Hogtown Consulting

End of 2006 approaching quick + feeling I’d like to blog more frequently = a look back at the year.

Stunningly original it ain’t, but it may just get me writing a little more.

Looking back on 2006 I’m going to start up with Democamp/Barcamp, the unconference weather system that descended on Toronto in 2006.

There were ups and there were downs, are there not always? But I have a definite feeling that there’s a there there, and that David Crow’s ambition to improve the tech community in Toronto is panning out.

This is very cool, the million dollar blog post at gifter.org is kind of like the million dollar homepage, but with generosity in place of pure, queasy-making self interest.

The million dollar blog post describes itself thus:

If you could make one wish for the world, what would it be?

In fact, we want to know so much, we’re willing to donate $1 to charity for each wish comment posted here.

The idea is that anyone can leave a wish for the world (as a comment on the post), and for each wish $1 will be donated to charity by a sponsor. Anyone can become a sponsor, just by making a donation to the charity of their choice, putting the receipt online and letting gifter.org know.

Sure some sponsors may have already been planning to make donations, others we hope are inspired by witnessing the community express their generosity that they make a donation they hadn’t planned on making.

We aren’t motivated by the money. The goal is to document in a social giving experiment how generous the Internet community can be, when we act collectively and support each others projects.

I really hope they make it to their $1m target, this sort of thing gives me hope that the Internet can be good for more than videos of blowing stuff up. Much more.

I’ll let the creators of this previously stealthed idea speak for themselves:

Recently out of a passion to have a shared workspace for entrepreneurs, innovators, and geeks in Toronto we ventured out and leased a great space at Richmond and Peter… It is basically about 2000 sq ft plus an additional mezzanine floor (the gallery). It is on the 5th floor (top floor) of an old brick and beam loft. The view of the city is outstanding and thankfully there is enough light to avoid florescent bulbs…

[from Creationstep, who are making this happen]

Indoor Playground is a next generation workspace based in the downtown core of Toronto. It is a home away from home for the entrepreneur who needs an office space on occasion. It helps to solve the problem of having a place to work when you are on the road or when you just want out of the house. Indoor Playground provides a good-looking and creative space populated by other great people worth meeting. It is the perfect solution for new start-ups and independent innovators who are looking for a professional yet affordable way to scale their business.

[from the official Indoor Playground site]

I’m going to be watching closely to see how this unfolds. To me the option of a cool space to work in around interesting people doing interesting things sounds pretty great.

We can only hope, after all the Grand-old-Torture Party just got thrown out in that country to the South, to be replaced by Torture-Party Lite admittedly, but it’s a start.

Actually, the Worldchanging to which I refer is the blog, book and book tour of the same name.

Worldchanging’s philosophy is probably well summed up by Alex Steffen, one of the blog’s co-founders, who says:

We find ourselves facing two futures, one unthinkable and the other currently unimaginable. My beat is looking for ways to create a future which is sustainable, dynamic, prosperous and fair — a future which is both bright and green.

Now that I can get behind. Tonight I saw Alex speak at the Toronto leg of the tour to launch the new Worldchanging book, and I was impressed. Inspired you might even say. Ed Burtynsky made a great co-presenter of the show, with a giant screen showing his genuinely awe inspiring photos of Chinese industry (and how often do we genuinely get our awe inspired?).

I have to admin I haven’t read the book yet, I would be halfway through already if I didn’t select the free-but-slow cheapskate deliver option on my order. If the book’s half as good as I hope though, everyone I know is getting a 600-page book shaped parcel this Christmas.

Here’s what the book says about itself:

From consumer consciousness to a new vision for industry; non-toxic homes to refugee shelters; microfinance to effective philanthropy; socially responsible investing to starting a green business; citizen media to human rights; ecological economics to climate change, this is the most comprehensive, cutting-edge overview to date of what’s possible in the near future — if we decide to make it so.

I expect to be thinking, and rambling in blog form, about this stuff more in the future. I can’t claim a great grasp on the environment or social justice or any related topic, but it seems to important not to try. I’m not alone in this thought either, here are a couple of locals that spring to mind BeSustainable and FreshBooks.

Alternate title: In which our protagonist takes a further swerve away from the original intent of his blog, realising that the miscellaneous category is full to brimming while the other categories he always meant to write something in are looking rather sad and empty.

So, applying a little after the fact strategising, I’ll say that the Hogtown blog will get even more about whatever the hell I’m thinking and less focused on specifically web/business-y stuff. Another way, this will become an excellent place to find out if I’m the sort of person you want to have anything to do with, and won’t even pretend to be a place to read well thought out articles on web development and related issues (which A List Apart, and a million others, do better than I ever will anyway).

So, here’s to an ever fuller miscellaneous category.

Scrybe is tough to describe, especially for my Saturday morning brain. It’s a very cool looking organisation app, watch the video demo if you have 5 minutes to kill.

Via Rob Hyndman

Boring site news: Due to a combination of technical troubles and my blissful ignorance the contact@patrickdinnen.com email which I plaster all over this site has been out of action for some time. So if you sent me an email recently but didn’t get a reply then please try again, that email should now connect to my brain in a way it wasn’t before.

If you are selling Rolexes or Viagra then please disregard, I don’t feel the need for either. Thank you however for the 4,500 messages which you sent already, preventing me from discovering if I had real email I needed to respond to.

Merlin is one of those geek micro-celebrities, which means that most people won’t know who he is. Merlin is, amongst various things, the author of the 43 Folders blog on productivity ‘n stuff.

He has an excellent, if extremely infrequent, podcast and gives the impression of being an all around decent guy (how could I not like someone who mixes mac productivity tips with observations on the Buddhist concept mindfulness).

Anyway, Merlin’s going to be in Toronto next week and there’s an open invite for people to come hang out with Merlin and the Inside the Net crew. I’d love to, but I’ll be on a plane headed for Paris. Here’s the details, for any other Merlin fan boys or girls out there:

Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte’s Inside the Net podcast comes to Toronto’s “No Regrets

I’m certainly not the first to write about now being a good time to be in the business of doing things on the web, here’s the 37 Signals take on it. There are a bunch of reasons this is true, but here’s one that I’ve found really relevant: open source software rocks!

Perhaps I should expand on that a little. As a one man web development/consulting shop I have a finite amount of time in a given week to get things done. The availability of good quality software components that are free and freely customisable is a huge bonus when I’m trying to make the most of my time, which is why I love open source.

Right now I’m developing a site for a non-profit who are working with Cisco to provide technology for post-Katrina redevelopment of schools on the Gulf Coast. The site spec called for forum and photo gallery systems. Now I could have written them from scratch, but it would have taken me a long time, or I could have bought them off the shelf, but likely the products would have cost a lot or just not been quite right. Open source to the rescue, after a little searching I found projects that provided exactly what I needed, and because they’re open source I can tweak the code to get them working exactly the way I want.

This is great, I don’t want to spend my time re-inventing the wheel in developing what’s already been done, I want to create great stuff on the web. So I can concentrate on the stuff I really love doing because there’s a huge number of great tools out there that I can plug together and alter as I need to. And the price tag of zero dollars (plus the occasional donation to the projects) can’t be beat either.

Trying to get out of post-vacation posting doldrums with a quick post on a couple of design links I liked.
Unto This Last is a cool furniture company base din London that I came across on the often inspirational inhabitat blog. Unto The Last use an in-store computer controlled fabrication process to build funky looking wood furniture with zero stock at near (ish) Ikea prices. Now that’s smart.