Buzz Canuck's 500th Post and Canada's Top Pick 20 Web 2.0 Sites

500 is a nice round meaty number to celebrate anything - 500 friends on Facebook separates the social wheat from the chaff, 500 miles is a sufficient length for a championship car race, 500 home runs or 500 hockey goals is a sure ticket into the Hall of Fame, 500 days on the job separates a corporate savvy CMO from a fired one...and so it is with my 500th post, I mark a decent-sized user generated milestone.

When I started this blog up, it was based out of passion - an unmitigated passion for 5 things:
- the belief in the power and influence of peer generated content, insight, support and advocacy
- an instinctive curiosity for why people talk, why ideas spread and why conversations happen
- a pride and calling card for the company I founded Agent Wildfire as one of the most innovative marketing, media and research firms and wanting to provide some thought leadership on behalf of it
- a patriotic love for cool, interesting ideas, people, companies and trends happening north of the border whose stories, given the weight of U.S. culture domination online and offline, never get told
- the feeling that if you're not practicing what you preach, that if you're not collaborating and sharing vs. competing and monopolizing, networking and socializing vs. hiding and cliquing and if you're not challenging yourself to new ideas and expressing them - than you just don't understand the new economy that well

I hope I'm achieving that, some weeks it's clear that I am, others less so. Simply for those of you who have stopped by to Buzz Canuck, readers, browsers, blogging brethren, commenters, fans and critics - thank you! Thank you for liking my content whether you agreed with it or not, thank you for ignoring my grammatical offences and malaprops and thank you for caring enough for what an old economy-marketeer- turned-new-economy-firestarter had to say about the marketplace, culture and world we live in.

On the same milestone note, I'd like to praise the list of Canadian web 2.0 sites that were recently evaluated as our country's best. As mentioned in a previous post, although we may not have a world of VC money or innovation capital in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or any other parts of our tundra, Canada has an undeniable world of entrepreneurial talent north of the 49th parallel.

I was therefore extremely glad to be considered among KPMG and Backbone Magazine's panel of 10 auspicious judges and actually spent a good deal of time getting more familiar with these disruptive  2.0-based companies below, they deserve all the plaudits they get.

Here they are for good measure (congrats also on KPMG and Backbone for this venture and specifically Elaine Pratt and Steve Dietrich for wrangling this initiative together , my hope is it continues) :

The PICK 20 Winners

1. Club Penguin
www.clubpenguin.com
A virtual world for kids

2. FreshBooks
www.freshbooks.com
An online invoicing and time tracking service that “saves you time and makes you look professional”

3. ConceptShare
www.conceptshare.com
An online design collaboration space that allows users to share, discuss and mark up designs for online review

4. Cambrian House
www.cambrianhouse.com
The home of a large crowdsourcing community

5. Smallthought Sytems’ Dabble DB
www.dabbledb.com
A site that helps people create online databases

6. Octopz
www.octopz.com
Online collaboration built for creative professionals

7. Open Text
www.opentext.com
An enterprise content management company

8. Kaboose
www.kaboose.com
Crafts, recipes, games, health, holidays, parenting and more

9. Standout Jobs
http://standoutjobs.com
A suite of Web-based recruitment tools

10. NowPublic
www.nowpublic.com
NowPublic is a crowdsourced media outlet

11. blogTO
www.blogto.com
A daily blog about Toronto covering “music, film, arts, people, places and other happenings”

12. Jiibe
www.jiibe.com
For people considering a career move, “making better decisions for a happier life”

12. Something Simpler
www.somethingsimpler.com
Unique functional applications that process vast streams of real-time Web information

14. Mob4Hire
www.mob4hire.com
A bidding system for mobile application testing

15. MovieSet
www.movieset.com
Premier online destination for behind-the-scenes access to films in production

15. b5media
www.b5media.com
A blog aggregator that claims more than 350 blogs and 15 vertical channels 

17. SmartHippo
www.smarthippo.com
A community-created site that compares rates on U.S. mortgages and other financial services

18. ThoughtFarmer
www.thoughtfarmer.com
An intranet for intranet-haters

19. Protagonize
www.protagonize.com
A collaborative fiction Web site

20. Store Ops-Center
www.opterus.com
On-demand service enabling two-way communication/task mgmt. between head-office & retail locations

Take a bow Maple Leaf 2.0 and if you take one piece of advice - spend some time at universities and  young executive seminars and pass along what you know to the next Canadian crop of Stars & Stripes, Union Jack, Rising Sun and Lotus Land world beaters.

I look forward to meeting all the winners at the 1st annual Pick 20 awards on September 16th in Vancouver and September 22, 2008 in Toronto.