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February 10, 2009

Tweet what you eat

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 02:21 PM ET | Comments (0)

These days Twitter is on the tip of everyone's tongue. Message boards are abuzz with strategy on how to use Twitter to build your business, and every tween this side of the Atlantic is frantically answering the simple question upon which the site is based — what are you doing?

Now, Wired reports that Twitter is about to outgrow its simple interface and go 2.0. A series of new apps designed by enterprising users will allow inanimate objects to communicate with you via Twitter.

Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.

These applications can also help you quit smoking or loose weight. Tweet what you eat is an application that allows individuals trying to lose weight tweet everything that passes through their lips.

But just exactly what this will mean for the average net surfer remains to be seen. As the web and its various applications continue to develop at breakneck speed, it seems only reasonable that at some point the rest of us won't be able to keep up. When it comes to Twitter, how much is too much?

More entries on: Interweb

February 06, 2009

TED2009

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 01:30 PM ET | Comments (0)

I'm not sure what happened. We waited for days then weeks, but the invitations never arrived. Yes, that's right, none of us in the office of This were invited to TED2009.

If you haven't heard of TED, don't despair. The annual invitation-only event brings the best and brightest in Technology, Entertainment and Design together to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). The goal is to foster and spread great ideas. Why? Consider this:

* An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired imagination.

* An idea weighs nothing.

* It can be transferred across the world at the speed of light for virtually zero cost.

* And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.

* It can reshape that mind's view of the world.

* It can dramatically alter the behavior of the mind's owner.

* It can cause the mind to pass on the idea to others.

Fortunately for those of us not quite brilliant enough (yet) to get the coveted TED invite, many of the talks are posted online. For a taste, check out the video above of a talk on spaghetti sauce given by fellow Canadian Malcolm Gladwell at a past TED conference. Or better yet, head to their website and check out the talks for yourself!

More entries on: Interweb

January 12, 2009

See for yourself - Conflict goes 2.0

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 11:17 AM ET | Comments (2)

It's hard to know just what to say about the most recent installment of the Israeli-Gaza conflict. The 16 days of fighting have killed 900 Palestinians and left 1.5 million in urgent need of food and medical aid. Recent reports suggest humanitarian aid is currently denied access at Gaza checkpoints. Many international agencies have pulled out, citing the increase of violence as an extreme hazard to their aid workers.

The Israeli government has forbidden foreign journalists from entering the Gaza strip, making it impossible to confirm accuracy of the reports coming from the region. Fortunately, in the age of the internet, anything is possible. For the first time in history you can act as an international observer from the comfort of your own home.

The Israel Defense Ministry has set up a web cam feed of the Kerem Shalom border crossing, the largest boarder crossing between Israel and Gaza. Live images are broadcast during the three hour ceasefire from three cameras that monitor the entrance and exit of the terminal. Are the trucks really making it across the boarder and into Gaza? Is there really a steady flow of aid to the Palestinian people? Now you can see for yourself.

Alternatively, if you're looking for a little hope in these troubled times, why not check out the live feed of the Western Wall.

Are all these live feeds just a publicity stunt for a beleaguered government trying to change international public opinion on their efforts? Is seeing really believing? What do you think?

More entries on: Interweb | War and peace

October 30, 2008

Random acts of kindness 2.0 with Montreal's Akoha.com

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 12:50 PM ET | Comments (0)

Today I stumbled across Akoha, a new website/game/social experiment that has recently started in Montreal and is slowly working its way across the land.

Akoha works by turning good deeds into a points-based game. Which sounds horrifying, in a way, but still strikes me as a better grade of electronic past-time than, say, Grand Theft Auto. It works this way: you sign up and receive a deck of instruction cards in the mail. You do the good deeds on the cards and pass them on. The next person repeats the process and so the cards hop around from person to person, spreading tidbits of joy wherever they go. And everyone can follow the cards on their journey through the website. Here's a little comic book that Akhoa has made to explain.

The endearing dorkiness of the whole enterprise really appeals to me. But I can't actually imagine handing these cards out to strangers, myself, although I might give them to a select group of friends. First, like most people, I would find it simply embarrassing to slip one of these to someone I didn't already know. Second, I would worry that the points system would retroactively undermine the altruism of what seems like a spontaneous act by turning the whole thing into a crass transaction.

But on balance, it's an intriguing idea and a nice, socially-aware variant on a chain-letter or Bookcrossing.com. And if it takes a deck of cards and some web-2.0 zeitgeisty social networking to advance what you might hope was just basic human kindness, well, I'll still take it.

More entries on: Interweb

September 10, 2008

Elect a Tory, kiss net neutrality goodbye

Posted by mason at 01:11 PM ET | Comments (0)

In a statement published on international peer-to-peer news site p2pnet.net, the NDP's Charlie Angus has brought the net neutrality issue into the federal election campaign. He begins by outlining what he calls the ruling Conservatives' ignorance toward digital innovation and the recent axing of the New Media Fund. The Harper government falls into line with the pro-free-market U.S. administration when it comes to copyright legislation, he continues, before extolling the virtues of his party as the only one defending Internet freedoms in the House of Commons.

"There are key urban ridings across Canada where the issue of copyright and Net Neutrality could spell the difference in winning or losing the riding," Angus writes. "This provides a unique opportunity to the arts, education and innovation community to get active and organized. The Conservative party needs to know that the digital community will push back against their corporate agenda."

Full text of the statement here.

More entries on: Copyright/left | Cultural industries | Election 2008 | Harper Index | Interweb

October 23, 2007

webcomic relief

Posted by nora at 12:10 PM ET | Comments (2)

One of my favourite webcomics out there is A Softer World -- it's sweet and acerbic and uses real-life photographs in place of drawings. Also, it's done by two excessively talented individuals who are unfurling their artistic fronds in multiple directions. Transplanted Maritimer Emily Horne (pictures) is currently a photographer, blogger and graphic designer in Victoria. Her Toronto-based cohort Joey Comeau (words) has published novels and short story collections. That's totally part of what I love about this burgeoning scene of online comics, that their creators are rarely anything but jacks- and janes-of-all-trades, unafraid of new territory, as well as constantly propping up any neat work their colleagues are doing.

But back to A Softer World. Emily takes pictures and quite artfully zigzags them into panels (sidebar: nothing like the "Comic Life" application that comes on the new Macs, if that's what you're picturing). And Joey writes words over them. The result is dark and adorable, and often LOL funny.

Also on the site is "Overqualified", ostensibly a collection of job application cover letters to major corporations. This premise is more of a front than anything, however, for Joey's inappropriate existential musings. As he sees it, "looking for work is an exercise in selling yourself. You write cover letter after cover letter, listing the parts of you that you respect the least, listing the selling points that make you valuable in a buyer's market ... And then maybe one day you just snap a little. You sit down to write a cover letter, and something entirely new comes out."

Here, Joey urges BBC to can the kookiness and glamorize Scrabble and cold beers for a change.
Here, Joey tells Google executives the story of how his grandmother coerced him into signing up for Gmail.

Joey's most recent collection of short stories, It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry, came out this summer. Right now he is working on a novel called The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved, "about a young boy with special powers and a young lady who is perhaps too violently enthusiastic about environmentalism." He's also working on a book based on the Overqualified letters, which he finds a ridiculous idea, and one that he believes has been going very well. Joey will be reading from his recent work at Canzine in Toronto this Sunday (the 28th) at the Gladstone Hotel. It sounds like a scene, and totally worth it -- either he just photographs well, or Joey's actually hell of cute. Trust me.

photo by e. horne and j. comeau

Nora Tennessen is an ex-pat Nova Scotian and current This Magazine intern. She likes science fiction and comic strips and sexy, sexy secularity.
Current boycrush: Michael Cera
Current girlcrush: Ellen Page
Political compass: Economic: 8.38 Political: 6.31

More entries on: From the intern desk | Interweb

October 03, 2007

Friendster begot MySpace begot Facebook begot WTF?!?

Posted by calvin at 08:09 PM ET | Comments (1)

With the popularity of social networking ripping across the globe like a fast mutating hantavirus, is it not an eventuality that niche social networks would evolve to address every self microcosm of lifestyle? Compiled below is the unofficial This Magazine list of social networking sites and their respective niches. Enjoy and feel free to add you own!

FRIENDSTER
original audience: silicon valley screenheads with low real-time social skills
revision 2: celebrity fakersters and their respective starf*cksters
current: tumbleweeds

MYSPACE
original audience: indie bands defected friendsters
revision 2: underage tweenster hunting ground
current: indie bands and friend request spam factory

FACEBOOK
original audience: academics and alumni
revision 2: tagged in last nights frat party photo
current: you, your parents and anyone else too old for MySpace

FRUMSTER
original audience: jews for marriage
future: jews for remarriage

NEWSAXON
original audience: "for whites by whites" (no kidding)
future: anti-hate crime police division

LINKEDIN
original audience: business networkers and job seekers
future: headhunters galore

VAMPIREFREAKS
original audience: goths, industrials, cyberpunks
future: satan

More entries on: Interweb

September 28, 2007

Why are so few Canadian left-wing blogs popular?

Posted by mason at 03:15 PM ET | Comments (89)

If you've ever been interested in reading Canadian political blogs but have no idea where to start, Paulitics compiled a list last month of some of the most popular political blogs in the country. It's not even close to an authoritative or scientific ranking, but it does give a sense of some of the better-read online writing on politics.

What I don't get is why so many on the list lean to the right, or at least fail to identify as progressive, small-l liberal or lefty in any way. How are left-wing blogs getting it wrong? Or perhaps more aptly, how are conservative blogs finding large audiences? Is this a comment on the reach of the left in general?

Just wondering.

IMAGE: INCREDIBLY, THIS RIGHT-WING BLOG IS VERY POPULAR

More entries on: Interweb

June 04, 2007

Blackle aims to brighten your days by darkening your searches

Posted by mason at 02:27 PM ET | Comments (4)

Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. For example, April’s federal and Ontario government decisions to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs struck me as a bit of a drop in the bucket when compared with other changes that could be made to save energy, such as turning off lights in office buildings overnight.

The value of small changes is well illustrated, though, with the introduction of Blackle. According to the site’s “About” page, Blackle was inspired by a January blog post calculating the energy used by a white screen versus a black screen:

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year.

Three thousand megawatt-hours a year. That’s no small amount. Motivated by this big number, Blackle was set up by Sydney, Australia’s Heap Media as a search page powered by a Google custom search.

Unfortunately, the two queries I tested it with turned up different results than the same google.com or google.ca search. (One was “pronger suspended,” the other “incandescent light bulbs ban.”) I’m not sure what accounts for the difference. Maybe it’s the Australian factor. Nevertheless, Blackle demonstrates original thinking on the day-to-day problems of climate change.

More entries on: Interweb | Planet Earth

April 26, 2007

Google with care

Posted by mason at 11:56 AM ET | Comments (3)

This week I received an e-mail from a This contributor kindly asking me to remove something incriminating from his contributor’s bio on the website. He pointed me to an article that outlines the plight of Vancouver psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar, who was barred from ever again entering the United States because he discussed his use of LSD in an academic article that was easily found via search engines. There’s no happy ending for Feldmar—applying for a waiver that would allow him entry to the U.S. is a costly, demeaning process, and having the U.S. government’s decision overturned through the courts is near impossible.

So this is just a friendly reminder for those of you who wish to visit the U.S.: Don’t post on the internet anything that might jeopardize your freedom to travel.

More entries on: Interweb

April 13, 2007

The changing nature of the word "friend"

Posted by Ariel Troster at 11:44 AM ET | Comments (12)

I've been thinking a lot about the changing nature of the word "friend" in the MySpace/Facebook era. For those of you who haven't become addicted yet, Facebook is a piece of highly sophisticated social networking software that instantly connects you with everyone you already know, and people that you had long forgotten.

The way to expand your social network on Facebook is to add people as "Friends" -- which means you get to see their full profiles, and receive up-to-the-minute updates on how they're feeling, what they're wearing, if they are in a relationship (Facebook sends you these crazy newsflashes when people announce that they are now in a relationship. Creepy).

Anyway, I have been receiving Friend requests from the oddest assortment of people in the last few weeks, as have many of my friends (as in real, live friends, not just interweb friends).

For example, I just received a Friend Request from this guy named Darryl that I used to hang out with when I was 15, simply because he had a car. Can you blame me? I was stuck in Unionville, Ontario. He lived in Newmarket. He used to throw parties where they would actually serve beer. His house was so big, it was like a mansion at Disneyland. Mysteriously, his parents were never home. Once we tried to make out, but it fell flat. He was about half my size, and his closet was full of Metallica and Rush t-shirts.

According to Facebook, he is now a technical writer, living -- guess where -- in Newmarket. His favourite band is -- guess who -- Rush.

I have also recently heard from a girl was was a camp counsellor with me at posh Jewish summer camp when I was 17. She was always a bit aggressive. I figured she was a proto-dyke. But apparently she's straight and into "all forms of full-contact fighting." Her boyfriend looks like he's in the Israeli Army (his Facebook photo features a very large Uzi semi-automatic weapon). She's part of a Facebook group called "Palestine is Not a Real Country." 'Nuff said. I have rejected her Friend request repeatedly.

My friend Rachel is experiencing a rash of Friend Requests from former childhood bullies.

"I don't get it," she writes. "I mean, I've had two childhood bullies friend me, and polite person that I am, friended them back, and then promptly ignored them. And now I have this one completely random guy who mostly ignored me in grade school inviting me to join America's Next Top Model groups. Which is about as opposite from my interests as one can get. And I like to think that I'm at least partially scary! I mean, I have a picture of myself as a zombie. Grrr!"

I have also been "friended" by some gay scenesters that have ignored me at every party I've ever been at, a couple of politicians that I've tried to ignore at every party I've ever been at, oh and my 14-year old cousin who is way more adept in the world of Facebook than I could ever be.

So here's what I wanna know: Is the internet the great bully eraser? Is having a lot of internet "friends" the new social economy? Is it a popularity game just like high school? Is it a way to erase the high school experience, or to extend it into our 20s and 30s and beyond?

Thoughts?

More entries on: Interweb

April 12, 2007

Help "Save the Internet" win a Webby

Posted by mason at 12:49 PM ET | Comments (0)

We’ve mentioned Save the Internet before, and no doubt our blogging was a big factor (yeah, right) in getting the video about the importance of Net Neutrality nominated for a Webby award.

Why am I highlighting this nominee over the others? Because a friend of the magazine, Matt Thompson, is the creator of the video.

Anyone can vote for their favourite nominee, and the one with the most votes gets the People’s Voice Award. You have until April 27 to vote, and here are the steps (after the jump):

How to vote for SavetheInternet.com:

1) Register to vote here:

http://peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com/account/login

2) Vote for our Video

Click on "Online Film & Video" —> "News/Documentary/Public Service" —> SavetheInternet.com

3) Vote for our Website

Click on "Website" —> "Society" —> "Activism" —> SavetheInternet.com

That’s it. The Webbys are a big deal, so while you’re voting for SavetheInternet.com, don’t be alarmed if you get distracted by all the great stuff out there. God bless the Internet.

More entries on: Interweb

March 23, 2007

Information Wants to be Free UPDATE

Posted by john_d at 10:42 AM ET | Comments (0)

(image courtesy nyc.uncivilservants.org)

Maybe this will be the first in a series of postings about our marvelous Internet, and the complicated issues it inspires.

The NYTimes reports on a New York City website encouraging regular citizens to rat on municipal employees potentially abusing their parking privileges in the city. Personal information such a license plates are displayed on the website nyc.uncivilservants.org, which has at least one NYC police officer understandably upset.

Here is a case of "public interest" advocacy bumping right up against the public interest. Here's a less than complimentary comment from the site:

Way to go. Next time I do surveillance in the hood I have to worry about whether or not my car is listed as a cop car online!

How free do we want our free Internet info? Free enough to endanger the families of those who park where they shouldn't?

You know, in Deadwood, where there are no laws and everyone is blissfully free, you can get shot in the eye for parking your horse in the wrong place.

More entries on: Interweb

March 19, 2007

Web 3.14159 -- somewhat rambly thoughts

Posted by john_d at 05:04 PM ET | Comments (0)

(photo of Dorothy Day at a draft card burning, courtesy of the Culture of Peace website

Here is a poem by THIS mag contributor, Brian Joseph Davis, from his very funny book Portable Altamont (Coach House 2005):

Philip Roth

I never should have trusted you
When you told me that you were
David Lee Roth's brother.

Davis has an essay in the latest THIS Magazine about Socialism, Internet Style -- you know, Web 2.0, social networking, participatory content-making, peer to peer, etc. Go, read it now. It's interesting.

I might have just read it and filed it with all the many, many other thoughts I'm having about the Internet these days, except after reading Davis I took a big book with me to lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant. It's called The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and is about four radical American Catholics and how literature shaped their lives. I try to read as much as I can about people way back in the 20th Century -- those backward folk who lived without the benefit of e-mail and file-sharing and MySpace -- and how they managed to get things done with ancient technologies like telephones and newspapers. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, at lunch a woman one table away was describing her job to her meal-mate. She runs a social networking site for TorStar, and her talk mirrored Davis' article almost perfectly-- the radical democratizing of content, the opportunity to connect and share and meet and message and make and change and create. What Davis calls "analyzing and editing the raw feed of life." Except the bottom line for TorStar is about aiming advertising. The information users share with them, the personalities they display online, the preferences they exhibit -- these are all used to push commercialism back at them in increasingly subtle ways.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Davis writes in his piece:

Using online applications and being a stakeholder in websites positions a user as part of something else -- something like society -- in a way that the alienation of everyday life usually keeps that person from attaining.

I'd like to talk a bit about this idea. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it. One immediate response is that I question if Web 2.0 really does manage an end-run around alienation. Does it? Society has always provided tools for engagement, both commercial and radical. Dorothy Day, one of the subjects of the book I'm reading, started the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City, and marched on Washington to demand the vote for women, spending weeks in jail for her radicalism, and winning in the end. I'm pretty sure e-mail and a myspace page could have helped her gather support for her hunger strike, but all the information and communications tech in the world is meaningless without that brave woman putting her body on the line.

Thoughts?

More entries on: Interweb

February 10, 2007

A gap in history?

Posted by mason at 01:03 PM ET | Comments (1)

I've often wondered what impact digital communication will have on our record of history, and apparently I'm not the only one. In the December issue of Popular Mechanics, Brad Reagan looks at the problems faced by archivists — particularly in government — who have to preserve electronic data for generations to come:

One irony of the Digital Age is that archiving has become a more complex process than it was in the past. You not only have to save the physical discs, tapes and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and software of the future. "Most people haven't recognized that digital stuff is encoded in some format that requires software to render it in a form that humans can perceive," Rothenberg says. "Software that knows how to render those bits becomes obsolete. And it runs on computers that become obsolete."

A companion problem is what happens to your e-mail after you die, which I read about in the January/February issue of Foreign Policy. Could it be that we're allowing a decades-long gap in human history to emerge? Since one of the recommended solutions to avoiding the problem is to print everything from your computer that's important, perhaps we'll be contributing to a crisis of another kind, in which the forests lose out to our need for accurate record-keeping.

More entries on: Generally Interesting | Interweb

February 06, 2007

And what, exactly, is personal about PCs?

Posted by mason at 01:35 PM ET | Comments (10)

(CROSSPOSTED TO PROPELLER)

Taking a spin through some of my favourite blogs recently in order to get propeller's blogroll up to date, I came across Double Plus Ungood's faux-prickly post about Macs, which links to a pointed Guardian rant on the same topic. Essentially, the argument is that Macs are nothing more than toys for grown-ups, and Mac users are vain, immature fiddlers who wouldn't know proper computing if it crashed their operating system (unlikely, but hey...).

I'm a Mac user, and the process of relaunching propeller has helped reinforce my sense that Macs, for all their flaws in encouraging commodity fetishism, are pretty great tools for a democratic internet. I've been deep in the world of WordPress lately, and all its plugins and widgets are a lesson in how an enthusiastic open-source community can make computing easier for users and promote independent media by providing a pleasant blog-reading experience.

I know there is nothing inherently "Mac" about WordPress or open-source development, but I do believe the growing power of open-source would be impossible without the release of Mac OS X in 2001. With its Unix-based infrastructure, OS X allowed Mac geeks to easily develop and release software to a decent-sized market of users. More than five years on, the result is a worldwide group of computer users who are also developers, and the blurring of audience/creator lines has spilled over to news media and popular culture.

So keep your "personal" computer with its complicated hardware and software, its unstable operating system and its vulnerability to viruses. I'll be over here with my Mac, doing my part to keep the internet vibrating.

More entries on: Interweb

January 26, 2007

Canada's net neutrality failure

Posted by mason at 11:59 AM ET | Comments (3)

Last month I posted about the net neutrality fight in the U.S., and noted in an update that Canadians couldn’t sign the petition set up by the Save The Internet campaign urging the U.S. Congress to legislate against a two-tiered Internet.

Since then The Tyee has picked up on this blind spot north of the border, writing recently that the fight is just as relevant in Canada, and that we may actually be in worse shape because the growing Internet inequalities are going largely unnoticed:

Just like in the States, net neutrality in Canada hovers in a state of legal limbo; the threadbare language of the Telecommunications Act means that two-tier Internet is more than a distant possibility; it’s already here.

“I think it’s already happening now but for the most part people don’t recognize it,” says [professor Michael] Geist, who is based at the University of Ottawa.

But they did not, strangely, pick up on our John Degen’s Deadwood analogy.

While I can appreciate that this fight wouldn’t be nearly as big without the self-interested businesses on the ‘support net neutrality’ side, for independent web publishers and new media users concerned about a diversity of voices, this may be the best opportunity to make a case to regulators while their attention is caught by big players.

From what The Tyee reports it appears Industry Minister Maxime Bernier is so far only responsive to big telecommunications companies, but at netneutrality.ca you can sign a petition (scroll all the way down) and get a button for your website to show you support a free and equal internet for all.

More entries on: Interweb

January 08, 2007

One Laptop per Child

Posted by mason at 01:29 PM ET | Comments (5)

After years of planning and much anticipation, 2007 looks to be the year the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project begins distributing its ground-breaking, $100 portable computers to children in developing countries.

A spinoff of MIT labs founded by Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC aims to give the world’s poorest children access to a valuable learning tool at a low cost. Unlike other laptops, the so-called XO machines will be cheap to manufacture, energy efficient and run on an open-source operating system called Sugar. Developed from the ground up for kids with no prior computer-use experience, Sugar eschews folders and windows in favour of icons and simple networking that encourage collaboration and task-based file retrieval.

The machines themselves will have no hard drive (just external memory) and a dual-mode display that can appear in black-and-white monochrome and is readable in sunlight with very little power use. They will be sturdy and adaptable for different uses, and OLPC boasts that they will be able to do everything a regular computer can do except store large amounts of data.

But perhaps the most exciting part of the project is how the computers will find their way into children’s hands. Instead of selling them directly to users, OLPC is working with ministries of education, who will buy them in bulk and distribute them to children like textbooks. The XO machines will be the child’s to keep. Brazil, Nigeria and Pakistan are among the countries already involved, and this week Rwanda also signed on to the initiative. Children in these countries and others are slated to begin testing the computers and operating system by the middle of this year.

It’s an exciting project, and it’s gaining momentum. Popular Science magazine included OLPC in its Best of What’s New 2006, and partners in the project include Google, Red Hat, and News Corp.

More entries on: Interweb

December 21, 2006

I'm not saying nothing; I'm just saying

Posted by john_d at 11:26 AM ET | Comments (0)

From DCist, the Washington DC daily blog -- this photo by Duncan Brooks and the following description:

If you haven't been down to Union Station this season, you should go -- the Norwegian decorations are lovely, and there's an exhibit about polar bears! Hooray! But as this photo by Flickr user Duncan Brooks shows, there's beauty in the everyday details of Union Station as well.

From Torontoist, the Toronto ON daily blog, a similar photo of Union Station ceiling detail by Flickr user Uwajedi (couldn't use the photo, but you can check it out on Torontoist), and this description:

In his photo of Union Station's Great Hall (above), the colours -- indigo, gold, and chartreuse -- are vibrant and intense, and his chosen vantage point really accentuates this grand space. But it's the little details that really caught our eye -- the shadowed crosses in the windows, the carved flourishes in the brickwork, the way the composition evenly balances out two archways.

So, what have we learned? First, our Union Station has more colours than that American Union Station. Also, we describe things with more words, and, since the Torontoist shot appeared three days ago while the DCist shot showed up today, those folks down in Washington ripped us off, again!

Or maybe the Washington shot is an homage to Toronto?

More entries on: Interweb

December 20, 2006

The 'Net Needs You

Posted by mason at 11:17 AM ET | Comments (10)

A nifty video stating the case for preserving net neutrality, essentially the principle of equal access for all web publishers to broadband. Without strong laws in the U.S. guaranteeing this, telecommunications companies threaten to set up a pay-for-access internet fast lane.

Clearly, the power of the internet as a democratic tool has the powers that be growing nervous.

Watch the video, and if it moves you, sign the petition.

UPDATE: Seems folks with a Canadian address can't sign the petition. Still a worthy campaign, though, and something for us Canadians to think about.

More entries on: Interweb

October 06, 2006

Reprehensible repression

Posted by mason at 10:23 PM ET | Comments (1)

Soup is Good Food directed us to a nifty campaign by Amnesty International, a campaign that now has a permanent presence in the right-hand column of Blog This. The idea is to spread the word about sites that are censored in their own countries by publishing their writings. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right that is often being denied people, and part of the power of the internet is to circumvent oppressive authorities who seek to hide injustices.

The green box you see is an attempt at broadening the reach of controversial ideas and proving they are "irrepressible." Each time you load Blog This, a new censored site is excerpted with a links to the site. No shortage of important, censored stories to sift through, from the killing of an opposition politician in Kazakhstan to the kidnapping of reporters in Iraq.

More entries on: Human rights | Interweb | Resistance | THIS matters

Greening Apple

Posted by mason at 05:06 PM ET | Comments (5)

It's about time we saw a campaign like this: Greenpeace has launched an effort to organize Apple customers and demand that the company employ non-toxic materials in its hardware.

For those of us who consider themselves environmentalists and buy a lot of junk from Apple (myself included), it's time to stop turning a blind eye to the harmful impacts of e-waste on the planet, as well as on workers in developing countries.

If any constituency is suited to a campaign getting to change a company's behaviour, it's Apple users. Greenpeace has set up a few cool features on its Green My Apple site that allow creative types to design t-shirts, make videos or print stickers to slap on Apple products.

Let's do it, folks.

More entries on: Activism | Human rights | Interweb | Planet Earth

September 11, 2006

Our seal. Approval?

Posted by mason at 01:51 AM ET | Comments (1)

I think the blog’s been around long enough that we’ve earned our own seal. Don’t you?

(Thanks for the link, Clive.)

More entries on: Interweb | THIS matters

September 06, 2006

Sleeping with Strangers

Posted by Krisztina at 02:14 AM ET | Comments (2)

I just returned from a weekend in the States; Seattle WA to be exact. My friend Gisele and I drove down for Bumbershoot, an annual cultural extravaganza held on the old Expo fair grounds. Thousands of people, hundreds of shows, long lines and sun sun sun.

But wait, bragging about my fabulous weekend is not the point of this entry. Bragging about staying for free in a two bedroom apartment in Capital Hill is.

Being the frugal minded adventurous sort, we decided we'd rather blow our money at the high-end outlet mall than pay for a hotel room or even an uncomfortable twin bed in a hostel. So we emailed a few fine folks on the recently resurrected couchsurfing website and scored ourselves a free place to stay.

If you haven't already heard about couchsurfing.com you should check out the website. It's all about making the world a smaller, friendlier, more inviting kinda place. And if the existence of such a site isn't remarkable enough, the site crashed and basically died in June (there were notices that almost all the data was lost and the creator couldn't take it on anymore), only to be resurrected by a group of hard-working volunteers in Montreal in just two weeks.

Usually the point of couchsurfing is to stay with locals, meet them, hang out with them, tip toe around their apartment when they go to bed super early, and find out all the cool things about the city you could never find on your own, but we lucked out and our host was gone to Burning Man all week. He left his apartment key at the bar around the corner from his house and his door key under his mat. We stayed 4 days and 3 nights in his centrally located apartment, went for coffee at the local cafe, watched his 6-foot boa try to get out of her cage, hung out in the hair salon he's put into his second bedroom and never met him.

So thanks Eric, your apartment rocks! Enjoy the six-pack of fat tire we left you.

More entries on: Activism | Interweb

August 30, 2006

Google Oracle part 1

Posted by calvin at 06:01 PM ET | Comments (3)

Search "failure" on google. That's right. Do it now. Who's number 1? Googlebomb!

More entries on: Interweb

August 29, 2006

How are your ears?

Posted by mason at 01:07 AM ET | Comments (5)

Some of you may have seen this item about smart-ass teenagers using an aural repellent with a pitch so high adults can't hear it as a ringtone.

Can you hear it? This simple test will determine if you are still young or not. Thank you for your time.

More entries on: Interweb

August 18, 2006

and more

Posted by john_d at 05:04 PM ET | Comments (6)

A very, very funny web page showing how the right wing read the New York Times.

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing is the tipster of record.

My favorite headline:

Slack-jawed NASCAR rubes drive around in circle

More entries on: Interweb

August 02, 2006

Handy Tips for THIS bloggers

Posted by john_d at 02:04 PM ET | Comments (2)

from the August issue of Wired magazine.

Be an Expert on Anything by Stephen Colbert

Thanks to Boing Boing for the tip.

More entries on: Interweb

July 24, 2006

Keep it short

Posted by mason at 12:46 PM ET | Comments (0)

The National Film Board has put online 50 animated shorts from throughout the years, including classics such as "The Sweater," "The Cat Came Back" and my personal favourite, "The Big Snit," a bizarre little cartoon with lots of sawing of furniture and eye-shaking. Give it a look and enjoy the 'toons.

IMAGE: "THE BIG SNIT"

More entries on: Interweb

June 21, 2006

Blame Canada for a Crappy Internet

Posted by john_d at 04:49 PM ET | Comments (0)

Checking out the link to The Nation in Mason's excellent post below, I noticed an ad promising to show me the future of the Internet. So I clicked, and got a lobby site for a group called Hands Off The Internet. I watched their little animation, which makes some clear and easy delineations between good guys and bad guys as we all move forward in building the Internet.

Clear and easy, but accurate? I have no idea.

Clue number one that I might not agree with these people: they make fun of my beloved country. Referring to Canada to make a point, the narrator audibly sneers, and the animation shows a Mountie atop a moose.The Mountie sings a bit of the national anthem and then some cartoon hearts appear, apparently to suggest our proud Mountie and his moose are more than just friends.

I have to say, I haven't a clue about "net neutrality" -- the issue at hand -- or any reasons to either love it or hate it, beyond this group's insistence that Canada is somehow diabolically involved and large corporations want net neutrality while consumers may not.

Check them out here:

http://www.dontregulate.org/

Some of the sponsor groups under the Hands Off umbrella:

The American Conservative Union
AT&T (hmmm, aren't they a large corporation?)
Center for Individual Freedom
Cingular

You see, this is exactly why I immediately distrust arguments that lean on the "we all know large corporations are evil" pillar of lefty thought.

More entries on: Interweb

June 17, 2006

mustn't... reveal... geekiness

Posted by john_d at 09:58 PM ET | Comments (7)

Just read about this in the New York Times today and, I admit, I've been watching the online episodes while rocking back and forth with glee.

Fan fiction meets digital video. Star Trek fans recreate -- extremely well, like, down to the schlockiness -- the look and feel of the original Star Trek franchise, and offer free online views. Sleeping children in the next room. This will be my Saturday night:

http://www.starshipexeter.com/

Wondering when they will be sued by a large studio, or the remaining, unorbiting, dust of Gene Roddenberry? Me too.

But... but... Captain. He's dead.

Seriously, I have no idea if the Star Trek copyright protection allows for this kind of brand borrowing. And, once I finish my, uh, research here, I'll check into it.

More entries on: Interweb

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