The CBC is running a series of ads these days in celebration of its 50th anniversary, or at least of the 50th anniversary of some part of itself.

One of the ads has a CBC luminary whose name escapes me talking about how one of the Big Missions of the CBC is Public Service. He cites as an example of this the recent Manitoba election when CBC Television was the only outlet in that province to offer live wall-to-wall coverage of the election.

That’s a Good Thing. And I think the CBC does a lot of Good Things, especially when it does things that you couldn’t really make money at if you tried. That’s what Public Service is all about, on one level, isn’t it?

But here’s what bothers me: the CBC’s approach to public service on the web is entirely derived from the kind of public service they’re used to offering on television and radio.

Here’s an example: every now and again, on a seemingly random schedule, various experts participate in the Maritime Noon phone in program (disclosure: I’ve been one of these experts myself, for my own little corner of e-expertise, on an even more random schedule).

The phone-in format is fine if you’re working within the limitations of radio: limited time, limited callers, audio-only. But considering that it’s unlikely that on the day my furnace breaks down their guest will be the furnace guy, and that even if this did happen, I would probably not get through as a caller, the radio phone in is of limited practical usefulness.

So here we have, in the Maritime Noon Phone-in, something that at one time in the distant past was exciting and revolutionary — hearing experts in Halifax speak about furnaces from the comfort of my living room in Charlottetown — but that is now mostly irrelevant given the changing informationscape around it.

Radio is ephemeral, there’s no way around that, and Maritime Noon is working on the radio within the boundaries of that medium as best it can.

Now, back to Public Service.

Presumably the CBC considers part of its Public Service role to be to provide consumers, citizens, listeners with practical everyday useful information delivered by people who know what they’re talking about. And to do so in an environment where education and enlightenment, not sales and profit, are the goals. That’s why they have a Maritime Noon phone-in.

The web is not ephemeral. Or at least it’s not as ephemeral as radio. The canvas of the web isn’t limited in the way that radio is, where you only have so much time to deliver information. And on the web you can not only include audio, but also video and text and pictures and moving rocketships.

So you would think that the web would provide the CBC with a way of expanding and enhancing and even perhaps replacing the Public Service consumer education mission it now handles with the Maritime Noon phone-in. My furnace breaks, so I go to the CBC website and find the furnace section, and there I can listen to and watch useful information about my furnace, read of others’ furnace experiences, email some furnace experts, and so on.

Because the CBC is a trusted source, this information is more valuable to me than, say, the website of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy which is funded by Private Companies and Their Associations.

But, alas, this is not the case. What I can do is get a list of upcoming Maritime Noon phone-in guests. An index of the ephemeral, in other words.

I’m the first to understand that the reason for this is probably in large part due to limited resources. I’m sure the Maritime Noon budget is stretched right now just trying to produce two hours of radio five days a week and there simply aren’t the staff and resources required to move in this direction or to even consider the possibilities.

It’s frustrating, in this light, to see that when the CBC does try and do new “web only” things, it does them in such an overblown, graphically intensive, non-standard, closed, proprietary fashion as to render the resources essentially useless. Need examples? ArtsCanada, Infomatrix, CBC Radio 3 are all examples of this insanity.

If the CBC is going to embrace the web as another conduit for informing Canadians, joining television and radio to form an info-triumvirate, then they’re going to have to engage the web on its own terms, and not simply see it as a brochure for what’s coming up on the radio, or some sort of wonky freakmedia where you do things you would never do on the air.

To do this is going to mean not only funding new media initiatives, but also educating journalists and producers, and taking the web seriously enough to devote serious creative energies towards it.

If the CBC sees as part of its mission to help me when my furnace dies, the web is just sitting there waiting for them to start using it.

As a special summertime experiment, we at Okeedokee are happy to announce the unveiling of OkeeNet: wireless access on Victoria Row. For access information, please contact Dave. Range appears to be roughly PEI Crafts Council to the western edge of Fishbones. As I type, I’m sitting the Confederation Centre Public Library on the same network, although the concrete sheel that houses it means I have to contort my body to get online. Thanks to The Buzz for joining us in play. More details later.

Happy Independence Day to our American cousins. Much is made of the differences between Americans and Canadians; one of the most significant is that Americans do patriotism right. Here in Canada we came late to the patriotism game, and it always feels more like subscribing to some government-controlled happiness program than something truly reflective of a deep abiding spirit. American patriotism suffers from no such problem: it’s real, it’s deep, and it cuts across social and economic lines.



July 4th is also the birthday of John Pierce, group publisher of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. John and his family will be visiting the Island next week for the first time; give them a wave when you pass them on the highway (they’ll be the ones in the Volve with the “Live Free or Die” license plates).

I think that Dairy Queen should get some sort of award for “fast food joint with the TV commercial depiction of their food least like the actual experience of eating their food.” Case in point is their current television ad featuring rivers of chocolate sauce, moist tasty brownies, lucious looking ice cream. Then you show up at the Drive Thru and are handed a depressing looking gaunt sundae the experience of which is absolutely nothing at all like swimming through a river of chocolate.

One of the fringe benefits of have our neighbourhood turned into a venue for a national rock concert is that sitting in our little vestibule on Prince St. we can get our finger on the pulse of suburban tourist chic. The Big Rage this year appears to be folding camping chairs that collapse into a tubular satchel. Many families are carrying a collection of 4 or 5 of these.

Backpack baby carriers are much more popular with the tourist set than they are with Islanders (I believe we may be the only Island family to own one, or at least it seems that way). They’re all over the place this weekend.

And the family dog seems more likely to be making the trip this year, and more likely to be stored inside some sort of car carrier than in previous years. Islanders, as a rule, do not use car carriers for their dogs, so this is an easy one to spot.

Thankfully the “umbrella as hat” device seems to be on the wane, although I spotted a couple of people wearing them this morning. Alas the temporary Canadian flag tattoo and/or temporary Canadian flag face paint have suffered no such fate and are in as much evidence as ever.

More fashion news as the masses pass by our door.

OTTAWA, ONTARIO — In a move that has rocked the Canadian public broadcasting host and performer community, Prime Minister Jean Chretien today announced that popular CBC personalities Jonathan Torrens and Ralph Benmergui are to be immediately deported to the small Island nation of Tuvalu.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office delivered the following brief statement from the steps of Parliament Hill early this morning:

After careful consideration to the needs of everyday working Canadians, the Prime Minister decided that the quality of life for all would be significantly improved if Mr. Torrens and Mr. Benmergui simply weren’t around anymore.

I love this paragraph (which came from here):

I know I’m a dork, but at least I have the energy to be diverse. Other dorks geek out about one particular thing - you know, medieval war re-enactments, Heavy Metal Magazine, the band Rush – but I am more of a dilettante, slightly dorking out over 20 things or so. I spray a fine sheen of nerd over my interests, which gives me the appearance of being curiously well-rounded, rather than vaguely creepy. I also have a moderately well-sharpened fashion sense, and can put most strangers at ease with a well-placed bon mot.

If nothing else this weekend, we are learning a lot about the acoustic properties of our small city. The Huge Stage at the waterfront is certainly capable of pumping out the most amount of sound that has ever been pumped out of our waterfront, and because of its orientation, pointing roughly exactly at our house, we’ve had a chance to experience what this means.

I’m not complaining. Really. Although I would rather they didn’t go quite so late at night and quite so loud, I was reminded by my friend Beth Cullen just now that there’s something neat about it all, despite all the loudness. And the weekend will eventually be over.

But it certainly is weird to ramble around the downtown when a Big Concert is in full swing. Right now, as I sit on my big comfy couch in my living room, roughly 5 blocks from the stage, the level of sound is approximately that I would hear if Oliver was blaring his stereo from his room upstairs (assuming that Oliver had a stereo, of course).

Walking along Victoria Row towards home just 10 minutes ago, I could have sworn that there was a rock concert taking place on the roof of the Coles Building. And then, 25 steps later, lots of sound appeared to becoming out of the document storage room on the second floor of the headquarters of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs. Most odd were the sounds of rock and roll bouncing off the sandstone of the St. Paul’s Anglican Church office — the sandstone’s acoustical properties are very different from the hard brick of the other buildings around, and produce a very different acoustical footprint.

More later from the sonic frontier.

It says here (under the mysterious headline “Residents chased from mountain town by wildfire allowed to return home”) that “a sedative called propofol was administered to [President] Bush through an intravenous line” during his routine colonoscopy this morning.

And, curiously, it says here that “Propofol is a diisopropylphenol. This intravenous hypnotic agent produces rapid sedation with minimal excitatory activity, however it has no analgesic properties. The actual mechanism of action is unknown, but it is postulated that propofol mediates activity of the GABA receptors.” (emphasis mine).

So in other words, the President was put to sleep for an operation using a drug the actual mechanism of which we don’t understand.

Apparently this isn’t all too unusual, as it says here that “although researchers have tried, no single explanation for general anaesthesia can be agreed upon.”

Good to know that some things remain mysteries.

My paternal grandmother was a wonderful odd duck. One of her eccentricities was a prediliction to use pig latin when she needed to pass private or secure messages — a sort of precursor to PGP, if you will. One day we showed up at her place to find a note affixed to the door: “Le Eekay is Oosay le Orchpay,” it said. We looked under the porch. Sure enough, there was the key. I guess she reasoned that nefarious criminals wouldn’t be sufficiently intelligent to decrypt the message.

Her husband, my grandfather Dan Rukavina, emigrated to Canada from Croatia. Once in Canada he worked in the mines and, said my grandmother inummerable times “beat the freight” across the country — in other words he hitched rides on freight trains going cross-country to look for work.

Somehow the history of “beating the freight” has been lost — search on Google and you find only 2 search results.

But there’s a new digital resurrection of at least part of this history in the new warchalking movement.

Apparently people like my grandfather communicated with each other using chalk symbols like these ones here to signal good locations for food, sleep, etc.

Warchalking duplicates this practice, but for a somewhat less urgent and less life-sustaining purpose: identifying public wireless Internet access points.

Since we installed WiFi here at Reinvented World HQ in Charlottetown a couple of weeks ago, it seems only right to share what we have and pay a sort of techo-homage to my grandfather’s generation. So witness our very own warchalking symbol pictured here. It’s not made of chalk — it rains too much here! — but the message is the same.

If you’re in the area — 100 Prince Street in downtown Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island — and you need some WiFi for your laptop, just pull your car out front, or have a seat on the lawn, and surf away.

The network uses WEP, so you’ll need the WEP key before you start. Le umbernay to allcay orfay le EPway Eekay is on le arwalkchay ignsay.

Have fun!