Normally I read ITBusiness for work (natch) but these two articles caught my out-of-the-office interest:

• Canadians swamp 2006 online census. I filled out the online census last week, and had no trouble at all. The Linux complaints and concerns about Lockheed Martin are valid, but it sounds like StatsCan answered them. Overall, I think the government deserves some praise for putting it online at all. Let’s at least pat them on the back before we nitpick them to death.
• Sure the gun registry is a boondoggle, but shouldn’t we try to fix it? Did it go WAY over budget? Yes. Is the value of the registry difficult to measure? Yes. Does it completely stop gun violence? Of course not. Does it make sense to get rid of it? No. The cost is sunk; either the registry is valuable (in terms of perceived benefit versus ongoing — not initial — cost) to society or it isn’t. As far as I understand it the RCMP want it left in place, and I’d defer to them on this.

.:.

One final thought on mesh: too many people trying to get rich from blogs and web 2.0, not enough people trying to change the way companies talk to their customers. While I didn’t like the style of her presentation, you can tell that Tara Hunt just aches for the latter. People like her, or Jeremy Wright, or Tom Williams…those were the people with whom I found myself silently agreeing, who left me felt like we could be doing something truly different with this technology, not just extracting the same value from the same people in a slightly different way. The people in the crowd who stood up after every presentation to ask about how they could “monetize” this technology or that…they just gave me the creeps. Either they don’t get it, or they get it and they’re trying to exploit it.
[tags]mesh06, mesh conference, gun registry, census[/tags]