Several of the folks in question are colleagues of mine, and represent Raincity Studios, the web studio I’m proud to say I co-founded. Kris Krug, Robert Scales and Dave Olson are tireless social media practitioners, trainers, authors and conference organizers. They represent the best of what Canada does when it comes to the ongoing evolution of journalism through technology. They are treated with the respect due to recognized experts outside Canada, it would be a loss for the Vancouver games to overlook great talent in their own backyard. It would be a win to build on what they learned using social media to cover the Beijing 2008 Summer Olypmic Games.

Nor should social media as a force for good and bad PR be overlooked. The news has been filled in the last few years with stories of journalists, politicians and businesses tanked by bloggers and cameraphones. But my colleages are not proposing to build a virtual lynch mob, interfere with the major networks who pay good money for exclusive coverage of the events, or otherwise tarnish the image of our beloved Vancouver.

“We’ll be hosting an independent, international media centre at our Gastown loft office. As part of this, we’ll organize events like photo walks and aggregate fan-made content for the enjoyment of a worldwide audience. We’d like to work with you to do this for mutual benefit…

We are aware of your obligations to media rights holders and are seeking to provide an entirely different sort of coverage than the accredited media provide. We are not looking to cover events per se but are instead interested in covering the cultural stories, athletes’ families’ stories, and stories from fans who saved and traveled from around the world for this experience.”

My colleagues want to help the mass of people who will arrive to watch and create social media at the games. I would like to see VANOC and the IOC reconsider bringing them to the table, at least so their exclusion doesn’t become a story that detracts from what I expect to be a most successful event.

If I may humbly offer a piece of advice: a little love goes a long way with the social media crowd. You don’t need to give them the VIP treatment, a seat at the big kids table is enough. Recognizing the powerful voice of the people will do wonders for getting them to sing on key.

I love this song, I just can’t hear it enough times. A short, simple folksy tale of lost love and growing older. What more can you ask for? It should be no surprise that The Superfantastics come from east coast Canada’s music city, Halifax. Yet another great find from the CBC Radio 3 podcast, which I recommend all my music loving friends subscribe to.

ZipLocal is a local search engine for Canadian metros. Folks from Toronto will recognize ZipLocal as being the company that formed with the merger of Zip411 and redToronto. I’m very excited to be working in the search space now, I’ve been watching the search engine industry very closely since shortly after Google showed up on the scene. To be working in local search, where there is still lots of innovation to be done, is all the more exciting.

I joined thanks to two fantastic ladies that I just had to work with. CEO Elaine Kunda was previously Managing Director at Toronto.com, and Director of Biz Dev Amy Rae was previously a principal at JLA Ventures. JLA is Canada’s premiere tech venture investment firm, the biggest shareholder in ZipLocal, and they also count my friends at b5media and former Raincity Studios clients MusicIP in their portfolio. On top of that, I get to work with the rad guys at Arktyp on the interface for the next version of ZipLocal. They’re the same dudes that kicked butt TWiT.tv for Leo Laporte and made the best looking magazine website, Macleans.ca. When Ambermac says you should work with people just for the opportunity to work with them alone, you don’t pass that up. And we’re even going to have the cats from Unspace recoding the entire thing in Ruby on Rails.

I’ll be doing a laundry list of activities, but thankfully for my sake that won’t actually include dirty socks. I’ll be helping get feedback from users to everyone in the company, managing relationships with city/neighborhood and subject matter reviewers and experts, giving the copy on our website a fresh and friendly voice, helping tell the story of the company to the outside world, monitoring and responding to ZipLocal mentions in social media, and integrating ZipLocal with the vibrant Canadian technology community.

So thanks to everyone at ZipLocal who have welcomed me so warmly, and to you my friends who support me in my ongoing quest to bring the awesomeness level up around this place. Hopefully soon finding a wicked patio with organic beer, great sushi with fresh unagi and the best dark chocolate in any city in Canada will be so much easier.

Tags: ziplocal, search

View the entire set of Pillow Fight Toronto Photos. Big props to Kevin and Lori from Newmindspace for organizing. I look forward to more of their events

technorati tags:toronto, newmindspace, pillowfight, flashmob, fun

And before anyone calls me out on it, no – I haven’t had a chance to do all of these myself yet. I’m just sharing my first steps with you as I figure them out

We’ve watched our brothers to the south in America fight the telco industry for net neutrality, and now the fight is on to keep net neutrality in Canada. Michael Geist has brought to the public’s attention what the current thinking on net neutrality is in front of the Industry Minister, and we’re in trouble. It might as well be straight from one of the telco’s PR flaks themselves. And get this: Rogers and Bell won’t even answer my colleague Amber MacArthur when asked about it!

Over the next while you’re going to hear me, and other bloggers in Canada banging the drum of this issue loudly. We will not roll over while major corporations ruin the most democratizing force, the biggest channel of personal expression and the most powerful enabler of innovation in human history. We cannot count on these major corporations to keep the citizens interests above their own quest for profit. Enron, Worldcom and actions of these very companies in Canada (I will be talking about them soon) have shown us that we must hold their feet to the fire.

I hereby call on my most respected Canadian blogging colleagues to speak up and blog immediately on this issue, we need to hear your voices: Boris Mann, Caterina Fake, Darren Barefoot, Derek K. Miller, Kris Krug, Richard Eriksson, Roland Tanglao, Austin Hill, Rannie Turnigan, Robert Paterson, Michael Fergusson, Tara Hunt, Tod Maffin, Jeremy Wright, Megan Cole, Rob Cottingham, Sarah Pullman, Travis Smith, Troy Angrinon, Brian Lamb, Alexandra Samuel, Robert Scales,