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Yesterday I wrote two blog entries, back to back, two hours each, from 7am til 11am in the morning. Then I spent the rest of the day leisurely bookmarking and promoting the posts in a ritual that has evolved over the years to include Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit and I tweet the links on @roberrific and have recently begun to use Zoomit.

Toronto Dentist on the Lenzr Blog

I started writing this piece by hammering out my recollections of the exact moment when Toronto dentist Dr Natalie Archer DDS of the Rosedale Family Dental Care office at 600 Sherbourne St unit #808 met a 22yr old female York University student named Seattle Dredge, the winner of the Lenzr Kids in Action photo contest, who already has lovely teeth btw; her smile is today far whiter whiter than my own teeth will ever be.  While writing the blog I remembered that Seattle didn’t take the toothbrushes, toothpaste, dental floss and mouthwash that was available for her consumption - a year’s supply of dental products. Let’s make sure she gets that next time.  Seattle had her camera at the scene of course, and I cant wait to see her pictures and understand her perception of the event. Read all the details on how Toronto dentist rewards Seattle Dredge on the Lenzr blog.

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff profiled on Canada Blog Friends

Here is Dr Yoni Freedhoff profile on Canada Blog Friends.

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff is the author of Weighty Matters, a food science and health blog that shines a bright light on the soft underbelly of Big Food.

Canada Blog Friends is an index of Canada’s most culturally significant bloggers and Yoni is a valuable addition the collective. His blog probably should be required reading for parents of overweight children, or anyone looking for insight into proper dieting, and how to exercise and lose weight effectively. Also what so called ‘health snacks’ you should  avoid buying for yourself or your family.  But that’s not what makes Yoni’s blog special.

Dr. Freedhoff isn’t afraid of publicly waging war with Big food, and he attacks the advertising agencies and marketing executives that print health jargon on their packaging without substantiating their claims. Or they print false claims, or make impossible statements that are essentially fraudulent.  The most fascinating things happen when Yoni publishes his blog posts, and you can almost hear his sentences echo through Big Food boardrooms all across corporate Canada.

The biggest offenders include the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Health Check which Yoni calls a “misinformation program”, and Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating which Dr Freedhoff feels is better described as, “Canada’s Food Guide to Unhealthy Eating”.

Years ago, Dr Yoni Freedhoff founded the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, a multi-disciplinary, ethical, evidence-based nutrition and weight management center.

As the Weighty Matters blogger, Yoni is now a respected trust agent. He prints the ugly truth about processed food products and their manufacturers and marketing departments. This is important because such editorials will not get printed in mainstream magazines, newspapers or radio, and will never be mentioned on any TV network that relies on these same food companies as sponsors for programming.

There’s something for everyone on Lenzr.com, as three new photo contests launch for the months of November and December 2009!

Medicinal Plants in Nature celebrates natural medicine and hopes to collect images of potent herbs and flowers growing wild in the great outdoors. The discipline of depicting plants and flowers accurately with respect to their form and colour is called botanical photography, and members are encouraged to pinpoint each plant’s medical applications. A successful botanical photographer is both a scientist and an artist. The discipline requires a detailed knowledge of plants and their habitats as well as a keen eye for making attractive pictures.

Sponsored by Ontario’s premier natural medicine clinic, the member that uploads the highest rated photo WINS six different Neal’s Yard Remedies which are formulated from botanical ingredients. The prize package includes Orange Flower Facial Wash, Rosewater Toner, Orange Flower Facial Oil, Yarrow & Comfrey Moisturizer, White Tea Eye Gel, Geranium & Orange Body Butter for a total retail value of $330.00* all prizes subject to change

Macro Photos of Life contest is specifically destined to amass a large display of small living things. Photographers are asked to use their camera’s macro lenses to capture the tiny facial expressions of animals and bugs.

ShrinkRay is a powerful tool built by an advanced mobile app developer to trans mutate business websites into effective mobile applications and web 2.0 widgets for small to mid sized enterprises. It’s a Device Management System (DMS) and an application toolkit that can be customized to suit any marketing agenda.

The friendly sponsor works with their clients to ensure the application delivers all necessary functionality.  ShrinkRay Mobile is quite possibly the best mobile platform available.

Prize is a free deluxe Locaboire Eastern Ontario Wine Tour Travel Package for two adults. The prize includes two meals and one night accommodation at a beautiful Brighton Ontario B&B. Contest ENDS: Jan 1st 2010

Ontario Tourist Attractions 2 photo contest on Lenzr.com will once again show off our province’s most interesting travel destinations. The contest theme fits with Kanetix.ca, a forward thinking company that specializes in delivering the lowest car insurance quotes, and so the challenge is even more relevant when people submit family road trip pictures. Are these types of vacations becoming a thing of the past? or are they even more relevant now in a recession? Eco tours are also becoming more popular - I think people who pick up liter and trash along the beaches and while hiking in the woods should be commended. If everyone were like them then the world would be a better place and the great outdoors would be even more great.

The winner is the member that uploads the top rated image January 1st 2010 as determined by the quantity of registered votes + popular votes / total number of votes.

Are you paying too much for your mortgage or your insurance policies? Can Kanetix help you to find a cheaper rate? As Canada’s leader in online insurance and mortgage price comparisons, Kanetix.ca can quickly provide you with competing quotes from top rated companies. Pick the company with the best quote and arrange for coverage online. Compare mortgage rates, home/property insurance, motorcycle insurance, life insurance, business insurance, travel insurance, health insurance, and more…

Halloween came and went and I have loot bag full of memories from Deb Lewis function at the Gardiner Museum.

Deb Lewis looked great and her party was a big success.

This is me with Farah Fawcett

At the Gardiner Museum.

Halloween is a healthy opportunity to wear a full body mask and truly be someone else.  Three glasses of rye and I became The Gladiator for a spell.

On Halloween night the fourth photo contest on Lenzr ended. Ontario Tourist Attractions amassed over seventy five different submissions which accumulated almost 3000 votes.

It came as no surprise to me that Mommakoala’s image ‘No Pesky Neighbours Here‘ was the winner with 93 total votes and a registered rating of 8.7. This is a quirky image and unusual pictures seem to win Lenzr photo contests.

Sponsored by Kanetix.ca this car insurance quotes provider was thrilled with the success of the endevour and asked politely if they could renew the contest and sponsor  the same event for another sixty days? I accepted and Ontario Tourist Attractions 2 was born.

On Monday I woke up to find an email message from the head of marketing at Mazoolo.com and we came to an understanding regarding the interactive photo challenge keyword landscape.

The keywords photo contest belong to Lenzr

The keywords photo game will link to Mazoolo.com

Check this place out - its the weirdest photo game I’ve ever seen and strangely compelling. I tried the free setting and have now invested $10 ( the minimum) via Paypal on my photos, which are better than average and so for this reason I think its a good investment. Let me explain, on this site the user’s photos are submitted to random challenges which they may win or lose by their own merit and according to other people’s votes. So its a bit like Lenzr except for the fragmentation and sheer randomness of the encounters and competitive activities. Anyway suffice to say I was intriqued immediately and wrote a passionate proposal to secure the business the next day.

On Tuesday I had a morning meeting with Faith Seekings of Rapport Communications and Design. I went to meet her with a copy of my Smojoe Social media Manual, hoping to persuade her to let me speak at her next gathering, but she sidelined me with an unexpected information share and theoretical discourse involving many and varied elements of B2B social media constructs.

Here’s Faith beside Dean Goldstone of Goldstone Studios at 64 George St in downtown Toronto, her downstairs neighbour.

We’re meeting next week to work on the Rapport blog which I’m going to trick out in front of a live audience. This will be a smojoe blog makeover.  Go there now to see the before and then go again late next week to see the after. Keep your eye on this portal and watch carefully - first I will add new Flickr and Twitter widgets, then MyBlogLog and finish with Facebook and the buttons of the social web blog indexes.

On Weds Darryl Cheung of Deezilla asked me to help his wife promote her cake baking business under the keywords Toronto wedding cakes for which she already ranks on page one but has adopted a defensive position in the shadow of some new corporate players in the local market.  So of course I told Darryl to put her picture on the site and let her drive a Wordpress blog with tips tricks and recipes and no corporation could ever displace that - especially if the recipes were her creations and other folks bookmarked them and linked to them in their cooking blogs etc.

Then Sir Richard Branson asked me to define what it is to be fearless...

Virgin Mobile has launched a clever campaign that hopes to instigate a new holiday  Nov 19th all of Canada will celebrate and his

Richard is cool guy, He has sailed the Atlantic in an open boat I remember and has floated a helium balloon around the globe. So he’s probably one of the most fearless businessmen in the world, and as such he’s the perfect choice to be the judge of a video contest that asks Canadians to submit their most fearless video for consideration and a chance to win $5000

Virgin Mobile Canada has announced that Nov 19th is National Fearless Day.

Do something fearless and you could win $5000, plus a chance to meet Richard Branson ! Info and entry at National Fearless Day.

There are three photo contests on Lenzr this summer, with three different prizes.

Its now the middle of July and Lenzr.com is off to a great start. All three of contests are up and running and offer great prizes. The whole competition will end midnight 31 August 2009, but for me and everyone watching the spectacle, the real rewards come when Google updates the PageRank value Lenzr.com and then the client websites.

So far in the very first Lenzr contest period, the debut summer competition, the best prize for photographers to win is without question the reward that has been posted in  Summer in Toronto. Here the lucky winner gets their choice of smart phone* and that prize is compelling because people want to know what phone will the winner chose? Which phone would you choose?

Summer in Toronto - This web challenge is the place to show us what the word ’summer’ means to you. Snap and submit good pictures and you could win a smart phone.  Get shots of football players and urban fisherman and flaming cocktails on the patio of a sweaty flamingo bar. Take pictures of kids and dogs at the beach, or damming up a creek, or riding their bikes in the streets. Whatever makes you think of these warm summer months when the weather outside is cold and miserable summer. The reward is compelling.

The winner will choose a brand new state-of-the-art smart phone, courtesy of the best cell phone deals website in Canada, and be prepared to tell everyone WHY they have selected this model, when they could have any brand or device available on the market.

Emergency in Toronto - Toronto Firemen and Health Care Workers and Police are always trying to save time and to be the most conscious of wasted seconds and lost minutes. They are trying to save lives. This web challenge asks the photographers living in the city to look to the firetrucks and get a shot of them as they pass. Take a minute to record a moment of their lives, and be sure and report where and when you snapped the shot.

The Esquire Verve 2020 men’s watch with stainless steel band and butterfly clasp is a fine reward. This waterproof timepiece is very stylish with four diamonds. The prize is to be awarded by a time management speaker named Steven Prentice who has become rather famous for innovating social media solutions in busy offices. He also lectures on how technology can save time.

Best Toronto Skyline challenge asks photographers to submit wide angle images of the Toronto skyline. Please show us our great city dominating the horizon, and try to get unusual angles from rare perspectives. This contest is sponsored by the photo contest itself, and the winner receives a Pentax Optio P70 compact camera. The web challenge is designed to celebrate our Megacity’s urban sprawl.

On Lenzr.com, the contests change every two months. These prizes are all relatively easy to win, especially if you have good photographs that inspire other people’s appreciation and support.

Local photo contest website Lenzr.com launched on July 1st 2009.

Happy Canada Day! The fireworks all over Toronto are bursting to celebrate the birth of this nation, but to me, the pyrotechnics are popping for Lenzr.

After a two months gestation period which began when the notion was first conceived on my chalk board, and then transcribed into a seven page IA document (drawn on the fabric of experience learned from Dumpdiggers.com), William Webb of Innate Media Group delivered a demo on June 15th and now finally the beta site at Lenzr.com/toronto is presently running the first photo challenge.

At the core of this photo contest website you can hear the echoes of the photo battles for old coins and marbles that occurred last fall in the Dumpdiggers Arena. As a website designer, I gained a lot of wisdom making the antiques social networking site at Dumpdiggers.com. Lenzr was built on the knowledge that photo contests can make boring businesses socially relevant, and that’s the key to findability in this age of earned media. Using the photo contest mechanism to dispense coupons doubles the effectiveness of the innovation as it collects and confirms email addresses.

Lenzr Photo Contest Evolved From Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battles

In Dumpdiggers.com, the photo battles in the Arena were just too darn short; they would only last a week. The contests were over and done with before anyone knew about them and respected collectors would show up in the forum and ask about photo battles in their niches long after they’d expired. The optimum length of a photo contest is three months, and if you maintain that tempo you can structure four contests a year and make them seasonal. Here’s the chronology of photo battles on Dumpdiggers.com

Lenzr.com photo challenges last for two months, and so there are six contest periods every year. But please understand that Lenzr.com is not a typical contest website that exists only to market one company. Rather, this destination was built to showcase very specific user submitted photos in an internet love affair with Toronto; it really is all about the art and the glory of winning the game is probably more important than the prize to most of the participants.

As you can see above, the model is similar to other ‘hot or not’ type of websites where you don’t have to be a member to vote. So casual passers-by can pass judgment on images and their votes are counted, and so are their IP addresses.  So voting becomes the best way to screen the images, one by one, in an interactive digestion of the material.

The first ever Lenzr photo contest is sponsored by Lenzr itself. The challenge will end August 31st and will award a shiny new digital camera to the lucky winner as it chronicles the story of their picture on the Lenzr blog and in other partner sites. The 12-megapixel Pentax Optio P70 is a super compact camera with a wide-angle 4x optical zoom lens (27.5-110mm equiv.). It has a 2.7-inch LCD display, Advanced Face Detection, Smile Capture, Blink Detection, and Pixel Track Shake Reduction “to assure sharp images with low noise even in poor lighting.” The camera can also capture 720p HD video at 15 frame-per-second.

Lenzr’s partners include many local Toronto bloggers.

Lenzr also has an alliance with All Canada Contests.

Lenzr is already an individual category on Toronto-Forums, a popular discussion forum website anchored in the GTA. Its hoped this forum will become the best place to discuss contests and sponsors and even individual pictures. This is where winners will be announced and winning pictures profiled. New ideas for contests and sponsors and photographers and friends can hook up in here to discuss Lenzr.

The very best facet of Lenzr is the library and the legacy of winning photos it shares with the people of Toronto. The archives at the rear end of the website will someday become a treasure trove of free images for anyone to use in blogs and forums, and also as postcards and calendars and rotating headers; the content will spawn photo widgets with free pictures of Toronto for the rest of time.