This just in from my friend Ish Theilheimer over at Straight Goods: The window is closing fast on your opportunity to secure a food safety commitment from the person who will be your MP. I' m writing on behalf of our partners with the Food Safety First campaign. With less than one week before election day, it' s urgent [...]

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I just noticed this: according to today' s Nanos poll, there' s a three-way statistical tie for second place in Quebec between the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives. (The Bloc is way out in front at 42%. The Greens get lovely parting gifts.) This is going to be one nail-biter of an election night. We' re already being [...]

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Jokes are supposed to be a public speaker' s best friend. They break the ice, put the audience at their ease, and make you look a little more warm and human. And so they do - when they work. When they don' t well, look at Sen. John McCain in last night' s presidential debate. Discussing health insurance, McCain joked about [...]

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This campaign may have been slow off the mark on the Web 2.0 front, but it' s picked up steam quickly - and user-generated media is one of the places Canadian social media is gaining traction. This is my favourite of the bunch (it speaks to my partisan roots), but there have been solid creative entries [...]

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There' s probably some deep-seated psychological reason for it ( Mommy and Daddy are fighting again! ), but I can' t stand watching televised election debates. I' m on edge the whole time, fidgeting, finding excuses to be elsewhere and just generally miserable and anxious. Weird, huh? Former political speechwriter, high school and university debater but I hate debates. Set aside whatever [...]

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I thought I' d published this a few weeks ago, but apparently not. My apologies to Tod Maffin (who made a few helpful calls - thanks, amigo!) and Liz Hamilton of Rogers - I really wanted to acknowledge your help immediately. Previously on RobCottingham.ca, I lost my iPhone: I called Rogers. The customer service people there told me I' d [...]

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You know, I had some idea this site could be a little, well, slow at times. I figured it was a combination of a shared hosting service and a few extraneous widgets in the sidebar. But with clients' projects needing attention, and the Social Signal site needing some love, well, it' s always the home front [...]

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That there is my first contribution to The Orange Room, the federal New Democratic Party' s remarkable new social media initiative. Go check it out. You' ll find user-contributed and user-rated media as well as a kind of crowd-sourced rapid response network and more. Nobody in Canadian politics has done anything quite like it. They' re inviting video, images and [...]

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Does this mean that my About page can say, When Doc Searls needs to benchmark search engines, he counts on Rob Cottingham ?

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I want to say more, but for now, thank you, Marion, for your inspiration, leadership and courage over so many years.

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My MacBook Pro is in the shop - something' s gone terribly wrong with the video (none on the laptop display, none on the external) - and I' m on a loaner computer, working from scratch. I have a hard drive with a few-days-old home folder on it, and whatever files and apps are out there in [...]

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Qik announces iPhone 3G support! Want to stream video from your iPhone? Now you can provided you re willing to do a little warranty-nullifying hackery. (tags: streaming video iphone qik mobile application jailbreak) Switzerland Network Testing Tool Electronic Frontier Foundation The EFF has a tool to let you know if your Internet provider is interfering with services like BitTorrent [...]

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Silverback — guerrilla usability testing Nifty testing tool that records user activity plus, through the webcam, the user. (tags: web usability testing tools ux video)

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Little Brother » Download for Free Cory Doctorow s latest is part thriller, part social commentary and part how-to manual for would-be geek rebels and defenders of civil liberties. Plus it s free for the downloading. (tags: scifi fiction free surveillance privacy book ebook cory_doctorow human_rights freedom)

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Women in Technology A series of articles by women about women in technology, hosted on the O Reilly web site and compiled by one of their associate editors, Tatiana Apandi. She explains how she came to choose the series iconic animal (most O Reilly books bear a black-and-white illustration of some species of animal): The animal that I ve chosen [...]

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Home - Save United - Remove Glenn Tilton United s pilots union comes out with the most personally-targeted blog I ve seen yet, aiming directly at United CEO Glenn Tilton. (tags: blog union labour united_airlines pilots) MoveOn.org Political Action: Take The Young Voter Pledge Specifically, promise that you won t get so trashed the day before the Nov. 4th election that you [...]

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Congratulations on that new iPhone you just got. Now, you' ll want a nice case to protect it and probably that cool Bluetooth headset they sell Oh. And a pair of handcuffs, to chain your iPhone to your person at all times. Because – as Rogers probably forgot to tell you when you plunked down your money – [...]

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Take Back Labor Day - Write about Unions Workers on Labor Day 2008 There s a U.S. campaign to try to reclaim the meaning of labour day as a celebration of working people and unions - and as part of it, they re holding a blogging carnival on Sept. 1. Count me in! (tags: blogging unions labor_day usa [...]

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A more complete blog post will follow about the incident and its aftermath but if you happen to have stumbled across an iPhone at the Twilight Drive-In after Get Smart (fun movie, somewhat true to the original, surprisingly fewer laughs than expected; all told, probably not worth the $299 cost of an iPhone), then I' d love [...]

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Big Contrarian: Tacky. An entertaining, compelling post arguing forcefully that writing blog posts as pure link-bait is crass and anti-social. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience. (tags: writing blogs blogging funny advice)

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