I am following up on the Open Letter to VANOC from Social Media Makers with a few notes as well as an invitation to continue the conversation with VANOC over a tasty beverage. The letter has made its way around the world with Twitters, comments, blog posts, and personal notes of support and/or confusion coming in from many corners of the globe.

So, to keep the conversation rolling, here are my annotated notes, thoughts and recaps from the past few days of opinions rolling in:

This past Saturday was  Media Democracy Day in Vancouver and around Canada.

While I was otherwise indisposed, the Vancouver event at the Public Library looked like a huge success (because of or in spite of the beautiful autumn weather), our man Scales was among the participants on stage on a panel to discuss "The Battle for New Media and Open Communication" along with Micheal Tippet of Now Public and others.

He used his experiences covering Olympic Games in Turin and Beijing as reference points to discussthe changing landscape of news gathering.

Our pal Tris Hussey was among the active audience live twittering the event to provide some excellent stream of collective consciousness reportage in: Journalism in a time of Big Media Domination & The Battle for New Media and Open Communication.

Tris captures snippets of the conversations ranging from landscape change and market woes to non-rights-holders covering the Olympics. Here's a taste:

"You won’t recognize the media landscape in three years" Michael Tippet edit • delete

Scales still "super editor" and "unofficial" China desk editor on NowPublic edit • delete

Streets of Torino, they couldn’t talk about the Olympics, IOC shut them down. Hmm. Guess you have to pay to cover, eh? Became cultural show edit • delete 

Lab with Leo is a technology show filmed in Vancouver. Hosted by the well known Leo Laporte with Matt Harris serving as producer of the show and has been working with Leo for 3 years.

Leo Laporte is well known on TV and from technology forums, a best-selling author of several gadget guides and technology almanacs as well as a TiVo guide. He also hosts The Tech Guy radio show and works on several podcasts on the TWiT.tv network, plus was a host on Call For Help and The Screen Savers.

Raincity's President Kris Krug has appeared on the show many times. He's covered topics like the Creative Commons licensing, Drupal, Facebook applications and more and recently filmed three more episodes covering the way bands are use content management systems as a way to power their new fan sites, growing open source Internet business in China, and the way corporate PR strategies have changed with new media.