Uninstalled

The Exile's Return

2008-05-02T09:34:00.002-04:00

One last quick copy & paste post before we jet off, just because it seems so appropriate:

The Exile's Return
(John Locke, 1847-1889)

T'anam chun Dia! but there it is -
The dawn on the hills of Ireland,
God's angels lifting the night's black veil
From the fair sweet face of my sireland.
Oh! Ireland isn't it grand you look,
Like a bride in her fresh adorning,
And with all the pent-up love of my heart
I bid you the top of the morning.

This one brief hour pays lavishly back,
For many a year of mourning,
I'd almost venture another flight,
There is so much joy in returning,
Watching out for the hallowed shore,
All other attraction scorning,
Oh: Ireland don't you hear me shout,
I bid you the top of the morning.

Ho, Ho, upon Glen's shelving strand,
The surges are wildly beating,
And Kerry is pushing her headlands out,
To give us a kindly greeting,
Now to the shore the sea birds fly,
On pinons that know no drooping,
Now out from the shore with welcome gaze,
A million of eaves come trooping.

Oh! Fairly, generous Irish land,
So Loyal, so fair, so loving,
No wonder the wandering Celt should think,
And dream of you in his roving,
The Alien shore may have gems and gold,
And sorrow may ne'er have gloomed it.
But the heart will sigh for its native shore,
Where the love-light first illumed it.

And doesn't old Cobh look charming there,
Watching the wild waves motion,
Resting her back against the hill.
And the tips of her toes to the ocean,
I wonder I don't hear the Shandon bells,
But maybe their chiming is over,
For it's a year since I began,
The life of a western rover.

For thirty years "A chuisle mochroi",
Those hills I now feast my eyes on,
Ne'er met my vision save at night,
In memory's dim horizon,
Even so, 'twas grand and fair they seemed,
In the landscape spread before me,
But dreams are dreams, and I would awake
To find American skies still o'er me.

And often in Texan plain,
When the day and the chase was over,
My heart would fly o'er the weary ways,
And around the coastline hover,
And my prayers would arise that some future date,
All danger, doubting and scorning,
I might help to win for my native land
The light of young liberty's morning.

Now fuller and turner the coastline shows
Was there ever a scene more splendid!
I feel the breath of the Munster breeze,
Oh! Thank God my exile is ended,
Old scenes, old songs, old friends again
There's the vale, there's the cot I was born in
Oh! Ireland from my heart of hearts
I bid you the "top o' the morning"

Off to England and Ireland - lighter blogging ahead

2008-05-01T23:38:00.004-04:00

This will probably be my last post for a couple of weeks, unless I get to squeeze in time to blog on vacation. Tomorrow we jet off to the UK and Ireland - heading home for the first time in five years.

It was Dad's 70th birthday a few days ago and Mom turned 70 last year. So there's a giant family party planned for the weekend (what we used to call, as kids, a WFD - I'll let you work out for yourself what that stands for). The farflung Clarke clan and many, many friends will be descending en masse on Stowe School - near to where Mom and Dad live - for what promises to be the hooley of the century. (Of the 21st Century, that is of course. The greatest hooley of the 20th Century was day Leona and I married).

So far, the rough itinerary looks something like this, subject to tweakage:

- May 3: arrive, disgustingly early, Birmingham airport
- May 4: M&D 70th birthday party
- May 5: Thame (Mom & Dad's place). Mighty hangover followed by the after-party party (hundreds of family members and friends will still be in the neighbourhood, so it's
inevitable there will be more drink taken)
- May 6: still knocking around Oxfordshire, nothing planned, AFAIK, other than shopping for a new liver, perhaps
- May 7: to London - planning a trip to the Tower of London (Charlie's choice) + possibly the London Eye (for Lily). Opera tix and dinner booked in the evening with one of my brothers
- May 8: London - morning: Natural History Museum (Ruairi's choice - dinosaurs!). Nothing planned for the afternoon or evening yet. Hoping to catch up with Suw & Kevin, maybe Gary Turner and family too. Drink will, no doubt, be involved.
- May 9: fly to Dublin to see the other half of the family. Visiting, more drinkage, plenty food, old friends, warm family moments, wandering my favourite streets in the world...
- May 16: fly back to Toronto

It's been a long, long time since we've seen the auld sod. Expecting things to be very different at home - something I'm a little nervous about. People have been telling me that both London and Dublin have grown almost beyond recognition in the past few years; Dublin in particular, as a result of the booming economy and the first period of significant population growth in hundreds of years of history.

Hard to imagine that two such well-established cities could alter so much in five years, but then I look around at what the idiots have done to the stretch of Toronto either side of the Gardiner in the same space of time, and... well, I'm aching for home, but hoping it's not all too screwed up.

Meanwhile - also on the Dad front (and on the subject of that Dirty Auld Town), after a four year break, we've finally got the second section of Dad's work-in-progress memoirs up at the Raised on Songs and Stories site.

When I can find a chunk of spare time, I want to spruce Dad's site up a bit - split the content into chapters and work on the navigation. For now, though, at least we've got the words up there, and a few photos. Nice to contrast this shot of Dad's birthplace:

With the venue we're booked into for Mom and Dad's birthday party:

Not too shabby for a gurrier from the North side. Heh.

So - see you on the other side of the pond. Thanks in advance to our kind housesitters and their three giant, scary Rottweilers for taking care of things in our absence.

Incredibly good chocolate delivered by Cluetrain

2008-04-30T23:09:00.002-04:00

I've no idea how much Rick Levine made from his share of the Cluetrain Manifesto profits, so it might be a bit of a stretch to call his new venture "The Chocolatier the Cluetrain Built"... but - however he went about funding this thing, I'm delighted to report that he's onto a winner.

OK - back up. Let me catch you up a little here.

So. The Cluetrain Manifesto - a great website that became a terrific email list, that ultimately evolved into an important book, a ton of media coverage, and a veritable explosion of game-changing ideas - had four authors. Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke went on to do a lot of other high profile things after the success of the original book.

The fourth author (aka the Fifth Beatle, as Jeneane calls him), Rick Levine, opted for a less high profile route. In truth, I think a lot of people figured he'd fallen completely off the map for much of the last 10 years.

Well as Jeneane explains in her post, Rick's been busy. I know he was working on some pretty cool startups for some of those intervening years (hey Rick - do you still own wordofmouth.com? What happened to that one?), but it turns out that he was secretly hatching a plan to create the world's finest artisan chocolatier, in Boulder, Colorado of all places.

I know this to be true, as earlier today we received a stunning sample box of outstanding chocolates from Seth Ellis Chocolatier (thank you Rick!). As you'd expect, from a Cluetrain original, the Seth Ellis site is a blog.

Now, I'm a really big fan of chocolate - especially the rich, dark kind. I turned to the dark side at an early age, shortly after I discovered Cadbury's Bournville and Thornton's Apricot Parfait.

Nowadays, Green & Black's organic (especially the Maya Gold variety) is the treat that makes my toes curl (sign of a perfect partner, btw - La Belle Saucisse bought me a Green & Black's dark easter egg this year. Thank you, Sausage - I love you). And having a brother & sister-in-law in Brussels is, as you might imagine, a very, very good thing indeed for a full-time chocophile.

But this stuff...

O.M.G.

I have no idea who Seth Ellis is or was, or why Rick's chocolatier is named after him - but I suspect he was a chocolate deity of the highest possible rank.

Each of the six hand-crafted delicacies in the Seth Ellis box is a perfectly-balanced work of chocolatey art. Fair trade organic Ecuadorean chocolate, carefully-selected organic ingredients, delicately blended and designed, then presented in a terrific little box like intricate pieces of jewelery. The scent alone, as you open the box, is enough to lift a chocoholic out of his shoes.

The minty one is a treat - billions of miles better than the typical gick that passes for chocolate in North American. Forget After Eights and any other mint/chocolate mashup you've tried in the past - this is to choc-o-mints as a Lotus Elan is to a Honda Civic.

Next, the raspberry truffle. Unreal. Delicately tart and aromatic - not cloyingly sweet like the typical raspberry choccie concoction in an assortment box. Fresh raspberry flavour sliced with sharp, tangy chocolate - bitter enough to have the tip of your tongue sizzling, rich enough to make the back of your palate feel like velvet.

Then there's the candied lemon one - sheer knocks my socks off. Intense, deep, heavenly. Candied Angel pee.

The ginger one - praise the chocolate gods! The ginger one!! Is there anything more perfect than the combination of rich dark chocolate and crystallized ginger? And is there any chocolate/ginger marriage more perfect than this? Two different kinds of ginger for a killer one-two punch of sweet and spicy.

And then... Oh. Oh my. The nutmeg. Nutmeg! Who woulda thunk it?! Nutmeg on a cappucino, sure - but I'd never have thought of building an entire ganache around nutmeg. Bugger me, that's a good chocolate.

There's a coffee truffle in there too - but by the time I hit this point I was comatose from the sheer hedonistic overload. I have become one with the couch; sunk down in a haze of chocolate bliss. I've achieved choco-nirvana.

If you're in the US, you may be able to find Seth Ellis chocs in your nearest Whole Foods Market. If that doesn't work, go here to order some online. Please. You will not be disappointed.

Thank you, Rick. You and your pals at Seth Ellis are chocogeniuses of the first order. My only request: make one with chili!

Terry Fallis' "The Best Laid Plans" wins the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

2008-04-30T13:17:00.003-04:00

The news just came through here in the Thornley Fallis office and we are all quite literally jumping with excitement and joy.

Our co-founder, colleague and friend, Terry Fallis - one of the nicest, smartest, most modest and just utterly charming people one could ever hope to meet - was just announced as the winner of the famous Stephen Leacock Medal For Humour.

Knowing that the award announcement luncheon was happening today up in Orillia, I'll confess that I've been refreshing my Google News search rather obsessively since around 12:30.

Terry was up against stiff competition, including the latest Doug Coupland novel and Will Ferguson's "Spanish Fly". I can hardly believe he won - this is too exciting. The Leacock is huge - it's like the Pulitzer of humour. With this win, Terry joins the ranks of such luminaries as Pierre Berton, W.O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, and Stuart McLean.

If you haven't already read Terry's novel, "The Best Laid Plans", hie thee to a book store and pick up a copy as soon as you can. It's superb - terrific characters in utterly believable situations and just an absolute pleasure to read.

Outstanding news. Hearty and heartfelt congratulations, Terry - a very well-deserved tribute to one of the most decent human beings on the planet.

I <3 Viigo

2008-04-24T11:23:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the misfortune of losing my Blackberry to a casual thief. Grrrr. That sucked.

Now that I have a replacement in hand, one of the things I really wasn't looking forward to was getting everything re-tweaked to work the way I'd customized the previous device. It's a pain to have to go back through and set up all the old shortcuts and favourite apps I'd already tweaked to work precisely the way I liked on the old handheld.

When it came to reinstalling Viigo, however, the entire process was rendered completely painless. I downloaded it, ran the install, logged in with my old username, and boom! All my feeds, folders and settings were re-created and synchronised without me having to tweak a darn thing. Such a simple thing to do - but why can't all apps work this way?

Going through this made me realise that I haven't blogged about Viigo yet, and I should. A month or so ago, I'd sent out a plea through Twitter and elsewhere, trying to find a good offline RSS feed reader for the Blackberry. I'd experimented with BerryBloglines and a few of the other options folk recommended, but none of the products I'd tried actually implemented offline reading properly.

What I really wanted was something that would take advantage of slack synch cycles on the Bb, to pull down feeds and cache them locally, such that I could then catch up on my blog reading while on the subway. Something, in other words, not unlike what AvantGo provided on my trusty old Palm Vx more than 8 years ago (albeit without the RSS).

By luck, I happened to be speaking at the ICE08 conference about a month ago, where I heard about Viigo. They'd done a special promo deal with the event organizers, pushing a skinned version of their app to interested attendees. Always happy to toy with new tools, I downloaded Viigo and was instantly smitten.

This is probably the perfect mobile app for me and has quickly become the most-used program on my Blackberry after email. It genuinely has changed my life, for the better. Instead of carrying the nagging guilt for being constantly behind on my feed reading, I can keep up-to-date on my commute every day, and I'm never without good stuff to read. Plus, I'd actually much rather be catching up with the news and blog posts on my Blackberry in the morning than trying to handle a full-size newspaper on a crowded tube train.

I know, I'm gushing - but I really do like it that much. If you're a Blackberry or Windows Mobile user, read a lot of blogs, and haven't checked Viigo out yet - what are you waiting for?

[Disclosure: in case you're wondering, no - I have absolutely no professional relationship with the Viigo guys. I do know their VP, Web Marketing from a former life. Terrific bloke. But that has absolutely nothing to do with my passion for their product. I didn't even realise he worked there until after I'd fallen in like with this thing.]

Not exactly the Friday evening Ruairi had planned

2008-04-19T00:34:00.003-04:00

We got home about 90 minutes ago from Toronto East General Hospital, after four hours of hanging around, X-rays, and examinations.

I was just on my way home when Leona called with the news that Ruairi had come down badly on the trampoline and hurt himself. He landed hard with his arm underneath him and his wrist bent back on itself. Ouch!

It looks like he may have what they tell me is a "SALTR-1" - that is, a type I Salter-Harris fracture of the radius bone in his right wrist (it's a crack through something called the growth plate at the very end of the bone). They won't really know for sure until an orthopaedic specialist has taken a good look at the X-rays and at his wrist once it comes out of the temporary cast next week.

It was Ruairi's idea to take the photo, btw. He's obviously in quite a lot of pain, but at the same time he's quietly excited about being the first member of the family to have a cast, and he wanted to make sure we got a photo with the new camera.

Poor little man. He's a brave one, our Ruairi - even turning his wrist for the X-rays was clearly agony, but he toughed it out. No more trampoline for a while, I guess.

[UPDATE: Many people have asked and I've been slack about reporting the news. It's very, very good news. After a visit to the fracture clinic, I'm thrilled to report that Ruairi was given a clean bill of health. The temporary cast is now off, and our little man is now bouncing with health and energy once again. It was a really bad sprain, but not - thank God - a fracture. Hooray!]

The PICK 20 Awards from Backbone Magazine & KPMG

2008-04-16T23:46:00.002-04:00

Now that the dust is settling on the judging process, I have a moment to blab about my participation in this terrific awards program being run by KPMG and Backbone Magazine.

The PICK 20 Awards are designed to result in Canada's first and only ranking of Canadian Web 2.0 pioneers. From the original description the Backbone chaps sent me a month or so ago:

We're looking for the companies who are leading the way in one or more of the following implementation categories:

Problem solving: customer response, idea generation, solution brainstorming
Innovation: crowdsourcing, market prediction, participatory feedback
Collaboration: jams, customer input, user rankings
Knowledge sharing and management: teamware, wikis, blogs and collaborative content creation

I was honoured to be asked to participate as a judge in this program, and absolutely stunned by the quality of the nominees. I'm not allowed to actually name any of the nominees, alas (for perfectly good reasons), but this has been an absolutely fascinating and enlightening experience. I knew we had some amazing home-grown Web 2.0 talent in Canada, but reviewing the work of the nominees has proven inspirational. Canada rocks!

The winners don't get announced until the July edition of Backbone hits the stands. I can't wait to see where my favourites end up in the final tally.

Discovery Channel does the Coke thing

2008-04-16T12:18:00.002-04:00

I love this.

If you're old enough to remember Coke's "I'd like to teach the world to sing" ad campaign, then you'll see immediate resonances in this new promo for the Discovery Channel.

Brilliant stuff.

If you're not old enough to get the Coke reference, and wondering what I'm blathering on about, here's your early 70s hairfest moment of joy for today:

Tip o' the space helmet to Will Pate for pointing to the Discovery Channel piece.

These streets we (virtually) walk

2008-04-15T23:55:00.004-04:00

Google Maps Street View continues to be a very cool idea with all sorts of mindless fun to be had digging up interesting, weird, or entertaining sightings.

For a degree of coolness beyond the Google approach, take a look at the way MapJack handles the same idea, but renders it even more enjoyable through the simple addition of a little minifig dude and some nice UI work.

If you're a Torontonian, the next plane of cooliosity is reached by checking out what they're doing at VirtualCity.ca. Deeply groovy - although they really need to update some of their imagery (the ROM Crystal still looks like a construction site in their shots).

There's something strangely enjoyable about virtually "strolling" through neighbourhoods you know so well. Nice that so many of the photos in their database were taken on bright, sunny days - I could have done with a dose of this site a few weeks ago, when we were still clutched in the grey, dismal heart of that long winter.

Of course, all of these sites lack one killer feature I'd love to see. Imagine looking at a particular street or landmark you know and thinking - "huh - I've got a much better photo than that" or "nice, but what does it look like at night?"

That's one of the paths the guys at PlanetEye could end up evolving down, I guess. If enough people submit enough photos from enough locations, they could potentially end up offering a similar service.

The PlanetEye approach is different, though - focused on providing a richer service. Virtually wandering the streets of Chaing Mai on MapJack is fun for a few minutes, but if I'm thinking of actually visiting a place, I really want other layers of info laid over the top - hotels, restaurants, bars, places of interest - plus recommendations from friends or local experts, ratings and - yes - photos and videos of the best places to go.

Macon Leary would love all this stuff.

Twitter use redefines "breaking news"

2008-04-10T23:51:00.003-04:00

Go read this post from B.L. Ochman.

B.L. points to Tony Katz, who live-tweeted what could have unfolded as a terrorist incident on board a USAir flight yesterday. As always, B.L. has some great observations to offer.

From Tony's blog post about the incident:

This is how the event started, that I then shared via Twitter, about how a dark haired, dark skinned man was removed from Flight 66 by police officers for stating to the flight attendant that he was being racially profiled and that he had a detonator in his pocket.

Wow. Just wow.

Citizen journalists - let's roll.

Hostile Takeover - what GWB could learn from Microsoft/Yahoo

2008-04-10T23:23:00.004-04:00

It's been said before, but it's worth saying again...

Heard on the CBC news earlier this evening, that estimates of the full cost of the war in Iraq have now surpassed two trillion dollars.

This site reports that the cost of the war as of April 9, 2008 stood at: $509,745,061,240

Five. Hundred. Billion. Dollars.

The CIA World Factbook pegs the GDP of Iraq at $100 Billion (2007 estimated).

So by this stage, Bush and his buddies could have just bought the entire country five times over - and not one soldier or civilian would have had to die.

Hat tip to David and Paolo who first crunched these numbers five years ago.

Take it easy, Doc

2008-04-10T21:56:00.004-04:00

I'm behind on my reed feading (so what else is new) - flat out for the last few days, getting our big groovy Sharp event done and a ton of other stuff, so I missed the fact that my friend Doc Searls was in hospital with a blood clot in his lung. He's out now, and seems to be well on the mend. Scary stuff though.

Comments and good wishes piling up for Doc in his comments, email and voicemail - many of us offering a consistent message: take it easy for a while there, Doc.

Doc is pretty much an international treasure, as far as I'm concerned, and still has so much to contribute to our understanding of what's happening in the general online and social media worlds. Project VRM is only just getting the steam going - that one project alone is way too important to lose its founding father at this early stage. Rest, Doc - we need you.

Just this morning, before I even knew Doc was under the doc, as 'twere, I left an audio comment in response to the latest InsidePR podcast, pointing people to one of the most important things Doc has ever written.

The most recent InsidePR episode featured a terrific panel session, recorded in front of a live audience at Third Tuesday Toronto. One of the best and most engaging IPR sessions I've heard in a while.

Listening to it on the tube this morning got me going, though - I took exception to the central question of the debate: "Who owns social media?" - a question that turned on the hypothesis that some group (whether ad agencies, PR folk, digital firms, or others) has more of a claim to the social media space than any other group.

This whole question just annoys me. Over the course of the recording - with some good comments from both panellists and audience participants - they approached what I think is a sensible outcome, but listening to the audience questions I know I'm not the only one who found the entire premise of the discussion flawed and, dare I say it, almost arrogant.

Social media - insofar as it's a thing that can be labelled, categorized, defined, or owned at all - is not the province of any one group. Even formulating the notion that it's worth asking who owns it is wrong-headed, web 1.0 thinking - a concept entirely in conflict with the nature of the darn thing.

We're naturally competitive, of course - and it's perfectly understandable that us PR folk would want to lay claim to being more conversational, more focused on relationship- and community-building, more inclined towards engagement and dialogue than our fellow travellers and confreres in other parts of the marketing mix. One could just as successfully build the counter argument, though. Neither position would be entirely wrong, nor wholly right.

As I listened to the podcast, I felt like the right thought was on the tip of everyone's tongue. The participants, to give them their due, sailed achingly close to epiphany a couple of times, but no one quite said what I was really hoping they'd say:

Nobody owns it.

Simple. To me, at least, that's the plain and evident fact. Plain truths rarely need elaboration, but there are a couple of inextricably related points that also need to be made here. The good news is that Doc, in a piece co-authored with the wonderful David Weinberger, has already made those points - succinctly, elegantly, and memorably.

Inscribe these words on the inside of your eyelids, oh ye social media mavens:

No one owns it.
Everyone can use it.
Anyone can improve it.

Doc and David crafted this simple cascade in a terrific piece that not enough people have read, dammit. It's five years since they put up the World of Ends site, and people - even really smart people - are still getting this stuff wrong. I don't mean the people at that IPR taping - they're a bunch of pretty clueful folk who actually do get this stuff; they just started from the wrong place with a bit of a silly question and then tripped over themselves a lot as they were fighting towards the light.

The people who are really getting this all wrong are the telcos, the DRM supporters, those opposed to the ideas of Net Neutrality (the "non-Neutrality" camp), the Net isolationists who want to build giant firewalls around their countries, and all those dinosaurs still dragging their tails through the boardrooms of the broadcast and recording industries.

N.E.A.

It's beautiful.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,�that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Read World of Ends. Please.

Read it already? Read it again.

Print it out, pin copies of it to your office notice boards, carpet bomb copies of it throughout the boardrooms of Madison Avenue, Bay Street, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Finsbury Square, Government Center, Parliament Hill, Sand Hill Road... strongholds of greydom and wrong-headedness the world over. Banzai!

The subtitle to World of Ends explains that it is an effort to explain: "What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else" - so it's not specifically about the social media space, per se. But it's no less relevant and apposite fer a' that.

Seriously: read it.

[P.s. Quoting Keats, above, reminds me of one of my favourite Spike Milligan stories.

Stationed in North Africa during WWII, Milligan describes his experience in an artillery unit as one of lengthy periods of excruciating boredom, punctuated by brief bursts of intense activity.

In an effort to alleviate the tedium and pour a little learning into the rank and file, some of the university-educated junior officers decided to introduce a series of postprandial lectures on cultural topics.

In Milligan's version of the tale, the gunnery sergeant called the mess tent to order to announce:

�Right, you lot � tonight Lieutenant Wilson will be giving a talk about Keats � and I bet not one of you ignorant bastards knows what a keat is.�

Aw, Spike. Six years since we lost you, and the world's still a sadder, less funny place without you around. God rest you, lovely man.]

Isn't this what Toronto Tech Week ought to be promoting?

2008-04-08T09:31:00.003-04:00

Following threads about the traffic-shaping mess that's been unravelling in the media over the last couple of weeks, I happened across a terrific, unrelated piece of news that doesn't seem to have received the attention it deserves (or maybe I just missed it).

On their website, the CATA Alliance (Canada's largest high tech association) points to news of Ontario's Next Generation Jobs Fund - a new $1.15 Billion fund created by the Ontario Provincial government.

The overall goal is to grow Ontario's economy by supporting and funding investments and job creation in leading-edge innovation. Areas targeted include digital media, advanced manufacturing, health and biopharmaceutical research, and clean/green automotive and other technologies. There's a good core of eco-awareness running through the middle of this thing.

The CATA Alliance site includes this call to action:

Dear High Tech Executives

Does your company have a project in the pipeline that will grow your business, create jobs or invest in R&D?

If the answer is yes, talk to Ontario because we can help make it happen.

Ontario's new $1.15 billion Next Generation Of Jobs Fund is a five-year program, which assists innovative companies to develop new technologies and services for world markets, while helping Ontario win investment and create jobs.

The fund is designed to be in step with how business works:
Fast and flexible - companies are guaranteed a decision within 45 days from the time a complete proposal is received. In many cases, 20 per cent of funding is provided upon signing.
Focused - the fund supports investment, innovation and growth in sectors where Ontario is strong or has the potential to become a global leader.

Proven track record - you will be dealing with people who know how to manage these funds effectively and work with business.

++ Action Item

Call us today at 1-800-819-8701 to connect with program staff to discuss your potential project.

If you're in the high tech or general R&D sector in Ontario, it would seem nuts not to explore the potential of this fund.

This strikes me as precisely the sort of initiative you'd think Toronto Tech Week would be getting behind. Ontario's a big place, but there's little doubt that a LOT of that $1.15 billion will end up in Toronto. Toronto is (or, at least, was - according to this data) the third largest technology industry hub in North America (behind San Francisco and New York) - a fact that Toronto Tech Week was, if I understand correctly, created to promote and celebrate.

No mention of this terrific funding initiative on the Toronto Tech Week site (well - there's not really anything of much interest on the Toronto Tech Week site, frankly).

Unless I'm missing something, the Toronto tech community should be jumping up and down celebrating this announcement - and calling that CATA Alliance number to see about getting a piece of the pie. Maybe they are, and I just can't hear them. Either way, this seems like the kind of thing I'd want to be hearing more about from the Toronto Tech Week and ICT Toronto organizations. Not a peep.

I've been trying really hard to suspend judgement of the Toronto Tech Week initiative, but I'm afraid that Joey, David Crow, Mark and others may be right.

On Ray Davies, Birthdays, and the Blackberry Thief

2008-04-07T23:04:00.002-04:00

Another flying update.

First - the Ray Davies show. In short: abso-freaking-lutely incredible.

What a showman! I�ve not seen a gig like this in over 10 years, or maybe more. It probably ranks up there with the best I've ever seen, in fact. The bloke is 63 years old and he�s bouncing around the stage like a teenager the whole night with a HUGE grin on his face, clearly having the time of his life � as was I.

I went expecting some kind of quiet, intimate, acoustic set - something along the lines of what he did on that "Storyteller" tour a few years back. But no - he blew the flippin' doors off. Full band (guitar, bass, keyboard, drums) backing him up, and what a band!

He did all the best old stuff and tons of great new songs - Lola, All Day & All of the Night, You Really Got Me, Where Have All The Good Times Gone, Come Dancing, Sunny Afternoon, Dedicated Follower - the lot.

The best thing about it was the way Davies clearly seems to just love performing. Tons of willing, happy audience participation - the packed Music Hall crowd singing their hearts out and dancing like the night would never end. Great songs, terrific singing, fantastic band. Just outstanding all round.

Seriously, I can't remember a gig this good since the last time I saw The Jam. Or maybe the Clash on the London Calling tour. Incredible stuff.

Second - excellent birthday last Saturday. Thanks for all the happy Twitter and Facebook messages and emails. Just a perfect day. The first properly Spring-like day we've had so far this year, after a nasty, sleet-drenched Friday.

Excellent breakfast and prezzies with the kids, then scramble out the door. Charlie had his championship hockey game to run to. His team hadn't finished top of the playoffs, but the way this league works they still got to play for the Bronze medal.

He put in his best performance ever, stopping more than 25 shots, and his entire team seemed to raise their game to a whole new level. Fantastic, thrilling, end-to-end stuff - about as exciting as a hockey game full of 10-year olds can get (and a lot more exciting than some of the Leafs home games have been this season). Final score 6-2.

Charlie also got a special medal for "Most Sportsmanlike" which has me absolutely bursting with pride. They hand out three specials every year: "Most Improved", "Most Dedicated" and this one. The Sportsman award is definitely the one to win, in my opinion. It's the "Lady Byng" of his hockey league. Choked me up.

Meanwhile, as Charlie was scrambling around in front of the net, fighting off all attacks, Lily and Ruairi were running in the Spring Sprint - an annual fun run along the Beaches boardwalk. Both finished really well, with Ruairi placing 7th in his age group (out of 20-odd kids), and Lily 18th out of 57.

The two of them were so proud of the numbers on their backs and their Spring Spring T-shirts; Ruairi wanted to sleep in his.

Charlie and I had hopped a cab down to the boardwalk after hockey, to catch up with the gang. After a couple of very happy pints in the Balmy Beach rugby clubhouse, we wandered lazily along the boardwalk for a couple of hours - blessed by the weather. This has been such a long, hard winter - coming in a centimetre or two short of the record annual snowfall. I've never seen anything like it. Saturday was bliss. We even got a bit sunburnt, surprised by the brightness of the day after months with our entire bodies wrapped in layers.

Dinner at Green Eggplant, a bloody good new restaurant in the beach. Huge quantities of grub, then home for fantastic Dufflet cake and watching the third Back To The Future movie with the kids (utter pants, I know, but it was their choice).

Joy.

Third - the not so great part of the weekend. The kids had a swim meet on Sunday, out at a sketchy part of the East End called Crescent Town. (BTW - where did we ever get such athletic kids? Hockey, running, swimming, Lily's dance and diving classes, plus footie and baseball starting up in a few weeks... I guess it's the way things are these days. Bloody brilliant really.)

So, arriving in a bit of a rush, I helped Charlie stuff his gear into a locker and pushed my leather jacket in after it - completely forgetting about my Blackberry in the inside pocket. Crap.

After the swimming and lunch, we headed off on bikes and blades to enjoy the sun and mess about for a couple of hours at a local playground. It wasn't until an hour or two later that I thought: "I wonder where my phone is...?"

The usual trick - ringing my own number - didn't find it. Checked the car, the briefcase, everywhere. Gone.

Piecing things together, and talking to Rogers (the phone company) about it, we figured it out:

At some time between 12 and 2pm, scumbag or scumbags unknown evidently went through the lockers and nabbed my Bb.
At 5:02pm - when the kids and I were still out on the bikes - Leona called me to see if we were on our way home. Someone answered - not me. Sausage naturally thought she'd got a wrong number, apologized, and hung up. Calling back, she just got voicemail.
According to Rogers, a call was placed from my phone - probably from somewhere in Newmarket - to a local cab company, at 4:56pm

Our theory is that the scumbag called for a cab (or called his buddy at the cab firm that also does a nice little sideline in knocked-off cells and Bb's) - then when Leona called a few minutes later, he thought it was the cab firm calling him back (why else would he answer?).

The phone has now been bricked by Rogers and our IT guys (they can completely wipe Blackberries remotely, apparently - who knew?), so I'm not so worried about any of the data that might have been on it.

By curious coincidence, the handset had crashed on me just last Friday, wiping most of my email and contacts. Not a problem, as I had everything backed up and the email is all mirrored on our corporate server anyway - in fact, it's a blessing. At least the scumbag wouldn't have been able to read anything but the last 4 emails I received on Friday night.

Still pissed off, though - at myself and at the scumbag; but mostly at myself. You have to love the fact that this scumbag was going through the lockers at a swim meet for kids. Class act.

The cops have all this info, of course - but I doubt very much they'll do anything, and I completely understand why. So some yuppie lost his fancy phone - they're not exactly going to scramble 55 Division for that one.

The one thing that really bites (apart from the realisation that I'm a pillock) is that the only photos we had of Charlie's epic hockey win on Saturday were on the Blackberry, dammit.

A sour end to an otherwise blissful weekend - but heck, it could have been a whole lot worse. Stuff it.

Coleman Engellenner is a genius

2008-04-02T23:11:00.002-04:00

Through a very happy accident, I bumped into this bloke Coleman Engellenner online a couple of weeks ago.

Coleman is a creative ad guy at Apollo Interactive in California, but that's not important right now.

As a sideline, and to keep his creative juices flowing, Coleman writes a weekly mini email zine: The Coleman Media Report. It's kind of like an "Onion" for the advertising and interactive business. Alas, you won't find it online - it's email only right now.

This is lovely stuff. If you've ever made the mistake of signing up for any of those MediaPost emails, or even if you've just been hanging around online for any time at all, Coleman's weekly wit is a breath of fresh air.

With Coleman's permission, here's the latest edition:

The ColemanMedia Report

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Niche Social Networks Outnumber Niches

With last week's launch of MyStarbucksIdea.com, Comscore Media Metrix reports that niche social networks now well outnumber actual niches within the human race. According to Comscore, the launch of 873 niche social networking sites last month eclipses the potential number of measurable human interests by more than 3 times. Not all media planners are excited about the potential to pinpoint target these new groups. "What the hell was wrong with MySpace and Facebook?" asked online media buyer Ceci Lisbon. "Now I have to take sales calls from FurryFriends.com?"

Read the Full Article

Study: iPhone Users Way Cooler Than You

A new Consumer Attitudes study by the PeeYoo Center For Life has confirmed that users of Apple's iPhone are in fact much, much cooler than users of any other type of handset. The study revealed that not only are iPhone users much smarter, smugger, and better-looking than non-iPhone users, but are also 37.9% more likely to answer a difficult question while dining out and 74.2% more likely to huddle amongst themselves at social gatherings and show off features of their phones. The study also found that Prius drivers are much more environmentally conscious than non-Prius drivers.

Read the Full Article

New IT Guy Just As Weird As Last IT Guy

New Systems Admin Specialist Richie Payolini is just as quirky and weird as the "freak" he replaced, according to co-workers close to the situation. While generally thought of as a nice enough guy, Payolini reportedly shares the exact same obsessions with World of Warcraft, comic book conventions, and outdated Reebok sneakers as his last two predecessors. "Where is it written that all IT guys have to ramble on about how great Battlestar Galactica is?" asked a co-worker. "Aren't any of them into sports? Or girls?"

Read the Full Article

Agency Advertises To Self, Improves Metrics

After the unsuccessful launch of Burger King's new Double Bacon Kosher Burger, award-winning agency Krispy, Portly & Bogus tried something unheard of and revolutionary: they focused all advertising on themselves. A mix of in-cubicle, email and IM media targeted only to the account team members yielded astonishingly good results - lifting brand awareness, message association and brand favorability over 72%. "It just goes to show you that targeting is everything in advertising," said Al Bogus. "You have to know who you're speaking to.

Read the Full Article

See what I mean? I'm sure Coleman would love extra subscribers, but I'm equally sure he wouldn't want me squirting his email address out there into the wild for all to harvest. Drop a comment here or email me and I'll gladly pass you on to Coleman.

And please join me in my campaign to get Coleman Engellenner blogging - this stuff deserves to live online and reach a bigger audience. It's precisely the pin the over-inflated interactive industry bubble needs.

Ray Davies At The Danforth Music Hall

2008-04-02T21:55:00.003-04:00

Through a kind friend, I've managed to score two free tickets to see the legendary Ray Davies tomorrow night (Thursday, April 3rd) at the old Music Hall on the Danforth.

Leona can't make it, alas. Long story. Trouble is, at such short notice, none of my friends seem able to make it either (either that or I just truly am Billy No-Mates).

Bummer.

I don't want to miss this, but I don't really want to go on my own. As a bit of a last resort, I thought I'd try the blog route.

If you're in Toronto tomorrow night, interested, willing to endure a couple of hours of my company (or, rather, in Ray's company, with me just happening to be in the seat beside you), and you're not some creepy weirdo who would scare me - fire me an email (michaelocc AT gmail DOT com) and I'll let you know if the spare ticket's still going.

It's either that, or I'll be sat there humming Waterloo Sunset all on me lonesome.

"Sha la laaaaaa..."

UPDATE: We have a winner! Ticket now taken. Yay!

It's A Michael World After All

2008-04-01T13:02:00.002-04:00

It's been an even-more-than-usually-busy couple of weeks, with a big event for our brand new client at the Canadian Tourism Commission, the launch of a huge API developers' challenge for our friends at Textwise in Rochester (that got TechCrunched!), and buckets of other work flowing through the pipe.

So in lieu of a real update, a few pointers to where else I've been popping up online and off in the last week or so.

First, it was nice to show up quoted alongside my old friend Carl Frappaolo in this piece at ITBusiness.ca: "Embrace social networking before it's too late, experts caution". I was interviewed for my thoughts on a very detailed new study published by AIIM - The Enterprise Content Management Association.

The study covers "Enterprise 2.0"- the adoption of Web 2.0-type technologies inside the firewall at large enterprises. As the document summary notes:

This study of 441 end users (performed in January 2008) found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.

Somehow, that doesn't surprise me at all. It's a huge study, and well worth reading if you're interested in how all this bloggy, wiki, social media-y goodness is starting to penetrate inside large enterprise IT environments. You can download all 80-something pages at the AIIM site, here.

It was fun to talk through this report with the chap at ITBusiness - I felt like I was on very familiar ground. Long before I became a PR guy, the document/content/knowledge management community was my life for many, many years. That solid grounding in the enterprise side of content & knowledge management, paired with my more recent experience in the social media universe seems to be paying off in all sorts of strange ways.

It's funny how so much of the stuff we used to talk about back then is still so incredibly relevant today - even more so, in many cases. And, now that I stop to think about it, it's also interesting to note how many of the gurus from old skool KM circles have gone on to become leading thinkers in the social media world - David Weinberger and Stowe Boyd being two examples that leap to mind - both of whom contributed to this AIIM study. There's a thread worthy of further discussion there, but I'm short on time.

Another thing about that AIIM study that I liked - they start off by trying to define just what the heck "Enterprise 2.0" means. This - not surprisingly - provoked considerable debate amongst the advisory group working on the study. In a smart, transparent, and very useful move, the AIIM guys decided to publish the entire email dialogue between advisory panel members at the front of the report. Nice. Very Research 2.0 of them.

This isn't the first time I've been quoted by the guys at ITBusiness.ca/IT World Canada. I popped up in their piece on the release of YouTube's API and then there was my Eight Steps to Launching a Corporate Blog thing from last year.

This is only really of interest to me, in my sad little moments of lonely ego-stroking - or perhaps, at a stretch, to my Mum - but it's kind of nice to see that the IT World Canada guys keep their archives online and freely searchable indefinitely. I can track my footprints through their coverage way back to 1998, when I was being quoted on the client side. I do wish they could get my surname right, though...

And one final moment of Michael-centricity, for anyone still awake. I can't link to an online copy, alas, but if you happen to be reading the latest issue of FP Business Magazine that came free with the National Post this morning, you'll see me popping up again to talk social media stuff on page 53 - quoted alongside the splendid Michael McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks.

All Michael, all the time. Time for a lie down, I think. Head... too... heavy...

Template torment

2008-03-28T11:42:00.002-04:00

I know my template is still broken in places. Sorry about that. The small army of highly-trained gerbils that maintains the code for this site are working feverishly to restore the broken comment links and other b0rked bits.

In the meantime, if you've been scouring the site trying to find a contact email address (one of the things that's been broken for a while), it's: michaelocc AT gmail DOT com.

Normal service will be, etc.

CBC adopts DRM-free BitTorrent format

2008-03-19T22:10:00.003-04:00

This is a pretty impressive move from Canada's national broadcaster. A big day for online TV and freedom of consumer choice.

Earlier today, the CBC announced that one of its major primetime shows ("Canada's Next Great Prime Minister") will be made available for free, unprotected download in the popular BitTorrent format so often associated with digital piracy.

No - I'm not making this up. Canada's greatest copyright guru, Michael Geist, leaked the story yesterday on his blog, and the CBC have both confirmed it and been actively involved in the comment thread at Michael's place. From the show blog:

The show will completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart�s desire.

This is courageous, smart, and just plain awesome.

The torrents will be completely free of nasty DRM too. One of the show's interactive producers, Guinevere Orvis, is quoted in this CNET piece, saying:

I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it ... if it's bad for the consumers, it's bad for the company.

Amen. Times like these, I'm proud to be living in Canada.

Obama camp delivers the fisking HRC so richly deserves

2008-03-13T22:23:00.003-04:00

As reported at NPR.org earlier today, Clinton campaign staff sent a lengthy email to reporters and bloggers covering the US presidential nomination race on Wednesday morning.

This is not unusual. I get a similar email almost every day from the Obama camp.

What makes this occasion newsworthy is that we get to see how some (presumably relatively junior) member of Senator Obama's staff chose to respond.

The resulting point-by-point rebuttal is a particularly juicy example of the fine art of fisking, once defined in the Observer newspaper as: "savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet."

What I enjoy most about this is not the sheer entertainment value of their response; it's the simple fact that we get to see it.

Regardless of how you might feel about the tone and nature of the fisking -- don't you just love this kind of transparency? Can you possibly imagine having this kind of insight and access in the pre-blogosphere, pre-Cluetrain world?

For the record, here's the full email. If you're interested, the original appears on the Clinton campaign website, here. The comments credited to the Obama campaign are in bold, below.

To: Interested Parties
From: Clinton Campaign
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Re: Keystone Test: Obama Losing Ground [Get ready for a good one.]

The path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes through Pennsylvania so if Barack Obama can't win there, how will he win the general election?

[Answer: I suppose by holding obviously Democratic states like California and New York, and beating McCain in swing states like Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia and Wisconsin where Clinton lost to Obama by mostly crushing margins. But good question.]

After setbacks in Ohio and Texas, Barack Obama needs to demonstrate that he can win the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the last state with more than 15 electoral votes on the primary calendar and Barack Obama has lost six of the seven other largest states so far -- every state except his home state of Illinois.

[If you define "setback" as netting enough delegates out of our 20-plus-point wins in Mississippi and Wyoming to completely erase any delegate advantage the Clinton campaign earned out of March 4th, then yeah, we feel pretty setback.]

Pennsylvania is of particular importance, along with Ohio, Florida and Michigan, because it is dominated by the swing voters who are critical to a Democratic victory in November. No Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since 1948. And no candidate has won the Democratic nomination without winning Pennsylvania since 1972.

[What the Clinton campaign secretly means: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT WE'VE LOST 14 OF THE LAST 17 CONTESTS AND SAID THAT MICHIGAN AND FLORIDA WOULDN'T COUNT FOR ANYTHING. Also, we're still trying to wrap our minds around the amazing coincidence that the only "important" states in the nominating process are the ones that Clinton won.]

But the Obama campaign has just announced that it is turning its attention away from Pennsylvania.

[Huh?]

This is not a strategy that can beat John McCain in November.

[I don't think Clinton's strategy of losing in state after state after promising more of the same politics is working all that well either.]

In the last two weeks, Barack Obama has lost ground among men, women, Democrats, independents and Republicans -- all of which point to a candidacy past its prime.

["A candidacy past its prime." These guys kill me.]

For example, just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama won 68% of men in Virginia, 67% in Wisconsin and 62% in Maryland. He won 60% of Virginia women and 55% of Maryland women. He won 62% of independents in Maryland, 64% in Wisconsin and 69% in Virginia. Obama won 59% of Democrats in Maryland, 53% in Wisconsin and 62% in Virginia. And among Republicans, Obama won 72% in both Virginia and Wisconsin.

But now Obama's support has dropped among all these groups.

[That's true, if you don't count all the winning we've been up to. As it turns out, it's difficult to maintain 40-point demographic advantages, even over Clinton]

In Mississippi, he won only 25% of Republicans and barely half of independents. In Ohio, he won only 48% of men, 41% of women and 42% of Democrats. In Texas, he won only 49% of independents and 46% of Democrats. And in Rhode Island, Obama won just 33% of women and 37% of Democrats.

[I'm sympathetic to their attempt to parse crushing defeats. And I'm sure Rush Limbaugh's full-throated endorsement of Clinton didn't make any difference. Right]

Why are so many voters turning away from Barack Obama in state after state?

[You mean besides the fact that we're ahead in votes, states won and delegates?]

In the last few weeks, questions have arisen about Obama's readiness to be president. In Virginia, 56% of Democratic primary voters said Obama was most qualified to be commander-in-chief. That number fell to 37% in Ohio, 35% in Rhode Island and 39% in Texas.

[Only the Clinton campaign could cherry pick states like this. But in contrast to their logic, in the most recent contest of Mississippi, voters said that Obama was more qualified to be commander in chief than Clinton by a margin of 55-42.]

So the late deciders -- those making up their minds in the last days before the election -- have been shifting to Hillary Clinton. Among those who made their decision in the last three days, Obama won 55% in Virginia and 53% in Wisconsin, but only 43% in Mississippi, 40% in Ohio, 39% in Texas and 37% in Rhode Island.

[If only there were enough late deciders for the Clinton campaign to actually be ahead, they would really be on to something.]

If Barack Obama cannot reverse his downward spiral with a big win in Pennsylvania, he cannot possibly be competitive against John McCain in November.

[If they are defining downward spiral as a series of events in which the Clinton campaign has lost more votes, lost more contests and lost more delegates to us ... I guess we will have to suffer this horribly painful slide all the way to the nomination and then on to the White House.]

[Thanks for the laughs guys. This was great.]

***

As one commenter at the NPR website put it, "Damn,I love me some information age."

Have I told you how much I hate Vista?

2008-03-06T17:39:00.004-05:00

OK, so maybe "hate" is a little strong.

What I really hate, perhaps, is the fact that operating systems have become so huge and so complex that it's almost impossible for the normal human mind to fully grok them in their entirety.

There are days when I pine for the simplicity of CP/M, or even DOS 3.11 - the last operating system I can honestly say that I completely and fully understood.

Windows Vista continues to behave in unexpected, unpredictable and frequently annoying ways. It seems to have been built for the convenience of Microsoft more than the convenience of the user.

Case in point: I'd heard there were some issues with the most recent Vista updates and Dell hardware. Some of my colleagues have had problems with the most recent updates messing things up. I really enjoy using my Dell laptop (disclosure: we do some work for Dell, but had already standardised on their kit long before they became a client), and I didn't want anything going sideways on me at the moment - we're far too busy.

So I've been skipping the updates - whenever it prompts me to "Install Updates and Shut Down" I've forced the "just shut the darn thing down" option. That worked fine until this morning.

I booted up first thing this morning while still at home. The machine immediately decided to start "configuring updates" I'd never asked it to install. It continued to "Installing 1 of 17 updates" and just sat there. In the end, I had to close the clamshell and travel to the office with the updates still running.

A full FIVE HOURS later, Vista finally finished unknotting its knickers and gave me my laptop back. FIVE BILLABLE HOURS without access to my network or anything. Good thing I had a morning of conference calls and hard copy to review.

The good news, I thought, was that everything seemed to come back together properly after the world's longest install - I thought I'd escaped most of the issues I'd been hearing about. Alas, though, I may have been mistaken. A few minutes ago, shutting down a Word document, this popped up:

In case that screenshot is a bit too small, let me explain what it's saying:

Vista Broke Word.

The latest updates to Microsoft Windows Vista managed to screw up something to do with Microsoft Word.

In the fine print under "See details" it points out that "This program requires flash.ocx, which is no longer included in this version of Windows".

So your latest mandatory update managed to uninstall a component required to run what is probably the single most widely-used piece of application software on the entire planet.

How utterly, utterly craptastic. Vista broke Word. I'm so happy.

[Bonus Link: Fascinating NY Times piece on the pending "Vista Capable" class action suit, citing Microsoft exec's own problems with Vista upgrades.]

IABC agrees to stick handle the Social Media Release

2008-03-06T16:03:00.002-05:00

I've had some less-than-positive things to say about the concept of Social Media News Releases and their execution in certain cases, but I've also said all along that I see merit and vaue in the overall idea of reinventing the way we do things in this respect.

Part of my concern up to this point has been that there was a lot of individual experimentation, and some interesting innovations from a number of vendors, but I felt that much broader and more inclusive discussion and collaboration was required across the industry.

If we, as professional communicators, collectively agree that the old way of doing things needs a complete rethink in light of the disruptive changes wrought by first the Internet and then all this Web 2.0 loveliness - then we should find some collective way of addressing the rethink.

To this end, I was greatly encouraged to read yesterday's news at Shel Holtz's blog that the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) will be taking on sponsorship of the Social Media Release initiative and coordinating development efforts towards some standards.

This is great news. As I said in a comment at Shel's blog: there are extremes at both ends of this discussion, but at the centre lie some real needs and opportunities. Only through the authoritative support of an objective industry body will we move towards true consensus.

I fired off a note to the IABC contact shortly after reading their announcement and I'm happy to say that they welcomed my petition to join the working group. This should be interesting.

Uninstalled Reimplemented

2008-03-05T00:52:00.002-05:00

So after four or more years limping along with the same cheesey old template (which I've hated since around the second day it went up), I've finally gotten around to the blog renovation project.

- Stripped out a lot of the old cruft that had collected in the sidebars (OK, so I might lose my blognerd status for not having the minimum 37 items of flair in my sidebar. I'll live).

- Found a template that let me make the sidebar navigation a lot groovier.

- Still got to fix commenting. I'm trying to switch across from the old 3rd-party comments system (Haloscan) to Blogger's built-in comments. Not working at the moment, but I'll figure it out.

I'm not wild on the blandness of the typeface, and I want to make the centre column a bit wider (a tad too much border right now), but it's a bit easier on the eyes than the old version, IMHO.

What do you think?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain - episode II

2008-03-04T22:51:00.001-05:00

I'm screwing with the template once again here. Trying for a massive overhaul in honour of the 7th Blogiversary. Seems only fair to the poor thing to blow the cobwebs off and give it a new coat of paing.

Things may go horribly wrong. Grab your ankles.

How many bloggers are there in Canada?

2008-03-04T21:41:00.002-05:00

I find it a little surprising that no widely-available source seems to have an answer to that question.

A journalist friend emailed me earlier today to ask if I knew of any stats about the size of the Canadian blogosphere. I was in a very quick break between meetings but, knowing he was on deadline, I sent a quick message out to a few friends who I thought might be likely to know, plus I sent up a flare on Twitter.

It doesn't look like any such data exists - at least not in readily available form.

I even asked Dave Sifry, Technorati founder and oracle of the blogosphere. Dave is the force behind Technorati's regular "State of the Blogosphere/State of the Live Web" reports. In their latest reports, they've been able to split out the size of the blogosphere by language, but even Technorati doesn't currently track numbers on a regional basis.

That's such a shame. I can imagine it's a pretty big problem to figure out how to do this, but not beyond the reach of some enterprising stats jock, surely. It would be really interesting to be able to see detailed break outs of:

- bloggers by country (whatr percentage of a country's total population is blogging);
- percentage of regional online population (i.e. of Net users per country, how many are bloggers?);
- comparative charting (e.g. what's the most bloggy country in the world? fastest growing?)

Wouldn't you love to know that sort of stuff?

So, chanelling another one of Dave's projects, I'm wondering hoosgot the time and resources to put together a comprehensive analysis of the size of the blogosphere by country/region?