Among many projects I’ve been involved in recently I lent a helping hand to launching CivicAccess.ca

Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data (aka: CivicAccess.ca). CivicAccess is being founded by [people] from across Canada. We are motivated by the belief that open civic information and data are necessary for being engaged citizens in an “information society”.

Here’s the personal motivation I put forward when signing up to be a founder of the group ‘I can get an RSS feed of where my FedEx packages are and XML data on the weather in Tokyo but if I want to know how my councillor voted I get a jumbled 200 page PDF published a week after the vote. So why is the most important democratic data so far behind the curve?‘. I’m going to coin the term ‘Democratic Web 2.0 Deficit’, watch that one take off.

The aims of the group are to:

1. To encourage all levels of governments (county, municipal, provincial, federal) to make civic data and information available to citizens without restrictions, at no cost, and in useable open formats.
2. To encourage the development of citizen projects using civic data and information

The group’s in the early stages right now, but it has the backing of a broad and interesting group of founders, so I have hopes of good things to come. If this looks interesting, join the email discussion list and get involved!

An analysis-free post here, with a link to a NYT article I found interesting

There is another breed of rival lurking online for traditional media, and it is perhaps the most vexing yet: call it purpose-driven media…

These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don’t really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about.

There’s nothing earth shattering here for people who follow the things web 2.0, but an interesting read anyway to see how the corporate, bottom line obsessed world sees this stuff. The TorCamp/DemoCamp events tend to showcase up some great examples of these ‘just because I could’ projects Questionville and Favorville for example (what’s with all the *villes I wonder?).

For a little while now I’ve been struggling with finding the ‘voice’ of this blog. Is it purely businessy stuff from the Hogtown Consulting point of view or is it more generally the voice of Patrick Dinnen, who also happens to be Hogtown Consulting?

I think by posting my vacation photos here I’m putting the final nail in the coffin of this blog as a strictly business proposition, an approach which was growing rather dry. So here they are, my photos from Santiago de Cuba (click the image to see a set of 13):

Chevy have opened up an online competition to create an ad for the Tahoe monster-jerk-truck ™. I’m sure that they have high hopes for the positive viral effect of this, but others have different ideas. There’s no reason that your ad has to be pro-Chevy. Check out this one, and as all the cool kids are doing it, I even had a go myself.

Please, no one buy a Chevy because of this post, or their manipulative ploy will have worked.

Your homepage should say one thing, well one and a half. It should what you are and why I should care, and it should say it really clearly.

Now this is a lesson it’s easy to forget (like so many of the best lessons) but I just came across a wonderful counter example that reminded me of this important wisdom. Take a look at the Advance Auto Trends Inc. homepage.

Ok, now you’ve read it, including the statement ‘People don’t want to spend time figuring out what a business does, so our home page will highlight the most important features of both our business and our web site‘. Now can tell me what AAT Inc. actually does? And did you bother going to read another page trying to figure it out and seeing if you wanted to give them some money? Nope, I thought not.

Right, I’m off to edit my homepage now.

I’ve included two semi-obscure pieces of jargon in that title, despite Jakob’s good advice that ‘Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog…’. One of those pieces of jargon is easy to define, and the other isn’t.

To start with the easy, according to Wikipedia ‘[the phrase is used] in discussions on computer technology, where someone who is a staunch advocate for a particular technology is described as having “drunk the Kool-Aid”.‘ The phrase has rather tragic roots, but I won’t go into that here.

The second phrase I need to define is much tougher. Using the term ‘Web 2.0′ in conversation, will quite reasonably lead to the question ‘what’s web 2.0?’. I’ll try to answer that here: Web 2.0 is a made up name for a whole broad range of ill defined technologies, practices and trends going on in the web world right now. There’s probably an even split between people who think it’s useful, if broad, term and people who think it’s pointless, empty hype-ridden junk. I didn’t even come close to defining it did I? Personally I like either ‘the read/write web’ (meaning the ‘new’ web is really about easy communication between real people, not just broadcast). I suggest the Wikipedia definition (or list of possible definitions) if you’re interested.

Personally I fall kind of between the two camps, with a feeling that there’s probably something in web 2.0 but it’s not quite clear what that is yet. But this post is more about kool-aid drinking than about web 2.0.

Here’s the anecdote (every good post should have one): Recently in conversation with Aimee, my significant other, I said ‘I was just looking at photos tagged jello on Flickr.’, Aimee’s response was ‘what are tags, what’s Flickr?’. For a web geek not knowing what tags and Flickr are is kind of like being puzzled by the terms jumping and circus. That brought it home pretty abruptly, just because I’m drinking the web kool-aid doesn’t mean the rest of the world is. To answer the actual questions, Flickr is the photo sharing tool of choice for geeks and tags are kind of like categories for content, but they’re user-make-upable not top-down defined.

The point here, if I have one, is something about realising that the things that are second-nature to you may well mean nothing at all to nearly everyone else in the world. Technology people could particularly benefit from keeping that in mind.

See: Darren Barefoot’s more concise and statisticed post on the web kool-aid.