As you may know, I’ve long been an evangelist for Plazes, the “where” web project based in Berlin. I’ve done radio interviews and art gallery talks about Plazes, developed applications and code for talking to Plazes, and later this week the wraps will come off a series of instructional screencasts I’ve been working on this fall.

All of this extends from a demo I had of Plazes at reboot in 2005: I was simply so impressed with the imaginative spark that gave birth to Plazes, and the elegance of the idea, that I wanted to advocate for it, support it, and be involved with its evolution.

Plazes is all about nouns. At its core it’s about leaving digital bread crumbs in your wake: publishing information about your location, contributing to the richness of data about locations, sharing the locations of others.

At reboot in 2006 I saw a demo of another elegant idea, one that’s very complementary to Plazes: Jaiku.

If Plazes is about where I am, then Jaiku is about what I’m doing: it’s a system that lets me publish information about my “presence” to my personal Jaiku website, and also to the Jaiku-enhanced contacts application in Series 60 mobile phones.

Here, for example, is a screen shot of my Jaiku presence page:

What you see integrated there, in chronological order, is a combination of manual updates I’ve made on Jaiku.com — Hacking Drupal, for example — posts from my weblog, my del.icio.us links, and updates I’ve sent by SMS message to Jaiku — “Stuffed bun and lemon iced tea” — when I’ve been out of the office.

Taken together this “presence stream” gives you a decent idea of what I’ve been up to lately, and my “current presence” — the latest entry — gives you some idea of whether it’s a good time to invite me out to coffee (“Procrastinating and Lonely”) or not (“Working heads down for a deadline”).

Interestingly, the killer Jaiku feature for me is its simplest: while you can use the fancy mobile app, and RSS feeds, and SMS messages to set your presence, you can also use a simple web app right on the front page of the Jaiku website. It looks like this:

Somehow those pale-blue icons roped me in, and took Jaiku to a whole other level for me. I don’t want to oversell this feature, but sometimes it’s the small elegances like this that can add an intangible allure to a web application.

Plazes and Jaiku are obviously both “playing in the presence space” and there is some overlap in their utility. But it’s also not hard to imagine them working together quite well, and integrating hooks for one into the tools of the other.

Plazes is obviously the more mature of the two right now — several years in and several website revisions later there’s a polish and feature-set at Plazes, along with a rich API, a set of code snippets in many languages, and a large user base.

Jaiku is just getting started, and I find myself wishing for more flexibility and utility — an API to grab and publish my presence, for example, and an RSS feed of my presence stream. But the signs are good that there’s more to come.

When I emailed my Dad a link to an early draft of the Plazes screencast, he emailed me back “I can’t for the life of me though understand why it’s important to have the information that Plazes gives you.”

Truth be told, although I’ve probably put Plazes to as much practical use as anyone — and it is a useful tool by times — I think we’re all in the process of figuring out exactly what the “practical” use of location and presence tools is. I enjoy mucking about inside Plazes, and now Jaiku because, if nothing else, it’s interesting experimenting on myself to see what the answer to Dad’s question might be.

Or, as my friend Cynthia just messaged me:

Oh my frigging god…it’s not bad enough we know where each other is, now we will know what each other is doing, if we choose.

You can follow Cynthia’s verbs and Cynthia’s nouns to truly understand.

I got a call yesterday from a producer at Island Morning asking me if I’d like to recast Sunday’s Renting Our Children to Multinational Corporations post as a “commentary” piece for the show.

It’s always fun (if mildly gut-wrenching) to appear on Island Morning, so I said yes, and then spent about an hour reworking the post for radio — mostly taking out the long quotes and cutting out extraneous bits to chop it down to 3 minutes of spoken word (for my pace that worked out to 500 words, about two double-spaced printed pages — the original post was 700 words).

It’s interesting to explore what works in print that doesn’t work out loud. For example, the closing stanza from the blog post read like this:

Remember the old days, when absentee landlords owned Prince Edward Island? Here’s how Britannica defines absentee ownership:

…originally, ownership of land by proprietors who did not reside on the land or cultivate it themselves but enjoyed income from it. The term absentee ownership has assumed a derogatory social connotation not inherent in its literal meaning, based on the assumption that absentee owners lack personal interest in and knowledge of their lands and tenants.

Substitute “our children” for “land” and the words ring more true today than ever.

After I sent in a first draft, my producer made the point that this whole “substitute X for Y” construct doesn’t work in audio, so I reworked the closing to read:

Remember the old days, when absentee landlords owned PEI, and the destiny of the Island was in the hands of others?

When we develop our economy by paying multinationals to move jobs here, jobs that will come and go at the whim of shareholders with no particular concern for the future of Prince Edward Island, we’re simply repeating old mistakes, renting out the energy, imagination and drive of our children for a short-term economic hit.

We all deserve more than this.

A little more over-the-top, perhaps. But I think it makes the point more effectively. Even in print. At least it saved me from reading dictionary definitions on the radio, which is as dull as dull.

When I went in to the CBC studio this morning to record the commentary, my biggest challenge was to follow the stage direction to be more emphatic in my delivery; apparently one has to go completely over-the-top fire-and-brimstone to come off as simply “concerned” on the radio. Anything less and apparently it sounds monotonic and dull.

I think I managed to invoke about 50% more indignation-filled fury by the time we were done recording; which is probably about 50% less than I needed to be truly effective.

And, hey, I’m back in the union again!

The piece should air tomorrow morning sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. (it’s planned for 7:40 a.m.) on CBC Radio One in Prince Edward Island and on the live stream to the net.

One of the nice things about subscribing to Flickr tags by RSS means that every morning I see a stream of interesting photos of things that I love floating past me in my newsreader. Like this photo of the marsh gardens in Bourges, France where Oliver and I spent a very pleasant after last year at the tail end of our time in France.

The excellent CBC Archives website has a video clip of the end of Peter Gzowski’s 90 Minutes Live.

In an interview on tonight’s episode of The Hour (which is becoming oddly compelling TV), comedian Billy Connolly mentioned that he met Robin Williams for the first time on 90 Minutes Live. Here’s some video of Williams and Gzowski.

According to Oliver, Ernie and Bert do not do their own laundry. Apparently this is too hard for them, and they need to bring Elmo in.

Sometimes we have the odd situation where an actor appears in two prime time series at the same time, often while they’re on the way out of one and a new series is debuting. Here are some examples from this season:

• Abraham Benrubi finished his run as “Jerry” on ER while starting a role as “Ben” in Men in Trees.
• Sara Gilbert has minor roles on both ER and the new sitcom The Class.
• Sally Field started the season reprising her occassional role on ER and is in the cast of the new ensemble drama Brothers & Sisters.

Odd how ER is one rung of all three ladders. Other examples?

You certainly can’t accuse our provincial government of a lack of imagination when it comes to trying to convince us that they’re being innovative.

You’ll recall the casino that’s not a casino. Well now we’re to have a “call centre that’s not a call centre.” As Phil Taylor, director with AMVESCAP, took great pains to drive home this week at his company’s announcement thereof. From the CBC:

While the AMVESCAP office will consist of people taking phone calls and answering questions, Taylor said the operation would be a lot more sophisticated than what Atlantic Canadians have come to think of when they think of call centres… “This is really a client relations operation. So we would be dealing with sophisticated financial advisers, or our end clients, or the back office admin groups of our corporate clients, like, let’s say, RBC Dominion here in Canada.”

And from The Guardian:

The Global Enterprise Centre will not be a call centre, said Taylor. It will provide client relations with financial advisers, as well as act as a backup to its Toronto headquarters in the event of a weather or terrorism-related crisis.

Spin-decrypting lesson number one: watch carefully for what they claim it isn’t; that’s probably what it is. Earn bonus points if the obfuscation involves the word “global.”

Presumably the move to Prince Edward Island is related to AMVESCAP’s goal, stated in their 2005 Annual Report, to:

…decrease our operating expenses by approximately $120 million… [w]e expect 50% of the expense reduction to be realized in Compensation costs, with the remainder of the savings from decreases in Property and Office, Technology/telecommunications, and General and Administrative costs.

And therein lies the rub: whether it’s called a “Global Enterprise Centre” or an office for telephone-based “client relations with financial advisers” or a call centre doesn’t really matter: it will still suffer from the same “fair weather friend” nature of all such enterprises.

Everything’s rosy and revolutionary right now; until something better comes along, a more lucrative package from another desperate jurisdiction, or the market dips, or the parent company gets acquired and operations “consolidated.”

Ask the people in Austin, Texas where the Houston Business Journal reported in 2003 that “Downtrodden market forcing AIM to close Austin call center:”

Underscoring the extended bear market, mutual fund manager AIM Investments will slash its Austin staff by about 200 positions this year. AIM, a Houston-based unit of London financial services giant Amvescap PLC, plans to make the cuts when it shuts down an Austin call center operation by the end of this year, says AIM spokesman Ivy McLemore.

Or the people in Denver, where, in 2004 the Denver Post wrote this about Invesco, another Amvescap subsidiary:

At its peak in 2000, Invesco Funds Group was flush with 860 employees and $56 billion in assets under management. The company built a new headquarters in Denver for up to 2,000 workers. The next year, Invesco Funds was confident enough in its future to pay $120 million for naming and advertising rights at Denver’s new football stadium, Invesco Field at Mile High. “We’ve just begun our work,” Invesco Funds chief executive Mark Williamson said at the time. It turned out to be the beginning of the end… Invesco Funds Group operations here are now managed by an executive out of Louisville, Ky.

While tarted up call centre jobs have all the sheen of “high tech” jobs that provide what the Premier qualifies as “good job opportunities for post-secondary graduates,” they are jobs that exist at the pleasure of decision makers with interests that predominantly lie elsewhere. These are not sustainable jobs, and they add nothing to the “natural capital” of Prince Edward Island.

Remember the old days, when absentee landlords owned Prince Edward Island? Here’s how Britannica defines absentee ownership:

…originally, ownership of land by proprietors who did not reside on the land or cultivate it themselves but enjoyed income from it. The term absentee ownership has assumed a derogatory social connotation not inherent in its literal meaning, based on the assumption that absentee owners lack personal interest in and knowledge of their lands and tenants.

Substitute “our children” for “land” and the words ring more true today than ever.

Here’s an iCal file for the 2007 publication schedule for The New Yorker magazine, extracted from their editorial calendar.

While placing full episodes (replete with full commercials and no fast-forward button) on the web is all the rage for U.S. networks, all of the networks have “U.S. only” filtering in place to prevent non-U.S. viewers from tuning in on the web:

Here in Canada we’re thus limited to watching TV, well, on TV. There are, however, a few exceptions:

• Global is making full episodes of Survivor: Cook Islands and Brothers & Sisters available, as well as some of their games shows and Canadian programming like Falcon Beach.
• CTV is making some of their Canadian shows, like Corner Gas and Whistler available online, but none of the U.S. shows they carry here. They don’t make it easy to find — you have to hunt for the “CTV Broadband Network” to load the players, and it seems to be Windows-only.
• CBC is making some content available on Google Video, although it’s mostly news items and short clips.

If you come across anything else, let me know.

If you’re resourceful, of course, there are ways of working around these U.S.-only restrictions. They are, after all, simply checking your IP address to see if it’s in the U.S. So if you set up your web browser to use a U.S. proxy server you will appear to be “in the U.S.” and you’ll be let in the door. Here’s some basic details about how to do this.

I’ve kept an AOL account for many years, mostly so I can test AOL’s spam filtering on clients’ email lists, and so I can test AOL’s gradually less wonky rendering of HTML email. It’s been costing me $6.95 a month for the “bring your own Internet access” price plan, which was reasonable. Today, though, I happened upon the fact, completely by accident, that AOL is now free for those that bring their own access.

Given AOL’s history of making it next to impossible to cancel an account once you sign up for one (endless telephone calls, tricky questions once you talk to the right person), I assumed it would be a Herculean task to turn off my $6.95/month account. Kudos to AOL for actually making it very, very easy; witness what I saw when I logged on to my AOL account:

Note the prominent Change to Free tab. I clicked there, confirmed, and now I’m on the “free plan.”