Last week, a little ripple traveled through my Facebook friends, delivering the news that Mark Dailey, a guy most of the world has never heard of, had died. Dailey was a reporter and news anchor in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the city where I grew up and where many of my friends still live, and as the news passed from status to status, many of us felt unaccountably sad over the loss of someone most of us had never met, while the rest of the online world went on posting pictures of their kids with Santa, complaining about the Maple Leafs and linking to WikiLeaks mirror sites.

In the last week, many Canadian sites and papers have published proper stories about Mr. Dailey (notice I can't call him Mark -- first names are for the Britneys and Angelinas of the world) and so if you are curious about him, get your Google on and have a read, or watch the official Citytv tribute to him, posted on YouTube.