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McLuhan's son Eric Headlines at CROSSMEDIATO: Insights into the Changing Media Landscape

crossmediaTO

July 21st marks the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian media visionary.

Last night's CROSSMEDIATO event hosted by Gavin McGarry of JumpWire Media featured McLuhan's son, Eric as a speaker. CrossmediaTO is a monthly series that focuses on motion, mobile, marketing, publishing and gaming the third Wednesday of every month. The notion of cross-media will be further explored byInteractive Ontario's X-Summit October 24-26 at The Carlu in Toronto, which has recently posted an open call for speakers. 

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This Week's Top 5 Trending Topics on Twitter in Canada

1. Harry Potter. 

The eighth and final movie in this epic fantasy saga launched at midnight this morning. Twitter users in Canada—and everywhere else, really—have been going nuts talking about the end of this decade-long movie series (they're books, too, by the way). "Gryffindor," "Albus Severus Potter," and "Neville Longbottom" are just some of the HP-related TTs that have been swirling about the Twittersphere these past couple days.

2. Rupert Murdoch and co.

Talk about controversy. Rupert Murdoch gained massive Twitter fame (and not the good kind) this week after he axed major British newspaper News of the World in a bid to take over television channel British Sky Broadcasting, a deal that ended up flopping anyway. NotW editor Rebekah Brooks has now quit amid allegations that the paper was involved in big-time phone hacking scandals. This story is only just beginning.

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Twitterstorm: Real-time social network will sign up as many people today as it did in first 16 months

Twitter was by no means a lightning bolt out of the gate. The peculiar, 140-character-based "real-time information network" was a niche on a good day and a straight-up outcast on a bad one.

It took Twitter 16 months, or nearly 500 days, to reach its first 600,000 users. And now? It signed up 600,000 people yesterday alone.

Twitter, who is celebrating its fifth birthday today, also revealed that on July 15th, 2006—its launch day—224 tweets were sent. Today, that many tweets are occurring more often than every tenth of a second, for a total of nearly 300,000,000 per day.

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Canadian Twitter users are on the Internet twice as much as others: Study

Twitter's constant flow of real-time conversations and news has got people hooked: Twitter users in Canada average  over 33 hours a week online, while their non-Twitter counterparts clock in just 17 hours online weekly, according to a CBC/Radio-Canada and BBM Analytics joint study.

Time spent accessing the internet has tripled for even the casual users: in 1997, weekly online time was less than 5 hours, the study notes.

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Follow #AccelerateAB today

AccelerateAB logoAccelerateAB is happening all day today Wednesday, July 13th in Calgary; and if you haven't already signed up, unfortunately registration is closed. If you weren't lucky enough to score a ticket and want to follow today's events, set your Twitter feed to track #AccelerateAB.

With over 300 attendees in the afternoon, consisting of A100 members, C100 members, Enterpreneurs, Service industry, TEC Edmonton, Innovate Calgary, Startup Calgary, and Startup Edmonton, and many other groups, including sponsor Techvibes, I'm looking forward to a great networking and pan-Alberta tech community event.

The morning pre-conference roundtables include 25 companies handpicked by a selection committee comprised of VCs and also includes 25 A100 members and 10 C100 members. The companies included are:

  • Aquila Diagnostic Systems Inc., Edmonton
  • Beamdog, Edmonton
  • BlackSquare Inc., Calgary
  • Business Infusions Inc., Calgary
  • CAN Telematics Inc., Calgary
  • Carbon Engineering, Calgary
  • Cardinal Media Technologies, Calgary
  • Chaordix, Calgary
  • Cleankeys Inc., Edmonton
  • Empire Avenue, Edmonton
  • eThor Media Ltd., Calgary
  • GEOTrac International, Calgary
  • Gridly, Calgary
  • hookflash, Calgary
  • iConnectivity, Calgary
  • Innovative Trauma Care Inc., Edmonton
  • Intelliview Technologies Inc., Calgary
  • Mobovivo Inc., Calgary
  • Poynt Corporation, Calgary
  • Psyko Audio Labs, Calgary
  • Pureinbox Inc., Edmonton
  • Tagle Information Technology Inc., Calgary
  • Xtreme Technologies Corp., Calgary

Experience the Calgary Stampede online with JOI Media's social experiment, Stampede Photos

Calgary's JOI Media recently launched a website called Stampede Photos.

This social experiment collects photos with the #stampede hashtag from Twitter. Designed to showcase the power of the Twitter hashtag, and to compile Calgary Stampede photos in a unique way, Stampede Photos is a fun and free way to experience the Stampede online from the eyes of the public.

You can join the fun by tweeting anything with the #stampede hashtag that includes a photo. The Calgary Stampede ends on July 17th.

Google+ blitzes to 10 million users in just two weeks

Google+ is blazing up the charts, racking up 10 million users in just two weeks, despite being invite-only and despite launching with out a lot of marketing and hype-up beforehand.

Google's social network is growing at a truly staggering pace. The company has not gone public with any user base numbers, but Ancestry.com's Paul Allen devised a methodology to calculate an estimate. It involves using surname data from the U.S. Census Bureau to hazard an educated guess as to how many American users there are, and a ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users to generate numbers globally.

His result is an approximate 9.5 million users worldwide. And with more than 2 million having joined in the past day and a half, the 10 million mark is just around the bend—if not already here.

Google+ wouldn't have to keep up this pace very long to become a serious contender in the social networking space. And considering that, out of the gate, social network numbers are generally slow and tend to pick up momentum after a year or three (think Twitter and Facebook), this could be the beginning of a tremendous surge. In a year, Google+ could have over 250 million users based on its current pace, or much more if it gained momentum—which would mark for a growth rate simply out of this world.

There are now one million apps for Twitter. To celebrate, company introduces new developer site

Twitter blogged today that it has achieved a milestone: there are now one million apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

The real-time social information network, which is an app unto itself when on platforms like the iOS, has seen 750,000 developers craft a total of one million registered third-party apps, 150,000 more than a year prior. Analytics, curation, and publisher tools are surging future growth, currently pegged at 40 new apps being registered per second—again, all for Twitter.

The company has also launched a new developer site.

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How Tom Sawyer invented Web 2.0

The Advenures of Tom Sawyer is a novel by Mark Twain. Published on 1876, the tale is remains a popular classic to this day.

In the book, Tom Sawyer is a mischievous young boy. One day he is caught skipping school and fighting another boy. As punishment, Tom's Aunt Polly orders him to whitewash the picket fence that surrounds their property.

Tom doesn't want to do it, naturally. There are things he'd much rather do instead. When a fellow schoolboy taunts him, Tom gets an idea: he pretends to enjoy his chore. In fact, he pretends to enjoy it so much that his friends want in on the fun. Tom plays hard to get, insisting only he deserves to enjoy such a task as painting the fence. Finally, he relents—but only on the condition that his friends pay him for the honour of whitewashing.

The common extraction of meaning from this Mississippi River parable is that in life, there are no absolutes; Mark Twain's mordant point is that humans can be manipulated to do things that fall out of line with the curiously rare "common" sense we all talk about.

It can be argued that Tom Sawyer is a forefather of Web 2.0.

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