The Sunburst Award is holding a charity auction next weekend at Ad Astra, Toronto’s regional science fiction convention (I’m one of the guests of honor, which is amazingly cool, given that Ad Astra is the first con I ever attended, volunteering as a gofer in exchange for free admission).

The Sunburst honors the best Canadian sf book of the year with a $1,000 cash prize and national prestige (my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, won the prize a few years back). It’s an award I’m glad to support — Canadian sf is incredibly vibrant and exciting.

I’ve donated naming rights for one of the characters in a forthcoming novel to the auction — the book that was partially syndicated under the title Themepunks last year on Salon. It’ll be out from Tor in 2008, and the winning bidder can have slap her/his name on either the female or the male lead.

Hope to see you at Ad Astra — and at the auction!

– 10th-anniversary statue of The Sandman, new in his box, all 12½ inches of him, with signed certificate of authenticity
-signed copy of Neil Gaiman’s novel Fragile Things (hardcover, first U.K. edition)
—signed first edition of Windflower, by Nick Bantock and Edoardo Ponti
—signed copy of Jeff Hoke’s non-fiction book The Museum of Lost Wonder, with special bonus not available in stores!
—two signed prints donated by Martin Springett: one from Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham and one Guy Gavriel Kay-related image
—AND a character named after the winning bidder in Cory Doctorow’s next novel.

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If it’s Thursday, this must be North Carolina! Just as soon as I finish breakfast, I’m off to give a couple speeches here in the Raleigh-Durham region:

• 5PM: Duke University, Love Auditorium, Levine Science Research Center — “From Myspace to Homeland Security: Privacy and the Totalitarian Urge”
• 2PM University of North Carolina, Wilson Library — a talk on copyright

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Midnight.Haulkerton, a “Grok Rock” band from Australia, has very kindly recorded a song inspired by my new short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present — just the first of more to come. This is about the coolest, most flattering thing ever.

Future shock, present shock, we’re already in past shock
Too much to go to and nowhere to go, we’ve got way too much to know
Something in the future’s already in the past, the present’s an illusion
Cos the world is spinning way too fast

Overclocked, clock shock
This watch never stops
Overclocked, time’s fast
You’ve been blasted in the past

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Just a reminder: I’m coming to North Carolina this Thursday, 22 Feb 07. I’ll be giving a talk on privacy at Duke University at 5PM and a talk on copyright at the University of North Carolina at 2PM. Hope to see you there!

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Other upcoming events: Ad Astra Toronto Mar 2-4; Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Mar 8/9.

Irene Delse has produced a French fan-translation of my Forbes article, Giving it Away.

Reminder for Angelenos: Tonight is my Los Angeles book-launch for Overclocked, my new short story collection. It’s at 7PM at Secret Headquarters, the best comic-store in town. Hope to see you there!

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Other upcoming events: Duke University, Feb 22; University of North Carolina, Feb 22; Ad Astra Toronto, Mar 2-4; Simon Fraser U, Vancouver, Mar 8/9

What the Internet is showing us is that there is a great deal of things that we previously believed to be non-substitutable that are in fact quite substitutable. News, right. Straight up news reportage. If the New York Times puts up a pay wall, you simply go to Google News and you can find another news site that carries essentially the same story that doesn’t have a pay wall or where you don’t have to register and still can get the same information. So to the extent that the New York Times long-term business fortunes rely on this strategy that even though people come to them, even though they are harder to get to than anyone else, because the brand New York Times is more valuable, I think is a doomed strategy. And for artists this is really becoming the case. Where I sit down to do something in front of my computer to kill an hour I can look at pornography, I can read a novel, I can get into instant messaging, I can play a massively multiplayer on my role-playing game and they are all one click away to finding the thing that’s just as fun as the thing that I was planning on doing. If the thing that I was planning on doing costs too much, or is to hard to get to, is a pain in the ass, or is down, it is actually getting easier every day to find something else to divert yourself with for an hour or two, or day, or whatever, and something that’s just as good, something that’s just as educational, uplifting, interesting.