Backblog | General

The movie Argo may have picked up the biggest prize in last week's Academy Awards ceremony, but it was the Best Documentary Short winner that had many on the Internet buzzing.

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Backbone magazine to you and your loved ones. We'll be back in the new year with the exciting 2013 Innovation Campaign, our annual predictions story, investment and technology trend news, and coverage of the latest gadgets.

Over the past couple years I have been interested in starting a Canadian and/or an Ontario Chapter of the Internet Society. The Internet Society is an international, non-profit organization devoted to making the "Internet for everyone".

Working with non-profit organizations, I am familiar with what a challenge online fundraising and e-commerce can be for an organization that doesn't have the specialization or budget to launch such services.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority released the results of its board of directors election yesterday and I was very pleased to be elected to the board with the largest number of votes of any candidate.

Summer is rarely a time of heated broadcast policy battles, but the proposed Bell - Astral merger has generated considerable public attention and fostered a growing war of words between Bell and groups that have banded together under the "Say No to Bell" banner.

Earlier this year, I wrote a column and post about proposed governance changes to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority in which I expressed concern that the plans would remove the ability for CIRA members to nominate their own candidates to the board.

Or: how to delight your users, appease Google and stop fearing each new update. For years now marketers have been using a combination of content, code, metrics and hearsay to nurture search engine traffic. It was like the Wild West, with SEO experts trying this or that new technique to game the search engines and rank better… until each next Google update.

Embedded below is a graphical look at what a Bell-Astral combined entity might look like in the United States (courtesy of Telus).