From Writing
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Living Can Kill You
“Living Can Kill You” first appeared as a chapbook poems in 1994, before being the name used to describe a regular blog starting in June of 2000.
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Holy Fuck!
Ironically, I never saw the Toronto band name-checked in the title when I lived in that city yet I heard lots about them (and again missed them) when they played a few block away from where I now live in Seattle. The band got rave reviews for their two recent performances and helped raise Toronto and Canada’s reputation amongst the often jaded scenesters in that U.S. city. Not good enough for the government of Canada who cites Holy Fuck as a reason for cutting funding to Canadian artists.
Toronto itself tried to cut another art institution today, but this time it was a tree. After the famous Queen West graffiti tree at Queen West and Peter feel over yesterday, the city was going to turn it into mulch. Thankfully, it was not to be.
That being said, another institution of my Toronto Years (as I think I’ll call them) is not so lucky. The Lakeview Lunch dinner has outlived its post-Cocktail revival. For a few years it was the highlight of Dundas west Bathurst but it quickly declined in direct contrast to the meteoric rise Ossington’s transformation into a the city’s destination strip.
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CBC: near- or farsighted?
Recently Canada’s public broadcaster urged the CRTC to “reject old assumptions about new media” and claimed that the consumption of broadcast media is not being negatively effected by the Internet.
This defies the observable evidence yet manages to be based in some careful shaped facts. For example, CBC’s paper claims that:
Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool. … These are the types of activities that are driving Canadians to spend time using the Internet. They are not activities that are substitutable with TV and radio usage: these activities are completely different than the time spent with traditional media.
Additionally, it claims one percent of Canadians watch television online. While the claims may be technically true, the arguments are on very weak ground.
True, the government’s research arm found almost everyone emails or searches for information online; but it also determined 65 percent “view news or sports” online and 28 percent listen to online radio.
In fact, in the past three years, there was a 60 percent increase in the number of people watching TV or movies online (20 percent in 2007). Seeing how people consume TV online in the U.S., I will confidently conclude there will be a similar increase in Canada after another three years.
Similar narrow-sightedness can be found in its discussion around online revenue opportunities (which is too broad for me to discuss in detail, but I will mention online ad spending continues to increase and is predicated to surpass radio advertising).
Everyone likes to shape facts to support their own perception of reality, and the CBC, like many media institutions, could be seen to be struggling to maintain its default top-down organization structure. (As evidence: people in the trenches have continually been doing some incredible things at the CBC as it relates to the online world, but the upper management seems oblivious to the realities.)
My hope is, like the Canadian newspapers before, the CBC has merely crafted a report to discourage the CRTC from regulating the Internet (or at least the Canadian media companies online) and is not merely a result of a lack of vision.
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Minor changes for big effect in iPhone 2.0
Sure, there are some new applications to download, but the big win with the iPhone 2.0 software is the subtle changes to the user experience, proving, once again, how attention to details can exponentially increase the perceived value of a product. (The other part, though, is making sure people can access that product.)
The four most appreciated improvements were:
- The call-forwarding option seemed to be more readily available and appears as the first option on the phone setting screen (it may have done that before, but I feel like I’m doing less finger flicks to get there).
- There is a new icon on the home screen for Contacts, meaning I don’t have to search around for it before remembering contacts are listed in the Phone application.
- When entering passwords, the last character stays unobscured for a few seconds, providing you a chance to confirm your fat fingers actually hit the right virtual key.
- In email fields the spacebar is replaced automatically with “@” key — which is brilliant, since email addresses can’t have spaces but do require the at sign.
As for those aforementioned apps: when you download them a progress bar is overlaid on the apps’ slightly transparent icon. Once it’s installed, the bar disappear and the icon becomes opaque.
Overall, the apps I’ve played with have all seemed well-executed, maintaining the good level of quality established by Apple’s original applications. Still, there are some that seem merely to be upgrades to the mobile Web experience (The New York Times application, Google, and a few others).
In many ways, the iPhone app experience as a whole reminds me of last year’s Facebook app rush and, to a lesser extent, the shareware environment a decade-and-a-half ago. Like those periods, I expect iPhone app developers will soon get comfortable with this environment and start building apps that truly make use of the Apple’s impressive mobile platform.
(Despite some wondering whether there’s a sustainable business model for app development, the market should be robust. People did spend tens of thousands of dollars on applications before the store was even officially selling them and Canadians are even lining-up to pay exorbitant prices for the iPhone alone.)
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iPhone apps
Tomorrow, Canada will get its first legal iPhone, but, as well-covered in the press, it will pay an unbelievable price for the privilege. Coincidentally, I’ll be getting my second and handing the first one — the iPhone that introduced me to Seattle — to the same person who made packing tape a necessary feature for the phone.
Today, though, almost everyone with an iPhone seemed to be testing out the new 2.0 software and downloading apps as fast as they could. (People were walking blindly through hallways twisting their phones in frantic ways playing Super Monkey Ball.) No doubt there will dozens of “best of” lists in the coming days, but this is my attempt to keep track of those ones most interesting to me:
- Remote
- AIM
- Twitterific
- Evernote
- NYTimes
- PayPal
- PandoraRadio
- Things (expensive at $10, but for me, very worth it)
- Shazam
- PhoneSaber
- Either Cro-Mag Rally or the aforementioned Super Monkey Ball
Add you recommendations in the comments.
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BarCamp Seattle: The Father’s Day Edition
Sunday morning and another Seattle bus adventure means arriving once again late for BarCamp Seattle, thankfully, the sessions also got underway a bit later. Today begins (for me) with a discussion on social media design where I promote Pownce’s friend/fan and group pattern (potentially to be added to the new social media repository announced in the session) and will end with, apparently, Diet Coke and Mentos.
Yesterday’s session were a solid mix, starting with more formal presentations and easing into casual discussion outside in the sun by the end of the day. Seattle was finally starting to get the BarCamp spirit. In fact the tipping point seemed to be a session on Starbuck vs. Samwise — it was a relaxed, loose conversation that was tangentially about the attention economy. Other sessions on the economy, mobile “microformats” and accessibility provoked some good discussions that were almost all cut short by the time limit of 30 minutes. This was most notable during a discussion on standards and search; one statement about using only one anchored link per page could have spawned an entire 60 minutes worth of argument.
Today, it’s about 45 minutes, which seems to be far more comfortable a timeslot, as evidenced by the social media talk and a demo of drawball.com. People seem to be a lot more comfortable and ready to participate…
OH: “What’s next!?”
Answer: How to be a superhero, by Tantek Çelik.
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