This past Monday I was fortunate enough to attend the first ever Free Summit held in San Mateo, California. Organized Hosted by TechDirt.com founder Mike Masnick with help from the folks at and organized by Sagescape, who also organized the Tech Policy Summit, the event sought to analyze and understand the business of free. The keynote speaker for the event was Wired editor Chris Anderson, whom I had seen deliver the same presentation a year earlier here in Toronto.

While I wrote a detailed report on the event for my clients, as well as a few CBC radio spots on the subject, I wanted to share some personal thoughts on my blog.

At one point during the day, Chris Anderson wondered aloud why it took 15 years to start talking about free in the context of business, and I feel the answer is that we've been focusing on the wrong things. The obsession with making money online has distracted us from the fact that people are where the real value lies.

Social media is finally teaching us to look at social dynamics and understand social relationships. It is rapidly becoming clear to all who care to notice that the moral taught to us by the web is "free."

One of the things I'm committed to doing in 2008 is organizing more public events. Last year, I ran a number of private interactive and intellectual discussions, which nurtured a desire to develop a larger and more public configuration for them.

To use a software development metaphor, my first public event was an alpha test, in that it was a raw and open exploration of a few concepts I've been developing or have seen in the wild and wanted to try myself.

Recently, there has been considerable innovation when it comes to event organizing, with the emergence of the BarCamp phenomenon as well as the Open Space movement. I am inspired by both, but still see room to incorporate my own sensibilities and experiences.

I've spent the last few years working in television and really studying the direction that industry is going, while also absorbing everything I can about production, both behind the scenes and on-camera. My approach to organizing events has been deeply impacted by this exploration of the television aesthetic and, conversely, my approach to television is heavily influenced by my love of live, interactive events.

The context to all this is, of course, the Internet, where I spend most of my time, and I'm always thinking how to bring the culture and properties of the Internet to live events and broadcast television. Often it has been the focus and/or subject matter. However, in the future, my intention is to run events in which the Internet is so ubiquitous as to no longer require explicit attention.

That is why I chose politics as the focus of my first event. I hoped to capture the zeitgeist of our time (with Obama inspiring a new generation) and tackle a subject that everyone should be able to relate to, one that lends itself to debate and disagreement.

For quite a while now I've been arguing that the traditional conference configuration is obsolete. Of course I'm not alone in asserting this. The incredibly popularity of the Camp phenomena represents a grassroots demonstration of why interactivity and spontaneity are becoming assumed qualities for any gathering big or small.

It's no surprise therefore to watch the fallout from the Mark Zuckerberg Q&A at the SXSW conference in Austin this past weekend. The session was hosted/moderated by journalist Sarah Lacy, and by all accounts it was a total disaster. Why? Sarah failed to either prepare for the panel itself, or be able to effectively engage the energy of the audience.

Add to this the power of twitter to give the audience a collective voice that can effectively organize and overwhelm the stage first with tweets than with heckling.

I've been organizing an event to be held at MaRS on March 18th, and one of our plans from the beginning was to have a big screen with an active twitter feed. This was meant as one of many means by which the audience can become an integral part of our event.

For a long time I've been working on ideas to expand the spontaneity and interactivity of live events, and this upcoming event at MaRS will serve as one of a series of beta tests I'll be doing to test out some of my concepts.

In my public speaking I often like to spend time on the subject of the Global Village, the McLuhan metaphor that describes our inter-connected global society. I cite events such as the OJ Simpson trail, the death of Princess Diana, and 9/11 as a few examples among many that illustrate the times when millions of people come together and share their emotions simultaneously across the continent or even the planet.

This week there were two such events, and what I find fascinating is the difference between how the two were understood and experienced.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in an Overlap session put on by my friends Michael Dila, and Robin Uchida, which was held at the MaRS Centre, largely focusing on MaRS itself, although there was also presentations on the One Laptop Per Child project as well as a company called Symtext.

This was my first Overlap event, and I was particularly excited about the range of perspectives that assembled in the circle.

Similarly the MaRS people had a great energy, and as I came to fully understand their mission and mandate, I was not only impressed, but outright inspired. Living in Toronto you always get the sense that this city has considerable greatness, MaRS is the type of institution that fosters this, cultivating greatness when it comes to innovation.

The effect for me however, in bringing together the MaRS team and the Overlap group, was the immediate identification of what I felt was a blind spot in the current approach that MaRS was taking.

I was reminded of a recent blog post by Robert Cringley in which he states that "the best start-ups are composed of symbiotic combinations of hippies and nerds. Hippies have the grand vision while nerds mind the details."

What MaRS needs is more hippies. And I suspect they know this and agree. The question is how do you cultivate the cultural side of innovation, foster a garden of visionaries in addition to buildings filled with laboratories and scientists.

One way would be to continue to host open events and allow for grassroots gatherings and initiatives. They have a great building, and I'm sure that if it was easier and cheaper to use it, there could be ample opportunities for the types of connections and networking that happen at community events. FacebookCamp Toronto happened at MaRS, and so too should other comparable events.

Another idea I had, was to look at how Nuit Blanche made the art world and cultural communities more accessible and public, towards organizing a similar event that could be used to make research and innovation equally accessible and public.

I also thought a bit about the role that fear plays in framing most people's experiences with technology, and couldn't help but extend this analysis of fear towards technology innovation in general. I suggested to the MaRS team that they engage in some market research to perhaps create a Technology Fear Index that measures the public's general anxiety about technology and the rate of technological change.

In general the MaRS folk were very open to my and other Overlap participants suggestions and feedback. This demonstrated to me in part the real power of the Overlap group in that such a multi/trans-disciplinary group is able to offer a perspective that is entirely unique and without equal.

I suspect the MaRS people understood this clearly as well. While their membership or community is currently biased towards things like advanced medical and pharmaceutical research, they expressed the desire to further diversify and have members from all sorts of industries and areas that are involved in innovation.

Eco-systems require diversity to survive and thrive, and MaRS has tried to foster this by attracting and seeking out Scientists, Engineers, Investors, Mangers, Bankers, Consultants, Business Experts, and other professionals able to help build and support a successful enterprise.

What they're still missing however are the hippies, or to be more accurate, the philosophers, the visionaries, the cultural artists who give body and meaning to the technology and science that make up the mission at MaRS.

Sometimes we take for granted the impact that Marshall McLuhan made on our city and the culture of innovation that thrives here. One lesson we cannot forgot is the intrinsic role of culture in technological innovation, and an easy way to apply this lesson would be to expand the cultural programming and pursuit of philosophy within the MaRS discovery district.

Update: I've since left the Overlap group concluding that they're a bunch of tossers. What a waste.

Facebook continues to grow, in Canada, and around the world. I've been researching this phenomenon on a number of levels, as a consultant, broadcaster, writer, and speaker.

I wrote a feature article for cbc.ca that explores what will happen now that Facebook is crossing over into the mainstream.

Legendary Canadian Golf Professional Herb Holzscheiter is an incredible and endearing individual. Playing out of the Weston Golf and Country Club, Herb is both an excellent golfer and a warm friend.

This speech by Herb was part of the award ceremony of the H/H Scramble held May 9th 2007 at Weston GCC. It offers a glimpse of his wit and charisma, something people close to Herb treasure and adore.

I've recently taken up quite an interest in the online environment second life, and the potential it holds as an emerging virtual reality.

It was with considerable pleasure that I heard the news that Linden Labs the owner of Second Life had open sourced their client software. This was quite a bold move, as it lays out their strategy as an environment, rather than as just software. It also allows for considerable possibilities when it comes to user-directed design and development.

I recently entered the virtual world Second Life, in large part to check it out and do a bit of research, but also to see who was "there". I've participated in online virtual environments for well over a decade, ranging from 3d graphical games, to 2d textual games, to educational environments, and pure chat.

Emily and I made our annual trip to Chicago this past weekend for American Thanksgiving. Explicitly we go to Palatine Illinois to visit Emily's grandfather Fred Pohl, and other members of the maternal side of her family. The last two years have been road trips as we've driven from Toronto to Chicago. Last year the weather was nasty, with all sorts of conditions ranging from fog, to snow, ice, rain, sleet, hail, you name it.