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DarrenBarefoot.com

The personal website of Darren Barefoot, a writer, marketer and raconteur from BC. Common topics include pop culture, politics, social media and travel.

Two New-to-Me Local SitesYesterday

I’ve been meaning to mention two local sites that I recently discovered:

• VancouverBC.com is a kind of portal site run by the guys who publish Vancouver View magazine (which I used to write for about four years ago). It’s focused, I gather, on locals–most of the other Vancouver portals seem to target tourists. There’s a schwack of blogs on the site, as well as a smorgasbord of event listings and other stuff you’d expect. The Vancouver hyper-local web is a competitive place (compared to sleepy, old-school Victoria), so it’ll be interesting to see how this one fairs.
• The Big Wild is an environmental outreach site run by Mountain Equipment Co-op (disclosure: for whom I’ve done a bit of consulting, though not on this site). It’s an advocacy site, with causes to support, green event listings, news and a way to turn your wilderness adventure into a pledge drive.

Sunset Over VictoriaYesterday

There was a beautiful sunset in Victoria (and apparently Vancouver) tonight. This photo doesn’t really do it justice (click for the super-sizing)

Here’s another similar photo I snapped (available in humungous size for your desktop).

A Weird Blog About Neve Campbell’s ChildhoodYesterday

I still have a Google Alerts feed set up for the all-too-common title of our ebook, “Getting to First Base”. As you might imagine, the results it generates are quite varied. I’ll be happy when we finally decide on a name for our forthcoming dead-tree edition, so that I can monitor the web for something a little more unique. Fingers crossed on that front.

Yesterday Google Alerts served up a link to this post on a blog entitled My Life. As Impacted by Neve Campbell. From an introductory entry:

Neve Campbell and I were students together for five years at Vista Heights Public School. We were enrolled in a French Immersion program in Mississauga Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. The following is the story of my life as it relates to her.

Weird, eh? Almost all of the entries were written in April, 2007, and they’re quite exhaustive. They include a couple of class photos and extensive tales of life near Neve. They’re quite detailed:

I

Why Are We Still Talking About Outbound Link Scarcity?Yesterday

Frank Rich has been a New York Times columnist for at least five years. Scott Rosenberg recently twittered about a post by Edward J. Delaney, in which Delaney interviews Rich about a practice that sets Rich apart from nearly all of the other Times columnists: he includes hyperlinks in his work.

Adding links, he says, “came about very informally…I’d say the biggest single breakthrough was to realize, as my assistant Benjamin Toff realized, we have the capability to insert links into the pieces easily, electronically…without going through the bureaucracy. If every link had to go through a bureaucratic procedure that was time-consuming on deadline, we couldn’t do it.

As Scott notes, it’s shocking that, 15 years into the web’s popular existence, we’re still talking about this issue. Rich says that “columnists at The Times are free agents”, and yet hardly any of them link to other stuff. Bizarre, eh?

There is hope, however. Mathew Ingram points out that the New York Times has started linking to third-party sources

I Don’t Know What To Think About Our GovernmentDecember 3

As you’ve probably heard, our federal government has gone a bit mad. If nothing else, this political crisis has taught an unsuspecting nation the meaning of the word prorogation.

I really don’t know what to think on this one.

There seems to be plenty of blame to spread around. Prime Minister Harper seemed pretty eager to goad the opposition with inaction on a stimulus package and the elimination of political subsidies (now off the table). The opposition seem all to keen to exploit this apparent misstep for all it’s worth. And poor, nerdy Elizabeth May is still trying to get a seat at the table.

What’s Best For Canadians?

It’s a simple question to ask, but I can’t answer it. Who are the better guides through murky economic waters? The Conservatives or a coalition? What kind of economic stimulus package (in your pants–sorry, just needed to get that out of the way) does the country need? And should we really bail out the auto industry? I’m philosophically opposed to such bailouts, but that’s a pretty unthinking response.

And then there are the ins and outs of parliamentary procedure. I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole mandate issue. Everybody in the House o