For those of you who missed it and care, I was on CityTV news earlier this week. Amber Macarthur interviewed me about the micro-blogging sensation known as Twitter. What's Twitter? Watch the video, silly. I thought I should at least document my moment in the mainstream media sun (ironically mostly in shadow) here. We talked about Twittervision a bit, the Twitter Google Maps mashup. I personally don't find Twittervision particularly interesting, but the Twittermap functionality is cool. Find Twitterers in your neighbourhood. It is through this that I discovered James Koole, who is located not far from me in Toronto's west-end. Nice blog design (my template needs a refresh), he's doing the production for the Social Media Today podcast and just joined TransitCamp-sponsor and original BarCamp Toronto supporters Tucows. Added. Note to self: I really need to come out of lurk mode on the Social Media Collective group and start contributing more to the conversation.

Technorati Tags: socialmediacollective, socialmedia, socialweb, twitter, twittervision

I'm finally getting to my post about the ICE07 conference, (formerly iSummit). Ian Kelso and the conference team did a great job and the Carlu provided a comfortable and stylish venue. I cannot say that the content, speakers or attendees were on the leading edge of thinking, but I always enjoy an opportunity to check the temperature of Canada's digital media content industry. There weren't many new ideas, but some good panel discussions provided insight into the current zeitgeist in the Canadian digital content industry. Details after the jump...

Technorati Tags: Canada, ICE07, netneutrality

Where's the Money?

ICE is an industry conference, not a web thinkers conference like Lift or a Web 2.0 event like Mesh, so it has its own character. There was more searching for new business models and ways to push brands in new channels than search for meaning or context. It is an unusual challenge that Ian Kelso has on his hand at the rebranded Interactive Ontario (formerly NMBA): to somehow bring together game developers, digital media services companies and the big media titans into a single room and make everyone happy. One thing we can all agree on, apparently, is that money is important.

Joost v. Rogers, round 1 of X

Wednesday, we had the beginning of an interesting dialogue between small innovative content creators and the cable and telcos around the future of content distribution at the session titled NEW WORLD ORDER: A Cross-platform Super-panel. I don't know what "New World Order" the organizers had in mind, but there was a sense of an elephant in the room. It's name is Joost. Brady Gilchrist of Fuel Industries argued that Joost is a major innovation that is very significant. As Shel Israel watched with bemusement, Mike Lee, Chief Strategy Officer of Rogers Communications rather predictably argued that it wasn't innovative, that it's all been done before, that it is made to look like TV ("channel-up, channel-down, volume-up, volume-down") and doesn't really change anything. At the same time, Lee made the point that the cable industry, because of it's huge sunk investments in infrastructure and large subscriber base, is slow to bring innovations to market. Rogers and Bell should be very concerned about Joost and the new platforms to follow it. Mike Lee's apparent confidence indicates a strategic insight - the telcos have no intention of going down without a fight. And yet, the other shoe did not drop: the words Net Neutrality were on none of the panelists' lips, but should have been at top of mind. I wanted the gloves to come off, I wanted to see sparks. But this is Canada, after all, and we are all too busy being passively aggressively polite to really get into it. Maybe next year.

Where Do Creators' Long-Term Interests Lie?

Thursday, we had another panel Just a Pipe Dream? - The Evolving Internet, which was described thusly:

Historically, the Internet has been a global and free medium of exchange and distribution. However, as traditional media content has become available online, we’ve seen changes to the very fabric of the Internet. Geo-fencing, network surcharges, traffic prioritization and peer-to-peer distribution are all changing the game for content distribution -- for better or worse. What does the Internet of the future hold in store – and what will be the challenges and opportunities for YOU?

Again, this is about Net Neutrality, if not in name. My question of the panel (if I recall my own words):

With a small domestic market (about 4% of the world) and with a status of being niche players in a global market for content, do the long-term natural interests of Canadian independent content creators lie with an open internet or a closed, partially locked-down distribution platform?

Another good question to ask: in a post-Joost world, what value does a cableco or a broadcaster add to either creator or audience? Is aggregation what audiences of the future want, or is infinite selectivity and always-on availability the future? How can such a future best be realized for both audience and creator? Stuart Macdonald repeatedly and convincingly argued that the telcos have every incentive in the world to extract value from customers in order to fill the gaping hole in their voice revenues, that this was the fundamental driver on attempts to throttle or control the internet. So we have the beginning of the formation of battle lines. It was a good opening discussion, and probably should have opened the whole conference. I didn't think the moderator, Mr. Brian Seth Hurst was necessarily an appropriate choice...he seemed to be controlling the discussion more than facilitating it. But the topic got the blood pumping at least, which unfortunately much of the rest of ICE did not.

I just finished reading a review for Canuck zombie-comedy Fido on BlogTO, which gives it a pretty warm reception:

Fido's beautiful 1950's art direction together with a spot on period score and eye popping cinematography meld perfectly with a laugh heavy script to make it one of the most pleasurable Canadian cinema experiences I've ever had.

Isn't it sad that reviewers so often use that prefix "Canadian-" to qualify an otherwise excellent experience at the movies. English-Canadian film has a major branding problem. And no for godsake, a branding strategy is most definitely NOT the answer. At least, not Branding 1.0. Let's start talking about audience appeal and user experience. Let's Cluetrain and 2.0-the-hell out of english-Canadian film. I think that BlogTO reviewer Matt Thomas describes it well. English Canadian film's strength is really in niche, oddball and genre stuff in the global market for english-speaking cinema. An enlightened view of how to get Canadians telling stories in a long-tail global market for content means playing to our strengths and lightening up on the definition of what so-called "Can-Con" really means if nobody sees the results of our creative and financial investment. So, Telefilm, tell us about the future of screen-based entertainment in a globalized and increasingly niche-driven market for content. Tell us how it changes the way YOU do business. Tell us at the ICE conference this week. Thanks!

I realized, thanks to Amber Macarthur's recent piece and various related issues around open access on various internet platforms, that Net Neutrality as an issue appears profoundly silent on the Canadian scene. Sure Mark Evans blogged about it a year ago, and of course Michael Geist and Rob Hyndman have been all over it. But what about the thousands of bloggers who benefit from the free, open and un-throttled internet we've become accustomed to? Where are all the YouTube fans in every office in the country? Net Neutrality is not an obscure telecom policy issue for CRTC-watchers and hardcore policy geeks. It is fundamental to the shape of the future of human culture. You may not have an opinion yet, or you may be confused by it, but silence is no longer cool when the cultural, economic and political implications are this large. We need to express ourselves in order to engage in the conversation; we need conversation to engage in co-creation - the social construction of the world we live in. So I'm starting to ping people for a blog-swarm: Jevon MacDonald, Will Pate, David Crow, Tom Purves, Sandy Kemsley, Rohan Jayasekera, Sean Howard, Ryan Coleman and Ryan Feeley. Posts tagged "netneutrality" and "canada" will appear here.

Technorati Tags: Canada, netneutrality

Or "How I Stopped Kvetching and Learned to Engage with the World." Kevin and Lori of Newmindspace are two of my favourite Gen-Y Facebook friends. When I met them at CaseCamp and again at TransitCamp, I immediately recognized their ability to combine fun and frivolity with keen organizational skills, grassroots guerilla marketing smarts, passion and thoughtfulness about the importance of public space in society. Subway parties, pillow fights and capture the flag, it turns out, are serious business. Eye Weekly just published a piece by Liz Worth titled Is the Movement for Sale?, that raised the spectre that Newmindspace's unique form of public space activism is being co-opted by corporate shills. Kevin brought to my attention several errors in the article, including Worth's report that he and Lori had decided to "sign on to work for a marketing company" and her claim that Newmindspace had "inked a deal with Cundari Integrated Advertising", thereby connecting them with such corporate evildoers as "BMW and Tim Hortons". For the record, Kevin clarified that they are doing some work for AMP, a new media think tank that has one Cundari employee on the board, and are focusing on campaigns for the nonprofit sector like what they did for the World Wildlife Fund. Newmindspace will never take a corporate sponsorship, nor will they market products to their community - knowing full well that the community would have none of it if they tried. Also for the record, Cundari SFP (their proper name) was a $300 sponsor of Toronto TransitCamp, and Eli Singer was one of the organizers of that event. So sue me. I'm glad we cleared that up. How Many Angry Activists Does It Take to Create Something New? I am sensitive to this kind of criticism myself, and can sympathize. I see myself as a social entrepreneur, a business person with a social mission that guides my activities. My methods mix social goals with entrepreneurial methods. Entrepreneurs, social or otherwise, are opportunity seekers and use strategy to achieve their goals. TransitCamp received criticism from some in the established transit activist community who accused us for being outsiders to the cause who were giving the TTC a free pass on past egregious sins. We, of course, saw it differently. We saw an opportunity to use culture, creativity, fun and openness in an attempt to help transform the relationship between the TTC and its community, and we were successful in doing so. It should not be a surprise that Newmindspace, TransitCamp and BarCamp have some common inspirations and methods, as they are all about activating people's passions and creating an open space for play. I was not able to attend CampaignCamp, which was an attempt to bring activists, techies and communications people together to collaborate on new social activism campaigns. I heard reports that some individuals within the activist community were angry and antagonistic towards the marketers gathered together to help their cause. This saddens me. WTF is going on here? Why so much anger? Why bother? Co-creation is the New Black I fear that some in the activist community, just as many in the corporate world, are stuck in an old paradigm of thinking. Civil society and corporations are co-creating a new set of governance structures, what C.K. Prahalad calls a "New Social Compact". In the context of global capitalism, with states in relative decline or receding from legitimate regulatory authority, private actors are increasingly placed in a position to create public goods and solve collective action problems that our governments are unwilling or unable to act upon. This is a characteristic of the new global reality, and the social mission sector and the corporate sector are quickly learning that it is a new world for them both. I am not arguing that activism itself is dead. Far from it. I am arguing that in order to advance the social goals activist groups hold dear, they need to realize both the opportunity and the responsibility to engage with the private sector as legitimate partners in creating our shared world. The social sector must commit itself to engaging the creative imaginations of the public at large and must become strategic "norm entrepreneurs", acting to transmit civil society values into the DNA of the multinational corporation. For their part, corporations need to embrace the idea that cultural and normative values held in civil society are important inputs to production - as important to the bottom line as the customers, employees and investors who hold those values. To withdraw from such engagement is to put our collective futures at even greater risk.

Technorati Tags: campaigncamp, co-creation, opencreativecommunities, torontotransitcamp, newmindspace

Over at the OpenCities wiki, the organizers of OpenCities Toronto 2007 are looking for contributions to help define what openness might mean in a city context on a global scale.

This is a space for your one-sentence dream statement. Please give some thought to crafting a statement that represents your dream, from your perspective.

Please contribute your dreams and leave your name and/or link-back to your blog. Open is the Answer. Community is the Framework.

Technorati Tags: opencities