David Akin’s On The Hill

Watching TV over the last couple of days, I couldn't help but notice the new Air Canada adverts, with soundtrack from Celine Dion. Ms. Dion — as I reported last month for CTV National News — is the new voice of Air Canada's marketing campaign. In addition to a new marketing campaign, Air Canada unveiled new uniforms for their employees, some new amenities on some aircraft, and a new logo and colour for their jets.

The song is called “You and I” and you hear it during Air Canada ads. Mind you, you don't see Ms. Dion in the TV adverts. You will, however, see her singing the entire song “You and I” next time you fly Air Canada. It is played inflight, I am told, though I haven't flown on Canada's flag carrier since the campaign launched.

Celine Dion fans — I'm told there are more than a few — need not spend hundreds on a plane ticket just to see that video. I have it right here, courtesy of Air Canada. (This is a 70 MB MPEG file, so be sure you're somewhere with the right bandwidth). The marketing materials that Air Canada provided to reporters included a CD with, among other things, the video of Ms. Dion singing “You and I”.

Now, I must confess that for a guy who grew up on the Clash and The Who, I find “You and I” strangely catchy.

The video, mind you, is pretty straight-ahead stuff. It was shot in Toronto and in Las Vegas, Air Canada said. There is one remarkable shot (see a still of it, right) in the piece. At three minutes, 14 seconds into the video, you'll see Dion hit the big high note of the piece while standing on the end of a runway just as some giant jet flies right over top of her exactly on cue. Do you know what that probably cost? How many times did they have to bring the jet back and start again because they didn't get the timing right?

No one knows what Ms. Dion is costing Air Canada. Air Canada won't say but experts I spoke to said it's likely in the millions. As one reference point, Chrysler paid Ms. Dion $14-million (US) to use her to market minivans although it must be said that Chrysler was to use Ms. Dion more than Air Canada plans to use her.

Not surprisingly, some of the union rank-and-file at Air Canada was less than pleased that, within weeks of coming out of bankruptcy protection — a period during which thousands of employees lost their job or were laid off or took drastic pay cuts — Air Canada is spending lavishly on a glitzy marketing campaign.

Part of that campaign includes painting planes a new minty blue (is that a colour?) and putting a new logo on the tail (see photo left). See the “B-Roll” section of this blog for more photos of Air Canada's new stuff and some more description.

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
–Doris Lessing, in Martha Quest (1952)

What of October, indeed. Well, around here October was the month Jon Stewart took on Crossfire and Colby Cosh lost his regular gig at the Post. (He's still chipping in from time to time, though, I'm told).
Posts here about both those items were among October's most popular posts.
For the record, there were more than 23,000 unique visitors to this blog plus 16,000 XML requests, presumably from those grabbing the RSS feed of this blog.
That traffic — and your links back to this point — have also put me in to the Technorati Top 100. For bloggers, this is pretty cool stuff.
Now, mind you, Canadians are well represented on the Technorati Top 100. For one thing, Toronto's Cory Doctorow (now in Britain, last we heard, carrying the EFF flag) and his Boing Boing blog is up there at number two. (Technorati's Top 100, incidentally, is a list of blogs ranked by the number of blogs which link back to the original site.)
Toronto-based Ross Rader, one of the Tucows brainiacs behind this publishing platform, has his Random Bytes blog clocking in at number 61 on the Top 100. (That's better than Jeff Jarvis and Joi Ito — two A-list bloggers)
Vancouver's Roland Tanglao has been on the Technorati Top list for a long time. On this day, he's at number 87.

And, finally, from Oakville, Ontario, making his first appearance on this august list, there I am at number 97. (left.)
Thanks for dropping by.
Here, then, for your review are October's greatest hits around here:

1. [What he said] Stewart on Crossfire (posted 10-16-2004)
2. No blogging from Olympic village (?) (posted on 8-8-2004)
3. More mainstream Canadian journo-bloggers (posted on 10-21-2004)
4. [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke (posted on 8-10-2004)
5. Is the Post trimming its columnists' roster? (posted on 10-1-2004)
6. How to spell Internet and Web (posted on 8-16-2004)
7. Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking! (posted on 12-13-2003)
8. I'm on Canada AM tomorrow (posted on 10-7-2004)
9. Google by the numbers (posted on 5-5-2004)
10. Canada best for access among world's largest economies (posted on 11-24-2003)

For a long time, I was a firm believer in what University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argued in his 2001 book Republic.com : That the Internet is a great example of narrow-casting and that that's bad for democracy. Sunstein's book was, I thought, a good start for the case that traditional mass media's role is actually more important in the Internet age.
Why? Well, when we log on, we usually know what information we want, so we seek it out. Increasingly sophisticated software agents, in fact, will help us find more of what we want. Our bookmarks are filled with sites which echo our interests.
Mass media, on the other hand, is different. We don't know what we will find as we turn the pages of the newspaper or watch a newscast. When we open the paper or turn on the TV, all we ask is “What's going on?”
As a result, through the mass media, will be exposed to information we never even thought to seek out. We will learn new things about parts of the world we never knew about and we will be exposed to ideas and opinions which may enrage us. Most of all, because many of us in a given community are reading or viewing the same paper or newscast, the community has some things in common to talk about. This is good for a healthy democracy.
So along comes the Pew Internet and American Life Project and they say fears I had (and, I suppose, Sunstein had) about the weakening of the democracy are unfounded. Pew researchers thought they would examine the premise that this echo-chamber effect of the Internet inhibits citizens in a democracy from colliding with others they would not otherwise collide with.

“…prominent commentators have expressed concern that growing use of the internet would be harmful to democratic deliberation. They worried that citizens would use the internet to seek information that reinforces their political preferences and avoid material that challenges their views. That would hurt citizens’ chances of contributing to informed debates.
The new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in collaboration with the University of Michigan School of Information survey belies those worries. It shows that internet users have greater overall exposure political arguments, including those that challenge their candidate preferences and their positions on some key issues.”

The Pew report goes on to say:

While all people like to see arguments that support their beliefs, internet users are limiting their information exposure to views that buttress their opinions. Instead, wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions.
Some of the increase in overall exposure merely reflects a higher level of interest politics among internet users. However, even when we compare Americans who similar in interest in politics and similar in demographic characteristics such as and education, our main findings still hold. Internet users have greater overall exposure to political arguments and they also hear more challenging arguments.

Interestingly enough, the report continues on to say:

Television is the primary news source for political information, broadband users increasingly get their information online. Three-quarters of all Americans (78%) say television is a main source. Some 38% of Americans say newspapers are a primary source; 16% the internet; and 4% say magazines.

and I think here is the key passage for those, like me, who worried that those who lived and died by Internet sites were locking themselves into information silos:

Internet news is mostly used as a complement to more traditional media. Still, a large number of people have gone to non-traditional Web sites to get information. People are not abandoning traditional news media for the internet. Of those who get news online on an average day, 90% also got news from a newspaper or TV.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., says it has put a database online that lets users examine where and how many U.S. troops were deployed around the world since 1950.
The Foundation found the following:

• On average, more than a fifth of all U.S. military personnel were stationed on foreign soil between 1950 and 2003.
• More than 380,000 U.S. military personnel were based on foreign soil in 2003, about four percent higher than the average for 1950-2002.
• Since 1950, 54 foreign countries have hosted at least 1,000 U.S. military personnel.

The foundation says the data is derived from the Statistical Information Analysis Division (SIAD) of the Directorate for Information Operations and Reports in the Pentagon.
And, “there are some significant caveats. For example, SIAD makes the information publicly available on its web site , but only on an annual basis and not as a time series. The data on the CDA web site for the 1950-1977 period is in Excel, while the data for the following years is in Adobe Acrobat. Even with the caveats, however, this data should be useful in reporting on topics related to defense transformation and U.S. troop redeployment, among others.”

Now, this is kind of bizarre: The Arizona Republic reports that the FBI foiled a plot to do some serious damage to the Intel plant in Chandler, Ariz. Apparently, an ex-employee who was arguing with Intel over disability payments planned to seek into Intel's plant there, turn on the gas, and shoot the place up.
The ex-employee, a guy named David Dugan, was, according to the paper diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder and had tried to commit suicide. His medical condition notwithstanding, this being America, he was able to buy an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle. Let's pick it up at this point from the Republic's report:

The [criminal] complaint [filed in court] then says … police and a friend of Dugan “removed a large amount of ammunition from Dugan's home” …., but Dugan refused to turn over numerous firearms and other weapons in his home, which he also monitored with cameras and a surveillance system.
On Oct. 20, Dugan obtained the weapon, 1,000 rounds of ammunition and five magazines for the AK-47 from the firearms store, the complaint says, and then told an Intel employee via telephone about the purchase.

Are there no cooling-off periods or even the slightest background checks for those in the U.S. who want to buy semi-automatic weapons?

Tara Calishain notes in her ResearchBuzz newsletter this week that Yahoo's Image Search is now indexing more than 1 billion images, compared to just under 900 million images over at Google. I love Google's image search and, am embarrassed to say, had no idea Yahoo was matching up so well in this regard. Tara has a good line about the search interface for both databases:
“Yahoo's Image Search interface is very basic, almost Googlesque — and does it strike anyone else as funny that the more people get broadband, the starker search interfaces get? Anyway, there's an advanced search that allows you to filter by size, type, color, and domain. And yes, there's a filter.?
So, anyhow, I go over to Yahoo and, to test any search engine, I always search on my own name. I figure I know just about everything there is to know about me so if a search engine does a good job pointing at me and my online artifacts, I'm likely to trust it to find search on terms or phrases I know nothing about. (I've no idea how computer science students test search engines but this, to me, seems like a relatively common-sense approach to separating search wheat from the chaff.)
The Yahoo search engine returns many images I figured would show up if I searched on my own name but it found a few I'd never seen before. First, apparently — and this is spooky — there is a David Akin Ministry, full of wholesome good-looking Akins, two of whom are named David — none of whom I know or who are likely related to me.
Second, Yahoo dredged up an article by a Humber College student about convergence in which I was featured. I'd forgotten about this. I do remember being interviewed and photographed for the piece about two years ago but I never saw the final result. Now, I've been the subject of several student journalism pieces but I've got to say Joel Hoidas, the author of the Humber College magazine piece, did one of the best jobs I've seen. He tackled a tough issue — convergence (convergence in the sense of two different media converging) — but I think he did a good job skectching out the work-a-day realities of convergence, mostly through me and Damien Cox, as well as touching on some of the bigger industry and journalism issues around convergence. He also took one of the best pictures (left) of me I'ver ever seen. Way to go, Joel.

Just about any company that's offered cell phone service in Canada — including Bell Mobility, Rogers Wireless, Telus Mobility, and Fido — are named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in August but which is just coming to light now. My friend Tyler Hamilton at the Toronto Star reports on the suit today and I've got the TV version on tonight's CTV National News.
Essentially, the suit claims that the cell phone companies misled customers in describing and collecting what are variously known as system admin fees, system access fees, system license fees or network access fees. Just about every one of the 12 million or so Canadian cellphone users pays the equivalent of about $7 a month on top of their regular cell phone plans for these charges.
You can download the Statement of Claim in the case. (A fast connection is helpful as this is a 4 MB PDF file.)
The case is at a very early stage. A judge has not yet certified the class-action status of the claim and none of the defendants have responded.

Hey, look at that, Toronto's NOW Magazine — free newsweekly/entertainment guide widely read by the college set and other young-at-hearts in the Greater Toronto and Southern Ontario Area — says my blog is OK. Go figger. Mind you, I would have thought Joey might have rated a mention. He's way more Toronto-centric than I am, plus he plays the accordion. But what do I know?
Seriously, though: Very nice to be noticed so thank you, NOW.
The NOW critics settled on Neil Lee's Beatnik Pad as Hogtown's top blog. I'd never dropped by until the NOW notice but on first blush, the NOW critics' comments seem dead on — it looks great. Content wise: Well, readers of this blog will no doubt want to check out Neil's solution for extending the range of an Airport base station with non-Apple equipment. (I say that because the most popular thing I've ever posted here was an article about getting a LinkSys B Wi-Fi router to work with Airport Extreme card. Clearly, you, my dear reader, are interested in wireless broadband connectivity issues.) Excellent walk-through. Speaking of which: I want to extend my little LinkSys wireless B router. How do I do that?
Joining me in the also-ran category is Carl Wilson — who I just mentioned on this site – and who I can do no more greater tribute to than ripping off his subject line for my own post. But, hey, this is the Internet, right? Just grab it if you like it and make it your own. (But if anyone asks, Carl, who writes fetching phrases like that for a living, came up with that one first. Thank you, Carl. Your cheque's in the mail.)
The other honourable mention went to Sean K. Robb, another one that was new to me. Sean was born in Newmarket, it says on his blog, and he and I have at least one hero in common (and it's not his parents.)

CNN announced today it will shutter its all-business cable news channel, CNNfn, even though the channel made a profit for the first time last year in its nine-year history. The story, broken by the Associated Press, suggests part of the reason was the loss of some distribution in the U.S. market. Meanwhile, News Corp., owner of the Fox brand, is apparently mulling over the idea of starting up its own all-business news channel. Fox News, of course, also has the story about CNNfn's demise.
The memo from a senior CNN boss to employees is online.
The AP story suggests that CNN also has some changes in mind for Headline News (perhaps that's why I saw HN's prime-time anchor Rudi Bakhtiar reporting from Washington on CNN the other day. hmm.), a cable channel which is licensed for distribution in Canada.
Neither CNNfn nor Fox News are, so far, licensed for distribution on Canadian cable or satellite distribution systems.

Those ICANN folks sure do get to travel
to the neatest spots. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers just announced today the locations of their first two meetings in
2005. From April 4-8, ICANN's directors and members of its various
subcommittees will meet in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Then, from July 11-15,
the same gang will take the road show to Luxembourg.