Author: dave Page 47 of 75

It’s Christmas time again and that means lots of list-making is happening all over the place. So I thought it would be a good time to point you to one of my favourite little on-line apps, TadaList.com.

This little gem is exactly what it says it is.

You just sign up, and presto! You’ll be creating lists, checking things off and feeling very up-to-date and plugged in, to boot!

It’s easy, fast and free. And you can print out your lists, send them to other people and even share the list with others, including letting them add to it. Want to see my list?

It’s a handy little utility. I use it all the time.

If you like reading and especially if you like reading about reading, and writing and books and booksellers, then you’re going to love this series.

Forbes.com has published a special report on books. And what a treat it is.

But a word of warning. You could end up spending a lot of time working your way through this, so make sure you’ve carved some time out of your hectic schedule first. I’ve only begun to work my way through the many articles in this great series, but it’s something worth bookmarking and returning to at your leisure.

Here’s a snippet from the introduction:

Are books in danger?

The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media–the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames–compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.

But surprise–the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.

People still burn books. But that only means that books are still dangerous enough to destroy. And if people want to destroy them, they are valuable enough that they will endure.

Where do you get your news from?

If you’re like me, there are a whole bunch of ways to get hold of what’s happening in the world. There’s on-line, newspapers, print magazines, TV, word-of-mouth, news releases, the company newsletter — the list goes on and on.

The scale can be intimidating. And it’s hard to figure out whether you’re reading a balanced, fair perspective, or a one-sided rant based on questionable assumptions or even outright falsehoods.

Lately, I’ve been participating in an experiment that combines the higher ideals of the new citizen journalist movement with traditional news outlets. It’s called NewsTrust.net and the public beta of the website launched a couple of days ago.

The premise is simple. NewsTrust.net compiles stories from around the world on a variety of topics and posts them on their site. Then members review the stories and rate them, adding comments, if they like. Ideally, the result will clarify the neutrality of a piece, based on accepted standards of ethical journalism.

Here’s how the site describes the process:

In recent years, the consolidation of mainstream media, combined with the rise of opinion news and the explosion of new media outlets, have created a serious problem for democracy: many people feel they can no longer trust the news media to deliver the information they need as citizens.

To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism – or “news you can trust.” Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources.

This non-profit community effort tracks news media nationwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy. Submitted stories and news sources are carefully researched and rated for balance, fairness and originality by panels of citizen reviewers, students and journalists. Their collective ratings, reviews and tags are then featured in our news feed, for online distribution by our members and partners.

Note that the ratings are supposed to be based on “journalistic quality,” not just popularity. That’s been one of my complaints about some of the similar news sites, where people can vote for stories they like. In theory, NewsTrust has different standards.

It’s an interesting idea and if it works it will add some clarity to some pretty large issues facing the world. And while the focus of the site may be U.S.-based, the more Canadians and others that participate, the more influence we’ll have.

So I’m sitting here in my office (with my thinking cap on), working on a post about some aspect of the world around me, or even my world. And I upload it to TheDailyUpload, and then you notice I’ve done that and you read it. It seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?

But as normal as it seems now, it wasn’t that long ago that the world looked a lot different. From the way we got our news, to the way we communicated, and the way we acted towards each other. In fact, when you stop to think about it, the changes are profound and they haven’t stopped. We’re in the midst of an info revolution and we can only guess at the ultimate effect it will have.

So I was intrigued by Michael Kinsley’s new article on Slate, the online magazine where he used to hang out (and co-founded). It’s called Like I Care: On The Internet Everybody Knows You’re A Dog.

The title comes, of course, from the famous New Yorker cartoon of a dog sitting at a keyboard, with the tagline “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

While anonymity was once touted as the strength of the medium, today’s Internet has turned that concept on its head. As Kinsley points out:

But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.

As Kinsley wanders through his article, he seems worried about what’s happening. But he doesn’t claim to have any answers. Just a lot of questions. And a niggling concern that what’s happening might not be all good.

I share his concern. While I’m an unabashed supporter of new technology, I worry about the way our society is evolving. The online freedom we enjoy has a dark side. People say things online they’d never mention face-to-face. And the world seems like a darker place, thanks to how much we know about all the bad things going on around us.

I love melodramas and the other night I watched How Green Was My Valley. It’s the story of a Welsh coal mining village’s evolution from idyllic to ruined wasteland, thanks to the success of the Industrial Revolution.

OK, I’m stretching things, I admit. But the Internet has changed our world, just as the Industrial Revolution changed that Welsh valley. But the people in that village packed up and moved to other places. Life went on. Some of it was good and some was bad.

Like Kinsley, I don’t know whether all this is good or bad. Of course, I have plenty of opinions. And as a good citizen of the Web, I’ll keep posting them and pointing to other people’s thoughts and suggesting that you do the same.

And in another 30 years, I’ll probably regret some of them just as much as I regret wearing that plaid suit and those tinted glasses.

We woke up this morning to a ton of white stuff all over Victoria and the rest of the lower mainland of BC. What a surprise!

This wasn’t the kind of winter weather I had in mind when we decided to come out here, that’s for sure. I know…I can hear all of you people in other parts of Canada saying “Give us a break. A little snow! Big deal!”

I used to say that too. But regardless of whether you figure we’re all wimps because the city is shut down by a major snowfall — I can tell you that the problems are many.

Yesterday, Heather got stranded when her new Mazda just couldn’t cut the heavy snow. We’re not sure whether it was because the large, oversized sport tires that didn’t leave enough room for snow in the wheelwells, or whether the tires are just a bad compound. The end result was that she couldn’t get up some of the hills around here – like a lot of other people. The heavy snow got really slippery, really fast.

She ended up leaving her car near the hospital, after taking almost an hour to do the 10-minute drive over there. Later, when the snowfall let up, we picked it up and brought it home.

But this morning, after snowing all night, the entire city is pretty much shut down. Schools are closed, offices, roads – everything is at a standstill. The cold weather has arrived now and the city just doesn’t have the resources to clear this stuff away in a hurry. We’ll have to wait for some warmer weather and a BC snowplow (ie Rain) to clear it.

Meantime, it is pretty, as you can see from the pictures. And of course, our dogs are loving it. It’s not your typical West Coast weather, but for a prairie boy, it’s not so bad. But that’s enough for now. We can return to normal programming any time now.

UPDATE — You can see more pictures at my Flickr site.