friendsprojects

MontrealTechWatch has a few pics from YulGeek entrepreneurs’ desks, including mine.

From Jon Udell’’s Interviews with Innovators: Community Wireless:

Michael Lenczner is one of the founders of Île Sans Fil, Montreal’s community wireless network which comprises over 150 hotspots and serves almost 60,000 registered users. By any standards the project is a huge success. Yet Michael is an unusually thoughtful technologists who asks himself hard questions about whether Ile Sans Fil has really enhanced community life in the ways the founders hoped it would.

Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star about Canadian book 2.0 projects. The two projects cited are Evan’s Wikitravel Press, and LibriVox.

About Wikitravel Press, says he:

For example, Wikitravel, one of the Internet’s most acclaimed travel websites, was launched in 2003 by Montreal residents Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Using the same wiki collaborative technology that has proven so successful for Wikipedia, the Wikitravel site invited travelers to post their comments and experiences about places around the world in an effort to build a community-generated travel guide.

In less than five years, the site has accumulated more than 30,000 online travel guides in 18 languages, with more than 10,000 editorial contributions each week. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons licence that allows the public to use, copy or edit the guides.

Building on Wikitravel’s success, Prodromou and Jenkins recently established Wikitravel Press, which introduced its first two titles earlier this month. Wikitravel Press represents a new approach to travel book publishing based on Internet collaborative tools and print-on-demand technologies that should capture the attention of the industry for several reasons…

[there’s more]
And on LibriVox:

Canadians are also playing a leading role in reshaping the creation of audiobooks. Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web developer, established LibriVox in August 2005. The site is also based on concept of Internet collaboration. In this instance, LibriVox volunteers create voice recordings of chapters of books that are in the public domain. The resulting audio files are posted back on to the Internet for free.

The LibriVox project, which does not have an annual budget, has succeeded in placing more than 1,200 audio books on the Internet, including Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, works from Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and hundreds more.

He finishes:

New technologies are rapidly reshaping the book industry and it is exciting to see how Canadians are quietly playing a leading role in the re-imagining of how books are created and distributed.

Montreal movers/shakers Ben and Fred have officially launched Standoutjobs Reception, with a little help from their friend Austin.

Here’s what it is:

The product is called RECEPTION. It’s a suite of web-based tools to power your online recruiting efforts. At its core you’ll find a do-it-yourself, interactive Career Site. The idea is to give companies the power to truly showcase their cultures and teams. Candidates want more information and interactivity from companies, and we hope to provide that. By allowing companies and candidates to build on-going relationships we make the process of hiring a more human one, which is ultimately, what it’s all about any way. Job descriptions and job requirements are nice (or not!) but what candidates really want is an inside view into your company - they want to know if it’s a good cultural and personal fit.

It’d be nice to be in a position to need to use the tools there, cause they look great, but we ain’t there yet.

Anyway, congrats on the launch.

Craig’s Regret the Error blog does a round-up of 2007 media screw-ups, and their usually insipid apologies. Number one:

Following the portrait of Tony and Cherie Blair published on 21 April in the Independent Saturday magazine, Ms Blair’s representatives have told us that she was friendly with but never had a relationship with Carole Caplin of the type suggested in the article. They want to make it clear, which we are happy to do, that Ms Blair “has never shared a shower with Ms Caplin, was not introduced to spirit guides or primal wrestling by Ms Caplin (or anyone else), and did not have her diary masterminded by Ms Caplin.”

See the rest here.

PodMtl, a monthly meet-up for podcasters and the podcast-curious, as well as friends and family-members of podcasters. PodMtl is a welcoming, non-judgmental gathering in an open, non-threatening environment, to talk about issues that affect podcasters and those around them.

So join us on November 29th starting at 19:30. Here’s the address :

* Sergent Recruteur
* 4801 St-Laurent blvd, Montreal
* 514.287.1412

I’m going to try to make it, but I am training back from Ottawa that day.

Thanks for organizing this, to: Sylvain and Bob.

I love when I discover richer and more varied uses for podcasts. Jim Mowatt, a long-time LibriVox guy, and a retired force behind the LibriVox community podcast, has just launched a podcast about history. He did wonderful work on the LV podcast, so I’ll bet this one will be a goodie, for you History buffs. Have not listened yet, but just queuing it up.

Check out: historyzine.com … or:
* Subscribe by RSS
* Subscribe in iTunes

Mike announces that free community wifi group ilesansfil is proposing a project to the City of Montreal for a million dollars over five years to increase hotspot coverage. Kudos and good luck. Article in La Presse.

In a related idea, Jon Udell talks about the cities and the creative class:

…the creative class values place above employer. To a 25-year-old European marketing or software professional, the choice of Barcelona over some less desirable city is now more decisive than the choice between working for IBM or Microsoft.

You still need to make your city attractive to IBM and Microsoft, because these companies help create and sustain the quality-of-life conditions that attract the creative class. But companies don’t have a direct interest in those conditions, people do.

It was fascinating to see how these cities are now thinking explicitly about competing — in terms of their housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement — to attract the creative class. Success produces a compound benefit, because the creative class is an engine of prosperity. Not only does it spend money, it also germinates new businesses. And those tend to be just the kinds of businesses that appeal to the creative class, so it can become a virtuous cycle.

Is it elitist to focus on the needs of the creative class? I don’t think so. Every citizen cares about housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement. If cities do better in those areas in order to attract the creative class, everybody wins.

From my personal experience, ISF has been a prime driver of much of the creative interaction among the people I know (which is a small group, granted) … hanging out and working at Laika — with free wifi — helped germinate many of my ideas about the web … at least one of which (LibriVox) has been successful.

Patrick’s co-working project is nearing launch, so that’ll add some good spice to the creative mix.

Another related thing that I’ve been thinking about (without doing any analysis) is that the web and small start-ups are egalitarian employers, and hence could be important for integration of new communities in Montreal.

In the (mostly ill-making) Bouchard-Taylor Commission, one of the things that came up recently was the inability of trained professionals (doctors, teachers, engineers) from other countries to get work in their domains in Quebec - despite a shortage of doctors, teachers and engineers. That’s the nice thing about the web - I can say, talking from experience as a small (unfunded) web start-up, that I couldn’t care less about official qualifications, where you’re from (indeed, where you live) … all I want to know is: can you do the things that I’m hoping can be done (which you’ve learned just by hacking, and can demonstrate by showing me things you’ve done on the web), and do I think we’ll get along?

That’s important since one of the big problems for immigrant communities is finding good work. So finding ways to support small start-ups (whatever that means) *could* be one way to give more interesting avenues for employment for young, keen immigrants. Helping people in general become hackers is another way to give avenues to prosperity, without having the mainstream constraints that our traditional education systems impose.

Montreal is ideally attractive to the creative class — funky, cheapish, fun, mixed, vibrant etc — but there are all sorts of problems here. For pros and cons, see the discussion from a while back over at Heri’s MontrealTechWatch.

I wonder how City of Montreal’s planning & policies compare with other hubs of innovation?

I’ve been using the Defensio anti-spam plugin on here for a couple of weeks now. I’m a happy man … and I believe it’s superior to the defacto wordpress spam blocker, Akismet. Why?

1. Defensio seems better at learning what’s spam and what’s not - and it admits its mistakes. there’s an nice little performance tracker in the admin panel that looks like this:

* Recent accuracy: 99.35%
* 2191 spam
* 42 legitimate comments
* 10 false negatives (undetected spam)
* 4 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

2. Because of the above, it feels like you have more control over it - Akismet rules your blog’s comment section with an invisible fist of iron… Defensio seems much more laid back - like you can hang out with it and say, hey man, that wasn’t spam, and defensio will be like, dude, sorry about that, i’ll try to remember that next time!

3. It ranks by spaminess … and obvious spam gets hidden, so you don’t have to go thru the hundreds of spam comments that Akismet makes you sift thru (if you want to bother), only the “possible” spam that might be legit.

4. The interface somehow feels friendly and inviting (maybe because I know some of the guys involved in the project?)

So good job Mat & Carl.

Matt sketched barcampmtl#3:

That’s me yammering about data.

christine’s brother is a vegan (or at least was … not sure now that he’s doing law school at NYU and working for big carnivorous law firms in the summers). feeding him causes his mother no end of angst.

And to the rescue comes original LibriVoxer, and my Collectik-business-partner Kristen, who has put out a guide called: “How to Feed a Vegan” … available as blog posts, or as a pdf.

Went to Craig Silverman’s book launch for Regret the Error … looks great. Good crowd of mtl geeks and other folk. Blurb from the introduction to the book, by Jeff Jarvis:

Craig Silverman’s examination of the art of the correction in his blog and now this book could not come at a better time for journalism. For the public’s trust in news organizations is falling about as fast as their revenues (and, yes, those may be related). One way to earn back that trust is to face honestly and directly the trade’s faults. The more – and more quickly – that news organizations admit and correct their mistakes, prominently and forthrightly, the less their detractors will have grounds to grumble about them

And what a pleasure to answer this question: “How do you know Craig?” … My answer: “Oh, he wrote about LibriVox in the New York Times.”

Quoi?
BarCamp Montréal, édition #3

Où?
Société des Arts Technologiques, 1195 blvd St. Laurent, Montréal.

Quand?
Samedi, 3 novembre 2007, de 9h00 à 18h00.

C’est quoi ça?
C’est expliqué ici. Mais en gros, voici le résumé:

Un BarCamp, c’est un rassemblement ad-hoc né du désir de permettre à des personnes de partager et apprendre dans un environnement ouvert. C’est un évènement intense comportant des discussions, des démonstrations et des interactions riches entre les participants.

[thanks for the copy, martine]

The fabulous Nora Young has just launched a new podcast (that also happens to be a CBC Radio* show), called Spark. Covering technology, art, society, it also aims to get more interactive feedback from the net. Comments, participation, stories and the like. As with all of Nora’s radio work, it’s good good stuff.

The next episode has a segment about the Warbike:

Did you know that almost anywhere that you go in a city you’ll be sharing space with someone’s private wireless computer network? All of their personal communication—e-mail, love messages, bank passwords, credit card numbers, and bizarre surfing habits—will be passing through your body without your awareness. Who are they, and how do you feel about sharing space with their personal life?

The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?

So, have a listen, and go comment on their blog (to help show CBC management that people on the web care about content).

UPDATE: also forgot to mention, they’re using podsafe/creative commons music on the show. sweet.

*NOTE: Radio shows are just like podcasts, except that you have to listen to them at specific times (often based on a “schedule” that a small group of people determine arbitrarily), and instead of being able to hear them on your computer, or put them on your portable mp3 player, you have to buy a special “radio receiver.” Radio receivers are devices that pick up radio signals (much like wifi), but are usually single-purpose machines - ie for audio only, no email, internet etc.

Nora Young is my favourite CBC radio journalist - she mixes contemporary pop culture with intelligence in just the right doses. She’s been particularly interested lately in technologies - web-based and otherwise. She’s just launching a new show, called Spark:

Spark is your guide to the Next Big Thing. On-air and online, join Nora Young for a surprising and irreverent look at tech, trends, and fresh ideas. Host Nora YoungNora Young has a love hate relationship with technology, culture, and armchair sociology, which she pursues on CBC Radio, on television, in print, and online.

Broadcast Times, CBC Radio One:
Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. (12:00 NT)
Saturdays at 4:00 p.m. (4:30 NT)

Podcast URL: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/spark.xml

Nora’s also a blogger, podcaster, , and she even set up a Facebook group for Spark.

Hey, sweet. Montreal video maven Casey McKinnon, of Galacticast and A Comic Book Orange, has an article in the (UK) Guardian, How Do You Beat Youtube, about what needs to happen in the online vid platform space.

Congrats.

UPDATE: Mat has an interesting response, from a consumer’s point of view. And he’s right on.

Any ROR developers looking for some work? A friend has a contract coming up, 3 months, decent money. Probably needs 2 sets of hands. Let me know if you want me to put you in touch.

Reuben did a roadtrip through the States, and among other things, took pics of Church billboards. Fruits of his (and God’s) labour include: “Our Church is Cool with AC and JC.” And:

See the slideshow here.

from montreal pals evan and niko, comes vinismo.com:

Vinismo is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable guide of all wines in the world. It uses the Wiki technology that lets people like you freely create and modify its pages.

Two comments:
-this is graphically the best looking wiki i’ve ever seen (meaning it doesn’t look like a wiki).
-this is the kind of targeted use of wiki technology that just makes good sense (bite sized info about a topic that people are passionate about, in a format that is useful).

Third comment: go play … they have doine a great job, but as with all open projects they need users to help it evolve into a useful tool.

Fourth: go vote for it on digg if you’re into that sort of thing.

Yulblogger, podcaster, ilesansfiler, and art gallery/space guy Chris Hand, aka Zeke, has had his blog shut down (UPDATE: possibly permanently???) by a court injunction.

The Montreal and Canadian blogging, free speech, rational people communities ought to be up in arms. I urge everyone to at least write about this to get this info out. It’s a real danger to all of us who write what we think online.

The story, as I understand it, is this:

1. Radio Canada, National Post, and Le Devoir ran stories about alleged art forgeries sold to Loto-Quebec by a local art dealer whose name will remain unwritten, lest I too get sued …all links still live.

2. Loto-Quebec issued a press release about the incident … link still live.

3. Zeke, who runs a blog about art in Canada, wrote a number of posts about the incident, linking to the articles above (the posts have since been excised from the web - tho the articles he based his posts on are still up). Also, due to some vague language, suggesting that the man in question had been somehow affiliated with the mafia.

4. The fellow mentioned in articles (still available online) by Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, and Loto Quebec sued Zeke for $25,000 in damages.

5. Zeke was told to change the wording of the posts (he did).

6. Zeke posted about the threats from the other guy’s lawyer.

7. A court order required Zeke to take down the relevant posts (he did).

8. Zeke posted about the court order.

9. A second court injunction appears to have shut down Zeke’s blog altogether
UPDATE: it seems as if this injunction may only last “until after the next court hearing, June 21″

10. Zeke is no longer posting.

Here is a Globe and Mail article about the events.

Those who know Zeke know he’s loud, opinionated and something of a loose cannon. He’s also a stalwart of Montreal’s blogging/podcasting/art/arts scene, and a good guy.

But regardless of Zeke’s personality, and given that:
a) the articles Zeke linked to, and based his posts on, are still on the net in the public sphere, and
b) Zeke is now under threat of $25,000 in damages, and
c) Zeke’s blog has been shut down by court order

how do you, as a reader of blogs and citizen of Canada and Quebec, feel about freedom of speech in your country?

Chris, what can we do to help?

MORE UPDATES:
- Heri’s take
- Fagstein’s review

All the legalese is a bit much for me this morning, but it seems as if Chris Hand of Zeke’s Gallery/Blog/Podcast is in some trouble for writing about some allegedly shady dealings in Quebec’s art world. Court injunctions, cease and desists etc. Read more here here, here and here.

Heri has a review of the case here. It really seems crazy: Chris is getting in trouble for posting about news stories that appeared in the Le Devoir & Radio Canada.

So: why does zeke get smashed, but Le Devoir and Radio Canada get to leave their articles up? Because Zeke doesn’t have expensive lawyers. And how the hell did the judge come to his conclusions? That’s what I don’t get. If Devoir & RC write about something, it’s in the public sphere, and bloggers should sure as heck be able to write about it.

Sweet. Ben and Fred his crew at Standout Jobs just announced $1.5 million in angel financing.

(Via austin’s twitter … he’s an angel investor in the project himself).

In a brilliant use of wiki technology, evan has launched the wiki clock, which uses the wisdom of the crowd to maintain an up-to-date, anyone-can-edit, clock. I just checked the clock, and the time was wrong. In the old days, I would have just moved along, thinking “what a crappy clock.” But, because it is a wikiclock, I was able to easily edit the time so that it was correct. Anyone can do the same.

Some will say: “But this clock will often be inaccurate.” But the point is, 1. it is free, and 2. eventually, with enough editors, this clock will, on balance, often have the correct time.

I really dropped the ball helping out Evan and Robin (and the rest of the team) on Rococo Camp … But I will be there!

What: Rococo Camp
When: Friday May 2007 18th to Sunday the 20th
Where: SAT, 1195 St-Laurent, Montréal (Métro St-Laurent)

What is it? Well, nominally it’s about wiki, but it’s really an unconference, whose agenda is set on the day, based on hallway conversations, using the Open Space conference model. Or:

To all wikiers, bloggers, users, developers, artists, academics, activists, inventors, video editors, and other creators which are interested in Collaboration, Creativity and Self-Management….the Rococo Barcamp is for you !

I just signed up to give a talk called:

why an open movement? data and evolutionary advantage

One of the problems with the open movement, and projects like Rococo camp, is explaining what they are - and attracting a diverse audience (not just girl boy etc, but architects, urban planners, energy companies, environmentalists, doctors etc). Reading the site, I still have not figured out what Rococo is about, and I am a member of the “community” that is organizing it! We really need to think about getting the language less dense. How can we get more non-geeks involved in these events? After all, if geeks are to be useful, we have to build tools that non-geeks can use. There is so much cross-pollination we need to foment in order to do more exciting things than build another social network or another wordpress widget. The world has big, very real problems that we can help with, but geeks don’t necessarily understand the problems, and non-geeks don’t understand the tools. So we have to bring people together.

I kick myself for not helping Evan et al on Rococo camp, especially on this issue which we discussed: getting non-geeks involved. But what can you do? Anyway, I’ll be there. I’ll be the guy with the glasses & the mac.

First: Barcamp is this weekend. Deets:

• Where : Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent [Google Map]
• When : Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 9:30 a.m.
• What : a free (un)conference, where everyone is invited to make a presentation. (more or less).

Also, I got in trouble a while back because I made a list of people I know doing cool thing on the web in Montreal, and my list included mostly men. My response was: criteria were: a) people I know b) who are doing cool things AND c) on the web. Which ended up mostly guys, the same guys who show up to things like barcamp.

So here is an invite to a number of women I know who are doing interesting things on the web, to attend Barcamp, and presentations I would like to hear them do (note: presentation part is to be ignored, and just coming to the event would be good):

• Shawna: thoughts on design and activism; twitter for families
• Miriam: making drupal work for you; kids and digital media; running a web shop
• Jen: the web from the corporate 90s to the community 2007
• Martine: writing, blogging, film and TV
• M-C: consulting in digital media; making a video community
• Marie-Eve: art and graphic design; wearing art
• Ella: photography and wifi; personal/public on the web
• Casey: the future of vidcasting
• Vero.b: will video kill the audio star? authenticity on screen
• Tracey: are people starting to talk like geographers; or are geographers starting to talk like people?

Boris (with help from Jer) has just launched the redesign of GlobalVoicesOnline, which:

…aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore [more …]

The site is jam packed with info from blogs all over the world, and this new design is much cleaner & easier to get at than the previous incarnation. One can only assume that simplicity belies some mean-ass wordpress hacking in the background.

by the way, I would recommend they change their tagline:

aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online

that’s some pretty jargony words.

Stephan, a hard-core LibriVox volunteer/admin (maker of the LV poster), has launched a new exciting project: pdsounds.org …(pd for “public domain”). About:

With recording devices and microphones pdsounds volunteers acoustically discover the beauty of the world. From the million sounds of things to the pure waves of sinus. Our goal is to record it all and make it available for free.

The project looks great (and the design looks familiar! ;-) ) … and it should be a welcome addition to the free audio world. There are a few other such libraries around, notably freesounds …but the main difference here is license: while freesound uses a creative commons license, pdsounds is all public domain - that is, can be used for whatever reason with no attribution, no worries about commercial/non-commercial etc. There might be some other differences.

Anway, I have contributed my first sound (thanks to Jer’s coffee making skills).

Illustration by Matthew Forsythe.

(PS Matthew, I’m using the image on your server, but I don’t think I have enough traffic that it should be a bother, if it is, let me know and I can host locally).

Oops I forgot to mention, I am presenting Collectik at DemoCamp Montreal on Thursday. DemoCamp is a free (un)conference, where local tech folk present their alpha, beta, or operational software, to local interested tech folk (other developers, angels etc). I’m on the bill with 4 others I think. Deets:

Where : Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent [Google Map]
When : Thursday March 29th, 2007. 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

You can register here, or just show up. And don’t worry that it’s going to be too techie! These are good events to just hang out with people working in tech related stuff in Montreal, but if you are reading this, you are geeky enough to come by, for a few minutes anyway.

It’s free, and should be fun.

I was hping to have a revamped Collectik ready by then, but unfortunately, no. I hope my sore throat/laryngitis will be cleared up by then.

Brett Gaylor, Montreal film-maker, vlogger, Homeless Nation guy, and Atwater Digital Project Advisory Committee member (and pal) is making a documentary film about music, copyright, and remix culture, with funding from the National Film Board. Part of the idea behind the film is to get people (that means you!) to provide content (audio, video, and photos), and to help edit, mix, mash, and remix bits of the film.

He’s just (re)launched a site, opensourcecinema.org, to get people to contribute.

So go try it out.

(Sylvain, Josh and I hung out last week, cleaning up the site & getting the look, feel and text right, and Patrick did the redesign).

I’ve had a few verbal (written or out loud) jousting matches with a number of academicy people of late. Curiously, all the debates were with women doing interesting things, mostly with an academic background: data liberationist, and GeoGal Tracey and I had a discussion about theory and practice as it relates to rethinking how politics happens. You can see most of that conversation over at the old dose. Web maestra and Atwater Media Centrist Miriam and I had a long debate about lists of people doing things on the web, and women, and technology, and various things like that. We’d previously had a more drunken exchange about the relative merits “meritocracies” and … well I’m not sure what the alternatives are, but maybe “fair-ocracies” or something. I’m all for meritocracies, as long as you define merit in interesting ways. Then I got into a heated exchange with mcluhan scholar, netizen and new media pioneer Liss Jeffery, about… well I can’t quite remember what, but it was interesting. It was partly about podcasting as one-way (rather than two-way) media (which I disagree with); and partly about open projects and getting things done. We’d crossed paths on the civicaccess mailing list, and Dr. J told me she thought I was a “60-year-old schoolmarm.” Which I am not. I am, however, a keen believer in anarchy with an iron fist, otherwise, in my opinion, things just don’t get done. But we had a spirited exchange about my apparently heavy-handed approach to things in civicaccess. I wasn’t conscious of being so … agressive … but looking back I can see why it might have seemed so. I’m keen to find out how civicaccess can be made into something more than a mailing list, and to date it’s been hard to marshall troops in any one direction. Which is frustrating. But we seem to be converging, with the instigation of Stephane on one small project, which is a good start. Finally, Charlotte and I had a conversation about clarity and linguistics.

Anyway, why the post?

Well I’m not quite sure what I’m getting at. I think part of why I got in all these fights (nice fights, but fights) is my distrust of academic language, and academic approaches to things. I think that academics are by definition removed from the real life of things. The institution of the university promotes something quite different from the rest of life: one is encouraged to think, to write, and to invent theories, much of it geared towards academics and students, much of it self-reflexive, and much of it totally removed from citizens. And nothing has to work in practice. It makes me angry when I read obtuse academic language when it is discussing life out here. And it makes me angry when I hear theories (such as those against meritocracies) which really make no sense if you are interested in actually getting things done. Academia is cloistered and removed, by design, and that has some good parts, but other dangerous sides to it. Or rather, an academic approach is not necessarily a good one, if your objective is to get things done with many people.

By the way this is not a reactionary critique of academia, but a progressive one. I admire much of the intention behind academia, but it seems to me a system where publishing in specialist journals is the main criterion for advancement encourages everything but hands on engagement in the real world. Which is fine, but limits academia’s usefulness. It limits academia’s ability to change society and solve problems (tho maybe that’s not their role?).

And also, by the way, this is in no way a critique of any of these women or the work they do - I just find it interesting that I butted heads so frequently over the past couple of months, often around the same issues of language and approaches to solving problems.

I was at podcamp in Toronto last weekend (check out the archive of videos of the presentations), and ran into a number of people doing great things. From the start I was excited by podcasting not because of the obvious things it would do, but the things that aren’t so obvious. The obvious thing is to create an army of radio hosts who imitate other radio hosts. The non-obvious things are happening and more and more is going to be rolling out in the coming years. Such an exciting time if you think that communicating ideas is an important thing for humans to do. So, here are a few people who were at the unconference whose projects impressed me:

• Sonya Buyting: Sonya is the Sassy Scientist, a science journalist and newly-minted podcaster she’s worked as a broadcaster for Discovery Channel among other things. I personally like my science podcasting dry and academic, or at least in the sober public radio mode. Sonya’s stuff is a lot more bouncy (music + science = sassy) … so I think her market is not so much stuffy 32-year-old grouches like me, but a younger audience. Which is laudable, considering the questionable state of science education, and declining interest among the young in that stuff that happens to allow us to live the way we do. In any case this is a sharp and professionally-produced podcast, and you’ve got to hand it to her: the first episode includes an interview with Sir Richard Branson, playboy billionaire owner of Virgin Airlines and recently announced climate-philantropist; and, even better, an interview with Seth Lloyd, writer of the best book I’ve read so far in 2007, Programming the Universe. Sonya is not a Montrealer. But she IS from New Brunswick, which gets her some extra points.
• Casey McKinnon & Rudy Jahchan: Galacticast is one of the most-watched vidcasts, certainly the top in Canada. Their take on making it in mainstream was pretty great: basically, bring it on, but we’re keeping all the rights to our stuff. That represents such a huge shift in the way broadcasting is going - and why music cos, and mainstream broadcasters are worried. Because the mainstream disseminators have less and less of a role to play: distribution channels aren’t limited anymore, so broadcasters and music companies haven’t figured out what they’ll be good for when art and media can sell itself. In the mean time, people like Rudy and Casey are out on the edge figuring out how this will work. Rudy and Casey are Montrealers.
• Julien Smith: Julian is a good friend and I see him pretty regularly, and I’ve probably posted about him a fair bit here. But still: I am always impressed by how well he understands the back-end of the net and how net-relationships are changing the way we do things. I understand all these things, but he lives them in a way that I don’t. He’s the longest-running and most popular podcaster in Canada, not by accident. It’s been interesting, too, to listen to his stuff evolve over the past year or so, and get more heavy, but still stay raw, and somehow fun. It’s an odd and compelling mix. He bares his soul online as a matter of course, which has some interesting by-products. He’s also got this other fantastic project that he’s nudging along to success, Listen to Your Kids. It hasn’t quite picked up yet with the kids, but it will. It’s just too cool an idea, and the sort of thing that makes me smile about podcasting. Julien is a Montrealer.
• jim milles: jim runs the really great UB Law Podcast, that “features conversations with University at Buffalo Law School faculty and other prominent scholars on cutting-edge research and important ideas in law and society.” This is such an obvious use of podcasting, and every university should have something similar. UC Berkeley, and many other universities, podcast course lectures, but that format doesn’t quite work for the general public (I’ve tried a number of lectures and though I’ve liked them, they don’t quite grab me). Better to do as Jim has done, get scholars to talk about their areas of expertise, in a conversational format, and record it. A perfect way to get this knowledge outside the walled world of academia, and to the rest of us. Jim is not a Montrealer.
• Matt Forsythe: Matt is an artist who works at the National Film Board, on a number of things including the almost-excellent CitizenShift. He’s also involved with the Schwartz movie, (check the fantastic trailer on Youtube). We had a long talk about digital media and analog institutions like the NFB. There seems to be such resistance to freeing all this content that sits collecting dust in the basement, watched by no one. It’s very puzzling to me that makers of media — especially non-commercial, publicly-funded media makers - are not clamouring to get all their media out to the wold in digital format. Any worries they might have had about bandwidth etc in the old days has been killed by all the vid services out there: blip.tv, googlevideo, youtube, not to mention the non-commercial options like Internet Archive and iBiblio. Yet all the wonderful wonderful work done by the NFB is inaccessible to me because so little of it is online. How great would it be for everyone - NFB included - if everything they made was available online. Matt is a Montrealer.
• mitch joel: I kept hearing about Mitch from different directions, and we kept missing each other at events. He works for digital marketing/branding company Twist Image, but it was funny, the thing that won me over was when he told me he worked for fifteen years writing music columns for Hour. I guess I have a natural mistrust for the corporate world, but when I hear that someone has put so much energy into something like writing music for a small community paper, it puts me at ease. Anyway, Mitch gave what was the slickest and most impressive presentation(.mov) I saw at podcamp. maybe I say that because the topic - more or less, branding you - is something i have been scratching my head over for the past month or so. I have been circling around doing so many things, and I need to start thinking about focusing my professional life better, and sorting out just what the hell I am going to do when I grow up. Mitch is a Montrealer.

I’m going to toss LibriVox into the ring, and suggest there is some hot stuff happening in Montreal.

But the million-dollar question I had coming out of podcamp was: how do I monetize my grouchiness?

(for those counting: 2 women, 5 men.)

A couple of events to attend:

• democamp: local techies show off their alpha software … Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent, Tuesday February 27th, 2007. 6:30pm to 8:30pm.
• beercamp: a beer-fueled collective programming party, to help Brett get his opensourcecinema.com site firing on all cylinders before the SXSW conference in March. Objective: “A quick hack of a Drupal 5.1 install to create an Open Source documentary website (for Brett’s upcoming OpenSourceCinema movie).” Needed: CSS/html hackers, some php stuff, designers, UI peeps, text writers, and alpha testers, etc. Come along, have a drink and help Brett build his site. Karma points like crazy… and the film is going to be a famous feature-length documentary about remix culture, creative commons and the like, so the medium here is the message. see Sylvain’s post for more info.

  Oh, it’s Thursday, here: 4475 St Laurent, #202 (coin Mt, Royal) … not sure what time.

A while back (on the old dose), I wrote some climate change posts, that attracted the attention of a couple of commenters, who I suspected of being flacks. We had a detailed exchange.

My theory for which I have zero proof, is that some people are paid to go around making climate-skeptic comments on blogs. I met Nicolas Ritoux (through Evan), and we talked about it. He writes for La Press, did some more digging, and wrote a couple of pieces that are in the paper today:

• Des «éco-sceptiques» à l’assaut du Web
• Une campagne organisée?

Cool.

And here is an article, from NY Review of Books, about where we are on climate.

Austin & Ben have relaunched gifter.org with a shinier interface. Idea is to get people talking about giving. Sponsor a wish (by donating to the charity of your choice), or make a wish on the site.

On that note, the Atwater Digital Literacy Project could really use your help. $25? $100? $1000? Any of those would be much appreciated:

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project gets at-risk kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their own communities.

[more info …]

Oh, and by the way, as a result of this post, as promised, I donated $23 (in addition to the regular chritable donations I made last year). I chose Amis de la Montagne, because I feel that the physical spaces like Mount Royal are spiritual mirrors to the open public (non-commercial) spaces on the net, like this-here blog, and other projects I like: wikipedia, librivox, gutenberg etc.