Prime Minister Stephen Harper is back from a winter-long vacation and ready to crush it! And, since lazy newspapers of every political stripe love nothing more than to freely pass off the thoughts of generally unidentifiable YouTube user names as authoritative vox populi, the Conservative Party of Canada will give them exactly what they want. This morning’s prime ministerial response to the Speech From the Throne streamed live at 10:45 via the new TalkCanada channel — a means of promoting that Harper is happy to take questions leading up to a YouTube interview next Tuesday night. The project is heartily endorsed by Google’s chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, who was previously an executive at Bell Canada. Generally, the idea is to get people to type questions that will be voted up or down by lurkers: 500 were submitted by 1:40 p.m. More ambitious is a solicitation of video questions, displayed in a separate category. A new partisan hero could be plucked from the webcam submissions, and perhaps Canada will find its own Joe the Plumber before this is through — even if the first few sincere entries bear more resemblance to the Star Wars Kid. But it’s also a place to accentuate dissent, which risks being flagged as inappropriate, so here’s some preservation of the earliest YouTube “interviewers” maximizing this unprecedented invitation to have their say. Continue Reading

Setting out to build the world’s third-biggest blog network sounds like a very Toronto thing to do, but b5media was left playing catch-up from the start — with a model that involved launching many dozens of websites covering niche topics, including celebrity gossip. Rick Segal, then a Toronto venture capitalist, outlined his motivation for helping back the company in October 2006: “It is not, in my view, about the act of blogging,” he wrote. “What is different today are the habits of a generation coming right up my proverbial tailpipe. They share a passion for information, the sharing of information, and most importantly the critical examination of information as a community.” Sounds great, where does a blogger sign up? There were plenty of takers of the offer to casually post blurbs on a blog that looked slick enough to pass for professional, in exchange for a hundred or two bucks a month, plus traffic bonuses — Jeremy Wright, then-CEO of the operation, boasted to The New York Times in June 2007 that the blogger behind Lohan Groupie was clearing six figures due to her duties beyond uploading last night’s paparazzi pics of Lindsay. But there were plenty of duds, too, resulting in cutbacks and the move to group the remaining sites into portal pages. Last spring, with the departure of executives and pay cuts across the board, Wright claimed b5 still had enough capital to survive “well into next year.” Then he was a goner, too, but the network remained — and now, all of a sudden, b5media is being portrayed as a player on the Manhattan media scene. Continue Reading

The notion that Roger Ebert has finally figured out how to monetize his writings on the internet by charging $5 a year to join The Ebert Club has only enhanced his hero status, after the Oprah appearance that affirmed he hopes to be tweeting for the long haul, despite the Esquire profile that implied he was running out of time. Moreover, the waves of Ebert affection have extended to writers revealing how encouraging he was of their journalism aspirations, whether a reply he wrote to an inquisitive letter from the teenage girl who grew up to be Slate film critic Dana Stevens, or personal encouragement of University of Illinois Will Leitch — who later wrote a webzine story ridiculing Ebert, and this week expressed over 2,500 words of regret. So, there’s another legacy being left here, with advice for anyone who’s managed to sustain a career in media: don’t be a paranoid jerk to those who express a genuine interest in doing the kind of things you do. Ebert’s encouragement can also be glimpsed in the list of just 53 people he follows on Twitter out of nearly 100,000 now following him: movie-obsessed Toronto bloggers Jenna Rocca, and Grace Wang. The latter’s site, Etheriel Musings, was highlighted by Ebert last September: “You sense no angst or hesitation in her prose,” he wrote. “It sparkles like conversation.” Subsequently, he posted a short story from Wang, and gave her a guest post to impart thoughts about The Hurt Locker. Rocca left a comment on the post about Ebert’s favourite blogs, encouraging him to check hers out, and he did. “I don’t think you understand how amazing you are. Or maybe you do and I’m just a silly fangirl,” she fawned on Ebert’s blog in January. His reply: “Anyone who can put together a blog like yours is far, far beyond silly fangirldom.”

Social Media Week, now being held in Toronto concurrent with five other cities, incorporated a Tuesday afternoon CaseCamp, a chance for corporate new media types to brag about their jobs. A video stream was promised from the back room of the Rivoli — but, unfortunately, that 1980s Queen Street West time warp extended to the technology. But there was no danger of the event not being tweeted, of course. The first thing learned was the value of making online video actually work: Alyson Walker of CTV promising 2,350 hours of event coverage of the 2010 Olympics online, anticipating a reach of 52 per cent of viewers, compared to 38 per cent two years ago — but, they’re using Silverlight to keep people on their own site instead of going the route of YouTube. Joshua Errett, online editor of NOW, then imparted his philosophy about using Twitter to engage rather than influence: “The biggest challenge we faced when joining Twitter was finding our voice,” he said of the alt-weekly, assuring attendees that they don’t have a boardroom to plan Twitter strategy a la The New York Times — but are planning a GPS-enabled restaurant guide. Judy Koke, deputy director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, shared its real marketing secret: “A great place to figure out if you want a second date with someone.” Idan Cohen, here from Israel to show off television juicer Boxee, demonstrated their idea of a successful app, the Suicide Girls. Speaking later this afternoon, Noel Biderman, president of adulterous dating service Ashley Madison. This morning, punters gathered at the musty headquarters of The Globe and Mail for a panel discussion called “Traditional Media Meets Social Media” — evidently summed up best by perennial panelist, Maclean’s national editor Andrew Coyne: “We were fat, lazy and complacent and now we’re getting our comeuppance.” And invitations to social media conferences!