David Akin’s On The Hill

ATI Technologies Inc., the Markham,
Ont.-based maker of video chipsets, has spent a good chunk of the year
dealing with allegations of insider trading by its chief executive and
founder. But while that's been going on, the boys in the lab have been
churning out top-notch products. But don't take my word for it. The
uber-geek's site Tom's Hardware Guide just released its year-end
reader poll of the best of 2003 and ATI scored big. ATI's All In
Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro was selected by the 20,000 hardcore hardware nuts
who read Tom's for Best Innovation in Graphics. The ATI Mobility
Radeon 9600 was selected for Best Innovation in Mobile
Technology. And ATI also walked away with the honour as Best Graphics
Card Manufacturer. This kind of broad acceptance by geek community could
be one reason why ATI's stock has been one of
the best performers on the Toronto Stock Exchange this year. ATI
arch-rival Nvidia scored
once: The Nforce 2
Ultra won Best Innovation in Chipsets.

Toronto, Ontario – Robert Hurst, President, CTV News, today announced senior management
appointments for CTV's news division. Effective in January 2004, Derwyn
Smith is appointed Vice-President of CTV Newsnet; Paul Rogers assumes the
role of Vice-President, CFTO News; Lis Travers is appointed Vice-President
and Executive Producer of Canada AM; and Mark Sikstrom assumes the role of
Executive Producer, CTV News Syndication.
[Read the full release]

This one is pretty good as far as geek funnies go. For sure, I'm going to hear this one delivered (probably poorly) as the opening bit in some speech by some industry guy at the next tech conference I go to. (In fact, I just might use it myself!). Chris Cummer has another funny one or two on his blog.

Australian researchers have a neat idea: Use VHF to deliver a 250 kbps Internet signal at distances up to 40 kilometres. The researchers say higher bandwidth rates are possible at shorter distances. The system is using off-the-shelf components but there's no word if you have to lug some rabbit ears around to stick on top of your laptop as you try to connect to some base station.

Once upon a time, in the early days of Google, you used to be able to type in “Spawn of Satan” (or some phrase like that; I forget what it was now) [see comment below – he's right! – Akin], hit Google's I'm Feeling Lucky button and up would pop the home page for that Redmond, Wash. behemoth.
Now a couple of new Google spoofs, both of which ask the user to type in a phrase and then hit the I'm Feeling Lucky button. For Canadians — type in the phrase: “What is the worst blog in the world”. For Canadians and everyone else, try typing in: “miserable failure” and see where you end up. How does all this work? Richard Dalton at Newsday explains.
A note to the non-Canadians here: First: We're sorry you're not Canadian but, hey, there's still plenty of room here. Second: Jean Chretien, our prime minister, retires at the end of the week and his replacement is Paul Martin.

One of the PR folks I communicate with regularly asks, in response to this post, how those who send releases via e-mail will know that anti-spam filters haven't killed their release? Many publicists, for example, send blind carbon copies to dozens of journalists and the receipt of a message with an address in the BCC field might trigger a filter. It's a good question and here's a modified version of my reply to that individual:
I know I've fought with varying degrees of success to have all filters taken off my corporate addresses. There are no filters on dakin@[nospam]globeandmail.ca but there are filters normally on any globeandmail.ca address. There are also filters on all ctv.ca addresses, including mine. I believe there are no filters on david@davidakin.com as well, although my hosting provider claims to have some anti-spam filter.
But I would never know, of course, if some legit mail didn't make it through. That's one of the biggest problems with server-based mail filters. The intended recipient not only has no idea what mail s/he missed but can't tell his or her correspondents what rules trigger the filter. I hope most spam filters are most sophisticated than filtering out anything with an address in the BCC field.
One more reason, though, to make press releases available via an RSS feed!

Just had a phone call from a public relations person in Boston — (Boston,
Massachusetts, this individual emphasized, lest I be confused) – who
wondered what format I would like my press releases in. I replied that
plain-text e-mail is always best. This individual sounded surprised when I
said that and noted that their original thinking was the press releases
should be formatted differently for Canadian newspapers. Hmmm. I don't think
so, but I'm happy to be enlightened.
But, more seriously, I'm often asked by those who want to communicate
something to the press what's best. So here's a couple of guidelines that
will impress me:

1. Never pitch by phone. Always pitch by e-mail.
2. E-mail should always be plain-text. No one ever decided to this story or
   that story because the press release had better bold text or italicized text
   or better coloured stationery background than another one. We don't care how
   it looks, we just want the information.

3. Never send unsolicited attachments. There's nothing worse than dialing
   up a slow network connection on the road only to have to wait to get through
   a 5 megabyte PowerPoint presentation that you're going to delete anyhow.

4. So to review: No phone calls. Plain text e-mail. No attachments.
5. There's never any need to follow an e-mail with a phone call unless the
   e-mail bounces back to you. If that happens, check to see if the e-mail
   address is correct. Those e-mail addresses are always at www.davidakin.com

I'm going to put a page with more suggestions and hints but in the
meantime, what San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan
Gillmor has to say on this would parallel my thinking on the issue very
closely.

As I'd mentioned here and elsewhere, the Supreme Court of Canada heard a landmark
Internet law case last week involving a petition by Canada's music
performance rights holders to force Internet service providers to pay a
blanket annual royalty.
Lawyer and University of Ottawa law school teacher Jason Young was at the
court (I wasn't unfortunately) and has made some notes about the day at his blog.
Young has also posted the judicial
review by the Federal Court of Appeals there and he's included a link to the PDF
file of the original Canadian Copyright Board decision that started this
whole thing.

I was at my alma mater, the University of
Guelph, earlier this week and checked out the Wi-Fi network in McLaughlin
Library, the campus' main library. Shelves of books on that library's first
floor have given way to lots of comfy chairs and a coffee shop. Library
users now access indexes, abstracts, and journal articles from their
wi-fi-enabled laptop. Don't have a laptop? No problem, the library will loan
you one at no charge.
If you're at Guelph, by the way, here's a tip: The network leaks well beyond
the library's walls, even as far as the Brass Traps in the University Centre
and up to Johnston Hall.
The University of British Columbia is the
other big Wi-Fi campus that I know of in Canada. In fact, UBC is the largest
geographic 802.11 hotspot in the world, I'm told.
Now comes news today that Brock
University in St. Catharines, Ont. is about to light up its campus-wide
wi-fi network.
“The network currently covers 60 per cent of the main campus, with plans to
reach 100 per cent coverage late next year. Current coverage includes many
of the large classrooms, small seminar/teaching rooms not previously hard
wired, corridors and large student gathering areas,” Brock says in a press
release. “The $100,000 investment in computing and telecommunications
infrastructure includes $30,000 in donations from graduates and parents of
students through the University's TeleGrad fundraising program. The balance
of the cost was covered by the University.”
There are 50 hotspots on Brock's campus right now. Brock is running 802.11b
at this point.
Mail me or fill out the comment below if your campus has some hotspot activity. Love to hear about it.

Jay Rosen offers up a tremendously interesting and thought-provoking essay
about meaningless PR stunts and whether or not we should cover them. You
might say, “Well, of course, we shouldn't cover meaningless PR stunts”. But
what if that stunt was the President of the United States visiting U.S. Troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving? Aaah. Now you've got an ethical quandary on
your hands. This stunt exists only for the press and costs several million
taxpayer dollars. But this is such a stunt — I mean, it's a doozy — that
you can't resist. And yet, if, as some commentators have said, our job is
tell the truth, what are we doing if we agree to not say anything about this
stunt until after the stunt is over?
From Rosen's blog:

Ask any of the reporters who accompanied Bush to Baghdad what they were doing there and, after allowing for the unusual circumstances (extreme
secrecy) they would say they were there to “cover the president's surprise
trip to Baghdad.” Which sounds reasonable enough until you realize that the
president's trip did not exist as a workable idea outside the anticipated
news coverage of it. This realization takes under three seconds.
The whole notion of the trip as an independently existing thing that could
be “covered” is transparently false, as the White House warning to
journalists demonstrates. If word leaked out, the trip was to be
cancelled–it would no longer exist–and the airplane would turn around and
head back to Washington. That does not mean the trip was illegitimate to
undertake or to treat as news; but it does mean that its potential
legitimacy as news event lies outside the logic of “things happen and we
cover them” or “the president took decisive action and the press reported
it.