Fall 2011 has been a fun time developing of Metaviews. While keeping tabs on the disruption of fields from advertising to academia, we have continued to develop our own projects, which has included extending our presence beyond Toronto.

A pair of salon events in Ottawa have focused on the challenges involved in the transformation to Open Government, which drew interest from all areas of the bureaucracy, as developing a more citizen-friendly approach has been pledged by the federal government.

Similar challenges are being faced by the non-profit sector as it attempts to retool its messaging for the social media age. The conversational research style of Metaviews.ca will increasingly be applied in this direction, too.

With the technological stakes increasingly being raised, though, we have continued to focus our attention on the business of the Internet. Recently, our subscriber newsletters, teleseminars and social media conversation has focused in areas that include:

• The state of the relationship between producers and consumers — and whether they can ever really be one and the same

• Whether or not self-styled internet intellectuals can be taken seriously in the age where everyone has their own online experience

• The increasingly blurred relationship between online communities and the way that we interact in physical spaces

• Marketing efforts that reach beyond online coupons or viral videos to target customers based on where they are standing

• New currency alternatives that stand to subvert the banking system and interest rates of credit card companies

• How hardware producers are constantly challenged by the marketplace to emphasize similarities more than differences

• What needs to be done in Canada to keep pace with the global evolution of online access and the distribution of content

As the year draws to a close, Metaviews.ca will conclude its year of specific research into “The Future of Authority,” and launch a similar project on how the internet stands to transform health care.

During the past year, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with a great team of researchers, writers and practitioners to develop Metaviews.ca into an original think tank dedicated to the relationship between media, technology and society.

Some of our efforts have been open to the public: regular posts to the Metaviews.ca website and other social media outlets, a growing library of original videos, and live events like the Monday Night Seminar series in honour of Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday.

Subscribers have also been able to access our insights on a deeper level, through the Metaviews Weekly newsletter, the Metaviews Telseminar and private presentations related to our research project, “The Future of Authority.”

Discussion topics for fall 2011 have ranged from the analysis of mass media coverage on topics ranging from the future of gadgets in the post-Steve Jobs era, to the influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, to how retail stores will be impacted by mobile marketing.

Developments in social media, the political scene and the economics of the internet have also been at the forefront of the Metaviews.ca agenda.

Other topics that will be high on our collective minds this fall and beyond include:

• Challenges faced by all levels of government to keep pace with a new communications era

• The ongoing transition of mass media to personalized forms of distribution and consumption

• Why some online communities are trusted more than geographical ones — and some are not

• Video games as a new cultural force and the hope and hype that surrounds “gamification”

• Social enterprise as a gateway for corporations to make a personal connection with customers

• How wider online access to health care information will result in a two-tier system for Canada

While some elements of our Metaviews.ca agenda will remain free to all on the web, subscribers receive access to the full scope of our collective efforts.

The email newsletter, distributed each Friday morning, is packed with ideas that will help sharpen reader perspectives for the week ahead.

Teleseminars also include participation from both industry experts and opinionated observers, in the effort to approach topics in a friendly, articulate, conversational format.

Subscribers also get priority access to the entire Metaviews.ca team, who provide research and opinion from backgrounds including academia, education, journalism, politics, business, and technology, along with expertise in executing special projects and in dynamic presentations.

Please see the Metaviews.ca website for more information on the subscription package.

When the calendar year comes to a close people get into the habit of reflection and forward thinking regarding where they've come from and where they want to go. New Year Resolutions are one way to articulate this kind of thinking, and while I tend to avoid such arbitrary expressions, I decided to put upon myself a worthy challenge that could fuse a bunch of my interests while also making me exercise in an intellectual and creative way that I've not done for some time.

I've always wanted to produce my own internet show, but I'm never able to make the time or find the right configuration or playing partner. Lately however I'm spending a fair bit of time researching YouTube and video on the net in general. That gave me a rather ludicrous and intimidating idea.

I'm going to try and produce a YouTube video for every day of 2011. They will be available via my Openflows YouTube channel.

The only thing that will unite all of these videos, will be my exploration of what I call Cyberpunk Surrealism. I've always been fond of surrealism and it's ability to offer unique insights by taking things out of context and mashing them up in new found ways. Similarly cyberpunk culture is something I've also quite enjoyed and identified with. I'm hesitant to give much more of an explanation, instead I'd rather offer the videos to speak for themselves.

I should point out that it is all experimental. I want to play with technology, concepts, and YouTube itself. You should not necessarily take what I say in this videos literally. They are for entertainment purposes only. While an exercise in art, they are also a reminder to myself that it is far more fun to make television than it is to watch it. So instead of watching, in 2011 I plan to spend more time making:

On Thursday I considered calling up Bell and ordering their new "Fibe" fiber-optic internet and TV service. Then on Friday I heard that Bell and CTV were merging. My initial reaction was to dismiss the idea of signing up for Fibe as there was no way I wanted Internet access from CTV.

This of course flies in the face of how the merger is presented and how the media report it. They all say that BCE is the company that is buying CTV. That the telephone company is buying the television network. Obviously it's more complicated than that, only most look at the wrong side of the complication.

"Those not busy being born are busy dying" Bobby Dylan

On the weekend of June 26th, Toronto underwent a transformation. A new generation of activists were politicized, and in many cases radicalized. Also, a new generation of journalists were born, products of a long-awaited fusion of traditional and new media. For me, it was a return to days of old, going back a decade to when I was young and radical.

So I was there, on the streets, providing coverage and witnessing history. I'm still processing the insights and emotions triggered by the events, and I finally have time to put down some thoughts. Rather than focus purely on what happened, I'd rather share my story in the form of advice for how to move forward.

When I was younger I genuinely loved the game of baseball, especially Toronto Blue Jays baseball. All winter I would pine for the start of spring training and opening day was often one of the best days of my year. The Jesse Barfield, Lloyd Moseby, George Bell outfield will always have a special place in my heart. Almost every Saturday for $2 as a Junior Jay I'd be in the outfield grandstand at Exhibition Stadium cheering on my team.

However as I aged, my interest in baseball began to fade. It's not that the team let me down, in fact they won two World Series as I was drifting away. Rather I was the one changing, seduced by the internet into an accelerated lifestyle that had little patience for a pastime like baseball that felt more dragged out and boring every time I tried to re-engage.

Since those two championships the Jays in general have lost the love and passion that this city once gave them, which is not to say they don't have a loyal fan base, but rather it cannot offer the size and momentum that inter-division rivals in New York and Boston can produce. While it's easy to focus on money and payroll as the secret to a team's success, the true source are the fans.

Recently a newspaper columnist from Chicago wrote that baseball in Toronto is dead, a remark made partly out of spite, but also after covering the White Sox play a series against the Jays, a series played to a handful of fans in a largely empty Rogers Centre. While some rushed to Toronto's defense, there's clearly something wrong when the stadium is as empty as it has been for the past few years.

Blue Jays (and Rogers) management counter with the argument that the team has to play well to earn the support of fans, however the players also require the support of fans in order to be motivated to play well. It strikes me that perhaps the solution is not just spending money but also spending social capital? For example let's look to the internet for a business model the team could learn from.

What if the Blue Jays were to adopt a freemium model? For the rest of the season, make all seats on the 500 level free, for all games. First come, first serve. Then allow all other seats to be sold on an auction basis, allowing seat holders to resell their seats if they become more valuable than when they were first bought.

If you can't fill the stadium for each game using that system, then yes, Baseball is dead in Toronto.

However I think that by making the games fun again, by making them a place people want to go, that they can go, it would give the players motivation to perform and excel.

The problem with baseball, is a similar problem that businesses face across industries. Whether they want to admit it or not they are competing with the internet, someway, somehow.

For me it was an issue of attention, that in this case can only be solved culturally, with economics coming second. By adding a freemium model to baseball, you could culturally change the vibe in the stadium, and therefore increase the appeal and value of the overall experience. You adopt and appropriate a little bit of the internet to upgrade an old pastime to something that preseves the game while expanding the potential audience/market.

As a metaphor the internet affords all sorts of sensational and melodramatic language. I regular receive emails from public relations professionals representing clients who claim they are starting a revolution or changing the world forever.

Last week I got such a message regarding an announcement from Cisco, who are "the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet." In this email, I was told that Cisco would make an announcement that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, business, and government" and that was all they could say.

Yesterday Cisco made their announcement, the introduction of their next generation router, the CRS-3, and the media seemed to walk right into the hype.

In their recent speech from the throne, the Canadian Government indicated their intention to raise foreign ownership limits with regard to the telecom industry. This is a decision long overdue, although one that requires balance and diplomacy when it comes to achieving the desired goal, something that the ruling Conservative Party has not been able to accomplish.

On the one hand they want to increase competition so as to lower consumer's monthly bills, yet on the other hand they also want to spur innovation by allowing existing companies access to foreign capital investment.

The demand for Internet and mobile networks is growing far faster than companies had anticipated and they will need to continually invest and expand their infrastructure which requires a lot of capital. The fear is that without foreign investment there would be further consolidation so as to pay for ongoing upgrades.

I love to be inspired by change, even the potential for change, and this is why the fall is tied with spring for my favourite season. Watching the world around me decay, knowing it will rise again, reminds me how important it is for the old to make way for the new.

This is why I rarely lament the decline of the journalism business, or any content-related industry, for that matter. Everywhere I look I see phoenixes ready to rise from the ashes.

For example, two of my favourite media outlets, both creations of internet culture, and also relatively new, are stumbling towards rather successful business models for online journalism. I say "stumbling" only because neither are waiting for permission or the perfect formula. They're embracing the embedded ethos of the online environment which is to "just do it."

Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun, at least that was the sentiment expressed on CNN.com by one of silicon valley's hottest pundits, Pete Cashmore. It's a sensationalist statement, but one that speaks to many people's feelings, both positive and negative, about how personal information gets caught up in the world wide web.

Is privacy really dead? No, not yet. However, there's a growing chorus of people empowered by social media who are eager to declare that it is. This is partly because of the power of networks, and their ability to leverage your private information for personal gain and/or amusement.

Social media is also regarded as a popularity tool that allows people to emulate the celebrity culture we are immersed in. We can all become micro-celebrities who capture attention and influence, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The fear is that as this starts to become more and more prevalent, discarding privacy will become compulsory, expected behaviour necessary for graduating from school, getting that job, buying the home, and succeeding in life.