Checking in from the basement of CBC's Vancouver headquarters as we kick off an event which is bound to be quite remarkable - the CBC Digital Development Labs.

This morning was introductions by the entrepreneurial-minded attendees chosen to display and refine their ideas for possible development by CBC. I'm participating as a mentor (along with others) here to advise, gut-check, collaborate with (and learn from) the emerging visionaries.

Our secret lair (which is very cool by the way - set up with a variety of workspaces, conversation breakout areas, Mac labs, gamer stations - feels like jPod) is also loaded with industry types acting more as observers to see how projects come together in the new media paradigm.

We're very happy to announce that Steven Wittens has decided to join us here at Bryght. Steven has a post on his personal site on why he decided to choose Bryght over his other offers:

After considering all my options, Bryght came out as the most interesting choice. Aside from getting to spend a significant amount of my time working on Drupal itself, they're also giving me the chance to move to Vancouver. Once the paperwork goes through (which could take a couple of months), it's good bye chocolate and beer and hello mounties, maple leaf and mountains.

We hope that having Steven join us will continue to show our commitment to the Drupal open source community. Steven will now have dedicated time in his schedule to work on Drupal. His "Bryght work" will of course be focused on Drupal as well, although he has indicated a desire to expand his programming range...I suspect some Python programming is in his future.

And yes, Steven is going to be joining us here in Vancouver. After all, we're moving into some new office space with lots of room for extra bodies, and everyone should get the chance to live in Canada. Want to move to Canada? Take the Skilled Worker Self-Assessment test from the Government of Canada to see if you have enough points.

To my American friends: everyone backs up their data...shouldn't you do the same with your country? ;P

[ Photo by Chris Rynearson ]

I'm looking forward to the Google "Behind the scenes" presentation put on by the Vancouver HPC Users Group (note: not a permalink; added to Upcoming.org). It's being given by Narayanan Shivakumar ('Shiva'), a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. The abstract is as follows:

Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We'll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google's various products, and make the products scalable and reliable.

The bio says that Shiva is currently "excited about a variety of search and webcrawling technologies (including Google Sitemaps)".

I see the challenge for Google and all search engines to be "how to search the live web". One of the things I often explain is that I firmly believe that all static web pages will eventually be replaced by dynamic web pages. Another way to say this is that much of the content on the web, especially much of it which is being updated often, is actually being created by web apps.

For web apps, URLs are nothing more than keys to content. Type in www.domain.com/about, and the underlying web application will look up the content that is keyed to that URL. In fact, that "about" string is nothing more than a query to the underlying content "engine" of a website.

What is Google and other search engines? They are a centralized aggregator of all the unique queries of all the web apps that run websites in the world. Increasingly, they are having trouble keeping up.

Being in Vancouver has many advantages. We're in the same timezone as California and an easy flight away from Silicon Valley and very close to Seattle. So our Web 2.0 community in Vancouver has met most of the Web 2.0 community in, Seattle and Silicon Valley at conferences and other events already. Interestingly enough we are better connected with Seattle and the Valley than our counterparts in the rest of Canada!

I agree with Boris, that although Mesh's program and focus is currently unclear it looks compelling but Gnomedex is equally compelling and we know Chris and Ponzi put on a great conference with a great vibe. It's not only the fact that decent food and decent WiFi are included (not as good as UBC's WiFi for Northern Voice but far, far better than most conferences). More importantly, it's the people we met and the connections we made at Gnomedex in addition to the fantastic (in terms of nurturing conversations on the compelling topics of the day) conference program itself.

Mesh, Gnomedex, both? We'll see what makes sense from a business and family point of view! I look forward to both whether I make it in person or not!

From Canada's web 2.0 conference - Toronto May 15 & 16.:

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