Big Brother promise finally fulfilled? Interesting article in the Globe and Mail this morning about PVR's ability to track viewing habits.

Globe and Mail article

MySpace is now playing catch up. You have to love disruption!

Read more.

Steven Pinker's new book coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Really enjoying myself at BookExpo right now. The Devices and Desires conference was excellent. It is more fun for me than I had anticipated.

Just came back from a conference in New York that BISG organized It was sponsored by codeMantra and Vista.
It turned out to be a pretty interesting conference. However, the big thing for me was being in New York, downtown Manhattan, for my first time. I have been all around Manhattan but never there. Publishers Row, McGraw Hill, Simon and Schuster, Random House, all located in these huge beautiful buildings in Times Square.

Oatmeal for breakfast, thoughtful discussion about the digital revolution that is happening in publishing till lunch, and then a stroll to Greenwich village and back.

John Seed was in Guelph town on Friday and had some interesting observations to make about climate change. John is a student of Joanna Macy who has a book out called Coming Back to Life.

A couple of the big insights I took away were:

1. If the US reduces the speed on their highways from 70 to 50 mph then there would be a savings of a billion barrels of oil a year. That, said Seed would keep things like the Iraq war from happening. That is a phenomenal idea!

2. Ruminate animals cause more greenhouse gases than all the cars on the planet. We need to eat less of that kind of meat. It isn't surprising that our agri business is as bad for the environment as our industrial practices.

One of the attendees of the conference said that he had just been at an environmental trade show and that there was a vendor there with a label for products that indicated the ecological footprint that was involved in manufacturing that product. There is a cool idea, let people decide how they spend their dollars based on that kind of information.

And finally, I don't have the article but a bunch of people were talking about a great article by Paul Hawken. I've read a Ecology of Commerce by Paul and it was great so want to track down this article that everyone was talking about. Fortunately I can just go talk to Stan Kozak down the street from me and ask him what it was. He sent it around.

Maude Barlow in Guelph:

Went to a talk given by Maude Barlow last night organized by Guelph Water Watchers. It was a great talk if not a little of a downer.

Here are the keypoints:
Humanity (that is us) is affecting the hydrologic cycle so that the planet is losing usable water. We are polluting the surface water, sucking out the ground water and creating polluted water. It is the ground level equivalent of global warming.

Our investment in nanotechnologies means we stop putting our efforts into conservation and thereby create bigger impacts on the eco-system. Not only that but water becomes a commodity under corporate control. The plants are nuclear powered, dirty and then we have to buy back the water for exorbitant amounts. The rich are the only ones who can afford water, not the ones who really need it.

Maude talked about NAFTA, North American Security and Prosperity and the efforts being put forward by short sighted business leaders to deregulate everything under the sun, which is nothing new.

Check out Council of Canadians, raise your voice, protect a precious resource, join the fight against Nestle who is basically stealing the future. Also think about joining this group on facebook if you are using facebook.

Spent the weekend puttzing around with Facebook and attending the first year of Suzuki Strings concert. Also started watching Deadwood. I knew I would like it and sure enough I do. I started with the first episode of season two. I was on the train and it was rainy out. I just needed to tune out and wanted to watch some t.v. so I did. It was perfect! When I got home I raced to Thomas Video and rented the first season.

So I just had to say I was wrong for slamming the readers for not having The Road available because they do here at The Road

It may be telling that I have yet to pick up the Iliad and start trying to use it as a reader. It may be telling that I turned on the Sony reader almost as soon as it was in my hands and started to load things onto it...only a few burps with the install of their updates. I had to uninstall the software and start over and not apply the update. There is nothing I hate more than an update that makes the thing it is updating stop working altogether.

I have heard people say that the Iliad is hard to approach as a non-technically minded user. Even the somewhat technically are intimidated by it and say things like there isn't anything to load onto it.

Nevertheless, the Iliad sits on my desk for one reason or another. A $1000.00 experiment waiting to be tested.

Our blog has started on the BookNet site. Michael started it off with a bang. Now we're all too intimidated by the audience and the quality, never mind that we are all busily reading all that stuff you can't get easily with an electronic reader. For instance, is one of the highest selling fiction books, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, available on the Sony reader, or the Iliad?

So anyway, I am the perfect candidate for using one of these pocket electronic libraries. I commute an hour and a half to work and lug a lot of reading material - not to mention a laptop - back and forth 3 hrs every day. My pack probably weighs close to 30lbs. I love to read! My tastes are varied, I go through cycles. I will read business books, math books, poetry, fiction, science, science fiction, cookbooks, gardening books, spiritual stuff, political, books like Fast Food Nation, Botany of Desire, Pattern Language, How Buildingd Learn, The Ingenuity Gap, Envisioning Information, The Sparrow, The Road, and I am a follower of Earthseed. I love the confused persons dummie guides to Statistics! (oh yeah and don't forget all of those amazing computer books from Pearsons). So how do I fulfill my reading desires with one of these devices?

This weekend I swear I will start looking at the Iliad. But I can't do what Michael did and swear off the printed page for an extended stay in London. Just can't do it.

E-readers: preliminary report
We received our ereaders this week and just a couple of early observations. First off it cost a lot of money for the Iliad reader from irex. The total cost Cdn. was almost 1000 dollars! That is 3x the cost of the Sony reader. $120.00 of that was for shipping. O.K. that is too much. The sad part is that the handling fee was only $8 and gst and pst made up the rest. Ouch. It remains to be seen if the extra cost is actually worth it.

The Sony reader came with excerpts of books which is about as useful as reading the back of a book. I mean why bother. Include the whole text or nothing. I got a public domain copy of Vanity Fair and loaded that on and also loaded some word documents which so far has been the best use of the reader. Technical documents make a lot of sense on the readers.

I'm not crazy about the usability of the form factor for the Sony reader. There are things I want to do like scroll the page that you just can't do and it is frustrating.

More on the software and form factor later.

The conference happened and was a big success. It was fascinating to see so many people who are involved in Canadian culture gathered together thinking about the state of affairs. If only we could have had a social network mapping of the event so everyone could see how the nodes on the tree fit together... Want to keep working on that aspect of organization, the book trade social network map.

One of the things coming out of this conference is the purchase of an Iliad and Sony ereader. We are waiting on these devices so we can blog about usability and content etc. I will get to use it on my commute to Toronto and see if I can drop some weight from my backpack. I can't imagine I will have the same content that I currently have though. I use the library a lot and if I could get the library loan onto the reader that would be awesome. Automated checking in and checking out....

The blogging is going to happen over on the BookNet site so stay tuned.

Harper Collins and Random House have made their own search inside widgets. Pretty cool little things that let you read the inside of the book ala Amazon. So now the problem is obvious. Publishers blow their brains out on developing this stuff but Amazon and Google offer much more content from a single source. Anyway, I think I prefer the random house widget over the harper collins but it will come down to content.

Help protect our water supply!

GCL member Mark Goldberg and James Gordon are the signators on an official
application made last week to the Environmental Commissioner Of Ontario
to object to the renewal of Nestle's water bottling license.

THEY NEED OUR HELP to help convince the province to deny this renewal.

At the Nestle bottling plant in Aberfoyle, they are basically taking our
water for free.

They can now draw 3.6 million litres per day from the same aquifer as
the City of Guelph and they pay nothing for it! water! (That is about 7
percent of our city's daily intake) This is the commercialization of a
public resource. The world’s largest food and beverage corporation is
bottling our water and selling it back to us for more than the price of
gasoline! Their permit is up for renewal in June. When they apply for a
renewal, their application will be posted on the Ministry of the
Environment’s Electronic Bulletin Board and people will be asked to
comment during the following 30 day period. They are hoping to organize
a campaign to get thousands of people to say they are opposed to the
renewal, and are asking us to help them.

There is an organizational meeting scheduled for:

7 pm on Tuesday February 13th in the Canada Room, ground Floor, the
Co-operators Building on Macdonnell Street.

Review the text of the application

Better late then never:

So I have been a bit late on the trends that are happening in the publishing world but I pledge to make amends:
Here is a link to the penguin wiki novel, a novel idea or a marketing ploy? You decide, and have some fun while deciding. Mitch Joel has some reservations about it. You also might like this idea for receiving your novel reading, I am getting Cory Doctorow's novel delivered every second day.

Digital Times:

Thought I should post something about the Conference that we have been putting together at BookNet Canada. Can check it out Here

This has been a fascinating project for me to sink my teeth into. I have learned quickly that the publishing landscape has changed drastically and that convergence is king. Convergence in devices and other technologies. Will post more later.

Well season 5 of 24 is behind me, and I have to say I wasn't disappointed. I'm not sure how they do it but the tension is never eased up. I have a whole new appreciation of Kiefer Sutherland based on this series, so much so that I even purchased this month's Men's Vogue that has him on the cover.