Copyright for Canada

 Family, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jun 192008
 

There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion in the papers about the newly-tabled Bill on Cana­dian Copy­right; suf­fice to say there are lots of issues with it and it needs to be sent back and turned into some­thing that meets the needs of the cit­izens and res­id­ents of this coun­try. If you’re liv­ing in Canada, I’d recom­mend you read some of Michael Geist’s blog, par­tic­u­larly the sum­mary of last week, and then email your MP about the issues that con­cern you the most. For me, it’s the poten­tial that play­ing DVDs from a region oth­er than Canada could viol­ate the law. If I’ve bought the DVDs leg­ally, or had them giv­en to me, why should play­ing them viol­ate the law? Why should get­ting a cell phone unlocked viol­ate the law? Why should back­ing up my CDs viol­ate the law? This is one of the few issues I can remem­ber where it seems that every news­pa­per has the same tone to the edit­or­i­al — and it isn’t com­pli­ment­ary to the government.

Mind you, my loc­al MP isn’t exactly known for listen­ing to his con­stitu­ents (there’s still a lot of loc­al anger at his cross­ing the floor after being elec­ted), so who knows how much good my email (a heav­ily edited ver­sion of the one at that used to be found at http://www.copyrightforcanadians.ca/action/firstlook) will do.

Update: it looks like the Min­is­ter sup­posedly in charge, isn’t — Cana­dian Industry Min­is­ter lies about his Cana­dian DMCA on nation­al radio, then hangs up — Boing Boing.

Spreading the Word

 General  No Responses »
Jun 122008
 

I’m not the first per­son to notice the duplic­a­tion of posts, as people post what’s hap­pen­ing to Twit­ter and Face­book and Plurk, and blog about it if they feel like writ­ing some­thing a little longer. Which means that when you really want to keep up with what someone is up to, you sub­scribe to them on all those chan­nels, and Friend­Feed as well, and put up with the duplic­a­tion (spiced up by the time lag between things appear­ing on one chan­nel and when they appear on the oth­er; ain’t latency fun?). 

The prob­lem comes when you want to respond, or join in the con­ver­sa­tion. Do you reply to the tweet? Or com­ment on the blog post­ing? Or respond to the per­son indi­vidu­ally by email or chat? Or all of the above? 

In the con­crete case that made me think about this, I sent off a chat mes­sage, and now I’m going to also blog it: con­grat­u­la­tions to Edd and fam­ily on the new arrival; may he sleep peace­fully and grow vig­or­ously, and not fight too much with his older siblings.

And maybe that’s the answer: take each case as it comes, depend­ing on which audi­ence you think might (or should) be involved, and how eph­em­er­al the con­ver­sa­tion should be.

Toddler Books

 Books, Family  3 Responses »
Jun 122008
 

My daugh­ter is now two, and likes some dif­fer­ent books to the set I reviewed six months ago, although she still likes the Boyn­ton books and Moth­er, May I? by Grace Mac­car­one (I sus­pect because it has a pic­ture of a truck in it, and fea­tures a hug at the end). 

In no par­tic­u­lar order, we have Hand, Hand, Fin­gers, Thumb by Al Per­kins and Eric Gurney, There’s a Night­mare in My Closet by Mer­cer May­er, Dog In, Cat Out by Gil­lian Rubin­stein and Ann James (lots of scope for mak­ing up stor­ies about what’s hap­pen­ing in the pic­tures), Waves in the Bathtub by Eugenie Fernandes (make up your own music for the song, it will sound much bet­ter than the tune in the book), and Where’s My Teddy? by Jez Albor­ough (ours is bundled with It’s the Bear!, which gets nearly equal billing in the tod­dler appre­ci­ation list). These are all books my son liked as well, so chances are good that oth­er tod­dlers will enjoy them just as much. My son did­n’t have Mon­key and Me by Emily Gravett, but my daugh­ter likes it.

And, of course, she also likes any­thing with a pic­ture of a truck in it.

Girls and Trucks

 Family  10 Responses »
Jun 092008
 

My tod­dler daugh­ter loves trucks; she’ll glee­fully point them out on the street and in books until you’re sick of the word. So just before her birth­day, there was me in the toy store look­ing at truck-related toys for her (trucks, trains, cars, oth­er assor­ted toy vehicles) try­ing to pick out some­thing that did­n’t entirely duplic­ate what she already has. Behind me, I heard a cus­tom­er ask the clerk for help. The con­ver­sa­tion ran along these lines:

Cus­tom­er: Hi, I’m look­ing for a toy for a two-year-old.
Clerk: boy or girl? Not that it should mat­ter, of course.
Cus­tom­er: it’s a girl.

At which the cus­tom­er was taken over to some oth­er aisle, far away from the trucks and trains and related toys, des­pite the claim that “it should­n’t mat­ter”. I was in the toy store for a while, and she nev­er did make it over to what I guess was con­sidered the “boy” side of the store. My daugh­ter loved the trucks we got her, and likes hav­ing the truck book that her grand­moth­er gave her for her birth­day read to her (to cries of “truck! truck!”). I just hope she does­n’t notice that every driver of every truck in the book is a man. 

Managing Distractions

 Technology  No Responses »
Jun 052008
 

It’s all too easy to get sucked in to check­ing your Twit­ter and your Plurk and your Brightkite and your Face­book and whatever oth­er ser­vices you use; in my case I can claim I need to know some­thing about how these things work for a pro­ject. In the­ory I’m mak­ing use­ful obser­va­tions of how people inter­act with ser­vices and what value they get from them, but in real­ity I spend a bit more time watch­ing and read­ing than is needed for that. It’s very easy to fol­low tweeted links and then find myself web-surf­ing, just like it was in the early days of the web, when we all watched what came up next on NCSA Mosa­ic’s “What’s New” page. So it’s a little iron­ic that John tweeted a link that made me more aware of the slip­pery slope of online dis­trac­tions, and poten­tial ways to com­bat them. Thanks, John!

Communities and Circles

 General  3 Responses »
Jun 042008
 

Someone asked me the oth­er day wheth­er blogs were com­munit­ies. This got me to think­ing about how we define com­munit­ies in the online space. And friends, and fol­low­ers, and how some social net­work­ing sites encour­age enlar­ging the social circle while oth­ers con­cen­trate on people you already know through oth­er means. “Social circle” being extremely loosely defined, of course, just as the term “friend” is much more loosely defined in the online space than in the phys­ic­al, face-to-face world. 

So let’s play with some ideas for a defin­i­tion of com­munity. If you have oth­er ideas, please add them to the com­ments and if you think I’m wrong, tell me why; maybe we can come up with a com­munity defin­i­tion of com­munity. Which leads of course to the real­isa­tion that I do think blogs (some blogs, any­way) con­sti­tute a community.

A com­munity is a group of people who inter­act with each oth­er in some for­um. How’s that for a begin­ning? Not too bad, but it does­n’t really nail down very much; the line-up in your loc­al cof­fee shop could be seen as a com­munity under this defin­i­tion. We need to add a tem­por­al aspect: mem­bers of the com­munity inter­act with each oth­er over a peri­od of time (this rules out the cof­fee shop line-up). And at least some mem­bers of the com­munity have to be act­ive with­in the com­munity (a social for­um where nobody posts any­thing is not a com­munity by this defin­i­tion). This last is more fuzzy (what does “act­ive” mean?) but I think is necessary. 

The defin­i­tion of com­munity needs an “act­ive” aspect since in my opin­ion for a blog to be con­sidered a com­munity, people read­ing it have to com­ment on it. Oth­er­wise it isn’t a com­munity, it’s a pub­lish­ing meth­od. We could get into dis­cus­sions about wheth­er a spoke-and-hub inter­ac­tion mod­el where read­ers com­ment on the posts but not on each oth­ers’ com­ments is still inter­ac­tion, or wheth­er you neeed a many-to-many inter­ac­tion mod­el (which is closer to what most people think of in the phys­ic­al world as a com­munity), but I think that’s a detail. What’s import­ant is that the com­mu­nic­a­tion in the com­munity flows in more than one dir­ec­tion. Mind you, the word “inter­act” is a verb, which implies an action, so adding the adverb “act­ively” to it is a tau­to­logy, which I try to avoid. 

This leaves: A com­munity is a group of people who inter­act with each oth­er over a peri­od of time in some for­um. Not per­fect, but not bad for a start.

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