Month: March 2005

I’ve been encountering a chunk of trackback spam recently [Learn about trackbacks], all coming from the same source. Now the blog publishing platform I’m using — Blogware from Tucows — has a nice little feature to block comment spam after the fact. Essentially, Blogware blog administrators can ‘ban’ any comments originating from a blacklist of IP addresses. The blog admin has control over the IP blacklist.

There is no such ability, though, to control trackback spam via an IP blacklist or some other such device.

The Tucows guys are working on something to control trackback spam but, in the meantime, I’m going to try to control trackback spam on an ad hoc basis. I’ve noticed that the trackback spammers keep linking to the same posts at this blog. So what I’ve done is disable the trackback functionality on those posts.

From time to time, I may disable trackback-ability on other posts. If you find it the trackback disabled, I encourage you in the meantime, to use the comments section and put a link to your site in that comment section. The comments section takes HTML, incidentally.

 

Bill Cameron was a tremendous broadcaster and journalist. I had just started in the last few years to get to know Bill and his wife Cheryl, also a tremendous broadcaster and journalist, in their capacities as teachers, advisors, and campaigners for improving the craft. Among other things, Bill was teaching ethics for journalists at Ryerson University in Toronto. He was also interested to hear about my experiment trying to work in daily print and daily TV at the same time. It always felt marvellous having his attention focused on you and I suspect this was the secret to his success as an interviewer and broadcaster. He was a big, gentle man with a great sense of humour and what seemed to be infinite patience. And when he focused his attention on you, either informally at a cocktail reception or more formally in a television studio, he made you feel special and interesting and, as a result, you tended to open up to him a bit more. You always felt good about yourself after talking to him and I think it was for that reason: You walked away from even a quick 'hello' from him thinking, “Well, at least one person out there recognizes what a tremendously interesting person I am.” Bill was diagnosed with eusophagal cancer just a few months ago and finally succumbed to that terrible disease. Well, the world is a much less interesting place without him in it. I'll say a prayer for Cheryl and their children. Bill Doskoch , John Gushue , and Paul Wells have some notes about him at their blogs. CBC, where Bill worked for much of his career, has a special section at its Archive for Bill. Among other things, it's got a wonderful radio commentary Bill did in 1977 in which he reflects on the movie Network and his own 'complicity' as a television journalist.

The Globe and Mail becomes today, so far as I know, the first Canadian newspaper to offer its Web content via an RSS feed.

Organizers of the first-ever Conservative Party of Canada policy convention have flip-flopped on a controversial proposal that would have had the effect of shutting down debate at the convention on so-called “issues of conscience”, preventing the party from taking a position on such hot-button issues as abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage.

But now, after a storm of criticism from grassroots members of the party, convention organizers will change some rules that would have the effect of allowing debate at the convention on those issues.

The convention begins in Montreal on March 19.

The party’s national caucus — all those who are Conservative members of the House of Commons or Senate of Canada — are backing a motion that would, in essence, leave all “issues of conscience” out of any party policy document and instead mandate that such issues would put to a free vote in the Commons.

“Those issues will be debated,” said Monte Solberg, the party’s finance critic and MP for Medicine Hat. “They'll be debated hotly in the country. They may not be debated at the convention. But the point of this is to ensure that if you are a member of Parliament in a riding where people have a different point-of-view than a position that you would have selected or that your party would have selected, then you have a chance to represent your constituents.”

The motion at hand is known as P-90 and reads:

“A Conservative government will restore democratic accountability in the House of Commons by allowing free votes. A Conservative government will make all votes free, except for budget and main estimates. On issues of moral conscience, such as abortion, the definition of marriage and euthanasia, the party acknowledges the diversity of deeply helf personal convictions among individual party members and the right of Members of Parliament to adopt positions in consultation with their constituents and to vote freely.”

The motion also contains this important note:

“If resolution P-90 is passed at the plenary, the plenary will not consider resolutions P-91 through P-95”

Resolutions 91 through 95 deal with the definition of marriage, abortion, and euthanasia. Several party members complained that they wanted the chance to debate these social issues regardless of the fate of P-90.

Gary Lunn, the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands and a lead convention organizer, said that the national caucus decided at its weekly meeting today to ask for a rule change, the effect of which would be to let debates on abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage proceed at the Montreal convention regardless of the fate of P-90.

 

Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario runs an e-journalism program, a program that tries to go beyond Web publishing and explore new ways of incorporating new communications and computer technologies into daily newsgathering and journalism storytelling.

I’m on the advisory board for the program.

Later this week, the students in the program will launch Portal, an annual online magazine.

The folks organizing the launch have put out a press release about the launch. Here’s the blurb:

Members of the press, students and staff are invited to attend the launch of Portal as it is posted to the web. The official launch will take place starting at 11:00 a.m. (EDT) in the President's boardroom in room 3h16 in Loyalist College's Kente Building. Refreshments will be provided.

The website was designed to demonstrate the strengths of combining traditional journalism such as investigative and enterprise reporting with online publishing tools such as web design, Flash animation, video and audio streaming, databases, and blogging.

“Once again, the students of the E-Journalism program undertake to stretch the boundaries and forms of traditional journalism.  It is an exciting time as we await to see the results of their efforts,”  said Professor Robert Washburn, co-ordinator of the E-Journalism post-graduate program at Loyalist College.

Students feel this is a great vehicle for their work done during the year.

“Basically, this website showcases the sum of our work, design, and studies developed over the duration of the course. It represents the program and the discipline in its entirety,”  said Darren Moore, one of the students.

Portal's mission statement emphasizes the balance between technology and journalism. “Our hope is to educate others who may benefit from the use of such technology and to create discussion around E-Journalism,” it states.

Statistics Canada reports this morning that immigrants to Canada are much more likely to become citizens than immigrants to most other countries, including the United States. Moreover, immigrants to Canada are becoming citizens at a much faster rate than earlier generations of immigrants to Canada.

Yesterday, the government said that, in 2004, Canada admitted 235,508 permanent residents. Permanent residency is the first step towards obtaining citizenship.

Statscan looked at the number of people living in Canada in 2001 who were born outside the country and found that 84 per cent of “eligible immigrants” were, in fact, Canadian citizens.

By contrast:

• Australia – 74 per cent of eligible immigrants had become Australians
• UK – 50 per cent of eligible immigrants had become British
• US – 40 per cent of eligible immigrants had become American

“This trend may be a result of the countries of origin,” Statscan says. “Newcomers entering Canada in the last decade were more likely to have been born in Asian nations such as China, India or the Philippines. Those who came before the 1960s tended to be from European nations such as the United Kingdom and Italy.

“Newly eligible immigrants from Africa or Asia are more likely to become Canadian citizens than those from Europe and the United States.

“Immigrants born in the United States were the least likely to hold Canadian citizenship. Even among US-born immigrants who had spent more than 30 years in Canada, 32% were not citizens.”

 

 

On Sunday night, Conservative Party finance critic and Medicine Hat, Alta. MP Monte Solberg put up a post at his blog that criticized Paul Martin, dubbing him Paul Martin Luther King. It’s difficult to follow Solberg’s point but one could read it and get a sense that Solberg is insulting the memory of the U.S. civil rights leaders.

Elizabeth Thompson reports in this morning’s Montreal Gazette that:

Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine Liberal MP Marlene Jennings said she was left speechless after reading it.

“It's actually quite despicable on his part because he trivializes the civil rights movement. He trivializes Martin Luther King Jr.'s contribution to the whole notion of tolerance, of peaceful resistance, of peaceful civil disobedience and, literally, the pain and the suffering that many blacks and whites underwent in order to remove segregationist legislation.”

Solberg was definitely trying to denigrate the Prime Minister, calling him, for example, a “knuckle dragger.”

Apparently, the Prime Minister’s Office complained about the post.

Solberg subsequently put up another post in which he called the PMO’s office staff who complained a bunch of cry babies and refined his explanation of the “Paul Martin Luther King” metaphor.

 

The Conservative Party of Canada will hold its first-ever national convention in Montreal later this month. The party, as most political followers know, is the result of a merger between the Alliance Party of Canada and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. While the platforms and policy positions of those two predecessor parties were similar, there were also some key differences.

Over the last year or so, members of the new Conservative Party have developed several policy proposals which will be put forward at the Montreal convention and voted on by delegates. The party says it is expecting about 2,000 delegates at the convention.

The Draft Policy Resolutions were put online today at the Conservative’s Web site. Again, these are draft resolutions and may or may not be adopted by the party as a whole. In fact, some of the resolutions are contradictory, that is, if some resolutions get adopted it will automatically mean the rejection of some other resolutions.

The party will also flesh out its constitution at this convention.

Those going to the convention should also familiarize themselves with the rules of procedure.

 

Prime Minister Paul Martin and U2 lead singer Bono have a good relationship. You could even say they’re friends. They forged their friendship while Martin was Canada’s finance minister and the two of them were working on joint international projects such as helping to alleviate poverty in Africa. Bono even made an appearance at the Liberal convention last year where Martin was elected leader of the party.

Recently, to support its most recent record, U2 headed out on a world tour — but Ottawa, as it turned out, wasn’t going to get a tour date.

An Ottawa radio  station, however, thought this was a shame and petitioned the Prime Minister’s Office to see if the PM could convince his pal Bono to have the band swing through Ottawa. The station, known as BOB-FM even promised that if the PM’s influence bore fruit, they’d rename the station to PAUL-FM for a day. Martin actually participated in a phone-in show (listen to that phone-in interview) earlier this year and promised to do what he could.

Well, yesterday, U2 announced it will be coming through Ottawa on November 25. And, good to its word, BOB-FM listeners are tuning in to only to find they’ve dialled in to PAUL-FM.

 

This blog is a still a relatively young thing — the Blogware version originated in October 2003 while a precursor on Blogger started in early 2002 — but there has never been anything close to the interest in one particular post than there has been for a call I put out shortly after Christmas for information on John and Jackie Knill, the Vancouver, B.C. couple who perished in the Asian Tsunami.

The saga of the Knills was in the news again last month after a U.S. missionary discovered a camera on the Thailand beach where the Knills died and was able to retrieve the pictures on that camera — pictures, it appears, that were taken by either John or Jackie as the waves were hitting the beach.

The full story — or links to more full versions of that story — is at my post, which was the most request blog entry here for the month of February. The rest of the top 10 most popular requests is also here, listed in descending order. The original posting date follows the link for each one. THe Knill post and the Celine Dion post were the only two posts, incidentally, that were also on January’s top 10 list.

Thanks again for stopping by.

1. Looking for John and Jackie Knill (12-30-2004) 
2. Air Canada and a new Celine Dion video — right here!  (11-1-2004) 
3. Mercedes' SmartCar  (1-20-2005) 
4. Honda Ridgeline (1-20-2005)
5. Why do I blog? Why would any journalist blog?  (2-1-2005) 
6. Workshop: Blogging and Public Journalism  (7-13-2004)
7. The Honda Ridgeline (1-17-2005) 
8. The Scion (1-20-2005) 
9. Another Conservative in favour of gay marriage (2-2-2005)
10. In Brussels, at NATO, with a shy Prime Minister (2-21-2005)