A friend of mine asked me what I though of the new CBC.ca website. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days, and here’s my answer.

I think the CBC has been trying very hard for many years to turn itself into a “brand” in the way that Palmolive and Kleenex and Xerox are brands. For listeners to CBC Radio this branding’s first cries were when the “coming up tonight on This Hour Has 22 Minutes” promos started to appear on Island Morning — we’d entered the era of the “cross-platform” CBC. And it’s only intensified since then, reaching its nadir, perhaps, with the awkward “Big Picture” days when one topic gets addressed on radio, TV and the web (something that always feels as awkward as getting the Grade 6 kids to do a school play with the Grade 2 kids).

The new CBC.ca takes this branding to a whole new level, flashing alternating images of the Dragons’ Den players from CBC Television with a photo Bernie McNamee from CBC Radio News with an image of what appears to be someone being killed by listening to CBC Radio 2.

When you’re selling diapers and you want people to buy your bum wipes, this sort of approach makes perfect sense.

But here’s the thing: I think the CBC defies all regular brand logic, and I think listeners and viewers and readers are unused to, and uncomfortable with the multi-hued beast being boiled down to a set of “platforms.”

My own experience suggests that a relationship with the CBC is really more a relationship with a collection of programs and their producers. When I listen to Island Morning, I’m listening to Karen and Mitch talk Prince Edward Island. Their “CBCness” is important to this — it represents a way of doing things, an editorial rigour, and access to national resources — but it doesn’t start there.

Similarly, when I listen to As It Happens, or Maritime Noon or Q, my “brand identification” is with the shows and their hosts, not with the CBC. Same thing with Compass or The Road to Avonlea or Venture.

This is not to suggest that the institution itself is unimportant, simply that it exists for me more like a rather interesting set of kitchen cupboards in which I find intriguing, unique things to nourish me and less like 7-11 where I find “trusted information content” that I demographically connect with.

The underlying assumption of the new CBC.ca appears to be that if I’m into one CBC thing, I’ll be into another. Which is sort of like assuming that if I use Tide I can be convinced to use Bounty paper towels and Duracell batteries and Old Spice cologne because, well, they’re all made by Proctor & Gamble.

But in the real world, the world that exists on the consuming side of the CBC, I don’t think we could care less that Hockey Night in Canada and The Current and Nana’s Helper all happen to share a funding pool and a set of standards and practices.

So I would suggest that the proper role for a new CBC.ca would be to allow we readers to navigate as quickly as possible to our little cubbyholes within the rabbit warren — show me how to find out what song just played on Sounds Like Canada or what’s coming up on this week’s episode of C’est La Vie. And then get out of the way.

Alas what we’ve been given instead is a super-charged version of “coming up tonight on This Hour Has 22 Minutes” and while it’s visually well put-together, and no doubt sells well to those leading the “cross-platform” drive, it’s ultimately quite useless to we who might actually use it.

A week into my new work blogging at Plazes, the blog.plazes.com server is suffering technical issues, and availability is spotty. This will be fixed soon.

Oliver and I are speeding down the track from Dorval to Kingston where we’ll rendezvous, after a week apart, with Catherine. Remember when I said that wifi is everywhere. Well it’s here on the train. Bandwidth sucks (latency to the mothership back in PEI is 619ms), and my Plazer keeps freezing (probably not its fault), and my iChat keeps kicking in and out (probably not its fault). But it’s still pretty cool. Indeed somehow cooler than wifi on airplanes because the technical insanity of it all is more obvious.

Sadly, even though there is wifi there are no power plugs, which makes the service of somewhat limited use after a few hours.

Thanks to the excellent efforts of Christian Dannemann, it took me 30 seconds to configure my Nokia E61i to make calls using our Asterisk server instead of my wireless provider.

I’ve now got the phone set up as, appropriately enough, “extension 61” on the local Asterisk PBX. This means, in practice, that it is now simply another handset here at the office. Except that “the office” stretches anywhere there is wifi. In other words, Johnny can pick up the phone in his office, dial “61” and my mobile will ring. Whether I am in the office next door or drinking absinthe with Olle in Copenhagen.

While this is technically elegant, it would also seem to signal a rather cataclysmic shift in the mobile marketplace: wifi is everywhere; once wifi-enabled phones are everywhere, is there any reason to have a SIM and be tied to expensive rates, dreadful service and poor features?

Starting this week I’ve taken on a new role as User Advocate with Plazes. It’s not a full-time gig — I’ll still be lovingly crafting almanacs and magazines most of the time. And we’re not uprooting ourselves to Berlin (at least not yet!). In a sense it’s doing what I’ve been doing all along — being a passionate Plazes user — except now it’s official.

I’ve explained more about exactly what this is all about in my first post of the Plazes weblog (a post that, unfortunately, has some people thinking my name is Julie; more fool me for making broad North America-centric pop culture references the centre of my posts).

After planning to all but ignore the Tour de PEI cycle race as it whizzed past our front door, I somehow conjured up a cycle-watching wine-drinking happening. At the height of it all we had a dozen people cheering the cyclists on from our tiny front yard. It was all quite thrilling. I took some photos. I took the photos on my new Nokia E61i, and these are the first photos on the camera since it arrived early this morning by UPS, so I’m still getting my sea legs with it. Here’s a short video taken early in the race:

I’ve got our Apple iSight camera sticking out the front window, pointed at the corner of Prince and Richmond Streets in downtown Charlottetown where, in a few hours from now, preparations — road blocks and who knows what else — should spring into life for the Tour de PEI cycle race that’s taking over the neighbourhood for the day. I’ll just leave the camera running:

Note that: time displayed in the video window is Pacific Time, which is 4 hours earlier than the local time here; audio is on, but you won’t hear much through the window; if you visit the stream’s page at Ustream you can chat with other viewers.

Two photos taken by Oliver, one week apart. Amazing what shave, haircut and tie will do for a guy:

Perhaps you, like I, have been wondering what Casa Mia, the new place on Queen Street next to Woolworths, will turn out to be once the wrapping comes off. There are some hints in their public trade name registration: “Coffee shop, etc., ice cream.” Anyone else have more intel?

So Oliver graduated from kindergarten this morning. Being the jaded curmudgeon that I pretend to be, I was all ready to concoct some biting “when I was a boy we graduated from high school and that was it” commentary. I mean kindergarten graduation? Come off it.

How naive I was.

It turns out the kindergarten graduation made me cry.

Right from the Pomp and Circumstance through the singing of various tribute songs and on to the handing out of the diplomas and the playing of a stirring tears-inducing PowerPoint montage of photos of the class taken over the year.

Don’t ask me why, school- and ceremony-averse as I am (I refused on principle to pay a $25 fee for a cap and gown rental for my own high school graduation), I was so affected by it all. But I was. I suppose it’s a combination of “our little boy is growing up” with some deep-seated human need to get all emotional when kids catapult up to the next level.

The staff at the Child Development Centre are amazing and put on a great event. I’m proud to say that my assigned potluck lunch task of “fruit plate for 10” was delivered on time, and was hand-cut from actual fruit, not just picked up at the Sobeys deli counter as Catherine insisted.

The resourceful staff went as far as burning a DVD of the teary PowerPoint for every graduate, so now we can watch it over and over again and relive it all over again.