Happy Birthday, Ludwig Van!

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Today would have been Ludwig van Beethoven’s 238th 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.”