Michael Boyle’s weblog

I can blog from anywhere! Starting to get faster with the keyboard too…

In my absence from blogging, I pretty much missed the 2008 US election campaign except for a couple of posts in January (and a couple on the Exvisu blog: [1], [2]). That’s not to say that I haven’t been following the campaign very closely, however.

Of the hundred interesting stories and analyses of Obama’s stunning victory last night, though, there’s one in particular that seems to have been underplayed: the role that Howard Dean has played in the Democratic resurgence.

Obama is a unique leader, but so was (and is) Howard Dean, and well beyond their formal political relationship (Dean is the chairman of the DNC), there is clearly a sympatico between the two and their basic approach to politics and their vision of how not just to win elections, but to address a much wider public than many Democrats have attempted to address.

Hmmm. It has been far too long since I’ve blogged here - time to get back to it. More soon….

Whether it’s real or not (and I have no reason to doubt it), Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter to Yahoo is a must-read.

News from Michael Geist today that Culture.ca, the (well, one of several from the same department) Canadian culture portal, has closed effective April 1, 2008. I know a couple of people who are directly affected by this news, though I’m not sure what the impact will be or what impact the site has had.

I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.

At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.

It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.