More than 2,000 people have signed up to be “fans” of the CBC page on Facebook. As more and more people add the page to their profiles, their friends see it and add it as well, leading to exponential growth, especially in the last few days. Here’s some statpr0n:

One of the things I think is really neat is it’s now relatively simple to conduct a large-scale focus group on topics relating to the CBC. Considering a 12-person panel from a research company costs thousands of dollars, getting access to 2,000 people (granted, not with the statistical assurances) for free is pretty darned good.

I just found this interesting program online. It lets you listen to CBC Radio on Sirius (okay, any Sirius channel) on your Mac. If you have a Mac and a Sirius satellite subscription, try it out and let us know if you like it. [discussion board]

Click here to download your own CBC Radio 3 desktop wallpaper!

If you’re with a CBC show and have your own desktop wallpaper you’d like put up on this blog, just attach it to a Groupwise message to me (Tod Maffin).

I’ve put together a special-edition “Inside the CBC” browser toolbar to give you quick access to CBC resources. The toolbar looks like this:

You can search right within the toolbar, check the latest headlines from Inside the CBC without going to the page, and even access direct areas of the CBC web site, including popular shows and podcasts.

On the right-side of the toolbar, you can listen to CBC Radio One and even chat with other listeners.

Install the Inside the CBC Toolbar (IE, Firefox)

Note: This is not an official thingy by the Corp; just something I made on my own, so if it breaks your computer, neither the Corp nor I can offer anything other than condolences.

It may not look like much but the folks at The Hour are starting to build a little garage in the virtual world Second Life.

I’m Davo Nabob in there. Do say hi. (Yes, I’m the avatar in the CBC-logo’ed Superman outfit, pictured to the right.)

If you run your own blog or web site and want to keep your readers up to date about the goings on at the CBC, just make a quick sidebar widget and pop it onto your blog and the three latest headlines from this site will show up directly on your site! You can can customize the look of it and it only takes a minute.

Here’s a handy little thing — this CBC Radio widget will sit unobtrusively on your desktop and whenever you want to tune into CBC Radio, you just click it. In the preferences, you can even tune into any of the live streams you prefer, giving you the ability to timeshift. It requires the free Yahoo! Widget engine, but I find it really very handy.

If you use Google’s personalized home page, you may want to add these CBC widgets to your home page. It’s an easy one-click to do!

This is pretty cool. The folks at CBC Television are posting a bunch of clips from the TV drama Intelligence and are inviting mashup and remix gurus to go at it to create a new promo. If they like yours you could win a MacBook Pro with Final Cut Studio (holy crap — when did we move from “you win a mug!!!” to this?! ) Even the honourable mentions will get a 30 GB iPod each.
     Here are the raw files and examples you’ll need.

I’m a big fan of radio, so it’s no surprise that I’m enjoying listening to the various Sirius channels. But I’ve got one big problem with Sirius — they don’t make it easy to find out what’s on right now, or what’s coming up on the various channels.
     I suppose the common wisdom is that people just tune into a channel and stay put — that they’re passive listeners, happy to be spoon-fed whatever comes next. I’ve always thought that theory is wrong: I believe fans of radio would love a proper radio guide, like TV Guide, so they can plan their listening.
     For instance, I’d love to visit a web site and look up what’s on Sirius right now. But Sirius’s very pretty web site makes this a miserable task involving many, many clicks. And the Canadian version of Sirius’ site barely have any schedules listed so you’ve got to track them down on the U.S. site.

To help make it easier, I’ve set up a quick-and-dirty unofficial Sirius listening guide. Please note that it covers the Canadian lineup of channels.
     It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what Sirius offers. Here’s hoping this will fill the gap until they come out with a decent listening guide of their own.

UPDATE: Mark from CBC pointed out that a better directory already exists. (Maybe I should try a Google search in the future to see if something exists before I try to duplicate the wheel! {grin}) It’s Sirius Radio Schedule Grid. There’s also It’s On Sirius, but it just displays the metadata for each channel so, not as helpful. Thanks Mark!

One of the groovalicious features coming in the forthcoming Mac operating system is the ability to create instant dashboard widgets for your favourite web site (which, it goes without mentioning, is CBC.ca).
     Now, you can get the functionality without waiting for Leopard. The author of this blog has made a simple widget that does that. (How come nobody thought of this first?)
     In the example above, I’ve set the region to the leading news section on CBC.ca and it will automatically refresh every hour. Cool.

A lot of people use Google’s excellent Gmail email service. I do and swear by it. But did you know that you can have it display headlines from CBC.ca and this blog automatically at the top of your email list? Take a peek at the image below:

Once you set it up, Gmail will automatically cycle through headlines from this blog and CBC.ca, and any other web site or blog, for that matter. (Note that Google will also display occasional single-line ads in this spot if you choose to turn it on.)
    It’s dead-easy to set up. Just click Settings at the top of your screen, then Web Clips on the orange settings screen. It’ll look like this:

In the box on the left, type in: http://feeds.feedburner.com/insidethecbc and click Search. It’ll ask if you want to add it (the answer, of course, is Yes!) and you’re done! Enjoy!