Christopher Roy

Salt Spring Island featured on the Today Show. Watch video at mid-way point.

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Voting in our online federal election poll continues today. Early results with 324 votes as of this posting show a very strong lead with Greens getting 85% of the vote, NDP 6%, Conservatives 5%, and Liberals at 3 %. Are the Greens going to get Salt Spring votes in a landslide? Are they better at getting the online vote out? Are there a disproportionate number of Greens that use the Salt Spring Exchange? Or are they just doing a better job connecting with Salt Spring voters? We're not sure. If you have thoughts, please comment on this post. We've notified all local riding representatives with the link to this poll and suggested they promote it with their constituents. We'll keep the poll open until end of day Thursday, April 7th, but so far in the first 24 hours there have been 324 votes logged. Our polling system tracks two methods to ensure that it is very difficult for any one person to vote more than once. If we see any multi-voting patterns we'll remove the votes f…

We're conducting an advance poll for the coming federal election. Take a minute to indicate which party you will vote for on election day. Choose one party listed below and click the 'Vote' button. The polling system permits only one submission per user. We've sent out notices to all political parties represented via email and Twitter to let them know this poll is running and to share it with their constituents. Once you enter your selection, you'll instantly see the current, real-time results of the poll. Which party will get your vote?customer surveys

UPDATE: Tsunami Advisory Lifted The tsunami advisory for British Columbia has been lifted, after the effects of an 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan passed the province's coastline without significant incident. The first effects of the Japan tsunami reached Canada's West Coast at about 7:30 a.m. PT, and wave-height changes were negligible. Federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced the end of the advisory shortly before 8:30 a.m. PT, speaking on CBC Radio. UPDATE: BC bulletin number 002 This is an important bulletin from the provincial emergency notification system. A large earthquake has occurred in the pacific basin near Japan. The West Coast Alaska Tsunami warning centre has raised the alert status to advisory for the following zones of coastal British Columbia: Zone A - the north coast and the Haida Gwaii islands Zone B - the central coast including Bella Bella, Bella Boola and shearwater Zone C - the outer west coast of Vancouver Island from Cape …

Video from the demolition of the old stores in town. Video from escapetosaltspring via YouTube

Sunset Magazine recently honoured Salt Spring Island as one the best places to live on the West Coast of North America! One of the best places to be an entrepreneur, artist and to raise a family. Congratulations Salt Spring! Click here to read the full story.

Would like to invite all those of you who might be going to the Victoria Wordpress camp this weekend for a meetup on the Fulford ferry for those traveling to and from the conference on Saturday. There are a bunch of us leaving on the 7:50 out of Fulford, returning again on 7. If you want to meet up with other Wordpress folks, let's use our travel time together to meet and talk all things Wordpress and to make the most of our time together at the event. Meetup in lounge 4 of the Skeena on either run if you want to connect with others going over for the day.

Last night 70+ islanders came out to the Harbour House to take the next step in this ongoing experiment of exploring how digital, marketing, media and knowledge working professionals could collaborate together on this island to help shape a sustainable, local economy for Salt Spring. Thank you to everyone who made it out on a dark December night. Thank you to the Harbour House for donating appetizers for all. Thank you to Margery Moore from I-SEA for helping to co-ordinate everyone from the Green Drinks community and thank to all our Digital Island collaborators who helped co-organize and promote the gathering; Jon Suk, Phillip Reece, Phil McCluskey, Suzanne Little, Johan Bosman, John Bateman and Pravin Pillay. Our organizing group is going to gather the ideas from last night and will share them back out, along with some suggestions for when our next event will be. Until then, if you are a professional working in the digital economy today consider joining our Facebook gro…

Out the window from where I sit is still a deep white from the usual green. Winter landed with a soft bang this weekend and I wanted to send a special thank you to all of the crews with BC Hydro and working for BC Hydro as well as the Shaw and Telus crews for all their hard work this weekend. There were hundreds and hundreds of homes and businesses without power, many still are and the crew work continues. These are vital services. It takes people to make it all work. Thank you for keeping us here at The Salt Spring Exchange going all weekend. Track all outage updates on at bchydro.com

Calling all Salt Spring social media enthusiasts! If you're using social media services like Facebook or Twitter for business, pleasure or otherwise on Salt Spring come down to Rock Salt and help us overload their brand new wi-fi service and drink some complimentary refreshments they are providing as sponsors. It's curry night at Rock Salt too! Always good food at Rock Salt. Meet some of the people in person you may have been connecting with only online. We'll also share a little about an initiative some of us are working on to create a sustainable, resilient local economy right here on Salt Spring. An economy designed to inspire digital innovation and entrepreneurship which might create better paying work opportunities for our island community. To get us going and inspired, we have some speakers lined up who will each have a ruthlessly fast, but fun, two minutes to share their story on 'why they're using social media' then we'll un-conference the rest of the gathering to se…

Congratulations Salt Spring! The fine folks at the Salt Spring Island Chamber of Commerce have awarded The Salt Spring Community List with the Business Ambassadors of the Year Award! The award was sponsored and presented by Salt Spring Air this past week at ArtSpring and was awarded for promoting quality of life on Salt Spring and the Salt Spring Island brand off-island. So we share this award with you. All of you are Salt Spring ambassadors and without you we would not have grown this site to serve over 12,000 absolute unique visitors per month who now view over 240,000 page views per month. Special thank you Harry Burton for helping to kick start the original mailing list that turned into our site, Kaz Amaranth who kicked off our nomination, the Salt Spring Chamber, Salt Spring Air, all the other recipients of this year's awards and to all of you, our supporters and members. Congratulations again and thank you to all of you for helping to make Salt Spring and this se…