Happy Birthday, Ludwig Van!

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Today would have been Lud­wig van Beethoven’s 238^th birth­day. Even though he only lived to the age of 56,  a life­time of 238 years would have been fine with me, if he could have kept writ­ing music.

The piece and excerpt above are from his Fifth Piano Con­certo, some­times called the ‘Emperor’ Con­certo, which he wrote between 1808 and 1809 for the Arch­duke Rudolph of Aus­tria. This open­ing, no mat­ter how many times I hear it, is always fas­ci­nat­ing. To begin the piece with these big, loud chords, with the strands of what sounds like a free impro­vi­sa­tion strung from col­umn to col­umn until it finally takes off, like a car shift­ing into drive, is such a fan­tas­tic idea, and so arrest­ing, that I’d be hard-pressed to come up with many other pieces of music that are both as star­tling and ulti­mately satisfying…and not writ­ten by the same guy.

Here’s to one of the great­est, 238 years later, still shout­ing beauty.

A View with a Room

Last week’s Best of 604 Awards, a cel­e­bra­tion and awards cer­e­mony that brought out many of the local blog­ging com­mu­nity, con­firmed my the­ory that Van­cou­ver is becom­ing a key cen­ter of what’s being now gen­er­ally called ‘Social Media’*. I’m going to write a much longer and more com­plete post­ing on why I think this is the case, why the con­di­tions here are so favor­able for this move­ment and activ­i­ties and how well they mesh with our lives, but one clear rea­son for the social media com­mu­nity being so close-knit and active in Van­cou­ver is some very strong and charis­matic lead­ers like Miss 604, who planned and hosted the event. Many thanks to her and those who helped and spon­sored the affair. Pam and I really enjoyed our­selves, and I was thrilled to see so many peo­ple who I knew (and read) be rec­og­nized for their efforts by their peers and read­ers. Like many suc­cess­ful fêtes in this town (like the Fringe Fes­ti­val, Film Fes­ti­val, Bar­Camp, the Fire­works Com­pe­ti­tion, etc.), it will surely become an annual event.

Another Busi­ness Using Social Media

It hasn’t taken very long for com­pa­nies (both large and small) to pick up on the mar­ket­ing poten­tial of social media, and many of my friends and fel­low blog­gers now make their liv­ing help­ing to bring their clients up to speed on the rapidly chang­ing and grow­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for mak­ing use of blog­ging and other online ‘con­duits’. Some of them clearly ‘get it’. In fact, one of the cat­e­gories of the Best of 604 awards was the cat­e­gory of ‘Best Com­pany Blog’, and this past fall’s Mol­son Brew 2.0 event showed that even large cor­po­ra­tions can indeed be very savvy regard­ing this new medium. Case in point:

High Tech Com­pa­nies, Mar­ket­ing Shops, and Large Brew­eries aren’t the only com­pa­nies blog­ging.  Van­cou­ver has some great hotels, and one of them, the Opus Hotel, has a blog.  How did I know about that? The Opus Hotel is also on Twit­ter, the microblog­ging plat­form. What’s more, they posted a ‘tweet’ of their blog post about one of their guest’s reac­tions to stay­ing in their rooms. The ‘review’ (whether it is the real thing or not) is not only laugh-out-loud hys­ter­i­cal, but I also think it’s a bril­liant piece of mar­ket­ing and won­der­ful use of a blog to talk about their busi­ness with cus­tomers.  While I’ve not stayed at the Opus Hotel and haven’t even been to their well-known bar or equally well-known restau­rant Elixir, I have to say that this piqued my curiousity.

*For those who aren’t famil­iar with the term, Social Media include blogs, micro-blogs like Twit­ter, social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, LinkedIn and MySpace, and even web sites made up of con­tri­bu­tions by their mem­bers like YouTube and Flickr. The Wikipedia arti­cle sums up Social Media well, and I par­tic­u­larly liked this sen­tence: “Social media depend on inter­ac­tions between peo­ple as the dis­cus­sion and inte­gra­tion of words to build shared-meaning, using tech­nol­ogy as a conduit.”