This past weekend, I had the opportunity to spend time with a roomful of people doing some pretty inspiring work (one of the best perks of my job!). One of those people was Richard Conlin, Council President for the City of Seattle.

For several years now, Richard has worked to help make Seattle a more livable city. This past Monday, Seattle become one of the few places in the States where you can:

• Grow food on your residential and sell it there too (think curb-side fruit stands in every community).
• Put a small, food-producing, greenhouse on your roof
• And — garnering a surprising amount of attention, and praise — the ability to raise up to eight chickens in your backyard.

This is only the latest development in what is an impressive record of achievements toward making Seattle one of the most green, low-waste, and energy-efficient cities in the US.

Richard — who biked from his home in Seattle to the gathering on Bainbridge Island — brims with enthusiasm when talking about urban farming, community gardening, and the potential for Seattle to become a zero-waste city.

Canada needs to find a way to import some of this vision and execution to our city councils. Toronto, I’m lookin’ at you.

This just came across my desk from the fine folks at The Tyee:

For those of you based in Vancouver, please pass this on to anyone you think might be interested. Or perhaps you’re in need of cheap and cheerful space yourself?

The Tyee has two workstations available in an overflow area of our newish office in Chinatown (211 East Georgia, right at the corner of Main).

For a mere $250/month + HST, you get:

• Desk, chair, bookshelf and lovely Ikea lamp (!)
• LAN and wireless connections

A friend wrote to me this week asking for a recommendation on “podcast platform software, he continues “I’m referring to software that will enable us to upload video and audio (a la Youtube) for others to view.”

Given that he already has a Web site, my sense is that he is looking for something quite separate and preferably hosted — not a new Drupal/Workpress/Etc. site that needs to be built from scratch, I would guess — that would make it possible to loosely integrate a podcast section to the existing site.

I had a couple of suggestions from experience: for basic audio podcasts, I’ve used BlogTalkRadio and Hipcast. I used Hipcast for a political campaign and it was easy to integrate into the campaign Web site, and — more importantly — it made it easy for the candidate to call in from anywhere to record a podcast. I see that Hipcast also handles video podcasts now, but haven’t had an opportunity to try it out.

I also wondered if something along the lines of a simple, hosted, blogging platform like Posterous might be an easy way to upload audio & video and provide an RSS feed for it. From experience, I know that services like Posterous handle audio and video quite nicely.

Lastly, the fine folks over at rabble.ca pointed me to Libsyn some years ago — I recall reading that it had some nice Web site integration features too.

All that to say: What are your recommendations? What are you using to built a audio & video podcast feed these days? Any and all link and experiences appreciated.

For the last couple years I’ve struggled to find the perfect backup solution. The perfect backup solution I was after had to meet certain criteria:

• It had to be continuous and require almost no thought;
• It had to be both onsite (for fast access) and offsite (in case of theft);
• It had to to be encrypted so that my client’s data was protected.

Recently, it all came into focus… so I thought I’d share my “ultimate data backup triple-play for under $500” in case you’re in a similar situation.

The first thing I did was ditch my Buffalo Linkstation Mini 1TB Network Attached Storage (NAS) device (great conceptually, terrible in practice) and bought a Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB drive with firewire 800 and USB 2.0 interfaces. Unlike the NAS device, the firewire 800 connection means that my local, onsite backups are blazingly fast and the device only cost $210 CAD at Canada Computers.

Next I signed-up for Backblaze — an online (thus offsite) backup service — after reading this (very convincing) article about their hardware and HTTP-based backup software. The Backblaze service costs $50/year for one computer with unlimited data (wich is the key, as I have a lot of data to backup).

Finally, I found a way to make the process of backing up to my 160GB “classic” iPod painless and functional by ditching my hand-crafted rsync scripts and replacing them with the easy-as-pie iPodBackup software. The current cost for a 160GB iPod is roughly $259.00 and you can probably find one a lot cheaper on eBay or Craigslist.

Those pieces in place, here’s how it all works:

• I have a full backup of my computer on the 2TB hard drive that runs continuously via Apple’s Time Machine software (not as terrible a piece of software as I thought it would be, to be honest). The hard drive mentioned above is one of the few at that price that comes with built-in hardware-based encryption — so the drive is locked and encrypted when I dismount it.
• A continuous encrypted backup of my essential client files (~40GB) happens via Backblaze so that I never need to think about it and can access the data in a pinch from the road. Backblaze lets you provide your own private encryption key, so that data is also encrypted both on-route to Backblaze and at their facility.
• Finally, I perform a semi-regular encrypted backup of my essential client files (~40GB) on to my iPod, which I bring along with me on trips so that I have a copy of all my client data in my pocket. The iPodBackup software handles the creation of an encrypted “sparse image” before it moves the backup to the iPod, so I never have to worry that much about losing the iPod or having it stolen, as the data is encrypted.

All this for under $500. That’s a low price to pay for complete piece of mind. :)

And, because I saw a tweet from my friend Rolf about it this morning, I should mention quickly what I do on the server that hosts my e-mail and Web sites. Basically, after much futzing around, I ended up with a simple solution using rsync and expect (to handle authentication prompts) that backs-up all of my Web site data, e-mail, and anything else lying around my account. This is all backed up to the free 100GB Strongspace account that I received as part of my lifetime hosting account with Textdrive (now Joyent). That backup runs every day by itself — never have to think about it! — and makes those files available via sFTP and a nifty Web interface.

Note to those of you that use a Linux desktop operating system: obviously, a lot of the above is Mac-centric. If you have some suggestions on how to achieve roughly the same set-up on open hardware and free software, it would be great if you could pop it into the comments. :-)

Over the years, I've subscribed to hundreds of e-mail lists. Like many of my colleagues in the online campaigning world, I subscribe to get a feel for how different organizations handle their online communication strategy. During the US Presidential election in 2008, I was subscribed to more than ever -- and I enjoyed every missive! -- however, when the election was over I unsubscribed, no longer wanting to hear from McCain, Ron Paul, and so on.

A year and eight months passed ... and then, today, I received the e-mail below.

I'm a big fan of e-mail and I work with many organizations to help grow their lists by reducing list attrition (unsubscribes) -- so my first reaction was "this is pretty smart." However, as I had a chance to read further and realize that I'd simply been re-subscribed to the list without permission, I was less enthusiastic. Now, frankly, I'm not the kind to get my knickers in a knot about this kind of thing (as it is easy enough to re-unsubscribe), but I bet that many others would. What do you think? Genius or Spam?

(Click for larger version.)

Good news for online publishers today: The company Endevver has announced the availability of a new plugin for the Movable Type content management system to enable subscription-focused e-commerce functionality. In their announcement, they describe the plugin as a general-use e-commerce platform, but what is really interesting are the features that speak to subscriptions, specifically:

• Creating subscriptions and accepting recurring payments
• Associating purchases and subscriptions to Web site users (subscriber-only content)
• Support for subscription-focused needs like trial periods, billing frequencies, and subscription fees

In their own words:

We have worked and built subscription based products before so we know just how confusing managing an e-commerce site can be. That is why we have worked so diligently to produce as an intuitive interface as possible. Especially for subscriptions, whose policies around trial periods, billing frequencies, and subscription fees can be very confusing. Using the Store Front plugin administrators can see a human readable description of the subscription model they want to create

The plugin currently supports Paypal, but as Endevver points out:

The Store Front plugin is more than “just a plugin” though - it is a framework that is easily extensible by developers, allowing developers to easily develop drivers for additional payment gateways, as well as giving them the ability to integrate the Store Front plugin into existing systems like Salesforce.com, or another internal billing or CRM solution.

At a time when Movable Type’s own developers at Six Apart seem to be distracted by other projects and priorities, it’s great to see that other development teams are picking up the slack and continuing to push forward what has historically been a great product. That’s open-source software development at work.

Image via CrunchBase

This weekend, I decided I wanted to finally order a copy of Beyond The Echo Chamber. Unfortunately, the book's publisher doesn't offer direct shipping to Canada, so -- after chatting with one of the authors -- I was directed to Amazon. Don't get me wrong: I use Amazon quite a bit. However, when buying a book from a smaller or progressive press -- like The New Press -- I try to go direct, or get it from a smaller distributor. Don't ask me why, I just do. (Probably some incorrect assumption that more of the proceeds will get to the author or some-such lefty nonsense.)

As I finished my order, I remembered that I had purchased Amazon Prime long ago and that -- because of its US-only shipping policy -- I had never used it. Now, Amazon prime was about $75 USD and was supposed to offer very low, or free, shipping in exchange for that annual fee. However, I had missed the rather fine print at the time of purchasing Prime and had, subsequently, never used it. It had long expired, in fact.

Some time ago, I purchased Amazon Prime at the suggestion of the site. However, I was not able to use it as I do not reside in the US and rarely send things to people in the US. I don't feel that the US-only shipping condition of the Prime service is well presented. So, in the interest of future customers, you may want to make that a bit more clear. I'm not formally asking for a refund, but just wanted to make you aware of my experience.

It was probably a bit longer, but that's roughly what I said. The next day -- a Sunday, no less -- I had this response in my mailbox:

Hello,

I'm sorry for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

I've forwarded your feedback about the Amazon Prime membership program to the appropriate department. It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects of shopping at Amazon.com. I'll make sure the appropriate people in our company see your message. Strong customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the selection and service we provide, and we appreciate the time you took to write to us.

Thanks for your suggestion about making  Amazon Prime option eligibility criteria more clear to those who do not reside or often ship to US. 

Because you didn't purchase more using Amazon Prime option, I've made an exception to our standard policy. I've requested a refund of $79 to your Visa card. You'll see the refund in the next 2-3 business days.

Greetings from Amazon.com.

We're writing to let you know we processed your refund of $79.00 

Yes, it’s true: after a one-year adventure and exploration of living and working in South America, we are back in Canada (more specifically, Toronto). So, now that we’ve had a chance to settle in and surprise a few friends here and there, I thought I should probably post an “official” update.

Over lunch with Matt Thompson earlier this week, I was lamenting the U.S Court of Appeals had ruled that FCC "did not have the authority to order Comcast to stop slowing down BitTorrent traffic" and -- in effect -- doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality. This is an issue that Matt had worked on for years and one that is near-and-dear to his heart. 

Matt shared with me some of the battles that were fought while he was working on the Save The Internet campaign and -- interestingly -- how some of the organizations working in the "open Internet" space don't support the FCC, or -- more specifically -- the idea of any regulation of the Internet at all. Matt pointed out, correctly I think, that this lack of government regulation creates exactly the right kind of environment for the opposite of regulation -- Monopolization. And with monopolies -- like Bell and Rogers to date in Canada -- the average citizen gets an entirely different kind of regulation, and it's usually not the kind that favours Canadian culture, openness, or anything other than the interests of the monopoly. 

David Eaves had recently offered up thoughts for the Canadian Parliamentary committee on "the future of media in Canada" and that post echoed some of the sentiments that I've also heard from those that favour an open Internet, but seek less government regulation. In Canada's case, this is the CRTC, which is by no means a perfect organization. However, I fear the call to limit the CRTC's ability to regulate the Internet in Canada.

An article published yesterday on TechCrunch about the ruling that impacts the FCC has an insightful quote (the bold is mine):

“Yesterday’s decision may affect a significant number of important Plan recommendations.  Among them are recommendations aimed at accelerating broadband access and adoption in rural America; connecting low-income Americans, Native American communities, and Americans with disabilities; supporting robust use of broadband by small businesses to drive productivity, growth and ongoing innovation; lowering barriers that hinder broadband deployment; strengthening public safety communications; cybersecurity; consumer protection, including transparency and disclosure; and consumer privacy. The Commission must have a sound legal basis for implementing each of these recommendations. We are assessing the implications of yesterday’s decision for each one, to ensure that the Commission has adequate authority to execute the mission laid out in the Plan.”

Reading the implications of the U.S Court of Appeals ruling struck a cord with me; more so in light of a piece that I read in last week's Globe about "Canada's digital divide" that points out "As urban centres rush to build high-speed broadband networks to keep up with exploding demand, many rural regions are being left behind." 

Canada's competitive future and cultural future both require an open, fast, and relatively unobstructed Internet. Canadian citizens -- and, thus, Canadian democracy -- require the same. The CRTC and its attempts to enforce Canadian content rules on the Internet may be misguided -- I am not arguing with that -- but I caution Canadians to not throw out the good with the bad.

Given a choice of a bureaucracy that reports to the people, or a monopoly that reports to the shareholders: I'll go with a bureaucracy every time.

See also

• Megan Tady: The Courts Can't Take Away Our Internet (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ruling puts US net plans in flux (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Court says FCC can't impose network neutrality (sfgate.com)
• FCC can't enforce net neutrality: court (cbc.ca)

Web of Change alums Tim Walker & Michael Silberman have put together a manifesto entitled "Web thinking: The Choice Ahead for Movement-Leading Organizations," which presents what organizations need to be thinking about in 2010 and beyond to success online (and in general).

Our field is maturing rapidly. The next generation of movement leaders is overcoming its fetish with technology and expertise as secrets to online success. Indeed, now faced with existential challenges from a fast shifting landscape, the time has come for us all to rethink our most deeply held tenets in this struggle to remain relevant. Thankfully, a brave few are trying – and they're finding answers. Looking beyond traditional online strategy, they're fundamentally transforming how they and their organizations work – shifting their entire perspective towards what we call "Web Thinking" – to better reflect the reality of our time. And they're winning. They're charting a path forward for us all.

The teams at EchoDitto and Biro Creative have been tracking and studying this shift for more than six years through their work with a wide range of leading social change organizations. After a decade of obsessive technology consumption, the sector is ready for a new chapter. This manifesto reveals new tenets for success. It is a call to arms for our next generation of leaders.

They go on to outline 10 proclamations that organizations should be thinking about in relation to their structure, thinking, and strategy about change. There are some great ideas there.

In some ways, it doesn't go far enough. I'll be adding my 3 cents, why not add yours?