• 2:58 PM AdamSchwabe - Session Description: Your folks won’t understand it, but sometimes you just need to quit your perfectly good job and go to work for yourself. This panel discussion will seek to understand what it is that makes a good entrepreneur and what are the best first-steps towards being one.

  Bryan Mason – Small Batch Inc
  Ryan Freitas – Plinky
  Christopher Sacca – Lowercase Capital
  Laura Mayes – Kirtsy

• 3:00 PM AdamSchwabe - Session running a tad late, people stil filing in.
• 3:02 PM AdamSchwabe - Mason: Why now is the perfect time to give Chris Sacca equity in your startup or how to get laid off or fired.

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• 11:33 AM jmdickinson - Current panel: Curating crowd-sourced content with an all-star lineup.
  #sxsw
• 11:33 AM thornley - Curating the Crowd-sourced world panel has Gina Trapani, Dustin Hostetler, Nion McEvoy, Paddy Johnson, Jen Bekman #sxsw
• 11:36 AM AdamSchwabe - Jen Bekman of 20×200 talking. Love that site.
• 11:38 AM ruralocity - crowdsourcing: talking a little about “old guard” and elitism, vs. crowd sourcing. applicable to academia. #sxswi

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• 10:20 AM Japor - at Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet-Jonathan Zittrain
• 10:21 AM AdamSchwabe - More people fixing problems on Wikipedia than problems appearing on the page.
• 10:22 AM AdamSchwabe - Wikipedia’s existence is held up by ‘civic defense’ of people watching the barricades.
• 10:23 AM remarkk - Talking about the fragile nature of the civic defense force that keeps the internet what it is today. Anywhere in the world, somebody is waking up to maintain it. We are always 45 minutes from utter destruction. Whoah.
• 10:23 AM AdamSchwabe - Cats that look like Hitler!
• 10:24 AM Rathbone - #sxsw Future of the Internet — Nanog and Wikipedia are “amazing civic defense syst… – at South by Southwest Con… http://shz.me/4si
• 10:25 AM remarkk - NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) provides a forum for the exchange of technical information, and promotes discussion of implementation issues that require community cooperation.

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I met Geordi La Forge… er, I mean, LeVar Burton. I say that without reservation because I’ve never heard a Trek actor complain about getting typecast, and why should they? I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation a good five days a week with my dad and loved every second of it.

For myself and countless other geeks around the world, Levar and crew were and very much still are our role models. They made science not only cool, but also made it seem like something tangible and real for us to aspire to studying. Star Trek wasn’t so much about spaceships and phasers and Klingons, but about hope for the future and optimism – looking ahead with curiousity and excitement, and that’s something I’ll always aspire to. (Photo by Jaime Woo)

Fellow Canuck Andrew “Bravehound” McDonald knows how to put together one hell of a mix. Every few months, he puts together a fantastic music mix with tracks mostly falling into the dance and high energy kind of genres. Glenn is right on the money; they’re great tunes for the gym.

Andrew just finished putting together his latest mix, pretty album art and all, called Show and it doesn’t disappoint. Lots of great tracks in there, but my favourite bit is his description of the compilation, “It’s like a beach party. But at night.”

Download “Show” – Andrew’s new mix at Bravehound.com

It’s been a long time coming since I’ve wanted to bring my own hand into a blog design around here, and as much experience as I’ve had with Wordpress, it’s always been a really intimidating prospect. Although I come from a coding background, it’s something that I haven’t really pursued since school, as I went more down the interaction, usability and design route.

After making use of many, many templates, I never really felt they reflected my own aesthetic sense or information architecture in any way. That’s why a few weeks ago when I finally had some runway to get heads down into things, I took a swing at redesigning this humble little blog site!

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Earlier today I did a short talk at Podcamp 2009 about Dear Toronto, our little ol’ video podcast that focuses on all things near and dear to our hearts about our fair city. A handful of people checked it out, and most seemed to enjoy what I had to say about what makes for good, fun, consumable video with a city as its primary subject. Here’s the slides I ran through care of Slideshare:

The slides lose a bit of context since most of them have short excerpts from some of our video along the bottom, but you can probably get the gist of what I was going for. I’ve got a lot to say about this year’s Podcamp, particularly the sessions that seemed to dominate regarding public relations and marketing use of social media, but I’ll leave that as a subject for another post.

You may have seen that Dopplr, the social traveling service recently generated a nice report for President (wow) Obama a little while ago. The report included how much distance the now President of the US had traveled during his campaign for office and how much energy was expended, among other things.

Dopplr has now generated my report and, while significantly exciting than Obama’s, includes some awesome stats, including:

See the full report above. It’s a really cool way of visualizing your travel patterns over the year!

Ever heard of that old story of if the world were a village of 100 people? It’s a simple way of representing percentages of different demographicsaround the world. For instance, “33 villagers would be Christians, 20 would be Muslims”, and “4 would be African, 11 would be European”

I’ve always found this to be an effective way of getting a basic breakdown of so, so many different groups of related objects, but like many things, it’s better represented by an infographic! Thankfully, someone’s done just that in a very interactive, attractive way. The village can be browsed by ‘neighbourhood’ so you can see just the religious, gender, racial, or homosexual parts of statistics. Very cool.

If the world were a village of 100 people (via information aesthetics)

Canadian artist Max Dean’s work focuses heavily on the performance and interactive aspects as well as the experience that the viewer gets when approaching his work. Perhaps best known in Toronto for his Robotic Chair which briefly was on display during Luminato in 2007, Toronto now gets a the chance to take a closer look at Max’s work. Until January 31, more than 40 years worth of his work is on display at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery (451 King St. W) in Toronto. I stopped by on the opening night to experience some of Max’s work. Music by Stars.

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