myprojects

This week on Media Hacks we talk about the new iPhone, the next level of mobile, and … yep … Twitter, Iran, and the characteristics of the reach of microblogging.

> Media Hacks 12

There’s a nice article, and some goofy pictures of me, about BookCampToronto in the National Post:

While some may bristle at a group of outsiders spearheading discussion on the future of books, the industry response has been positive.

“I really think I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but book publishing needs to stop being so insular. We need to stop just looking at our own industry for inspiration,” says Deanna McFadden, marketing manager, online content and strategy for HarperCollins. “The people who are doing BookCamp in Toronto are all smart people who understand where the industry is and where we need to go, and are really looking at innovative ways for us to keep book publishing alive and healthy.”

That seems to be at the root of Book-Camp Toronto — not a hostile takeover, a rejection of traditional books for e-books or putting big publishers out of business.

“I care deeply about books and literature and the publishing business,” McGuire says, “and I’d like to see a thriving future for writers and readers and people in between.” – Check back in two weeks for our letter from BookCamp. And check The Afterword and Twitter for live coverage. [more...]

For some reason the article is posted twice, with different pics.

Would you like to take a look at what we are doing at Book Oven? We are building an online collaboration platform for the making of books. Lots still in development, and everything still in alpha (meaning still private, still not finished). But we are starting with a small (private) alpha launch today of Bite-Size Edits, a collaborative proofreading tool.

Or, a word-based online game.

Or, a massive — yet productive — time waster.

Anyway, we’d like you to tell us what you think …

To get some feedback, while doing some good for the universe, we are starting by helping Project Gutenberg & Distributed Proofreaders edit some of their public domain texts. If it works, we hope to keep feeding error correction into the Gutenberg/Distributed Proofreaders process.

For more info, and to login, see the Book Oven Gutenberg Rally.

There are a bunch of codes below, please use one and post in the comments which one you’ve taken.

If you do have time to try it out and have problems, please let me know: hugh@bookoven.com

Also, feel free to use the invites from your account if you think you know others who might be interested…

Again, here is the URL: http://bookoven.com/gutenberg/

And here is a first batch of codes. Use one and post below which one you used.

6yPZJVVB
DCu2uxhD
apHBPVta
KFepnooo
L3sZdpSA
biVfm82b

Media Hacks #5: this one ended up pretty interesting, talking about Twitter as a search engine and possible Google rival, Google search tweaks, brands, and conferences/unconferences. On the media hacks hotline: C.C. Chapman, Julien Smith, Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 5

So along with a few others, I’ve been organizing BookCampToronto, a:

conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

The event is June 6, but it’s currently full (huge flood of demand), but send an email to bookcampto@gmail.com if you’d like to get put on the waiting list.

I asked Book Oven’s wonderful designer, Marie-Eve Bélanger to come up with a logo, and this was the beauty she produced:

Sweet, eh?

From an old unpublished novel, for a lark, here is Chapter 3:

Vivianne stood inside the walk-in refrigerator, with her back to me, her small wiry body tight and ready to pounce, her mass of curly blond hair bobbing with her head. She wore her crisp white chef’s jacket, with loose-fitting black-and-white checked pants, held a note pad and pen in her little hands. She swore in creative flourishes, in English and French, at the produce.

“Nothing,” she said, turning to me finally, “is personal in my kitchen. There’s no such thing as private personal business in the kitchens of Révolution”

Genevieve, the manager responsible for scheduling had failed to accommodate my request for time off for driving classes; she had referred my application for Tuesday nights off to Vivianne. I pressed my case. She walked past me out of the refrigerator.

“This is a collective kitchen. We,” she continued, sweeping her hand around the room, as if showing me her kitchen and staff for the first time. Julie rushed into the kitchen, taking her pink, puffy winter jacket off and she hurried by us, muttering an apology for her tardiness, which Vivianne ignored. “We are a team, a unit,” she continued. “One for all, Oscar. It’s like a, like a … battalion in, you know, a … an army here. The marines. No man left behind, that sort of thing.”

[more...]

Previously, on Blind Spot:
Chapter One
Chapter Two

Have I ever mentioned that I wrote a novel? I finished Blind Spot in 2005, sent it out, got a stack of rejections. It’s been sitting in various formats of a drawer for years now, and I figured it was time to release it into the wild.

The about goes something like this:

A novel about learning to drive, dying student drivers, terrorists, the CIA, an anarchist driving instructor, and one, or more, murders.

And here is the beginning of Chapter One:

He talked about the car crash all through the evening shift. Sylvain was shaken, true, but there was something reverential about his tone, as if he felt honoured to be the universe’s first chosen beholder of these deaths, and now that the two of us were alone, finishing the last of the kitchen clean-up, he grew more animated in his descriptions, more precise, more excited. His eyes sparkled as he spoke.

It was incredible, he said. Just incredible. The blood, the bone fragments. The damage done to a human body.

The sound of the crash had woken him at 7:12 a.m. that morning, and he had rushed out of his Villeray apartment, wearing only a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, despite the cool of the October morning. He expected survivors, he said, and took his cell phone with him, dialing 911 on the way down the stairs. The little red car had smashed head-on into a poorly-placed concrete divider, and as he rushed towards the steaming metal, Sylvain lost hope of finding anyone alive. The damage done to the automobile was frightening, and he braced himself for the carnage he would find inside.

“Have you ever seen a really bad car accident?” he asked me, suddenly. “I mean close up, I mean with the bodies, I mean before it gets cleaned up? Have you ever seen what actually happens to people?” He wasn’t interested in my answer to that question, and he pushed on with an uncomfortable mix of glee and horror, giving me more details I didn’t want to hear. The smashed windshield, jutting bits of metal, and descriptions of blood and bodies, the angle of one of the victim’s arms. “Pointing in all the wrong directions,” Sylvain said. “It was so weird.” He rested his chin on his mop, sombre and somehow pitying my lack of knowledge of the world. “You have no idea, Oscar,” he said, and the lights glinted off the shining tile of the floor, “how terrible it really is. How really terrible when you see it up close like that. These were people talking and breathing and all of a sudden they’re gone. I’m not religious,” he continued, cleaning again as he spoke, paying close attention to the floor, moving the mop in slow figure eights, the cleansing symbols of infinity, over and over in front of him. “But it’s scary seeing a body moments after the soul disappears. You have no idea.”

I did have an idea but instead of saying so, I just nodded. [more...]

It’s available in multiple formats:

• I’ll be publishing chapters weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• I’ll be podcasting each chapter weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• You can download the pdf (free!), or epub ebook (free!)
• You can buy the softcover.

I’ll be exploring more channels for getting it out there (Smashwords, Shortcovers, Podiobooks etc.) in the coming weeks.

And of course kind feedback is always appreciated.

Announcing BookCamp Toronto, Saturday, June 6, 2009 at the MaRS Center, 101 College Street.

BookCampToronto is a free unconference (definition at wikipedia) about:

The future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

For more information, and to register, suggest sessions, please visit the wiki.

BookCamp Toronto is inspired by BookCamp London.

The Toronto version is being organized by Mitch, Mark B, Erin and Alexa. And me!

Allentrepreneur has just posted an interview with moi:

Allentrepreneur: Welcome to Allentrepreneur Hugh and thanks for taking the time to talk. You’ve got quite a start-up resume to your name. LibriVox.org, earideas.com, datalibre.ca and your latest one, The Book Oven, which has me particularly curious since I’m a book junkie. Could you give us an introduction?

Hugh: The book business is going through massive changes, there are cutbacks all over the place in publishing houses, bricks and mortar booksellers are in trouble, and there’s angst everywhere about how digital and ebooks will upset business models that have been entrenched for 100 years. But books are still a $50 billion business, and there are passionate readers and writers all over the world. The book business looks a lot like the music business did 10 years ago, with these huge companies knowing things are going to change, but having great trouble adjusting.

One really exciting thing is new technologies that make publishing a book cheap and easy: print-on-demand and ebooks. In some sense these technologies can take the publisher out of the picture – in the same way that musicians can now make and distribute their music online, writers now have the same abilities.

But making a book is an arduous and collaborative process. Book Oven will help bridge the gap between writing, and publishing a finished product. [more...]

Mitch Joel, Julien Smith and I get together every once in a while for lunch, inevitably yakking about media, the web, communities. Sometimes they make me talk about marketing too. It’s almost invariably intense, and fun, and illuminating, and I usually leave all fired up (after having let loose with a few grumpy-old-man tirades against various offenders against common sense). Mitch keeps saying, “You know, we should record these lunches.” And Julien & I say: “Yup.”

But Mitch one-upped that idea, and asked some more smart digital people to join us for an every-so-often podcast. So, together with the three Montreal amigos, Chris Brogan, CC Chapman, Chris Penn will help round out the podcast sixsome. We’re calling it:

(No url yet, but it’s coming I think).

Here is the first episode (mp3), featuring Julien, Chris Brogan, and Mitch, but not: CC, Chris Penn, and me. [Note: it's intro'd as Six Pixels of Separation, but it'll have it's own, er, branding soon. Also Note: Julien swears like a drunken sailor, which is why we love him].

[photo by CC]

Just posted over at LibriVox:

Just in time for your 2008/09 new year’s celebration, LibriVox has reach another great milestone, by cataloging our 2,000th book, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. VI.

The rest of the series can be found here:

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

LibriVox is an all-volunteer project to record public domain audiobooks, and give them away for free. We are among the most prolific audiobook publishers in the world.

We reached 1,000 books on October 31, 2007, after 26 months; the second thousand came 14 months later.

Congratulations to all the readers, coordinators, proof-listeners, moderators, and techies who have helped build LibriVox into one of the great communities online. Thanks to Internet Archive for hosting our audio files, and to Project Gutenberg for making thousands of public domain texts available online. And thanks to all our listeners for listening.

If you’d like to volunteer to help make audio recordings of every public domain text in the universe, you could take a look at our volunteer page, or jump right into our forum.

I’ll be on a panel this afternoon about science, web, collaboration, and I’m not sure what else, organized by Steven Mansour:

On Saturday, November 29th, please join us for an informal discussion panel bringing together Scientists, Technologists and Designers to weigh in about the current and future influence of each of these disciplines on one another. The Mother-Child Health International Research Network, The World Association of Young Scientists and the Canadian Centre for Architecture invite you to a public conversation on collaboration between these three critically important – and increasingly interdependent – fields of knowledge.

This session will be structured around a series of questions posed to our guest panelists, followed by a discussion and open exchange with the audience.

Saturday November 29th, 2008, from 2:30pm until 4:00pm
Canadian Centre for Architecture: 1920 rue Baile, Montréal, Québec – Shaughnessy House.
Refreshments will be provided.
[more...]

(By the way, it’s almost 2008, and the CCA does not have a URL for an event they are hosting.)

I was asked to join a panel discussion at Montreal StartUpCamp3 about lessons learned in pitching successfully for financing. Seb Provencher of Praized and John Stokes of MSU (our financiers) were my partners in crime on the stage.

My advice is:

• Do some practice pitches to a small group of the smartest friends you can gather
• Be sure about the core of your product, and be excited about it
• Don’t sell to yourself, sell to the funders

I made a bit of a hash of my presentation, though it turned out fine (I wasn’t really pitching) … violating another important rule:

• be prepared

The other attendees/presenters included:

• Smarthippo
• DokDok
• Tiamat Trading
• Arkalumen
• Austin of Akoha

After a long hiatus due to a wordpress hack, datalibre is back up and running. I did a full reinstall of wp, a full update of the theme files, and put in most of the customization (I think).

So we’re back to agitating for data freedom in Canada, to whit:

datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected using Canadian tax-payer funds, and we believe use of the data should not be restricted to those who can afford the exorbitant fees.

If you’ve got an opinion on that, maybe you’d like to write a post for datalibre?

from earideas.com comes the earideas wednesday picks, three great bits of audio from the past week. this week:

some wacky quantum science, a good old fashioned podcast with every quirk you might like, and an onion report that made me laugh out loud.

[link to: wednesday picks]
[link to: earideas]

Today’s the day! We’re launching earideas.com … an audio directory of the best audio on the net.

Why is earideas.com different?
* it’s a curated collection – only the very best quality is in there
* it’s targeted – the collection slants to public radio, “for thinkin’ folks”
* it’s built for people who don’t know or care what a “podcast” is
* it’s easy to use (we hope) … designed to pass rigorous Mom UI testing standards
* it updates with new shows daily, and you can listen on our site
* we’ll do a weekly round-up (on our blog, and later by email) of three of the best bits of audio from our directory

Here’s a screenshot:

[image by Heri]

Some new features are coming, though we are planning on keeping it simple. In case you were wondering, development was done by Chris Goringe, design by Marie-Eve, and html/css by Madeline.

Feedback much appreciated either here, by email, or at the good old blog: blog.earideas.com

In case it’s not clear, some link-love would be nice … and I have an audio challenge that I’ll tag many of you with, please don’t be angry with me. For details, or to preempt your tagging, see:

The earideas audio challenge!

The global Collectik team is getting painfully close to releasing a new web project. Not much left but a couple of little tweaks … very exciting. I’m so happy that all the work we did on Collectik is finally blossoming into something that I really think will help people find great audio on the net. I don’t know if the new project will be a big success, but it’s something I’m very proud of. Our experience with our previous project collectik.net was so frustrating in many ways.

It suffered from a number of probably classic start-up/web errors:

1. feature creep
2. fixing user experience by adding more features, rather than stripping them away
3. never really deciding what tool was supposed to do (see notes 1 and 2)
4. making a designer design *and* do html … deadly on a project like this, esp when there’s no money in it!

These and some other things meant that we could never really make Collectik work.

At the same time, that experience helped us understand how the tool was being used by the few who used it.

So we’ve stripped it all down, to its essential and the new project is the result. We plan to start some other projects building more features back into the platform, but the new one will stay clean and simple.

Anyway, the whole process has been fascinating for me and big thanks to Chris (back-end), Marie-Eve (design), and Madeline (html) … as well as to Kristen who got collectik far enough along that we could get to the new project.

More news to come soon!

I haven’t been posting much to my project poetic spam, since I found out there are many spam poem sites out there. But I just published one today, which I thought was pretty moving:

I used to believe the stock market
would make me rich.
All I needed
to do was pick the right stock
and I’d be a millionaire.

In March
of 2000,
I decided
that stock
was PALM,

which I bought the morning
it went public.

Within days
my $1,000 investment was worth $600,
and my fantasies of instant
wealth
were swept out the door.

My mistake
was a desire.

After a whole lot of work, the Collectik Team is very happy to announce the official (soft) launch, of the Canadian Cultural Podcast Directory, a project of the National Arts Centre, and Culture.ca (a site run by the Department of Canadian Heritage) … coding, design and implementation by Collectik.

Here is the about:

Welcome to Culture.ca’s cultural podcast listing. This unique collection, curated with the expertise of the National Arts Centre, brings together Canadian audio and video podcasts that reflect Canada’s vibrant arts and culture scene. We collect podcasts produced by Canadians in French, English, and other languages on a variety of cultural topics.

We strive to be a complete collection, and if you feel your podcast qualifies for inclusion, please let us know through our submit form.

Big thanks to Chris (the programming maestro), Marie-Eve (the graphic wrangler with the eyes of gold), and Madeline (the html artiste/pound-IE-into-submissioner).

More projects to come soon! Stay tuned…

Dear Mr. McGuire,

Thank you for your submission to House of Anansi Press. Anansi has been experiencing a severe backlog in submissions that has resulted in very long delays. We apologize for the wait.

After careful consideration and considerable review, our editorial board has decided that, although you demonstrate writing potential, Blind Spot does not suit our current list. Please feel free to submit again if you have another manuscript for us to consider. We wish you all the best in finding a suitable publisher for your work.

I sent Anansi a query (standard cover letter and 30 page sample of the novel) in September 2005 (two years ago). They responded to the query asking for the full manuscript in October 2006 (one year ago). And this arrived a year later. To recap: submitted the novel 2 years ago, finally got rejection today.

Question: is this a standard form letter or is it encouraging. I *think* it’s just a form letter, though I might call them to ask.

This is the last response I was expecting, so now I can go ahead with my plans to publish Blind Spot online, (free audio, free bloggy-text, free pdf, and bound copies from lulu.com for anyone who actually wants to buy it). Stay tuned for news.

And I have started editing Novel Number Two … it’s coming along well. Hope to have it in shape by the end of December.

i participated a while ago on Michel Dumais’ Citoyen Numerique. you have to listen through the little player, it’s:

2007 10 11 01citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 02citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 03citoyennumnerique-ballado

the main librivox part is 03, at minute: 15:15ish. the rest is about podcasting, podcasting in quebec, digital music downloads etc … i make a couple of comments in those parts but not much.

other participants are my montreal podmates: bob goyetche & sylvain grand’maison, as well as journalist Tristan Péloquin.

from librivox forum:

After years of listening to Libri Vox works I have now felt the need to post a call to do up a book and am even ready to record chapters if needed….

…After years of listening to LibriVox works … ??? wow. I guess we have been around for a while now.

OK so I said a while back that if I have not heard from the publisher about Blind Spot (my old, fatally-flawed first novel; i have a newer one to shop around now) by the end of September, I would do something with it. Options:

1. make an audio version (maybe with some LibriVox friends) and podcast it (say a chap a week)
2. publish it in sections online – in serial format (say a chap a week)
3. do a print-on-demand lulu.com version, for friends who want to buy a hard copy
*4. publish online in a wiki – so that either: people can easily copyedit for me (ha!), or, more radically, the text could be modified substantially (????)
5. a combo of the above

Votes?

*Note: I have some hesitation about 2 & 3, because I will soon be shopping around a second novel to publishers – and I think maybe that publishing the other one online/with lulu might be considered poorly by publishing houses. Self-publishing still carries a stigma. So I don’t want to be tarred with a Vanity brush. Maybe that’s silly.

And maybe I should put my money where my distributed media mouth is, suck it up, and put it out there.

Every year there is a big digital/social/web etc conference in austin called south by south west interactive.

I have proposed a LibriVox talk, based on the presentation will I did at Podcasters Across Borders (slides and audio + transcript )

I think panel selections get made by votes from interested people like you. so… it’d be appreciated if anyone who feels inclined could vote for the panel, here.

I was asked back in May to do some blogging for the megablog Huffington Post. It’s been a bit of a strange summer, and I haven’t written much of relevance for a wide audience. But today I finally wrote something (see the facebook post below) and thought: oh, that could get sent over. So I sent it over.

Here it is in the HuffPo. And here is my bio page.

Shoot, when I did my “research” before putting up poeticspam.com I didn’t find any sites dedicated to the poetry of spam. Or at least, I didn’t think I did.

I just came across spam-poetry.com … which appears to have been at it since 2003 (!). And now I find spampoetry.org AND poemsmadefromspam.blogspot.com/ AND spam poems

What the hell was wrong with google that day? or, what the hell was wrong with me?

Ah well, surely there is room in the world for more than a few online spam poetry journals? A technicality: spam-poetry is poetry composed of the subject lines from spam. Whereas poetic spam maintains spam in its purest form.

But to all of you: please consider submitting a few spam poems.

So I just started a new little project, a literary journal called Poetic Spam…deets:

Poetic Spam is a literary journal that celebrates the poetry of spam.

Submission guidelines:

1. poetic spam submissions must be legitimate spam (email or comment), whose poetic quality glows through its spamminess
2. you may submit spam snippets, rather than the enitre spam message
3. you may reformat the linebreaks etc.
4. you may NOT add or remove or rearrange words
5. all poetic forms (sonnets, haiku, free verse, etc) are accepted
6. if you wish to be credited, please include your name and URL

Please submit your poetic spam to:

submissions [AT] poeticspam [DOT] com

submissions are open, so send em along if you got em.

The Mirror’s got an article on the Atwater Digital Literacy Project, nicely done. Here’s the lede:

Give a kid a video camera and they’ll fiddle around with the buttons, but teach a kid how to make movies and they’ll be feverishly posting to YouTube in no time—or at least that’s the idea behind the Atwater Library’s Digital Literacy Project.

[more...]

Thanks Tracey!

You should go check out a group project I am involved in, datalibre.ca (so it’s a group blog, currently consisting of a group of two, one of them not me).

Tons of neat stuff going on in this space internationally, and in Canada. In particular, I just posted about the Istanbul Declaration from the OECD, which states that governments should provide data, for free, as a public good.

A bit late, but here is of objectives for 2007, focusing on the next, say, 5 months. I have been waffling a little, dipping toes into too many things, and I need to focus on some key professional objectives. Here they are:

primary objectives:
1. finish novel #2 (draft 1) (august)
2. redesign collectik (august)
3. launch “edited collectik” (july)
4. launch new start-up (sept)
5. pitch book on LibriVox (sept)

secondary objectives:
6. get 2nd contract for collectik
7. publish novel #1 online (audio?) if I don’t hear back from Anansi (october)
8. get funding for atwater media project (sept)
9. post on huffington 2x per month

… LibriVox began in a vibrant section of Montreal called the Plateau, where 32-year-old Hugh McGuire lives with his wife…McGuire hangs out at Laika, a café and bar around the corner from his house that is popular with Montreal techies. At Laika, open source gurus, community WiFi evangelists, and A-list Web designers drink coffee, eat brunch, work on their laptops, and swap ideas…

Apparently in the print version of the mag, there’s a big pic of Laika – I’ll scan & post it when I get it (coming in the mail). See:

The Wealth of LibriVox:
Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production
by Michael Erard

(thanks to Heri for the heads up).

I’ve always been a big fan of Jon Udell’s stuff – he writes not just about tech things that interest me, but he’s also got a great sense that web technology ought to be good for society as well. Jon was one of the first “famous” people I contacted when I started LibriVox, and he’s been a fan, and written about the project a number of times. So I was really happy when he asked me to join him on his IT Conversations podcast, Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators (you might need to register to see that page). This was a long (47 mins) and great interview, really getting into the meat and bones of how and why LibriVox works, but also touching on much other interesting stuff as well.

Here’s the page.

Listen here: mp3 link.

***

In other exciting news, Jon whipped up a script (tweaked and built on by the ever-effective Chris), that allows you to add a LibriVox book directly to iTunes. Here’s how Kri describes the new addition to the site:

Thanks to Jon Udell and our resident catalog development guru tis (Chris Goringe) we have a new feature that has been added to all catalog pages. Check out the most recent Short Poetry Collection to see an example of the following…

1. A “Subscribe in iTunes” link. If you regularly use iTunes for podcasts, or would like to, this link will be very helpful to you. Just click on the link, and allow it to launch the external application (iTunes) if it asks

2. An RSS feed for the 64kbps files. What’s the point of this? For some this makes it easier to download all of the 64kbps MP3 files at once. For example, if you listen to podcasts and have a podcatcher, use this link to download them all more easily.

I did a podcast interview with Jon Udell about LibriVox, for ITConversations (I’ll let you know when it’s available). Was a great talk, and part of our discussions were about the still-significant barriers to accessing good audio on the net. There is great stuff out there, but for many not-so-net-savvy people there exist many problems with knowing about audio, finding it, choosing it, downloading it, getting it into a media player (and then getting it into a portable media device).

all of these processes are harder than they should be still (collectik is an effort to solve some of them), and I’d wager that the main audience for audio (especially the LibriVox, public interest, public radio type) is not as tech savvy as most net video watchers. Yet this is an important market – in part because of the value of the information available this way. This is a new sphere for public discourse, and should be made as simple as possible.

With LibriVox we often get people wondering how to get the mp3s they have downloaded into their ipod. A simple task for most of you, but not obvious to many people who would like to listen to LibriVox books. There’s an easy solution to this problem: generate an xml file of our catalog pages, that will be read as a podcast feed by iTunes, and allow for the one-click iTunes “subscription” to that book.

So Jon whipped up a python script that can do the job, eg. click on this:
itpc://jonudell.net/librivox/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles-by-arthur-conan-doyle.xml

iTunes will open, & you’ll get subscribed to this book – you may have to “get” all the files to download them. This eliminates some complication for people.

We’ll have to figure out how to integrate this – ideally the script could work in tandem with a wordpress plugin, that would work in our catalog page template. So that each page would generate the right link.

Evan did something similar a while back, with his PodPager… but the tool seems to be disabled.

I did a video interview of Montreal hip hop artist Boogat, for the National Arts Centre’s Scene Quebec programme/podcast. SceneQuebec is an arts festival in Ottawa/Gatineau, April 20-May 5.

Here’s the boogat vid.

There are a few more vids by me coming out too, some about theatre, and another about the classical music programming.

You can find the scenequebec schedule & tix here, the podcast here, and check out Alexis O’Hara’s vid – great stuff.

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?

I presented Collectik at Democamp Montreal#2 … a great evening and I got some really great response and feedback. Josh, at Yashlabs, has an excellent review of the event, including some vids. I’ll be posting more on this soonish, I hope.

Austin hosted a great post-event cocktail party at his pad for presenters and an assortment of techies, investors etc.

Next up, I’ll be presenting about some of the mistakes I think I & we have made & lessons learned to the next Barcamp Montreal, on Saturday, April 28th, 2007.

(cross-posted at TextoSolvo)

One of the problems in the Western world right now, in my estimation, is that we see “freedom” as an artificially good thing in an abstract & idealized sense. humans, whatever else we are, are animals, and we have developed biological and cultural systems to deal with the universe. and nothing is “free” in the universe. you must obey the laws of physics: when you get punched in the nose it hurts, and when you eat rocks, they taste bad and make you sick, and break your teeth. that they are painful helps you try to avoid getting punched in the nose, and discourages you from eating rocks instead of apples, both of which are helpful if you wish to survive in the world. that is what the universe is “like,” yet in the western world we have abstracted out “freedom” as some kind of thing which is good in itself. I too think freedom is good, but not “in itself.” i think it is good because increased freedom for a larger number of people results in a better ability to solve important problems (firstly, how do we feed and clothe ourselves, and protect our families, and then other more complex, but less important issues).

so librivox is a kind of demonstration that says: here are the rules. everything *else* is free, but the rules are not negotiable. and they are not negotiabale BECAUSE librivox has an objective that defines everything we do: “to make all public domain books available in audio for free.” the rules have been/are set in order to help us achieve that objective. everything is weighed against the objective, not against some abastract “freedom.”

that is very powerful. i believe one of the driving evolutionary forces that has made humans successful is our desire to build and pleasure at building things.

but building things takes discipline and dedication. it is always easier to sit on your ass and do nothing. and you are – in our very rich, and very easy world, “free” to sit on your ass and do nothing, but I don’t believe you will ever be happy if you take that approach. In order to be a happy human, I believe, you must build things.

and *that*, to me, is what freedom means: the freedom to build the things you want to build. not freedom to do whatever you want, wherever you want, because “freedom” per se is sacred, but the freedom to pursue objectives you believe in.

we have lost our sense of discipline, and I think that makes people very unhappy. I don’t mean that in any draconican sense, I just mean that in western world, we are told (by psychologists, parents, media, etc) that we can do whatever we want, that we are the centre of the universe, that our freedom is the most important thing and we have a *right* to it, that just believing in ourselves is enough to succeed. all of which is, frankly, bullshit.

and that kind of thinking makes, I think, for unhappy people, and a disfunctional society, because we are NOT the centre of the universe able to influence it with our belief in how important we are; we are just a little part of it, subject to its laws. among which is, not much ever gets done without work.

A few people have gotten involved with LibriVox, been impressed by the anarchist underpinnings, and argued that we needed to allow full freedom (ie to rant, to be disruptive etc). but librivox as a system works in part because of the laws of our little universe, some of which we understand, some of which are mysterious. I’ve been careful to try to defend and protect those mysterious things – even if I do not totally understand them (hence my defense of the “disclaimer” – I don’t want to mess with something that’s worked unless it is very clear that messing will make LV work better).

I read recently somewhere that real freedom only comes from the pleasure of succeeding within constraints. Which seems to me to be about right.

LibriVox had a March Madness campaign – a concerted effort to finish as many public domain books as we could in the month of March.

We finished SEVENTY!

Yes, 7-0 works of great literature. That’s pretty crazy. I didn’t do much to contribute, I must say, but I am proud as punch.

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.

Sylvain has launched the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur $100 Challenge. He’s calling on Montreall tech entrepreneurs to donate $100 to the Atwater Digital Literacy Project (name change coming, I think):

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets 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 communities.

If you are interested, you can find out how to donate here. $100 would be great. $10 would be great too. You can also help out in outher ways.

I’m on the board at the Atwater Library, and I’ve been pushing for this digital project for a couple of years (Sylvain was around in the early days).

We should make this a quarterly thing: 4 times a year get the Montreal Tech community to ralley around a particular cause and try to raise some money for something.

…fantastic organization, kudos to the putters-togetherers, and I’ll point out some cool projects shortly.

But please, please, please make this phrase disappear.

(PS, thanks for the ride home Bob).

UPDATE: you can see vids of the event, including some footage of me, here.

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.

Welcome to the new dosemagazine … I moved from the old one, for a number of reasons: mainly, I am an adult now and thought it was about time I got my own server space, and officially launched the domain name I bought in 2002. Blogsome was a fine home for a long while, but I was constrained by the version of wordpress they are running, the available themes, and especially their limited number of plugins. On the other hand, if things go pear-shaped here, I am on my own, so I better figure out how to back-up my posts.

I’m still fiddling a bit, but things are more or less how I want them. I don’t like the way the header graphic looks here tho, so I’ll have to figure out what to do about that. I’ll likely be testing a few options.

Anyway, comments welcome etc.

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a tool that will let me get all the info out of my old blogsome.com blog, please let me know.

Technorati Profile