Regardless of who is to blame or what is causing it, our planet’s climate is in a state of flux.  Let’s just get that out of the way now, shall we? Great.  Now let’s talk about dealing with realities here.  Essentially as the world warms, etc we’re going to see a shift in things like where key fishing grounds are (the ocean’s temperature will change) and where the “bread baskets” are in a given area. Lucky for Canada, as things warm. more of the prairies should become arable and what is arable now should be able to support a wider range of crops.  With the NW Passage opening up, well there is a whole new way to ship things around.  Imagine, Hudson’s Bay as a year-round port. All this comes from this report... [Read more]

Russell is bang on, microblogging should be based on a queuing system and not whatever it is now. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, no one thought Twitter or microblogging would take off like this. The lesson from Twitter is that microblogs aren’t Content Management Systems at all, but are instead Messaging systems, and have to be architected as such. SMTP or EDI are our models here, not publishing or blogs. Here’s how a microblog system has to work to scale: All the messages created by users have to go into a Queue when they’re created, and an external process then has to go through one by one and figure out which messages go into which subscriber’s message list. As the system grows and more messages are created, the messages... [Read more]

I had a good chuckle over this article in CIO about why IT might think their CIO is clueless.  This point clicked with me, because I think it makes a pretty interesting point: to be a good CIO you have to grok geek culture: 8. The CIO collaborates to death. Whether it is the character flaw of being indecisive or some middle-school notion of democracy, you are in charge. Collaboration is critical, but you also need to make the right decision at the right time. Collaborate like Captain Kirk. "Spock?" "Bones?" He gets opinions from his experts but there is never any question about who will make the final decision. And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn’t even be a CIO. Source: 9 Reasons Why Application... [Read more]

The day after Canada Day and we have a new, and potentially exciting, microblogging service to play around with.  Identi.ca might seem like “just another Twitter clone”, but I think they are really onto something here. Corvida, Sarah Perez, and Marshall Kirkpatrick all have it right on target.  Sure, it’s early days and Identi.ca doesn’t have all the features that we’re used to, but they have one thing that Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku all missed: the are offering the sever software as open source that can we can install ourselves. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, even FriendFeed, all rely on increasing their own capacity to survive.  This is different.  We can install the server ourselves and then, of course like POP, have... [Read more]

The day after I wrote my last iPhone post, I received an email from the PR company working with Rogers Mobile (MS&L Digital) on the pricing plans: Hello, My name is Nicole Burguess and I’m writing on behalf of Rogers to give you some additional information about the Rogers rate plans available for the iPhone. The iPhone 3G bundles released June 27 are not the only price plans available to customers, they are the high value plans that allow Rogers customers to use the device to its fullest and offer considerable savings over separate voice and data plans that exist in market today. That said, Rogers customers have more choices available to them and can use their existing voice and smartphone data plans if they wish. For... [Read more]