Six months ago, I noticed a young woman sitting across from me on the subway sketching caricatures of people as they entered the train. I asked to see “me” (it was remarkably good for a 30-second sketch), and we’ve been good friends ever since.

If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s talking to strangers.

For that reason, I really enjoyed Kris Hughes post on the seven reasons you should talk to strangers.

While Hughes’ post does an excellent job of outlining the great things you can get from reaching out to people you don’t know, I thought I’d remind people that the best reasons for talking to strangers are what you can give instead:

1. Help. Too many times I have seen people with perplexed looks staring at maps, or frazzled looks peeking under tables. It isn’t easy to ask for help, but it is much easier to accept an offer of support. Next time you see a stranger lost in a new city or looking for their fallen keys, give them a hand.
2. Appreciation. There are many people we often take for granted: the traffic cop down the street, the barista at Starbucks, the cleaning lady at the office. Simply giving a few seconds of your day to let them know you’re thankful they’re around can make all the difference in the rest of their day.
3. Belonging. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a lot easier to feel isolated when you’re surrounded by people you don’t know than when you’re alone. Making that effort to say hello to the new kind in school or that guys at the party nobody really knows does a lot to lift that feeling of isolation and gives people a sense of place.

In the end, we all need a periodic reminder that people care, that there is goodness in our world. Talking to strangers lets all of us give that feeling of hope to the people around us, and maybe even get some of that feeling reflected back.

Five days ago, Tumblr ran into some downtime because of problems with their web host, Rackspace. While the service disruptions were minimal and the problems were completely out of his control, Tumblr creator David Karp was extremely apologetic about the slowness and outages.

As part of his apology on the Davidville blog, Karp offered compensation to Tumblr users:

To hopefully redeem some of your faith, we will be raising the Audio Upload limit to 10 megabytes (from 5), in addition to the already scheduled feature update due in a few days.

This is an amazing move by David and his team at Tumblr, particularly because Tumblr is a free service. While I agree that users should expect reasonable uptime from a web service, they should definitely not feel a sense of entitlement if they are let down by a service that isn’t charging them any money.

I will pay for Tumblr

What I’m trying to say, however, is that Tumblr should be charging me something to use their service to power Squandrous. I understand that David is determined to keep the Tumblr completely free, so in that light, I’m recommending he offer a paid version of the service to help offset some of the costs.

I would gladly pay a monthly or yearly fee for extra features like more storage space, easy incremental backups to my personal server (yeah, I’m worried about data loss everywhere I go), uptime guarantees, and search and archiving flexibility.

By giving the heavy Tumblr users the option to pay for some extra features that aren’t too resource-intensive, Davidville would be able to offset some of the costs from the free service, and also devote additional resources to making the basic service more robust. Sounds like a good idea to me, and I personally know quite a few people that would gladly be willing to throw a few bucks each month towards Tumblr.

I will pay for Twitter

First, my gripe: I’ve been using Twitter by SMS for months now, and there has never been any problems with the 200-300 SMS messages I was receiving every day. Three weeks ago, however, I received a message that I was now limited to 250 SMS messages a week, making Twitter almost completely unusable through my mobile phone.

My problems with downgrading a feature (without telling current users before instituting the change) aside, it seems as though the main reason for this new restriction is money:

Twitter doesn’t charge individuals for sending or receiving messages. In order to provide global messaging, Twitter negotiates with mobile operators and their representatives around the world for reasonable SMS fees. We do this so that folks can use Twitter in as many countries as possible. Until agreements are in place, however, we need to put in limits on the number of messages received per person.

The problem with that message is the first sentence: if Twitter doesn’t charge individuals for sending or receiving messages, maybe it should. I’d recommend keeping the 250 message limit for free users, and letting heavy SMS users pay a monthly fee for all the extra messages they will be sending and receiving over the month. Sounds simple to me.

I’d probably pay a bit extra for some uptime assurances as well — we all know Twitter has the reputation for being a bit finicky at times.

I will pay for what I use

The conclusion is simple: if I’m getting value out of a product or service, I’m more likely to support that same product or service financially. And I’m not the only one.

I admire companies that are determined to keep their services free, but in the end, you need to have some kind of revenue stream to ensure that the free service remains robust and fully-functioning. Flickr has proved that asking heavy users to subsidize the rest of the community — in return for added functionality and features — is a smart way to keep your finances in the black.

It’s about time that Tumblr and Twitter took that approach as well.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Library of Congress made a huge splash on the web when they announced that they had decided to collaborate with Flickr and share their photo collection on the web. With one of the largest publicly-held photo collections in the world, this is not only big news for The Library of Congress, but it is quite exciting for web users who now have easy access to a collection that tells a compelling story of the people who built the country to our south.

While their collection may not be as extensive as that of the LoC, the Toronto Archives hold photos from as far back as 1856. This extensive compendium on all things Toronto is partially-accessible through the web, but for the most part, it’s still hidden away from our city’s general public, many of whom have no clue that the Archives even exist.

Is it time for the Toronto Archives to collaborate with an organization like Flickr in order to share their collections with a larger audience?

The Library of Congress definitely sees the promise in the new partnership. Not only do they get to share their collection with a larger audience, but they get to tap into the power of that same audience to tag and categorize the collection at the same time:

If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

Not everyone is sure that the crowdsourcing of metadata is such a good idea. Mathew Ingram, a Toronto-based technology writer for The Globe and Mail, worries about the potential for incorrect captioning or even misuse of tags:

The problem with letting anyone tag a photo is that their ability to do so properly is completely unknown. To take one example from the Flickr page, there’s a shot of a guy wearing old automobile goggles, behind the wheel of an old car — and people have tagged it “goggles,” “wheel” and “man.” So far, so good. However, the photo is identified as “Burman,” and someone has tagged it “burnam.” That’s not only unhelpful, it’s wrong.

These issues would obviously affect the Toronto Archives as well, should they decide to follow the LoC’s lead. But are those concerns enough to make the the city archives reconsider opening up their collection on the web?

If the Toronto Archives do decide to open up to a larger web audience, would it not be smarter to collaborate with the Wikimedia Commons instead of Flickr, a commercial photo service? Is there perhaps merit in doing both?

While there are a lot of questions that the City needs to ask itself before it embarks on any kind of project of this magnitude, it is almost impossible to argue that opening up the Toronto Archives to a larger audience is of benefit to both Torontonians and to the City itself.

Places like blogTO will keep doing what they can to dig through the archives and share them with Toronto residents, but it’s high time the City stepped up and did more with this remarkable resource.

(Originally posted to blogTO on January 21, 2008.)

Today, I have a lot to talk about.

Today, I could talk about the Oscar nominations. I could talk about how Madame Tutli-Putli is an absolute lock to win Best Animated Short. I could talk about how I’m glad the Academy agreed with me and nominated Cate Blanchett for both I’m Not There and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I could talk about how I’m stunned that both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Persepolis didn’t make cut for Best Foreign Language Film. I could talk about how I’m happy Juno is getting the respect it deserves. I could talk about how I’ve seen 53 of the 58 nominated films. I could talk about how Canada was well-represented in the nominations this year. I could talk about how I expected almost every single nomination and there were very few surprises.

Today, I could talk about the Razzie nominations. I could talk about how Norbit was an absolutely horrible movie. I could talk about how I’m glad I didn’t see I Know Who Killed Me. I could talk about how I’m shocked I know people that actually thought I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry was funny.

Instead, today I will talk about Heath Ledger. Most of you know by now that Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday afternoon. Most of you know that Heath Ledger’s performance in the upcoming The Dark Knight is already being rumored as being one of the best acting performances of 2008. Most of you will acknowledge, like I do, that Ledger was probably one of the most promising actors in the film industry.

What most of you don’t know is that one day, Heath Ledger made me smile. In 2006, Ledger was in Toronto for the North American premiere of the film Candy, and I ran into him in Yorkville. Always one to speak to strangers, I told him that I thought he was a brilliant actor and that I was a huge fan. He looked back at me and replied:

“Just doing my job. I’m sure someone out there is your fan too.”

At 28, Heath Ledger was much too young to die: he had enormous amounts of untapped potential. Most people will miss him because of his proven acting talent. I will miss him because he reminded me to take advantage of my own talent and potential.

So you know that post I wrote today where I said that Steve Jobs was wrong when he said that reading was dead? Well, as much as that post came from my heart, it wasn’t really the best post I have ever written.

What I really wish I had written, instead, was something akin to what Bronwyn Jones wrote on her site today. Here’s a great gem from her post:

If the Kindle fails, it won’t be because it’s ugly or because it uses only one font or because people don’t read anymore. It will fail because of a lack of imagination. The book was a fucking great idea. Seriously ace. Thank you, Aldus Manutius, you 15th-century Venetian crazy genius. The Kindle is not a unique idea, nor does it improve on Manutius’s really great idea.

Bronwyn is one of my heroes, and has been for a long time. Not only is she one of the best writers I have ever read — which she definitely is — but the way she crafts her thoughts is enlightening and inspirational.

There are very few people that inspire me like Bronwyn Jones, and I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to tell her that in person. (Aside from her amazing writing, she’s also a wonderful person.) If you don’t subscribe to her blog, you’re missing out on some of the greatest word-craft you’ll ever witness on the web.

Subscribe, enjoy, and thank me later.

The day before the Macworld keynote, I wrote a list of some of the products I would love to see from Apple. Among that list was my wish for a well-designed e-book reader.

I’ve had the chance to play with the Amazon Kindle, and while I do like many aspects of Amazon’s reading device, I still think that it would benefit from the Apple design touch.

Sadly, it looks like Steve Jobs has no intention, whatsoever, to capitalize on the reader market:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people donâ’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people donâ’t read anymore.”

As much as I consider Steve Jobs a visionary — and even somewhat of a demi-god — I think he’s really missing something here, and that he’s wrong about the popularity of reading in contemporary society. Or at least I hope he is.

Why reading is not dead

Traveling in Europe gives me faith in the power of books. In a commuter culture that is still heavily tied to rail travel rather than driving, I’m almost guaranteed to see at least 50% of travelers engaged in reading of some kind. Sure, iPods and other media players may be gaining ground, but reading is still a basic and easy form of entertainment for most commuters.

It is exactly this ease that has ensured that reading has not died with the rise in ubiquity of video and audio. After all, if you were to compare the number of blogs to the number of podcasts on the internet, you’ll see that the difference in number is quite striking. With the barrier for entry for blogging being so low, reading and writing is still the bedrock of the world wide web, despite the appeal and gloss of other kinds of media.

The web isn’t the only place where ease of entry is crucial to the survival of reading: it’s still rare to see your furniture bundled with an assembly video. Paper is cheap, easy to bundle, and — in places with good levels of literacy — still remains the best way to convey information to a large number of consumers.

Why reading should not die

I’m going to save you from the rhetoric that you usually get from book-enthusiasts: sure, reading is good for your intellectual growth and educational pursuits, but that’s not the reason it needs to be saved from extinction.

For me, however, the importance of reading lies not in its intellectual merits, but in the maintenance of diversity.

It’s clear that video and audio are compelling mediums for sharing information and ideas — after all, television is still one of the most dominant forms of media in the world. What makes media like the world wide web more absorbing than television, however, is the integration of various ways of delivering messages: podcasts, blogs, streaming video, and images all get their equal due on the web, and this makes the web more accessible to different types of people looking to consume different kinds of media.

This diversity is key outside the framework of the web as well: having a variance in the types of information and entertainment available to the general public makes that same information more easily accessible and more likely to be consumed by a larger audience. By eliminating reading and only relying on other forms of media such as video and audio, we not only eliminate a valid entry-point into information, but we eliminate a compelling form of reaction and response as well.

Text may seem like a less interesting format than video or even audio, but it is still integral — and will be for several years to come — to the effective dissemination of knowledge and entertainment.

Your parents may have told you reading was important because it exercised your imagination, but these days, text is important because it is another way for your imagination to react and respond to the stimuli it experiences.

All that to say: Will Pate, if you do decide to forgo the book deal and instead create a video, call me and let me write the accompanying text for your video. I’ll even do it for free.

Quiznos recently introduced their “Sammies” sandwiches in their stores here in Canada. Yesterday, a Quiznos worker — partly in jest — told me that it was the best “Sammy” she had ever had.

In my early years of high school, some of my good friends started affectionately calling me Sammy. So you can see why I was a bit disconcerted when Quiznos started telling me that their Sammies were the best. What about me?

Partly because i’m in a silly mood, and partly because this needs to be settled as soon as possible, I created the ultimate Sammy comparison, which you can see below. Which Sammy is truly best: Quiznos’ “Sammy” Sandwich or Sameer “Sammy” Vasta?

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Just let it be known that when it comes to competition, I bring it.

There are just over 12 hours to go until the 2008 Macworld Keynote by Steve Jobs. This year, I told myself that I wouldn’t get suckered in by all the Apple hype; I vowed to simply go about my business on January 15 and hold off on finding out what Steve Jobs announced until the weekend.

Yeah, that didn’t work so well.

I’ve spent the past hour browsing the Mac rumor sites trying to decipher what to expect tomorrow, and I’ve already bookmarked Engadget’s liveblog page so that I know what’s being announced as soon as it comes out of Jobs’ lips.

While it’s easy to get carried away with the rumors — particularly those of a super-sexy sub-notebook like the image below from Wired — it is important to stay grounded and realize that not everything Jobs announces tomorrow is going to be as revolutionary as last year’s iPhone. I think John Gruber has the best predictions for tomorrow’s keynote address, and they’re so well thought-out, I’d actually be surprised if he got any of his predictions wrong.

Instead of making predictions, however, I think I would be better suited to create my Macworld wishlist. After all, I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable as Gruber on all things Apple, but I sure do have some ideas on what I’d like to see announced tomorrow.

My Macworld Keynote Wishlist

Here are the three things that would benefit me most should they be announced tomorrow:

• iPhone in Canada: Okay, so I know Macworld isn’t the best forum to announce a country launch for an existing product, but I really hope Rogers capitalizes on all the hype and makes their iPhone announcement tomorrow or by the end of the week. It has been a year since the original announcement by Jobs and us Canadians are still iPhone-less.
• Beefier .Mac: Sure, it was just updated a little while ago, but Apple’s .Mac service is still subpar for the price you pay. I’d recommend that Apple and Google team up to make .Mac much more than just a bit of web-space and an email account: instead, .Mac would be the perfect point of contact for access to document collaboration, calendar syncing (natively between iCal and GCal?), RSS perusal, and financial tracking.
• An e-book reader: The few times I’ve had the chance to play with Amazon’s kindle, I’ve been impressed by most of the functionality, but the design is still clunky and not intuitive, particularly for someone like me that spends hours a week reading books. I’m confident Apple could easily fix the design. Perhaps an Amazon-Apple partnership? Naw, it’ll never happen.

Yeah, I know most of those are boring, and really don’t have the “shazzam!” effect that is needed at a Macworld keynote, but they’re definitely three announcements that would make me smile from ear to ear.

You hear that Stevie J? Not only will I buy those products, but I’ll smile real big too. Everyone loves a smile…

Late yesterday afternoon, I had the chance to leaf through a 1,000-page document released by the Toronto School Community Safety Panel that outlined several recommendations on how to make Toronto public schools safer environments for all students.

The report, prepared by a panel led by lawyer Julian Falconer, was commissioned by the Toronto District School Board after the shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute last year. The full findings can be obtained through the TDSB and the School Safety Panel, but many major media outlets in the city have already been analyzing the 120 recommendations in the massive report.

I didn’t have a chance to get through all of the recommendations during the hour or so during which I was flipping through the document, but there was one thing that came across very strongly in the few pages I was able to peruse: going to school is a very scary experience for many students in Toronto.

Growing up, school wasn’t a scary place for me. Sure, as the class bookworm I was an easy target for bullies, but there wasn’t a single day when I was fearing for my life by stepping inside my school. I grew up and went to school in Rexdale — which is one of the areas of Toronto that is often cited for violence and crime — but I never felt as though my learning environment was threatening to my personal safety.

Not so much these days. The report released yesterday stated that there was an abundance of guns in our city’s public schools, that sexual assault and harassment is widespread, and that some schools are breeding grounds for gang violence.

Color me naive, but apart from a few incidents that I knew of growing up, these kinds of concerns didn’t cross my mind when I was going to public school in Toronto.

While this news might be frightening for parents, I applaud the Toronto District School Board for opening up and acknowledging that there is a problem. A statement released yesterday by the Chair of the Board and the Director of Education promises more accountability:

As we have demonstrated throughout this precedent-setting process, we will continue to be completely accountable and open with the public and with our staff as we moAmonve forward. Regular updates on our website and through the media will ensure that our staff, students, parents, and communities remain confident in the work that we are doing every day to support every single one of our students.

Minister of Education Kathleen Wynne also released a statement yesterday referencing the report, assuring parents and Ontario public that she “strongly believes that our publicly funded schools offer Ontario students the best education possible. Ontario’s schools should be as inclusive, welcoming and safe as possible.”

Among the recommendations that I was able to find in the report are measures such as school uniforms, identity cards, and new disciplinary actions. Underneath it all, however, was still the feeling that students now feared going to school.

I may have dreaded going to school some days when i was growing up, but I never actually feared for my life. Is that just me, or have schools in Toronto really changed that much? Did you get this feeling when you were growing up?

(Originally posted to blogTO on January 11, 2008.

A week ago, Damon Cortesi (who happens to be one rockin’ guy) wrote a little Perl script to help Twitter users create some really pretty graphs that chart their Twitter usage over the past year. In the week or so that has followed, everyone has been posting their Twitter stats on their websites or on Flickr, allowing the Twitter community to see just how the service is being used by different people.

I posted my stats on Flickr and Squandrous about a week ago, but I thought I’d share them with you here and perhaps take a closer look at them while I’m at it.

Many kudos for Damon for helping me create these really pretty charts. Now let’s take a look at what it all means.

Tweets per month

I started using Twitter towards the end of January 2007. Of course, Twitter is a richer tool when you’re following more people and you connect with other Twitterers, so it makes sense that my usage has been increasing as the year has progressed. The few dips — mainly in July, September, and November — correspond to the times of the year where I was doing a lot of traveling and didn’t have much access to the web or my mobile.

Tweets per day

I’m not surprised at all that my frequency of Twitter use drops over the weekend. After all, I’m much more likely to be away from my computer and too busy to check my SMS messages on Friday nights and during the day on Saturday. Sunday, of course, is football day, and who uses the web when the NFL is on?

Tweets per hour

The scary thing that this chart proves is that I usually go to bed around or after 1am and I’m definitely awake before 6am. Maybe I need to work on that. Also, while I’ve noticed that Twitter usage for most people peaks at lunch time, mine actually drops. This might have something to do with the fact that lunch time is the only time during my work day when I consciously get away from my computer.

Top @s

I’m not quite sure what the difference is between the two @ graphs, especially since they both contain roughly the same people. They’re all wonderful people though, so if you’re on Twitter, make sure you’re following all of them.

What it all means

That’s a silly heading, because I don’t really know what it all means. What it does indicate, however, is that if you’re not on Twitter yet, you’re seriously missing out. And if you are on Twitter, add me. Because I’m a nice guy. Sometimes.