Wigley and Associates

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.