Canada 9-5Welcome to Canada 9-5, the September edition!  This blog carnival is about Canadians blogs about business, non-profits, public life and work in general.  Somehow, this edition has a distinctive taste of creativity to it.  Look:

A Winnipeg Music Blog
… with the great name Painting Over Silence. It tells you all about the Winnipeg music scene, which, like all music scenes, is mostly Indie. And thanks to Painting Over Silence, if you’re an Indie fan, you can now find out about your personality.

A couple days back an enlightening article appeared on the CBC that published the findings of a Scottish University’s study aimed at unearthing the link between musical taste and personality.

Musicians for the Environment
The Lake Ontario Waterkeepers, an environmental group, have a newsroom which contains one of the Great Lakes’ largest archives on environmental law and water quality issues. One of the articles aggregated there talks about Canadian musician Sarah Harmer, who co-founded PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), an organization campaigning, according to Wikipedia,

to protect the Niagara Escarpment from a proposed gravel development which would see parts of the wilderness on the escarpment destroyed. To support the organization, she and her acoustic band embarked on a tour of the escarpment, hiking the Bruce Trail and performing at theatres and community halls in towns along the way. A documentary DVD of this tour was released in 2006 as Escarpment Blues.

A Courier in Vancouver
Bulletproof Courier is the brain – or helmet? – child of Greg Crosby, a citizen journalist documenting news and events in downtown Vancouver. Greg says he also enjoys producing catchy video reports of local events and venues he attends, often through the unique perspective of his helmet cam. I haven’t met Greg (yet – hopefully I will next week) but, well, I guess he is a bicycle courier, and I’m glad I finally found such a blog. Bicycle couriers – don’t you think they’re ideal people to have a blog? They see a lot, both on the streets, in the dark corridors of CorporateLand and in the deep, frustrated eyes of law office receptionists. Plus they have their own rather quirky perspective (or am I stereotyping, Greg). Anyway, to stay with the music theme – enjoy Greg’s video of the Star Wars theme on bagpipes.

Marketing
Staying with the creative theme, let’s move from music to creative marketing ideas. Ethnicomm, a marketing blog, has a post on 7 steps towards becoming more creative . I know, there are lots of blog posts out there but what I found interesting that in addition to the usual suspects (“go against the flow”, “be inspired”) there are also ones that I don’t come across that often, for example

Chatter incessantly.
The more you talk, the more you expose yourself to opportunities to have a conversation with someone. And if you tie this in to point #1 above [“go against the flow”], even better. Just be careful that you’re not always talking to yourself. The barista at your local Starbucks, the cab drive driving you to your innovation seminar, the math teacher at your child’s school, the annoyed and tired looking gentleman on that transatlantic flight can all help with your verbal rapid prototyping efforts.

(Uh – what are verbal rapid prototyping efforts?  Is that a new word creation?)

Interior designjelly chairs!
Gaile Guevara has a blog that showcases modern furniture and other interior design articles (artifacts?), like the jelly chairs you can see gracing this post. There are a great many links on her blog, which I really like – what I’m missing, however, is a sense for what Gaile does. Does she have a store? Does she offer her services as an interior designer?

Author and Grow Rich! In 12 hours!
I guess we could still put this in the category of creativity although what Glenn Dietz from Sarnia, Ontario, is mostly about is – you guessed it: making money from books. Not just $27 ebooks but something that brings in $10,000. In this post here about – well I guess it’s about market feedback – if I get it right, he talks about flowcharting one’s thoughts. That sounds interesting. I hope he’ll write more about it.

Canucks Blog – Cory Schneider
I have to confess that I’m pretty much in the dark when it comes to hockey and our Vancouver team, the Canucks. (Although, staying with the topic du jour, I think that sports has quite a lot to do with creativity). Fortunately, that doesn’t prevent me from at least trying to get to know about their online activities; maybe I’ll even learn something? Let’s take Cory Schneider’s blog. I like how he just tells his story; it’s almost an old-fashioned type of blog, just a little diary – perfect for someone with fans who are eager to get a glimpse of the lives of a sports celebrity. In this entry, he talks about getting to know the team – and I even about music! His favourite band right now is 3 Days Grace (also a group I hadn’t known, so thanks for introducing me to them, Cory!)

Hardcore Accounting
Ok, finally here’s a blog that has nothing to do with creativity. (Or does it?) Through MBA Explorer I found out about Krupo’s A Counting School – Hardcore Chartered Accountancy
since 1494. I was curious about “1494” and after googling for a moment, was reminded that was the year when the Italian monk Luca Pacioli, “the Father of Accounting” published the first book written on double-entry accounting. The title of this exciting book is “Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry, and Proportions.” A 500-year bestseller. Hey, maybe we can get Glenn, our author specialist, to write something about it!)

At any rate, here is an interesting entry by Krupo, Trainwreck of economic logic. He compares professional services that cost money with those that make money. Krupo just alludes to these concepts, saying that he would not “fisk” the referenced article that spoke somewhat disparagingly of people who “only” cost money. Thus, Krupo introduced me to the term “fisking”. In all this time in the blogosphere I had never come across it but apparently it’s widely used, meaning “a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story”. At any rate, I would have liked to hear more about this; I think it would make for an interesting conversation about all kinds of things, for example, the difference between long-term and short-term economic benefits, something of interest not just for accountants but ordinary folks, too.

That’s it for this edition!  As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. The next edition will be out on October 18, 2008.