Although Boston, Austin and Silicon Valley are home to both companies and personalities considered to be heavyweights in the Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Technology, Open Leadership, Social Learning and Social Media spaces, — phew — I’d like to introduce you to Vancouver – or, as I’d like to rename it, Vancoolver.

Dan, who's quickly impressed me as one of the smartest people I've ever encountered in a few all-too-brief meetings, has a terrific list of some of the companies and people who are making Vancouver's innovation scene sizzle. (Disclosure: my wife and Social Signal co-conspirator Alex is on that list. And by "disclosure", I mean "bragging".)

What I love about this list is that it isn't just the usual suspects. Check it out and see if you don't discover someone new and fascinating from our little burg.

Kris Krüg has a fascinating post about the work he's doing with UNAIDS, and in particular a project called CrowdOutAIDS. It aims to crowdsource strategies on youth and HIV, drawing heavily on social networks.

Check out CrowdOutAIDS — there's a lot to like here, including the four-step diagram right at the top. (I'm also very partial to that sign-up form, and may have to steal emulate the field design sometime.)

4) Be Consistently Optimistic

I'm not saying you should be naive, but following someone who has enthusiasm about what they're doing, their community, connections and technology is a lot more fun than a sourpuss. Good early adopters and social networkers that see holes in a product expect they'll be filled in time, rather than complaining and making a list of open demands. Supporting the community's ideas, families, projects and interests is all good.

You've probably heard most of this advice in bits and pieces across the web. But I've never found it as concisely phrased as Louis does here, with 10 principles for building a social following on pretty much any platform. He's thinking social media sites, but honestly? This will serve you well in face-to-face interactions, too.

And number four in this list, excerpted above, is a real winner. Louis focuses on products, but I'd extend this to everything from your own life to the world around you. I like people who can offer an informed critique (especially if it includes suggestions), but I'm a lot less likely to follow someone who is relentlessly negative. Many people who believe human society is heading in a profoundly wrong direction still leaven their analysis with signs of hope and positive alternatives.

Put it this way: you're posting something, even something negative, because you might think it could do some good, right? How about spelling out what that good is?

Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we’d all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago.

But then armed officers stormed my plane, threw me in handcuffs and locked me up.

A chilling account of running afoul of another passenger's paranoia - and the security apparatus it set in motion - in post-9/11 North America.

I manage to avoid a whole lot of horseshit because I'm white, male, straight and middle-class. It gives me a truly skewed view of the world; pieces like these serve as corrective lenses.

If you recognize that iconic logo, so closely associated with one of the toughest fights for social justice in North American history, then you've been affected by the work of Richard Chavez.

The younger brother of United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, Richard designed that logo, based on an Aztec eagle. He also mortgaged his home to launch a credit union for farm workers and helped build the union into a force to be reckoned with, in one of the great David-and-Goliath stories of modern history.

He wasn't a professional designer, but that logo has seen the union through five decades. And there aren't too many of us who can say the same about the work we're doing today.

Richard Chavez died yesterday at the age of 81. His logo is still going strong.

I really hate that whole philosophy of what makes a good comedian or artist. I don’t believe that in order to be funny, you need to be in pain, addicted to something or a dude.

I did a double-take coming out of Blenz this morning, having put in a few solid hours of work and arranged with Morgan — Social Signal's operations manager — to meet up later in the day.

And yet there, in the WestEnder newspaper box outside of the Blenz entrance, was Morgan's face on the front page.

I have an "I knew her when..." blog post all queued up and ready to go in a year or two. I might have to bump up the publication date.

This Sunday's issue of the News of the World will be the last edition of the paper, News International chairman James Murdoch has said.

In the past few days, claims have been made that the paper authorised hacking into the mobile phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and the families of 7/7 bombing victims.

Mr Murdoch said proceeds from the last edition would go to good causes.

I've often wondered if a commercial organization can disgrace itself so thoroughly that the only resort is capital punishment.

I don't mean executing the people responsible. (Personal accountability is critical, of course, and consequences including prison should be on the table for illegal behaviour.) I mean death for the organization as an organization, and particularly for the brand.

The continued survival (even profitability) of, say, Goldman Sachs and the tobacco industry might make you think the answer is a sad no. (Or, if you're a believer in maximizing profit at any cost to society, a happy no.)

But then along comes something like today's news that News of the World is about to bite the dust, and it gives me some hope.

True, what the paper did pales in comparison to the lethal toll of a Bhopal disaster or the environmental catastrophe caused by the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And you could certainly see this as a cynical bit of damage control by a company hoping to avoid further scrutiny.

But there's some comfort in the fact that the public can become so disgusted with an organization's conduct that its brand becomes toxic — not just to society, but to its owners.

Welcome to the HTML Email Boilerplate. This website and its sample code creates a template of sorts, absent of design or layout, that will help you avoid some of the major rendering problems with the most common email clients out there — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. While not plug and play (you know, you'll have to do some work ;-), it will provide some helpful examples and snippets that will keep your email design rendering as true-to-form as possible.

Here's a terrific free tool with thoroughly commented code, to help you ensure your next email newsletter looks as gorgeous in Gmail as it does on Yahoo.

I love that people share this kind of knowledge.