I want to tell you a story about how the internet changed. It used to be the case that most content on the world wide web was created by rich white English-speaking men. The web was created by one: Tim Berners-Lee. The leading online commentators of the 90s – people like John Dvorak – fit this profile as well. But it’s not the case anymore.

• Today, the most popular blog on the web is Arianna Huffington’s (top of the technorati 100).
• Most blogs are written by women (35% of online teen girls blog compared to 20% of guys).
• Teens from families earning less than $50,000 are almost twice as likely to blog as are teens from richer families. (source)

And that gender and income gap is growing. Why weren’t women contributing to the web as much before? It wasn’t because they lacked access. 90% of US teens can access the Internet from their home today and that’s about the same percentage as in the year 2000. Instead, people weren’t contributing content to the web because they found it too difficult.

• Women are far more likely to say that they would “need to ask a friend for help” in order to upload a file to a web site than are men
• Men have long been far more likely to share video and photos online than women, but when broadband internet and social networking sites like facebook made it really easy to share these files, the gender balance flipped and women became the primary sharers of media online

In a nutshell, social networking, blogs, and other web 2.0 technologies were what finally got a lot of otherwise disenfranchised people to contribute to the web. And this was a tremendously positive development, not least because it meant that about half the American population, a whole lot of females, and poorer people became truly included in the netscape and it amplified the voice of proud islamists, book authors and new associations.

My contention is that wikipedia is in their equivalent of the pre-blog era. Most wikipedia users today are male, rich, urban, and young. For example, three-quarters of internet-using seniors have never been to the wikipedia site, whereas most college grads have. And when wikipedia draws on such a subset of the population, we all lose out because areas of human knowledge are under-represented and under-developed in the encyclopedia.

Let’s find our wikipedia-equivalent of the Proud Islamist, a new voice brought to prominence because of enabling technology. Just as the likes of blogs induced women to contribute content online (even though homepage creation sites like geocities had been available for years), my prediction is that introducing WYSIWYG editing in wikipedia, creating a workable discussion and messaging system, and generally focusing on usability would have a similar effect, changing the gender, income, and age of the typical wikipedia contributor. What changes might we expect? Surely, the interesting changes will be the ones that I can’t easily predict.

• Women disproportionately use the internet to look for information about religion, health, and personal problems, so I’d bet on those areas of wikipedia flourishing (Source)
• Teenage girls are far more likely to upload photos to the web than are teenage boys; if more wikipedia contributors were female I would expect to see more visuals on the site
• Females are significantly more likely to use the internet for communication (instant messaging, writing on a facebook wall, using an online chat room) than are males; I’d expect to see the discussion pages flourish

I’m posting a twitter-like commentary on my life in B.C. at my new blog Prowse B.C.

Case 1: I moved to BC two weeks ago. The first thing that I did was get my BC driver’s licence; it arrived in the mail today. It came along with an organ donor registration card. But I can’t register to be an organ donor in BC. Because I have an Ontario Health Card, not a BC one. And you need to have a BC ‘Care Card’ in order to so register. And here’s the kicker: I won’t be eligible for one until I’ve lived in BC for three months. So I can’t have my organ donor status listed on my driver’s licence. It’s a small hole in the system that shouldn’t exist.

Case 2: A participant in my Katimavik cluster went to the doctor the other day. But they’re from Quebec and Quebec doesn’t have a reciprocal agreement with BC to recognize each other’s health cards. So this participant had to pay out of pocket and submit paperwork to the Quebec government for reimbursement. It’s annoying. And more than that, it’s an impediment which limits the access of a Canadian Citizen to health care.

Our Prime Minister is set to meet with the Canadian Premiers next week. In the leadup, we’re hearing much gladhanding about their record and terms like new era of federal-provincial relations are being bandied. But there are festering inter-provincial issues. They affect our lives. They impede the mobility, the health, the security of Canadians. And they’re likely to be addressed only if there’s a strong federal government which compels the provinces to co-operate.

If the provinces don’t like a heavyhanded Ottawa, so be it. That’s why I’m a federalist. It shouldn’t be easier to move from Spain to Belgium than it is to move between two Canadian provinces. It just shouldn’t.

On Christmas day, I appeared on The Mike Powell Power Hour (unless its been renamed to include Adam and the second hour – I’m not sure) on CKCU 93.1 fm in Ottawa. We spoke about the five most over-reported news stories of the year. This was my list and my notes about each:

5. Within the tech journalism community, this got a huge amount of play. And it was too early a release. And it’s added up to nothing. And Google has a history of trying initiatives that don’t pan out.
Reporters should set the agenda by asking questions about what they deign to be in ‘the public interest’. And this becomes more likely when we have a diverse and competitive news market; when markets have a large number of newspapers – like in Britain, New York, and Toronto – then newspapers adopt perspectives – like the Economic POV of The Economist, or the left-wing POV of The Toronto Star, or the decidedly right-wing perspective of media newcomers like the National Post and Fox News. Newspapers don’t do this when they have a de facto monopoly in a market, as they strive to represent everybody. Newspapers should strive to incorporate their values into the sorts of stories that they choose to cover – do you want to focus on poverty (The Star does this well) – do you want to focus on business (the Financial Post does this quite well).
A question of resources. Online is terrible. Places like Japan and Scandenavia have more than half of their population subscribe to a newspaper. In Canada that number is about 15%

4. Toronto Star features when they sent their reporters into local private religious schools (feature in Ryerson Journalism Review). But the National Newspaper Awards don’t adequately highlight the best of Canadian journalism. The Pulitzer prizes do a good job of showcasing the best reporting. NNA don’t. They don’t have an RSS feed. They don’t republish the articles on their web page.

3. In the 70s, publications like Time magazine used to put cats and ice cream on their cover. (literally). And at the time it was hailed as brilliant and innovative because sales shot up. In the 90s, similarly, they would have celebrity covers with the likes of Tom Cruise. But they don’t do those things anymore. They have a lot more hard news covers or covers about education or back pain or things like that. And it reflects the segmenting of the news industry and the proliferation of celebrity magazines. Time sales don’t increase when they put Tom Cruise on the cover anymore – in part because such a small portion of their sales are at the newsstand.

2. Reporting is better when newspapers don’t feel obliged to take a bland ‘he said-she said’ approach to objectivity. Objectivity is not antithetical to analysis and evaluating the credibility of sources.

1. All good journalism is investigative. William Randolph Hearst said that “news is what people don’t want you to know, everything else is advertising.” I think that the media is doing too much advertising; Just because the Prime Minister of Canada says it, for instance, doesn’t mean it’s news. Maybe we shouldn’t be covering all of their press conferences – especially when they have an undue degree of control over which reporters are allowed to ask questions. Or when they use matters such as this to distract from other stories. When the media goes along with this, they are de facto burying another story.

And one other thought about the media: on the lack of quality military coverage in Canada. America has milblogs. America has embedding with the troops. America has video of the troops going house-to-house. We don’t have that.

The Liberals have been conspicuously silent on copyright reform.  The above search of their web site turns up nothing, while the Conservative, NDP, and Green Party sites each include specific information about their party’s respective policy positions.

The Tories won the last election with their regular policy announcements. The Liberal strategy of not releasing a policy document for the better part of the campaign was roundly criticizied as having contributed to their defeat. So why are the Liberals repeating that failing strategy by not weighing in on key public policy debates, such as this one over copyright reform?

Perhaps the explanation is that the internal disarray of the Liberals has paralyzed their party. Perhaps the explanation is that, as the blog Digital Copyright documents, the Liberals are really wholeheartedly behind the Conservative bill. Whatever the explanation, the lack of (an official) opposition is hurting Canada.

When he gave the only good Convocation Speech I’ve ever listened to, William Hutt told the Spring 2006 graduates of Queen’s University:

“Until I was about 20, my life had no centre; it had no touchstone against which to evaluate experience. I was riding the waves, going where the wind blew me and the tide took me; I was a tourist in my own life. It was not until I left home and spent two years in uniform serving – and hating – the army that a couple of things began to penetrate the mud of battlefield surrounding me and the fog of denial and hostility shrouding me. First was the realization that the war was not going to end any time soon and consequently I had better find a way to tolerate army life (perhaps to even learn from it), or else if the enemy did not kill me, boredom and lack of involvement certainly would. I then began to recognize the need to put verbs into my life – to search, to find, to explore rather than wallow in apathy, torpor and hostile indifference. At war’s end, as I waited months to board a ship bound for home, I realized that the top priority for my immediate future was to search for, make contact with, and inhabit my own life.”

It was in the context of just this search that William Hutt noted the American writer Norman Mailer’s sad observation that “there is a law of life – so cruel and so just – that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” Both William Hutt and Norman Mailer were men who refused to remain the same, who wanted to grow. To flourish. To turn their lives into quests. For Hutt, “it was a quest for answers, for peace that comes with understanding, for intellectual adventures and broader horizons, for the ability to change and the talent to use one experience as the springboard onto the next.” He says – with all the bravado and theatricality that made his performances of Shakespeare so glorious and accessible – that “more than anything, I wanted to gravitate towards those areas of life where thought had energy.”

For Mailer, his reticence to ‘remain the same’ took a more frenzied, harried form, evocative of Jack Kerouac’s immortal run-on-sentences in On the Road: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to talk, mad to live, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

His ‘mad desire’ brought him six wives. Nine children. The oft-theatrical spectacles which preceded (and precipitated) his divorces, such as when he prematurely ended a dinner party by stabbing his second wife with a penknife. His furious avant-garde films, such as Maidstone, whose climactic brawl between him and a fellow actor, to quote the wry observation of one Wikipedia editor, ‘may or may not have been planned.’ And today it’s brought him a raft of obituaries peppered with epithets like ‘pugnacious’ and ‘pugilistic’. He grew – but certainly in a different sense than the one Hutt means when he says that he “searched for escape in the parklands of the mind and for inspiration and guidance in the meditations of great thinkers.”

Norman Mailer died last night. William Hutt died last summer. There were similarities betwixt them: they were both paragons of the arts establishment: Mailer’s debut novel is listed by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels in English language, to say nothing of his repeated Pulitzer Prizes. Hutt was widely considered to be the world’s greatest Shakespearean actor and was inducted into the Order of Canada on account of it. They were both outsiders, as a Jew and a homosexual, respectively. They both subscribed to a philosophy of life which mandates personal growth, even if they manifested it in markedly different ways. Hutt was oft known to say “I entertain a certain reluctance to speak – unless I feel it improves on silence.” These are two people who have both, in their own ways, improved on silence. And for that I am thankful.

William Hutt’s Convocation Address is available on the iTunes Music Store (Free; 17 minutes)

I long thought that Mr. Floatie (pictured, right) was an amusing Victoria phenomenon. But after attending a forum on the state of Ottawa’s Water, I’ve started to think that it may be time for Ottawans to consider such stunts to attract attention to our sewage disposal debacle. The forum was hosted by Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and Ottawa-Centre Liberal Candidate Penny Collenette. It included speakers from Pollution Probe, the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, and the Ottawa Riverkeeper. The Riverkeeper’s presentation highlighted the fact that, as the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper puts it:

Ottawa city staff have admitted that only 75 per cent of sewage and storm water from a large section of downtown makes it to the municipality’s treatment centre. The remainder—about 400,000 cubic metres a year—is dumped untreated into the Ottawa River in contravention of provincial environment laws at five overflow sites in the downtown. (story via LexisNexis)

Counsellors have recognized the problem, but have so far balked at solving it, instead opting for (cheaper) stop-gap measures that leave Ottawa dumping sewage now and into the future, as with the effluent visible towards the bottom of this photograph:

This post is my contribution to the blog action day, an initiative to have bloggers from around the world post about the same subject on the same day. This year’s subject is ‘the environment’. Read entries from the 20,603 other blogs that participated:

There’s a reason why people aren’t doing it now.
When rhetoric ignores people’s expressed preferences,
it fails to consider real-life tradeoffs that people must make.

I’m going to vote in the Ontario election in exactly two weeks. I’ve never voted in a provincial election before. My vote’s up for grabs. So, today I checked out the party stances via their web sites. I was disappointed with what I saw from the Ontario NDP.

I’d like to cheekily submit that the Ontario NDP campaign strategy seems to be an effort to emulate Paul Martin’s 2006 electoral strategy, including some of his signature campaign tactics:

• Being the last to release your campaign policy document because the campaign doesn’t really being until the last two weeks of the campaign, anyways.
• Giving a series of ‘mad-as-hell I’m-going-on-the-attack’ speeches
• Making key policy announcements that will have no effect (remember Martin’s handgun ‘ban’?)
• And on key issues in the campaign (accountability, for Martin) stand back and let your opponents do the debating

Now let’s look at some of the similarities to the Ontario NDP campaign:

No Policy Until the Very Last Minute
The campaigning starts Monday. The Ontario Liberals have released a 42-page policy document alongside a comprehensive costing document establishing what they will do when elected and how much it will cost.

The Ontario PC Party has a 61-page policy document, replete with citations and charts about everything from Ontario GDP growth to electronic medical records implementation rates.

The Green Party of Ontario has an entire policy platform section of their web site with well-designed policy documents on the likes of education (9 pages) and environmental policy (14 pages).

The Ontario NDP has chosen not to release a platform document. And not to release a costing structure. I emailed the NDP about this and they merely pointed me to their press releases and noted that even though they have yet to announce all of their major commitments, I could expect “more to be unveiled in the coming week.”

Mad-As-Hell
Instead of focusing on policy, the NDP is focusing on just how angry they are at Dalton McGuinty. It’s dominated the NDP campaign.

• The top result from a Google News search for ‘NDP’ emphasizes their attacks on the Liberals
• The top result from a search for ‘Ontario Liberal’ emphasizes their policy commitments instead

Similarly, the NDP tv ads are all attack ads with no talk about NDP policy proposals:
Contradictory and Ineffectual Policy Announcements
Now, the NDP does have a number of policy proposals. One of their top-three issues, listed on the front of their web page, is a promise to address global warming. The Ontario NDP commits to dramatic greenhouse gas reductions so that Ontario will meet Kyoto targets within four years. What is remarkable is how this squares with two other major planks of Ontario NDP policy:

• A commitment to lower gas prices for motorists (through regulated price caps!)
• A commitment to ensure that Ontario manufacturers don’t go out of business, environmental impacts notwithstanding

I’ll leave you consider how that all adds up.

Nowhere on the issues
In what is undoubtedly one of the key issues of this election, religious school funding, the NDP is being left out of the debate. They do not mention the issue on their web site. News pieces, such as this one from the CBC, present the issue as one of the Tory ‘fund everything’ proposal vs. the Liberal ’status quo’ proposal vs. the Green ‘only public’ proposal, without so much as mentioning the NDP. The fact is that on a major issue of the 2007 campaign, the NDP has not effectively staked out a position in the public debate.

All told
Now, despite adopting this campaigning strategy, the NDP is going to increase their seat count. They’re going to call this election a success. But when your party hits rock bottom, it’s easy to go up. This is the fourth time that Howard Hampton has lead the NDP into a provincial election. During each successive election, the NDP has lost seats. During the last election they even lost official party status in the legislature.

I want to submit that the NDP will not return to government with an attack-focused campaign (even if they avoid references to ailurophilic gastronomes :). To reference the Martin campaign one more time:

The NDP does not have a policy document.
A policy document. The NDP.
I did not make this up.

Choose your Ontario.