My opinion?

Not exciting. Overpriced. Broken.

I am livid that Macspeech Dictate 1.3 is broken beyond usability, that it would cost me so much to buy and ship 1.5 to Canada, and that even 1.5 is reported to be so broken.

Injury to ship beta software. Insult to demand so much for an “upgrade” that still doesn’t work. I bought in January, but the free upgrade is only if you bought in the last month…

I was looking forward to unshelving it. Looks like ebay with caveat emptor is my only option.

To which I reply:

Thanks Ray. I am glad it works for you.

Did you read http://www.macspeech.com/extensions/forums/topic.php?id=323 “Pay an upgrade fee to get the software to work?”

Have you never had it write backward in the dictate notepad? http://www.macspeech.com/extensions/search/search.php?search=backwards…

The technology is cool, but definitely beta quality.

Granted, if your typing is poor, it offers value. But if, like me you can type quickly, it needs a usability hike to make it usable.

1.3 and 1.5 are reported to not even work in MacOS 1.5.7.

They’ve produced 1.5.1 since 1.5. So where is 1.3.1?

Let’s do the math. I paid ~$200 for it. Upgrade is $54.95 USD, shipping to Canada: $31.06 FedEx. USD Total: 86.01 Convert to CAD: $93.77. Now add expected FedEx brokerage fee: $20. Total: 113.77

So, the beta quality software I have is worth $200-114 = $86.

Except that it doesn’t work in 10.5.7, and there is no upgrade path. So, what’s it worth?

Net loss: $200.

The protests on the MacSpeech forums are loud and clear. I sure hope MacSpeech will start listening.

What an un-Apple like experience.

I can understand charging an upgrade fee for software, but only once your product works. And MacSpeech say that they don’t do digital downloads because 1.5GB download is “too big”.

Shelfware. Sadly.

Each of these episodes explored a swathe of gaps, which after debate, workers, industry leaders, government drew some conclusions about issues. The issues and opportunities that arose are documented on http://wiki.theagenda.tvo.org/ and there are some 45 short videos from each breakout session listed on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1341CA7B9BA9C666

TVO presented at http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/

Atlassian, a leader vendor (I have done many wiki deployments of Confluence: it’s a solid product), is offering a new multi-user license of their flagship product for just $5. Further, this price will apply to support and maintenance. The offer expires in five days!

If you need advice on how Confluence stacks up strategically or technically against competitor wiki products, I’ll happily spend a few minutes with you explaining.

I hope this helps, I think it’s a great deal.

Best, Martin Cleaver
Skype: mrjcleaver
416-786-6752
http://www.blendedperspectives.com/

JIRA & Confluence for only $5 each!

While you may still be evaluating an Atlassian product, we have a special announcement. This week, we’re offering 5-user licenses of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. We’re calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it’s our way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, we’re going to donate every penny to charity!

There is no catch and no strings attached. You’ll get fully functional, supported copies of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. After a year, you can renew support and maintenance of your license for just $5.

The Atlassian Foundation is donating all proceeds to Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org), a charity that helps the world’s future entrepreneurs by building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

Get all the details at www.atlassian.com/starter. Hurry, offer ends in just a few days!

Cheers,

The Atlassians

PS Twitter this http://bit.ly/AtlassianStarter and tell a friend about the starter licenses — they’re great for small teams and help charity.

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA
http://twitter.com/mrjcleaver
+1 416-786-6752 (GMT-5)

I object that:

1. If there was really a scarcity tariffs should be priced at decreasing marginal rate, not at a punitive one
2. This affects everyone but the deadline is tonight, and there’s been no public consultation

Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to you today as many activities are underway to shape/reshape Internet use as you all know it. Over the last year some of you have been made aware and/or have seen activities on throttling in the news or in your daily lives. Another proceeding relating to the Internet in Canada required Telecom providers (Bell/Telus/etc.) to provide ISPs with wholesale service speeds that match those that they offer to their own retail customers.

Specifically, Bell has been directed by the CRTC to provide matching speeds which would allow us all to have more flexibility in our day to day online requirements. Instead of adhering to these directives, Bell decided to take this issue to the federal Cabinet and at the same time file a tariff application with the CRTC proposing to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB) on its wholesale customer accounts.

What does this mean for you, the consumer?

Bell provides TekSavvy with last mile, wholesale DSL access services, which TekSavvy uses to provide you with your Internet access. If Bell were to be allowed to introduce UBB on this service, a cap of 60GB would be imposed on all of its users, with very heavy penalties per Gigabyte afterwards (multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages). This would inherently all but remove Unlimited internet services in Ontario/Quebec and potentially cause large increases in internet costs
from month to month.

If you’d like to make your comments/concerns known about what Bell is attempting to do, please do so here:

http://support.crtc.gc.ca/crtcsubmissionmu/forms/Telecom.aspx?lang=e

Select the word “Tariff” from the drop down list.

Add the following in Subject Line “File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 - Bell Canada - TN 7181″ and make your thoughts known!

The deadline for filing your comments is today at midnight, so hurry!

Regards,

Rocky

Rocky Gaudrault
Chief Executive Officer
TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

Reserve you spot & get on the announcements list: http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/

Speaker: Keith Robinson
This month’s speaker is from TV Ontario and will speak about the use of wikis for TVO’s The Agenda

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 16th April
See http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/ for location

Synopsis

The idea behind the AgendaCamp (http://tvo.org/agendacamp) concept was to marry the barcamp (http://barcamp.org) model with the production of a live current affairs television program in order to engage the community to help create television as the Agenda with Steve Paikin went on a five city tour across Ontario.

AgendaCamp is a unique new concept that marries the best aspects of public broadcasting and emerging social media. At AgendaCamp members of the public, expert guests, and host Steve Paikin join together face to face in a local venue for a series of workshops focused on regional economies. Any participant can propose and lead a discussion. Participants capture the event by live blogging, shooting video and uploading to Youtube, taking pictures and creating an interactive wiki. The online audience can follow the conference as it unfolds, and continue the discussion after the event.

Despite the high tech veneer, AgendaCamp is not simply about preaching to the converted. Several locations were remote in communities (including AgendaCamp Thunder Bay which took place at the Fort William First Nation Community Centre). A big part of the experience is teaching ordinary citizens how to use these new digital tools.

Over the course of the first four events, AgendaCamp has had more than 300 in-the-flesh participants including: mayors, MPPs, MPs, cabinet ministers, native chiefs, policy wonks, students, professors, factory workers, and factory owners. It has generated more than 100 user created Youtube video clips, and hundreds of wiki entries that have been viewed tens of thousands of times.

And while AgendaCamp is designed to stand on its own, the ideas generated by it have reached many hundreds of thousands through the Agenda on the Road broadcasts. Clips from the camp are rolled into the broadcast and participants are able to ask the panel questions as part of the live studio audience.

Keith will take us through how TVO used the wiki to: plan the events, engage participant interaction through, during and after the events and how the wiki became pivotal for both production and Agenda Camp outcome purposes.

About our Speaker and his organization
Keith Robinson is the supervising editor of tvo.org. TVO is Ontario’s public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought.

Who should come and why

Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

* TV professionals * Those interested in using wikis to amass and disseminate opinion * Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating possible use of wikis * Change transformation agents * Organizational design professionals interested in creating organisational transparency * Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins * Those interested in Deki Wiki * Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity, and, if you are still reading, * You!

About our Sponsors
Citadel Rock provides extranets and intranet strategies based on the Tiki Wiki platform.

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration.

Verna Allee is speaking at Knowledge Workers Toronto tomorrow night (no cost to attend) and giving a training all day ($199 USD) at Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation.

Verna’s paper, “Value Network Analysis: Value Conversion of Tangible and Intangible Assets,” just won “Highly Commended Award” in the 2009 Emerald Publishing’s Literati Network Awards for Excellence.

For more information or to reserve one of the few remaining places, please see http://www.meetup.com/Knowledge-Workers-Toronto/

See you at the Groundhog Pub!!
Best,
Martin.

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA

This month’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday speakers are from Toronto Public Library. They will speak about their work on Wikis for Healthcare

Date: 10 March 2008
Time: 6:30 for 7pm

Event Sponsor: Citadel Rock

When and Where:

6:30pm, Tuesday 10th March
See http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9716560/ for location and sign-up

Synopsis

In a large public organization it can be a challenge to quickly adopt new technologies, especially technologies such as wikis which promote decentralization of control.

Donna MacLeod and Sandy Arbuthnot of the Toronto Public Library will discuss how the library has come to use collaborative web tools, the challenges they faced and what they did to overcome these challenges.

The talk will also guide us through two wikis created for the the people of Ontatio and hosted on a low-cost wiki provider: Consumer Health Information Service (CHIS) and CHIS asthma information. Both sites provide reliable health information, written in understandable language, from a Canadian perspective.

They will also describe ways library staff use wikis internally, and an give us an insight into possible future directions for wikis in their online services.

Other Announcements

Derek Wong will provide a short recap of Recent Changes Camp 2009, a 3-day conference on wiki that took place in February in Portland, Oregon.

About our Speakers

Donna MacLeod

Donna MacLeod is a consumer health librarian, providing reference and information services in English and in French to all Ontarians through Toronto Public Library’s Consumer Health Information Service. She also edits and maintains the FACT website, a complementary and alternative health website. In addition, Donna freelances as a writer (articles and computer documentation), researcher, editor and translator (to and from English and French).

Who should come and why: Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

* Healthcare and Library professionals * Public interested in the use of Wikis for Toronto Services * Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating the use of wikis * Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki * Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins * Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on wikis and open collaboration.

Capturing Information for Billing
Being self-employed it’s very important to me to ensure that I bill my clients correctly. While my clients keep telling me that they appreciate the level of billing I give them, that billing has always incurred a great deal of overhead cost to document.

Last year I used product for the PC called http://www.timesnapper.com. I loved this program: it gave me a breakdown of what I was doing and when I was doing it. (It also collected screenshots which were pretty handy but the analysis was where the value was for me: reclaiming a few minutes was easily enough to pay for the program).

When I moved to a Mac I had to find something new because Timesnapper didn’t make a Mac version. After a brief flirt with RescueTime, I settled on Slife, from Slifelabs.com. The main reason I preferred Slife was because, unlike Rescue Time, which sends your personal information up to the Rescue Time Website, Slife maintains a local database.

Slife captures your web and document histories so you know where you browsed and what you edited. After the fact you can quickly easily figure out when you’re working and when you were “relaxing”, and knowing you’ll be faced with the history adds another level of motivation to get my day started earlier

Capturing for Personal Knowledge Management

I have always been very keen on personal knowledge management. Capturing enables reuse and refinement, and later, delegation.

As useful as Slife it is for billing and productivity, it doesn’t tell the complete story. e.g. What if I’m not a computer?

Well, I do have an iPhone. With this I make phone calls and I go places. So, of course, the iPhone call log knows who I have spoken to. I found and hacked a program (calllog2ical.rb) that queries this database and fixed it so it creates a log of the output instead of writing details to ical. For the GPS my (jailbroken) iPhone has an application called “Locatable”. Locatable really is a tool for programmers that knows your current GPS location and can call a script you write. So I use it to call back to a script that writes a log every 30 minutes noting wherever I go.

I work a lot in a Linix command shell. Whether configuring servers or installing software, a lot of it is tedious detail-oriented expert work. A problem can easily take 45 minutes to solve and result in a command of one or two lines. If six months later, you can hit the same problem, and wish you could remember what you had typed. So, I wrote a modification to my UNIX command line profile (based on the Bash External History method) to record exactly what commands are given to the command line, and I log these too.

When editing I mostly use Emacs. For this I wrote, using emacs-lisp, a script to log which files I was saving. (And, while I was there, created a mechanism whereby (almost) every edit a file would result in a RCS history file to be saved alongside. RCS is very commonly installed, blatantly obvious and doesn’t conflict with modern revision control systems). Now from the log I can see which files I edited, and from the history RCS file, see what I changed.

I’ve hacked together an IRC conversation extractor too. If I was involved in a conversation, it copies that part into the log file, and on to the wiki.

And recently, I built a client to pull in my history of tweets from twitter. These now get filed into my wiki too.

None of the code is production quality. It is all Perl scripts, Shell scripts, and nasty things that invade application’s private databases looking for data.

I’ve discovered it is really neat, albeit sometimes a little anal, to know exactly what I did the last three months, who I spoke to, where I went and what I worked on.

There’s always more I’d like to add: e.g. a call log, such that I can make voice notes or written notes after I’ve concluded a call. And why not share those notes with the person with whom I’ve conversed?

I should, of course, make all this code available. Open source it. I have no objection to doing so: ask me and I will. Indeed many of the components that comprise my solution are already using is open source. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to maintain the code for a community, for it really is not central to what I do. But I would prefer to move my code base into an existing system.

I know companies are working on products that do this type of thing. Do you know of any? How about Open Source ones?

Sometimes I’ve gone so far as to record them as audio files.
And now, I hope, I’ve found a means to blend these two worlds: MacSpeech Dictate.

We’ll see…

So I went down to the Toronto Eaton Centre Apple Store today and bought MacSpeech. Retail. (I realised that the CAD is doing so pathetically against the USD that even with cheaper software prices in the US this was less expensive to buy in Canada. And, I had to get the packaging because it includes a hardware USB noise cancelling voice-enhancer. When I bought VMware Fusion, for which I had Amazon.com post the CD + packaging to a friend in the US and then got the friend to email me the registration code and throw away the CD etc: insanely cost 50% less than buying online, but, forgive me, I digress. )

I installed MacSpeech this afternoon, tried to set up a profile and it crashed. Repeatedly. For you geeks: SIGBUS. In the background I could see it waiting to update the software, but was unable to do so until I got past the profile set up. Eventually, after giving up on waiting for a reply from @macspeech on twitter, I did discover how to update the software from the MacSpeech site. There’s no “Download” link apparent, but you can find it on http://www.macspeech.com/pages.php?pID=13

So! I have audio recordings, many of them. Some of just me, others of me talking to clients. I want transcripts. Not perfect ones, just transcripts good enough to find the piece of audio that matches a given keyword.

I determined that MacSpeech “doesn’t support” audio files created outside the context of either the supplied headset or one of a set of specific digital voice recorders. Well, I’m not looking for perfect transcripts and, given that I already have the audio files, and have an iPhone so will be using that to record (if at all possible), I want a way to input from plain audio, accepting that the higher the bit rate the better accuracy I can expect.

I’ll find out tomorrow if the following little gem works:

I installed Dictate yesterday, and tested it while recording a podcast with Audacity, using Soundflower and the “Software Playthrough” feature (look in Audio I/O prefs) on Audacity.

I first had to set up a profile with Soundflower (2ch) as the audio device, but Software Playthrough made that work just fine. I was able to read the text in the Dictate window into Audacity, and Dictate picked it all up seamlessly.

A note on practicalities: I had intended to dictate the whole of this blog post, but doing that will have to wait as I am writing this from the comfort of my bed whilst my wife and child are nearby, and sleeping. For now I am typing, inspired by the possibilities. And soon, I’ll dream them too.

Our talk events, Knowledge Workers Toronto, aim at the practices and management to benefit the needs of the worker, such that the worker, and consequently the organizations that hire them, can make sustained and best of their talents. Our aim is to bridge the insights of the worker, corporates and academics in a practical, lighthearted and informative way.

We would appreciate if you would extend our invitation to those in your network who may wish to attend.

Regards and thanks,
Martin

PS. I also run Toronto Wiki Tuesdays, which has a similar format but is focused exclusively on the applications of the wiki paradigm, technologies and culture. More details about our past meetings can be found at http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/ and signed up at http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA
Principal, http://www.blendedperspectives.com/
Founder, http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/
Publicity chair, http://www.wikisym.org/

———- Forwarded message ———-

New Business Strategy and Networking Meetup Group!
Knowledge Workers Toronto
Knowledge Workers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker) are the primary drivers of business activity, with knowledge workers outnumbering non-knowledge workers 4 to 1. The term, defined as one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace, was coined by Peter Drucker in 1959.

Knowledge workers are faced with high levels of autonomy in their day-to-day work roles yet are expected to pull together en-masse with the rest of the workforce. To thrive in today’s society Knowledge Workers need to be both information and technologically literate.

Come and meet other locals from all knowledge-intensive industries to discuss the goals, issues and opportunities facing knowledge management professionals. Share your experiences of issues and network across industry boundaries.

This group’s first Meetup is already scheduled! Knowledge Workers Toronto

January 28, 2009, Knowledge Worker Meeting, “Expertise Networking” Joel Alleyne — Wednesday, January 28, 2009

His story highlights how the OLPC project (which I reported on in 2006) is changing culture, getting kids to be more open and sharing as well as giving them much more meaningful avenues to both learn and teach each other.

Here’s an extract of Ivan’s Story. Go read it.

Kids started talking to each other outside of school hours over the mesh, and working together more while in school.

It’s not that the kids are starving, it’s just that they don’t have very much; what they do have, they’re reluctant to share. With the laptops, the kids had to turn to each other to learn how to use them. Then they realized it was easy to send each other pictures and things they’ve written — and it became commonplace. The sharing, asserts Mrs. Cornejo, extended into the physical world, where once jealously-guarded personal items increasingly started being passed around between the kids, if somewhat nervously.

“Children’s fathers used to seethe with fury when the laptops were passed out, because the kids no longer wanted to help work in the field all day,” he continued.

“I didn’t know how we’d stop the fathers from revolting and making the kids return their XOs,” he says, shaking his head slightly. “The kids solved the dilemma for me: they taught their fathers how to use the Internet and a search engine.”

The fathers, I later heard, all decided an education could stop their children from having no choice but to work the field all day as they did. With the laptops in place, the school was no longer a black box whose efficacy had to be taken on faith: the kids could prove they were learning. Schooling had gone open source.

http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay

The power that Rogers exert in the market for wireless, wireless data and broadband internet is utterly ridiculous. The competitive situation for these services in Canada has always been poor, but the situation was made much worse when they bought Microcell.

Since we’ve had GSM monopoly the ONLY way to use innovative GSM products is through Rogers-Fido. Canada has the highest pricing for wireless data in the world. The result is the public shy away from using such products, and a knock-on effect is that this threatens our industry’s willingness to build services upon these products to innovate.

Broadband and wireless data pricing reflects that company’s need for these services are inelastic with respect to price. Rogers are market skimming.

At the very least all the wireless carriers should be made to include their System Access Fees in their advertised price.

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080630.wiphone30/CommentStory/Business/;

Today, the CRTC responded:

Dear Martin Cleaver,

Thank you for your correspondence dated July 2, 2008 regarding Rogers Communications Inc. (“Rogers”).

The Competition Bureau (the “Bureau”) is an independent law enforcement agency that contributes to the prosperity of Canadians by protecting and promoting competitive markets and enabling informed consumer choice. As part of its mandate, the Bureau is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Competition Act (the “Act”), a federal law that governs most business conduct in Canada. The Act contains both civil and criminal provisions aimed at preventing anti-competitive practices from taking place in the marketplace.

As a general principle, the Bureau does not regulate prices or dictate distribution policies to firms. The purpose of the Act is to ensure that firms do not create, abuse, or artificially maintain their power within a market. However, legitimate exercise of any market power, including setting prices, is not a violation of the Act. In general, businesses are free to set prices as they see fit and let the market determine if these prices are viable and can be sustained.

The abuse of dominance provision of the Act (section 79) seeks to prevent dominant firms from engaging in anti-competitive acts that harm competitors and significantly impact competition in a given market. In order for conduct to violate section 79 of the Act and for the Bureau to obtain an order to stop it, the following three conditions must be met:

(a) one or more person substantially or completely control, throughout Canada or any area thereof, a class or species of business,

(b) that person or those persons have engaged in or are engaging in a practice of anti-competitive acts, and
(c) the practice has had, is having or is likely to have the effect of preventing or lessening competition substantially in a market.

Under paragraph 79(1)(a) of the Act, the Bureau must be able to show that a firm, in this case Rogers, holds a dominant position in a market and that it has used this dominant position to enhance or entrench its market power. Furthermore, under paragraph 79(1)(b) of the Act, the Bureau is required to show that Rogers is engaging in a “practice of anti-competitive acts” with an intended negative effect on a competitor that is predatory, disciplinary or exclusionary.

It is the Bureau’s view that Rogers does not hold a dominant position in the market for mobile wireless telephony services in Canada. Rogers is in direct competition with two other major wireless providers, in addition to a number of smaller carriers, all of whom offer handsets that are functional substitutes for the iPhone. Moreover, Rogers’ recently-announced pricing plans for the iPhone do not constitute an anti-competitive act as these pricing plans do not have an intended negative effect on a competitor that is predatory, disciplinary or exclusionary. Rather, they reflect an attempt by Rogers to market a product consumers find desirable and set prices accordingly. This may ultimately be disciplined by competitor responses, and/or by consumers rejecting such a strategy. In either case, market forces will determine if these prices can be sustained.

For more information on the Bureau’s approach to enforcing section 79 of the Act, please consult our Enforcement Guidelines on the Abuse of Dominance Provisions at http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/epic/site/cb-bc.nsf/vwapj/aod.pdf/$FILE/aod.pdf.

Again, thank you for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention.

Sincerely,

Stephanie Paolin
Agent du droit de la concurrence | Direction générale des affaires civiles
Competition Law Officer | Civil Matters Branch

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20824864-URL-Manipulation

What Rogers has done is review the URL structure used by this feature when using the Microsoft Live.com search provider. This particular provider takes what is typed into the address bar, when DNS name resolution fails redirects your entry too:

»search.live.com/results.aspx?q=y···-Address

The important aspect of this URL is the src=IE-Address component. This particular component is what Rogers is using to decide if they should steal the request and redirect it to their own service. If you browse to the link […] your request will be stolen and sent to Rogers.

Rogers has made the decision for all Internet Explorer users to prevent [them] from using the Address Bar searching feature for Live.com. [Rogers] are preventing individuals from accessing a public search engine as intended. This is not only something to be reported to the various sites already mentioned, but to Microsoft and Live.com themselves.

My thanks to Hondra of @fmc-law.com for the post and to Colin Smilie of Refresh Partners for verifying the behaviour.

This month’s speaker will be Maury Markowitz, discussing how Wikipedia is addressing the problem of ensuring truth in articles. Maury is a renowned Wikipedia editor with over 1,000 new articles and over 20,000 edits to his name. Maury works at a Toronto hedge fund firm where he is the programmer-on-call.

Note new Location! The Ferret And Firkin
Date: 8 Jul 2008
Time: 6:30 for 7pm

Event Sponsors:

Synopsis

Over the last two years or so the Wikipedia has faced a number of criticisms in the press about its potential inaccuracies. It’s not so much that the Wikipedia is filled with errors, but that it could be filled with errors, and the reader will never know one way or the other.

But over the last year the hue and cry on this topic has almost disappeared. So what happened? And can these methods be further improved?

When and Where:

6:30pm, Tuesday 8th July at 720 Spadina Ave, (just south of Spadina TTC stop on Bloor) in the back room: http://torontodarts.com/featured/ferret.html

Please sign up at

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Managers and leaders responsible for applying such questions to the use of wikis in organisations
• Entrepreneurs wanting to use a wiki as the backbone to their site
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins
• Wiki contributors, users and wiki gardeners

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

* especially by me
** net neutrality issues, system-access fees, extortionate plans for mobile data, typically a 3 year cell phone commitment, use of CDMA technology, no competition for GSM customers
*** technically pre-WiMax

I’ve used a Portable Internet modem since last summer, both at home, and in my bag as the main way I connect to the internet. Last night, I purchased a higher-powered modem with enhanced reception for use at the cottage.

Despite what seemed like Rogers actively doing everything possible to prevent me buying this (at the service availability, billing, and technical support levels) I happily report that I’m now connected. Let me tell you, it’s a world of difference from dial-up.

How did I get on with their Outdoor Modem?

And how come Rogers’ made it so difficult to buy? It’s not like Rogers have avoided taking money from the Canadian public before.

(more…)

Today marks the launch of the Universal Edit Button. Similar to the orange “radio waves” RSS icon, which alerts the user to the availability of a feed for a site, the Universal Edit Button is an icon to appear in your browser’s location bar to alert that the page is editable.

It is hoped that the icon will draw contributions to wiki-based sites, by serving as a reminder to how changeable they are.

Without further ado:

The green pencil icon has been adopted as the standard icon.

It is presently implemented on:

• Moin Moin 1.7
• Socialtext hosted
• TikiWiki 1.10
• TWiki 4.2
• Wikipedia

For further details, check out http://www.universaleditbutton.org/Universal_Edit_Button.

My thanks to Mark Dilley of AboutUs.org for the reminder to post about it today.

MartinCleaver_: I have a ext3 in lvm filesystem on an external USB drive. How can I mount this on my mac? I have macfuse installed in case that can help.

Well, its not that I’ve been silent. I’ve just been talking in a different room, i.e. on the WikiSym blog! Here’s a round up of the last few. Most are aimed at ensuring the best companies, consultants and researchers come and share their story.

• Wiki farm companies: which are your biggest growing communities?
• Thanks for all the WikiSym Poster Submissions. Deadline extension: June 30th
• Business Intelligence? Competitive Intelligence? WikiSym is where you need to be.
• Integration wikis? Application wikis? Semantic wikis?
• Call to Wiki Vendors: Come and Display Your Wiki Software!
• WikiSym Participants: Skype Chat Channel
• Wikis as Intranets: Come Celebrate Your Success!

Since its inception 4 years ago, WikiSym has attracted the deepest thinkers in the wiki, hypertext and documentation fields. As other industries catch on and wikis are proving their utility as intranets, extranets and in knowledge collection, retention, and dissemination, and core to documentation processes, my goal is to the conference does indeed get representation across the board, everywhere wikis are making an impact.

Periodically I will summarize here on my blog, http://martin.cleaver.org the entries I post for WikiSym. In the meantime, if you want to watch what’s happening closely, please subscribe to the blog feed at http://www.wikisym.org/

WikiSym 2008 will be held in Porto, Portugal Sept 8-10. It’s sure to be both informative and fun!

Continuing our 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series,
Vanessa Peters (PhD Candidate, OISE) will lead discussions next Tuesday at Toronto Wiki Tuesday
at another new location, GROUNDHOG PUB.

http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/twiki/bin/view/TorontoWikiTuesdays/WikisInEducationMay2008

Here’s Vanessa’s description:

In this meeting I will discuss a new wiki-based scripted activity that was created for secondary school biology students. Using a co-design method, the researchers collaborated with two experienced science teachers to create a curriculum unit where 114 grade-ten biology students developed a knowledge base of ideas about human physiology, then drew upon those ideas as resources for subsequent curricular activities. Results demonstrate that this innovative lesson fostered collaborative knowledge construction as well as individual student learning. This suggests that a carefully designed wiki-based activity can complement and enhance the value of a collective knowledge building community within secondary school settings.

Please sign up at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/468369/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating the use of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins
• Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

Toronto Wiki Tuesday’s May Meeting is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professionals.

–
Martin@Cleaver.org

When I first arrived in Toronto in 2004 I found very little in the way of Tech community. I was told that the Dot Com Crash had pretty much annihilated every shred of enthusiasm this city had left to offer.

Today, in 2008, there’s no doubt in my mind that we have a vibrant community, with many events competing for our attention.

Here’s tonight’s choices:

1. Startup Camp - startups get together to practice their pitch (closed event) http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/22/startupcamp-toronto-2-what-we-expect-from-you/
2. Toronto Tech Talks - in preparation for Toronto Tech Week (Sept), “The event brings together professionals from the technology industry, and other industries such as advertising, accounting, public relations and finance come out to exchange ideas and make new business connections.”. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=14399969049
3. Case Camp - PR and Media firms look at case studies of Social Media http://www.casecamp.org/index.html
4. CIPS Unified Messaging http://www.cipstoronto.ca/activities/event_info1.php?402

Finally, if you are interested in Tech in Toronto, no matter where you go before, you need to end up here:

SummerCamp Dance Party, A Toronto Creative Mashup
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want any part of your revolution.”
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12682267965

Start Time: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 9:00pm
End Time: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 3:00am
Location: CiRCA - Ballroom and Kid Robot Room
Street: 126 John Street

See you at CIRCA!

Last year I commented:

Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.

While it is fair that ISPs should be able to charge for the amount of traffic, (this bears down on their infrastructure) why should they have the right to select what that traffic is used for.

From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.

Last week, Bell Canada took this to a new level. They started not only filtering their own customer’s traffic, they started impacting resellers, wholesale providers that buy bandwidth in bulk from Bell and sell to their own customers. In filtering the types of traffic those ISPs could deliver doing so they excised force in the market, trashing the business models of tens of ISPs across the country, directly impacting millions and scuppering technology innovation by organisations such as Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation:

On Sunday, CBC offered a final episode of reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. The release was an experiment for the public broadcaster in new ways of offering its programming.

However, downloaders who blogged about the experience on the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister site complained about very long periods required to download the show.

One user received a notice that it could take 2½ hours to download, while another was quoted 11 hours. The bottleneck is occurring because ISPs such as Rogers and Bell limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file-swapping on BitTorrent.

Michael Geist reports:

“The CRTC has to date largely avoided the net neutrality issue, however, that is about to change. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Canada’s largest ISP association, has filed a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. The application, which was filed late yesterday and is not yet posted on the CRTC site, is the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet since it places the issue squarely before the Commission. The filing provides additional insights into Bell’s action - the throttling has reduced speeds by as much as 90 percent - and marks an important milestone since the outcome will provide a clear answer on whether Canadian law currently protects net neutrality or if legislative reform is needed.”

What you can do
Check out Steve Anderson’s Campaign for Democratic Media and the Stop the Throttler campaigns. Share your story.

1. http://www.stopthethrottler.ca/
2. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10734109708
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5UvAKcxTGE
4. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=4ac678a5-38e7-40dc-8d80-80e6e8e01aeb&p=2
5. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/02/tech-bell.html
6. http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/407730
7. http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/04/03/and-then-there-was-two-bell-canada-seeks-to-wipe-out-isp-competitors/

My thanks go to my friend Sandy Kemsley for the link.

As part of the 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series, Adrian Fritsch (Software Consultant and founder of debatum.org) will lead discussions at Toronto Wiki Tuesday at Epicure Cafe, Here’s Adrian’s event description:

What: Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: using Wikis to Debate

The problem:

To form a well-reasoned opinion, you need the best arguments on different sides of a debate. Wikipedia stresses neutral point of view and so make it’s content hard to contrast with your current understanding. While every wiki houses content, a method is needed to help the community express contrasting opinions.

The Debatum solution:

Debatum is a wiki with a method that guides uses to document and interconnect arguments. Examples it uses include debating controversial issues such as:

1. Can computers think?
2. When is a declaration of independence reasonable?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Should there be Net Neutrality?

Debatum overlays a methodology over the wiki to encourage the growth of disparate viewpoints to inform and persuade readers. This provides users to enrich the arguments and powerfully inform and influence others.

While Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Debatum wants to be an interconnect of arguments, ideas, and lines of thought. While Wikipedia stresses a Neutral Point of view, Debatum’s goal is to write the best arguments of each side and include weak, yet popular arguments together with (strong) counter-arguments. Unlike Wikipedia, which accepts content only if it is written outside, Debatum seeks to mesh arguments with original thinking from participants.

Debatum’s goal is to well-thought-out opinions, rather than to facilitate “winning” debates. Debatum’s motto is “Knowledge by debate”.

Additional topics:

• We will discuss other attempts to approach online debates (wiki-based or not) and compare them to Debatum.
• We ask whether Wiki is actually the ideal format for documenting debates.
• We question whether (controversial) subjects be learned faster from a “debating construct” instead of a “plain” layout?
• We discuss whether a wiki format discourages rhetoric and ask whether this is a good thing.

After Adrian’s talk we’ll turn the conversation to the audience to discuss how, where and why Wikis are usually used in Politics and in what ways Debatum offers something new. Expect a lively discussion of the opportunities and resistance to wikis in politics.

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 8th April at 502 Queen Street West in the Front Room: http://www.theepicure.ca/event.html
Please sign up for this event at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/444745/
Join our mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/torontowikituesday/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion or unique use of a wiki? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Parties interested in expression of contraversal or political material on wikis.
• Wikipedians responsible for promoting a neutral point of view
• Anyone who thinks that wikis are not the place to express dissent
• Technical writers responsible for documentation tasks
• Managers and leaders trying to understand the potential of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Wiki users and Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:
Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives, a wiki consulting firm based in Toronto, and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

• http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/03/toronto-wiki-tuesdays-march-april-and-onward-2008/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/05/wikisym2008-im-chair-for-demos-and-posters/

About our Sponsor:
April’s Toronto Wiki Tuesdays is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professsionals. See http://www.sipgroup.org/ and http://www.sipgroup.blogspot.com/

Upcoming Toronto Wiki Tuesdays
See http://www.torontowikituesdays.com for the dates and the topics for Toronto Wiki Tuesdays for the next 3 months.

From the team at Avaaz:

Dear friends,

In just 7 days over 1 million of us have signed the petition supporting human rights and dialogue in Tibet - the fastest growing internet petition in history! After decades of injustice, the Tibetan people are crying out to the world for change, and the world is answering.

As China’s leaders decide whether to respond to Tibetan grievances with increased repression or dialogue with the Dalai Lama, an International Day of Action has been declared for Monday, March 31st. In 4 days, thousands of people in cities across the world will march to Chinese embassies and consulates, and stack hundreds of boxes containing our petition outside them. 1 million signatures makes a mountain of boxes - it’s a powerful way to deliver our message.

We have just 4 days left until the petition delivery, so we’re redoubling our efforts to build the petition even larger - to 2 million signatures - in that time. Please sign below, and then forward this email to all your friends and family:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/73.php/?cl=67201776

China’s hardliners are lashing out publicly at the Dalai Lama–but many Chinese leaders believe dialogue is the best hope for stability in Tibet. Governments around the world have begun calling for dialogue, and there are many hopeful signs that, if we can keep the pressure up, China will agree. Already, we have had constructive discussions with Chinese officials about the message of our campaign.

Chinese President Hu Jintao values his country’s international reputation, and he needs to hear from us that the ‘Made in China’ brand and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing will succeed only if he chooses dialogue over the hardliners’ repression. An avalanche of global people power is moving to get his attention. Our petition recognizes the concerns of Chinese leaders that riots and separatism could lead to dangerous instability. But we support the position of the Dalai Lama, that the best path to stability and development for China lies through dialogue and respect, not repression.

This is the most promising moment in decades to address the injustices of Tibet - but already the media is moving on to other stories. We need to seize this moment with a massive statement of global support this Monday — for the next four days, let’s pull out all the stops for Tibet.

With hope,

Ricken, Graziela, Ben, Iain, Pascal, Milena, Galit, Paul, Esra’a and the whole Avaaz team

PS - Here are some links for more information:

Reuters reports unrest continues:
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed1/idUSPEK369654

China allows first journalists back into Lhasa, monks speak out:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/china/local%20news/tibet/2008/03/27/149167/Tibet-monks.htm

Europe and the US step up calls for dialogue:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/europe/27europe.php

Prominent Chinese Intellectuals call for fair approach to Tibet:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/24/asia/chinasub.php
———–

DSL: Not only has Bell imposed this on their own customers but also on their wholesale resellers, organisations such as Teksavvy, who they have started traffic-shaping, cutting off many of the newest services on the internet.

Cable: Rogers have been traffic shaping for a couple of years now, but this week stated that they will charge overlimit fees.

That both operators act so definitively, so drastically, and within such a short pace of time must get the attention of our government and the CRTC who must act on their responsibility to ensure competition in the marketplace. From an economics standpoint, these simultaneous industry moves look nothing short of collusion.

While it is in industry’s interests to promote high fees and high profits on data delivery, technologies exist to make data delivery very cheap to deliver. Industry has a mindset and investment model for traditional business models. It is in the public’s interests, and society’s to get to low costs.

> > On the Wordpress professional developer’s forum, Skaneateles Design said:
> > Working with and customizing WordPress MU requires quite a bit of
> > integrative skill, since the development docs are limited for the
> > program (often, the code itself is the documentation!), and the system is not trivial.
> >
> I wrote:
> Please excuse the off-topic, but just to let everyone know, there is an
> (underloved) section on Codex wiki for wpmu, at
> http://codex.wordpress.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category:WPMU&hideminor=0&days=180&limit=50
>
> And… until someone revamps the forums to make the wiki prominent, the
> documentation will likely remain just as fragmented and limited.

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:33 PM, kingler wrote:

Are you suggesting a better WPMU codex page with INDEX? Maybe it is time to start a new maillist for WPMU users and developers as well?

Hi Liang,

The http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:WPMU page is a reasonable start page. What is lacking is the wiki’s prominence in the mu forums. As the majority of people only use the forums the bulk of the most recent information is in the forums, and the pages on the wiki are not very useful.

Although a wiki provides the means to refine and os to accomplish terseness and high relevancy, blogs and in particular, forums, generate sprawl and disconnectedness. (See http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/28/wikis-compared-to-email-discussion-groups-and-blogs/ and maybe http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/06/blogs-are-like-plastics-wikis-are-like-leaves/ )

Now, forums have their place for conversation but they are not the means for generating reference material. (People do summarise in forums, but these summaries also get swept away in the flow of conversation). We need both, conversation and reference, and we need the means to harness the people’s efforts appropriately.

Given that most content is already in the forums, we need to find ways to link the forums to the wiki, and indeed, the wiki to the forums.

Our audience has barely embraced the Codex wiki so there’s little mu-specific information useful to them (although the single user wordpress information is pretty reasonable). To make Codex appealing to mu-users and to keep it front of mind, I think we need to automate the linkage between forum and wiki. This will help the community navigate from knowledge socialised in a particular conversation, to information definitively documented in the wiki, and back again, so viewing the wiki shows conversations discussing the concepts of the wiki.

If this linkage can be made convenient and appealing enough for users to traverse, they will iteratively travel the conversation (forum)-documentation (wiki) pathway, pulling the concepts they have just internalised from the new conversations into the reference documentation. Then, the user editing the shared reference has the opportunity to consolidate their new insight or understanding into the logic shared with everyone else. The reference information, being the product of the many, is comprehensive (rather than the conversation, which will typically address only a few points).

Comparing an idea or notion proposed in conversation to the comprehensive helps the editor think through the idea inside constraining context of the knowledge already known. When a user edits the reference she align herselves with the masses, and begins to engage with all the factors needed to pull the masses toward her idea.

In a forum talking in one thread provides little or no exposure to users not following that thread. A mailing list has the same issue. The lack of exposure means good seed ideas can miss growing up, and that bad ideas get pursued for too long because their authors miss a constraint that is known somewhere. A wiki, with a community properly engaged on it, will factor seeds of ideas into pages where the idea can grow, be pruned and cared for. Ideas placed on forums and mailing lists can too easily get lost.

While some communities get away with hosting conversation on the wiki itself (and there are advantages to doing so - my favourite being that the conversation can be pruned of overly verbose, poorly written or just plain wrong information), the simple fact today is that many communities do have that separate forum that the community likes, so the question is not how to eliminate the forum but how to create the relationship between the wiki and the forum.

At mu forums, what I’d like to see is this:

1. On the front page it shows the list of mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point. This continuously informs people what reference information is being built.
2. At the bottom of every forum post show content from wiki pages. This linkage could be implied from the tags on the post in view, or via a tag generation method.

On Codex, I’d like to see:

1. a method whereby users can expand a twisty or something and get all relevant conversation items
2. the menu bar shows the mu entry points: mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point

This method could work for both multi- and single- user versions of wordpress. Indeed, I believe for many communities today it would improve the knowledge-information (SECI) flow.

Feedwordpress is documented at http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/ and is run by the incredibly busy Charles Johnson (RadGeek). I think it would be better if Charles put a wiki for Feedwordpress at radgeek.com, and indeed I asked him to do so a few months ago, but until he does, at least people who need to use his software can collaborate with one another. You can find this wiki at http://feedwordpress.pbwiki.com/

It is a basic human need to collaborate. Cooperating with others saves us time, and helps us share our expression so at a minimum guarantees that we did what we can. Commenting on blogs does not provide the deep blending of perspectives needed for real value to be added to knowledge. In the FeedWordPress case users have asked for a forum or another means to collectively pool their time, but a wiki not only adds this but changes the sequence in which information is presented. (Actually, the password reset on the feedwordpress blog doesn’t work for me!)

Whether this Feedwordpress wiki will take off will depend on a lot of things. Whether it is seeded compellingly (including from the gems of existing content), whether people subscribe, whether people share their problems and help one another solve theirs, and what signal:noise ratio occurs on it.

We can each do our bit. Pooling our bits to be together can save us all time and energy. I hope this feedwordpresswiki will help.