My friend in Montreal, Bob Hunt of Way Down Here, dropped everything he was doing and played this elegant little applet the other day. Taking his advice, I did the same, and was rewarded by an amazing little game. What is it that makes this so appealing? The music? The whimsy? The simple animation? Play it and then leave me a comment with your opinion. I want everything in my life to work this well.
That link is why Way Down Here is one of my favourite Canadian blogs. In the spirit of lists, and inspired by Pollard, here are some more:
- Reinvented from my old friend and fellow ex-Peterborough resident Peter Rukavina, which is a blog full of reflections of life on PEI
- Riley Dog, by Steve Laidlaw out of Kamloops, BC, being and electic survey of a couple of pieces of cool writing a day, with images
- Dave Pollard’s aforementioned How To Save The World, from near Toronto
- Fellow Bowen Islander John Dumbrille’s new blog Bowen…Bowen…Bon, which captures perfectly his sense of humour and place
- The standard setting wood s lot from Mark Woods of Perth Ontario. One of the best known and most-read arts and culture blogs on the web.
- Rob Patterson’s blog, documenting his engagement with knowledge management and contributing to a healthy overrepresentation of PEI webloggers on this list.
- Vancouver-based tea and lit blog at Caterina.net from Caterina Fake.
- Seb’s Open Research, from Sebastien Paquet who is now in New Brunswick I think.
- Another Bowen Islander, Marian Bantjes, who blogs on her renovations and her design work and many other things besides.
- Saskatoon-based hockey fan Jordon Cooper, who’s blog runs the gamut but sticks close to it’s Christian and social justice roots. It’s one of the few Christian blogs I read regularyly, mostly becasue Jordon is ENGAGED. With capitals.
- Tony Tross in Whitehorse, Yukon represents North of 60 with his weird and amazing abuddha’s memes
- Hockey Pundits, a group blog about the NHL written by a bunch of fans, including yours truly.
I’d really like to have a representative smaple from accross the country. So which are the best blogs from Alberta, NWT, Nunavut, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Eh?
My buddy John Dumbrille hits on a nice, succinct argument for human scale on the web:
“As humans and communities are organically linked – their evolution and decay is interdependent – it seems web communities mirror this very well, better than, say, super-sites that pump out syndicated content; and they are, consequently, more satisfying. I think it’s a mistake to see & market sites as independent destinations, just as it’s a mistake to define a human being without the context of his/her relationships.”
Sweet.
Blogger let me down lately. Not able to FTP for a while…no clue why. We seem to be back in the saddle.
There are a bunch of new blogs adorning the blogroll these days. In fact the blogroll is an eclectic mess, and the more I look at it, the more I love it. I have it set to list the blogs randomly every time the browser loads my page, so there’s always a new treat at the top of the list.
At any rate, here are a couple of the newer additions:
- City Comforts Blog a blog about urban design, with some very smart commentary and linkage.
- Fast Company Now! from the writers and editors of the business magazine.
- How To Save The World from Dave Pollard, a fellow Canadian writing great stuff about blogging, environmental issues and community. (And he picked my blog as one of his favourite Canadian ones…thanks Dave…right back atcha)
- Smart Meeting Design, a collaborative blog and wiki from smart meeting designers Jack Ricchiuto and George Nemeth in Cleveland, USA.
- Positive Living from fellow Open Space Tech facilitator Alexander Kjerulf in Denmark, who is writing a book about happiness at work.
Sure these blogs all seem to be about organization, and it’s true that the blogroll has been padded with these guys since I closed Open Space (if such a paradox is possible) but fear not, there is still poetry, art and music to be had here. In fact it all seems to fit together so much nicer for me these days; that this blog can be about ideas as they hatch and wobble about in my brain. Call it a more honest relfection of the soul behind the blog.
Today I finally received my HaidaBucks T-shirt in smart black with the logo and name prominant. And on Friday I ran into Cliff Fregin at the Vancouver airport, a friend and one of the original owners of Haida Bucks. He tells me all’s well that ends well, that Starbucks backed down and Haida Bucks has withstood the legal onslaught. They issued a press release in August stating:
Lately, the coffee in Masset, a small town on the remote island of Haida Gwaii, tastes especially sweet. That’s because HaidaBucks, a small indigenous-owned coffee house and restaurant located there, is savouring its victory over Starbucks and its claims of trademark infringement.
Read the whole thing here and then go order a T-shirt for yourself.
Congrats to Cliff and his partners. Still no word from Starbuck Customer Relations on why they told a couple of big fibs. I guess we’ll just have to let it go…and grab our coffees elsewhere.
Sidney, BC
The Dymaxion Map of Buckminster Fuller
From The Buckminster Fuller Institute
John Cage interviewed many years ago on public television, about his friend Buckminster Fuller:
I think the ideas of both Buckminster Fuller and of Marshall McLuhan about the world as a single place are essential to the possibility of our solving problems now. And will always be at the basis of a good life, if we have one, on this earth. In other words, seeing the earth not as a plurality of sovereignties, as Bucky said, but as a single place. For me, it became clear when I went to Oahu in Hawaii…
When I went to Hawaii, I noticed that between Honolulu on the southern side of Oahu, and the sections of Hawaii on the north side of Oahu, there was a tunnel, and at the top of the tunnel there were crenellations as on a medieval castle. And I asked what they were for. And I was told that formerly the people to the north or to the south used those crenellations to protect themselves while shooting poisoned arrows at the people on the other side. Now they share the same utilities, and that they were ever at war with one another is laughable. This then, I, brought me to thinking of Bucky’s map of the of the world which shows that the whole earth is a single island and that were we to do as they now do in Hawaii, share the utilities with all the other people on the planet, anything like war would be out of the question. It seems already, with our recent news, that war is becoming increasingly questionable. But still we don’t have the, the sharing of utilities. And I think we have many corners of the earth that the powerful nations give little thought to.
. . .
[A]ny future that we have will be based on his ideas and those of Marshall McLuhan, because they’re ideas which see the life of all of us on earth as being one life to the problems attacking which must be solved. One of the things that interests me at the moment about Bucky was his concern not with politics but with economics. He said that the best newspaper to read in New York was not the Times, but the Wall Street Journal. And if we connect that with the fact that the only people who are really acting in a global way are the industries, whose advances are retailed to us in the Wall Street Journal, we see what he was talking about. What we would like is that kind of energy without the greed that is associated with it. And I think that, that absence of greed and the presence of complete generosity is what Bucky had.
For a great list of John Cage resources visit John Cage Online. For more on Bucky Fuller’s ideas, visit The Fuller Map.