No Time to Blog Home

Today is the second anniversary of this blog and of me blogging. Last year, I marked the anniversary by waxing philosophical on how blogging triggered and/or coincided with my regained enthusiasm for the Internet and some profound personal and career changes as a result. While asserting my passion for the Internet, I remarked on how my other interests were equally important.

I did not intend the anniversary of blogging to be an occasion for cloying sentiment, but it does seem that blogging has formed a pivotal role in my life this last year again, so I will indulge myself.

What's changed since last year?
Coincidentally, just 3 days ago, I was offered to be paid to blog regularly, opposed to the zero amount I make from blogging here and being picked up by Backbone Magazine. As much as I would like to blog more often, lately I haven't had time to sleep fully, let alone commit to regular blogging. So I reluctantly had to postpone the offer. As it is, I love blogging here and for Backbone, but find I just don't have the time either to blog or even to keep up with interesting developments worthy of posting. Although I have been using my Netvibes page to quickly keep track of important Internet news, and I finally succumbed to Twitter and realized it was great for microblogging (see right).

As far as keeping a balance with my other interests and hobbies, that's been complete history for the past year. My master's program at Royal Roads University, while fascinating and enriching, has proven to be so much work that it leaves little time for anything other than school and family time (which I won't sacrifice).

But I still have had time to pursue Internet activities and learning. I attended Mesh again (the best conference I've been to), some Casecamps and Facebook camps, as well as recently some of Toronto Tech Week. I've read some interesting related books either for a class or on my own (recent highlights are: Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger, Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by Joe Karaganis, and Groundswell -- one of these days I'll blog about the Internet canon.)

Career-wise, I've had huge changes as I quit my job managing the website for a pension plan. I won a research grant to study website accessibility so that money was enough that I can afford to focus on studies to pursue more meaningful work. When working at the pension plan, I felt the parade was passing me by. And it was for years and years. But blogging was a great way to make my own float and join the parade at least somewhat. It also let me chronicle my other cyber-adventures, such as my love affair with social bookmarking (delicious) and social networking. Before I left the pension plan, I helped with the launch of a fully transactional website for plan members, which was really the last applicable online thing left to do there.

This blog has been great for letting me publish some of my essays from class, which would have otherwise been confined to the dusty recesses of my computer. I intend to continue blogging about my research and findings in school, including an upcoming conference to India for the Internet Society and my thesis findings on website accessibility. I'm now certain I want to do a doctorate, but have not found a suitable place (other than Oxford) where one can devote oneself to studying the Internet so I'll probably continue with communications, and focus as much as possible on the Internet.

Over the last year, my blog postings have got more coverage, which is great. I love seeing other people quoting my blog (who doesn't) and Technorati and AideRSS have made that really easy. I still do the vanity googles, but Technorati and AideRSS pull up stuff Google doesn't.

So right now, my only problem with blogging is not having the time to do more of it.

Google Is Ten Years Old

Checking out Bargainista's blog today and it brought to my attention two things. One Google is ten years old, as Eden states:

Can you even imagine a day without Google? I can’t. For the past 10 years, it’s helped make our lives easier by giving us all kinds of incredible online tools – and all of them are free! Bargainista, Sep 2008

I was surprised Google was ten years old, as it doesn't seem like that long ago we had to make do with Alta Vista for search and Yahoo for directory browsing. I remember responding to Google's early buzz by telling people Direct Hit is even better and Ask Jeeves was more fun. I also remember trying to convince Toronto companies of SEO back in 1999 and having zero luck so I gave up.

The second thing I discovered today from Eden's blog is this neat functionality on her blog to let one easily quote passages to their blog, called Zemanta Reblog. I've never tried it, so I figured it this was a good time to try it.

Trumpeting Toronto Tech

This Monday was the first day of the Toronto Tech Week conference. The event's goal is to foster Toronto as a tech sector and help position local companies to make the most of new and emerging technology. As such, Web 2.0 was a hot topic.

Despite the much-hyped claim that Toronto is the third largest tech centre in North America, I am, however, dubious of this claim. My suspicion is that there is a lot of IT work going on here as we are a centre for corporate head-offices, but I don't know of a lot of companies doing innovative and/or wildly successful things in Toronto and the post-secondary options are limited and generally out-dated. Various speakers did point out that not enough was being done by government, education, and business to really make Toronto a viable tech centre. The Mayor of Toronto, David Miller, provided the opening keynote address, signalling the City's commitment to this issue.

Overall, the Toronto Tech Week first day had a good batch of speakers from business, academia, and government.

The day's highlight for me was a panel discussion on the Corporate Adoption of Web 2.0, which offered good tips and caveats for how companies can use web 2.0. The message from all speakers (and one I definitely support) is that companies need to decide first what they want to achieve and then decide the technology, rather than start with the technology. Web 2.0, it was agreed, is not about the technology, but rather the ability to connect companies with their customers in on-going conversations. When asked whether all companies should adopt web 2.0, one speaker, Sean Moffitt of Agent Wildfire, pointed out that for companies who aren't completely above board, it probably is best to not start that conversation, as it will undoubtedly not be good. However, Mike McDerment of Freshbooks, added that if you don't do it, your competitor will. John Meyers of Open Text noted in his experience of technology adoption, it takes ten years for new tech to be absorbed and embraced and by 2015 with web 2.0 "it'll be like why was there any discussion".

This discussion was followed by the presentation of Canada's Web 2.0 Awards handed out by Backbone Magazine and KPMG. Other discussions at the conference focused on how to help recruit technology workers, how to foster Toronto's technology sector, and how companies can best implement web 2.0.

With some exception (such as the panel) attendance seemed to be lacklustre, however, which I feel is due to this conference being targetted to C-level executives (who don't really have the time to attend these things) and then priced accordingly. Also, I was surprised that despite the tech sector's youthful and non-traditional workforce, the attendees were primarily Suits over 50. I feel this missed the opportunity to bring in larger numbers and diversity of people working in the tech sector.

This is the second year for Toronto Tech Week and judging by the first day they got some really good discussions started. My hope for next year is that it opens up to a wider cross section of the tech sector to help Toronto create the vitality and innovation needed to make this City the tech sector it wants (and claims) to be

Press Release about me

Here's the press release that Royal Roads recently submitted for my scholarship. Can't resist posting it.

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Toronto grad student from Royal Roads University earns scholarship

For immediate release – August 28, 2008

Victoria, B.C. – Glen Farrelly of Toronto is one of thirteen graduate students from Royal Roads University to be awarded a scholarship worth $17,500 for applied research required to complete his MA degree.

“We are proud of the high calibre of learners such as Glen that we draw to Royal Roads University and, considering the size of our university compared to peer institutions, our learners do very well in submitting successful grant applications,” says Mary Bernard, associate vice president of research at RRU.

Farrelly is completing an MA in professional communication and his research project is looking at how Canadian websites can be made more accessible for the visually impaired.

“The World Wide Web Consortium published accessibility standards as far back as 1999 but the visually impaired still face barriers when it comes to accessing many websites in Canada”, says Farrelly. “I will interview website managers to identify their levels of awareness of accessibility issues and then develop practical recommendations for government, industry and advocacy groups to help them enact technological and social change”.

The J. Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships, awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, seek to develop research skills and assist in the training of highly-qualified personnel by supporting students in the social sciences and humanities who demonstrate a high standard of achievement in undergraduate and early graduate studies.

Also earning J. Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships are Royal Roads University students Adrian Bergles of Radium Hot Springs, B.C.; Rebecca Henn of Vancouver, B.C.; Alison James of Victoria, B.C.; Gordana Jelinic of Williams Lake, B.C.; Johann Jenson of Salt Spring Island, B.C.; Dorothy Kelker of Edmonton, Alberta; Michelle Mungall of Nelson, B.C.; Shane Rooney of Abbotsford, B.C.; and, from Calgary, Alberta, Conny Betuzzi, Kathleen Frit and Eloise Pulos. Adrian Leslie receives a $17,500 Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Music Industry Does Not Know the Words to Digital Music's Songs

Since shortly after the creation of the digital music format, MP3, increased Internet broadband access, and the rise of peer-to-peer networks for easy file distribution, we have seen new models of interaction amongst artists, industry, and consumers; however, it has also provoked controversy and animosity.

Initially slow to react to the trend of consumer swapping of music, the "Big Five" record companies (EMI, Universal, Sony, Time Warner and BMG) eventually banded together under their industry association, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), to stop it, primarily through litigation. RIAA initially sued the first MP3 player manufacturer Diamond in 1998, but lost, thus paving the way for the ubiquitous iPod. They then sued MP3 distribution website Napster (1999), Aimster (2002), LimeWire (2006), and several Internet radio stations. Most controversially, they have sued thousands of individuals who downloaded music, including parents of children and deceased people. These lawsuits, however, caused negative publicity for the industry and have been ineffectual in stopping piracy; as Lam and Tan note, “Lawsuits are ephemeral and serve only as a delay tactic for record labels to catch up with emerging technologies. While the issue of contention in lawsuits is often the protection of copyright materials, the real concern for record labels may be the ceding of monopoly power” (2001, p. 68).

While the desire to get free music is no doubt a motivation, some downloaders feel this is a victimless crime and that music industry has a reputation for being greedy and artificially inflating prices. This reputation is not unfounded as Easley, Michel, & Devaraj found that the industry fought digital music due to a perceived threat of lower profits, as a "key economic issue for the recording industry is that the marginal cost of e-distribution of music is negligible, creating intense competitive pressure on prices and established distribution channels" (2003, p.92). MP3 is a universal, open standard, thus preventing proprietary products and corresponding price protection afforded, as McCourt and Burkart add "MP3 developed outside of the Big Five’s control, and offered no intrinsic protections against copying. MP3s therefore threatened the music industry by holding out the possibility of a business model that links artists directly to consumers, bypassing the record companies completely" (2003, p.336).

While RIAA's main efforts to combat this change appears to be litigation, they have also funded public education campaigns. On their website, they use strong language to convince downloaders of the harm to artists that their actions cause:

It's commonly known as piracy, but it’s a too benign term that doesn’t even begin to adequately describe the toll that music theft takes on the many artists, songwriters, musicians, record label employees and others whose hard work and great talent make music possible (Piracy, n.d.).

This appeal that the RIAA is fighting digital piracy to protect artists, spurred recording artist Courtney Love to write a column for Salon, in it she shows the copyright law engineered by the industry gives ownership to the companies, and the creative accounting companies use enables them to keep a large portion of the profits (Love, 2000). She asserts, "How dare they [RIAA] behave in such a horrified manner in regards to copyright law when their entire industry is based on piracy?" (Love, 2000). Love argues that the Internet can offer a great medium for artists to connect creatively and financially with their fans:

Being the gatekeeper was the most profitable place to be, but now we're in a world half without gates. The Internet allows artists to communicate directly with their audiences; we don't have to depend solely on an inefficient system where the record company promotes our records to radio, press or retail and then sits back and hopes fans find out about our music.... The present system keeps artists from finding an audience because it has too many artificial scarcities: limited radio promotion, limited bin space in stores and a limited number of spots on the record company roster. The digital world has no scarcities. There are countless ways to reach an audience. (Love, 2000)

This article was widely circulated, but the message of the dubious copyright laws is also gaining popularity amongst Internet users due to other prominent issues such as remixing, Digital Rights Management, etc., such that RIAA's appeal under this ground may be unsuccessful.

Further complicating this issue is the huge popularity of legal music download sites, such as iTunes, Amazon, Wal-mart, Real, Yahoo Music, etc. in which flat rate downloads per song are flourishing seemingly beyond the power of the industry for price control or to package songs primarily as an album, and thus make more money. In addition, the lowering cost of at-home recording equipment combined with the phenomenal success of websites such as MySpace are enabling musical artists to build direct relationships with their fans completely without any involvement of the recording industry.

RIAA and its constituent organizations seem unable to create a new digital music model or to stop piracy. Their communication strategy appears to be reactive and largely ineffective. The world is singing a new tune, but apparently those in RIAA don't know the words.

References

Easley, R. F., Michel, J. G., & Devaraj, S. (2003). The Mp3 open standard and the music industry's response to internet piracy. Communications of the ACM, 46 (11), 90-96.

Lam, C. K. M., & Tan, B. C. Y. (2001). The Internet is changing the music industry. Communications of the ACM, 44(8), 62-68.

Love, C. (2000). Courtney love does the math. Salon. Retrieved August 14, 2008, from http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

McCourt, T. (2003). When creators, corporations and consumers collide: Napster and the development of on-line music distribution. Media Culture and Society, 25, 333-350.

Piracy: Online and on the street. (n.d.). Retrieved August 15, 2008, from http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php

Six Random-ish Things

If one ever misses those chain letters of one's youth, they certainly haven't disappeared, but are now called "Internet memes".

They can be fun, so I when Eden Spodek, Toronto's fashion and shopping blogger extraordinaire tagged me, I figured I'd participate. However, I'm changing the rules to focus just on random things related to the Internet and I'm not passing the chain on.

Six Random Internet Things About Me

1. I have a "Adult Contemporary" channel as one of my favourites on Internet radio station, Iceberg. Tom Jones' "Delilah" came on now, and while I know I should feel ashamed, I'm happily singing along.
2. My first Internet job was temping for Macromedia for their Dreamweaver 2.0 release in Toronto (I hardly even knew what the Net was and had no idea what HTML or WYSIWYG was)
   
3. I think I like WebKinz better than my daughter does. I wish I had the koala bear WebKinz.
   
4. While I love the Internet, I hate it when people assume I'm some major techie geek. I can't fix everyone's computer problems and hate it when people insist I try.
5. I do a vanity Google every couple days and can't stand it when others with my name come up in the first 20 results.
   
6. When deciding upon a new career direction it was between eco-tourism or the Internet.
   

BTW, I do like these things but I much preferred a tea towel chain that I participated in years ago.

Home & Away: Physical vs. Electronic Communities

This blog posting is by a guest blogger. She discusses how the Internet is changing another facet of life. While her experience is with boarding schools, I believe her findings apply to residence dorms for universities & colleges.

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I work for a private, senior school. The school is a traditional school that fosters and emphasizes a family atmosphere for its boarding students. In previous times, this culture of family was reinforced by the physical distance separating the students from their families and the social networks of their home places. The close, integrated network created between the students and the residential staff (and with the school in general) is an integral part of the traditional boarding experience; it helped the students branch out from comfortable niches of home and family and establish lasting, meaningful relationships with the impromptu “family” offered at their “home away from home.”

With the emergence of recent Internet-based technologies (webcams, MSN, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) the world has changed dramatically. Without going too much into the general impact of these technologies on society in general, I will offer that these technologies have redefined physical spaces and social connections. It is entirely possible to construct a meaningful, diverse social life without any attention to geographical space. As a consequence, the veritable physical isolation that characterized the traditional boarding school experience is broken down. I will offer that this results in the essential breakdown of the traditional boarding house relationship network. Physical proximity means less, therefore it is not as necessary to form lasting, or even meaningful relationships with the people you share a physical space with – you can essentially continue your social network (almost without missing a beat) even though you have transplanted your body half way around the globe. There is no pressing need to establish new relationships or overcome differences (or expand culturally) by interacting with the small global village housed within the boarding house’s walls; technologies have made it so that essentially you never left.

The consequences have been myriad. Students often do not even attempt to learn the language or cultures of the other students surrounding them, they immerse themselves entirely in their familiar cultures online and electronically. Microphone-type telephones (they operate like international walkie-talkies) boom across the hallways in an essential dog’s breakfast of languages. Students can walk around the campus while conversing with a group of students across the world doing the same thing. It is the strangest sensation to be in the middle of a technological gaggle of teenagers when there is only one body to account for. Almost every facet of one’s familiar cultural landscape can be recreated or revisited online. It is an unfortunate truth of human behaviour that we often need to be pushed into engaging with an unfamiliar culture by our veritable submersion within it. This is not to say that I am arguing for homogenization, just that part of the traditional boarding school experience is a veritable broadening of horizons by immersion in cultures and experiences unfamiliar to oneself. This is part of the experience touted by organizations as a positive by-product of the residential school experience. This is broken down by electronic and Internet technologies that have gone beyond providing essential connections to home and family to allowing boarders to essentially live at home while abroad. These changes are evolutionary; they are part of the restructuring of modern times, yet the pace that these technologies develop is rapid.

The organization has attempted to control this change by closely stipulating personal laptop specifications, monitoring bandwidth and Internet activity, and setting up well-demarcated times and physical places for computer use. The problem I see is that technology adapts more quickly and more seductively than the control agents can operate. Furthermore, even though the time and medium might be restricted, the cognitive commitment to these cultural bubbles created and reinforced by even the least amount of time online and on-phone cannot be controlled. Also it is a serious infringement on personal freedoms to limit access to home, family, and one’s culture; it is unanimous that no one wants to limit this.

My proposal is limited at this point. I would suggest that the tradition of the school needs to change – clearly the elements of physical isolation and close proximity to diversity that formerly characterized the boarding house experience are negated by these emergent technologies. The boarding school needs to reflect, incorporate, and encourage these technologies in a self-reflexive way – the school needs to create technological systems that foster connections between students through these same mediums. It seems absurd given the physical proximity of the students to each other and the campus, but I would argue that the same effect that shrinks international spaces creates distance where there is none. While monitoring and limiting the use of these technologies is a challenging and slippery slope, creating new, dare I say sexy technologies that will encourage online participation with a local network will be the proverbial carrot to the stick.