Day: May 26, 2004

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My Canada

Anna-Maria is in Toronto all this week. I’m off to play Risk with some friends but before I go, here is a little message about Canada (from Joey DeVille’s Accordion Guy):

Joey, a Filipino-born Canadian, writes a spirited editorial in response to a jackass racist blogger at enterstageright.com who asserts that the Canadians who died in the Boer War, the two World Wars, and the Korean conflict certainly didn’t intend for Toronto to be annexed by the “Third World,” and says that the non-whites of Canada are less Canadian, with “no knowledge or affection for the old Canada, in either their hearts or minds.”

Hey “Enter Stage Right”, fuddle-duddle off eh!

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Return of the Bloggers

A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic’s query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers’ scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism.

Online Journal Review on how bloggers are influencing mainstream newspapers.

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Creative Commons New 2.0 Licenses

Last night they turned on version 2.0 of their main Creative Commons licenses. The new licenses clarify and refine the initial terms of the 1.0 licenses, and CC has posted good, clear commentary explaining the changes.

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Google’s Own Messenger

I know you’re thinking it. If you’re not well you can start now. When is Google going to come out with their own instant message program? They’re obviously working on it. Think about it — they started out with creating the world’s best search engine, then they bought out my favourite blogging service: Blogger, they own a pretty nifty networking service: Orkut and they’ve stated they want to infringe upon Microsoft’s turf. They clearly need to enter the messenger market in order to really pull the mass market of users from Hotmail to Gmail. I’m aware of Hello the IM that Blogger is pushing for the purpose of photoblogging, though I haven’t tried it. But I’m looking for something that can interact with my webmail – a true blue google product. It’s only a matter of time until we see “The Google Messenger”, and I, for one, cannot wait.

Update: Turns out Google doesn’t own Orkut, they are just affiliated. From Orkut’s help page:

Why is it called orkut?

Category: General
Updated: 2/9/2004
Answer
orkut.com is a new social networking service named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.) This was created as an independent project and is not part of the Google product portfolio.

Update August 2005: Google Talk has just been released.

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The War in Iraq – A Soldiers Viewpoint

I received a forwarded email this morning quoting a blog posting of a letter from a soldier in Iraq.

The gist of what this guy says is that while he is grateful for people “supporting the troops” he is disappointed that they don’t support the war.

My quick response to that is: the people don’t support the war because the reasons used to justify it were lies, it’s a waste of money and people, and it’s not going to make a long term difference.

Of course he supports the war, he’s a gun toting, warmongering soldier who loves kicking ass over there, and he just wishes the American people could understand how fun that is.