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)

Chef Vikram Vij is the charismatic and talented chef who’s first Vancouver restaurant was a tiny 14 seater that developed a big reputation.  He’s since moved to a larger location but kept the same great quality. 

Chef Vikram Vij, always expressive and always entertaining – from his podcast at Capers

He’s the latest in our Chef’s series for Capers Community Market.  The podcast is available here. If the podcast inspires you to try your hand at Vikram’s delicious Prawns in Coconut Masala, you can get the recipe from the Capers web site.

Eileen does these amazing programs for kids at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  The latest is called Paint.  Here’s the deal:

PAINT

With brushes big and small, with oil, acrylic and watercolour, artists in British Columbia have been exploring the possibilities of paint. In this 10 week session, actors will begin with a tour and an art making workshop of the exhibition, PAINT, using it as a catalyst to create a play to be performed on the Gallery’s family day, supersunday, December 17.  Ages 9 and up.

Eileen’s a Jessie Award winning actor and her programs at the VAG are always a hit with young actors. The program is run through Vancouver Youth Theatre.

If you’re interested, contact Eileen by email for more information.  paint@bigsnit.com

We were off the grid last week while spending some quality time getting intimate with rock faces, high ropes, zip lines, kayaks, canoes and main sheets.

Loads to say about Strathcona Park Lodge – all of it good – once I get caught up from 8 days of not checking email.

I have a love-hate relationship with Sony, but I have to admit, their media management software for the PSP is great.

We push a lot of media to the PSP – presentations, video clips, podcasts etc.  It is hands down the best multi-media presentation tool for one-on-ones.

And while there are some free tools out there to help re-code the files and manage Sony’s bizarre file naming system, they require way too much work and way too much time and trouble shooting.

I’d tried an early version of Sony’s software to mixed results, but this latest version is awesome.

It works, and works fast.  No more running 2 or more applications to handle re-coding and moving and file names. 

One interface –  drag, drop and go. 

It’s really fast on the re-coding side and will do batch files, two things that are critical.

In typical Sony fashion, the software is impossible to find on the Sony consumer site.

You’ll find it here on the Sony media software site.

As a recent Mac switcher I’ve come to realize that all the hype around the heavenly Mac is just that. Hype.

For instance, my days of cooking eggs of my charging MacBook Pro may be coming to an end.

I’m not saying the thing runs hot, I’m saying it runs HOT BABY.

Which may explain why both my batteries are on a recall list, apparently because, according to Apple, “they do not meet our high standards for battery performance.”

Which begs the question – just what is the high standard my batteries are not meeting ?

For instance, I’m pretty sure that if they ran just a few degrees hotter, I could use the back of my Mac to do some quick solder jobs around the house. That certainly would be a high standard of handy.

I’ll just have to wait for my new high standard batteries to find out what all the hype is really about, ’cause Apple certainly isn’t saying. So much for transparency.

If you own one of these, you might want to visit the Apple recall page.

There’s a nice review of The Dissociates in this week’s Georgia Straight. This is the new play Eileen is doing right now – get out to see it if you get a chance.

If you had ‘issues’ reaching the blog today, my apologies. We were moving a few things around and needed to drop off the grid for a bit.  All’s well, now we can get at those lovely Martini glasses…

My business partner in At Large Media is adding a new title to her already impressive resume.

Mom. 

Emma’s little guy arrived this morning at 3 am – a little past the due date but everybody’s in great shape and doing well. 

I love this story. Short version:

Old guy juiced up with radioactive medical ‘tracer’ sets off alarms while crossing the border between BC and Washington State.

Is old guy going across the border as part of his medical treatments ?

Nope.

He’s on his way to a casino.

Capers Community Markets is our most recent client to start podcasting.

We’re starting off with a series of chefs recorded live at Capers’ new Cambie Street store. First up is Capers in-house chef Nathan Hyam. He’ll walk you through a Thai Red Curry Chicken dish that is delicious and quite easy to make – at least it is with Chef Nathan guiding you along.

In a few weeks we’ll be featuring Chef Vikram Vij, and we’ll be bringing more of the Capers in-store experience to your mp3 player in all sorts of ways, so stay tuned. Oh, and an added bonus is an RSS feed to keep you up to date on what’s happening at the busy Capers Community Markets in Vancouver.

The RSS feed & podcasts are here.