December is around the corner and Christmas is in the air. To transition out of fall and into the Holiday spirit I’m participating a classic Vancouver event… The Chrismas Wish Breakfast at the Pan Pacific Hotel. Here’s some details about the breakfast and toy drive. Let me know if you’re gonna be there and we’ll plan to meetup!
The Pan Pacific Vancouver Christmas Wish Breakfast is back for another epic toy drive benefiting the Lower Mainland Christmas Bureau Tuesday, November 30, 2010. For the past 23 years, Vancouverites have began their holiday season with amazing generosity by bringing an unwrapped toy in exchange for a festive breakfast at the iconic downtown hotel between 6-9 a.m.
Some helpful hints from the kind folks at the Pan Pacific Vancouver:
• Vinci is offering one free hour of parking but if you can keep it green, the Canada Line, seabus and other
public transit options are a great idea!
• If you can’t make the breakfast you can still participate by watching Global’s live coverage, by listening to
JackFM and by tweeting with #PPVChristmas.
• Donations can be made online at www.lmcb.ca and a winner will be drawn for a four-night stay in
between Christmas and New Years at the Pan Pacific Vancouver.
Toys toys and more toys!
• Some areas of need are gifts for older kids to why not opt for a curling iron, board game or a cool
hoodie?
• Money donations go a long way toward costs such as delivery.
We’ll use this film as a foundation for our discussions on copyright, sharing, remix culture, and Creative Commons.
“Created over a period of six years, the documentary film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to the Open Source Cinema website, helping to create the “world’s first open source documentary” as Gaylor put it. The project’s working title was Basement Tapes,[3] (referring to the album of the same name) but it was renamed RiP!: A Remix Manifesto prior to theatrical release. Gaylor encourages more people to create their own remixes from this movie, using media available from the Open Source Cinema website, or other websites like YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, or MySpace. (via Wikipedia)
HOMEWORK:
– write a 2 paragraph review of RiP!: A Remix Manifesto. include links, images, videos, etc.
– prep 25 photos, illustrations, screenshots, or other images for uploading to Flickr next week. come to class ready to work with these files.
Today’s lecture is going to be given by Vancouver independent media leader Dave Olson of HootSuite. Here’s some background info on him as well as a couple cool interviews and a photo gallery of images you can use in your wrap-up posts.
Biography:
Dave Olson (@daveohoots) is the Community Marketing Director for social media dashboard maker HootSuite. He frequently presents at events including SXSW and Northern Voice, and appears in the media discussing technology, art, hockey and culture.
A graduate of Evergreen College (BA Inter-disciplinary Studies, 2004), Dave’s work is published in magazines and journals on topics ranging from Japanese agri-history to Telco de-regulation. A chronic documentarian from his earliest days, Dave currently creates static montage art, historical essays and renegade documentary podcasts. He enjoys listening to old vinyl albums on the back porch whilst gazing at North Vancouver’s mountains and trees.
Here’s a couple local Vancouver projects that inspire me. I’ve documented each of them as they’ve developed over the past several months and recently published these editorials.
The Waldorf Hotel
“The Waldorf is a creative hub in the heart of East Vancouver where contemporary art, music, food and culture convene under one roof. The programming for the space will be both artistically expansive and thematically inclusive. The complex consists of thirty rooms, two restaurants (directed by Ernesto Gomez and executive chef Ned Bell), a Tiki bar (restored and retrofitted with a vintage analogue audiophile sound system), a hair salon (run by Barbarella Hair), a gift shop, a nightclub and a live music venue. In the works are a multi-media theater space and recording studio (tied to a residency program for visiting musicians).The Waldorf joins a new wave of Vancouver businesses that are conversing with the city, setting a benchmark for culture and hospitality.”
The Beatty Street Mural
“The Beatty Street Mural Project aims to explore the effects of applying various social networking concepts to a monumental public art installation. Creating an interactive platform between the community, the artists, photographers, bloggers, etc”
The paragraph below is a first draft at some thoughts that I may include in the project. Looking for perspectives and feedback on photography in difficult situations such as the one in my neighborhood.
“What people need to understand about Downtown Eastside is that there is a long and sordid history to this part of Vancouver. When you make a photographic history of the place, you cannot lose sight of this fact, you need to be aware and you must be respectful of it. Jeff Wall’s oeuvre is preeminent in describing Downtown Eastside. His contributions have established themselves as key components of Vancouver’s contemporary, critical art lineage but by extension, have emphasised the dilapidation of the place.
There are only three ways of capturing the essential characteristics of Downtown Eastside on film. You can ask permission from residents explicitly, refrain from photographing them at all, or you can encourage their engagement implicitly, by way of the establishment of an affiliation that is both personable and considerate. Ultimately, the latter approach makes for a comfortable and mutually respectful atmosphere that will appropriately translate into photographs. When a resident refuses to be photographed however, the only ethical thing to do is to act in accordance with their wishes. People have stories to tell and they have histories that we want to see, but these will only be recounted when thoughtfulness and caring is shown them. When you want to document Downtown Eastside, all I say is – respect the area when you are there. Voyeuristic surveillance is not acceptable. I am not interested in that.â€
These are some notes and homework to serve as a guide for my New Media and Web Development at BCIT – Class 2.
Before we embark on this adventure I’d like to warn you about a couple of things.
First, the land of Twitter otherwise annoyingly referred to by TwitterHeads as the Twitterverse or Twittersphere… is awash with used car salesman, get rich quick dudes, snake oil peddlers, hacks, loudmouths & know-it-alls. Don’t let it turn you off. Don’t think that’s an ok way to act online. This however shouldn’t be any reason to not engage in the medium but instead probably some sort of proof point that there is in fact something new and special happening here.
Second, I want you to know that Twitter isn’t just people talking about mundane things. People all over the world are right this second sharing knowledge, ideas, stories, intimate details, connections, and emotions – to audiences known and unknown. Not just miscellania but real intimate discourse. By participating in some little corner of the Net, you are contributing to the organic growth of something much larger – a collective consciousness of info, art and emotion — and by doing this we are contributing to the overall health of the public domain and our culture.
@Replies
– a public message directed to an individual account. the equivalent of talking to someone and knowing others are listening.
Direct Messages (DM’s)
– a private message directed to an individual account. the equivalent of whispering in someone’s ear
ReTweets (RTs)
– Twitter’s equivalent of a forward, +1, or ‘ME TOO!’.
#Hashtags
– similar to a ‘tag’ generally but the ‘#” hash designation differentiates the tags from the content of the Tweet.
– good way to string a conversation together or add meta-data to the Tweet payload.
Twitter Clients:
– HootSuite
– TweetDeck
Twitter Search:
– realtime search on search.twitter.com vs. persistent searches in your Twitter client
Twitter Lists
– a great way to organize followers or Twitterers by subject, geography, or any other designation
Homework:
– read “The Twitter Guide Book” by @mashable
– signup for HootSuite or download TweetDeck
– create 3 persistent searches in your Twitter client
– subscribe to 2 #hasttags
– send out at least 1 standard message, 1 @ reply, 1 Direct Message & 1 ReTweet.
– start 1 Twitter list
– follow 20 interesting people
Bonus:
– signup for either TED x Vancouver or BarCamp Vancouver
– start a Twitter list for this class comprising the Twitter usernames of each student in the class.
– find 2 interesting tools of the vast expanse of Twitter tools available out there and share them with the class next week.
For 3 years I was the editor-in-chief of a great online magazine called *spark. It was a culture and technology monthly with a philosophical bent and great design and photography. Here are the archived issues.
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