I know my template is still broken in places. Sorry about that. The small army of highly-trained gerbils that maintains the code for this site are working feverishly to restore the broken comment links and other b0rked bits.

In the meantime, if you've been scouring the site trying to find a contact email address (one of the things that's been broken for a while), it's: michaelocc AT gmail DOT com.


Normal service will be, etc.

This is a pretty impressive move from Canada's national broadcaster. A big day for online TV and freedom of consumer choice.

Earlier today, the CBC announced that one of its major primetime shows ("Canada's Next Great Prime Minister") will be made available for free, unprotected download in the popular BitTorrent format so often associated with digital piracy.

No - I'm not making this up. Canada's greatest copyright guru, Michael Geist, leaked the story yesterday on his blog, and the CBC have both confirmed it and been actively involved in the comment thread at Michael's place. From the show blog:

The show will completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart’s desire.

This is courageous, smart, and just plain awesome.

The torrents will be completely free of nasty DRM too. One of the show's interactive producers, Guinevere Orvis, is quoted in this CNET piece, saying:

I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it ... if it's bad for the consumers, it's bad for the company.

Amen. Times like these, I'm proud to be living in Canada.

As reported at NPR.org earlier today, Clinton campaign staff sent a lengthy email to reporters and bloggers covering the US presidential nomination race on Wednesday morning.

This is not unusual. I get a similar email almost every day from the Obama camp.

What makes this occasion newsworthy is that we get to see how some (presumably relatively junior) member of Senator Obama's staff chose to respond.

The resulting point-by-point rebuttal is a particularly juicy example of the fine art of fisking, once defined in the Observer newspaper as: "savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet."

What I enjoy most about this is not the sheer entertainment value of their response; it's the simple fact that we get to see it.

Regardless of how you might feel about the tone and nature of the fisking -- don't you just love this kind of transparency? Can you possibly imagine having this kind of insight and access in the pre-blogosphere, pre-Cluetrain world?

For the record, here's the full email. If you're interested, the original appears on the Clinton campaign website, here. The comments credited to the Obama campaign are in bold, below.

To: Interested Parties
From: Clinton Campaign
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Re: Keystone Test: Obama Losing Ground [Get ready for a good one.]

The path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes through Pennsylvania so if Barack Obama can't win there, how will he win the general election?

[Answer: I suppose by holding obviously Democratic states like California and New York, and beating McCain in swing states like Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia and Wisconsin where Clinton lost to Obama by mostly crushing margins. But good question.]

After setbacks in Ohio and Texas, Barack Obama needs to demonstrate that he can win the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the last state with more than 15 electoral votes on the primary calendar and Barack Obama has lost six of the seven other largest states so far -- every state except his home state of Illinois.

[If you define "setback" as netting enough delegates out of our 20-plus-point wins in Mississippi and Wyoming to completely erase any delegate advantage the Clinton campaign earned out of March 4th, then yeah, we feel pretty setback.]

Pennsylvania is of particular importance, along with Ohio, Florida and Michigan, because it is dominated by the swing voters who are critical to a Democratic victory in November. No Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since 1948. And no candidate has won the Democratic nomination without winning Pennsylvania since 1972.

[What the Clinton campaign secretly means: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT WE'VE LOST 14 OF THE LAST 17 CONTESTS AND SAID THAT MICHIGAN AND FLORIDA WOULDN'T COUNT FOR ANYTHING. Also, we're still trying to wrap our minds around the amazing coincidence that the only "important" states in the nominating process are the ones that Clinton won.]

But the Obama campaign has just announced that it is turning its attention away from Pennsylvania.

[Huh?]

This is not a strategy that can beat John McCain in November.

[I don't think Clinton's strategy of losing in state after state after promising more of the same politics is working all that well either.]

In the last two weeks, Barack Obama has lost ground among men, women, Democrats, independents and Republicans -- all of which point to a candidacy past its prime.

["A candidacy past its prime." These guys kill me.]

For example, just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama won 68% of men in Virginia, 67% in Wisconsin and 62% in Maryland. He won 60% of Virginia women and 55% of Maryland women. He won 62% of independents in Maryland, 64% in Wisconsin and 69% in Virginia. Obama won 59% of Democrats in Maryland, 53% in Wisconsin and 62% in Virginia. And among Republicans, Obama won 72% in both Virginia and Wisconsin.

But now Obama's support has dropped among all these groups.

[That's true, if you don't count all the winning we've been up to. As it turns out, it's difficult to maintain 40-point demographic advantages, even over Clinton]

In Mississippi, he won only 25% of Republicans and barely half of independents. In Ohio, he won only 48% of men, 41% of women and 42% of Democrats. In Texas, he won only 49% of independents and 46% of Democrats. And in Rhode Island, Obama won just 33% of women and 37% of Democrats.

[I'm sympathetic to their attempt to parse crushing defeats. And I'm sure Rush Limbaugh's full-throated endorsement of Clinton didn't make any difference. Right]

Why are so many voters turning away from Barack Obama in state after state?

[You mean besides the fact that we're ahead in votes, states won and delegates?]

In the last few weeks, questions have arisen about Obama's readiness to be president. In Virginia, 56% of Democratic primary voters said Obama was most qualified to be commander-in-chief. That number fell to 37% in Ohio, 35% in Rhode Island and 39% in Texas.

[Only the Clinton campaign could cherry pick states like this. But in contrast to their logic, in the most recent contest of Mississippi, voters said that Obama was more qualified to be commander in chief than Clinton by a margin of 55-42.]

So the late deciders -- those making up their minds in the last days before the election -- have been shifting to Hillary Clinton. Among those who made their decision in the last three days, Obama won 55% in Virginia and 53% in Wisconsin, but only 43% in Mississippi, 40% in Ohio, 39% in Texas and 37% in Rhode Island.

[If only there were enough late deciders for the Clinton campaign to actually be ahead, they would really be on to something.]

If Barack Obama cannot reverse his downward spiral with a big win in Pennsylvania, he cannot possibly be competitive against John McCain in November.

[If they are defining downward spiral as a series of events in which the Clinton campaign has lost more votes, lost more contests and lost more delegates to us ... I guess we will have to suffer this horribly painful slide all the way to the nomination and then on to the White House.]

[Thanks for the laughs guys. This was great.]


As one commenter at the NPR website put it, "Damn,I love me some information age."

OK, so maybe "hate" is a little strong.

What I really hate, perhaps, is the fact that operating systems have become so huge and so complex that it's almost impossible for the normal human mind to fully grok them in their entirety.

There are days when I pine for the simplicity of CP/M, or even DOS 3.11 - the last operating system I can honestly say that I completely and fully understood.

Windows Vista continues to behave in unexpected, unpredictable and frequently annoying ways. It seems to have been built for the convenience of Microsoft more than the convenience of the user.

Case in point: I'd heard there were some issues with the most recent Vista updates and Dell hardware. Some of my colleagues have had problems with the most recent updates messing things up. I really enjoy using my Dell laptop (disclosure: we do some work for Dell, but had already standardised on their kit long before they became a client), and I didn't want anything going sideways on me at the moment - we're far too busy.

So I've been skipping the updates - whenever it prompts me to "Install Updates and Shut Down" I've forced the "just shut the darn thing down" option. That worked fine until this morning.

I booted up first thing this morning while still at home. The machine immediately decided to start "configuring updates" I'd never asked it to install. It continued to "Installing 1 of 17 updates" and just sat there. In the end, I had to close the clamshell and travel to the office with the updates still running.

A full FIVE HOURS later, Vista finally finished unknotting its knickers and gave me my laptop back. FIVE BILLABLE HOURS without access to my network or anything. Good thing I had a morning of conference calls and hard copy to review.

The good news, I thought, was that everything seemed to come back together properly after the world's longest install - I thought I'd escaped most of the issues I'd been hearing about. Alas, though, I may have been mistaken. A few minutes ago, shutting down a Word document, this popped up:


In case that screenshot is a bit too small, let me explain what it's saying:


The latest updates to Microsoft Windows Vista managed to screw up something to do with Microsoft Word.

In the fine print under "See details" it points out that "This program requires flash.ocx, which is no longer included in this version of Windows".

So your latest mandatory update managed to uninstall a component required to run what is probably the single most widely-used piece of application software on the entire planet.

How utterly, utterly craptastic. Vista broke Word. I'm so happy.

[Bonus Link: Fascinating NY Times piece on the pending "Vista Capable" class action suit, citing Microsoft exec's own problems with Vista upgrades.]

[UPDATE: May 29, 2009 - Since I originally wrote this post over a year ago, I've been living with Vista every day on my main laptop. I've learned to appreciate some of its better features. I guess I don't really hate it nearly as much as I used to - or maybe I've just come to a kind of grudging acceptance. There are still days when it drives me utterly ballistic - usually when it chooses to do something like auto-reboot while I'm away from my desk. That's just utterly inexcusable.]

I've had some less-than-positive things to say about the concept of Social Media News Releases and their execution in certain cases, but I've also said all along that I see merit and vaue in the overall idea of reinventing the way we do things in this respect.

Part of my concern up to this point has been that there was a lot of individual experimentation, and some interesting innovations from a number of vendors, but I felt that much broader and more inclusive discussion and collaboration was required across the industry.

If we, as professional communicators, collectively agree that the old way of doing things needs a complete rethink in light of the disruptive changes wrought by first the Internet and then all this Web 2.0 loveliness - then we should find some collective way of addressing the rethink.

To this end, I was greatly encouraged to read yesterday's news at Shel Holtz's blog that the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) will be taking on sponsorship of the Social Media Release initiative and coordinating development efforts towards some standards.

This is great news. As I said in a comment at Shel's blog: there are extremes at both ends of this discussion, but at the centre lie some real needs and opportunities. Only through the authoritative support of an objective industry body will we move towards true consensus.

I fired off a note to the IABC contact shortly after reading their announcement and I'm happy to say that they welcomed my petition to join the working group. This should be interesting.

So after four or more years limping along with the same cheesey old template (which I've hated since around the second day it went up), I've finally gotten around to the blog renovation project.

- Stripped out a lot of the old cruft that had collected in the sidebars (OK, so I might lose my blognerd status for not having the minimum 37 items of flair in my sidebar. I'll live).

- Found a template that let me make the sidebar navigation a lot groovier.

- Still got to fix commenting. I'm trying to switch across from the old 3rd-party comments system (Haloscan) to Blogger's built-in comments. Not working at the moment, but I'll figure it out.

I'm not wild on the blandness of the typeface, and I want to make the centre column a bit wider (a tad too much border right now), but it's a bit easier on the eyes than the old version, IMHO.

What do you think?

I'm screwing with the template once again here. Trying for a massive overhaul in honour of the 7th Blogiversary. Seems only fair to the poor thing to blow the cobwebs off and give it a new coat of paing.

Things may go horribly wrong. Grab your ankles.

I find it a little surprising that no widely-available source seems to have an answer to that question.

A journalist friend emailed me earlier today to ask if I knew of any stats about the size of the Canadian blogosphere. I was in a very quick break between meetings but, knowing he was on deadline, I sent a quick message out to a few friends who I thought might be likely to know, plus I sent up a flare on Twitter.

It doesn't look like any such data exists - at least not in readily available form.

I even asked Dave Sifry, Technorati founder and oracle of the blogosphere. Dave is the force behind Technorati's regular "State of the Blogosphere/State of the Live Web" reports. In their latest reports, they've been able to split out the size of the blogosphere by language, but even Technorati doesn't currently track numbers on a regional basis.

That's such a shame. I can imagine it's a pretty big problem to figure out how to do this, but not beyond the reach of some enterprising stats jock, surely. It would be really interesting to be able to see detailed break outs of:

- bloggers by country (whatr percentage of a country's total population is blogging);
- percentage of regional online population (i.e. of Net users per country, how many are bloggers?);
- comparative charting (e.g. what's the most bloggy country in the world? fastest growing?)

Wouldn't you love to know that sort of stuff?

So, chanelling another one of Dave's projects, I'm wondering hoosgot the time and resources to put together a comprehensive analysis of the size of the blogosphere by country/region?

Yes, I'm a nerd.

My brothers and I discovered D&D some time around 1976. There was a sci-fi and fantasy bookstore in one of the seedier parts of Birmingham, on Summer Row, sandwiched between a collection of dodgy adult bookstores. It's probably all designer bars and coffee shops now.

I wish I could remember the name of the store. In the basement, their was a mightily-bearded hippy dude who carried a selection of board games and war games rulebooks. I still remember the illustrations in the original set of D&D rules, and our collective excitement when the first set of Advanced D&D rule books appeared a couple of years later. Nerdtopia.

God rest, Gary.

(Image credit: Penny Arcade)

[UPDATE: Just noticed that yesterday's xkcd comic could be read as a prescient epitaph for Gary]

In yet another massive outpouring of collaborative indifference, the entire blogosphere was united in a consensus of apathy at the weekend, coming together to collectively ignore the extraordinary insignificance of my seventh Blogiversary.

I've been posting to this thing from March 1, 2001 through to March 1, 2008, almost uninterrupted. That's a lot of words. Some of them even made sense.

We've come so very far in the seven years of my personal social media voyage. Lots and lots of changes. "I have a blog" has gone from sounding funny and vaguely lavatorial, to being almost yawn-inducingly predictable in everyday conversation. Blogs on the cover of Business Week, no less. Who woulda thunk it?

Yet plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Some days, it seems like no matter how much the world embraces the Internet and the ever-expanding blogosphere, people still keep making the same mistakes.

Ack. I'm having a weltschmerz day, for some indefinable reason. Or maybe it's weltwidewebschmerz...

I could try to explain, but it's a long story. If you haven't read @Man recently, refresh your memory now.

And happy Blogday to me.

[UPDATE: Happy 7th Blogiversary also to my friend Brent Ashley, who's wondering whether his blog needs to adopt a greyer theme, now that it's so old. Had no idea this place was just a day older than Brent's]