Maple Leaf 2.0 - Technology and Web 2.0 News in Canada

July 14th, 2008

Eee PC 901 small keyboard cool features

I’ve wanted to get an Eee PC for a long time. I came really close to getting a 900, but with the 901 announced I was convinced to hold off. I’m so glad I did.

Over the weekend I got my usual NCIX e-flyer, clicking through because the 900s were on sale, I saw that the 901s were in! Wasting no time I bought one for in store pick up.

This is a cool machine. Keyboard, yes, it’s very small and will take some time to get used to.

That said this little XP-powered machine is pretty peppy. Bluetooth, Draft N wifi, 3 usb ports, ethernet, vga out, sd card reader.

Out of the box I found it pretty useful.  Except for the fact that I had to copy the touchpad drivers from the DVD to a usb key to tweak the touchpad settings (I hate tap to click).

I’m going to be giving this a serious test over the next while. I’m taking it on vacation instead of a full laptop for pics and writing.

This is going to be fun!

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By Tris Hussey -- 2 comments

July 11th, 2008

Truemors and NowPublic brings news full circle

Picked up this nice news yesterday—NowPublic Acquires Truemors—which not only makes Guy happy I’m sure, but I think it adds a nice and interesting facet to NowPublic.

NowPublic is fantastic for expanding local coverage of news and giving people the chance to give their spin on it.

Truemors, of course, is more for those rumours that we’d all like to read.

Together? I think you get the best of both worlds.

Is the media now solely in our hands?  Will the print, radio, and TV worlds be just analyzing what we’re saying?

Yeah, not likely. I think that the MSM is still going to be essential to do the digging that they do so well. That said, I think social media/new media/new journalism is going to be playing a more and more important role in how everyone consumes the news.

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By Tris Hussey -- 1 comment

July 8th, 2008

How engaged are your readers? Do you know? Soon aideRSS will give you the data soon

Jim Murphy hinted in his comment on yesterday’s post about aideRSS that cool stuff was coming soon, like really soon.  Well I bugged Melanie until I got something.  It’s a cool something too: a proof of concept of an “engagement score” for blogs and posts.:

What we really want to figure out is engagement. We want reassurance that we’re not just shouting into the void. Who are we reaching, and what do they think? But most metrics out there only represent individual slices of information, and they only give you numbers, not stories. AideRSS changes that. Source: Storytelling ROI: social engagement metrics for Marketing & Social Media bloggers - AideRSS Blog

Melanie took 25 of the best marketing blogs and ran them through the magic  engagementaliszer and got this:

This means that Chris Brogan is the king of engagement.  Okay Seth Godin’s there too, but I don’t know Seth.

Wondering about this little old blog?  Melanie was kind enough to run the data for me and she got these results:

Which puts me nicely in that group of blogs, which I think is pretty darn cool.

Is this just, “meh nice to know” data or “holy smokes how did I live without this” data?  That depends on your perspective, of course. I’m going to be using the data to help b5 bloggers write posts that their audience wants more of. I’ll be doing the same here, of course. Some folks will be more, nice to know but not critical. Sure because a lot of people just write to enjoy. I won’t be doing this on my personal blog because there I don’t care.  It’s my space to be my own, but here this is work and I’m shooting for a whole different thing.

This is going to have to tied us over until Thursday because major coolness is supposed to be coming then.

Hmm, I think I need to offer better bribes.

Image from aideRSS

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By Tris Hussey -- 3 comments

July 7th, 2008

If you can judge a wise (wo)man by the colour of his (her) skin, mister you’re a better man than I

Recognize the quote? Probably not, so I’ll give it to you. Aerosmith, Livin’ on the Edge. Yep. Why do I bring this up? Because Corvida wrote a post that some are going to take issue with, I’m sure, but I have to stand by:

I don’t think it’s a secret as to why I did it, but in case you don’t know, Loren Feldman of 1983media did a video last year entitled “Techn****”, which basically put black people in a bad light. He asked where were the African-American tech bloggers and then proceeded to put on a parody of a “gangster” tech blogger that perpetuated many stereotypes that African-Americans already face due to ignorance of a variety of things. No I’m not linking to his ****. Source: I Requested That Verizon Drop Their Deal With 1938media | SheGeeks

It doesn’t really matter what I think of Loren personally (I didn’t see that episode), nor does it matter.  What matters is that, yes Corvida is right. Verizon should consider her words.

No, it isn’t censorship. The government isn’t tell Loren to stop. His ISP isn’t cutting him off. No one is saying not to listen to him, he does have a sharp wit and some wise things to say.

This is taking a stand, and I’m standing with Corvida.

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By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments

July 7th, 2008

aideRSS has a new VP of Development—Jim Murphy

Coming in on a motorcycle, Jim Murphy is the new VP of Development for aideRSS.  Have to wonder what’s on his docket for his first 90 days:

Though he rode into town on a motorcycle rather than a spirited palomino, as our new VP Development, Jim won’t be wasting any time applying his know-how, creativity, and discipline to planning, operations, and support here at AideRSS. Source: There’s a new sheriff in town… - AideRSS Blog

Now that you’re whistling the tune from Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, let’s think about where things are going and maybe come up with our own suggestions.

Over the last few weeks it seems that RSS, a mainstay in my info existence, has fallen off our radar.  We’re talking about AIR apps and micro blogging and FriendFeed and lifestreams.

I think should be pretty clear to all of us that the tools, techniques, and algorithms that aideRSS have  developed will be key to us being able to sort through the mire to find the nuggets we want.

In fact, as I was writing this a post from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s blog passed by via Snackr on well, pulling info out of Facebook as an RSS feed using Dapper.

Handy, eh?

Now what’s handier here?  Snackr? Facebook? Marshall? Or my ability to pull it out?

That’s what we need to think about about do better.

So Jim, let’s expand the filters, make them easier, and rock it.

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By Tris Hussey -- 3 comments

July 5th, 2008

Wide variety of ecozones, stable economy, large area, small population—Canada is ready to manage climate change

Regardless of who is to blame or what is causing it, our planet’s climate is in a state of flux.  Let’s just get that out of the way now, shall we?

Great.  Now let’s talk about dealing with realities here.  Essentially as the world warms, etc we’re going to see a shift in things like where key fishing grounds are (the ocean’s temperature will change) and where the “bread baskets” are in a given area.

Lucky for Canada, as things warm. more of the prairies should become arable and what is arable now should be able to support a wider range of crops.  With the NW Passage opening up, well there is a whole new way to ship things around.  Imagine, Hudson’s Bay as a year-round port.

All this comes from this report I caught today (thanks Mack!)—Canada best to escape climate change – Telegraph—and looking at the chart from the article … well blue is bad.

Part of the “bad” will be related to how climate will change (low lying areas, yeah not good) the other part is the ability to adapt and change with climate.

So, as developed countries, do we have a responsibility to help?  Should we?  Can the planet manage to support all these people?  I am not advocating wholesale culling of the world’s population.  I think the question we need to consider is how to deal with the fact that lots of people are going to be suffering and will likely need a new place to live.

And we thought oil wars were bad.  We fear water wars, I’m thinking we’re going to be facing “habitable land” wars in our future.

Image credit: Maplecroft

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By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments

July 4th, 2008

Will microblogging get the architecture right in time?

Russell is bang on, microblogging should be based on a queuing system and not whatever it is now. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, no one thought Twitter or microblogging would take off like this.

The lesson from Twitter is that microblogs aren’t Content Management Systems at all, but are instead Messaging systems, and have to be architected as such. SMTP or EDI are our models here, not publishing or blogs.

Here’s how a microblog system has to work to scale: All the messages created by users have to go into a Queue when they’re created, and an external process then has to go through one by one and figure out which messages go into which subscriber’s message list. As the system grows and more messages are created, the messages may arrive in your "inbox" slower, but they will still arrive. This type of system can be easily broken up into dedicated servers and multiple processes can handle different parts of the read/write process, and the individual user message lists can be more easily cached - as once a page is created that contains messages, it doesn’t change. Source: Let the microblogs bloom - RussellBeattie.com

As we’re seeing more interesting ways to aggregate our microblogging (like TweetDeck and ping.fm), I see that we’re accelerating towards microblogging as the fourth pillar of e-communication (email, IM, and blogging being the other three).

The only question is, will the microblogging systems get into a better architecture in time?

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By Tris Hussey -- 1 comment

July 3rd, 2008

A good CIO needs to know the Scotty Principle

I had a good chuckle over this article in CIO about why IT might think their CIO is clueless.  This point clicked with me, because I think it makes a pretty interesting point: to be a good CIO you have to grok geek culture:

8. The CIO collaborates to death.
Whether it is the character flaw of being indecisive or some middle-school notion of democracy, you are in charge. Collaboration is critical, but you also need to make the right decision at the right time. Collaborate like Captain Kirk. "Spock?" "Bones?" He gets opinions from his experts but there is never any question about who will make the final decision. And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn’t even be a CIO. Source: 9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

I think to really lead geeks well you need to have watched the shows we watched, read the books (and comics) we read, movies we watched … you have to know where we’re coming from.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve been heavily influenced by Roddenberry, Heinlein, Asimov.  They have helped us form and conceive of the world around us.

To be able to relate to geeks, developers, sys admins, etc. you have to know this stuff.   Really you need to grok it.

But most of all you need to know the Scotty Principle.

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By Tris Hussey -- 4 comments

July 2nd, 2008

Identi.ca Canada’s gift to microblogging and might become Twitter’s salvation

The day after Canada Day and we have a new, and potentially exciting, microblogging service to play around with.  Identi.ca might seem like “just another Twitter clone”, but I think they are really onto something here.

Corvida, Sarah Perez, and Marshall Kirkpatrick all have it right on target.  Sure, it’s early days and Identi.ca doesn’t have all the features that we’re used to, but they have one thing that Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku all missed: the are offering the sever software as open source that can we can install ourselves.

Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, even FriendFeed, all rely on increasing their own capacity to survive.  This is different.  We can install the server ourselves and then, of course like POP, have accounts to connect to the larger cloud with.

The question will be not how fast will Identi.ca add Twitter, but how fast will Twitter add Laconica.

You can follow me here: http://identi.ca/trishussey

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By Tris Hussey -- 4 comments

July 1st, 2008

The official word on iPhone pricing in Canada

The day after I wrote my last iPhone post, I received an email from the PR company working with Rogers Mobile (MS&L Digital) on the pricing plans:

Hello,
My name is Nicole Burguess and I’m writing on behalf of Rogers to give you some additional information about the Rogers rate plans available for the iPhone.
The iPhone 3G bundles released June 27 are not the only price plans available to customers, they are the high value plans that allow Rogers customers to use the device to its fullest and offer considerable savings over separate voice and data plans that exist in market today.
That said, Rogers customers have more choices available to them and can use their existing voice and smartphone data plans if they wish. For example, they can select from the new data pricing (ranging from $30 for 300MB to $100 for 6GB or $50 Flex Rate plan) and add a voice plan, or they can choose a combined voice and data plan to best suit their individual needs.
Customers are not required to take the value packs, and can order most other features a la carte, such as $7 for Caller ID.
Existing customers can keep their existing voice service plan and pick a separate data plan (not in the iPhone 3G bundle) to meet their needs. They will need to check their upgrade eligibility, but any customer with a monthly service fee that is over $30 can upgrade to an iPhone 3G at $199 (for the 8GB model). Other options outside the iPhone bundle may be available depending on the customer’s individual information.
If you have any questions, please let me know and I will do my best to help you.
Sincerely,
Nicole Burguess
Account Executive | MS&L Digital

I replied with the following:

Thank you for emailing Nicole.  Two questions.
First, what about an unlimited (and affordable) data plan?  I’ve found from personal experience unlimited data plans allow users to feel free to use their devices to the fullest and not worry
Second I would like to post your email verbatim (without your contact info, because that would just be mean), would that be okay?
Tris

And Nicole replied today:

Hi, Tris.
Thanks for writing back. In answer to your question, The iPhone bundles were created to provide the best value to our customers.
With respect to Rogers iPhone 3G pricing, we believe that the customer that wants this device wants to fully appreciate all that iPhone 3G has to offer so there’s a wide selection of high value price packages to meet the needs of Canadians. We believe that unlimited plans could end up costing customers more for what they don’t use. Rogers’ iPhone 3G plans will more than accommodate the vast majority of customers.
Yes, you may post my e-mail verbatim. And thank you for your consideration in omitting my contact info.
I’m available if you have any additional questions about this information.
Kind regards,
Nicole Burguess

Nicole is right is some respects, given the exorbitant data rates in Canada, yeah and unlimited plan might cost far more that you actually use.  You can see the flaw in the logic.  The US can do it.  Unlimited data plans there are affordable.  Why not here?

Again, I’m saying the same things I always do.  Canada needs better mobile and data rates.  It’s appalling, really.

The protest site RuinediPhone is coming up with a 403 forbidden for me, very odd error I think.

Is the techie outcry about the iPhone going to be what we need to get some change?  When CNN is talking about and bringing attention to how much we’re getting the shaft up here, maybe that is enough.

Wishful thinking, I know.

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By Tris Hussey -- 10 comments