1. Operate a respected international cable news channel.
2. Create an innovative, ground-breaking television program using all the techniques of social media Web sites more than five years before it becomes cliched.
3. Get praise for the former, and inspire a former vice-president to copy the model outright.
4. Stop producing content for the respected news outlet so said ex-vice-president can use the channel to host the aforementioned copy.
5. Wait about four years, and strike a deal to create a Canadian version of the groundbreaking news channel that resulted from those deals.

Both views can be applied, for example, to Microsoft’s preview of its Web-based Office Live product. Likewise, the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to abandon a printed newspaper and focus its news operations online is either too late or leading edge.

The same can be said when company get the “open source” religion.

Netscape did it when its browser was dying, and the move, literally, resulted in a phoenix rising from the flames.

Sun is doing it with Java with less dramatic effect.

After consuming so many Web 2.0 companies, the bulk of Yahoo’s interesting efforts have been to produce a public means to access many of the tools and data that makes Yahoo Yahoo.

More radical, though, are The New York Times’ efforts to free the information contained within its storied archives. Within the past two weeks, the Gray Lady has given Web access to its campaign finance information and its movie reviews. Bloggers can now associate related New York Times articles with each of their posts. Designers are invited to comment on the news by creating new visualizations from the Times’ archive.

Late last week, another leading international newspaper, The Guardian (and its sibling, The Observer), has taken the Times’ move to its logical conclusion and have made the full-text of (and the meta data about) nearly every article it publishes available through RSS.

News long ago became a commodity, and to compete, news organizations must focus on how best to present the gathered facts. This is, in essence, what differentiates my employer, msnbc.com, from nytimes.com from huffingtonpost.com from an anonymous blogger.

The last time and economic bubble burst, the Web went on to create tools, like Blogger and MovableType, enabling anyone to easily post a story online. Just under ten years later, and in the shadows of another economic collapse, the Web is developing the tools for anyone to crunch data and present their findings in visually compelling ways.

The traditional news industry barely made it through the last wave of change. This time, though, some finally seem to be learning those lessons and discovering how to make themselves an indispensable resource.

Out of curiosity, I thought I’d see how things would have broken down were seats awarded purely by the popular vote received (not that I’d recommend such a system, there are more accurate proportional representation models available):

The result is still a Conservative minority, but a more balanced opposition — and one that, in theory could form a coalition government were it needed, thereby lessening the need for yet another election in a couple of years. A more proportional system might even prevent new voter participation lows being set with each new election

Just sayin’

In the United States, there are no media blackout laws about covering the election (partially, because California is such a populous state that it can help change the election), and in this Internet age, it seems ridiculous Canada still has such a law.

As I write this, polls in a number of provinces have already closed, and the big two are moments away from closing. None of the news outlets are allowed to tell me who won. Many on Twitter are, though. And everyone who posts is technically breaking the law. No one really seems to know or care.

This grassroots reporting of a major national event may finally be the thing that enables Election Canada to give-up on such archaic rules.

In the meantime, if you still can, go out and vote. If you already have, snuggle up in front of your monitor, and watch the results come trickling in through your social networks.

Now I find myself watching the Canadian election second-hand at the same time as the Obama vs. McCain American election. The experience is surreal, and I have decided to keep track of some of the ways Canadian politicians insult one another as gleaned from the scant coverage I get.

October 10, 2008:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper suddenly spends $25-billion to ease pressure on Canadian banks. It is not a bailout, he claimed.

October 9, 2008:

CTV airs embarrassing footage of Liberal leader Stephane Dion stumbling a question about leadership and the economy; the footage quickly becomes fodder for the Conservatives

October 7, 2008:

Supporters of some Liberal Toronto candidates are being threatened and harassed with phone calls and vandalism; some have even had their car brake cables and phone lines cut

September 30, 2008:

A Harper speech urging Canadians to send troops to Iraq was directly copied from a speech by the Australian prime minister. The plagiarist has resigned, but the Conservative’s foreign policy integrity is being questioned

September 19 – 29, 2008:

Various resignations from candidates caught doing silly things in the past (I debate stopping this post for lack of anything interesting)

September 18, 2008:

The Prime Minister stands by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz despite Ritz’s joke about the food-related death of 17 Canadians and his hope that an opposition member was one of the dead

After a government staffer insinuated aboriginal protesters were drunks, the Conservatives issue an apology

September 17, 2008:

A founder of the Marijuana Party of Canada has resigned as a Vancouver NDP candidate over questions about his role in selling coca plants

September 12, 2008:

Failing to block the Green Party leader from the debate, the Canadian broadcasters schedule the leader’s English debate for the exact same night as Sarah Palin debates Joe Biden in the American election

September 10, 2008:

The “progressive” Bloc Québécois separatist party is called a clone of the left-wing New Democratic Party

September 9, 2008:

The governing Conservative party creates an ad showing a bird pooping on the shoulder of the Opposition leader, a Liberal

Yes, the title should probably read “Canadian political defamation” because the items cover both libel and slander, but since these won’t be legal defamations I felt okay about referencing the more conversational term “slander.”

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.

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.

The four most appreciated improvements were:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.)

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.

Both the CBC and The Globe and Mail have run articles on how Canada is losing its place in the world, and from my vantage in a country that has done that in a very public way over the past decade (beginning, with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and culminating in the “war on terror”), it it is easy to see how damaging this loss of purpose can become.

Canadians would do well to remember, as The Globe and Mail points out in a series of articles, that despite seeing itself as a doer of good in the world, most of Canada’s foreign policies suggest otherwise.

Yes, seeing Canadian soldiers marching in a gay pride parade really is something to be proud about. But those soldiers are no longer wearing the peacekeepers’s blue helmet, either.

The Conference Board of Canada needs to be heard when it says the country is “moving to the back of the class because of its underperformance in almost all subjects [economy, education, health and the social environment].”

Canada has not yet lost the moral idealism that grew (ironically) from the social gospel movement. But Canadians can’t become to complacent about their national mythologies. The silent majority needs speak up, and remind the government how to keep Canada the country they so strongly believe it is.

Leading the American news this morning was an accusation from a religious leader that a U.S. presidential candidate was distorting a key religious text. As a not-so closeted political junkie, I tried to recall a time in Canada’s political history when something remotely similar happened. In fact, Canadians fervently (if occasionally, wrongly) believe the words of one the country’s longest-serving leaders: “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”

Now I have just read that Heinz has pulled an advertisement featuring two parents kissing as one of the two heads off to work. Apparently the 200 complaints received by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority were enough for Heinz to pull the ad. My first thought was to wonder how many of the complainers actually saw the ad on television; this morning, afterall, I had received a spam from the American Family Association. The so-called “Action Alert” read in part:

We suggest you forward this to all your family and friends letting them know of the push for homosexual marriage by Heinz. This ad is currently running in England, but no doubt can be expected in the U.S. soon. It is the kind of ad which we can expect to see in California as they prepare to vote on homosexual marriage. Homosexual marriage is illegal in England. [Ed.: That last sentence, while legally accurate, is essentially false: since 2004, civil partnerships in the United Kingdom have given same-sex partners the same rights as a civil marriage does.]

The spam then urged me to take action by emailing or phoning Heinz, with the implicit message I should urge it be pulled from the air.

This week also happens to be Pride Week. In Toronto, the event and parade have become a city-wide party in which everyone is welcome to — and most often does — participate.

In Canada, I had almost forgotten why it was needed.

In the U.S., even in Seattle, I am constantly reminded.

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.

That being said, the level of discourse is excellent and the snacks are great (no Starbucks coffee [but no keg of beer that might get stolen]). In fact, the attendees are actively engaged in each of the half-hour sessions I’ve been in (there are three rooms and a packed grid).

Best tip so far

Judo can help Web standards.

Best moments so far

Seeing all the organizers wandering around in housecoats.

Weirdest moment so far

Seeing all the organizers wandering around in housecoats.

Toronto held its first BarCamp in November 2005 and the community that’s grown around it has helped energize the tech and Web development community there (and potentially created a baby boom).

This weekend, marks my third fourth BarCamp, but the first in a city (my new city) where the tech community is so dominant in mainstream life. Although Seattle is four-and-a-half times smaller than Toronto, this weekend's BarCamp Seattle includes some of the Web/tech community celebrities and is being held in Adobe Seattle campus (which is right beside Google and Getty and across the channel from Newsvine [Microsoft is a bit further away]).

All of this is leading to some high expectations for the proceedings ahead, and I hope, as the weekend wears on the chronicle some of them here.

(Sadly the updates to this site about our time in Seattle have been less frequent than planned, but that’s only because we’ve been spending exploring a lot of our time exploring the city.)

How did the move go?

Once our stuff finally cleared customs (it took a week longer than expected), it went very well. Unpacking seemingly took forever but we are all settled in now. Our place feels more like home than almost any of our past residences.

How are you liking it?

Seattle is definitely the best place we could have moved to here in the U.S. The climate is good (and when it is, the views are spectacular); the people are friendly intelligent, and politically akin to our fellow Torontonians. And the dog loves it here.

Are you missing Toronto?

Some days, extraordinarily, when Jason Collett and his band serenaded us with some songs from our old neighbourhood, and when we want nothing more than hang out with good friends at places like Sweaty Betty’s. But it does help that Toronto had near-record snow this winter.

How has the weather been?

Honestly, except for the end of March when it snowed just as a good friend from Toronto arrived for a visit, the weather has been more better than I expected. A few days ago it was 27°C and sunny. Typically, it’s been in the mid-teens, and the rain never really lasts. Compared to the Toronto weather patterns, Seattle’s are, to us, unpredictable and brief.

What’s different?

A lot, and not a lot. Biggest thing that has surprised us is how cheap it is. Everything, even with the dollar at par is cheaper than it is in Toronto: food, drinks, clothes, appliances, and transportation. That Seattle’s recycling program is horribly antiquated in comparison to Toronto (and Ontario).

How is the commute?

We live close enough to the Microsoft campus that my commute (on a company shuttle, with Wifi, no less) is about half-an-hour each way.

Will you get a car?

Probably not. But everyone in Seattle seems to love their cars. Which is strange, consider own environmentally friendly they seem.

How is public transit then?

Public transit as means of getting around town, though, is less than ideal. With the exception of very short streetcar line (dubbed the SLUT) and a dead-end monorail, it is all buses that mostly into downtown and back out. And the payment system…we still struggle with that on occasion. But, it is cheap.

Hilary or Obama? …Or McCain?

Can’t vote here yet (which has made living in the U.S.’s current political climate a bit strange).

When are you coming back?

To visit? This summer — in the first week of June. If you are in the city and would like to meet-up, let me know.