www.community.techvillage.com Blogs

New Media BC'S National Digital Media Day Celebration Sept 25

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:36:00 -0700

New Media BC'S National Digital Media Day Celebration

September 25, 2008 5:00 pm
Radical Entertainment, 8th Floor, 369 Terminal Ave, Vancouver, BC

Join us to celebrate BC’s 1000+ new media companies and our position as a world centre for digital media excellence!

Meet BC’s digerati as they gather to celebrate the inaugural National Digital Media Day! 350+ people are expected for an evening of mixing and mingling and catching up with the rest of Canada.

5:00 - 10:00pm
National Digital Media Day Mixer / Launch Party 5 / Politube Shorts Screening presented by New Forms Festival

Event Details ?

Date: September 25, 2008
Time: 5:00 pm
Location: Radical Entertainment, 8th Floor, 369 Terminal Ave, Vancouver, BC
Organized By: New Media BC

New Media BC Opportunity Alert - a resource and matchmaking service for the digital media industry

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:42:25 -0700

This is an interesting resource for techvillage members and digital media companies. A 1 year membership is free.

http://www.opportunityalert.ca/en/home

Opportunity Alert is a matchmaking service for digital media companies seeking partnership opportunities. Opportunity Alert is managed byNew Media BC

New Media BC Opportunity Alert - a resource and matchmaking service for the digital media industry

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:41:53 -0700

This is an interesting resoruce for techvillage memebrs and digital media companies. A 1 year membership is free.

http://www.opportunityalert.ca/en/home

Opportunity Alert is a matchmaking service for digital media companies seeking partnership opportunities. Opportunity Alert is managed byNew Media BC

Fort Nelson Northern Rockies Website and E-marketing RFP - submissions due due by 4:30pm (Pacific Standard Time) on Wednesday August 12th, 2008

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:38:05 -0700

As part of a marketing strategy, and out of need for a better site for our citizens and potential investors to access information about the Northern Rockies Regional District and the Town of Fort Nelson, The NRRD would like to revamp its website (www.northernrockies.org) into an easy-to-use modern format, while maintaining a high level of flexibility in order to adapt quickly to changing needs and events, and meets the needs of the local government in communicating information to our citizens.

Equally important is this project’s ability to attract new business and investment through e-marketing and the publication of pertinent economic development information and links on our website.

It is imperative that the NRRD be able to maintain, update, and modify www.northernrockies.org in the future.

Overview of Scope of Work

The Town of Fort Nelson and the NRRD are seeking a qualified website developer (successful bidder) to:
1. redevelop www.northernrockies.org for the Town and Regional District
2. adapt the information in our old website to the new one, and produce new content as necessary
3. train Town Staff in the use of the new website, so that updates can be quickly and easily done
4. develop an e-marketing strategy that can be implemented by Town Staff or a future contractor as opportunity and budget allow.

Any questions regarding the scope of work outlined in this request must be directed to: Tyler Mattheis – Community Development Officer at 250-774-2541 ext. 261 or by e-mail at tmattheis@northernrockies.org.
Alternatively, questions may be directed to: Randy McLean, Chief Administrative Officer at 250-774-2541 or by e-mail at rmclean@northernrockies.org.

www.emilybeamer.com now updated!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:34:29 -0700

www.emilybeamer.com now updated!

check it out.

thanks

BC Tops Canadas Internet Usage

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:58:57 -0700

78% of BC ers reported using Net in 2007 compared with 73% national average.

Source: Joe Couture, The Vancouver Province, Friday 13 June 2008

British Columbians are Canada’s biggest Internet users and that’s no surprise to Gisele Baxter, an expert on Net culture. “I think we still think of the West Coast – and I think this is as true of Canada as it is of the States – as sort of a frontier, a place where there’s a sense f newness and possibility. It’s still a culture that’s more apt to embrace new technologies,” said Baxter, a University of BC professor, noting Microsoft and Apple both started on the West Coast.

Statistics Canada said that 78 per cent of BC residents reported using the internet in 2007, compared with a national average of 73 per cent. High usage in metropolitan areas boosted BC’s numbers. In Bancouver, 78 per cent used the Internet and in Victoria, 83 per cent. The survey found that 96 per cent of those aged 16 to 24 used the Net, compared with 29 per cent of those over 65. In households making more than $95,000 annually, 91 per cent of people used the Internet, compared with 47 per cent in households making less than $24, 000 a year.

Among those with at least some post-secondary education, 84 per cent used the Internet, while only 58 per cent of those with less education did. Baxter said students are becoming increasingly more comfortable with the technology. “Now, if you find a student who doesn’t use the Internet, it’s more of a political decision – avoiding bandwagon jumping or going green or something,” she said. “It’s not that they haven’t had the opportunity to be exposed to it.”

The most significant thing Baxter has noticed in the Internet’s evolution over the last five years is an increased emphasis on interactivity. Users can post much more of their own content today than they could in the recent past, giving growth to sites like YouTube. “It’s been a gradual change, but a relatively rapid one,” she said. “Once the technology became established, it very quickly evolved.” Baxter’s assessment is backed up by the StatsCan figures.

E-mail and general browsing are still the most popular Internet activities, according to the survey, but banking and ordering goods are also big, and increasing numbers of Canadians are posting videos and photos online and contributing to blogs and discussion groups, the increasing level of interactive options has had an effect on every other aspect of pop culture, Baxter said – hence the rise of Idol-type reality show where viewers call or text in their votes.

BC Institute of Technology student Junstine Sing, like thousands of other BC ers, says she would have trouble living without the Net. “If I didn’t have access, I’d be very unhappy to put it lightly,” says Sing.

Internet Use Across Country

British Columbia: 78%

Alberta: 77%

Ontario: 75%

Saskatchewan: 73%

Manitoba: 70%

Quebec: 69%

Prince Edward Island: 69%

Nova Scotia: 69%

New Brunswick: 65%

Newfoundland and Labrador: 61%

Source: Statistics Canada

Open Source Video editing, Animation, Effects etc...

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:39:27 -0700

Here's a brief but useful list of some really good open source visual effects, animation and editing tools. Most of which are pretty specific, but if you are interested and don't want to fork out the big bucks, these are great tools... for FREE.

Video Editing and Effects http://jahshaka.org

open source video editing, effects, keying, rotoscoping, titleing and animation. I've played with this app and have to say it's pretty solid. It doesn't capture or have any dv deck control built in but so far, it's pretty good.

3d Modeling and animation http://www.blender.org/

a fantastic 3d modeling and animation tool that has been taking the 3D world by storm. It has a great community base for tutorials and support and of course Development (following the open source model).

Voodoo Camera and Motion Tracking http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/download.html

This is an amazing tool. Equivalent comercial applications run upwards of $10,000/seat (boujou). This application estimates the camera parameters from any video footage and constructs a 3d Scene for Maya, Lightwave, Softimage and of course the above mentioned Blender.

3d Human Model Creator - http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/download.html

MakeHuman is an excellent character creator for the 3d Animator that doesn't have the modeling skills or the time to generate fully articulated human characters.

Canada's Largest Green Data Center Being Built by gigaCENTER With Help of IBM

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:42:54 -0700

KELOWNA, BC and MONTREAL - 11 Jun 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has signed an agreement to help build a $ CDN 75 million, 150,000 square foot "green" data center in the heart of British Columbia with gigaCENTER Services Corporation, in partnership with RackForce Networks.

The new facility called gigaCENTER Services Corp will be among the most efficient and "greenest" large-scale data centers in Canada. It is being developed using IBM's modular approach and will include power and cooling capabilities to support a variety of technologies from high-density blade servers to mainframes.

"We are building a data center with IBM in a safe and secure location to respond to growing issues about natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods," said Tim Dufour, CEO of both RackForce and gigaCENTER. "This center will support the latest technologies using 'green' hydro-generated power and the most efficient, environmentally friendly design. The IBM design is calculated at a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of 1.38, which will mean our facility will be among the most efficient in the industry."

Watch Video>

IBM products and services will be delivered over the three-year construction, with the first phase scheduled to open in December 2008. When completed, the facility will support 70,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space and create jobs for up to 100 employees.

Customers of the new center will be able to rent space in increments as small as one cabinet, up to dedicated cages and private rooms. The center will provide facilities to support on demand server capacity services and Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, delivered through RackForce and IBM Global Services.

"A year ago when IBM launched Project Big Green, one of its goals was to help identify ways to optimize data center usage and reduce energy consumption needs," said Steve Sams, IBM vice president, Global Site and Facilities Services. "This new data center is an example of this initiative. By offering 'green' colocation and data center services, gigaCENTER and IBM will enable enterprises to meet their corporate and IT environmental goals."

About RackForce

RackForce is a leading provider of green data center infrastructure and network services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its superior data center design, automated systems and virtualization expertise it provides highly reliable On Demand servers, colocation and connectivity to a worldwide customer base.

About gigaCENTER

gigaCenter Services Corporation is a leader in the design, construction and operation of premium green data centers engineered to support the rigorous computing demands of today and the future. gigaCENTER will provide power and cooling capabilities to support a variety of technologies including high density blade servers, virtualized server clusters and mainframes.

About IBM

For more information about IBM, go to www.ibm.com.



Contact(s) information
Joanne Fortin IBM Communications - Canada (514) 964-8558 Fortin@ca.ibm.com	Tim Willeford IBM Media relations - USA (914) 766-4618 twilleford@us.ibm.com

Adobe Newsletter: The Edge June 2008

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:41:57 -0700

June 2008

Send to a friend Archive Help Unsubscribe

Featured content
	Experience Design Manager Matt Snow provides a behind-the-scenes look at the Adobe XD Mobile and Devices team and demos several applications currently under development. View video ›

In this issue
See what's in store for the next release of Adobe® Dreamweaver® by Scott Fegette		Learn how to geocode with Papervision3D and Adobe Flex® by Mark Walters
The edge of Flash® by Rob Ford		Project profile: Sprout Builder grows with Flex by Julie Campagna
Get the scoop on the next release of Adobe Fireworks® by Aaron Beall		Coding standards: What are they and why should you use them? by James Polanco
Untravel Media enables unique sightseeing tours on mobile devices by Ira Hochman		To ensure you experience the Edge as intended, we recommend that you download and install the latest version of Flash Player.

istockphoto: Tip of the week

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:33:58 -0700

Congratulations! You've taken a magnificent photo or you've just purchased the perfect one for your project. The end is not so near, though because as a design professional you want to put your custom stamp of creativity on the image.

Many beginner designers open the Curves tool, slide the point left or right, close the box and often undo the change. Once you master the subtleties of the Curves tool, it will be your most powerful tool for controlling tonality and color regardless of whether your image is too light or too dark.

Here are some Curves tips the iStock design team picked up from the Kelby Training PhotoShop CS3 conference today in Calgary. Think of Curves as a blind on a window. When the blind is all the way down, there's no light or total blackness, when it's all the way up you have maximum light or white.

If there's an area of the image you would like to darken to bring out the detail of a shot, open Image>Adjustments>Curves. Then click and hold the eye-dropper tool to see the area you want to lighten, noted by the hollow circle moving on the graph.
As you are using the eye-dropper control and click (PC) or command and click (Mac) and this will create a first point (Point A) on your Curves graph. From here you want to drag that point down (not left or right) to darken it. You may notice that this darkens the rest of your image, but don't worry.
To correct this extra darkness, create a new point (Point B) by clicking in the Curves graph just under Point A. Point B is your fixing point and you should move that point ever so slightly, keeping it beneath Point A, until the tonal range is to your liking.

Banish your fear of Curves forever!

Banff Venture Forum 2008 - Call for Presenting Companies

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:32:25 -0700

2008 Call For Presenting Companies

Banff Venture Forum 2008

10 Years of Financing
in the Heart of the Rocky Mountains

October 2 & 3, 2008
Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel

Call for Banff Venture Forum 2008 presenting companies in the information and communications technologies, traditional and alternative energy technologies, clean technologies, life sciences, agricultural biotechnology and medical devices fields.

Present your early or growth stage IT, Energy Technology or Life Sciences company to technology investors gathered from across North America.
Build your network with the leaders of technology commercialization at the premier investment forum in Canada.
Past Banff Venture Forum presenting companies have reported over $300 million in financing and M&A activity.
Get early exposure to the Banff Venture Forum selection committee, comprised of leading private equity investors.

APPLY NOW! Application forms and information available at the Banff Venture Forum 2008 Website: Apply online.

Investor and general delegate registration is now open! Visit www.banffventureforum.com for registration, updates & announcements.

Leading Industry Sponsors

Winlaw Illustrator/Designer wins award in Japan

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:46:01 -0700

Emily Beamer, of Winlaw, recently won the Bronze prize in the interenational Illustration contest 2008 for Graniph Designs of Tokyo Japan. The contest was featured in Nylon magazine. Her illustration will be sold on t-shirts in Tokyo at Graniph boutiques and on www.graniph.com

Emily's work can be viewed on www.emilybeamer.com

Emily is old school and illustrates only by hand, using pen and ink on paper, not computers. She likes to draw plants, birds, and guts.

KAST Spirit of Innovation Awards a Huge Success!

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:26:55 -0700

Tech Village recently attended the KAST Spirit of Innovation Awards as we were a finalist in the category of Innovative Organization. Although we didn't win in our category, we did greatly benefit from the broad exposure and networking opportunities.

Thanks to KAST for coordinating this event and we look forward to the next one, hopefully we won't have to wait four years! Check out some photos of the event:

Mozilla aims for record-breaking Firefox 3 launch

Thu, 29 May 2008 09:22:57 -0700

Ars Techinica

By Ryan Paul | Published: May 29, 2008 - 08:20AM CT

Our testing of the latest release candidate reinforces the belief held by many that Firefox 3 represents a major breakthrough in performance, usability, and resource efficiency. But that isn't enough for its intrepid developers, who also plan to set a new record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

Mozilla plans to host a worldwide Download Day following the upcoming official release of Firefox 3. The number of total unique downloads will be tabulated and submitted to the Guinness World Records organization for evaluation and potential inclusion in the Guinness World Records. There is no existing record for most software downloaded in 24 hours, so Mozilla has a good chance of being the first to appear inGuinness.

Mozilla is encouraging users and enthusiasts to participate by downloading Firefox 3 on the day of its release. Those who want to preemptively show their support and get a reminder when the release comes can sign up and pledge to download at the Spread Firefox web site. Firefox enthusiasts are also planning Download Day parties in many regions.

Mozilla's community-driven Spread Firefox web site announced earlier this year that the total number of Firefox downloads had exceeded 500 million. The number on the download counter continues to climb and will likely get a big boost following the Firefox 3 release. Statistics published by Mozilla's John Lilly last year revealed that Firefox had approximately 125 million daily users—the number has since grown to approximately 175 million. Firefox market share continues to grow and is especially high in some parts of Europe.

We have been testing Firefox 3 since the earliest alpha releases and have consistently been impressed with its performance improvements and strong feature set. After the upcoming release, Firefox will hopefully continue to see increased growth.

What is Web 3.0?

Mon, 26 May 2008 11:12:51 -0700

Web 3.0, according to Wikipedia, is a term used to describe the future of the web. Web 2.0 would refer to the recent evolution of the web. A brief description of this evolution would be apropos. Wikipedia explores the following ideas in the first 179 words of its definition of Web 2.0
“Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. According to Tim O’Reilly:

‘Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.’”

In Wikipedia’s definition of Web2.0, we’re given Tim O’reilly’s definition as well. 2.0 might also be referred to as the second iteration of the operating system of the Internet. In this version, social software enabled the masses to publish information to the platform, search helped to provide access to and sorting of all of this information, and data portability (via XML based web services) has enabled us to use the information in a variety of ways, most prominently by mashing up the information with other emerging web technologies. We could further elaborate on Web2.0 and revise or add to Tim or Wikipedia’s definition, but for the purposes of this creative exercise I will focus on expert perspective of Web3.0, or Web3, in addition to my own perspective on what 3.0 is and how it might evolve.

Of course we start with Wikipedia’s definition of 3.0, which includes a definition by some of the most prescient minds around the Internet operating platform. According to Wikipedia:

“In May 2006, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web stated:

‘People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.’

At the Seoul Digital Forum in May 2007, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was asked to define Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. He responded:

‘Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and I think you’ve just invented Web 3.0. But if I were to guess what Web 3.0 is, I would tell you that it’s a different way of building applications… My prediction would be that Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as applications which are pieced together. There are a number of characteristics: the applications are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the applications can run on any device, PC or mobile phone, the applications are very fast and they’re very customizable. Furthermore, the applications are distributed virally: literally by social networks, by email. You won’t go to the store and purchase them… That’s a very different application model than we’ve ever seen in computing.’

At the Technet Summit in November 2006, Jerry Yang, founder and Chief of Yahoo, stated:

‘Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium…the distinction between professional, semi-professional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.’

At the same Technet Summit, Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, stated a simpler formula for defining the phases of the Web:

‘Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.’

Web 3.0 is frequently referred to as an environment consisting of intelligent web-based semantic applications and desktops, where the web is a database of information published via reusable formats such as XML, RDF, ICDL and other micro formats. By some, it is perceived as part of digital media contribution to the evolutionary path to artificial intelligence that can provide access to information driven by laws of mathematical probability previously calculated by Shannon’s Laws and Bayes’ Theorem. Web3.0 may bring the realization of the Semantic Web, where meaning can be extracted from data representations such as hypertext and utility driven by meaning.

Web 3.0 is also called the “Internet of Services”, where all of the aforementioned promote technology driven creative extrapolations and recombination’s of the information in line with new emerging data services. Again Wikipedia describes Web 3.0 as an “Executable” Web Abstraction Layer - driven by user generated content and broader, more advanced and accessible social media and publishing applications.

Digital Ethnographers such as Mike Wesch explore Web 3.0 as it relates to socio-technological values and the impact of the Internet on communication, thought discovery and the redefinition of information ownership. His video interpretation of the future of the web is compelling and visionary.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Fri, 23 May 2008 11:29:11 -0700

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

By Clay Shirky on April 26, 2008 10:48 AM

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

NYT: The history of geekdom

Fri, 23 May 2008 11:23:24 -0700

The Alpha Geeks

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 23, 2008

In 1950, Dr. Seuss published a book called “If I Ran the Zoo.” It contained the sentence: “I’ll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!” According to the psychologist David Anderegg, that’s believed to be the first printed use of the word “nerd” in modern English.

David Brooks

The next year, Newsweek noticed that nerd was being used in Detroit as a substitute for “square.” But, as Ander-egg writes in his book, “Nerds,” the term didn’t really blossom onto mass consciousness until The Fonz used it in “Happy Days” in the mid- to late-1970s. And thus began what you might call the ascent of nerdism in modern America.

At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades. The word described a high-school or college outcast who was persecuted by the jocks, preps, frat boys and sorority sisters. Nerds had their own heroes (Stan Lee of comic book fame), their own vocations (Dungeons & Dragons), their own religion (supplied by George Lucas and “Star Wars”) and their own skill sets (tech support). But even as “Revenge of the Nerds” was gracing the nation’s movie screens, a different version of nerd-dom was percolating through popular culture. Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads’s David Byrne popularized a cool geek style that’s led to Moby, Weezer, Vampire Weekend and even self-styled “nerdcore” rock and geeksta rappers.

The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls — Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and so on.

Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

Geeks not only rebelled against jocks, but they distinguished themselves from alienated and self-pitying outsiders who wept with recognition when they read “Catcher in the Rye.” If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In “The Laws of Cool,” Alan Liu writes: “Cool is a feeling for information.” When someone has that dexterity, you know it.

Tina Fey, who once was on the cover of Geek Monthly magazine, has emerged as a symbol of the geek who grows into a swan. There is now a cool geek fashion style, which can be found on shopping sites all over the Web (think Japanese sneakers and text-laden T-shirts). Schwinn now makes a retro-looking Sid/Nancy bicycle, which is sweet and clunky even though it has a faux-angry name. There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

Paul Krugman is off today.

Fontstruct - Build, Share, Download!

Mon, 19 May 2008 20:00:38 -0700

FontStruct is a free font-building tool, completely online. It's quick and easy and oh... did I mention... FREE!

Also, sign in and check out the gallery. All the fonts created here are developed under the Creative Commons license. Give the credit where it's due and the fonts here are Free!

http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

iStockphoto Tip Of The Week-05.13.08-Eye can see clearly now

Tue, 13 May 2008 17:53:58 -0700

If you are unable to see the message below, click here to view.

Your monitor is a looking glass into the visual world of iStockphoto. It's important to set it up correctly but not surprisingly, many people don’t. One of the most important elements, and one of the most difficult to understand, is screen resolution. The higher the resolution, the more you can see. On the flip side, with the same screen, the higher the resolution, the smaller the items appear on screen.

iStockphoto is optimized to work best at a minimum resolution of 1024x768. Our site reflows for bigger monitors so that you're able to see more results at once, which speeds up your search for the perfect image.

CRT (heavy monitor shaped like an old TV)
The best way to set your screen resolution on a CRT (cathode ray tube) is with a bit of experimentation. As you increase the resolution of a CRT, the refresh rate drops (the number of times the screen is drawn each second). You'll want to increase the resolution as much as possible while keeping the refresh rate at a minimum of 75-85 Hz. Check right now. Anything lower than 75 Hz will result in a noticeable flicker as the screen refreshes, which is the most common factor in eye strain and fatigue. Pick the highest resolution with an acceptable refresh rate, while keeping the elements and fonts at a comfortable size for your eyes.

LCD (thin flat monitor)
LCDs (liquid crystal display) don't exhibit the same kind of flicker as CRTs, so lower refresh rates are acceptable. The important thing with an LCD is that you're running it at its native resolution. What's your panel's native resolution? They're all different, but a few quick searches on Google or your owner's manual should give you the answer. What might be more important is how you have your LCD connected. Generally, an all-digital connection like DVI gives better results than a typical analog VGA connection. If your computer and LCD have a DVI connector, use it instead of the VGA.

They've been around almost as long as the Web, but lately they've made stunning gains in influence. Are they the new music labels?

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:28:37 -0700

Music blogs: The new wall of sound

by Greg Sandoval at CNET

Technology may have made it simple to obtain digital music, but it hasn't provided an easy way to sift through millions of tracks to find the tunes we like.

The Internet has, however, connected music fans to a legion of hardcore aficionados who help steer people to new music. Think of Barry, Jack Black's rock-addicted character from the filmHigh Fidelity, with a blog.

Stereogum founder Scott Lapatine has had to fend off accusations that his blog is going corporate.

(Credit: Stereogum)

The difference is that some of today's most popular music bloggers may someday be worth more than Barry ever dreamed of earning in that record store. Music blogs are nearly as old as the Web, but the past year has brought unprecedented growth, influence, and dollars to the sector as people look for help discovering new music. Now, the most popular blogs, such asStereogum, BrooklynVegan, and Pitchfork, look less and less like Internet fanzines and more like tech start-ups.

Last month, Stereogum was sold to social-media site Buzznet, while Pitchfork made a splashy foray into music videos that spurred observers to call the site the "new MTV." Music blogs are organizing concerts, being quoted on television, and releasing independent albums--just like a record label. The changes have spurred some to declare there is no limit to how far the blogs can go. Others fear they might lose their edge if they go corporate.

"With success come changes," said Yancey Strickler, eMusic's editorial director and a longtime observer of the music blogosphere. "The way these things normally go is you'll start to generate a lot of attention, and it gets harder to just keep writing a music blog. It can become more of a managerial role and less about curation and finding interesting ways to discover music."

If some music bloggers are overwhelmed by success, it's because they never planned for it. Pitchfork was launched in 1995 by a then-teenage Ryan Schreiber, who wrote from his parents' basement. Stereogum was started in 2003 as a workplace distraction for founder Scott Lapatine.

Hardly any were trained writers or music-industry veterans. They lured readers through wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and a hunk-of-burning love for music.

The music blogs also didn't try to cater to mass audiences--at least at first. They focused on niches. For example, BrooklynVegan developed a reputation for being the must-read blog for concert information in New York. At Pitchfork, Schreiber was early in covering independent music; his site is now famous for spotting new talent, including the band Arcade Fire.

Another sign of how far the blogs have come: A year ago, some of the big record companies were sending "cease and desist" letters to blogs that posted unauthorized MP3 files to their sites. Now, Strickler said, many of those same companies plead with the blogs to host their music.

How big is too big?
Gerd Leonhard, the tech sector's self-described media futurist, argues that the top music blogswill use their popularity and influence to build empires.

"I'm kind of in the minority of my friends or anyone I know. I'm the only one who reads Rolling Stoneor any of the music magazines."

--Scott Lapatine,
founder, Stereogum

"The leading music blogs will become what used to be called record labels," Leonhard wrote in a blog last month. "The people running them will be those sharp, tuned-in, hyper-networked and resourceful BlogJs formerly known as bloggers...these disruptors, thought leaders, and influencers will be our future broadcasters."

To this point, there's little chance Universal or EMI feel threatened. Pitchfork sees 1.5 million unique users per month, while most other music blogs only see a fraction of that. Regardless, Leonhard says there is nothing to keep the blogs from expanding into other areas such as signing artists, selling downloads, and promoting concerts.

Some of the blogs have already begun doing much of this. Last July, Stereogum issued a digital album, OKX, a tribute to the 10th anniversary of Radiohead's classic OK Computer. Pitchfork has hosted a music festival in Chicago every year since 2005. Schreiber has even made the jump to online video with the launch last month of Pitchfork.tv, which hosts music-related clips.

In the site's first week, more than 1 million videos were viewed and critics have given the site a thumb's up.

"The way Rolling Stonecompetes is we pick up the phone and bring original reporting. We take advantage of our access. Most blogs don't have the staffs to pick up the phone."

--Nathan Brackett,
deputy managing editor,
Rolling Stone

But if they grow too big or allow corporate America to hijack their editorial content, couldn't these sites lose credibility with their young readers?

Even before Buzznet acquired Stereogum, the blog had strong ties to big business. Among the site's backers was the Pilot Group, an investment firm headed by former AOL honcho Bob Pittman. The real trouble for Stereogum came after Buzznet bought it. That was when it was reported that Universal Music Group was a Buzznet investor. To some observers, this meant that one of the major music companies was now in a position to influence Stereogum's editorial content.

Scott Lapatine, the site's founder and editor in chief, didn't want to delve too deeply into such criticism but did say there's no way anyone except him is going to steer the direction of editorial content. "I'm still running the site," Lapatine said. "A lot of what was reported about the sale was inaccurate. Our editorial isn't going to change."

Should Rolling Stone watch its back?
The bloggers interviewed said they have absolutely no intentions of trying to replacing the record companies. But how about knocking off Rolling Stone as the big daddy of music publications?

Well, the truth is, the iconic music magazine doesn't hold much sway with the bloggers.

"I'm kind of in the minority of my friends or anyone I know," Lapatine said. "I'm the only one who reads Rolling Stone or any of the music magazines."

Nathan Brackett, Rolling Stone's deputy managing editor, doesn't blink. He says there isn't any blog out there that can rival his magazine's readership or level of journalism.

"I wouldn't call what they do as writing," Brackett said. "The blogs do the really quick 50-word update on what a band's doing. They'll write about (singer) Lilly Allen releasing a new EP or (that the band) Man Man is preparing an album. The way Rolling Stone competes is we pick up the phone and bring original reporting. We take advantage of our access. Most blogs don't have the staffs to pick up the phone."

www.community.techvillage.com Blogs

New Media BC'S National Digital Media Day Celebration Sept 25

New Media BC'S National Digital Media Day Celebration

Event Details ?

New Media BC Opportunity Alert - a resource and matchmaking service for the digital media industry

This is an interesting resource for techvillage members and digital media companies. A 1 year membership is free.

New Media BC Opportunity Alert - a resource and matchmaking service for the digital media industry

This is an interesting resoruce for techvillage memebrs and digital media companies. A 1 year membership is free.

Fort Nelson Northern Rockies Website and E-marketing RFP - submissions due due by 4:30pm (Pacific Standard Time) on Wednesday August 12th, 2008

www.emilybeamer.com now updated!

BC Tops Canadas Internet Usage

Open Source Video editing, Animation, Effects etc...

Canada's Largest Green Data Center Being Built by gigaCENTER With Help of IBM

Adobe Newsletter: The Edge June 2008

istockphoto: Tip of the week

Banff Venture Forum 2008 - Call for Presenting Companies

2008 Call For Presenting Companies

Banff Venture Forum 2008

10 Years of Financing in the Heart of the Rocky Mountains

October 2 & 3, 2008 Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel

Leading Industry Sponsors

Winlaw Illustrator/Designer wins award in Japan

KAST Spirit of Innovation Awards a Huge Success!

Mozilla aims for record-breaking Firefox 3 launch

Ars Techinica

What is Web 3.0?

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

NYT: The history of geekdom

The Alpha Geeks

Fontstruct - Build, Share, Download!

iStockphoto Tip Of The Week-05.13.08-Eye can see clearly now

They've been around almost as long as the Web, but lately they've made stunning gains in influence. Are they the new music labels?

Music blogs: The new wall of sound

BC Tops Canadas Internet Usage

10 Years of Financing
in the Heart of the Rocky Mountains

October 2 & 3, 2008
Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel