The first job listings for Pixar’s future studio in Vancouver, British Columbia have appeared on the web (here and here) at two independent websites (they’re not yet posted on the careers page at Pixar.com).

The positions Pixar is seeking to fill are Manager of Information Systems, Production Manager, and Layout Artist. The Production Manager will report to the general manager of the Vancouver studio and their producer in Emeryille.

Each of the listings term the satellite studio Pixar Canada, a “wholly-owned subsidiary of Pixar Animation Studios”. As we’ve known since the project was announced, “the Vancouver studio will produce short-form animation focusing on legacy Pixar characters from films such as Toy Story and Cars”.

A well-placed source confirms that the new campus will be up and running “sometime in 2010″.

[VIA Pixar Blog and Facebook (thx Roger)]

If you missed it yesterday Major League Soccer is coming to Vancouver in 2011 [mbv], and you can reserve your right to be the first in line for seasons tickets starting tomorrow at the official site of Vancouver’s embryo of an MLS team [vm11].  Meanwhile the Seattle Sounders, who last year played in the United Soccer Leagues (USL) first division with the Whitecaps, played their first game in the MLS having made the jump to the big leagues this year.

They beat the New York Red Bulls, though I haven’t been able to figure out whether or not former Arsenal winger and Calvin Klein underwear model Freddie Ljungberg played for them [av].  He’s been nursing an injury, and basically has spent the last few years of his career in various states of injury.  Arsenal fans will remember him fondly, especially for this great goal in the FA Cup against Chelsea [yt].  Here’s another video of it and this one includes Ray Parlour’s goal [yt] and some nice shots of Tony Adams being Tony Adams and thus awesome.

Hmm… sorry wrong blog for that sort of thing.

After years of rumours [mbv] it seems like Vancouver is going to get an Major League Soccer (MLS) franchise.  Granted it’s at a slightly low point for the MLS, after the David Beckham experiment which was meant to prove that soccer in America was on its way to becoming as much of a force as it is in Europe has failed.  Beckham’s decided he prefers playing in the semi-retirement league that is Series A in Italy and is paying out of his own pocket to stay there.

 Meanwhile what this means for the Whitecaps we’re not sure.  The ownership group of the new team is largely the same as that of the Whitecaps with owner Greg Kerfoot heading the group that paid the $35 million dollar fee for an MLS franchise, but it seems like it’s not a sure thing that the new team will be called the Whitecaps and there’s clearly not enough soccer support to keep the two teams going in Vancouver. 

The new team will play in BC Place as opposed to Swangard, because if you can’t sell out Swangard you’re might as well go big and not sell out  BC Place.

The example of Toronto FC [mbv] shows that a Canadian city can support professional soccer, but the population and demographics are a lot different in Toronto than they are Vancouver.  The success of the new MLS team is hardly a sure thing, on or off the pitch.

Of course now this also means that there’s no way that we’ll ever get any sort of media accreditation for the Whitecaps.  While the team is great at calling me back to renew my season tickets, they’ve never once returned an email or a call about press accreditation for covering the Whitecaps games.  Any of the photos for the posts on the team I’ve taken have been with a camera that I’ve learned how to smuggle into games.

As a former (damn economy) season ticket owner I hope the new team succeeds.  I do think Vancouver hast the potential to support another major league sports franchise in town, and this will certainly be less of a fiasco than the Grizzlies were, and I am very eager for some higher level soccer to be played in town.  Even if there will be no David Beckham.  Even if I have to assemble my camera in a washroom stall so that I can cover the games.

So if you’re a regular reader of Metroblogging Vancouver, or someone whose looking to make a splash in the local blog scene, then we’re looking at you and for you. We’re looking at you through your monitor right now, so don’t do anything weird or alarming.

What we’re peering out at the world for is for additional authors, the brave women and men who are willing and able to write about Vancouver three or more times a week. Whether you want to write about the great sandwich shop you found, or that political issue that’s been bugging you we’re offering you a platform and an audience.

So if you’re interested in writing for Metroblogging Vancouver then email me at jefferysimpson at mac dot com and let me know. Once you’ve passed our very official tests, which consists of giving me your email address and promising not to just use us to advertise your porn site, you’ll be an official Metroblogging Vancouver author.

Act now, don’t delay and remember this offer is not valid in the Province of Quebec or in conjunction with any other sale, offer or coupon.

If you remember back during the summer much was made of Hasbro’s new Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition game opening up voting for cities to become properties on the board.  Though it sort of loses the original intent of Monopoly, since you clearly can’t own an entire city (someone needs to check the continuity of the Monopoly-verse), it got the game a lot of publicity for a few weeks as citizens of numerous cities tried to get their home town on the board.

Vancouver got on along with Montreal [mbm] and Toronto [mbt][cbc], with Montreal landing the coveted role as the Boardwalk property.  Don’t take too much away from that, Belgrade is a higher priced property than Vancouver and well they’re still getting over being the centre of NATO bombing during the Kosovo War.  Well, maybe they do deserve it more than we do.  The point is we did beat out Toronto.

The new iPhone version of Monopoly is based on the Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition and has our city included and once again we’re better than Toronto.

About time right?!

You’d think they do something like this after the question of whether a suspect died as a result of being tasered?

Well at least this is is headed in a better direction.  Testing has shown that the voltage occasionally exceeds the specs.  In addition to police, this includes corrections officers, sherriff’s services, and transit officials.

More details over at CTV

Story via Macbreak Weekly [twt].

As with everything there are different levels of nerds.  On one hand you have the people who line up twenty minutes early so that they can get into an early showing of the latest comic book inspired movie like Iron Man; they’re the daytripping nerds.  Maybe they’ve named their dog after Albert Eienstein or made a Back To The Future reference in a blog post, they’re kind of dorky but you don’t need to be afraid of them.

Then there’s the people who not only continue to use a ten year old handheld computing platform, but self-maintain their devices and hold conferences for them.  That’s right, ten years ago Apple stopped selling the Newton and apart from a now confusing joke on The Simpsons about handwriting recognition software, there’s not a lot of evidence that it was ever around.

You know apart from the Alpha Geeks who cling to it because… well I suppose because it’s either that or buy somthing new.  And no, I doubt anyone is saving money by keeping their Newton at this point.  If anything running a Newton is probably more expensive than buying a newer PDA, and certainly attending a conference about it is not a cost saving maneuver.

That’s right next July Vancouver plays host to the WWNC: 2009, the Word Wide Newton Conference [wwnc] and they’re looking for speakers.  So if you’ve been Montgomery Scotting a Newton so that it stayed active, you’ve got a chance to meet your own kind, trade stories and run web serves together. 

Whatever it is you Alpha Nerds do.

Prime Minister Harper is in town doing the campaign thing.  I didn’t realize this until I tried to go home after work and found a man holding a very large sign that linked Harper with big oil.  I went up to my apartment and within three minutes someone had set off a very loud alarm across the street which continued on for about forty minutes, stopping only so that the same sound system could play “Amazing Grace”.

The protesters unfurled a banner, wore a polar bear costume and generally… well protested.  What they were on about, apart from the environment is good and Harper is bad, I’m not sure.  The news networks leapt all over them, so I’m sure their manifesto will be broadcast this evening just before the NHL pre-season scores.

Remind me to tell my Stephen Harper story later this week, the one where I had to interview him while drunk.  I was drunk, he presumably was sober.

Pictures of the protest, taken from my balcony, can be found here [fkr].  Please respect the Creative Commons do-dad if you want to use them.

to celebrate their ten year birthday Google has put their oldest available search index online. Now for a limited time you can search their database that was active in 2001 [g01] as well as my hilariously ugly Matthew Good Band fansite and various student paper stuff [g01]. What will you find if you do? Well for starters you’ll find one of my first blogs [g01] as well as the fact that that other Jeffrey Simpson (a senior writer at The Globe and Mail) had a slightly larger web presence than I did, even though I kind of figure that he had no idea what the internet was at that point.

Give the search a try, and see what comes up. In 2001 for example there was no iPod. What a backwards age that must have been.

Vancouver comes up with not one of the very popular blogs that dot our digital landscape now, at least not on the first page. Who does show up? Well the Vancouver Grizzlies [g01]. The closest thing to the social networking sort of sites that we all laud now [mbv] is a now defunct page for the local chapter of IndyMedia.

These days you can’t throw a rock into the air without hitting someone trying to sell their SEO (search engine optimization) skills or a blogger fretting about Page Rank. 2001 seems so quaint and unspoiled, like an episode of Road to Avonlea.

Maybe I shouldn’t be sarcastic with the title, maybe they do know the internet. I mean they at least know the fundamental fact that the best way to get traffic is to mention people by name. It’s the same thing we used to do in the student press, a front page picture of a rock band would only get picked up by fans of that band but a front page picture of a bunch of students would get picked up by the students, their friends and anyone who wanted to sleep with any of the students pictured.

It was circulation gold.

So when NowPublic, the people who don’t seem to understand Creative Commons licenses so spam you four times a week on Flickr asking to use your photos, the Vancouver Sun must have thought “Hey NowPublic is already repurposing all of our content as large block quotes and calling it ‘Citizen Journalism’ we might as well get involved in a link baiting scheme with them.”

And thus was born the link baiting list of Vancouver Top 20 most influential bloggers. A list that’s been run in other cities, and finally makes it up to Vancouver. Now the one thing that they’ve improved over previous cities is that NowPublic at least now gives outgoing links to the winners’ blogs whereas before the links just redirected to other pages on NowPublic and the bloggers were asked to sign in and edit their own NowPublic profile and thus by simply having a NowPublic account were counted as NowPublic contributors. In the Vancouver list they actually figured out the internet enough to realize that if you’re writing about someone you should probably link to them.

Which you might note is not what I’m doing, but that’s only because it’s tacky to link to link bait.

Now of course this is the internet, and egos are involved so the list instantly set off, well how would I say it, complaining about rank [mg], noting that the list misspelled their name [bh] which I think if you’re going to make a big fuss about honouring people you’d better at the very least spell their name right and of course celebrating [rr].

That’s not to say that the people on this list don’t deserve recognition. Unlike LA’s list there’s no total tools on the Vancouver blog scene, and everyone on this list that I’ve ever met and dealt with has always proven to be very kind and giving of their time. Two of them Rebecca Bollwitt [m604] and Travis Smith [hs] were founding bloggers here at Metroblogging Vancouver and both Darren Barefoot [db] and Alfred Hermida [rr] have been kind enough to speak with me for interviews in my freelance work.

The problem with the list is that it’s just a call for incoming links. As Sean Bonner, Metroblogging co-founder and member of LA’s list pointed out [mbla]:

There’s no question that a good number of people on that list have notable online presence but that’s very different than being influential. Having a few thousand people follow you on twitter because occasionally you say something amusing, or having a bunch of people listing you as a contact on flickr because you post interesting photos does not make you influential. These folks all do things online a lot, but does that mean they know what they are talking about? I’m on that list and that’s a total sham. Anyone who reads what I have to say knows I’m full of shit most of the time, so I’m certainly not influential. I’m not knocking anyone else on the list, they all have their own audience for sure, but if you look there’s not a lot of overlap in which audiences those are which might suggest NowPublic was trying to cast a wide net as it’s pretty safe to assume most of these folks might mention this “award” and link back to NowPublic, which again is obviously the point in the first place.

Now of course it’s easier for Bonner to point out the flaws with the list than it is me because the easy criticism is that I’m simply jealous that I didn’t make the list. Right, because I wanted NowPublic to give my name and contact information to their marketing company like they did in previous cities [sb] for future spamming. Though one has to ask where Sean Orr is on the list, since love him or hate him people read Sean Orr and the Morning Brew [br].

Me? Heck five people read my website and as much ballot stuffing as my mother would have done apparently influencing her is not a big deal. Metroblogging Vancouver isn’t me, isn’t mine and isn’t something that I should get credit for because it’s a team effort. No one person runs this site, or writes its content so to have been put on any sort of list for my work here would have been missing the point entirely. That NowPublic boils Rebecca’s blogging accomplishments down to sometimes being a blogger here, with no mention of her own blog apart from the outgoing link, is a clear sign that a lot of thought went into the list.

But of course that’s the way these lists are. I’ve made enough of them with and without editorial groups helping to know that it’s all just a bunch of hooey. It’s a bunch of people sitting in a room throwing names out, all for their own reasons. At least The Georgia Straight’s Best of List was voted on by readers [gs] and thus the public. (Disclaimer: I freelance for The Georgia Straight).

Again this is not to insult anyone on this list. As far as I’ve ever experienced they’re all incredibly nice people, and influence far more than just their mothers.