This is going to be my SOP for the rest of the year:

Aside from the lack of start-up capital, one of the most frustrating elements of the tech community is the total lack of self-promotion. Instead of yelling about the great things they’re developing and how they’re going to kick some serious ass, too many Canadian tech entrepreneurs quietly toil away and then wonder why no one (investors, media, employees) aren’t beating a path to their doors.

TransitCamp on Sunday was very interesting. Here's a video from CityTV that gives a pretty good overview of what was going on (that's me standing up, red scarf, trench coated at :17 in):

I attended two sessions and did the usual networking thing. The first session was about data as in opening up the transit schedules and providing real time locations of all buses and subways along the routes. You can read the session notes here. My impression? There's lots of good ideas. Kieran (who's net identity I haven't figured out yet) is working on a open collaborative data system for mapping the TTC and its routes. I'd prefer that the TTC and the city open up all its data information but I realize that this is going to require change mandated from the top down. This is something I've been b*tching about for years, and not only as an abstract sort of thing, but because I've been personally burned by it and that I think it makes Canada less competitive than the US. The TTC people in attendance didn't really say a lot. I wonder if they were scared by the presence of TTC Chair Adam Giambrone? In either case, they all gave the impression (to me, anyway) that that the TTC is very bureaucratic and not too fond of change.

In the afternoon I attended TTC + other modes of transit which covered many of the same issues. With an open way of sharing data, the TTC data could easily be integrated with Go, AutoShare^*, ZipCar^*, Greyhound and so on and so on. To address a particular concern about "not everyone has a computer" -- think 10 years out: with ubiquitous wifi and displays as cheap as singing birthday cards, we'll be living in a different future sooner than you think.

Other people writing about TransitCamp:

• Mark
• Will Pate
• Joey
• Julia Brechenreid
• David Crow

^* Notice how I'm linking to sponsors.

Cross posted to my personal blog.

I'll be attending TransitCamp this morning to discuss APIs, Mashups and Microformats and to provide at least a little "from the right" perspective to what's going on:

An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto's talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto's transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.

I was at the University of Toronto this morning, courtesy of Greg Wilson to run through in more detail the demo I gave at DemoCamp several months back (link, link). In return I got a demo of BlogScope which is tracking an impressive 2.6 million blogs as of today. BlogScope does "text stream" analysis of blog posts, tracking what's popular, what's hot ("bursts"), and doing a form a faceted analysis ("correlation") -- what other words are popular in posts that have a certain word/phrase in them -- which is cleverly done since one would expect this to be a O(N²) algorithm.

We discussed structured data, geotags, tagging (all pretty key concepts in BlogMatrix) and so forth and how they could be used to extend BlogScope. There's a lot of potential for this application in "intranets", closed networks, if RSS/Atom had widespread adoption to export events and data with an organization.