Supporting Ideas from zene.ca

I only contributed a minimal amount to this project, but I'm proud of what the community was able to come up with. The internal process was a very fluid and enlightening example of a completely collaborative editorial and design process. Kudos to Alex for organizing all of this!

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/

http://www.businessmodelalchemist.com/

Video of the production of Business Model Generation - visit at the book binder in Utrecht, NL

Business Model Generation - visit at the book binder in Utrecht, NL from Alex Osterwalder on Vimeo.

September 27, 2009 - Queen's Park, Toronto, ON

I spent a busy and thought-provoking afternoon at Word on the Street on Sunday. I missed WotS for the last two years, and I was determined to make it to the national book & magazine fest this year.

I met up with Alastair Cheng from the Literary Review of Canada at the magazines area on the eastern arm of Queen's Park Crescent, and made our rounds through the booths.

Here is a brief summary of interesting ideas and people met:

1) Canada Council for the Arts: I snagged a print copy of their 2007/8 Annual Report, which also came with a CD with English and French PDFs. The latest 2008/9 report was released Sept 17, 2008, and the full set of documents are available at:  http://www.canadacouncil.ca/aboutus/organization/annualreports/. The search function on their website was not working and spewed out error messages, so I had to run a google search using site:canadacouncil.ca in order to find anything.

After two and a half years of dissecting annual and quarterly reports for CNW Group, I have new respect for the lowly annual report and associated financials. A project idea would be to build an online annual report for the CCA in the vein of PotashCorp's report done by zu.com

2) rabble.ca - conversations with Kim Elliot, publisher

At the rabble booth, we talked about Media Democracy Day and their upcoming media mapping project that, as far as I can gather, seeks to map out the creators and consumers of independent media in the Greater Toronto Area. It's a great idea for finding out who is in our community, what their interests are, and how we can help support the growth of relationships and linkages between indy media. This is an idea dear to me, and I'll definitely be looking for more information about this project. The discussion expanded to include university media projects such as futurity.org, where academic institutions host their own portal to highlight scientific or academic news that otherwise wouldn't get attention from mainstream media.

Other topics explored with Kim and other rabble.ca volunteers include a potential unified online ad exchange for Canadian independent media/news organizations who are all using OpenAds (which is now OpenX)

Apparently, about two years ago, there was a project on the table that sought to bring together organizations like rabble.ca, the Tyee, etc, to cooperate in web ad sales. This initiative petered out because there wasn't enough interest, but perhaps with the rise of web ads in the last two years, the idea can be revisited. Anyone who has more information about this, please email me, twitter me, or feel free to leave a comment here.

3) Ran into Jordan Himelfarb (from the Mark) at the maisonneuve tent. The Mark is an up and coming new site that's hitting some of the right buttons. I've got to investigate further, but at first glance, they're using getsatisfaction.com for feedback from their readers. It's something that I've wanted to do for the longest time: to use getsatisfaction as a collaborative editorial brain storming tool.

4) New subscriptions purchased

The Walrus (recently, they were looking for an assistant editor - closing date was Sept 24th)

musicworks (Comes with a CD!)

Broken Pencil Subscription + their fiction anthology can'tlit: fearless fiction from broken pencil magazine

Toronto Life

Canadian Art

and of course

maisonneuve

How was your Word on the Street experience? If I were only a little bit ambitious, I would build an after-show vertical search engine that aggregated the #wots09 hashtag and associated media to compile the ultimate, automatically updated, national coverage for this great event. But alas. I don't have the time nor the technical chops to do it, and thus ends my review of Word on the Street Toronto.

Up next week: Reconstruction of a magazine website. - Stay tuned.

-jl

Useful style guide from Campaign Monitor for writing html emails http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

Click here to download:

Campaign_Monitor_Guide_to_CSS_Support_in_Email_27_Aug_2009.pdf (89 KB)

Posted to the Opensocial-Community group @ Sept 16, 2009 - OpenSocial Community > Using opensocial to describe the social network of a 3rd party

Hello all,

I apologize if the questions in this post has been addressed before. I was wondering if OpenSocial could be used, not to describe 1st person relationships (ie the quintessential Facebook profile), but to describe 3rd party relationships that had been discovered through research, freedom of information act requests, or some sort of machine-learned filtering.

I'm in the media/journalism business, and in the financial press, we need to keep track of who sits on who's board of directors, and the  large number of C-level executive musical chairs that happens around us as industries goes through acquisitions and contractions.

I'd like to use opensocial to build a researcher's map of this type of social relations, sort of the linkedin profile that we as the public build for a particular person: the journalist's black book - open for all to see and all to fathom the consequences.

I can see this being a public good as well, when applied on our politicians, who come out of one bad senate assignment only to become  the next chairperson of another obtusely named governmental body.

It'd be very interesting to see how far the social graph concept can be pushed when applied to the complexities of business executives or  politicians.

Jonathan Lin