JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

I’ve been giving my mom my castoff MP3 players. Recently I bought my parents His & Her’s iPod Nano’s. New ones even. And that’s when Mom discovered the joy of podcasts. She’s got her own faves, but they’re mostly (all) French, which doesn’t really jive with my readership (yep, the same three dudes). So I thought I’d tell you about some of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.

(BTW, if you’re not clear on the whole “podcast” thing, don’t sweat it. Check out these resources:

Tucows: How to Listen to Podcasts
Tucows: Tell Me About… Podcasting
butterscotch: Tune In: A Novice Guide to iTunes)

But first a quick rant about why podcasts are important, and should be part of your life. You’ve got limited time to expose yourself to content. You can choose pre-packaged, pre-digested, top-40’s content, or you can consume interesting, thought provoking material. You are what you ingest.

We’ve spent the greater part of our lives consuming content curated for us by others. The promise of the Internet was that we could assemble our own content feed. Is this good or bad? If you seek out content which agrees with your opinions, you’ll have no challenging opinions. No counterpoints. That’s probably not a good thing. So, I recommend finding content from a wide spectrum of sources. You may disagree with some of the views, but at least you’ll have exposed yourself to challenging opinions, and will be better able to articulate objections to those views. (OK, rant off.) (more…)

This year I participated in One Web Day. OWD promotes Web issues to the public. It celebrates that every participant to the web is also a contributor.

As part of Tucows’ support and involvement, we collected over 10GB of public domain and Creative Commons ebooks. These will be loaded onto computers we donated to the Little Geeks Foundation, and sent to Northern communities.

Andy Walker, who started Little Geeks, and happens to be my boss, tells us these communities are rife with social problems, resulting in high rates of teen suicide. The last time books were sent there, the suicide rate dropped by 50%. So I’m hoping our efforts here will have a real, positive and lasting effect on these peoples’ lives.

Mozilla also supported One Web Day 2009. In fact, it capped off their Web Service Week; which is like seven days of One Web Day.

They had these cool OWD posters you could print, have your picture taken with, and uploaded it to flickr.

Finally, we had a terrific soiree at Cafe Taste, around the corner from Tucows HQ, sponsored by Tucows, Mozilla and WikiDomo.

If you missed One Web Day, don’t fret: it’s an annual thing. This was the 3rd, and only my first. Keep an eye on the OWD site. I expect I’ll also say something about it here, before the 2010 event. Until then, be good to our web: create some content.

Google is set to stand communications on its head. Again.

The soon to be released Google Wave program, web app, platform, protocol, paradigm is introducing a new way to do email, IM, forums, wikis, social networking and blogs. All-in-one. And not to put too fine a point on it, it looks pretty slick.

Not only do they have an awesome webclient to ship, but we’ll be able to integrate all that functionality into our own websites and programs using their API.

But wait! You won’t have to rely on Google’s servers: they’re making all this stuff open source, so you can host your own version of the Wave.

Here’s the demo from Google IO 2009 developer conference (1h 20min):

There’s also a very good analysis of the technology at TechCrunch.

Awesome sauce.

I missed it last year, but I’ll be there with bells on this year!  WordCamp is a series of regional conferences dedicated to our favourite blogging platform, WordPress, as well as blogging and social networking in general.

Get the 411 at http://phug.ca/wordcamptoronto/.

WCT is coming this Friday May 8, through to Sunday May 10.  Registration is $35 for students, and $50 for us reg’lar folk.

I’ve always thought of Ada Lovelace as being a contemporary of Mary Shelley.  Turns out Shelley was a friend of her father’s, Lord Byron, who Lovelace hardly knew.  She is widely credited with being the first computer programmer, having written a description of how to setup Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine to produce Bernoulli Numbers.

Of course, Babbage never actually built either of his engines (Difference or Analytical); so Lovelace was saved the heartache and tedium of debugging.  Of course, she also never knew the elation of seeing your program running.  Oh well, software giveth, and software taketh away.

Ada Lovelace Day is a celebration of women in technology.  Bloggers are asked to post about women they know and admire in technology.  So here goes.

Sue Nichols- Miss Nichols was my first Computer Science teacher in grade 9.  She taught me BASIC on an HP 2000.  She also arranged for me and two friends to get our first summer job programming at Cygnet Mini Computers.

More recently I’m privileged to be working with extraordinary women at Tucows, such as Heather Leson, Joan Sumner and Jackie Fraser.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, all.

I’d heard about RiP: A Remix Manifesto on CBC’s very excellent Search Engine podcast a couple of weeks ago.  I’m not sure how it bubbled up (probably through Facebook), but I ended up going to see it at the Royal on opening night with Morty and Bebe.

WARNING: You will come out of this movie hating the Disney Corporation with the red-hot intensity of a thousand suns.  (You know… if you didn’t already.) (more…)

The CRTC is in the process of gathering comments on Net Neutrality from Canadians, in preparation for their hearings on the subject this summer.  Now is your oportunity to let your voice be heard on this important subject.

Our friends at SaveOurNet.ca have set up a handy form to send your thoughts on the matter to CRTC Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein.  They’ve even provided you with a very well crafted default letter (which you can easily edit, or override), in case you don’t have time to write one yourself.  The deadline is Feb. 16, 2009, so don’t delay!

Update: According to Mediacaster Magazine, the deadline has been extended by a week, to Feb 23.

On June 19th one of my favourite podcasts, CBC’s Search Engine, announced they were being taken off the air.  I was so upset I started a Facebook group, Saving CBC’s Search Engine, which managed to attract over 800 other unhappy fans of the show.

Search Engine tackles some of the most important issues facing Canadians in the Digital Age.  Their motto was “We predict the present”. (more…)

Google is today releasing a new browser called Chrome. It’s supposed to be much faster and more robust than existing alternatives. (Yes, even better than FF. Can you believe it?) Google describes the philosophy and advantages in a 38 page comic book:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

The big question is what this will mean for the current players?  I figure it’s too soon to tell.  But I’m hoping Mozilla will use the opportunity to pick up whatever they can from the GPLed Chrome, for inclusion in Firefox.

Also, I’m not sure how much I can trust Google since they’ve pulled the rug out from under my feet with their now defunct Browser Synch extension.