For the holidays, The Vancouver Province is rolling out a special insert called “The Holiday Survival Guide”. It’s my job to pick the Top 5 Gadget Gifts. It’s basically a dream come true. The only downside is that there are so many awesome gadgets, which five do I pick? I have scoured gadget web sites, magazines, and my own apartment to find the best gadget gifts to recommend and I’m just not feeling my current list.

This is where I need your help!

What are your favourite gadgets of 2008?

What do gadgets do you want? Anything from a camera to a games console to a gorilla pod. I don’t want all the gadgets I recommend to be really expensive so that no one can afford them. I’m sure we’d all love the new Canon 5D Mark II or a brand new MacBook Pro, but those just aren’t feasible holiday “gifts”… unless your Facebook profile states “in a relationship with Kanye West”.

Dead twitter bird by Pasquale.

Remember when Twitter was elitist and cool and way geeky? When tweets actually contained thoughts or links to sweet content? When the twitter was, like, our geeky secret club of social 2.0 misfits?

Twitter is about connecting, about sharing, about helping each other through our daily geeky struggles with toasted HDs, exploding MBPs, 404s and other jedi mind tricks.

That’s all gone now because therealbritney is on Twitter. Yeah, even Britney Spears can’t get her own name on twitter. Anyway, I won’t start that rant about how some jerk took @mostlylisa on Twitter!

Stop the madness and just say NO! No Britney we will not follow you, or @ you, or retweet any of your lame blogs or blog entries. I’m glad your management team has finally discovered the power of social media, but Twitter is our world and you and your nekkid videos can take a hike off my feed.

Now say after me:

I promise to not follow Britney Spears on Twitter

Good! Now I wanna see your solemn vow in my comments!

NB. I will, however, continue to listen to your music while cleaning and doing laundry and perhaps dancing in front of a mirror with a Swiffer Sweeper.

Published in The Province.

At some point during the last 10 years of this computer age, spelling and grammatical accuracy got tossed, phrases got shortened to two-finger tappables like “CU l8r”, and a whole new lexicon of ever-expanding nerd words like “w00t”, “l337″, “n00b” moved from underground Internet forums to mainstream media and your e-mail inbox.

More and more we see the Internet shaping the way we communicate with each other. The language of the Internet is fast-paced, constantly changing, and rich with cynicism and rebellion. After all, the age group developing and propagating this new iSpeak is Internet savvy teenagers belonging to Gen Z or the “Google Generation.” These kids grew up on the web, texting their friends in kindergarten, pirating mp3s for their iPods before puberty and coding complex websites during high-school geography class.

Gen Z is not afraid of breaking rules or experimenting with language. Just look at the plethora of fabulous spellings for the frequently used teen phrase “this sucks” in Internet slang, or LeetSpeak. There is “teh suxs” for everyday usage, “suxx0rz” for really bad suckage, or “suxxaga” when things just can’t suck any worse.

At first it may seem like there is no rhyme nor reason to these derivations, but like any linguistic code, it has a pattern. Once you know the pattern, it oesn’t-day, uck-say. What? No one remembers Pig Latin? Even if you are a complete n00b (”newbie”) on the Internet you will have run into your fair share of LOLs and emoticons, like this smiley, winking guy, ; ).

Whether you know the exact translation as “laugh out loud” or not, the meaning of LOL is universal. No matter where you are in the world, LOL means “I’m laughing”, while means “I’m sad.” This guy “:P” will get you out of a lot of trouble if you have the tendency to make snarky remarks that easily offend people — but I wouldn’t know anything about that.

The days of ruthlessly guarded spelling and grammar rules of our parents’ generation are slowly slipping away. With that being said, I am a bit of a stickler for grammar, and I’ll admit to a 50-per-cent increase in pulse rate when I see a beautifully crafted sentence like this one written on my Facebook wall: “i love your photo’s, their really good.” That was actually written by a high-school English teacher, so go figure. I’ve just had to let my Nancy Know-It-All tendencies slide a little and embrace the positives in this linguistic evolution.

So, for better or worse, the Internet is dramatically changing the landscape of human communication.

I see the evolution of language on the web as progress, rather than a slap in the face of steadfast English grammar rules. After all, we are a global community now. It’s time we start to think laterally in terms of language and communication. Plus, I never wuz a gr8 spellr anyway.

What do you think? Is our growing Internet language helping or hindering global communication?

And now for something completely different…

Blog World hi-jinks with my bff Amanda Coolong (TechZulu), Pete Cashmore (Mashable), Snaps (the Kangaroo), USB HubMan/kid, a Zannel squooshie schwag yoyo & a lone pigeon.

Powered by my sweet Mostly Lisa Viddler Tees, 2 hours of sleep, 3 chocolate chip cookies, a large scoop of vanilla ice cream, Yahoo mints, some nuclear green coloured caffeinated drink and Las Vegas.

I’ll be the first to admit it. This video is pretty weird, but it oddly enough captures the essence of a Blogging/Tech/2.0 conference very well. That essence smelling something like a mixture of day-old deodorant, guacamole, gasoline, melting plastic, glue, warm cookies, and dusty carpet. *sigh* I guess you just had to be there.

At least this time I didn’t dive bomb a geek with a USendit airplane or lose a whole bunch of dough with Rosie O’Donnell.

Thanks to rocknrollgeek for filming, the MindTouch girl that gave Snaps a special button, and Pete $more for just lookin’ fly.

PS. I think Amanda really needs to work on her interviewing skills if she’s ever going to be considered, like a serious reporter or whatever.

Article written & published special to the Province.

The fact that mainstream media have made celebrity gossip blogger, Perez Hilton, synonymous with blogging, is one of the greatest tragedies of the web. If you haven’t been introduced to Perez’s particular brand of snarky, childish, eye-gauging celebutrashing, then you are in the minority. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 1.7 million viewers are happily clicking on PerezHilton.com everyday to get their daily dose of “he got fat, she got fake boobs, they’re engaged, now married, now divorced, and both in rehab” news.

And guess what?

Your shallow addiction to Britney Spear’s cellulite is making Perez rich — and the most famous blogger on the Internet.

In the last few months I’ve seen Perez spring up on the cover and the glossy pages of Rolling Stone, Wired, Time, and People. With the support of mainstream media, Perez’s Internet fame is mutating into TV shows, appearances on popular talk shows like The View, and spawning a whole Internet cesspool of copycat bloggers hoping to cash in on Perez’s success.

The latest celeb blog making a splash on the web is Ashton Kutcher’s South Park-esque, BlahGirls.com. From the man who brought us such quality programming as Punk’d and Beauty and the Geek, we have yet another Perez-cloned site aimed at teenage girls. This is what really gets my knickers in a twist: I understand the potential monetary gain and amusement derived from celeb gossip blogging, but seriously — do teenage girls need to hear any more about Britney flashing her cooch?

The mainstream popularization of trashy, trite, and slovenly written blogs like PerezHilton.com is giving bloggers a bad name.

For many people who aren’t exploring the intense array of intelligent and thought-provoking blogs on the web, Perez might be the only blog they read. And that is one of the great tragedies of the web.
Maybe I am biased. I’m a blogger. Most of my friends are bloggers. I’ve even got my Internet n00b (unskilled user) mother turned on to the idea of keeping an online journal of her recent foray into digital photography. I think that sharing experience, knowledge, and information through first-hand journaling through blogs is an enriching experience for both the author and reader.

Blogs provide a platform for the writer and the reader to strike up an instantaneous discourse through comments which happen in real time.

It’s personal, immediate, and socks you right in the gut if you aren’t careful. It’s freedom of expression at it’s finest. And true, there is a lot of blogging debris on the web, but if more reputable journalists like Matt Taibbi and Anderson Cooper toss their credibility and craft onto the web, hopefully the mainstream will take note and push the crap aside, even if it is crap made from the finest champagne and fair-trade, organic celery sticks.

Opinions & comments? You know where to put ‘em.

Since this was published in the Province this morning, I’ve already received a stack of unimpressed and angry Perez fans. Bring it I say! Plus, in a few hours I’ll be on a plane to Vegas. Should take the sting off.

Oh and if you live in Vancouver, pick up a copy of The Province, my first article may be worth something some day :p

Twitter redesigned some stuff. Moved tabs to the side and opened up the design. Personally I like it. The best new ‘tweek’ is the ability to reply to a Direct Message just by clicking a small mail icon on the right-hand side of the message you’d like to reply to.

Also, you can spice up your tweets or express the complexity of your emotions with TwitterKeys by the guys at The Next Web, i.e. ❉ ❥ ♘. It’s nothing complicated, just a pop up browser bookmarket of a symbol library where you copy and paste little unicode symbols anywhere, like on Twitter, Facebook or right here, on your blog: ☃.

Or just like, double click & copy n paste these puppies below:

What’s your favourite TwitterKeys symbol?

While I was down in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I swung by Pixel Corps and casually hosted MacBreak with iJustine.

We talked about the new ultra cool Flip Mino, hung out with Alex Lindsay and the awesome crew at Pixel Corps, including Joe who is not on twitter, and then nearly got kicked out of an Apple Store. Besides that, the “rat” problem, and the epic Kelly Clarkson lip dub-a-thon, it was a totally normal Friday for me.

To check out the MacBreak 159: Flip Video Podcast:
Subscribe via iTunes
View the video directly here.

Here’s my Flip Mino in action (with a wee bit of bokeh and a sweet WP sticker Andy gave me).

PS. Even my MacBook Air got a little taste of limelight. It did so well considering the pressure.

(On top of Moscone Centre, San Francisco)

This was my first Holga lomo picture to actually come out. I took it the day after the madness that was WWDC 2008. My first roll, I accidentally exposed to light while taking it out of the camera. My second roll, I shot mostly at night in San Francisco (which looked so so cool) but I forgot to set the camera to “bulb” and all the shots were underexposed. Gah!

Film is intense. After having the immediacy of digital shots, waiting for film developing drives me bananas, but you can’t deny the coolness of the medium format. The graininess, the subtle vignetting, the saturation of colour, the sweet 70s feel it gives photos. I’m really excited about exploring the lomo now!

Check out lomography.com or the flickr Lomo group for inspiration. And if you are experimenting with lomography link me up to your flickr photos.

I love my digital SLR, and I don’t see myself ever using film as my main format, but there is something almost too perfect and unnatural about digital images, especially those that have been photoshopped. You lose all the unexpected surprises in the process of using film cameras that can produce seriously beautiful shots. After seeing my lomo shots, I realize that it is still important for photographers to experiment with film and develop a style that is independent of digital automation.

What do you think? Is there still a place for film in today’s digital photography age?

I was the special guest on an uber cerebral podcast last night called the Friday Night Party Line. I promise that I most definitely said something to embarrass myself. We talked about Esperanto, kids, video editing, environmental issues, polar bears, GPS, and what we would spend $5000 if we had to spend it.

What I would spend $5000 on if I was in some alternate universe where money grew on trees and responsibilities floated away on hot air balloons and the world wasn’t in peril (so I’m excluding things like rent, food, bills, saving the environment & polar bears et al.):

1. Shure SCL5 Sound Isolating Earphones ($400)
2. Canon 100mm Macro lens ($600)
3. Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS ($1500)
4. Heaps of Marks & Spencer biscuits ($200)
5. Plane ticket to Australia ($2000) + Dingo repellant ($19.95)
6. iPhone ($300 + $??? + 3 year contract + ∞)

Ok I went a bit over. Spending fake money is super easy.

What would buy with $5000?

Good lenses are ridiculously expenses, so for most of us, owning a bunch of good glass is just not financially feasible. I own one good lens for my Canon Xti/400D. The 50mm f/1.4. Such a beautiful lens, but limiting. I also have a crappy kit lens 18-55mm f/cr.ap, but i refuse to use it now, because I know the results will be sub-par.

The other option is to rent lenses, which is actually a lot more affordable than you think. Plus, you get to take the lens for a test spin, keep the photos, and not have to sell stolen girl guides cookies out of your garage. Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad idea… No not a good idea… A very bad idea…

You can rent pretty much any lens, even the elite L-series, for approx. $30 a day. And with most camera rental places, if you rent a lens on a Friday, you can keep it for the weekend. If you live in Vancouver check out Beau Photo or Leo’s Cameras.

So I wanted to ask all the photogs out there:

What is your favourite lens?
What awesome lenses do you think I should try?

PS. Thanks to my twitter peeps, I had a nice list going on twitter, but then the tweety bird freaked out again. So I’d like to compile a list on my blog, because I’m fairly certain WP won’t try to lift a giant whale with tiny songbirds.