Hogtown Consulting

This passage comes from a well written and persuasive excerpt from Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason on the Time website.

The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

Typically the arrival of an About Me page wouldn’t rate a blog post. But as I’ve been intending to get around to creating one for Hogtown for about two years now this is a marginally special day.

Here it is in all its expositional glory: about me.

Net neutrality is a complex topic, but an important one. The gist is that the companies that provide Internet access (Bell or Rogers in the case of most of Canada) should not be able control or prioritise data on their networks based on where it comes from or what it is. OK, so far so dull – what does that really mean?

Here’s the Telecommmunications Policy Review Panel’s suggested net neutrality provision, via Michael Geist’s much better thought out post on the topic of net neutrality:

“The Telecommunications Act should be amended to confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet…”

This is one of those unfortunate issues that it is very dry and technical, yet important to the average Canadian (though they may not know it yet). Essentially the Internet as we know it is neutral, and the call is to keep it that way. Neutral, in the context, means that your data packets from You Tube get the same priority as mine from whatever half-assed video service Rogers is trying to sell us right now.

The opposite of net neutrality, what we might call net discrimination, is what some Canadian ISPs would like to see. Personally I’m very fond of the Internet as it is, where new applications and uses can flourish without worrying about whether Bell or Rogers is going to discriminate against a particular type of network traffic in their own self interest. I guess I don’t think my interests and Bell’s consistently line up, so I’d like a promise that they will keep delivering whatever I ask for over the Internet connection I pay them for.

More at neutrality.ca

update April 21, 2007:
Or there was more at neutrality.ca yesterday whan I wrote this post, now there is a message reading:

Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.

We have no comment for the media and will not be releasing any additional detail about the factors leading up to this decision. We are currently looking for an appropriate organization to take over these properties and who has the resources to properly operate these sites.
Sincerely,

Kevin McArthur
StormTide Digital Studios Inc.

I don’t know anything about the background to the neutrality.ca site being pulled, but is seems ominous.

10 days since I got home from South by Southwest Interactive 2007, but real life stuff like buying a home and doing work kept the wrap-up unwrapped until now.

I won’t do detailed notes, you can listen to an expanding number of the panels as podcasts if you’re interested. Here are some impressions:

Will Wright – gave an I’ve-got-a-lot-of-stuff-here-and-you-better keep up keynote on story and gaming, which (so far as I could keep up) was pretty intriguing. The demo of Will’s much anticipated evolution game Spore was really cool. I’m a very occasional gamer, but seriously worry about my productivoty once Spore finally arrives.

Bruce Sterling – a somewhat toned down closing rant from Bruce this year, compared to last, I thought. Still well worth a listen though, and a great way to recalibrate from the all too easy ‘web 2.0 will save the world’ with a generous serving of ‘we’re all doomed, and here’s my eloquent and well researched opinion on why’.

Alex Steffen – I’m a big fan of the Worldchanging ‘bright green’ philosophy for how we deal with the global challenges we seem to face in abundance right now. I had seen this same presentation when Alex was in town for the Worldchanging book launch, but the message and messenger are engaging enough to stand repeat viewing. I liked ‘green you geek’ as a suggested approach to the ‘ok I need to change, but where do I begin?’ question. That is, you change in the thing you really care about in life, you stand a better chance of influencing others by example if you try to green the thing you are really passionate about.

Henry Jenkins & Danah Boyd – This was another one I could only barely keep up with, but what I followed was pretty consistently interesting. Henry and Danah ranged over the culture of fandom, mashups and the horribly damaging culture of fear in US politics.

I had a great time in Austin, and expect to be back next year. Sunshine, tech, grackles, beer and cool folks (nod to Michele and David) are a great way to get the year rolling.

Sunday morning I caught the panel Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois.

The guys on the panel were all doing some really cool stuff with hacking consumer hardware, an idea I like a lot. For she shear I -can’t-believe-he-got-that-to-work ingenuity I was really impressed by Paul Slocum’s hack of an old dot matrix printer, to make it into a musical instrument. By changing the timing of the pins hitting the paper he could generate musical notes with a printer.

I also really liked the work Bob Sabiston had done with a homebrew drawing/animation app on the Nintendo DS gameboy. The app seemed small but perfectly formed and he is working on plans to se the DS’ wifi capabilities to be able to share drawings through the web from the device. The image above is of a full sized canvas print of pixel art that Bob drew in his app, apparently while watching TV – obviously a talented guy.

I have a quarter-baked idea about tying in the DS/drawing/WiFi thing with the ideas we’re kicking around at Wireless Toronto for developing local engagement/creation aspects of our 30 location specific portals. More to come on that I hope.

This was my first panel of SXSWi 2007. Featuring: Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster Inc.; Tara Hunt, CoFounder & CMO, Citizen Agency; Gabe Rivera, CEO, Techmeme; Shanalyn Victor, Owner/Designer, Pixelgirl Shop; Ryan Carson, Carson Systems.

The title didn’t excite me, but the panelists seemed like an interesting bunch so I thought I’d give a try. Glad I did, it was a really energetic and interesting discussion.

The general drift of the conversation was that it’s cool to just start doing something online because you think it’s cool or important, and then figure out how or if to attach a business model later on. The exception to that rule was Ryan Carson, who has had failures in the past trying to graft business model onto a successful project, so now starts with the model baked into the idea.

There was lots of anecdote and personal experience, which for me lifts a panel above ‘I could have read that on a dozen blogs’ to ‘yeah, that was a worthwhile human experience’. Unfortunately I don’t report that anecdote stuff well, but here are a few quotes I liked (paraphrased to match my not taking rate).

Tara Hunt – ‘it’s cheap to fail, so fail often’. Seems right to me, it’s an often mentioned driver of web 2.0 that open source and cheap hardwcompanies are (amongst others) allow one or two people to build a web site/app/thing quickly and cheaply. You don’t need to borrow $1mil to get it going, so it doesn’t matter so much if your thing turns out to be a big thing or not. So you can try often and fail often, searching for the thing that works and hopefully having fun along the road.

Asked by an audience member ‘What’s your exit strategy?’ Shanalyn answered that she didn’t really have one ‘the premise of Pixel Girl is that it’s stuff picked by me, and I can’t see anyone else being me.’ This seemed to be a theme, Tara said something similar and again Ryan was the exception to the rule saying that all companies should be built with the intention of being sold (not sure if I got that right, if I did then I disagree, depends on what sort of company you’re talking about I guess).

I really liked the tone of the talk in general. The message seemed to be that you should do something you love (and accept that, at least to start, you may be the only one who loves what you’re doing) and you can’t go too far wrong. With that message, brought to you my Disney Corp., I’m closing the browser to go see the first panel of SXSWi day 2.

I’m at South by Southwest Interactive for the next five days, so I expect by brain to be buzzing non-stop (except when it’s quieted by free, web 2.0 sponsored beer).

I’m going to try to blog in bite sized chunks during the conference, as there will be no shortage of interesting material but a significant shortage of time. So this is a warm up, be warned – there’s no story arc here, this post is all exposition.

I love buildings (at least the potential of buildings, if not the common execution). From my recent Amazon purchases you might even say I’m a wannabe architect (Pattern Language, Architecture of Happiness and Design Like You Give a Damn).

I enjoy the the idea of small but superbly designed houses, discussed here. Maybe I’ll build one myself one day, I do have some relevant skills as I did a 2-month apprenticeship in timber framing a few years ago (big timbers, lots of powertools and no metal fasteners, very cool building technique).

One day maybe I’ll build that timber frame cabin I have the plans for. Until then, I’m looking for ways to work my architectural interests into my web development life.

If you’re running WordPress 2.1.1 then you need to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately, as 2.1.1 has a major security breach. And of course I installed 2.1.1 for a client only yesterday, Sod’s law, the upgrade only took a couple of minutes though.

Usually I wouldn’t do these security warnings on the Hogtown blog (although it would certainly raise my post frequency) but WP is a widely deployed blog platform so I thought this one was worth a mention.

Kiva.org is an organisation that describes itself thus:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

This seems to me like a fantastic example of how web 2.0 and the broader (and more important) ethos of openness and connectedness that it represents can make real difference in the world. In an hour or so of web surfing I can read about individual business people in developing countries. From there I pick a few individuals (who make up my loan portfolio) and transfer some funds via PayPal. Now I am a micro-lender, with a part of my tax refund cash helping entrepreneurs on three continents build up their businesses to (hopefully) lift their families out of poverty.

I don’t know a great deal about micro-lending other than snippets I’ve heard about its effectiveness (in fact I haven’t even read the Wikipedia entry yet), but this just feels right. I’ve ordered a book on the subject to try to improve my knowledge, but for now I’m happy to be an uninformed micro-lender.

Credit to the TorCamp chat swarm, Marc Rigaux in particular, for reminding me that Kiva exists, right at tax refund time too.

2007 has comes with various changes and milestones (Aimee and I planning to get married, looking for a home, 1 year self-employed and 30 years alive to name the big ones). All this has brought with is a lot of thinking, here are some of the pieces that seem like they might fit in the puzzle whose shape I can’t quite make out.

David Crow thinking about the nature of community, having kicked off BarCamp Toronto

Tara Hunt blogging about community and integrity in marketing

Indoor Playground launches, for a cool shared co-working space in Toronto

Centre for Social Innovation expands, providing shared office space for social innovators

Robert Patterson blogs with hopefulness on a huge range of things, like education, energy and wood stoves

Jevon on thinking about Enterprise 2.0 and radar

Steve Jobs on Digital Rights Management (it’s bad and we need a new, less double-speak name for the damn stuff)

Seth Godin, more integrity in marketing

TransitCamp, bringing the BarCamp ethos into the real world in Toronto

Worldchanging condensing thought about how we can best approach the possibilities and threats in our near future, with hopes for a Bright Green future

Wikinomics, telling it to business like the Web 2.0 geeks amongst us always knew it was (collaboration good, industrial age business models in the information age bad)

Unto This Last, a shop building smart furniture on site using a stack of plywood and a computer controlled machine

I’m going to try to make something more considered out of this mess of stuff, but it felt worthwhile just getting it out there for now.