Dave Olsen is just getting underway Three Ps of Podcasting and he’s got Penmachine Session 2 playing.
Hi Derek, we miss you.
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MooseCamp Schedule is up. This post will be updated throughout the day as I add session notes.
Session #1: Mashups for Non-Programmers
My first session of MooseCamp, part of Northern Voice. A great demo session on cool tools that non-programmers can use to create pretty cool websites, applications or aggregators.
The Mashup page has links to the speakers’ demos, the tools they use and examples.
Session #2: Identity and Privacy on the Web
How many logins do you have? How many email addresses? How do you manage your multiple identities? How do you manage what companies know about you?
There’s no real answer.
One example: OpenID from www.sxip.com
AND, Boris Mann kindly mentioned that Old Skool logins for www.Flickr.com are being phased out. Ack, that’s me. I don’t read the messages sent to my Flickr inbox. Bad Monique. I also don’t read the text around the login box–I’m busy logging in. Bad Monique. So, without Boris I would have been very upset on March 17 when my Flickr login no longer worked.
So I now have yet another digital identity, this one with Yahoo.
Imagine if all your logins are store loyalty cards in your wallet. I’d need a minion to carry them around for me. But unlike store loyalty cards, I can’t refuse the login. I can’t limit the relationship between myself and the company. If I want to use the service, I have to fill out all the required fields: name, email, birthday, username, password, favourite colour, mother’s maiden name, blah blah blah.
Session 3: PhotoCamp
Kris Krug and the photo geeks talked white balance, tools and techniques.
Session 4: Favourite Tools Session with Tod Maffin
I’m sold. Just check out the wiki and the links to the tools: These are my favourite tools
Hey Kids! General Motors is running the Great Canadian Writing Contest .
The contest is open to kids across Canada in Grade 5 or Grade 6. You just write a short story (200 words) in English or French on the contest theme of family, and you illustrate a book cover to go along with it.
The contest runs through to April 16, 2007.
Here’s the contest details:
http://www.abc-canada.org/gmac/en/
Today was a day of tap dance. I have a class on Sundays that I take with the venerable Jim Hibbard. The class this morning was fantastic. Then this evening I attended a fundraiser and “thank you” dinner for the great Lynn Dally of Jazz Tap Ensemble.
Now here’s a little Fred Astaire for you to watch. I love this number.
Friday.
I had beer at lunch.
This makes for a good Friday.
I also was pointed towards Chocomap.com.
It is never too late in the day to drool over the chocolatey goodness that is a Google map indicating all sources of heavenly bites in my neighbourhood (as if I don’t know them already).
But it’s not all beer and chocolate.
I attended the SFU, Master of Publishing, Magazine Fair this afternoon.
Three magazine proposals were on tap, complete with trade-fair booths featuring business plans, schwag, bubbly and buttons. There were short presentations from the groups: Traffic, a mag for Vancouverites in transit; TBSP, a foodie mag for those of us who like messy kitchens, playing with our food and are just on this side of hip, “this is not your mother’s food & wine magazine”; and last but not least and online only mag, jibe.ca (I was paying attention but the correct name eludes me). Jibe is an entertainment filter–the best source for “have you seen that video? that article? that photo?”.
Geist magazine, Modern Dog, The Tyee were also in attendance with goodies, free mags and other promo pieces. I walked away with issue 63 of Geist, which features a fancy ad for SoMisguided.com (thank you Patricia and Siobhan).
P.S. Sio have you seen this?
This came firing over the transom this afternoon.
Books are hard. Watch the video.
I love it.
Canadians are notorious for our enjoyment of puns. Check out Social Signal’s technically sweet Valentine. I digg it.
Giles Slade, author of Made to Break, was on CNN last Sunday on “In The Money”.
Here’s a transcript of the segment:
http://ernestoche.blogspot.com/2007/02/romans-all-right.html
The stories we tell ourselves and others is how we make sense of the world.
In searching for who said the above quote I came across, “Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all” (Philip Pullman).
I was searching for the origins of these quotes in reference to Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. Gaiman has written a book of stories, myths and legends that collide and at times are at war.
American Gods are the gods who have come to America in the minds of its immigrants. Odin, Easter, Ganesh, Anansi. The ancient gods are the left to their own devices, poised to disappeared as they are pushed out by America’s newest gods. The ones we make sacrifices to daily: TV, big cars, the internet, warfare in the name of liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
Both worlds become Shadow’s world. Shadow, who did time for assaulting his bank-robbing partners for cheating him of his share of the proceeds, who is hired by Wednesday to rally the old gods against the new, and Shadow, who represents our look into the shadows. Gaiman asks us to take a closer look at the things that sometimes catch the corner of our eye. The things that we hope not to be true, but deeply believe to exist.
As our protagonist, it is Shadow’s job to make sense of this world. To tell the story. To sort things out. To know under which cup the nut is, into which hand the coin drops.
I enjoyed this book.
Anansi Boys is still my favourite, maybe because I read it first. But American Gods is one of those novels that will hang in my mind like a remembered dream.
I wanted to write about the power of narrative, how it informs what we do, how we understand ourselves, our country, our beliefs. Instead of telling you my story, why don’t you read this one.
The fine folks at Random House have created BookLounge.ca, which I thought was fantastic from the beginning. It’s a bit of a virtual book club/library/aggregation of cool book things.
Today I received an email promoting new stuff on the site: podcasts, sneak peaks at upcoming publications, author interviews. It was an ok newsletter–clean design, easy to read. It’s a great way to remind me to check out the site. But what intrigued me to click through to the site was “Let our insiders give you a window into the publishing industry.” It’s a great set of blog posts from employees. The first is from Marion Garner, publisher of Vintage Canada, who writes about one of her titles being an Oprah pick, or “Oprahtunity” as she calls it.
Fun Stuff. Check out the site.