What a great day. The weather in Montreal has been fantastic the last few days -- we've had sunny, hot, clear days with showers at night to clean up the air. It's been really spectacular to be out.
Of course, this is the time of year that Montreal really shines -- festival season. It kicks off this weekend with the Grand Prix du Canada, which includes a giant party in the downtown area, on St. Laurent, and in the rest of the city as well.
In my neighborhood (old and new), we have the Nuit Blanche sur Tableau Noir, a street fair that closes down av. Mont-Royal for auto traffic from June 7 to June 10th. There are huge murals painted on the street itself, and every business, retail outlet and restaurant expands onto the street, while people rove up and down all day and all night.
And soon we get the International Fireworks Festival, which kicks off in only two weeks. One of the hallmarks of summer in this city is that just about every Wednesday and Saturday there's a gigantic fireworks show on Île Ste. Hélène, at La Ronde amusement park. You can see the lights all over the city, and feel the thumping in every house and bar. It's disconcerting and awe-inspiring.
We've already started having Piknic Électronik events, with another going tomorrow. Wow.
tags: montreal travel festivals grand prix nuit blanche fireworks piknicélectronik
SXSW talk online
So, my talk at South by Southwest 2007 is now available online as a podcast. You can get the audio at the sxsw.com site and you can follow along on the OpenOffice.org or Powerpoint slides at Talks/SXSW07.
I liked listening to this recording, although I realize that I need to do some speech practice for future talks. I say "ummmmm..." after every sentence in this talk, which would probably drive me crazy if I were listening to it. I'm surprised that the applause at the end is so strong -- I'd probably have thrown food at this guy.
tags: wikitravel wiki sxsw07 podcast audio
Wikimania
On that note, I'm glad to point out that my and Maj's talk for Wikimania 2007 was accepted. I guess that means we'll be going to deliver it in Taipei.
The subject is Extending wikis with social networking tools. We're going to cover Wikitravel Extra: our motivations for it, implementation issues, and results. It's going to be pretty interesting.
tags: wiki wikimania social networking