DemoCamp 7 takes place tonight from 7:00 - 9:00 at the Clocktower Brew Pub on Bank St. I’ll be there tonight checking out what looks to be some exciting demos from Ottawa’s tech community. The last DemoCamp I was at (6) was pretty good, so I’m looking forward to this one.

It’s been 3 months since the Mayor’s speech on enabling a “Business 2.0″approach to online serices the City provides (I hope he wasn’t thinking this Business 2.0 approach). Regardless, what the City needs to do is expose the underlying data in formats that are easy to build upon to enable this approach. Starting with these few things would go a long way into enabling “Ottawa’s Leading Technology Community” to build interesting mashups and tools that would benefit all citizens and kickstart some interesting mashups:

• RSS Feeds
  The News feed on the main page, as well as other sections should all be available in a subscribable syndication format. I don’t neccsarily want to check the city’s website everyday, but if its streamed in with my other feeds, I might see something I would not have otherwise noticed.
  
  
• iCal Syndication
  Provide iCal or XML data for any calendars or events such as waste disposal schedules, Council meeting schedules, Arts and recreational events (Swimming schedules, etc). People can then subscribe to these calendars directly from within their Calendar software, or to enable third parties to build interesting tools on top of them.
• Raw XML Data
  Provide raw XML data for things like Outdoor Skating rink locations, municipal offices, transit schedules, and recreational facilities. Geotag it. Allow people to consume the data and build things on top of this data. Scraping and cleansing the data from the website is painful and unnceesary when all the underlying data already exists.
• Podcasts
  Not everyone has time to watch City Council webcasts at their computer, but if you’re taking the bus in from Orléans, you might throw it on your iPod and watch on the way to work. Assuming the City (not Rogers) maintains the rights to these meetings, syndicate it to iTunes and let people watch it where and when they want.

As an example, and mostly because I wanted to find the closest outdoor skating rink to my house without going through a list of 230 locations and trying to figure out which ones sounded like they might be close - I scraped, geo-tagged, and mapped all of the City’s outdoor skating rink locations. I also tried to make the legend of what is on-site at each rink little easier to understand. At first glance, I had no clue what W, L,S,B was and thought I couldn’t be alone in this.  All told, it probably took me about an hour and a half to clean and geotag the data, and a couple more hours to drop it into Google Maps and determine the layout. The most paunful part though, was cleaning the data. If we had clean data like this from the City, they’d have a ton of great mashups.

Features I thought about adding might be the ability to upload photos of each rink, comments on the latest conditions,  etc. But for now, I wanted to get it out there so that other people don’t have to suffer through the pain of guessing which rink might be closest.

While the City seems to be moving in the right direction with their online consultation process, allowing people to comment directly on whitepapers is hardly revolutionary, it is a small step in the right direction.

I’m not sure how recently this happened (it wasn’t there yesterday), but the Google Reader team has pushed out a new favicon for Google Reader:

Old:    New:

I like the old one better, but I guess its not as close to the standard RSS icons.

On my way home today, I decided to stop in at the Chapters on Rideau St. and see if I could pick up a copy of Don Tapscott’s new book Wikinomics. A quick check on the Book Search terminal, and I discover there’s 19 copies in the store. “Great! I’m in luck.” Off I go to the Business / Business Technology section, and the book is no where to be found. A helpful Chapters employee asks if they can help and point me in the general direction and mention that it’s displayed quite openly - and therefore one would think it easy to find. I scan all of the Business sections I can think of, check the Technology section, and happen to glance at another Book Search terminal which someone has left on the Wikinomics search result as well. I have competition. As I walk past another Chapters employee, I overhear that another individual is also looking for the book, and that she is unable to help him find it. Another quick scan of the shelves, and I leave empty handed.

Would it be so difficult to tag each book with an RFID tag and then place a mesh network of RFID transmitters on each shelf so as to keep track of every book within the store passively. A Book Search would display exactly where each book was located within the store, and avoid the ridiculousness that was today’s bookstore experience. I’ve slowly stopped going into Chapters/Indigo as much as I used to as they either tend not to carry the book I’m looking for, or its simply too hard to find a title.

Update: As you may have noticed from the comments, both the Rideau Store Manager, and Heather Reisman have been in contact offering to right the situation.

I just noticed I was tagged 5 days ago by Zachary Houle for a game of blog tag that’s going around the blogosphere.. five things you probably don’t know about me:

1. I used to swim competitively and went to the OFSAA finals for men’s 800 free-style and I think I did about 200m in the men’s relay.
2. I co-wrote a 1-hour play back in high school entitled “Home Honey I’m Hi” created a site (RIP script-source.com) to host it and about 250 other independantly written/amateur scripts, screenplays, and it was subsequently performed by two high schools: one in Guam, the other I believe was in Saskatchewan. I’ve not been able to find a copy of the script since a hard drive crash in 2001. I know there were backup copies somewhere, it could be floating on the internet somewhere.
3. I played the clarinet in high school band. I couldn’t read sheet music fast enough, so I just played by ear/memory.
4. I love to cook….less a fan of the clean-up.
5. I took piano lessons until I was 9 or 10. I want to learn how to play again.

Owen, Chris Erwin, Spencer Callaghan, Dave Bobak, and foo, you’re up!