Month: October 2004

The Treasury Board has just published its annual report on Access to Information and Privacy within that organization.

September's traffic here at the blog seems to be down a bit from the highs hit in August. The meters at the Blogware server say there were just over 21,000 visitors here last month — pretty good if you ask me. I have no idea where all these visitors come from, what they do or what they're interested in. Well, actually, I might have an idea what they're interested in because one of Blogware's chief benefits is that you can track the most popular posts for a given time period. And, as it turns out, just one item posted in September was among the 10 most popular posts accessed during the month.
Here, then, are the Top 10 for September at this blog. As an added bonus, the numbers in brackets refer to their position on the hit list last month:

1. (2) No blogging from Olympic village (?) Posted 8-8-2004
2. (4) Journalism ethics: Toronto police shoot a hostage taker. What do you show on TV? Posted 8-26-2004
3. (1) [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke Posted 8-10-2004
4. (8) Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking! Posted 12-13-2003
5. (3) Who pays for this blog? Some disclaimers Posted 8-13-2004
6. (6) How to spell Internet and Web Posted 8-16-2004
7. (-) Canada best for access among world's largest economies Posted 11-24-2003
8. (-) Google by the numbers Posted 5-5-2004
9. (5) Participatory journalism — mid-day report Posted 8-3-2004
10. (na) Blogware gets a new version but Safari hates it Posted 9-21-2004

I was assigned a question from a viewer who wanted to know if some other hockey league, such as the Canadian Universities league, could compete for and be awarded hockey's Holy Grail if there was no NHL season.
I gave that viewer the answer and we shot it, naturally enough, at the Stanley Cup.
What was the answer?
Well . . . read on ….

I've been lucky enough to watch David Weinberger do what he does for a living — speak to a large group of people — and he's very funny. Here's a great example of his wit:

[microsoft] Swag

At the Search Champs private conference I'm at, Microsoft has been giving out excellent swag: A copy of Money, Office and Flight Simulator, a logo-ed windbreaker, sun visor and golf shirt, and a thumb storage device….all packed in a logoed-backpack. I'm too mature and self-knowing for swag to affect me, but I'm beginning to think that Microsoft has been badly misunderstood and under-appreciated. Plus, today we get to go to the Microsoft Store where we can spend up to $120 on heavily discounted Microsoft products. Unfortunately, I'm leaving before the trip to the store, so I assume I'm allowed to download $120's worth of copyright-challenged Microsoft products via BitTorrent at Suprnova.org or the P2P network of my choice. That's right, isn't it?

Mathew Englander says they can — but only if they get informed consent from all of their customers. And he is certain that Telus Communications, the phone company in his city of Vancouver, never got informed consent from its customers before it started selling names and numbers of Telus subscribers to telemarketers.
Englander believes that, by failing to get informed consent, Telus is violating Canada's privacy legislation.
Moreover, he believes that, under that legislation, Telus and other phone companies should not be able to charge a fee for unlisted numbers. “Telus is legally required to respect your privacy choices without charging an extra fee,” Englander says.
Englander, a non-practising lawyer interested in privacy rights, has not had much luck, so far, convincing judges of the merits of his views. Canada's privacy commissioner dismissed a complaint he filed and so did a Federal Court judge.
But later this month — Oct. 7 in Vancouver — Englander's appeal will be heard.
“The case has a significant business dimension, since if I win all Canadian phone companies will be affected. The case also could set an important legal precedent for the privacy rights of consumers,” Englander writes.

Lord Conrad Black (pictured at left) is suing all those at his New York-based operating company, Hollinger International, who authored or help to author the 600-page report which detail alleged abuses by him, his longtime associate David Radler and others. This report, you'll remember, was presented to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and to a court in Illinois and, in it, Black and his colleagues are accused of diverting at least $600-million of company money for their own unauthorized use.
Black is suing under Ontario laws in an Ontario court and is asking for $1-billion CDN (that's right, one billion) pluse $100-million in damages.
This suit is in addition to another libel suit, with many of the same defendants, in which he seeks $850-million in damages.
He also sued Toronto Life magazine but they're on the hook for a paltry $2.1-million.

Colby Cosh, an Alberta-based editorial page columnist for the National Post, says he got the call today that “contained the last words any human being wants to hear”. He'd been canned, “effective immediately.”
Cosh, at his blog, says he was told by the paper's comment editor that the Post is being re-organized further.
Anyone hear anything else?

You should be.
The blogosphere is all excited because this is the first big presidential debate that will be blogged in real-time. Who cares what a bunch of yo-yos like me sitting on their couch with a Wi-Fi connection and a laptop think? Watch the debate. Turn off your computer. Go to the source and pay attention.
Tomorrow, we'll get back to our blogs and yak all about it.

Researchers who want to make a big splash with their work might want to consider open-access publishing. [What's that?] Now, a new study in a journal called College and Research Libraries concludes that journal articles published under an open-access system are cited more frequently than those published through subscription-only services.
But will scholars get that message? Apparently not:
“[Scholars] want the imprimatur of quality and integrity that a peer-reviewed, high-impact title can offer, together with reasonable levels of publisher service. Above all, they want to narrowcast their ideas to a close community of like-minded researchers. . .”, says a new study authored by Ian Rowlands, Dave Nicholas and Paul Huntingdon. Those three conducted an international survey of scholars and report that more than 80 per cent of researchers have not yet heard about open access publishing and, in any event, hardly any of them would be willing to pay the $500 (U.S.) or more it costs to have their work made available under an open access system
For now, it seems, the world's scholarly knowledge will remained locked up in ivory towers where it does little good to anyone but the academic priesthood.
Why else is open-access publishing important? Some say reform of scholarly publishing is vital because the current system is bankrupting university and research libraries. Some research libraries are paying what are literally millions of dollars a year in journal subscriptions. Many are finding that burden to be too high. Their choice is to either pass these costs on to students — which raises the costs of education and makes a post-secondary education even more elitist — or to cease subscribing to some of these subscriptions — and that reduces the information or knowledge flow which, of course, is part of the core mission of most libraries.