I’m a big supporter of independent media. As part of the team at NowPublic I help build tools that anyone can use to report on the news and events happening around them. With the prevalence of devices capable of recording video, still images and sound, it is almost impossible that a significant event will not be recorded in some way. And sometimes all this content created by the people is at odds with the interests of the corporations that produce or sponsor an event.
The 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be taking place in Vancouver and we are home to some very creative people who will be on the ground, recording and reporting on their experience during the games. For this reason a few days ago Raincity Studios wrote an open letter to VANOC requesting to start a conversation about how we can make sure that everyone will be able to document their Olympic experience:
“In brief, we’d like to have a conversation about how to allow fans and amateur media makers to document their Olympic experience while keeping out of the way of the IOC IP lawyers.”
It remains to be seen what VANOC’s response will be, if any. It would be very nice if everyone could document their Olympic experience and share it with the rest of the world without the fear of getting takedown notices that would make all their efforts useless.
NowPublic today announced, in partnership with the Vancouver Sun, the launch of its fourth MostPublic Index, this time for Vancouver. And I’m in the top 10!
The MostPublic Index identifies the Web’s 20 most visible individuals, those who are engaged in the world around them;
“This is the first attempt to take a group of people and say, ‘Let’s crunch the data and see when somebody says something, how many people do they reach with that message.’ “I think the list will surprise some people,” – Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic
Although I do “keep my head down” in many ways, I’m nothing if not prolific on the web. It’s a great honor to be a part of this list.
The Top 10 from the Vancouver MostPublic Index are:
- Darren Barefoot http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/
- Tim Bray http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
- Boris Mann http://blog.bootuplabs.com/
- Kris Krüg http://kriskrug.com/
- Roland Tanglao http://rolandtanglao.com/
- Tom Williams http://www.givemeaning.com/blog/index.html
- Megan Cole http://www.megancole.org/
- Rebecca Bollwitt http://www.miss604.com/
- Arieanna Schweber http://www.blogaholics.ca/
- Tod Maffin http://todmaffin.com/
Check out the full Top 20 here. And have a look around the NowPublic site – if you haven’t seen it since the re-design, it’s well worth some of your time. The header is constantly changing too, which is great fun.
And yes, I’m aware the Vancouver Sun mis-spelled my name :(
I’m feeling a little overworked today, but somehow that didn’t stop me from jumping onto the FaceYourManga meme that hit twitter today. In fact, it made my day just a little bit brighter. I’m not sure who started the meme, but all day my twitter feed has been steadily been going manga. Check it out:
In just a few minutes you can customize your own little manga. The settings are easy to use and the results quite unique. The assortment of options is "enough" while not perfect. In the end, you pay a small price to download your personal manga. Totally fine by me, it was a fun few minutes of my day! Here, see the manga I was making for Ianiv:
And this is the Arieanna manga:
What does your manga look like?
Tags: manga, face your manga, faceyourmanga, meme, twitter, cartoon, avatar
Last night, Launch Party 4 was held at The Republic in Vancouver. Launch Party is a mixer for entrepreneus and tech geeks and is always to be counted on for it’s "un-networking" vibe. There are no panels, no speakers. Just local companies doing demos and people having a good time sharing ideas.
LPV4 featured demos for some Vancouver start-ups including Strutta and FundFindr.
Photo credit: Ianiv & Raul
You can check our photo set out here.
Tags: launch party, launchparty, lpv4, lpv, the republic, tech, vancouver
We may not update our blog very much, but we are on twitter every day.
What is twitter? The insular resonse would be "like lots of Facebook status updates you can reply to like in IM".
Basically, twitter is really a way for you to say what you’re doing from a very simple web interface (or IM client, or mobile device), and to hear what others are doing. To interact in simple ways. It is incredibly social, interacting with individuals and with communities at once. It took me a while to ‘get it’, but for busy people, it is a great way to stay in touch with people and with news.
So, if you’re on twitter, here’s how you find us:
Considering how few updates our site gets, we were tempted to toss our twitter feeds here. But, then it would just become a twitter blog, and that’s probably not ideal ;)
Tags: twitter
