Our good friend Jack Christie is the go-to guy for information about travel and outdoor recreation in BC. In addition to his regular column in the Georgia Straight, Jack writes some of the best travel guides around.

His current books are…

• Best Weekend Getaways from Vancouver
• The Whistler Book
• 52 Best Daytrips from Vancouver

We had the pleasure of putting together his brand new website at jackchristie.com to coinside with the launch of Best Weekend Getaways from Vancouver. The site is a great resource for stories about travel and adventure in BC.

Are you ever reminded of something that was a big deal, maybe 10 years ago, and then think, “Oh yeah, whatever happened to that?” Today while browsing through the Apple Hi-Definition Movie Trailers I came across a film called, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which is the story of the ill-fated EV1. I like films that take our current situation (such as our high oil prices) and ask the question of how we got to this particular point in history, and what we can learn from it. I look forward to checking this out.

Here’s the movie’s website

Read the post here

Online services such as Google and AOL are now getting into the video advertising game. As people increasingly get video content over the internet, the marketplace for video advertising is about to be expanded exponentially.

While we have seen this coming for awhile, there is a more interesting twist to the story. eBay has come up with an auction system to sell online advertising. You can buy a spot on a show in an open market. This has the potential to take control for setting rates away from the broadcasters and into the hands of the marketplace. Now shows and the audiences that follow them can be traded, much like what happened years ago with cotton and pork bellies.

If audiences are bought and sold on some kind of mercantile exchange, you don’t have to be one of the big networks to get in on the action, all you need is an audience to sell. Who else sees the possibilities in this idea?

read more | digg story

They set out to answer a question, why is it that most elite soccer players are born in the first three months of the year? It turns out that practice, and a very specific kind of practice, holds the key to success in any endevour. If we want to get good at something, we should set specific goals, obtain immediate feedback of how we’re doing, and concentrate on technique more than outcome as we practice.

Read the article here.

read more | digg story

read more | digg story

Check out the article

An Excerpt…

“In 2004, Wired magazine popularized the phrase “the long tail” to refer to the large number of specialized offerings that in themselves appeal to a small number of people, but cumulatively represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.

Indeed, the Internet’s ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don’t sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop — think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.”

Here’s the Slashdot post with links to the article.