This is what happens when you celebrate community, volunteers, fans, and those active in hockey: HockeyStars.com is a new social networking portal focused on all of these important people when it comes to local minor hockey players in BC, the real stars of the game.

HockeyStars is devoted to the real stars of the game. It’s a social networking site for minor hockey players, coaches, parents and volunteers that will officially launch to the public in time for the 2008-09 hockey season.

To kick off in style, they’re looking for your photo or video, on or off the ice, of your personal best hockey moment for the My Best Hockey Highlight contest.

All you need to do is head to the site from May 5 to June 9, 2008, upload your content along with a brief story (250 words max) that depicts your Best Hockey Highlight and you could win an XBox 360 or a $1000 Citizens Bank gift card Visa. Also, if you head to the site and place votes on the content that’s up there you could also win a “voters” prize pack including a Sony DVD Camcorder.

As a super cool added bonus gift, if you drop a comment on THIS blog post by midnight on Monday May 19th, you’ll be entered to win these two hockey books authographed by the author, Jason Farris:

Hockey Play by Play with Jim Robson (legendary Canucks broadcaster) and Hail Cesare (tribute to Cesare Maniago).

So let’s recap shall we?

Step One: Check out the My Best Hockey Highlight contest on HockeyStars.com. If you have some content to share (and are 13 years old and up), upload your photos or videos for your chance to win a $1000 Citizens Bank gift card or XBox 360. If you don’t have content to share, vote on other submissions to win the “voters” prize.

Step Two: Just for checking out the HockeyStars site, leave a comment on this blog post to have a chance at winning the two great hockey books mentioned above.

I’ll draw the winner of the books on Tuesday May 20th, pulling a name at random from all the comments below. A huge hat tip to Nancy Zimmerman for making this possible and for being the best social media for banking evangelist around. Good luck everyone!

I decided to accompany John to work today and be a radio groupie out in Port Coquitlam. It was actually pretty fun for a small-scale promotion and it was for a very good cause. Petland was sponsoring a dog wash, all by donation and proceeds would go to help a young girl with autism get a National Service Dog. Chloe is 9 years old and would benefit greatly from having an assistance dog, unfortunately it costs about $18,000 to obtain, train and raise a dog for two years before it can start helping her out.

This is the first of many events to raise money for her and it seemed pretty successful. For more information about upcoming fund raisers for Chloe, contact Petland in Port Coquitlam.

Earlier on in the day a man stopped by the tent with his dog. After chit chatting for a while we found out he was Gordon Kirkland - acclaimed Canadian author, columnist and entertainer. He shared some amazing stories about his work and colleagues and informed us about the 3-day novel contest in which he’ll be participating, August 31st.

BookTelevision is bringing 12 writers from across Canada to participate in the world’s most grueling literary competition, the “3-Day Novel Contest,” live on national television….

…12 writers will write 12 novels in just 72 hours as they battle crowds, cameras, fatigue, each other, and themselves in the competition to become Canada’s next literary superstar. [BookTV]

It was a pleasure to meet Mr. Kirkland who does have an excellent sense of humour. His most recent book (launched this summer) is, “I May Be Big But I Didn’t Cause That Solar Eclipse” [Amazon.ca].

The 3-day novel writing contest will be live on television (BookTV). Best of luck to Kirkland in writing a novel in 72 hours… I know it just took me about 20 minutes to make up this blog post, so I can only imagine what a task this must be.

My co-worker just sent me a link to an article talking about a book by a U of C professor.

Michael Keren, who has written “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena,” suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.

“Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills,” the author says.

I could start ranting, but seriously what’s the point? We all know why each of us blog, we all have our reasons. Be it personal, informative, geeky, literary, or just for the sake of tapping your fingers on a keyboard and publishing the result for the world to see.

I must admit though, I’m not completely transparent on my blog, I don’t go into details if I’ve had a bad day (except maybe when it has to do with a certain Credit Union) but that’s just me. That could say something about me, I could read into it, but… meh, I don’t really want to.

Keren praises the Internet as a great place for self-expression, but he also suggests that blogs often have the opposite effect by creating feelings of loneliness for those who aren’t lucky enough to reach “celebrity” status.

There are some people out there who are blogging to get recognized, but I’m sure there’s an equal amount of people who do it just to say something, share, and to have an outlet regardless of Technorati ranking or ‘blogebrity’ status.

For all we know this dude could be writing a book just to create a buzz. Maybe he knows if people blog about it he’s succeeded, whether it’s created a positive or negative review. Who knows, maybe we’ll all get the book and read it and it’ll become an Amazon best seller (regardless if its better purpose is that of a paperweight or not). Will he be upset if it doesn’t become popular?

We’re all entitled to our opinions, and I suppose this author is as well. Only thing is, I think he’ll just make more money off his, than I will mine.

My Metroblogging T-shirt arrived today. Being a shiny new City Captain, I’m just getting my feet wet and getting used to a few more responsibilities. Being privy to about 30 emails a day on the worldwide captains email list isn’t the most lovely thing for my inbox but it is interesting to see what’s going on in say, the Bangalore or Manilla blogging world.

The next Vancouver Metblogs meetup is December 12 at the Shawarma place in the Crystal near Metrotown, all are welcome [mbv].

Around the Vancouver girlie blogs (although the content isn’t girlie, and the bloggers are all fine women)…

Fellow Metroblogger Maktaaq shares the toils and frustrations of work, dreams, finances and novel writing in her usual delightfully amazing and detailed fashion [Maktaaq].

Gus Greeper is reading Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and sparking an interesting comment thread [IfSpockIsEnough]. Basically what are your 7 ideal Jeopardy categories. The next step is to read jPod, which I completed this past summer [ms604]. I still think it grows on me more each time I think about it.

Loxy, being an Oiler-lovin chick, continues to give the Vancouver Canucks second chances at becoming her adopted home-town team, but by the way we’ve been playing lately, it ain’t lookin’ good [YouAreABlog].

Mel from 2BitStudios, making us totally jealous while having awesome snowboarding days at Whistler, has gone country (more…)