You may think that, as a Canadian, you’ve already bought data about your country with your tax dollars. But you are wrong. Here’s a contrast between Canada and the USA regarding availability of digital geographic names data:

• Canada (cost: $660.00)
• USA (cost: free)

Ironically, you can get some Canadian data from the USA. For free.

I’ve been doing some hacking with the downloadable files available from the U.S. State and Topical Gazetteer page. Each of the 1,844,756 features in the Gazetteer has a “feature type” associated with it; here’s an interesting breakdown of the number of each feature in the 50 states:

If you use TextWrangler to edit PHP files, you may find the following shell command useful (pointer from here):

defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Services:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate “http://www.php.net/search.php?show=quickref&pattern=%@”

This will set the TextWrangler “Find in Reference” contextual menu item to look up the selected text on the PHP website (rather than on the Apple Developer Connection site, which is the default).

Here’s how the world of public relations and marketing works now:

1. In June I go to the reboot conference and meet the guys who made Plazes.
2. Plazes is cool, so I join up and start evangelizing.
3. Months pass.
4. Robert Scoble blogs about a need for an open database of locations.
5. I recommend Plazes.
6. Robert signs up and makes his current location a Plaze.
7. Robert says Plazes is cool.

And now more people will know about Plazes. Important things to remember:

• I didn’t make Plazes.
• I have no stake in Plazes (other than an emotional one).
• It’s a Sunday on a holiday weekend and it’s after supper in Berlin, where Plazes calls home, just after lunch here, and just after breakfast where Robert is.
• Robert and I are connected by a very thin, mostly digital thread: we met at Pop!Tech four years ago, and again at reboot (ironically). But I’m not an “insider” and, mostly, I just read his blog.
• All of the above happened in the space of about five minutes.

So in there somewhere are two continents, three time zones, some blog posts, and a neat product. No money has changed hands. No advertisements in trade publications have been purchased. And yet more people will know about Plazes.

This is the new world of PR.

Postscript: Stefan Kellner from Plazes emailed a link to this interesting page of Plazes statistics. I pulled off the following graphic, which shows a jump in the number of Plazes after Robert’s blog post:

The “check engine light” in my 2000 VW Jetta has been on for almost six months. Wary of being told I need to “replace the trigenic configuration valve-pulse generator” for $950, I’ve avoided taking it in to the dealer to have it looked at. I was due for an inspection and an oil change this week, though, so I bit the bullet and made an appointment.

To my pleasant surprise there had been an “oxygen sensor recall” for the 2000 Jetta, which resulted in my getting a free brand new oxygen sensor (who knew that cars needed oxygen!) which, in turn, made the check engine light turn itself off.

There was also a recall on the “hazard light switch,” so I got a new one of those two. An interesting side-effect of that is that the “clicking sound” that my car makes when I switch on the turn signal has changed its tone (Jodi says it’s “much sharper sounding” now). It’s like a brand new car!

So total damage for inspection, a new brake light, a new oxygen sensor, a new hazard light and an oil change was only $65.

Flipping through the channels earlier this week I stumbled across an old episode of Venture, CBC’s business program. The episode focused on the competition amongst Canadian provinces for a piece of the video game making market, and featured the Island’s own John Eden, Technology PEI’s “Account Executive New Business Investment” in a cameo role trying to drum up video gaming business for PEI.

Apparently the province has decided to focus on the video game market; at least that’s what it says in this Atlantic Business Magazine article:

“A couple of years ago, we identified video game development as an opportunity to grow a cluster in our IT sector” says John Eden, account executive with TechPEI – a Crown corporation established to advance the growth and development of Prince Edward Island’s technology sector. “We looked at what was hot, and decided game development was a way to provide new jobs for similar skills from the technology sector.”

Like the Marshall Medias, the ISPs (Cycor et al), the call centres, and the Atlantic Technology Centre, this effort seems pre-destined to be another crazy grab for business that’s not going to come. Or if it does come it won’t be sustainable nor organic and will simply pack up and leave when the money runs out.

Contrast this insanity with a post today on Island expat Amber MacArthur’s blog:

The Island’s capital city (POP approx. 30K), has come a long way. Now there are no signs of party lines, but there are signs everywhere for open WiFi… everywhere… and I mean everywhere. I’m spending my days working at the high-tech community centre (Queen Street Commons), wandering a block to Timothy’s for more surfing/coffee, stopping by Baba’s Lounge for tea (and more WiFi), and yesterday we shot commandN at ITAP (the Island’s technology centre).

They even have an Apple reseller in town, The Little Mac Shop. There are web designers, bloggers, and tech enthusiasts working and headhailing (AKA brainstorming) on new and exciting projects all over this town. It is so nice to be part of such a tight community. I never want to leave…

None of what Amber mentions has anything to do with the approach the province takes to the “IT industry” (save the technology centre, which was useful mostly for its comfortable chairs).

The real engines of the Island’s IT economy aren’t the simulacrums that the technocrats try to conjure up with bribes incentives, they are the Perry Williams and the Dave Moses and the Peter Richards and the Derek Martins and the silveroranges and the Cynthia Dunsfords and the Kevin O’Briens and the Rob Patersons and the many, many others building small-scale, sustainable, nimble, loosely-coupled businesses. Businesses that don’t have big capital needs. Businesses so small that you might not even notice they exist. Businesses that don’t make good photo opportunities or news releases but that will be here for years after the hepped up droids enticed to move here from Toronto have gone back home.

Let’s just stop allowing our money to be used to fund desperate boneheaded tech megaprojects and focus instead on the elegance of the IT industry we already have. Let’s stop trying to go head-to-head with Toronto and Montreal in the incentives game and realize we have something that they can never duplicate: a quality of life, an interconnectedness, and a strong tradition of nomadic freelancers running a networked economy (read farmers, fishers, builders, weavers).

Let’s stop “growing clusters” and rebuild our approach to managing our IT economy around Amber’s words: “It is so nice to be part of such a tight community. I never want to leave…”

I appeared in my first “vidcast” this afternoon: Amber MacArthur interviewed me about Plazes for commandN. The episode should “air” on Monday.

From Oliver Baker comes the sad news that Scharffen Berger, a small Berkeley-based independent maker of very, very good chocolate has been consumed by Hershey’s, which is about as close as you can come to getting assimilated by the Borg in the world of chocolate.

There’s news of the acquisition on the Hershey’s website but the Scharffen Berger news page lacks any mention of it.

The purchase is ironic given that the Scharffen Berger factory tour, at least when we took it last year, contained a lot of Hershey’s-slagging — lots of talk about the low cacao content in the crap chocolate that Hershey’s turns out.

Why is this a bad thing? One quote sums it all up for me; in this story:

“We view it as a great opportunity,” said Stephanie Moritz, a spokeswoman for Hershey. “Scharffen Berger is very on trend.”

I transcribed my best man’s speech, delivered last Sunday at Oliver and Sophie’s wedding.

On Sunday, August 28th, 2005 my friends Oliver Baker and Sophie Petersen got married. Catherine, [wee] Oliver and I were, through the magic of high-speed air travel, able to attend, and I had the added pleasure of being Oliver’s best man (yes, it is confusing that there are two Oliver’s in this post; it’s also delightful).

That their wedding was to be an Orthodox Jewish wedding was somewhat daunting to me during the days leading up to it; I’m irreligious at the best of times, and my knowledge of Judaism is even worse than my knowledge of Christianity (I live in a place where “Jewish” doesn’t appear in the list of top 10 religions and the number of self-identified Jews is 55 out of 132,910). But Oliver was a helpful guide, and the officiating Rabbi, a Canadian no-less, was pleasantly improvisational and expository, so I needn’t have worried; once I got the kippah to stay on my head, I was set.

We arrived a little early at Beth Israel in Berkeley, taking BART over from San Francisco to the North Berkeley station and walking 5 or 6 blocks south.

Beth Israel was also the site of Oliver’s Bar Mitzvah twenty-five years ago, and was coming to the end of a substantial renovation as we gathered for the wedding: Oliver and Sophie were the first couple to be married in the new configuration.

Our kippah nervousness was sated quickly by the presence of a helpful basket of loaners; [wee] Oliver and I found a couple that fit us and the fear of heaven was upon us.

As I was in charge of the music for the reception, I busied myself with hooking up my iPod to Oliver’s stereo system. Rabbi Silverman arrived a few minutes later, and I was whisked away to an impromptu run-through with Oliver, Sophie, and the chuppah holders.

It wasn’t until this point that I learned that my best man’s speech was to be delivered not in the rollicking atmosphere of the reception, but rather under the solemn cover of the chuppah mid-way through the festivities at a point where, historically, there would be a month-long break while the bride and groom considered their options and gathered resources to make a home. I had a brief panic, thinking the my casual, breezey, irreverent tone wouldn’t be under-chuppah suitable, and that I was going to take up too much time in the proceedings. So I darted out the back door to try to make quick revisions. Ultimately I decided to just deliver the speech as-is; how many times in life to you get to hang out under a chuppah and say whatever you like, I asked myself.

As it turns out, my dash outside left me locked out of the building, and so as to not disturb the bride during her wedding pre-flight, I walked around to the front, appearing to [wee] Oliver as if by magic through the front door again.

Around 1:30 p.m., almost on time, the formal proceedings began. With Sophie squirreled away in a secluded antechamber, Oliver signed on for the Ketubah and its secular equivalent; the party, minus Oliver and supporters, then moved to Sophie who did likewise. Oliver and Sophie then joined each other in the antechamber for a blessing by Oliver’s mother Judith and various other ministrations after which we all repaired to the main part of the hall for the main part of the ceremony.

The four chuppah holders came in first, each holding up a pole that, in turn, held up the large piece of fabric on top. Oliver and his mother and step-father walked in next, and finally Sophie and her mother. The formal ceremony was divided into two parts, with the aforementioned best man’s speech acting as a sort of intermission. I won’t try to do justice to the details of the ceremony suffice to say that Sophie had to walk around Oliver seven times, there was a lot of Aramaic recitation, some wine, and a glass got crushed. My speech (transcript) seemed to have been well-received — the jokes were laughed at and I even made an unintended “all over Oliver” pun.

And so Oliver and Sophie became Oliver and Sophie.

Afterwards we all repaired to the reception hall for kosher champagne and hors d’oeuvres, the cutting of the cake, some ritual singing in Hebrew, and lots of photo opportunities.

Around 4:00 p.m. things came to an end, and we joined Oliver and Sophie at his mother’s house high in the Berkeley hills for a snack and then returned, happy but exhausted, back to our hotel just before darkness fell. For their part, Oliver and Sophie had no time to honeymoon, as Oliver is at the start of law school and Sophie at the start of a veterinary residency, so they’ll honeymoon sometime in 2008.