I guess if my surname was Googan this would be my home page too…

Our local North Vancouver school board (district 44) is proposing selling a number of parcels of land adjacent to schools. One of them is a lovely wooded area next to Cleveland school. Our kids and their friends love to play in the woods next to the school, it is an amazing thing to have nature right outside the door, and it would be a travesty to see the land sold for development.

To help make sure everyone’s voice is heard, I’ve set up a blog at blog.ambleside.com. The process from initial discussion to eventual sale should provide everyone with a chance to have their voices heard. Kids deserve more than concrete and gravel areas for playgrounds.

If you ever attended Cleveland and remember playing in the woods please add your voice to those concerned about seeing this natural amenity disappear.

Can you match the headline to the news organization. Same day, Same story:

“CBC wants mandate review every 10 years”
“No sex please, we’re the CBC”
“Heritage committee grills CBC bosses on reality TV, hockey”

Choices:

CBC.CA
The National Post
The Globe and Mail.

Answer – see bottom of this post

It’s always difficult when media outlets have to do news stories about themselves.

That said, it’s got to hurt when you’re the President and CEO and acting Chairman of the Board, and your own news organization decides that this should be the lead quote in an item about you:

Rabinovitch said that he had been ambiguous last year and stressed that the network would not do “shows that stress plastic surgery, sex and humiliation [and the] eating of insects.”

(full story here) CBC.Ca went on to quote their president on low supper hour news ratings. Nice. If it was me, I’d be some pissed. But that’s just me.

The CBC.Ca story appears to be largely a rewrite of the piece that ran on CanWest news services (i.e. the National Post) as it probably ran on the wires.

The Globe meanwhile covered the same story without mention of the dreaded ‘bug eating’.

More on the triplejunearthed.com success from my pals in Australia.

There’s a full press release (pdf) here.

In just over a month since launching, over 1 MILLION tracks have been streamed by listeners on triplejunearthed.com – that’s over 1 million ears hearing the freshest sounds in new Australian music first…over a quarter of a million songs have been downloaded.

The only question I have is – shouldn’t that be 2-million ears ?Congrats gang!

It is fantastic to see the Australian Broadcasting Corporation doing so well with their new music sharing site Triple J Unearthed.  

The site is modeled on CBC Radio 3’s NewMusicCanada.com

Four years ago I was invited to speak at the ABC’s annual radio meetings.  The following year I was asked to come back and do some workshops with various groups in Sydney and Melbourne. 

Linda Bracken who runs Triple J gave me office space (the run of the place really).  Back in 2003 Linda was keen to get a version of NewMusicCanada running – mostly to serve their awesome Unearthed contest.  So we spent lots of time talking about how to make it happen, what we’d learned creating and running NewMusicCanada (which we launched in 2000) and I spent some time with her technical team leads explaining how we had build things here.

Every now and then we’d exchange email and I’d ask how it was going, and she never lost sight of the goal – and if you’ve ever met Linda you’ll know that if she’s got her mind set on something, it’s going to happen. 

Last July they soft-launched Triple J Unearthed, and this week I got a note from her: 

unearthed has exceeded even my grand visions for its popularity ….in the first month it was launched it has over 10 000 tracks from 5000 bands….over 10 000 people visit each day ….we are actually overwhelmed by its success…the buzz here in the music community is fantastic … we are still getting around 200 tracks per day ! I think everyone in Australia with a guitar has uploaded surely.

It’s a great tribute to the team at Triple J that they’ve doing so well – and I’m thrilled to have had a tiny part to play in it.    

I wonder who actually has more clients these days – RIAA or LimeWire. Game on…

Lime Wire LLC yesterday filed its response to the RIAA lawsuit against it, and the company plans to mount a vigorous defense. Instead of simply defending themselves, Lime Wire has gone on offense and countersued the music labels for anti-competitive activities, illegal restraint of trade, tortious interference, and deceptive trade practices. Full Story here and here

This is a pretty good one.

Another American claim-to-fame. The average American home now has more TV’s than people, 2.73 TV sets per household.

Full story here.

Same study says average person (in the US) watches 4 hours 35 minutes of TV a day.

Back in the day when I had a few thousand (vinyl) record albums, my pride and joy was a Rega Planer turntable. It had a glass platter and one switch – on/off. It was a thing of beauty in form and function.

Like the albums, its long gone.

Seeing this new turntable from Rega brought it all back. I have no inclination to start collecting vinyl again, but somehow my iPod looks lame and tacky all of a sudden.

Richard Branson’s putting cash on the table to fight global warning. Profits from his travel firms could amount to 3 billion dollars.
Full story here from BBC.

And is it just me, or is that picture of him and Bill Clinton just a wee bit creepy ?

What happens if an entire country fails to pay its internet bandwidth charges ?
Chaos apparently.

It’s happening right now in Zimbabwe.

There’s an interesting bit at the end of the article about how the telco grows tobacco so it can pay its internet bill.

Now this has got to be one of the most useful online tools I’ve come across in ages.

This site spits out mnemonics for your phone number.

PhoneSpell.

It’s almost exactly a year ago that CBC got handed a new chair of the board, filling the position left open after the charming and talented (and CBC’s breath of fresh air) Carole Taylor resigned to go into provincial politics.

I first blogged about Guy Fournier back on Sept 9th 2005, the day after his appointement.

At the time the corp was embroiled in a lock-out, and some people even thought he would rush in and save the day.

Too bad the government that appointed him didn’t bother asking his opinions on say, the Lebanese community, or maybe his thoughts on going to the bathroom. 

Oh wait, no need, he’s been telling everyone all on his own. 

Today, Mr. Fournier was forced to resign over his remarks (more in this Reuters story).

Mr. Fournier lasted 1 year and 11 days in the job. 

(This whole story makes this somehow even funnier, and it was pretty funny to begin with)