So far I’ve only read Outliers, but the rest of his books are on my “want to read” list. I had a chance to speak at Massive last year, maybe I can twist Lindsay’s arm to to speak again. I would love to have a chance to speak with Malcolm.

I should probably get in line, eh?

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What Is Next For b5Media? Riddle me this…What is a media company with no sales? Answer…no much! Nothing has been confirmed yet, but my money is on b5Media being put on the selling block. I don’t think another blog network will purchase it as the original model of blog networks is all but dead, traditional newspapers are all struggling on both sides of the border, but I can’t think of who’d be interested in a network of blog based on the current market condition and online advertising sales suffering from the recession.

link: Chad Randall Exits b5Media, Will b5Media Keep The Doors With No Sales? | Profectio

Not a ringing endorsement of the business model, so I have to ponder what is the right way to earn money from content online. Creating great content (written, audio, video, imagery) take a lot of time, effort, skill, and creativity. If you want great content, it has to be paid for somehow. If the purely ad-supported model doesn’t seem to work, could we syndicate the content to other outlets?

Would someone pay for a certain number of posts per week to build up content for the site?

Frankly I’m not sure what content play might work, but I honestly think some form of paid syndication is going to play a role.

[As a note of disclosure, I worked at b5media, know all the founders (and count them as friends), and know Chad as well.]

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As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic has been acquired by Examiner.com. This is great news for the company, our readers and all of our contributors. Some of you may know Examiner.com but if you don’t already you’ll be seeing more of them soon. Like NowPublic, they are re-writing the rules about how news gets made. They’ve got thousands of Examiners in cities across the US writing and reporting on everything from nightlife, sports and business to technology news and education issues. This means that there will be some great opportunities for all NowPublicans to get news out to an even larger audience. Stay tuned for details on how to get involved.

link: NowPublic Acquired by Examiner.com | NowPublic News Coverage

This is a bittersweet piece of news. It’s fantastic for the folks at NowPublic. They’ve created something amazing, something tremendously powerful, something new, and something that is helping to reshape how we think about news. They must be proud beyond measure. Of course on the other side of the coin, NP was scooped up by an American company. I hope that given NP and Examiner.com are going to still run independently that NP maintains its base in Vancouver and (I think) a very international/Canadian feel to it.

Okay, that’s a minor point. This is fantastically great for NP and yet another example of how the Vancouver tech scene is not only one of Canada’s, but also North America’s, hottest and innovative places to be.

Congrats guys.

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Today we heard from the Privacy Commissioner again about Facebook, this time with good news–Facebook to make privacy changes and BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook changes privacy policy–news that should be welcomed not only by Canadians, but Facebook users world-wide.

The two biggest changes, and greatest victories for us as users, are that Facebook will make it very clear what the difference is between disabling your account and deleting your account (the latter ensuring that your information is deleted, the former it will stay around) and the people who make Facebook applications will have a much, much smaller amount of personal data they can get their hands on without your consent.

For the non-Facebook users–which I am often tempted to become–Facebook will limit the data needed and kept if you’re invited to look at an event or something (for example your email address).

The best part of this? These changes are world-wide changes. Granted it will take a year to make changes to the application issues (which the Privacy Commissioner is fine with), the rest will start coming into play very shortly.

Chalk one up for Canada. We might be polite, but we know when to make a stink.

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Oh, can’t make it in person? No problem, M2O has you covered because we’re livestreaming the whole thing via Adobe Connect (in partnership with BCIT):

You are invited to attend the Masters of Digital Media (MDM) Program Open House on March 19th hosted by the Centre for Digital Media (CDM) at the Great Northern Way Campus. This is the final Open House before the March 31st application deadline. It is an event not to be missed for students with a passion for digital media and considering graduate school.

Come mix and mingle with current faculty, students and soon-to-be graduates at the Open House. There will be samples of student work, facility tours and informaiton about the program, scholarships and program admission requirements.

Event Details:

Date: Thursday, March 19th

Time: 6:00 – 7:30pm Pacific Standard Time (sign-in begins @ 5:30pm)

Registration is required.

Can’t make it in person? Join us for this event Live Online!

[From Masters of Digital Media Program Open House | Masters of Digital Media Program at the Centre for Digital Media]

If you want to attend in person or virtually, you need to register for the event (there is still time) and if that isn’t cool enough Joanna Robinson, Research Assoc. Virtual Worlds, is going to stream it into Second Life as well (fitting as William Gibson’s birthday was Tuesday).

For the past two months M2O and BCIT have been doing virtual seminars to small businesses throughout the province using the same platform and technology. We’re making this huge province a little smaller using some great technology. Imagine you’re in Kelowna or Prince George and you’d like to listen to the best and the brightest in business, entrepreneurship, technology, or social media. Yes, you could come to Vancouver or Victoria for a conference or meeting or invite a speaker to you, but that isn’t very cost effective.

The solution we’ve found is pretty elegant. We patch our standard setup for taping Connected Life episodes and rig it to pass into a dedicated machine which pumps it into Adobe Connect. Because we’re using our regular recording set up, this isn’t webcam quality picture or sound, this is the real deal. Two cameras, live switching between close and wide, audio piped right into the stream from real mics.

This would be cool enough, but we push to the next level by also recording to DV tape so we can reproduce the talk in nearly any format we wish.

It’s a slick setup that we’ve now made mobile, so this is just the beginning.

Watch tonight and see what it’s like.

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The eVaro is a gas-electric hybrid that can hit 200 km/hr with over 135 mpg, and still be able to do 0-60 in 5 seconds. Yeah 5 seconds.

Right now the prototype only has one seat, but check it out, it’s street legal! It is registered and insured with ICBC!

We have two pieces of video for you about the car, plus a slide show of these amazingly cool cars:

Future Vehicle Technologies is a privately-held company currently seeking additional funding to bring this car to market in a couple years.

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