Wigley and Associates

The Cannon River Community Land Trust has a new website with a weblog, with Joel West, board chair, as the main blogger. I took the photo of him at our first coaching session a couple of weeks ago when we met at the James Gang HideAway in downtown Northfield. Click to enlarge.

Eden Prairie City Manager Scott Neal is a longtime blogger, a client, and known far and wide for his trademark weblog phrases

“Putting a face on the faceless bureaucrat“

and

“Blog or be blogged.“

He posted this entry yesterday:

Probably the most common question these days about my blog is why I don’t have it open for “comments” like other bloggers do. There are a couple of reasons for that.

Keeping the comments feature of a blog disabled is not a common practice among leaders who blog but it’s one I’ve long supported. Scott shows that there still can be some interactivity with a blog but in a way that can be more easily managed.

Explorer Will Steger spoke on global warming tonight to a crowd of almost 500 people at Bethel Lutheran Church here in Northfield, along with two colleagues, J. Drake Hamilton, Science Policy Director at Fresh Energy, and Alycia Ashburn with the Lutheran Coalition for Public Policy in Minnesota. Steger’s foundation has launched a project called Global Warming 101 which “… raises broad public awareness about global warming as witnessed through Will Steger’s polar expeditions.”

Back in 1993, two of my sons, Collin and Graham (then ages 16 and 12) accompanied Steger and fellow explorers to Yellowknife and the Arctic Circle for six weeks to help with the ham radio and internet communications for a training run for the International Arctic Expedition … ultimately held two years later. I was delighted to catch up with Will again. My wheels are turning already on how I could become involved in his next expedition, set for early next year.

L to R: Will Steger, J. Drake Hamilton, Alycia Ashburn.

L to R: Dan Kallman and the Bethel choir; Brianna Spittle and my daughter Gilly Wigley get a poster signed by Steger for a donation to the foundation; the audience at the booths in the vestibule at Bethel. Click photos to enlarge.

Will Steger’s presentation. Click to play. 33 minutes.

J. Drake Hamilton’s presentation. Click to play. 24 minutes.

I’m briefly quoted in today’s Chicago Tribune business section in an article titled, Podcasts spread message: Audio and video broadcasts are becoming easier for small firms to use in marketing by Anne Meyer.

To keep the podcast conversational, it helps to have a second person involved in the recording, said Griff Wigley, principal of the Web log coaching firm Wigley & Associates in Northfield, Minn. “Voice is very important,” he said. Without someone else in the room to have a conversation with, “People slip into sing-songy memo speak,” he said.

I get a kick out of how major print publications still insist on making the word ‘weblog’ into two words ‘web log.’ The tyranny of the style guide, I guess.

I spent an hour this morning at the James Gang Hideaway visiting with Jørgen Jensen, a journalist with Danmarks Radio (DR), Denmark’s national broadcasting corporation. He works at their station in Bornholm. (See the Wikipedia entries on Bornholm and DR for more.)

Jørgen has been in Minnesota the past ten days, visiting with people and organizations involved in citizen journalism. He heard about Northfield Citizens Online and Northfield.org and wanted to hear from someone who was there as the beginning. I recorded our discussion and have uploaded it to Hipcast. If you’re interested in hearing it, let me know.

Back in August, I met with Shelley Rose, President & CEO of LogIn. I got to know her many years ago when they were located in the Lowertown area of downtown St. Paul near where I worked at gofast.net.

I’ve done some search-related contract work over the years for them and among other things, they’re the people behind IACPnet, the online network for the International Association of Chiefs of Police - hence the photo of me with Shelley and the Brad Pitt-as-cop cutout above. (Click photo to enlarge.)

Since I’m a blogging coach to several leaders in law enforcement here in Minnesota (Dan Carlson, Rob Reynolds, Gary Smith, Mark Murphy) and have started working with Mike Alderson in the UK, I’m interested in exploring ways that I might work with LogIn and the IACP on leadership blogging. Shelley and I agreed to start scheming on ways for leadership blogging to have a presence at next year’s IACP annual conference.

A couple of weeks ago I met with author, blogger, and long-time client Kent Nerburn who was on his way through the Twin Cities back to his home in Bemidji. We holed up at the Dunn Bros. at 33rd and Hennepin for a few hours of coaching and planning with his sister, Carole Humphrey. (Click photo to enlarge.)

We’ve been gradually revamping Kent’s blog site lately (converting it from Movable Type to WordPress) as he gears up to add products and services (autographed books, audio books, speaking engagements, etc.) to his site.

Way back in October of 2000, I blogged about how I got to know Kent:

“… I also wrote a review for his book Letters to My Son way back in 1993 when I worked at Utne Reader magazine. A short blurb from that review ultimately ended up on the cover of the paperback edition: “Clear and gentle guidance about the big issues in life… Nerburn delivers an eloquent spiritual philosophy to fathers in a way that men can easily hear.”

A few years later, the book was boiled down into a smaller version, with the title adapted from my review: Simple Truths: Clear and Gentle Guidance on the Big Issues in Life. I got a kick out of that and ultimately met Kent when he did an author’s reading/signing at bookstore in the Twin Cities. He was quite appreciative.

I installed the new Google Analytics tool here on my own site a few days ago. “Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. “

Here’s an initial snapshot from what they call the executive summary.

It’s a free service and is not difficult to install. You do need a Gmail account.