhibit leadership capabilities.”

Update Oct 25: I took photos of the front page coverage since Buzz abandoned his Minnesota roots for Florida and probably doesn’t get the print edition. And the graphic is priceless. Click either to enlarge. I’ve also suggested that he link to his Buzzmodo (“just about ideas”) and Buzznovation (“aggregating ideas inside technology” ) blogs from his ActiveWords site.

Last week I started coaching Elizabeth Schott, Executive Director of the Northfield Area United Way, on the use of their weblog.

I’ve started working with Director Susan Waughtal and the people at RNeighbors (also known as the Rochester Neighborhood Resource Center) to create a citizen/community journalism website called RVoices in Rochester, MN.

It’s intended to be similar to what we’ve created here in my hometown of Northfield, called Northfield.org (operated by the 501c3 non-profit, Northfield Citizens Online (NCO).

There’s nothing there yet, as all we’ve done is install CivicSpace, “… a free open-source software platform for grassroots organizing and civic activity. It allows individuals and organizations to build online communities that communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations and communities.” NCO is actively working on installing this platform on N.org as well.

I am experimenting with some different tools to make it easier for posting to blogs, rather than using the default rich text editors that are provided by the blogging platform.

This is being posted with Blogjet.

The big problem with most apps is that they don’t handle full wysiwyg with images/photos very well.  So let’s see how this one works. 

I’ve uploaded a postcard and had it create a thumbnail that allows text to wrap. So far so good. I’ll keep experimenting.

We got back from Italy late last night.

Lots to show and tell but until we get the Cinque Terre trip blog and photo album up, this photo of Vernazza (where we stayed for one of the two weeks) will have to suffice.

My wife Robbie and I are heading to Italy for vacation on Tuesday.

We plan to spend our entire two weeks in the Cinque Terre region. (The best photos we’ve found are here.)

According to Rick Steves: “The Cinque Terre… is a series of villages clinging to a remote stretch of the Riviera coastline. Each town is a variation on the same theme: a pastel jumble of homes crouching in a gully like crusty sea creatures in a tide pool, undisturbed by traffic or modern development.”

The first few days we’re staying at the Trattoria Gianni Franzi in Vernazza. After that, who knows?

We’re not bringing our computers and we’re not going to be blogging or moblogging on the trip. We may check email occasionally and we have enabled our cellphones to receive voicemails (see my Contact page). We will be taking a s***load of photos, natch, and will put them up in an online album when we return in early October.

Arrivederci!