Hey look at this: Seb’s Open Research is back on the air! Or should I say, on the wire? If (by chance) you still read here (and I haven’t exactly been the most prolific blogger in the last while either) and are NOT aware of Sebastien and his blog, I strongly recommend that you click as quickly as you can and check it out. Seb is one of those guys who keeps a relatively low profile compared to the “stars” – but who has a huge and entirely deserved (in my experience) reputation among the long-standing and most perceptive thinkers in the strange space described by terms as “social” and “web” and such.
Archives for 2009
Found while moving!
Tonight when moving the last of my stuff I came across my old copy of Millennium Cabaret (and yes it’s amazing to me that the site is still up). It’s a CD that (now) doubles as an important cultural record of a scene that thrived in Montreal throughout the 90s – and stretched backwards to the early 80s, as I recall the history.
The CD is full of performance poetry – a recorded anthology put together by Ian Ferrier including a who’s who of what was once a really thriving community here. Check out the website for some clips – but the CD itself is a wonderful document. I won’t name everyone (again, check the site) but if you can find a copy (or convince Ian that it’s time to put the whole thing online), you’ll find early work by Heather O’Neill, now-Toronto-expats Buffy Bonanza, Julie Crysler, and David Jager. It also features the ever-wonderful Cat Kidd (on temporary – I hope – leave from Montreal), the dean of the Montreal scene, Fortner Anderson, and many, many more.
Great news for Identi.ca
GigaOM has a piece today (confirmed by Evan Prodromou, the company‘s founder) that Control Yourself, Inc., the company behind Identi.ca and the Laconica microblogging platform, has taken funding from Montreal Startup. Congratulations to Evan and his team!
Google & the Newspaper Crisis
This morning Wired’s Epicenter blog is running an interesting piece: Five Things Google Could Do For Newspapers. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there, but my fear is that all of the suggestions are merely handwaving unless papers deal with the real problem – they don’t actually print enough real news. Newspapers made bets in the 90s and into the 00s that served (essentially) to divest themselves of the business of publishing the news, in many cases preferring wire services for the majority of news content. What (many) newspapers have become are reprinters of wire copy padded by a myriad of opinion, editorial, and marginally ethical fluff “journalism”.
What Google should do is to set up a fund to help struggling newspapers re-staff their news divisions and a deeply discounted consulting wing to help owners – who have made the bad decisions that got us where we are today – understand that their only real commercial value springs from factual reporting.
YULBlog.org relaunch tonight!
If you’re a blogger from Montreal, it would be a great idea to come to YULBlog tonight. Patrick and Eric Demay have done a great job developing a new (beautiful) YULBlog website that will give members much more direct control over both their personal profile and their blogs. The site is being launched tonight at First Wednesday at La Quincaillerie and you’ll (likely) be able to sign up for a profile and add your blog or blogs while having a beer or two with the YULBlog crew.
