matthewgruman.com

Other original programming planned for TheWB.com includes … “jPod,” a quirky soap set in the world of a video game design company…

Read the rest of the press release.

Thanks again to Firefly for keeping me up to date on the jPod situation. TheWB.com, provided it will be region-free, is an excellent venue for the show. There’s also a Post for the ‘Pod campaign about to begin at savejpod.ca (snail-mail bombardment in the week leading up to the Leo awards. jPod has 15 nominations.)

Things I really want to buy, but probably won’t:

1. Drum kit iPhone
2. Theremin iPhone
3. Mini Cooper iPhone
4. Encyclopedia set iPhone

iPhone finally available in Canada.

rob mclennan is nominated for this year’s 2008 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere award; I strongly suggest you vote for him. If you haven’t read his work, there is a wealth of content on his website. Aside from his poetry, I can’t think of another individual Canadian who does so much to help promote his peers. The 12 or 20 interviews are a personal favourite.

A Parti Québécois member of the provincial legislature who wants to create a distinct Quebec identity on the internet will first have to get approval from a United Nations agency.

Longtime sovereigntist Daniel Turp has started a petition to persuade the international authority responsible for internet domain names to create the .qc national extension, similar to Canada’s .ca.

CBC.

Turp explains, apparently unaware of what “autonomous” and “self-governing” mean (hint: they’re the same thing, and neither applies to Québec):

Turp points out that Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, has its own national extension — .cat — while the same goes for Greenland, a self-governing province of Denmark, which uses .gl.

First prize to anyone who can think of a more irrelevant waste.

The BBC is reporting that masturbation can help prevent cancer:

They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly.

And they say sexual intercourse may not have the same protective effect because of the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, which could increase men’s cancer risk.

The study was done in Australia; I’m not informed enough of their politics to guess if this is politically/religiously motivated, or just plain weird. The money quote has to be:

Dr Chris Hiley, head of policy and research at the UK’s Prostate Cancer Charity, told BBC News Online: “This is a plausible theory.”

One day at work, Melnick took the usual bathroom break when a light bulb went off: He wondered if a plume of contaminated water droplets was ejected into the air every time a toilet flushed.
[...]
During the study, gauze pads were placed around the experimental bathroom. Close-up photos of the germy ejecta, according to Gerba, looked like “Baghdad at night during an air attack.” The study showed that significant quantities of microbes floated around the bathroom for at least two hours after each flush. Gerba discovered that a lot of virus fell on those gauze pads.
[...]
“If an alien came from space and studied the bacterial counts, he probably would conclude he should wash his hands in your toilet and crap in your sink,” says Dr. Germ, with cheerful bluntness.

The Naked Scientists.

Bob Papper, chair of Hofstra University’s department of journalism, media studies and public relations, talks about whether or not you should link to a competitor’s website. Short answer: “yes, people aren’t idiots.”

Via Masthead.

There are few commercial signs or posters in a recently opened Mile End bookstore, but one in particular appears to have upset a local resident.

That person formally complained to the Office qu�b�cois de la langue fran�aise, which dispatched an inspector Friday to check out and photograph signage at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly on Bernard Ave. W. near de l�Esplanade Ave.

The complainant alleged there was too much English on signs, but on a visit yesterday, all a reporter could find in English only was an antique, hand-drawn paper clock on the door of the storefront.

The offending item, about 12 centimetres in diameter, says Open, Come In.

From The Montreal Gazette via Quill Blog.

For those who may not know, Bill 101 is a Quebec law stating that French must be more visible than any other language. Drawn and Quarterly is one of the best (THE best?) comics publisher in Canada. The ideal of Bill 101 is to help keep the Quebec culture and language alive. The ideal of Drawn and Quarterly is to keep comic culture alive and progressive.

The reality is that Bill 101 does little more than promote both subtle and not-so-subtle prejudice, while wasting taxpayer dollars, to satisfy the misguided ideals of a select few. Drawn and Quarterly, on the other hand, publishes awesome comics.

A more effective way to promote and sustain the Quebec culture would be to promote the Quebec culture. Believe it or not, its existence isn’t actually dependent on monolinguism.

According to mastheadonline (sub req’d), the number of starts and closures have both declined in the past year, with the biggest decline in the b-to-b sector, where only 5 books were launched. Total launches in 2007 dropped 15 per cent from 2006. On average, measured over 10 years, about 60 consumer magazines are launched.

From Canadian Magazines.

One of the challenges with tracking online magazines is coming up with a definition of “online magazine.” Is something like the multi-contributor, multi-topic Torontoist an “online magazine” or a blog?

From the comments.

This is a bit concerning. No one in the magazine/journal industry has come up with a solid definition of what it means to be an online magazine/journal, yet they are being included in current grant applications if they just don’t label themselves as blogs.

Qualitatively, I’ve been noticing (and getting contacted by) a lot of magazines/journals that just don’t have a print version. I wonder how much this has affected their figures.

For what it’s worth, I think that Torontoist is a better “magazine” than most magazines.

Suggestions

One big debate right now is how to track online readership because of the disparities between stats programs. Something I’ve brought up is the idea of active users: users who have logged in over the past 30 days. This is a typical way to measure online usage.

The problem, of course, is that you’d have to log in. Options:

• Make content available whether logged in or not and just count logged in users. Print magazines don’t count readership at magazine stands or libraries.
• Follow the lead of Instapaper and make a painless registration process. Don’t want a password? Don’t bother. You don’t need demographics, you need raw numbers.
• Use LONG sessions in your login script! Don’t make people login every time they come to your site; give the option to stay logged in for a few months.

Most diabetes sufferers could be cured within four years if a revolutionary treatment involving the BCG vaccine works, scientists said yesterday.
[...]
The vaccine destroyed abnormal white blood cells obstructing the production of insulin, which is needed to prevent diabetes, she said.

The first step in the human study is to determine whether the same strategy using BCG vaccination can be used to modify the abnormal autoimmune cells present in type 1 diabetes, sometimes called �juvenile-onset� diabetes.

The Daily Mail.

Not sure if this is worth getting excited about. The “abnormal white blood cells” cause an autoimmune attack (current theories point towards opportunist viral infections as the most likely trigger) which kills off the beta cells in your pancreas needed for insulin cell production. Destroying those cell would act like extinguishing a forest fire: it might not get worse, but nothing else is going to grow until trees (cells) are replanted.

Maybe if stem cell therapy was put in the mix? At any rate, all of these recent “cures” seem to only be effective for new diabetics who still have some beta cells left. This is fine — frankly, I think new/young diabetics SHOULD be the focus of current research — but I wish they’d stop using the word “cure”; it gets disheartening.