Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Shel Holtz was in town yesterday to talk about blogging and social media and one of the things he had to say was “social media is changing everything” the other thing he had to say was something along the lines of “[don’t worry] new media never completely kills old media”. Of course to say that old media forms never get killed is a pretty strong statement. Historically, there must be tons of dead media. Help me make a list!

Dead Media!

• sheet music
• poetry
• the fax machine
• 8 tracks
• town criers
• overhead projectors
• letter writing
• floppy disks
• mixed tapes
• papyrus
• illustrated manuscripts
• dotmatrix printers
• VHS (and Beta)
• Oral history
• Latin
• Morse code (and telegrams)
• Typewriters
• Clay Tablets
• Disco Music
• Hieroglyphics
• The Oracle of Delphi
• Nailing people to crosses (ouch)
• The Spanish Inquisition
• Wood block prints
• Handbills
• Parchment
• MS DOS
• What else can you think of?

BONUS: For your enjoyment, 15 years of songs about Dead Radio:

• Metric, Dead Disco (2003)
• Smiths, Panic (1988)

“we ask for too much I guess, cause all we get is dead disco, dead funk, dead rock ‘n roll…”

“hang the dj, hang the blessed dj, for the music that they constantly play, says nothing to me about my life…”

.

# Michael Geist concludes 30 days of DRM

Geist (as usual) has done a fantastic job of surmising the issues at stake with regard to DRM (Digital rights Management) and the potential outcomes of copyright “reform” in discussion by our current government. Go read the piece, go write to your MP. In writing. On average, how many constituent letters is required for an MP to take an interest in an issue? Just two. I’ve blogged previously on copyright here.

# ICT Toronto: Ourselves Helping Local Policymakers Help Themselves at Drafing Better Policy to Help People like Ourselves

What the heck is going on with the once vaunted ICT Toronto Initiative? Barcamp’s own heroic policy wonk Mark Kuznicki is organizing a meet up of techsters and bloggers “to meet with
ICT Toronto the first or second week in October… The focus of the session would be for ICT to share their plans with the group and to solicit our input on what’s really necessary to support a vibrant leading tech industry cluster in Toronto.”. This conversation stemming from recent stations on Mark’s blog here and Joey’s blog here. Want to get involved? Contact Mark or add comments to any of these blogs, if you have ideas suggestions or would like to attend etc.

Bliss 2 stars
Apparently, in Chinese and “bliss” means something entirely different. beautifully shot film, of unhappy people in a grim, rainy, and bleak urban Chinese city I couldn’t identify. And they don’t get any happier. yikes.

El Cantante 2-3 stars (depending how much you like salsa)
Had to ditch The Fall (sigh, Dave says his best of the festival) but thanks to the good folks at Visa it was a pretty enjoyable all-around gala event pictures. The story of Hector Lavoe salsa musician and one of the biggest superstars of the 70s/80s Puerto Rican community in NewYork (who knew?). JLo is in it. Marc Antony is in it. Surprisingly(?), they’re both pretty good. in fact every scene in this movie is pretty good. The only trouble is there’s a lot of scenes in this movie each much the same (Hector belting out salsa, JLo acting sassy, Hector falling in to drugs, Hector belting out salsa, JLo being sassy, hector back to drugs…) for about two hours. good music, though a _lot_ of it.

D.O.A.P. (Death of a President) 3 stars
Fictional story about the assassination of an actual president. So the title kind of gives away what’s going to happen, but it’s good, there’s real tension to it, you don’t know how or when and you don’t want him to get shot but obviously you know it’s coming. A little over-the-top in places in its backhanded criticism of the current Bush regime (and bear in mind I’m no Bush apologist myself) but nonetheless worth seeing.