Currents

While picking up some free tickets to the lookout as prizes for a viral video contest I’m organizing for a local college, I finally made it up to the top of Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver.

Why, why, why-eeeeey did I wait so long? It was a blast!

I think I’ve put it off all these years I’ve lived in Vancouver just because I didn’t think the building looked all that tall. I mean, I’ve been to CN Tower. I’ve been to the top of Eiffel Tower in Paris and Namsan Tower in Seoul. I just figured, how spectacular could the view from Harbour Centre possibly be? But the Vancouver lookout easily rivaled all those other great views.

Sadly, this was the one day of the week I didn’t take my camera to work. You’ll just have to go and see the view yourself, since the Youtube videos I’ve found to date just don’t do it justice.

Notwithstanding what the Chinese Lunar Calendar says, this year is the Year of the Frog, according to conservation groups worldwide (CBCnews.ca). They are trying to call attention to the dire threat faced by our froggy friends these days from a rampant fungus (and presumably other causes discovered be devotees of the Frogger video game, such as fast-moving cars and trucks). Vancouver Aquarium will be holding a special exhibit to highlight the threat.

But the sad future for frogs isn’t really breaking news. I remember in high school biology class hearing about how the permeability of frogs’ skin makes them awfully susceptible to environmental hazards. Instead of keeping an eye on the canary in the coal mine, environment-watchers really ought to be paying attention to the health of our little green buddies.

The war on terror is over. We won. You have George Bush Jr.  to thank for this happy, shocking development. God bless America.

Head over to Fast Fictions for the details on how the most reviled American president in modern history made the world safer for democracy and consigned the terrorists to a choice between camel buggery and death.

You’ll be glad you did.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, you’ll immediately understand the basic premise of crowdsourcing: no one is as smart as all of us. When contestants ask the audience to vote for the correct answer, they’re hoping (and are usually correct) that the majority of the audience will be able to give the correct answer.

Combing the Vancouver blogs for inspiration, I’ve come across social marketing maven Monica Hamburg’s interesting take on crowdsourcing: for corporations, basically just a way to avoid contracting out work to specialists and get lots of raw data or content at little or no cost using the viral data sucking power of the Internet.

I’m not certain it’s all that evil; after all, companies do have to put some specialists to work analyzing all the data and suggestions they get from thousands of strangers in order to utilize it. On balance, crowdsourcing may actually be a pretty positive thing when it comes to keeping our society’s professional elite employed.

On a personal note, I know that I’m benefiting from crowdsourcing with a new viral video marketing campaign I’m in the process of developing from a client who pays me to create it. The best video creators will be awarded with prizes… but am I just exploiting all the ones who submit their stuff for free and don’t win prizes?  Does it qualify as crowdsourcing if it’s using the Internet to submit promotional material for my client, or is it just plain-old fashioned marketing?

Maybe crowdsourcing itself isn’t really anything new. Maybe it’s just a catchy name for something we’ve always had.

Canadian imperialists are interfering once again in politics beyond the borders of our nefarious dominion. No good can come of this.

Canadians are heading down by the busload to the United States to help one political faction take power away from the incumbent regime, according to the Metro News in Vancouver. How much longer will the world have to put up with our Canuckian political adventurism?

In all seriousness, a couple of Canadians heading down to the United States to support Barack Obama are not a direct threat to democracy in the United States. On the other hand, Canadians really ought to think about how it would look if the reverse was happening and Americans were busing up here to help Harper, Dion or old Jack get a leg up on their rivals.

The Greg Felton anti-Semitic literary travesty at Vancouver Public Library took place tonight. Owing to professional commitments, I was unable to attend. Hopefully, someone else was able to come and smack the author over the head with a bag full of intellectual heft flavored by the side of good. Vancouverific true blue blog Covenant Zone has the most complete commentary on the issue (hopefully with a writeup on the event in question soon to follow), much in line with my own views:

“We cannot entirely answer the real question that the library’s invitation of an “anti-Zionist” to highlight “Freedom to Read Week” poses unless we attempt to explain how professional librarians could be enticed into thinking that Felton’s claims of a Jewish (or “Zionist”) conspiracy to run America and its foreign policy, to create al Qaeda (and 9/11) as America’s whipping boy, had any kind of merit.”

Those librarians have got a looooooooooot of explaining to do.

UPDATE: Covenant Zone has published a comprehensive report on the riotous event at the library. A quick note: some of it seems to be written verbatim from notes recording Felton’s words verbatim without a qualifier, so don’t be confused when the author of the blog seems to be agreeing with Felton’s conspiracy theories. He ain’t.

I met the most important Matt in the world today at Vancouver’s super-cool blogger conference, Northern Voice. Matthew Mullenweg is the number one Matt on the planet, according to Google, thanks to his work as founding developer of the Wordpress blogging platform. For those who happen to like the visual layout and functionality of this blog, you can thank Matt and his friends.

To me, he is the blogging equivalent of Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the first working typewriter (I was tempted to make the comparison to Johannes Gutenberg (the inventor of movable-type printing in Europe), but let’s face it, there were many blogging platforms before Wordpress ever came along).

To find out more about this guy, just follow these directions which are the only information to be found on his business card:

1. Go to google.com
2. Type in “Matt”
3. Press “I’m feeling lucky”

That’s one cool business card. By the way, this guy is Matt’s number-one competition for top Matt-spot on Google.

Oh, didn’t you know that Al Queda doesn’t really exist, the White House organized 9/11 and the Jews are behind the BIG CONSPIRACY?

Well, you would know it if you read and believed what you read in former Vancouver Courier columnist/Arab webzine writer/neo-Nazi website commentator Greg Felton’s book. At least, you would “know” that Greg Felton thinks these things, even if most educated people would dismiss them as the hateful ravings of a lunatic. When asked why the Vancouver Public Library’s people chose Felton to host a Freedom to Read event happening on Monday at VPL, the Library’s rationale seemed to pretty much boil down to: “well, it’s not hate speech”. Yet, as BC author and journalist Terry Glavin wrote in the Vancouver Sun, what exactly is the word for “Felton’s thesis, which is that a Zionist ‘junta’ was at work on Sept. 11, 2001, and that al-Qaida is a mere concoction in a secret plan to subvert the American Constitution, demonize Muslims and commit mass murder?”

This event isn’t about intellectual freedom; indeed, this incident seems to demonstrate that Canada is a country where the “freedom to read” is already so ingrained that the only books that don’t get read are the ones that don’t deserve it. When an author fills up a book with hateful lies, the vast majority of the population studiously ignores it.

That Felton’s book hasn’t been reviewed by mainstream media and no libraries in Canada stock it isn’t an indication of censorship; it’s really just that Canadians are too smart to waste their time with rotten books.

This story is well-covered by the dauntless Terry Glavin here, with additional erudite commentary by Covenant Zone.

Apparently, it has taken time out of Vancouver marketing maven and blogger extraordinaire Jeremy Lim’s social agenda - although, to judge by the title of his blog, marketing had already ruined his life prior to the advent of Facebook.

As a butterfly on the periphery of Vancouver’s tech/marketing/blogging/whatever scene, I’ve definitely heard my share of anecdotes about whether or not social media applications are just taking up too much time to be worth it. As an addiction, I’d say Facebook hit me pretty hard at first, but in time, I’ve definitely gotten control over it. That may have something to do with the fact that I NEVER CLICK ON ANY FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS THAT I THINK WILL WASTE TIME, like Werewolves versus Vampires (who the hell cares that you’ve infected 200 chumps? What, do you actually get to boss them around in a hypnotic state, or what? If so, then I really do need to start infecting chumps…). This ensures I only get a quality Facebooking every time without the distracting (and annoying extras).

Also, this ensures people don’t post pornographic images on my Facebook site, which is always a good thing. Some things really ought to remain between a man and his monitor.

Castro steps down as President of Cuba! Now, he is to be replaced by… Castro.

Who knew? Cubans had a revolution to replace a vile dictatorship with another dictatorship that has evolved into… a vile monarchy. Wasn’t that stage of political development supposed to take place centuries BEFORE the arrival of communism?

Ah, well. The people at Stopwar.ca must be happy. As they might say, hands off the Latin American kings! Democrats, go put a sock in it!