The folks over at Tazzu are organizing a three-hour seminar-style camp about all things blog-related tomorrow evening at the Network Hub! Even if WordPress isn't your platform of choice, you can still learn a great deal about blogging by attending. The list of speakers and their topics is quite diverse, so there will be something here for everyone. To find out more, visit their website or Facebook event page, and show up early tomorrow to make sure you get a spot! I'll be there, laptop battery charged and typing fingers ready to go.

Thanks to Peter for the heads up!
Photo by ryn wltr wgnr from the BR Flickr Pool.

I've setup a snazzy Video for BR. If it all goes well and, most importantly, if you are excited about this trial pilot feature, we'll try to whip it up for ya on a regular basis. It's a video my peers and I have been working on (each doing our bit to help out, while I get to talk about it) that, well, you will surely feast your hyper eyes on. It's a celebration of Vancouver's hippest little neighborhood called Mt. Pleasant (among other snazzy hoods like on the Drive, among others). This is a celebration of the shoppes and 'hoods (one video at a time) that are keeping Mt. Pleasant hip, independent, and original. Think of this as a neighbourhood feature and store-feature in video format, much like our store profiles but, well, in high definition, so to speak.

Our first feature is on the 'Temple of the Modern Girl,' one of Mt. Pleasant's most lovely boutiques, located at 2695 Main St., 604 630-8656. For other details, do continue on. Below is the Video and some background on our lovely producers...

Remember Terry Gilliam's Brazil? Remember Robert de Niro's character? In a dystopian society where nothing works because of a callous authoritarian government, he's a renegade heating engineer who's called a terrorist because he actually makes things work.

Nearly two months into the civic strike, community centres closed, garbage accumulating, and half the city torn up by construction, Vancouver could use a good visit from Archibald "Call me Harry" Tuttle. For instance, take the fabled promise of covering the city with free wireless Internet access through your laptop or PDA. On Valentine's Day, 2006, city councilors Peter Ladner and Heather Deal argued over who came up with the idea first, but everyone was in agreement that it was a good idea for the city. And what has happened since then?

While showing a German documentary film crew around our fair city, I explained to them that three of the four daily newspapers available were owned by the same company, not to mention some of the mini-tabs. They were astonished that this was permitted. This kind of media monopolization isn't allowed in other countries.

I was reminded of this when I tried to show a friend an article I had published in the Vancouver Courier a year or two ago. (Disclosure: I still freelance for them.) I visited the Vancouver Courier's site for the first time in a while and found it had been folded into the Canada.com megasite.

I first met Kris Krug when we both worked at a little web design start up where I was the sys admin and he was the marketing guy. Or something like that. These days it's still as hard to pin a label on Kris, but instead of my bad memory, it's because he's got his so many things going on. You could start with blogger, photographer, entrepreneur, author, networker, community agitator, man-about-town and you'd still only be halfway done. In a Vancouver game of 6 degrees of separation, it wouldn't take you long to run into Kris or something he's been involved in. So I sat down with him under the watchful eye of Gassy Jack and got caught up on online communities, fashion photography and what he thinks of our favorite city.

Okay, I've seen the looks, fine, I get it. Yes, I'm 36 and I still ride a skateboard to work. Listen, first of all, a bike won't fit in my locker. Secondly, my generation invented the damn things, which is the same reason I still unapologetically play video games, so there. I am, however, of an age where I am convinced that doing anything riskier than moving forward in pretty much a straight line will result in a busted sacrum, so I will grant you that my Colt Cannon short board may look a might poseurish. Maybe it's time to evolve after all.

On Shore Boards, an independent Vancouver-based company, is beginning to make a splash here with a revolutionary board technology. OSB's founder and CEO Brad Bradfield, an ex-pat surfer from South Africa, went ahead and redesigned the skateboard to achieve what he himself was looking for: a more surf-like feeling on concrete. By widening the rear wheel-base and exchanging the front trucks with what is essentially an in-line skate system, Brad's brain-child is built more for carving sea-walls than for grinding handrails.