Plain words, uncommon sense
James and I engaged in a poke-and-stroll down 4th avenue today. Poke as in stick your head in a store, poke about, then stroll on. I redeemed my Duthie’s gift certificate that my brother gave me for my 30th birthday. 30 bucks for 30 years. Thank you D.
Here’s the book I got: The Genius in the Design
I like book gifts and it is that time of year so here’s my wishlist: Amazon listmania
What’s on your list? Any good recommendations I don’t have on my list?
CBC has reported a couple of times on a Vancouver couple who are observing a special diet that restricts them to eating foods that are grown and produced within a hundred mile radius of their home. The authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon are actually writing a series of articles for The Tyee. The diet is really less about dieting than about the politics of food, recognizing where things are grown, the amount of fuel used to transport food, and our disassociation with the food production process.
Quill and Quire reported today that Random House Canada has acquired the rights to publish The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. It will be interesting to see whether two authors interested in their ecological footprint will be able to ensure the book is printed on 100% post-consumer, recycled paper, vegetable-based ink, non-bleached paper, etc. I certainly hope so because the good work they did decreasing their consumption of foods requiring long-distance transport (fossil fuels) might be quickly undone by the rather environmentally heavy act of publishing thousands of copies of a book using virgin paper (paper from trees as opposed to paper two or three times removed from the original tree).
Random House has signed on with Markets Initiative and I hope that means the book will be as eco-friendly as the diet. Watch for the book in Spring 2007.
And the learning continued …
I’m not a fan of blog posts of lists but noting some of the things I learned in point form is primarily for my own resources so stay with me.
1. Flickr.com Groups vs. Tags. So Flickr Groups is kind of like Yahoo Groups. You can join a group and see the group’s photos, which might be a nice thing to do at a conference like this, get everyone to join one group and then we see all the photos for our group. The other way, which seems to be what we mostly did, was tags. You can tag a photo, for example, blogsndogs, and then all photos tagged with that tag are searchable.
2. Vonage.com allows unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico for a flat rate of $24.99 per month. I don’t recall who was talking this up to me, it is long distance calling with your broadband and computer instead of the land line. My problem is that I have no problem with long distance calling on my land line so for now I’m not interested.
3. Apparently bloggers can become an accredited journalist for about $15 per year. Being granted protection as a member of the press or just having a press badge seems like a worthwhile thing, but I missed how you go about registering. Anyone know?
4. Zoominfo.com. No link because I don’t want to give these guys any Google juice. This is an icky service that lets you search for anyone’s employment history, bios, personal phone numbers and emails. The interesting thing is that they cache information and then display it in a pretty authoritative looking manner, but lots of stuff is old and/or incorrect. The wonderful thing is that you can become a member and correct and manage your data. Seems like holding someone’s digital identity hostage isn’t an ethical way of gaining a member base. Apparently HR people are heavy users of this service. Beware of what you post online LiveJournal users.
5. Favourite quotes from the week. “Join us for the Kool-Aid after,” which was in reference to blogging as a religion. And “I never fully understood ‘exposed skin’ until today,” which was in reference to our skin freezing after 3 minutes of exposure while dogsledding.
6. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a not-nice phrase.
7. Mappr.com is an interactive space for exploring place, based on the photos people take.
8. Lee talked about technology trends and the changing sense of community. He likes to refer to online communities as a “social” or “party.” “Community is something that each person feels on a different level. It may be across blogs, in a wiki or message board, or all of the above.” What struck me was his use of social, social like social interaction and I didn’t want to interupt the lecture but I did want to add that the prairie sense of a social perfectly embodies that sense of online community Lee was discussing. A social is a gathering of people around a common goal (such as raising money for a hockey team or for a wedding) and attendance and promotion of the event/location is based on word-of-mouth.
9. What’s a day without acronyms. CSR. Corporate Social Responsibility.
10. Lee’s version of weblog vs. message boards.
11. Cool travel blog
12. The Onion uses Drupal. If I was going to create a blog today, I’d seriously consider Drupal and using Raincity Studios to do the design. Yes yes I would. Expression Engine is what I use now and I have no complaints. It is great blog software. I know the Drupal people yawn looking at it, but if you want to do more than Typepad and Movable Type but less than Drupal. Expression Engine is the way to go. That’s my unpaid, user endorsement.
Raincity Studios is the cat’s meow. I am thrilled that they picked me and this blog to attend the Blogs n Dogs conference in Banff. It was fantastic and I met my goals: learn more, meet new people, get an extra edge on the new tools and trends. Thank you thank you thank you.
A number of people asked me yesterday what I learned at the conference, and I had a hard time answering, not because I didn’t learn anything but because the things I learned were a bunch of small things rather than one large thing. Small things are sometimes harder to articulate. In some cases it wasn’t so much not knowing about a thing but being reminded of a thing I’d forgotten.
What I Learned on Day One:
1. Flickr.com: A reminder that at the bottom of the page you can create an RSS feed for a tag.
2. Upcoming.org: Didn’t know about this cool event website and now I have to remember on Jan 20 to go to the podcasting meet-up at the Beatty St. Bar and Grill.
3. Last.fm: Didn’t know I could listen to all sorts of great music.
4. DLA: Digital Lifestyle Aggregator. Who makes up this stuff?
5. MySpace.com: Patrick Brealey and the Knives are on MySpace.
6. I have invisibility powers and mind control. It’s true, ask Kris.
7. Allconsuming.net: Appears to pull data from Amazon.com, clever idea for something else I’m working on.
8. Odeo.com and Audioblog.com: Knew about it before but got to see it in action.
9. Statcounter.com: Didn’t know about this great free tool.
10. Lee LeFever should write for Lonely Planet. It’s true the world is not flat. And his user network for suggesting countries to visit is a very cool idea.
11. Will Pate. Need I say more? Ok, a bit more, his blog aggregates everything he writes anywhere on the web. I want that.
12. Vonage: Podcasting dealy-o with VoIP.
13. Blogroll with Bloglines: I knew I could do this, but I didn’t quite get why I’d want to use Bloglines to do it. Now, I understand. I can put the Bloglines blogroll on my blog and it will show all the public feeds I read.
14. John thinks Jackie Pittigliani has cool photos on Flickr.com. Some I like.
15. I should MooseCamp an idea I’m working on.
16. ShoZoo. Ronald Shozu. Roland has a Nokia with shozu and he can automatically upload photos to Flickr.
UPDATE: Shozu not ShoZoo. Shazam. Also my humble apologies. It is Roland not Ronald. I did that a couple of times in my head and thought I’d cured myself completely. Not the case. Roland Roland Roland down the dogsledding trail.
17. Yarnharlot.ca. Knit away my friend.
18. It is -26 C, which is 23 degrees different than Vancouver temperature right now, and 23 negative degrees more than I’m comfortable with.
Kris Krug was just demonstrating MySpace.com and as he was doing that I thought, Patrick Brealey needs to be on MySpace, then I searched and there he was. Patrick rocks my world. Have a listen.
The challenge going to blogging conferences with bloggers is that they are snap-happy-camera fiends. Within seconds of meeting Lee LeFever, for example, I appeared on Flickr.
The great Roland was also in on the action.
Lee takes photos of Roland taking photos … See what I mean. It’s an endless mise-en-scene. Then we all talk about metadata. Metadata within metanarrative. The postmodernists go wild.
CTV Canada AM reported this morning that the Tories have podcasts up on their site and the Liberals are blogging. Perhaps they’ll show up at the Blogs n Dogs session today.
http://www.technorati.com/tag/blogsndogs
Altitude: Please be aware that Banff’s elevation is approximately 1,384 metres (4,540 feet) … you may experience fatigue, shortness of breath and/or dizziness.
It has nothing to do with being out of shape. See how awesome this place is.
Other wonderful things include the recycling bins in my room, the SmartSaver lightbulbs, and the guy in the box outside my window playing violin.
Check out the music hut. I’d guess it is 6-8 foot cube.
http://www.banffcentre.ca/music/facilities/
I’m a bit distracted by all the cool things and I should be working on an outstanding proposal. Outstanding in that it is incomplete rather than exceedingly brilliant.
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” (Saint Augustine)
I’m on my way to Banff tomorrow for the Blog n Dogs conference. I have borrowed snow pants. I have located my winter shoes. I’m still searching for more appropriate outerwear. My wee wool coat is not going to do it.
Suggestions on braving the cold?
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