Martin Hofmann

a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me

Archives for March 2006

Being nice goes a long way

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Rick Segal wrote a post about his experience with Canadian immigration officers at the airport: “More often then not ‘Welcome back’ or ‘Welcome home’ is the norm when rolling into Canada.”

It reminded me that last week was my sixth anniversary as a landed immigrant and permanent resident in Canada. When I arrived at Pearson Airport in March 2000 with my immigration papers in my hand and a lot of nervousness in my eyes, the customs officer grabbed the papers and shook my hands while shouting “welcome to Canada, glad to have you here!” Could anyone ask for a better beginning to a new life in a new country?

Rick Segal says just being nice is a good start. I agree. And it can help others get off to a great start. 

Want to build an online community? Start the printing press

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OpinioI like what my German hometown paper NGZ is doing. They have embraced blogging and are taking it a step further in a  back-to-the-future kind of way. NGZ and sister publication Rheinische Post launched a “reader-to-reader” portal called Opinio in early 2005. Readers can post their own articles about a broad range of topics. More than a year later, they have contributed 14,000 articles.

The kicker is that editors select the best articles and publish them once a week in the print edition of the newspapers and every two weeks in a dedicated magazine supplement. The prospect of having their own words and photos appear in print seems to appeal to many people, and is an additional incentive to join the Opinio online community.

Opinio was developed by Boogie Medien for Rheinische Post. If you know of other newspapers with similar ideas let me know. Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post all do something or other with blogs on their sites now, and all three employ journalists who have started personal weblogs related to their beat. But it would be interesting to see a Canadian newspaper launch a blog-to-print portal like Opinio.  

 

The Sleuth’s surprising online success: it’s no mystery

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Just reading through the March edition of The Merchant of Menace, the newsletter of Toronto mystery bookstore Sleuth of Baker Street. It includes an online success story of its own. The Sleuth started an online store a few months ago. According to the newsletter, the owners were surprised about the number of non-mysteries that people ordered through their online shop.

Being a Sleuth customer myself, I think there’s a simple reason. The Sleuth is a great specialized store with outstanding customer service, which includes staff with passion, real knowledge and insights about the authors and books they sell. Those qualities are hard to find in the age of mega bookstores and online-only retailers, and they deserve support. Buying non-mysteries through the Sleuth’s online store is easy and convenient, and an additional way for happy customers to support an independent book store.

The online shop is powered by Canadian software TBM BookManager, which – according to its website – helps more than 400 bookstores across Canada and internationally. The first version of the point-of-sale software came out in 1986, and twenty years later it has a database of more than four million titles and added functionality that lets independent book stores create their own online store.

It may not be the type of Internet business that gets Web 2.0 enthusiasts excited. But to me, this is what much of the power of the Internet is really about – making self-service easy and simple for the interests of individuals and niche markets.

There’s an interview with TBM BookManager founder and president Michael Neil in the March print edition of book trade magazine “Quill and Quire”. I’ll see if I can pick up a copy next time I am in The Sleuth.

Syndicate Canada 2006

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Clicking through some pages on ITWorldCanada.com, I came across the website for Syndicate Canada conference, a new event around blogging, RSS, podcasting and other things related to content syndication. It is scheduled for June 14 to 15 in Toronto. This is the Canadian version of Syndicate conference in New York, which is scheduled for May 16/17 and has a number of the usual high profile bloggers plus a whole bunch more. Sounds like a great conference. No details about program and speakers for Canada yet.

With regard to conference program and speakers, it is going to be interesting to see how they will be able to differentiate Syndicate Canada from the Toronto Blogging/Web 2.0 Conference that Michael McDerment, Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram and Rob Hyndman are planning for May 8/9. But it is nice to see so much activity around blogging in Toronto all of a sudden. 

I’m giving JAlbum a try

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For years I’ve been putting photos on my little personal homepage so my family and friends in Germany can see what we’re up to here in Toronto. I’ve tried Corel (Jasc) Photo Album, which wasn’t great, and Google’s Picasa, which was an okay if somewhat limited experience. And Flickr still doesn’t seem all that appealing to me, despite its great blog integration. But now I found JAlbum. It looks like a great free software tool that allows a lot of flexibility and is written for the exact purpose of creating photo albums on the web, so I will give it a try. It just seems to be in contrast to many of the other digital imaging tools which are treating web album creation as an afterthought. I’ve just started using JAlbum. Let’s see how it goes. 

Canada’s Top 300 Technology Companies according to Branham

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The Branham Group announced their annual listing of the top 300 Canadian technology companies. Not a lot of suprises in 2006 but it provides a good overview of the Canadian market. Categories include:

• Top 25 Multinationals
• Top 20 Movers and Shakers
• Top 25 Up and Comers
• Top 25 Canadian Software Companies
• Top 25 Canadian IT Professional Services Companies
• Top 10 Canadian IT Security Companies
• Top 10 Canadian xSPCompanies
• Top 10 Canadian Wireless Solution Providers
• Top 25 ICT Hardware and Infrastructure Companies