Mathew Ingram at Third Tuesday Ottawa

First to get some administrivia out of the way - yes, in words I think I can attribute to Douglas Adams, as his trilogy grew to four books and more - "there was a miscounting" and Third Tuesday was indeed on the 5th Monday.  But regardless... thanks to Joseph Thornley, CNW and everyone involved for bringing Mathew Ingram of the Globe to talk in Ottawa.

I think as part of his role of engaging the community Mathew has been giving this talk a lot, but it was still good - he covered a range of topics including the Public Policy Wiki and Twitter, with unexpected praise for CoverItLive (which I didn't know was Canadian) and TweetDeck as powerful tools.  I have to admit that while I had skimmed through the TweetDeck interface options, I hadn't tried them all - the Twitscoop tag cloud integration is a way to keep an eye on the realtime news topics streaming by - Mathew said he found out about the Mumbai attacks when he noticed Mumbai getting larger and larger in the word cloud and clicked through to see what was going on.  (See my posting on Twitter modes for a bit more about TweetDeck.)

There was time for a number of questions (it's always good to see a presentation that makes time for this) - I won't go over them all - you can see the--what are we supposed to call it--liveblogging? livetweeting? of the event under hashtag

#tto

He had a posting earlier this month The Guardian ups the ante on APIs and if you've been reading this blog, you know I'm all about the APIs, so I was glad to have an opportunity to ask him a question about it.  It would be great if the Globe could offer this kind of capability.  In my opinion the winners in the online space are going to be the ones who figure out how to be open, machine readable, and (somehow) monetized.  (Maybe we all buy tshirts that say "I love the Globe API", I don't know :)

UPDATE 2009-03-31: Brief summary with links to audio of presentation and Q&A now available.  Via Twitter/FF.  ENDUPDATE

SIDEBAR on the space and on technology: It was a good meeting space, although there's no free wifi.  I'm getting increasingly tempted to get a Rogers Rocket Stick 3G USB network stick, but I don't think I could justify the cost - I wish they had a pay-as-you-go version, I'd use it all the time.

Since my tiny netbook got attention again, I'll mention it's the Asus Eee PC 4G, it's a first-generation device and handy to throw in a backpack or shoulder bag, but it has a few issues: small screen, tiny keys (I'm lucky that my fingers are small), limited battery life (maybe 1.5 hours) and limited storage 4G "hard drive" - internal flash drive.  People asked if it was slow but it's actually not compute limited for basic web surfing tasks, even using WinXP - that's one of the lessons netbooks are teaching us - you can even play full motion video on it.  You can add an SD card in a built-in slot for more storage, it appears as a second drive.

I think you're probably better off with a second-generation device, say 9" to 10", with better keyboard, longer battery life, and 160GB internal HD, something like an Acer Aspire One.  There's a good comparison chart of netbooks in Wikipedia (although look at the raw weight numbers only, not the colours, since they've made an eccentric decision to colour the weight ranges differently depending whether it's measured in pounds of kilograms).  END SIDEBAR