Canada — Page 4

The Internet story in Canada

March 8, 2006 by Michael Boyle

The Internet story in Canada

yesterday and in the near future has been Toronto Hydro’s announcement that they plan to roll out full WiFi access throughout Downtown Toronto in the next few months. During the initial rollout it will be free, but after 6 months they say that there will be 4 pricing plans to choose from.

I wonder – if you’re sitting in an apartment with a Hydro pole outside your window, do you ditch Rogers altogether and rely on the Utility company for your primary access? Or do you keep your Rogers or Bell service and sign up for the Hydro plan for those times when you roam around the city?

Creative Commons Canada

March 7, 2006 by Michael Boyle

Creative Commons Canada

released the Canadian Licence Version 2.5.

Boris suggests

July 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Boris suggests

that people promote awareness of Creative Commons licensing options in Flickr. I agree with him in principle – but there’s a problem. As far as I can tell, a US CC license on Canadian-origin content is probably invalid, in particular since there are CC Canada licenses available. Should Flickr (and Six Apart and others) not provide international customers with an equal opportunity to add such a license?
Update: Anil Dash commented that Six Apart has added such support to Movable Type 3.2.

Better late than never:

June 25, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Better late than never:

spurred on by my post yesterday, I have finally licenced the content of mikel.org under a Creative Commons Canada by-nc-sa license. It was really just inertia that kept me from doing it before, or at least since November 2004 when Canadian CC licences were first made available.

Wish list? Movable Type makes it easy to create a US license right in the site preferences. Frankly, though, I think it’s obnoxious that Six Apart has a US-centric feature embedded in their software when International versions do in fact exist. I also wish the Creative Commons Canada people had: a) made it easier to download the appropriate graphic and store it locally (with instructions for those who don’t know how); and, b) I wish they’d included size attributes in the image tag itself. Small details, but important ones.

As a general principle,

June 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

As a general principle,

I love the internet. After all, I’ve made a very comfortable living by working on internet projects over the last 11 years, and I’ve met some wonderful friends and all the rest of it – all through the net.

Sometimes, though, I’m brought face to face with an undeniable and amazing fact: the web in Canada sucks. Badly. The infrastructure is there, the rate of high-speed adoption is second to none in the world, some of the great internet companies and services have come from Canada… but in terms of local, regional, or even national services, the situation is really lame.

What brings this on is a simple but telling tale. For curiosity’s sake, I was taking a look at take-out sushi restaurants in Montreal. I noted (and have noticed on the street) that there are the Sushi Shops and Soto/Soto Express. The Sushi Shop has a pretty good little site – no problem there. So I tried soto.ca andsotoexpress.ca. Nothing. No response, not even a squatter. OK, let’s check Google. The first result is from some Washington DC magazine, and it confirms that soto.ca is the right address… or seems to confirm it. Of course there’s still nothing there, though.

Hmmm, I thought, maybe Soto has gone out of business or something. So I cruise over to the Canada.com Montreal Gazette site to check. Surely there will be even an excerpt of a story in there if they’ve closed up in the last little while. Uh, no.

First of all, you can’t even search just the Montreal site, at all. Then, the only results (most of which are already guaranteed to be useless, as they come from across Canada) are from the last 7 days. Only. CyberPresse, the online arm of the La Presse group of papers, is worse: there is no search at all.

Then, I went back to the Canada.com site, this time to their Yellow Pages, and tried a search for sushi. I managed eventually (through the worst-designed search I’ve seen in years) to get a list of sushi places… but there was not a single link. They had links to maps, to directions… but no links to websites that I know for a fact exist. What’s the point!?! To add insult to injury, of course none of this stuff is touched by Google, so it’s completely hidden from view to locals or to the world.

Basically, according to the Web, a supposedly thriving restaurant chain in one of Canada’s major cities does not exist. And there are no local online news media through which you can confirm or deny this possibility in any way. What, is it 1992?