montreal

Tourism-Montreal has just launched, according to Patrick, a $1.5 million web site. I just violated their terms of service, because incredibly (that word is too weak), their terms of service indicate:

You are prohibited from creating links in other Web sites leading to this Web site without prior express authorization from the Site Owner.

????

UPDATE: Martin Lessard has news (from Emmanuelle Legault, Directrice des communications, Tourisme Montréal) that all shall be well on the Tourism-Mtl site, and the crazy anti-linking terms will be taken away (apparently it had something to do with porno sites!?!).

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.

I’m always excited when the web starts having an impact on the actual city (or country) we live in. I am unlikely to go to a protest march or city hall to demand meetings with the mayor. I do send the odd nasty email to newspapers and politicians though, and I’ve seen three times online cage-rattling in which I did some banging of the bars seemed to have an impact: with the Parc/Bourassa stupidity; with the latest copyright kerfluffle in ottawa; and a the fed election when a copyright/RIAA lackey was beaten out by the NDP. Who knows whether the online activism did anything, but it sure didn’t hurt.

Well, Griffintown is under attack from the kind of stupid urban ‘”planning” that involves big developers ruining neighbourhoods. If that bugs you, have a look at Save Griffintown to find out more.

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.

Never seen a shot of the city from this perspective:

[pic by caribb; via spacingmontreal]

This shocked me:

Nearly half of Montreal’s 63,000 immigrants [from] Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia arrived here after 2001 and they’re quickly making their presence felt.

What a change in seven years! I haven’t noticed, though the guy who installed my Videotron modem was from morocco and we had a good chat about life back there, and the Moroccan poufs in our house (that we bought from that great little Moroccan store on Duluth). Well …

Walk a few minutes east from Saint-Michel metro and you’ll find yourself in one of Montreal’s most recent ethnic neighbourhoods: the Petit Maghreb, a 15-block strip of North African business along Jean Talon Street between St. Michel and Pie IX boulevards.

Anyone fancy a tagine sometime soon?

[I’m loving Spacingmontreal.ca, by the way].

Heri’s got a map of Montreal tech start-uppy things going on, if you’ve got a project to put in there:

for some reason they make me happy. not sure why.

(from clinesclines, of ye olde flyckkr)

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.

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?

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]

I will be on two panels for the CKUT conference, Redefining Media: Media Democracy and Community Radio, this weekend at McGill.

My sessions are both on Sunday:

Copyright And Community Radio
Sunday, Oct 21st, 2007, 12:30pm - Shatner Ballroom, 3480 McTavish, 3rd floor
How does intellectual property law affect what you hear on your radio dial? Learn about copyright, royalties, tariffs and the emerging trend towards a creative commons.

and:

New Technologies and Community Radio
Sunday, Oct 21st, 2007, 2:30pm - Shatner Ballroom, 3480 McTavish, 3rd floor
The analog medium of radio takes on the digital age: find out how community radio can work synergistically with emerging technologies.

I also plan to go see the wonderful Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now, give the keynote on Friday night, anyone wanna come?

Keynote Presentation: Amy Goodman
Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, & the People Who Fight Back

Friday, Oct 19th, 2007, 7pm - Leacock Auditorium, 855 Sherbrooke St West, McGill University.
Advance tickets are available at CKUT, located at 3647 University Street from Oct 15th-19th, 2007 between noon and 6pm.

The host, founder and executive producer of Democracy Now speaks in commemoration of Media Democracy Day at McGill University. Airing on more than 500 radio and TV stations across North America, Democracy Now is an award-winning independent news program. Democracy Now! is celebrating its tenth anniversary offering independent news and coverage of peace and human rights movements. Amy Goodman’s second New York Times Bestseller, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back, has recently come out in paperback.

Here.

(some familiar faces in there).

Hey, I *am* the media! Writing for the Huffington Post pays off! I got a press pass to Pop&Policy Conference (part of Pop!Montreal) and I plan to go see:

Thurs.Oct.4 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm - Tanna Schulich Hall (527 Sherbrooke W.)
KEYNOTE & PANEL: Dr. Daniel Levitin,
Author of This is Your Brain on Music and Max Bell Chair in the Psychology of the Information Sciences at McGill University, offers an overview on music cognition - what we know about how musical expertise is attained and how musical preferences are formed. [link]

and:

Fri.Oct.5 – 4:00pm – 5:30pm - Pollack Hall (555 Sherbrooke W.)
KEYNOTE: Patti Smith
The “Poet Laureate of Punk Rock”, in a keynote conversation with John Nichols, Washington Editor of The Nation and author of The Great Impeachment. [link]

And I might go check out Evan and Brett talking turkey in the morning at their session: “Copyright and Collaboration: Problems and Creative Solutions” … Thurs.Oct.4 - 10:45 - 12:15 - Tanna Schulich Hall.

I wonder if that gets me into music shows too?

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.

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.

Beautiful!:

more at controlman, a blog about urban exploration.

[via mtl city weblogs]

Heri whipped up a great little map of montreal’s web scene, surely missing all sorts of stuff, but it’s still a great visualization of many of the people I rub shoulders with, drink coffee with, and occasionally quaff the odd pint or two with. Missing, I note, is Collectik (tho we are in quiet retooling mode, so that’s OK):

Would be nice if the stations and lines were live links.

Some updates on the story of Zeke & Mr. Tremblay (see my previous post for background). The court session was held June 21, arguments were made, and now … we wait again till September 7.

• For a good review see: Fagstein: Zeke maintains status quo in court.
• Also interesting, Pierre-Antoine Tremblay has reached out to the blogosphere, here: Michel Leblanc: Affaire Zeke’s Gallery, le point de vue de Tremblay

I’ve had a few discussions with people about this and, there are a few points worth considering:

1. be careful how you phrase things: the case here seems to turn on Zeke suggesting that Pierre-Antoine Tremblay was associated with the mafia, for which I gather there is no evidence. that’s a serious (and dangerous) sort of thing to suggest. my understanding also is that the original post was unclearly written, which is where the problem may be. bad syntax … but just pay attention to your words, you are responsible for them. morally and legally.

2. It’s interesting to note the power of blogs now. As Julien said in his Podcasters Across Borders presentation, you are who Google says you are. And for someone who isn’t online, and doesn’t have some google linkjuice protection, one post from a relatively well-ranked blog might just end up defining who google thinks you are.

3. Mr. Tremblay’s plea to the blogosphere, (linked above) goes like this:
-he’s not rich, just a guy who works in a gallery, is a writer, poet artist [relevant for PR, but not the case]
-he’s sad to see people write nasty things about him (quoting some blogger, not chris) [relevant as proof that some people are jerks, but not the case]
-he’s upset that zeke brings up the lotto quebec forgery case [this is the one that gets my goat: this lotto quebec forgery case is IN THE PUBLIC RECORD … if the charges were all untrue, if the case was settle out of court, it sucks that mr. tremblay got tarred by the story, but Zeke is fully within his rights to say: Mr. Tremblay got taken to court for (allegedly, counsels my lawyer to write) selling forgeries to Lotto Quebec. That it’s a chapter Mr. Tremblay wishes to forget is unfortunate, but it’s still a fact, and you can still read about it at Devoir, Radio-Canada and a Lotto-Quebec press release!
-he’s upset that zeke suggests he was linked to the mafia [for this he would have a legitimate beef, if indeed zeke did so]
-he states that zeke should have contacted him before writing [this is just odd…]
-he states that this has nothing to do with free speech [a bit more on this below …]

so, to me, all the stuff about who zeke is and who tremblay is… is beside the point. The question is, why should Zeke be forced to take down posts that state and link to facts that are in the public record?

The answer of course, is that the court injunction serves as a means to stop any potential “crimes” until such a time as the court can decide (now delayed to September 6). again, i’ll bet that zeke made some wrong moves in the early days … and i’ll bet the whole thing more or less goes away without much impact on you or me.

but it’s not irrelevant, and it is important, and it’s worth paying attention to.

so good luck chris.

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).

screw it, I’ve been humming about this post for a while, so I’m just going to sketch it out here.

Barcamp, Boys and Girls
I wanted to address Martine’s great talk on women at conferences, and I have a few comments:

• remember that barcamp is different from other conferences in that no one really gets invited to attend or speak - it’s free, everyone should come.
• 50% of the human species is female; the other 50% is male … so whatever you are doing, on the net or elsewhere, it’s worthwhile to remember that 50% of people that might use the thing you are building will be of a sex different than your own. So getting their input is of great value.
• in the context of barcamp at least, this isn’t anyone’s “fault” … not the boys, not the girls. the important thing (if you think it’s important) is that we (all of us) do what we can to attract interesting people who can contribute interesting things to barcamps and similar events. so don’t worry so much about why things are not as good as they could be, think rather about how they might be better, and act to make them so.

Barcamp, in general

For barcamp to be useful we need to attract interesting people to talk about different things. Everyone’s new web 2.0 social network is all fine and dandy, but that fixes a low bar on level of discourse. So the challenge I put out to all you naysayers, is come along, and bring someone who has something interesting to say on topics other than what we’ve seen so far. While the travel talk was interesting, I think it should all relate back to technology one way or another. Let’s get openmedicine.ca to talk about medicine, the web, and the open movement. Or, Thomas Homer-Dixon to come talk about the major challenges he sees humanity facing, and start a conversation about how we community-minded geeks might start addressing some of these major problems. Let’s invite people from political parties, and have a discussion about how the web can positively impact the democratic process, and some small projects that might be undertaken in that direction. Or, some teachers working with kids and blogs/podcasts/video. Or get Tracey or Daniel or Mike or Jon Udell or Hans Rossling (hell, I’ll even talk about it…in fact I will) to muse on open access to government data, and how citizens might start using that data. Etc.

That is, let’s not let barcamp become “your social web application camp.” Let’s make it something much more.

Rococo Camp
I have a little less to say about Rococo camp, since I missed much of it (see here for a good run-down). I was there Friday, but had another engagement all of Saturday, and by the time Sunday came around I was out of it. But I enjoyed the Open Agenda/Spaces concept (though there seemed to be too much yakking in the morning about Open Spaces, and not enough actual jazzing on topics). I had some great talks about semantic web & wikis, as well as the always-delicate issue of community building & difficult people (something we’ve been very successful dealing with at LibriVox). One person came my discussion of Data & Evolution, but we had a good chat.

Another semi-aside, to all wiki-enthusiasts: wikis are ugly and hard to read to most eyeballs, and if you want non-wiki people to come to your events, you need to at the very least have a web presence that is legible to non-wikiers.

But all in all, Evan and gang did a great job (bagels were good).

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.

link.

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?

Tues, April 10 @ 9am, at Bistro Etc.:

Bistro Etc.
1291 Avenue Mont-Royal Est
Montreal, QC H2J 1Y4
(514) 525-1895
Map

Details chez Ben.

And hey, let’s see some more women at the event. It’s casual and relaxed.

I presented collectik last week at Montreal’s second Democamp. It was much bigger than I thought i would be - and there were more suity-looking folk than I expected. I guess there were about 100 people in the crowd to watch 5 of us present our projects. I showed off Collectik, and the other presentations were KakiLoc, iotum, BumpTop, and OpenSourceCinema. I’ll talk about Collectik first, then the others, finally some thoughts about Democamp Montreal.

(PS Josh, at Yashlabs, has the best overview of the even, including some vids; simon has a great bunch of pics)

I was really happy with the response to Collectik. In some ways it’s been such a frustrating project - I know we have built a good and useful tool that no one else has built. But due to some rookie mistakes, one of the main ones being trying to fix user interface problems by throwing more features into the mix, the site has been too dense for most people to get into. We have pretty healthy traffic, but we have very minimal stickiness. We have a handful of pretty passionate users - but for the most part we’ve not yet convinced people why this is useful to them. And yet I am still convinced it can be. It is for me, and for others.

I went over these ideas in my presentation - in part trying to share some advice to developers out there, the main thing is: figure out what you DO and do that well. Then look at other features. I think it took us eight months or so to really figure out the real core of what we do. We’re there now, and need to rebuild the site to reflect that.

But if you do not know your core function, and if you are not certain your core function is useful, then you probably don’t have a product.

So to distill the most important stuff:
1. figure out your core function
2. build your design & UI around your core function - make it obvious and easy
3. if you have design & UI problems (see #s 1 &2 above), you cannot fix by adding new features

Another problem for us, I think, is the word “podcast.” I really find the jargonny nature of that word turns people off: “I don’t have an ipod;” “I don’t have time for podcasts,” etc. And yet when you tell a science nerd that New Scientist and Nature magazine both have podcasts, well, they get all excited. Had some nice post-event conversations about that.

In any case, I got tons of great feedback on Collectik, and that was so refreshing. So many people said: great that looks like a really useful tool. So it’s reenergized me on the project, which is nice because we’ve had some long delays on some other good news we’re waiting on.

Even better, I had a great talk with Alistair about a really intriguing idea about how to generate revenues out of collectik while doing some important good too. That one really excited me. I’ve obviously thought about Collectik - but I’ve thought about the other side of this top-secret proposition too. It never even occurred to me to put the two together. So that is extremely exciting; I’ll keep mulling whether there’s actually a business in there.

Here are quick thoughts on the other presentations.

KakiLoc
I’ve seen these guys before, and they’ve got a great mobile phone/web technology to let groups of people know each other’s location. It looks like great tech, and works like a charm. It’s complex though, and is it a compelling enough function? My gut is that they will need to find some really specific applications for it. I don’t even own a mobile phone, so I’m not the market! End-game, though, must be to sell to mobile service providers.

iotum
Another mobile device technology, iotum (if I got it right) lets you define your availability based on relationships to other people. Having a job interview, and your tennis partner calls? It won’t disturb you. Out with your friend John for a coffee, and the love of your life calls? You’ll hear it. The service works well, and the usefulness is clear. The one question is, again, is it compelling enough? Probably yes, and I guess the end-game here is to sell to mobile service providers.

BumpTop
Super slick graphic desktop environment. See the vid here. Lots of fun … tho I don’t want to add all that chaos to my desktop. You definitely get the sense that there’s some great applications in there, though I am not convinced the desktop is the best place. God knows I’ve been wrong before.

OpenSourceCinema
Brett’s film project, a documentary on creative commons and copyright. Opensourcecinema is the place where you can help him remix the movie. Patrick did the design. Sylvain, Josh, and I helped out with the site during Beercamp #1.

After the event, Austin threw a little shindig at his carrraaaaazy bachelor pad. Beautiful loft in the industrial zone of St-Henri (out by MacAuslan). Had a couple of good chats there, mostly (as usual, with me, with people I know already).

Now some thoughts on DemoCamp:
1. very English. would be nice to see some more French there.
2. god, I wish this movement was around back in the summer when we were fist launching alpha/beta collectik
3. lets face it: iotum is from Ottawa; Bumptop is from Toronto. Where are all the montreal developers?

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).

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.)

Julien, a Montreal podcaster (longest active Canadian podcaster, most popular DIYer in Canada etc) & satelite radio man, just told me that his show, In Over Your Head plays on SIRIUS satelite radio in the USofA, but not in Canada. CBC owns 40% of SIRIUS Canada. Presumably interested in playing CanCon? But not interested in Mr. Smith.

Wha???

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.

Moons ago, Sylvain & I were talking about building a digital media school for kids-at-risk at the Atwater Library. Well, a couple of years later, we’ve got some funding from Heritage Canada, a fantastic project co-ordinator, a bunch of very keen partner groups; and a gaggle of great volunteers and organizers. The plan in this pilot phase is a series workshops, tailored for each partner group, from late February to April 2007.

Here is the project blurb:

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

We need some more cash for digital equipment (about $5000). Here’s how you can donate some money (can you spare $25? $100?), or some working equipment:

SUPPORT THE ATWATER DIGITAL LITERACY PROJECT.

You can also help by blogging about this, by sending out some emails, or by volunteering. If you work for a company, especially a tech or media company, maybe you can ask them to sponsor the project? If you want more info, shoot me an email.

And thanks to all who have helped with this project, of course Mir who has done the lions share of the work, the organizers, coordinators, and volunteers, and the great Advisory Committee: Julien Smith, Jen Schultes, Austin Hill, Brett Gaylor, Anuradha Dugal, Sylvain Carle, Paul Shore.

Ben’s the once-great Montreal smoked meat resto, is no more. I took some photos there late one night a couple of years ago.

See the rest here.