I’ve been lamenting the state of Canadian telecommunications for quite a while now, but today marks a real significant step backwards for this country’s telecom industry.

Rogers, a major Canadian internet service provider, has decided to limit their once-unlimited service to 60 gigabytes per month, and charge users a fee of up to $5 for each additional gigabyte they download (up to a maximum of $25).

While Rogers defines this as download capping, it’s really just a $25 rate increase for their users who are getting the most out of the service they provide. It’s a cash grab, plain and simple.

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I’ve upgraded the site today to WordPress’ latest version: WordPress 2.5, Release Candidate 2 (RC2). In case you’re curious to see what’s new with the latest version, you can check it out over at the WordPress development blog.

The admin interface has changed substantially (and it seems much more pastel, but maybe it’s just me), with more emphasis being placed on the dashboard as a place to launch functionality from.

Nothing much should change on your end, the site should look basically the same as it did before (with the excpetion of the tag cloud, which looks a bit different, due to the fact that 2.5 RC2 broke Ultimate Tag Warrior, which was outdated a long time ago anyway).

So if you notice anything broken/breaking/on fire, please let me know and I’ll try to get to it as soon as I can (I haven’t thoroughly tested everything, I’m just crossing my fingers that nothing broke). Thanks!

Google announced back in December that the company would be creating something called “knols”, which Google describes as “units of knowledge” — which has been met with a mixed reaction. For example (and this is lifted, by me, from the Wikipedia page on knols), Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, suggested: “At the end of the day, there’s a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals. What you’re seeing here, slowly, is Google embracing an advertising-driven model, in which money will have a greater impact on what people have ready access to.”

Google embracing an advertising-driven model? Given the whole AdSense thing, isn’t Google already advertising-driven? Not to mention the fact that the Google motto is “don’t be evil”, not “be good” (tricky footwork there, Google).

While it would be pretty cool if there was a non-profit organization that created a bunch of neat stuff like Google does, I just don’t see it happening.

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A little while ago, I decided to drop the ‘www’ from this site. I accomplished this by basically redirecting www.lucasmcdonnell.com to lucasmcdonnell.com. Seemed simple enough at the time — and I preferred leaving out the ‘www’ (it always seems redundant to me).

What this also accomplished however, was to drop my Google PageRank from four to zero. PageRank is basically a score that Google uses to determine how high your site should rank in search results (it’s only part of the Google algorithm however).

I’m sad to see my PageRank go — but I’m hoping this is a temporary situation, and that things will go back to normal. There were quite a few plugin issues around making the change, so I’m really hoping I don’t have to reverse the change — not to mention wondering whether messing around with this further will make things worse rather than better. Strangely, www.lucasmcdonnell.com also shows up as PageRank zero now.

Has anyone has had any experience with redirects and PageRank?

I thought my post about the potential decline of knowledge management on my other blog, memetiks.com, might interest my readers here. While I suggested in that post that the declining searches on Google Trends may be due to an increased understanding of what KM is about, I’m still reminded of the knowledge management as nonsense argument.

Knowledge management, in its purest, distilled form, was always about (or should have been about) making things simpler for people (yes, I’m being very liberal with my interpretation here). It would seem, however, that in its present incarnation, KM is rarely making things simpler for people.

Part of the problem seems to be that we, as knowledge management folk, assume that people want to know what KM is (or perhaps we just hope they care). Funny thing is, they don’t really care. They care about being better at their job.

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In case anybody reading this blog doesn’t already know, I work in knowledge management. As a discipline, it hasn’t really been around that long — Wikipedia suggests it’s been an established discipline since 1995.

So let’s assume for a moment that knowledge management itself is a meme — one that really started to pick up around 1995. Well, the web certainly wasn’t as popular in 1995 as it is now, so it’s a bit difficult to determine the popularity of the phrase then, but take a look at the graph below from Google Trends.

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Well, I’m back to Toronto after my holiday. I had mentioned in my last post that I had visited Quebec’s museum of civilization — where they had an exhibit on the future of cities around the world.

The exhibit is called Urbanopolis, and is a especially apropos since it’s the 400th anniversary of Quebec City. Within Urbanopolis, there are several models of potential future cities, including New York, Chicago and Quebec City — all of which are projected out 100 years to the beginning of the 22nd century.

Looking back at some of the projections people have made about where we would be at the beginning of the 21st century, it would seem that while such projections are an interesting exercise, they don’t necessarily always pan out to be true.

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