David Akin’s On The Hill

Apple said yesterday it would finally open its iTunes music store here in November although one report suggests that music industry types here have yet to ink any deals with Apple.
Right now, there is no iTunes music store in Canada, a frustration for many iPod and Canadian music fans.
Apple yesterday announced new iPods and new music stores in Europe.
As part of that release, there was a single line, noting that Apple would open the ITunes music store in Canada in November.

The Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser takes a look at the way some publications in the United States are going about collecting, editing, and publishing the news.

The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen Media Sites Want You (to Write)!
From Bakersfield, Calif. to Columbia, Mo. to Skokie, Ill. and to small-town New Jersey, community news sites are springing up with a bottom-up “open source” approach, written and photographed by citizens and overseen by journalists. But is it sustainable?

For those of use who grew up while Brit punk, new wave and alternative music was growing up, BBC DJ John Peel (pictured left) was a central figure. The BBC is reporting today that Peel, just 65 years old, died of a heart attack.
Just as Alan Freed might be the DJ most closely associated with promoting American rock'n'roll of the 1950s, Peel did the same for the underground sound that developed in Britain in the late 1970s. He sought out new bands, promoted them, and had a great ear for a new sound.
“Right from the outset, Peel changed the rules. He played every track without interruption, to the delight of those wishing to tape his show, while providing a witty and knowledgeable running commentary, seemingly a million miles away from the transatlantic platitudes of many of his colleagues,” the BBC obituary says. “In the early days Peel championed acts like Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Captain Beefheart, as he did throughout his career, by giving them studio-time to record legendary “Peel sessions”.
I was a club DJ through most of the 1980s and always looked for The Peel Sessions series, albums of music by key bands of the day — Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, UK Subs, Buzzcocks, and so on. They were sessions recorded specifically for his show and were often terrific.

Toronto blogger and PR pro Michael O'Connor Clarke has this today:

Announcing Flackster
Those fine blokes at Corante have invited me to set up a new weblog as part of their stable of “Industry Insiders”. As both a PR guy and a blogger, they thought I might have something interesting to say about how weblogs are blurring the lines of influence that formerly separated mainstream news from individual views… . . . .Flackster explores, through the voices of PR professionals, journalists, cultural commentators and others, how the rapid rise of social media and participatory journalism is impacting both the business of news reporting and the role of public relations.

The San Jose Mercury News reports
that Hewlett-Packard Co. is asking to chop down the tree that shades
the famous garage that Hewlett and Packard founded the company in . . .

The majestic oak tree that shades the garage where
Hewlett-Packard was founded more than 65 years ago was but a sapling
when William Hewlett and David Packard gave birth to one of Silicon
Valley's most famous companies.
As Hewlett and Packard's young company grew, so did the oak. And
perhaps it was inevitable that the yard would prove too small for both
of them.
On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard requested permission from the city of Palo
Alto to remove the tree, which rises high above the shed where Hewlett
once slept and stretches its branches over neighboring yards . . .
Read the full story

During a visit to Toronto a few months ago, Xerox Corp. chief executive officer Anne Mulcahy (pictured, left) spoke enthusiastically about a bright future for the Stamford, Conn.-based company, known chiefly for its photocopiers.
After all, she said, all she had to do when she took over the ailing high-tech giant in 2001 was clean up the company's balance sheet. In her view, Xerox's product portfolio was already perfectly placed for the emerging digital future.
“The greatest source of paper growth is the printing of e-mail. Isn't that amazing?,” Ms. Mulcahy told The Globe and Mail in June.
Yesterday, Xerox reported third-quarter financial results that contained the evidence of Ms. Mulcahy's turnaround work.
Before markets opened yesterday, the company said its third-quarter profit jumped 39 per cent, albeit mostly on one-time gains and some tight cost controls … [Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail]

I was tipped off today to the Public Library of Science, which, this week, launched a new peer-reviewed medical journal. Why is this important? This journal, unlike most academic journals, is available online to anyone who wants to read it — for free. This is called the Open Access model of academic publishing. Before Open Access, you normally had to go to an academic library if you wanted to read a journal or pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to subscribe to the journal.
I like the idea of Open Access academic publishing because it aids the dissemination of discovery and research and that can only be a good thing. Here's what the Public Library of Science people had to say in their press release:

A new general medical journal launched this week with a non-traditional publishing model is the latest top-tier venue for publishing important,peer-reviewed biomedical research, and is being called the first major, international journal to be
introduced in more than 70 years. Unlike most medical journals which are available only through costly subscriptions, PLoS Medicine is available free of charge and accessible to everyone through the Internet, at plosmedicine.org. PLoS Medicine is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a coalition of researchers and physicians founded in 2000 by Nobel Prize winner and former National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus, M.D.

In the U.S, they're everywhere, but up here in the Great White North, bloggers who are also staffers at mainstream news organizations are a much rarer sight. I've been trying to keep track of those staffers that blog (just in case we have to form an association, a fire drill, or a Royal Commission at some point) by keeping their links over there on the right hand side under “Mainstream Canadian Journos”.
I'm pleased to discover a few more additions to the roster, effective immediately:

• Carl Wilson, The Globe and Mail. Carl's been the copy editor on a couple of my pieces and they were both a lot better for his help. Most Globe readers, though, will know Carl as the paper's rock music critic. He's got a great ear and a great blog, Zoilus.
• J. Kelly Nestruck, of the National Post, was not at the Post (I think) when I was. But he's got a blog. (Shame he doesn't disclose to his blog readers about his day job. Why wouldn't you? His job — writing about ahts and cultcha stuff is a damn cool one.)
• Aaron Wherry doesn't tell us he works at the Post, either, but that indeed is where most folks find him, writing about music and other things. His column runs Mondays.
• Back in the days when I was a club DJ, I wanted to work at MuchMusic. My pal, the late Dan Gallagher, worked there and I thought I might get a crack at it, too. Dan was a lot funnier and a lot better at the whole VJ thing than I was ever likely to be. So rather than announce the latest Radiohead video, I'm now on TV now talking about the dollar. Anyhow, the Much folks have a community blog just like . . .
• The National Post editorial board does. If you love the Post's editorials, you'll love reading this blog where you get some of the backstory and gossip that goes into the unsigned tomes.

I'm sure there's more out there. If you are a staffer (my definition of a staffer is: You have an e-mail address for which the part after the @ sign is the name of the organization you work for, e.g. I'm dakin @ globeandmail.ca or dakin @ ctv.ca) or know of one, do let me know. If you're not a staffer but have evolved to the higher plane of freelancing or contract writing, let me know, too, cuz I'm trying to keep track of those folks, as well.

In the U.S., Apple Computer is taking the world of online music by storm. But here in Canada, Apple's music store has not yet been switched on (although my friend and former colleague Robert Thompson of the National Post reported last week that Apple was ready to light it up any day now).
In Canada, the the 99-cents-a-song business has belonged largely to PureTracks, the store set up and operated by Moontaxi Media of Toronto. They're a nice bunch of folks and they've sold over a million songs in their first year, which is nothing to sneeze at when it's just us 30 million Canadians you're selling to. (Canadians are also, I might add, the world's biggest per capita users of those semi-legal P2P file-sharing services so that makes it a little tough for the legit crowd). I've been over to their offices, talked to at least one of the principals, and checked out the service. It's a Windows-only operation but, just like Apple's iTunes, it's a very clean service.
But I digress …
After operating exclusively in the Canadian market for than a year now, PureTracks announced this week that it's ready to take on Apple, Real, and others on their turf in the U.S. Puretracks is tying itself to Windows Media Player 10 and is offering songs for 99 cents U.S. and downloadable albums for $9.99 U.S.
Good luck, Puretracks!

So the Canadian dollar has crested above 80 cents U.S. That's an 11-year-plus high for the loonie. A few years ago, the Canadian loonie used to be worth around 65 American pennies. When I was a kid in the 1970s, the Canadian dollar was worth a lot more than the U.S. dollar — $1.10 or $1.20 U.S. — I don't exactly remember as I was 10 at the time.
I do know, though, that my folks used to take us down to Maine to vacation in August and then my mom would pack all us kids off to Sears in Bath, Maine or some other metropolis where she 'd stock up on school supplies and ToughSkins. She did that, of course, because her Canuck bucks went further back then in the U.S.
It's never been like that so long as I've been an adult. The U.S. dollar has always been worth more than the Canuck buck.
But now, the loonie is climbing back.
The best minds we have here in Canada believe we can chalk the interest in our dollar up to a few factors.
First, our central bank is raising interest rates. Just did so again this week. The U.S. central bank is a little more neutral, i.e. they're keeping things where they are. That increases the spread between U.S. and Canadian rates and that puts upward pressure on our dollar.
Second, our federal government has not run a fiscal deficit for 7 years now (!) and, in fact, the political brouhaha on this side of the border centres on the fact that our budgetary surplus is too big!
We're also running, as we almost always have, a healthy trade surplus. Meanwhile, our most important trading partner, the U.S. (and we're their most important trading partner, incidentally, not Japan or Europe), is running an absolutely monstrous fiscal deficit and an equally large trade deficit. Currency traders tend not to like trade and fiscal deficits, one reason why the Loonie, the Euro, the Swiss Franc, the Australian Dollar and just about any coin you can name is doing better these days. The reason is: The U.S. fiscal house is a mess.
(Note to my U.S. friends who might be voting next month: We've had Liberals running the books up here for the last dozen yars or so and, lo and behold, despite wasting plenty of dough on their friends and through other shenanigans, we've got a big surplus. Meanwhile, those Republicans — conservatives who are supposed to be the opposite of those crazy tax-and-spend Liberals — have racked up record debt and deficit levels. That just doesn't make any sense.)
Finally, as RBC Capital Markets economist David Wolf noted in the piece I did on this topic for CTV News [see the VIDEO LINKS section on the right hand side of the page], we are, rightly or wrongly, perceived as a commodity currency. Canada has lots of stuff. Stuff like oil and copper. The world (and China most of all) needs lots of stuff. That's pushed up commodity prices and made life for Canada's commodity producers pretty sweet.
But is a strengthening loonie a good thing?
It depends, of course, on what side of the transaction you're on. By and large, most Canadian consumers would say it's a good thing. When they travel to the U.S., they get more for their money. When their grocer imports broccoli from California this winter, it should be cheaper.
But for others — mostly exporters — it's made life kind of rough. If your a company that has most of its costs in Canada but most of your sales in the U.S., a rising loonie means you're not making the same amount of money.
And then there's the poor schmos in our TV and film industry. When the dollar was trading at 70 cents U.S., Hollywood was sending all sorts of production work up here, helping to employ thousands of actors, technicians, directors, producers, and others.
In that CTV piece I referred to, you can meet Nicholas Gray, an independent Toronto-based director and producer. He's been in the biz for 18 years but he's been without a job for 12 months thanks to our stronger loonie.