2008 will be the year that;

1. A barcamp/democamp/startup camp etc. will be held in Atlantic Canada. Possibly PEI at Rob’s place. Harold has made the great suggestion of it being a Kitchen Camp. Perfect maritime flavour.

2. We will have tweet ups to meet fellow twitter friends. An attempt was made over the holidays but everyone’s schedules were a little crazy, so no luck.

3. Dan Martell will hopefully organize an event for us to watch a video of the Future of Web apps. Possibly Fredericton. Date TBD.

4. If you can, you should try to attend The Power Within in Halifax, Feb. 26. We will have the opportunity to meet up with others from Atlantic Canada involved in this industry and we can all corner Mitch Joel to pick his brain;)

5. The AIM (Atlantic Canada Internet Marketing) conference is in Moncton this year, May 4-6.  Another great opportunity to engage with others.

6. We all love social media. We’re twittering, facebooking, seesmicing, blogging, Second Lifeing and so on. It’s wonderful we can connect up with like minded people. Yet you’ll notice all these above points are about meeting people in person. Making real life connections on top of the virtual connections. David Alston from Radian6 expressed it well that his number one resolution this year is to find balance - to invest in both social media and traditional family and friends relationships.

Here’s to a connected and balanced 2008 in Atlantic Canada!

Earlier this week in the news, CBC reported that Saint John was the happiest place to live in Canada. Both Chris Nadeau and Harold Jarche commented on this as well this week. As both mentioned, everyone is feeling positive about some of the great technology coming out of Atlantic Canada (visit the blog roll). PropelSJ stays on top of business technology and events happening in the SJ area. The regular news updates show that the Saint John area is becoming a business hub. And of course there’s no doubt that Atlantic Canada has some of the most beautiful vistas in the world.

This recent news is fortunate because for the past year Saint John and the Atlantic Provinces have mostly receiving failing grades in Health and Academic matters. In October of this year, Saint John was considered one of the fattest cities in Canada, likely attributed to poverty. People living in Saint John have the highest obesity rate, at 24.4 per cent of the population over 15 years old. The report card style study tracked the quality of life of Canadian communities in relation to poverty gaps, health, housing and the environment.  Saint John was not marked on track for any of these items.

NB also has some of highest caesarian rates in Canada. According to WHO (World Health Organization), 15% is the average c-section rate, yet in NB it is close to 29%. With northern NB having twice as many c-sections. Women’s groups wonder if it is about a lack of health resources or health professionals to deal with long labour. And certainly if looking at Northern NB where many hospitals were shut down, emergency rooms closing earlier, it would seem likely that is the case. This coupled with general long hospital waits compared to the rest of Canada also leads to a lack of resources.

In education, students in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick all performed significantly below average in science and math.

Again, does this come back to poverty/lack of resources due to low funding?

So if that’s the case, how come we’re so happy in Atlantic Canada?

Maybe because money really can’t buy happiness.

I was curious to see what there was for squidoo pages in this neck of Canada. For those of you unfamiliar with Squidoo, it’s  a brainchild of marketing guru, Seth Godin.

From wikipedia;

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses –single pages that highlights one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Squidoo has often been used by niche marketers and some have been very sucessful with earning revenue. However with Squidoo on the end of a google slap, it’s been much harder for sites to move up in google rankings.  

What I like about Squidoo is that it is a hub of resources. And for a tourism venue site like some of the ones below, it is a very fast way to have a good looking site with multiple media resources.

I’m VERY surprised that I didn’t find a lense on unusual Newfoundland place names. With names like Dildo, Come-by-Chance, Blow-me-down and more you would think that would make for an interesting lense.

A few lenses from ’round here.

NF

http://www.squidoo.com/newfie/

http://www.squidoo.com/rick-mercer/

http://www.squidoo.com/laurieleehane/

PEI

http://www.squidoo.com/DiscGolfing/

http://www.squidoo.com/fan-of-anne-of-green-gables-and-avonlea/

NB

http://www.squidoo.com/fredericton/

http://www.squidoo.com/chrisnadeau/

http://www.squidoo.com/fly-fishing-new-brunswick/

http://www.squidoo.com/sackville/

 NS

http://www.squidoo.com/novascotiafirstnation/

http://smartest.dentist.ever.com/  - this is the new evolution from Squidoo, the Ever Project with the best/smartest, etc.  .ever.com

http://www.squidoo.com/halifaxnovascotia/

http://www.squidoo.com/luckynovascotia/

I’ve started to build an Atlantic Canada twitter list of those in technology/marketing/ social media and related fields on the right sidebar. If you want to be added to the list, you can follow me on twitter or you can contact me. On the flip side, if you want your twitter removed from the twitter list, let me know and I’ll remove it.

If you’re new to what twitter is, from wikipedia;

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, email, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.

Caroline Middlebrook has a very comprehensive Big Juicy Twitter Guide. 

 My reasons for using Twitter:

1. it’s easy to use and doesn’t take much time
2. it helps build relationships with others
3. you’re usually the first to know what is happening
4. if you can’t attend an event, you can often follow a twitter on the event, ie. http://twitter.com/forrester
5. it’s fairly viral with followers and who you’re following, lots of marketing opportunities
6. it’s indexed by google, useful for seo

Most of all, I really enjoy the diversity of people out there and getting the big picture in a micro way of the world outside of mine.