A constable killed; Ontario bets on education; and Alberta's premier shuns "duck porn". Listen to my four-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Tuesday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.
You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.
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Somali group outlawed; Ontario's hospitals; and a historic Oscar. Listen to my four-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Tuesday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.
You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.
Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner
Note to reader: Do click on the Flickr slide show, left, before you begin reading. I believe it will enhance your reading experience! 🙂
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as everyone must surely know by now, is a big hockey fan. In that respect, he's just like millions of Canadians. But there's a big difference between Harper the hockey fan and the rest of us hockey fans. Generally speaking, we don't show up at the game with our videographer and photographer in tow with the idea of demonstrating that our love of the national game is one of the qualifications for the jobs we do.
Hockey has been a constant and frequent theme since his election as prime minister in 2006. I don't recall hockey having such a prominent role prior to 2006, in the 2004 election campaign or in his leadership campaigns or his fight to unite the right.
Presumably, hockey is a frequent theme because, in this country at least, hockey is a unifying force. From Chicoutimi to Calgary, Canadians can talk about hockey the way Canadians can talk about the weather. But unlike the weather, key hockey events — that gold medal game or a Stanley Cup final — are one of the few common shared experiences of the country. More than 25 million Canadians watched that gold medal game! That's a remarkable number in a country of 34 million people.
So if you're a politician, what's not to like about having your personal brand associated with hockey?
Still, for Harper, is it too much of what, for Conservatives, must seem like a good thing? Is the hockey connection overshadowing, by accident or design, Harper's connection to other important issues. Here's a quick stat:
II suspect, however, that the PMO brand managers have long ago figured that it will be impossible to "over-brand" Harper as a hockey lover. And so I suspect that the official Flickr Photostream from the prime minister's office will continue to be stuffed with a ton of hockey-related pics (that's a Flickr slide-show above assembled from pics at Flickr which have a hockey connection.)
Ontario's Progressive Conservatives are holding their annual general meeting in Ottawa today and, as part of the festivities later today, the party will announce that leader Tim Hudak now has his own iPhone application, the first leader of a Canadian political party, so far as I know, to have his own app delivered through Apple's iTunes store to iPhones around the country.
Good for the Ontario PCs for being a first mover, if you will, on the iPhone, but the real innovation will come with its use. Can this app, and others that will surely follow for Android, BlackBerry and other mobile operating systems, be an effective tool to help organize, fundraise, track voters, promote and publicize, and get elected? Personally, I think the answer is yes and that mobile apps will eventually be a must-have tool for political organizations.
They'll become must-haves because:
Mobile political apps give grassroots supporters to self-mobilize. The geolocation feature of a good mobile app is the secret sauce to harnessing this power. People can find other people who are physically near them. They don't need permission from the party brass to do so. They can talk. They can trade ideas. They can figure things out. This was the key lesson from the Howard Dean campaign and his senior Internet advisor David Weinberger.
Mobile apps are about sharing, on all platforms, from anywhere, anytime. Did you watch the 2006 Liberal Leadership convention, the one that Dion one? I wonder if the voting right at the end might have been different had one group or another been organized and better able to share intelligence about what was happening within their own camp elsehwere.
Mobile apps can help with organizational velocity. In other words, as a group, you can do the same stuff faster and react more quickly. There was a provincial byelection in Ottawa this week. As expected Liberal Bob Chiarelli, a former mayor and former MPP, won. He was replacing Jim Watson, who wants to run for mayor, who won in the last general election by 18 or 19 points. Chiarelli won by about 4 points. Hudak's PCs are pleased that they closed the gap but they also wonder what might have been had all their workers, organizers, and campaigners got together for one final push. Some said had the campaign been two weeks longer, Chiarelli might have been upset. Take two weeks and now think: Two days. I think mobile apps can help with the velocity.
Developed properly, mobile apps help political organizations gather intelligence. Version 1.0 of Hudak App has a built-in survey function (a function the app's developer Purple Forge Software has built into many apps for its politcal clients in the U.S.) This goes beyond simple polling because, again, you're able to get some geolocation data with your survey results.
The Liberal Party of Canada also has an iPhone app and I'm certain that it will want to build on what is a really thin app right now. It's only at version 0.3 right now so let's assume they have some plans to build out the app as it gets up to version 1.0. Like the official app from The White House, the Liberal app is really just a newsletter. The Hudak app also provides news about Hudak and his party but it goes beyond that and has the building blocks to become a tool to gather and mobilize political intelligence. Let's see if they know what to do with it.
Canadian and world environmental groups have taken out a full-page ad (left) in Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine, to endorse the movie Avatar for the best picture Oscar. The green groups say the ad is part of a campaign, largely being mounted in the United States, to halt expansion of Alberta's oil sands.
“We want Hollywood, and the powerful thought leaders there, to know Avatar does a great job of exposing the Tar Sands,” said Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence Canada, one of 55 groups that signed the ad. “It's the world's most destructive project – Pandora's unobtanium is Canada's Tar Sands.”
One of the images in the ad is a 797B Heavy Hauler, one of the first trucks used to mine the oil sands, which the green groups say is identical to some of the trucks used in Avatar. The ad “also shows the vast open pit mines and tailings ponds that cut across what was once pristine Boreal forest – the same forest that stretched across [Canadian-born Avatar director James] Cameron's hometown in Ontario.”
The Speech from the Throne; a Douglas Cardinal sports stadium; and a mailman under attack. Listen to my four-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Thursday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.
You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.
Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner
A new poll finds more support the Tories; predictions for the budget and throne speech; and Regina learns of new stadium plans; Listen to my four-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Tuesday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.
You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.
Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner
Hey geeks! Need a hand. For some reason, Entourage has just gone and duplicated a pile of my contacts. There's got to be an AppleScript out there that will seek out duplicates, isolate them, and let me dispose of them either all at once or in some other efficient manner.
Running Entourage 2004 (v 11.4.x) on Mac OS 10.5.8
If you're all geared up the Canada-USA Men's Hockey Gold Medal game, probably best to wait until after the game's conclusion to read this essay from Laura Robinson. Laura, a friend whom I haven't seen in too long a time, loves sport — and is a tremendous athlete herself — but has always been a strong critic of those — mostly male — who control and often exploit athletes. It's an angry, cynical but important read about the so-called international Olympic event. It is definitely not the kind of celebratory journalism that mainstream media organizations, mine included, are keen to serve up as Canada finds itself tied for the all-time lead in gold medals won in any one Winter Olympics.
The short version of Her current essay, in The Literary Review of Canada, is that IOC members have too many fascists and Nazi sympathizers — I'm generalizing only slightly — but she also has much to say about the International Olympic Committee's dodgy record when it comes to one of the fundamental ground rules in our democracy: You must be accountable and you must be transparent. The IOC, in Robinson's view, fails on both counts:
One World Trust, an independent British think tank, recently ranked the IOC as the least transparent of the 30 non-profit organizations it measured.
When they appear in public, members of the IOC are surrounded by security. Journalists were initially banned from the 121st session of the Olympic Congress this past October in Copenhagen; then the 1,400 media representatives who had come to cover the selection of the host city for the 2016 Olympics were cordoned off by hundreds of police officers and security agents. Once the choice of Rio de Janeiro was announced, most of the journalists left, but there were still a couple of hundred wanting to cover the rest of the congress. The IOC allowed 17 to question delegates in the lobby of the Copenhagen Marriott during lunch and breaks, dividing the journalists into two groups, A and B, with only group A getting access to the IOC members. No reason was given for this by Mark Adams, the IOC’s communications director—at least no reason that made any sense to the journalists present. Gianni Merlo, president of the International Press Association, said, “This is unfair. We are here to talk to the IOC members. And we don’t want to be listed as A and B journalists. It’s complete nonsense to prevent us access to the delegates.” He was joined by the president of the Olympic Journalists Association, Alain Lunzenfichter, who also tried to obtain media accreditation for all journalists. At the end of days of confusion and double-talk from the IOC, Adams said: “Thanks, this was a most enjoyable press briefing.”
The Germans thought that starting Franz Beckenbauer might do the trick. When that idea fizzled, German manager Martin Luther made a surprise late substitution, putting Marx in and taking Wittgenstein out.
But it was to no avail. Greece, led by that veteran back Heraclitus, was simply too much for the Germans (see video, left). The Germans were finished off with a brilliant header by Socrates "probably the most important goal of his career."
Canadian and world environmental groups have taken out a full-page ad (left) in 