From Fast Company comes a short article about failure, called Failure Is Glorious:

Organizations willing to ply this borderline need robustness in all areas, including a robust purpose, vision and structure. That way when ideas fail, the entire enterprise is not called into question. Facilitating this kind of attitude means cultivating a culture of trial and error, where mistakes are allowed to happens and risks are encouraged. The trick is that everyone wants to be open to the great results that come from risk-taking, but very few people have the stomach for the magnitude of failure that can result. Using processes like Open Space Technology encourages a practice of working with the unknown. That practice, at both the individual and the corporate level helps develop a culture where failure and success on large scales can be tolerated, encompassed and learned from.

Thanks to Pure Content for the link.

My friend in Montreal, Bob Hunt of Way Down Here, dropped everything he was doing and played this elegant little applet the other day. Taking his advice, I did the same, and was rewarded by an amazing little game. What is it that makes this so appealing? The music? The whimsy? The simple animation? Play it and then leave me a comment with your opinion. I want everything in my life to work this well.

That link is why Way Down Here is one of my favourite Canadian blogs. In the spirit of lists, and inspired by Pollard, here are some more:

• Reinvented from my old friend and fellow ex-Peterborough resident Peter Rukavina, which is a blog full of reflections of life on PEI
• Riley Dog, by Steve Laidlaw out of Kamloops, BC, being and electic survey of a couple of pieces of cool writing a day, with images
• Dave Pollard’s aforementioned How To Save The World, from near Toronto
• Fellow Bowen Islander John Dumbrille’s new blog Bowen…Bowen…Bon, which captures perfectly his sense of humour and place
• The standard setting wood s lot from Mark Woods of Perth Ontario. One of the best known and most-read arts and culture blogs on the web.
• Rob Patterson’s blog, documenting his engagement with knowledge management and contributing to a healthy overrepresentation of PEI webloggers on this list.
• Vancouver-based tea and lit blog at Caterina.net from Caterina Fake.
• Seb’s Open Research, from Sebastien Paquet who is now in New Brunswick I think.
• Another Bowen Islander, Marian Bantjes, who blogs on her renovations and her design work and many other things besides.
• Saskatoon-based hockey fan Jordon Cooper, who’s blog runs the gamut but sticks close to it’s Christian and social justice roots. It’s one of the few Christian blogs I read regularyly, mostly becasue Jordon is ENGAGED. With capitals.
• Tony Tross in Whitehorse, Yukon represents North of 60 with his weird and amazing abuddha’s memes
• Hockey Pundits, a group blog about the NHL written by a bunch of fans, including yours truly.

I’d really like to have a representative smaple from accross the country. So which are the best blogs from Alberta, NWT, Nunavut, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Eh?

My buddy John Dumbrille hits on a nice, succinct argument for human scale on the web:

Sweet.

Blogger let me down lately. Not able to FTP for a while…no clue why. We seem to be back in the saddle.

There are a bunch of new blogs adorning the blogroll these days. In fact the blogroll is an eclectic mess, and the more I look at it, the more I love it. I have it set to list the blogs randomly every time the browser loads my page, so there’s always a new treat at the top of the list.

At any rate, here are a couple of the newer additions:

• City Comforts Blog a blog about urban design, with some very smart commentary and linkage.
• Fast Company Now! from the writers and editors of the business magazine.
• How To Save The World from Dave Pollard, a fellow Canadian writing great stuff about blogging, environmental issues and community. (And he picked my blog as one of his favourite Canadian ones…thanks Dave…right back atcha)
• Smart Meeting Design, a collaborative blog and wiki from smart meeting designers Jack Ricchiuto and George Nemeth in Cleveland, USA.
• Positive Living from fellow Open Space Tech facilitator Alexander Kjerulf in Denmark, who is writing a book about happiness at work.

Sure these blogs all seem to be about organization, and it’s true that the blogroll has been padded with these guys since I closed Open Space (if such a paradox is possible) but fear not, there is still poetry, art and music to be had here. In fact it all seems to fit together so much nicer for me these days; that this blog can be about ideas as they hatch and wobble about in my brain. Call it a more honest relfection of the soul behind the blog.

Today I finally received my HaidaBucks T-shirt in smart black with the logo and name prominant. And on Friday I ran into Cliff Fregin at the Vancouver airport, a friend and one of the original owners of Haida Bucks. He tells me all’s well that ends well, that Starbucks backed down and Haida Bucks has withstood the legal onslaught. They issued a press release in August stating:

Read the whole thing here and then go order a T-shirt for yourself.

Congrats to Cliff and his partners. Still no word from Starbuck Customer Relations on why they told a couple of big fibs. I guess we’ll just have to let it go…and grab our coffees elsewhere.