I'm posting this because I know I have readers who live in Montreal.
Fellow blogger Mark Carey needs help in retrieving misplaced passports. I
know I'd be really grateful to get help if I were in such a situation...
Are you from Montreal? I need your help!. I really need the help of someone who lives in Montreal. In preparation
for my upcoming honeymoon in Egypt, I mailed our passports and travel
visa applications to the General Consulate of Egypt in Montreal - or so
I thought. It turns out that the address on the Egyptian Embassy
website is wrong - and has been for some time. Canada Post was no help
- all they could tell was that they delivered the package to the wrong
address. They didn't even get a signature as I requested. The Consulate
in Montreal has had this problem before, but they don't have a phone
number for the person or business at the wrong address (they think it
might actually be a residence). The package was delivered October 1,
and it has not been returned.
I need someone in Montreal to help me find out what person or business
is at 3754 Côte-des-Neiges. A telephone number for that address would
be very helpful. Also, if anyone happens to live or work near this
address, it would be extremely nice if you could knock on the door and
ask about the package that was delivered on October 1st - addressed to
"The General Consulate of Egypt" from "Mark Carey". Please email me at
webdawn@markcarey.com if you can help. Thank you so much in advance.
Si tu ne parle pas anglais, je peut lire et communiquer en francais, mais pas tres bien. Merci si tu peut m'aider.... [Channel 'montreal_quebec_canada']
I went today and spoke to the guy who lives at that address on Cote-des-Neiges where the Egyptian consulate was. He knows about the address issue because he gets mail there all the time, but he always writes the consulate's real address on things and throws them back into the mailbox. He hasn't got Mark Carey's package. He's pretty tired of hearing about the consulate - although he was perfectly civil with me - so please don't send someone there to ask him again.
Puzzlepieces: Google Glossary, perhaps my favourite Google Lab tool, is now available on Google proper. Search for define [someword] to see a definition, or define:[someword] to see all definitions.
David Weinberger has been blogging PopTech. Here's a great quote from his record of Robert Wright's talk: "History advances because technology enables people to play [non-zero sum] games over greater distances."
Another quote from Wright's talk: "In a [zero-sum] game it
never makes sense to communicate honestly." I'll try to keep this in
mind.
Now, the sad thing is, many people play non-zero-sum games as if they
were zero-sum games, in the process making them far less enjoyable if
you ask me.
I
think
there is a comparison between some C-List bloggers and student radio
stations, or pirate radio stations. We have a limited audience, perhaps
even no audience. But we're broadcasting because we believe that our ideas
have some inherent value.
Which is more reminiscent of the attitude of 19th-century
pamphleteers than of that of a bunch of teens in the food
court.
There
is indeed a qualitative difference between blogging and conversing
among friends as we are used to doing it: the conversation is
persistent and strangers
may peek in,
sometimes in the middle of the conversation, sometimes months later,
following some obscure link or a lucky Google query. Linkable
conversations enable new interested parties to connect the way
ordinary conversation simply doesn't.
So how should we frame
the activity? By considering the audience, or the author? If we take
the intent of the author as the starting point, "broadcast" may be the
appropriate term - even given a nano-audience.
Many2Many: The Critics Are The First To Go. Brilliant. A manifestation of what many of us have been believing for a long time.
[...] the most important restaurant reviewer in the country was called to
revisit an opinion because his earlier work was so at odds with the
judgment of an anonymous and distributed group; he had to admit that
yes, on sober reflection “The Grocery deserves a nearly perfect score”;
and having made that admission, it is obvious to anyone who cares about
food that the NY Times is now an also-ran compared to Zagat’s in terms of tracking quality over time.
As the tools of collective intelligence improve and spread out,
individual critics on matters of popular appeal - food, movies, music,
websites, games, etc., will find it increasingly hard to hold a candle
to the aggregated opinion of mobs. (Another post on M2M illustrates how
collective intelligence impacts the ability to solve puzzles.)
It seems likely that the monopoly of expertise will progressively be
relegated to those topics that few people care about. As soon as
something gets big enough, opinion aggregators will be more reliable
than J. Random Expert. (With the exception of cases where you have
enough prior personal experience with the expert to know you agree with
him most of the time.)
Greg Gershman onfull-content RSS feeds
brings up an interesting point: having a full syndication feed might
decrease your HTML page views while increasing your readership. For an
ad-less blog this is great; however if you get paid by the page you
might lose out - unless you throw ads into your feed. But then you'll
lose subscribers. Sorry, my attention is too precious!
