MediaStyle loves great local stories, good design, and cutting-edge tech, which is why we are re-blogging this abridged version of an article I wrote for OpenFile. The entire story can be found here.

Canada is no stranger to independent video games. The movement of art-focused, largely un-financed video game designers has produced some of the most critically acclaimed games of the decade. And Canada is home to award-winning indie studios like Montreal’s Polytron and Winnipeg’s Infinite Ammo.

Since January 2010, a video game design collective called The Dirty Rectangles has earned Ottawa attention in the indie games world by organizing events including monthly video game showcases and 48-hour design challenges called game jams. The Dirty Rectangles, made up of Eric McQuiggan, Justin Dempsey and Derek Ledoux, includes a loose collective of members who meet up to showcase game ideas, share design philosophies and encourage independent game making in the city.

The three graduates of the Algonquin game design program work as Flash developers at local game studio Fuel Industries and design experimental games outside of their day jobs.

“We were all sort of thinking of Triple-A development [as students],” says Dempsey, referring to his hopes of working at a major studio. “Then you get this big [realization] that video games are an art form and that you can push boundaries and be really creative.”

Games to come out of The Dirty Rectangles events include Regrowth, McQuiggan’s game based on the growth cycle of trees after forest fires; The Photograph, Ledoux’s meditation on addiction and isolation; and Life of the Party, Dempsey’s multiplayer game based on cellular automata.

Check out the next next Dirty Rectangles showcase at 8 p.m. at the Avant-Garde on July 20. The Dirty Rectangles can be found on Twitter at DirtyRectangles.

Banner image of The Life of the Party, courtesy Justin Dempsey

Samuel Steward at his tattoo parlor in Chicago in the mid-1950s.

I finished reading one of those “challenging” books this weekend. An extremely well written biography of Samuel Steward called Secret Historian by Justin Spring.

Samuel Steward was an author and a renegade – a key source and muse to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a dear friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and let’s just say this biography of his renegade life isn’t for the faint of heart.

In his early life as an academic he was a well-travelled author and editor. Much later in life, Steward became the official tattoo artist to the then-California-based Hell’s Angels. A tough life would be an understatement. The thing that stood out to me was his obsessive record keeping: we know a lot about gay Chicago in 1920 and 1930 because of his documentation of, well, everything.

I’m left wondering what references the biographers of tomorrow will use to document the rebels and iconoclasts of today. I suppose it’s inevitable 50 years from now we’ll be read passages from massive troves of long Gmail, Facebook conversation chains, private messages, Twitter DMs and computer files. A bit like Steward, we’ve all become archivists with the advent of the digital age – each of us a bit of a secret historian.

A moment in the book truly struck me. As Steward was preparing for his death, he tacked up a note to a bookcase with instructions on what to do with the massive pile of documentation he had amassed.

What kind of instructions can you leave in 2011?

Some of the most comprehensive work on this subject has been created by Adele McAlear. One of her main suggestions is to appoint a “digital executor” – a person in your life you you trust with the passwords to your Internet accounts and the directions on what to do if you should pass. Visit her site to learn more.

Journalists Who Blog is a series where journalists who report daily in Canada’s mainstream media talk about how the participatory web is changing their craft.  Each of these writers have mastered the art of capturing what happened today and reporting online and for an audience tomorrow. I asked blogging journalists three questions about their craft and the evolution of reporting as the industry of news changes.

David Akin is a well-known Canadian political reporter who has been blogging since 2002; he also maintains an extensive vinyl collection (he is digitizing it, of course) and has used many mediums to tell stories. He is one of the few people – perhaps the first (comment if you know others) – to have an iPhone for work use on Parliament Hill.

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

I’ve been blogging since 2002. As for questions about why, let me refer you to “It’s not the blog, it’s the Net.”

“I write; I publish. And that used to be the end of it. Now, I write, I publish and a community of people who have special knowledge or who are deeply interested in the topic amplify, correct, modify, or extend the reportage. For a beat reporter, this is fabulous, because I now have more knowledge about my beat.”

I wrote that in 2005 in a q-and-a with NYU’s Jay Rosen and, after reading it over again in late 2009, my answers still stand.

“…it’s still early day” says Akin

Q: Are you are in touch with more readers and consumers of news because of social media; how does blogging or participating in social media change your reporting or refine your writing?

Do read the essay cited above for more detail but the bottom line is that your blogs, since 2002, and social media have made reporting interactive and it used to be simply a one-way street. Social media has, just as blogs did, increase the velocity of the news cycle but once you get up to speed, that’s not such a big deal. Writing for TV and then returning to writing for print made me a better print writer. I’m not so sure that any social network application has made me a better writer or changed my writing but it’s still early days so we’ll see.

“Print and radio are for lone wolves”, Akin

Q: As the business of gathering news changes and the people who report daily are adapting and learning new tools/skills to thrive – will distinctions remain between online, print, television and broadcast mediums?

Yes. Absolutely. There are very few reporters who can excel in television and excel in print. I believe there are similar skill sets are tapped for radio and print but TV is a completely different beast. TV/video/film takes time, a significantly different approach, and, usually, a team. Print and radio are for lone wolves and good print and radio work can be turned around with a lot fewer people. (And it’s a lot cheaper). Print and radio folks are going to be asked to shoot video but it’s going to look like video shot by, well, print and radio folks. And that may be fine. But to get really excellent work, you need journalists who are specializing in and understand their medium.

This is part three of and ongoing series. Previously featured: Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star and Bill Doskoch of CTV Toronto.

What’s an API and why should you care?

API stands for “application programming interface” (And, no… don’t pronounce it “appy.”  Not cool.)

In the most non-technical terms:  an API is all the technical junk* that’s needed for developers to take information from one place send it through the intertubes and have it pop up somewhere else in a very different format.

* programming routines, data structures, libraries and operating systems services, object classes (and no, I have no clue any of what that is either… this is what application developers are for.)

The Guardian has two primary products in their “The Open Platform“:

The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content.  You can query our content database for articles and then get full content back in formats that are particularly useful for integration with other internet applications.

The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian editors.  You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Guardian isn’t the only newspaper doing this.  The venerable New York Times has a team working on API’s as well.  If you want to stay up-to-date as they release new API’s for various sets of information, they have an open-source technology blog.

Here is what Marshal Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb said on the day NYT launched their API:

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity.  It’s hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper, or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world.  They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in; that’s not a safe bet for the future.

My take

Newspapers with a open-source API can now also charge developers (with commercial intent) for access to their information and eventually newspapers can require all users of the API to join their advertising network. In other words, newspapers are creating new ways to charge for the information they professionally produce.  It’s a good sign.  I think it means newspapers are evolving.  Respected analyst  Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research has more ideas on how the Guardian API can be used.