Up in Ontario

Patrick Brealey and the Knives

For everyone who attended the Up in Ontario launch party, Live at the Lake, here in Vancouver, you'll be familiar with the sweet stylings of Patrick Brealey. Patrick played the second set of the night to loud applause and coos from the ladies. As my friend Riggs says, "Patrick's like catnip for the ladies."

Now Patrick's fronting his own rock and roll band and they're due to play this week. They've launched a website at PatrickBrealey.com where you can sample the beauty tunes yourself and snap up a copy of the three-song EP they have available for purchase. Read below for all the groovy groovy details on the concert this week, directly from the man his self.

Hello everybody,

I trust you are well and ready for some music.

I am pleased to let you know that the debut of Patrick Brealey & the Knives will take place on Friday, March 25th at the Railway Club in Vancouver. Full band, full throttle. It will be a fun night with lots of Knives sharing the stage and songs that will make you want to dance, sing, laugh and cry all at the same time. I will be playing around 11pm and will be followed by Leeroy Stagger, who is a definite candidate for heartbreaker of the year. More details to come but consider this your best option for Good Friday.

While you are marking your calendar you may as well check out http://www.patrickbrealey.com/ too. While the website isn't yet the most exciting spot in the vast stretches of the internet, it will soon provide you with some nice things to look at, some pleasant sounds to hear and a few potentially interesting things to read. If you are into the whole bookmarking thing, go for it.

Thanks and remember, a sharp Knife is a safe Knife.
Patrick

p.s. if you would rather hear about Patrick Brealey & the Knives by your own means, please let me know and I will take you off the list...I am not here to pester, just to inform. I won't take it too personally, I promise.

Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game

Another Nerd posting, this time from John Battelle's SearchBlog, we find a link to Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game, where the value of cutting edge technologies and technology companies is predicted in a style that mimics financial markets. The project comes out of Yahoo Research Labs, where some top A-list geeks ply their trade.

A huge array of categories and topics are available for 'investment,' with play money, of course. The arbiter of measurement for investments is the buzz score of aggregated Yahoo searches: "The buzz score of a stock is its percent search buzz compared to other stocks in the same market. So if searches for Internet Explorer (IE) make up 60% of all searches about stocks in the BROWSER market, then the buzz score for IE is 60. Note that the buzz scores of all technologies within any market always add up to 100."

To play the Tech Buzz Game you have to sign up and create an account. I don't think I'm interested enough to invest my time in playing. I'll just sit and watch from the sidelines, as a casual observer. I also don't have much faith in these types of predictive markets since they tend to work well and revel in abstract, homogeneous settings while discounting the lumpy human factors at work. What really interests me is how people hunt for information, sometimes online, where the results can be tracked, accumulated and analyzed, and how that hunting corresponds to behaviours.

At the Web 2.0 conference back in October, Gian Fulgoni, the Chairman of comScore Networks, showed a slide in his presentation on the impact of broadband penetration on user habits that showed how following users' search and browsing patterns could act as a predictive indicator of purchasing. The example used is for car purchases and the graph below illustrates. In a way this is simple logic: if I'm looking for information on a car it's likely because I want to buy a car. But the web enables us to see a statistical glimpse into this behaviour translated and its results. And if it works for car buying, what else do you suppose it would work for? Extrapolated further, predictive indicators could be wonderfully useful or tremendously invasive and manipulative. So who controls your behaviour information?

3POs in 10 Years Time

This past Saturday the Duck and I packed a picnic lunch and spent the afternoon basking under the glorious sunshine out at Lighthouse Park. We hiked out to a ledge high above the ocean, read and ate our lunch while the boats passed by and the eagles flew overhead. As they say out east, it was some nice.

Between reading and eating we talked about whatever crossed either of our minds. Sometimes this was nothing. Other times we made a remark about something we had read or a boat passing.

At one point I read an article in a magazine about iPods and I got to thinking about an essay I'd read last week by Tod Maffin entitled Vertical Listening. The basic premise of the essay is that the current way listeners consume radio, through a radio, tuning in to a linear stream of programming organized by time and broken up into smaller segments called stories, was being disrupted by recording devices that extracted radio programs from the linear stream. An example online is PodCasting: recording audio programs and posting them online for download to personal digital media players over the Internet. Kind of like recording TV programs with a VCR but different because some gee-whiz technologies like Rich Site Syndication (RSS, which I've gone on about in Reading RSS Feeds) make it easy to subscribe to programs so that you're notified when new shows are available. So instead of having to make an effort to record the show, subscribers find out when fresh shows are available and grab them if they're interested. It's kind of like shows on-availability and then on-demand.

Alright, so now we're getting to the interesting part. Or, interesting to me at least. And since the last time I went on about technology like this, my brother called me a "Neeeerd!", I'll keep it snappy.

I thought out loud to the Duck on the rocks out at Lighthouse Park that in 10 years, when all content is transmitable over the Internet - all text, images, radio, TV, webpages, telephone calls, all of it - I imagine we'll all have Personal Private Players. 3Ps, if you will. The 3Ps will have a wireless Internet connection and you'll be able to send, receive and store all the content I've referred to above - text, images, audio, TV, etc. - on your own 3P. Through the same device you'll have telephone conversations, you'll record movies and take photos, you'll write stories and you'll read / listen to / watch stories. It'll be like an iPod or cell phone for everything. If you extend the buzzword logic a little further, you could even come up with a better name: 3POs (Personal Private Players On-demand Streams), a catch tag for the Star Wars generation it will target.

So what will that look like? Well, all the ways media exist today will continue to exist. Books will still be published. Broadcast radio and television will not go away. But the stories will be decoupled from the linear stream of production, distribution and programming. The go-live date for a story or program will become more gradual. Early, test or bootleg versions of programs will be released or leaked and archives of past programs will be opened up and made available. Overall, more programs will likely be consumed, though the entrenched powers will not see it that way and will need to be wrestled along with the innovations, kicking and screaming and trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to put lipstick on the tired, old pig of a system they know and trust just as it erodes under their tightening grip.

Subscribers to programs will also be able to have greater control over what you read / listen to / watch since their 3POs will be able to customize the presentation of the stories, the same way that you can customize the presentation of a web page in your web browser. In a way, we all become creators, even though many of us will not want to be creators. On the other hand, producers will be able to work a whole new angle for their creations. They'll know more about their audience, track usage better and offer more value to the sponsors and advertisers footing the bill. They'll also be able to create new subscription revenues from original release and then from access to archives. Copyright will be a mess, but then, smart people like Lawrence Lessig have been saying that copyright is a mess for over 10 years now.

So why is any of this interesting and why was I thinking about it instead of enjoying the view as a beautiful, maroon-sailed schooner cut past in the waves below us? Well, with these crazy new 3POs people will want new types of programs, new stories. The usual ones produced for the evening news, 1 to 2 minutes long, spliced with live or archival footage and a reporter on the scene, won't be much good if people want more details on a part of the story. At the same time the half-hour or hour-long sitcom or drama will be too long for the small snippets of time and attention available for 3PO users.

I think a new type of programming will emerge, about 8 - 10 minutes in length, with supplementary information interlinked with the story. Perhaps longer segments will be serialized and bundled together but still broken out as 8 - 10 minute segments. This length is consistent with both radio segments, TV personality segments and the time it takes readers to get through the usual newspaper article (800 - 1,000 words). Somehow it seems like the right size for conveying most stories and I think a whole new genre will be devised to fill the need for stories to be told in a way that combines all the best qualities of the various media with audiences' preferences.

Imagine audio stories with companion texts and images that commuters could subscribe to for delivery twice a day, just in time for the ride in to work and the ride home. Imagine a stock report just for the stocks a subscriber tracks, a weather report for the days and locations of concern to a subscriber, a columnist who can make reference to source material (an interview with a celebrity, a historical event, a quotation from a text) and if the reader is unfamiliar with the source material they can see it / read it / hear it right then and there so the rest of the column makes sense. All kinds of possibilities seem possible.

As a public service announcement, the key buzzwords for this new way of consuming media are, in no particular order:

• Place Shifting: taking media out of its linear stream, as in the Vertical Radio example cited above, and recontextualizing it. This may also apply to Time Shifting.
  
• PodCasting: "A podcast is like an audio magazine subscription: a subscriber receives regular audio programs delivered via the internet, and can listen to them at their leisure."
  
• Rip, Mix, Burn Culture: originally coined in an Apple TV commercial (Quicktime movie, 2.7 MB), the concept of Rip, Mix, Burn is that all media (text, photos, video, music) is now available in digital form and in digital form it is subject to enless recombination and remixing, such as DJs with records, hip-hop producers sampling riffs from old records, film producers splicing in archival material. The original Apple ad ran until the Disney legal cabal filed cease and desist papers against them, just setting the tone of the discussion and the means of suppression.
  
• PVRs (Personal Video Recorders): devices such as TiVO that mediate a digital-TV signal and record programs for rebroadcast and recombination
  
• Personal Grid Computing: all your devices working together to share content, bandwidth and computing power, enabling the smaller, less-powerful devices to do larger tasks
  
• The Long Tail: originally the title of a wired article entitled, The Long Tail, the idea has proven immensely popular and spawned a book deal for its author and a blog detailing the writing of the book. Basically the article lays out how millions of micro markets in aggregate have overtaken the mass markets and the mainstream in sales and interest.
  
• DRM (Digital Rights Management): "an umbrella term for any of several arrangements which allows a vendor of content in electronic form to control the material and restrict its usage in various ways that can be specified by the vendor." The latest example court case: MGM vs. Grokster
  
• The Architecture of Participation: an idea that participation equals existence, that without participation things stagnate and die out, that minimal hierarchy exists to hamper participation (an idea from anywhere is as valid as any other idea) and that participation is implicitly built into the request-response architecture of the web; certainly debatable

Now you can impress your friends and acquitances at cocktail parties. Like good red wine, please use responsibly.

Up in Ontario, the chapbook

For over a year now I've been receiving daily Google Alerts updates that tell me when a new link to upinontario.com is added to Google, or when someone uses keyword phrases applicable to me or my novel, Up in Ontario and those references are indexed in Google. The Google Alerts are very handy for keeping your finger on the pulse of the web.

Over the weekend I received a Google Alert that piqued my curiousity and brought back memories: a reference to a review of Up in Ontario, the chapbook from Broken Pencil magazine. The chapbook was the first thing I wrote in what turned out to be the novel, Up in Ontario. If you look through you copy of the novel (of course, you have bought a copy of the novel, right?) you'll notice that one of the middle chapters is called Up in Ontario. An earlier form of that chapter lived as Up in Ontario, the chapbook.

Back in 1997 Broken Pencil said:

Up in Ontario chapbook, 32 pages / publisher: Jesse James Press / main creator: James Sherrett / $4 /

What you feel while reading this beautifully understated story by James Sherrett is something akin to what the crayfish in the story feels when they are caught: "They were confused and caught by something they didn't understand and couldn't do anything about. They tried to get at what it was, but couldn't. Their hooked claws, extended open and searching, were ready to pinch anything that came near." Wade and his father go out fishing together. That's really the extent of the plot right there. But I was riveted. There's an undercurrent of danger to this story that, incredibly, remains below the surface. You know it's there, but you can't put your finger on it; even at the end it remains implicit. I kept waiting for some kind of crisis and at times it looked like one might occur. Wade snorkels over to some rocks to try to catch a fish in a net. He's under the water for quite a while. His breath begins to run out. But then he just swims back to the surface and is fine. He doesn't even catch the fish. Later, Wade does catch a fish in his net, and the rest of the story centres around Wade and his father trying to decide whether to keep the fish or to put it back in the water. What makes this story so compelling is it's elusiveness. Sherrett maybe captures the essence of what he's doing in his description of what Wade sees in the water below the boat. "Wade was looking down at the water, trying to see what he could. The water was clear but the current made it impossible to be sure about anything. Wade could only get a vague idea of the shape and colour of things in the fast flowing water." This story seems crystal clear on the surface, but it's impossible to be sure about just what is going on beneath the surface. Because even if the exact substance of the undercurrent isn't apparent, Sherrett makes the reader feel it powerfully. (KS)

The New Mythologers: Bloggers and Rappers

My brother once said to me, as we neared the end of our respective tethers in a discussion, that, "if you can't with with reason, win with volume." I've ingrained his comment since then and try to use it not as a credo but as a disarming aside, though the former sometime happens too. So when I read Josh Levin's article, Rappers and Bloggers on Slate, I couldn't help but be reminded of my brother's comment. Volume, indeed.

And don't forget those silly, silly names. Even if he didn't flaunt his devotion to pimping and pit bulls, you'd probably guess Snoop Dogg is a rapper. And Fedlawyerguy—yeah, probably a blogger. But the "blogger or rapper?" parlor game can stump even the nerdiest gangsta. Does uggabugga hate on wack emcees or wack Charles Krauthammer? What about Mad Kane? Big Noyd, Justus League, Uppity Negro, Little Brother, Cold Fury, and South Knox Bubba? (Answers: blogger, blogger, rapper, rap group, blogger, rap group, blogger, blogger.)

Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments. Rap songs use the same recipe: Dig through a crate of records, slice out a high hat and a bass line, and lay a new vocal track on top. Of course, the molecular structure of dead-tree journalism and classic rock is filthy with other people's research and other people's chord progressions. But in newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts. For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage.

Listening to rap music, something I'm not frequently caught enjoying, I'm usually struck by the bravado of the rappers. In their rap they create their own mythology. Wealth, status, credibility, the struggle against opponents, real and imagined, women subjegated to supporting, one-dimensional roles - not much has changed since the classical songs and poems of Greek myth, since the sophists roamed the land, paid to create rhetoric to support arguments. Though now the heros tell their own stories, the producers deliver the melody and the record companies distribute the product to the kids.

So even if that music don't make me want to go hippity hop, I can still respect the desire to be heard, to create stories and reach people and make sense of this crazy, mixed-up world. I just wish we could hear some different stories. Gunfights and stepping to homeys to get my respect somehow doesn't resonate with my personal experience. Does it resonate with yours?

How to Donate Your Old Computer

The good folks at TechSoup have posted on their website a primer of Ten Tips for Donating A Computer to a school or non-profit. The article offers some basic reasons for donating your old computer to a school or non-profit and then some sound advice on how to go about doing it, and whether your computer is a good candidate for donation.

In our bedroom closet the Duck and I have an old anchor of a computer which now serves as a platform to hold a shoebox containing my good, dress shoes, brought out only for weddings. When my mom was in town recently she asked me if her computer could be upgraded or if she should start from scratch with a new machine. Moore's Law has been a fantastic development for software developers, web geeks and computer users in general, but its cost is just beginning to show up in landfills ill-designed for hazardous waste disposal, where the hard metals integral to the hardware components of the computer leech into groundwater and pollute environments downstream.

As loyal Up in Ontario readers may have noticed in the past few weeks from posts like What We'll be Remembered For, I've been thinking more and more about our impact on the planet, and further, about my individual choices and their impact on the planet. I know that practical guides to making sustainable and responsible choices exist, I just haven't yet had the courage to pick one up and invest myself in following its advice. Is it time? What do you do to make good choices? Or, do you make good choices?