In the next couple of weeks, there are two big climate change-related events that I wanted to mention.
First up, this Thursday is Blog Action Day, a day on which a bunch of bloggers agree to all write about the same topic. This year, that topic is climate change (over at TckTckTck, we pushed hard to make that happen).
If you’re a blogger, please consider joining Blog Action Day and, this Thursday, writing about climate change. If you do, you can find plenty of helpful assets associated with the TckTckTck campaign. We’ve got a bunch of evocative photos on our Flickr stream, and a mega YouTube playlist of great videos.
Bridge to a Cool Planet
October 24 is the Global Day of Climate Action, where people all over the planet engage in thousands of actions–flash mobs, parades, protests and other events–to call for a fair, binding and ambitious climate treaty. This two-minute video (featuring an awesome Sigur Ros song) explains:
The biggest event that I’m aware of locally is Bridge to a Cool Planet. The northbound lanes of the Cambie Street Bridge will be closed to traffic, and people will walk north across the bridge and then east over to Science World, where there will apparently be festivities throughout the afternoon.
The excellent people at the Surrey International Writers Conference have kindly shuffled the schedule around so that I can come down and take part for a couple of hours in the afternoon. If you’re in the vicinity during the actual walk, drop me a tweet or text.
Many years ago, my friend convinced me that the Cambie Street Bridge, though least attractive, has the best views of any bridge on the south side of downtown. That’s a bonus to the whole fighting climate change business, but the views alone are worth the walk.
About six months ago, I wrote about seeing the Google Street View camera car drive past. When Google’s street-level photo feature was implemented in Vancouver, I figured I might show up. Unfortunately, the patio tables out front at Subeez are empty (it’s clearly much earlier in the day), so I didn’t make the cut.
Of course, I immediately became interested in other familiar Vancouver spots:
Though it seems a little gimmicky, Street View is actually a very useful tool. I often remember where a business or office is, but can’t remember the name. Or, alternatively, I think I might remember the name of the restaurant, but I want to see its exterior to confirm that’s it the right one. So, despite not featuring me anywhere in the Lower Mainland, it’s super handy.
What’s your favourite Vancouver spot on Street View?
This Saturday is Vancouver’s fourth annual BarCamp. A bit like Northern Voice, the event has doubled in scope over that time. The first one, back in 2006, had 120 people (as many as would fit in Workspace). This one apparently has 299 people coming.
Boris the BarCamp Organizer (unofficial title) hooked me up with some information about this year’s registrants. For 122 attendees, this will be their first BarCamp, which is always good news. About 20% requested women’s t-shirts, so we’re assuming that they’re either women or very svelte men.
Speaking of t-shirts, I stuck the aggregate requests for t-shirt sizes into Wordle, and produced this little tag cloud:
I’m looking forward to attending and not actually speaking. I mean, in front of people. More than three people at a time. You get the idea. That said, I will be playing the role of Room Selection Bad Cop (unofficial title) during the scheduling jam.
Last night, courtesy of the Vancouver Comedy Festival, we watched George Strombopolous interview Steve Martin at the Orpheum Theatre. There was no particular framing around the evening–Martin wasn’t promoting a book or movie–just a reasonably informal chat in front of an adoring, apparently sold-out crowd.
I’m not a big fan of Strombopolous’s public persona, but he’s a reasonably capable interviewer. The conversation meandered through Martin’s youth, his stand-up career, his movies and other sundry pursuit–he’s a bit of a Renaissance Man.
Though I don’t consider myself a huge Steve Martin fan, I’ve actually consumed a ton of his work. I’ve seen most of his movies (excepting those made ‘for the whole family’) and at least one of his plays, and I’ve read both his novels and his autobiography. He writes charming, readable books, and his autobiography was a fascinating study of one artist’s mind.
Having read Martin’s autobiography, a number of his entertaining anecdotes were familiar to me. Still, it was a funny evening. After 35 or 40 years on-stage, he’s just an innately amusing performer. Looking dapper in a linen jacket and striped socks, he was kind of everyone’s funny uncle. Though I’ve never made this connection before, his physicality reminded me quite a bit of Alan Alda–skinny, white hair, all elbows and knees.
An Adoring Audience
And everyone else seemed to agree. I was surprised by the youthfulness of my fellow audience members. I wasn’t particularly scientific, but I’m pretty sure the majority of the audience was born after 1976, when Martin stopped regularly doing stand-up comedy. I saw a couple of my friends from the theatre community there, which seems natural, but I was, frankly, shocked at how many people paid $60 to $185 to watch Martin chat with Strombopolous and play a couple of bluegrass tunes on the banjo. And they were so smitten. They gave Martin a standing ovation when he walked out on stage.
Maybe it’s a supply and demand question: the opportunities to see him locally, in any guise, are pretty rare.
A significant chunk of the evening was given over to questions from the audience. As they always do, these ranged from the inane to the insightful, and people frequently started by gushing about how much they loved the comedian. I could have done without this. I’d rather watch a succinct, well-run 80 minute interview–I came to hear from Martin, not his fans.
My only technical complaint is that the sound seemed pretty poor. I was toward the back of the main floor of the house, but I often had to strain to hear what Martin and Strombopolous were saying. Strombopolous, in particular, is a bit of a mumbler. If that was the best the venue could do for amplification, they might have been better off not using microphones at all.
A few random quotes from the evening:
Martin described the movie poster for The Lonely Guy as “the worst movie poster ever made”. He’s right.
“3:00pm is the worst time for comedy.”
When asked, he admitted to occasionally reading the message boards on his website. He said, “if there was a discussion forum about you, wouldn’t you read it?”
Rebecca scored an interview with Canada’s boyfriend yesterday, in case you’re looking for more Strombopolousity.
This generation of children is the most pampered and protected of its kind in all of history. Of course, that’s probably been true of every subsequent generation of the past 150 years, if not longer. Still, some instances of helicopter parenting are particularly exasperating. One is the radical change in children being restricted from walking to and from school on their own.
In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children’s ability to navigate the world.
The article, as it happens, describes an incident from “a Vancouver suburb”:
Lisa Reid, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, had signed a permission form, but when her first-grader proudly told his teacher he was walking home himself last spring, a distance of six houses, the teacher was incredulous. She took him to the office and called Mrs. Reid, who didn’t hear the phone. That was because Mrs. Reid was pacing at the end of the driveway, waiting for her son, her worries climbing exponentially as the moments ticked by.
The article goes on to explain that–the math here is mine–a child is more than 2000 times likelier to be injured in a car accident than be abducted by a stranger. There are the 62 million American children under the age of 14, and only about 115 of them are abducted by strangers every year. In Canada, there are about40 to 50 stranger abductions a year.
I wonder why it’s so much higher, per capita in Canada? Maybe there are differences in how the crime is defined? In Canada, a stranger is apparently anybody other than a parent or guardian–”a close friend, neighbour, uncle, grandparent or another family member”. I wasn’t able to find a definition for ’stranger abduction’ in the US.
In short, the odds of a particular child being abducted are extremely small. Not to be all “when I was a young’un”, but the truth is that the abduction risk hasn’t changed since I walked about 500 meters home from elementary school in the eighties.
I should recognize that there are still many levelheaded parents out there. Derek, for example, lets his kids walk to school (and take other risks). It’s a little sad, if not surprising, that our the majority’s perceptions have so overruled the very safe reality.
While writing this post, I remembered the excellent map that accompanies this Daily Mail article.
We’ve been doing a lot of speaking and workshops lately. At these events, people inevitably ask us “what’s the Next Big Thing?” I’m incredibly poor at predictions, but my best guess lately has been Foursquare. The buzz for this location-based social network among the early adopters mimics that of Twitter, Flickr and other tools.
Here’s a great Mashable article on what Foursquare is, and why it’s more compelling than the other location-based social networks such as BrightKite and Google Latitude:
Now we’re starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.
As the article points out, the killer feature of Foursquare is the gaming component. In Foursquare, you earn points every time you ‘check in’ to a particular location. The point system is slightly more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist. If you check in frequently at a particular location, you can become ‘the mayor’ of that location. What does that imply? Nothing really, it’s just classic useless online cred, as old as arcade games. But I suspect that it’ll be highly addictive.
Foursquare strikes me as one of the first practical tools to have a powerful and direct connection between the web and the real world. It blends the real-time nature of something like Twitter with the physicality of the real world. It takes Twitter’s question of “what am I doing right now?” , adds “where am I doing it?” and turns the whole process into a game.
I also like that Foursquare reflects the social swarming behaviour that text-happy teens exhibit. It feels like a logical extension of this behaviour.
A Game-Changer for Local Businesses?
We’ve been mentioning Foursquare in some recent workshops, and I’ve been showing this photo from San Francisco’s Marsh Cafe (click to embiggen):
Talk about an enticement to frequent visit this cafe, eh? I’m not sure what they are yet, but I can imagine that there will be all sorts of creative applications for real-world businesses. Consider, for example, a restaurant where each subsequent check-in in the same week gets you an additional 10% off? It feels like a game-changer for local businesses who haven’t necessarily seen the point of having a robust web presence.
What About the Creep Factor?
Normal Humans tend to get seriously creeped out by location-based social networks. It’s not a surprising response, but I remind them of the fears they’ve probably already overcome as they adopted blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. They may find that, in six months, Foursquare feels totally ordinary to them. Or not–I’m incredibly bad at predicting the success of these things.
In any case (thanks mostly to Chris Briekss, I gather), Foursquare has arrived in Vancouver–the first Canadian city. I won’t be able to try it out in person until I return from my pan-Canadian voyage next week, but here’s my account.
I’m not sure how (or even if) I’m going to use Foursquare. However, I’m going to try to only ‘friend’ Foursquare users who I know and have met in real life (and probably people who I’ve come to know well online). Sharing my physical location with strangers, even only occasionally, feels like a bridge too far.
UPDATE: Here’s another symptom of Foursquare’s real-world connectedness: there won’t be the same compulsive friend-counting that occurs in Facebook or Twitter. What’s the upside of having 1000 Foursquare friends? That doesn’t scale very well if you’re just trying to get some work done at Starbucks.
Last week Julie and I spent a couple of days working from a cabin on one of the islands off the Sunshine Coast. There’s no cable or landline phone service to the cabin, so the only way we could manage this feat was by using the Internet Tethering feature on our iPhone.
For those outside the Cult of Mac, tethering transforms your iPhone into a modem for your computer. You use the phone’s 3G signal to access the web at slow but manageable speeds. You’re not going to play World of Warcraft, but it’s good enough for email or work-related web surfing.
This is kind of a game-changer for us. It means that we can work anywhere there’s 3G cell service. How much of BC is that? Not very much, but it’s a good start and I suspect that it’ll get better. Still, the promise of working remotely more–as well as always being able to access the web on my laptop in the city–is excellent news.
Canada Line, Ho!
When we’re in Vancouver, we usually stay near Cambie and Broadway. So we’ve been anticipating the opening of the new SkyTrain line for months. Since it opened last Monday, I’ve taken it like, 17 times. Okay, maybe more like six times, but it’s fairly awesome.
The trains are frequent and spacious, and it takes only 25 minutes to get all the way out to Richmond Centre. It’s a joy to ride the Canada Line right now, because it’s entirely advertising-free. All of the poster frames are empty, and the video advertising screens are off.
My only criticism of the Canada Line is that the subterranean platforms are aesthetically banal. Having ridden subways in a bunch of other cities around the world, I’ve always enjoyed it when individual stations have distinct designs. The Canada Line platforms look pretty much identical. Maybe this is due to time or budget restrictions, and there are plans to individualize the platforms down the road.
On a vaguely related note, we went out to Richmond Centre for a meeting on Wednesday morning. We walked through the mall–I don’t think I’d ever been before–before the stores were open. We passed several hundred Chinese seniors doing calisthenics to the music of, oddly, the Counting Crows. It was, I must say, a little Maoist. There was also a smaller group doing Tai Chi. I’d heard of seniors doing mall walking, but the scope of these exercising oldies was truly impressive.
We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:
ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.
In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 - just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).
