Monthly Archives: November 2007

Journalists don’t check ID

November 30, 2007 – 11:51 pm| Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

Anonymous blogger "Emma", who was recently approached (via email) by Radio-Canada and asked to identify herself for a story, waxes philosophical about the idea of anonymous blogging, especially in the wake of the "Elodie Gagnon-Martin" scandal where an ADQ blogger turned out to be ... maybe ... an ADQ staffer of another name.

As a journalist who writes about blogs (and for that matter other online stories), I see both sides. But what is perhaps being forgotten in all this is the simple matter that journalists don't check ID. Unless they have some reason to believe that you're lying to them, they'll take your word for it that you are who you say you are. Unless you say your name is Hugh Jass (and even then...) or the name of someone they already know, whatever name you give them is the name they'll use.

So with that in mind, what's the point, really? There will always be situations where journalists get tricked and have to apologize, and unless they ask for a driver's license before every interview there's no way to ensure that won't happen again.

Anonymous blogs should be simply identified as such in the news: Take ideas at face value, but trust at your own risk.

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Hydro-Quebec wants more too

November 30, 2007 – 12:14 am| Posted in Business, In the news

Hydro-Quebec

'Tis truly the season of giving. As if transit fare hikes wasn't enough for you, Hydro-Quebec is also asking for fee increases: 2.9% starting in April.

The increase needs to be approved by the government before it can happen. That decision should come in February or March.

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CTV News about to get less Cavallarific

November 30, 2007 – 12:01 am| Posted in Montreal, TV

According to Coolopolis, CTV weatherman Frank Cavallaro's days are numbered, thanks to a decision by management not to renew his contract.

One can guess at why this decision was made: hair not blond enough, boobs not perky enough, insufficient ratings boost from teenage boy masturbation (though I dispute that last one, see below).

But no matter his meteorological credentials or his mad witty-banter skills that he displays with other hosts, Frank has always been a polarizing figure, as evidenced by two Facebook groups: one praising his giant zucchini, another recommending his lynching, that are fiercely competing for membership (28 members in the former, 26 in the latter as of this writing).

Of course, with looks like these, the World's Top Weather Presenter probably won't be out of a job long:

Frank Cavallaro

The news also has a funny timing to it. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the departure of Bill Haugland.

So who's next off the island?

CTV News personalities

Here's a quick cheat sheet of CTV News's big personalities (hey, where's Rob Lurie?), assuming of course that looks is your only criteria. It's ordered by seniority, with the newest members on the left. I'm discounting lead anchors Mutsumi Takahashi and Brian Britt (lower left), since I'm pretty sure they're set for as long as they want the jobs.

UPDATE (Dec. 21): The Suburban's Mike Cohen has some career suggestions for Frank: either radio or a job at CBC.

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Facebook can’t be TRUSTe’d?

November 29, 2007 – 6:47 pm| Posted in Blogosphere, Business, Technology

Looks like a complaint about the insane loops people have to jump through to delete Facebook accounts has prompted independent privacy certifier TRUSTe to investigate.

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Transit fares going up (but down in Laval)

November 29, 2007 – 6:40 pm| Posted in In the news, Montreal, Public transit

$TM

It's about to hit December, which means it's that time of year when the STM announces its fare increases for the coming year. It's required to give 30 days notice of fare increases, so that's why it happens now.

The skinny:

  Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly CAM $66.25 $65 1.9% $36 $35 2.9%
Weekly CAM Hebdo $19.25 $19 1.3% $11 $10.75 2.3%
Six tickets $12 $11.75 2.1% $6.50 $6.25 4%
Cash fare $2.75 $2.75 No change $1.75 $1.75 No change
Tourist card (3 days) $17.00 $17.00 No change      
Tourist card (1 day) $9.00 $9.00 No change      

The STM argues that these fare increases are modest (average of 1.9%, and lower than last year's increases), and combined with a hefty increase in the amount Montreal is giving the corporation will help pay for increased capital expenditures and better services, some of which have already been announced or implemented. These include:

  • Running six trains all day on the Blue Line
  • Replacing 40-year-old train cars (currenty operating on the green line) with new ones
  • Increased metro service (26%), especially before and after rush hour on the green, orange and blue lines
  • Increased bus service on its 30 most popular lines, including the 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu, 18 Beaubien and 24 Sherbrooke
  • Longer service hours for rush-hour expresses 470 Pierrefonds and 194 Rivière-des-Prairies (running both during the day between rush hours), and running the 12 Île-des-Soeurs on Sundays.
  • General budget expenses to cope with a 2% increase in ridership.

Laval cheapens up

  Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly pass $74 $72.50 2.1% ? $43.00 ?
Eight tickets $18 $21 -14% ? $12.25 ?
Cash fare $2.50 $3.00 -17% ? $1.80 ?

The Laval transit corporation, meanwhile, is going in the opposite direction, reducing its single-use fares. A single fare will now be $2.50 instead of $3. There will also be cute little incentives like increasing the age at which children can travel freely from 5 to 11 on weekends and holidays.

The decrease makes sense, especially because now it's cheaper to take the metro from Montmorency to downtown Montreal ($2.75) than it is to take an STL bus down the street ($3). The change will reverse that. (The fact that neither STL nor STM tickets are valid at the Laval metro stations is still a huge annoyance though.)

On the other hand, the price of a monthly pass is going up, from $72.50 to $74. This changes the math of how often you have to use transit for the monthly pass to be worth your purchase. Right now, if you use public transit fewer than 28 times a month (14 round trips), it's better off to get tickets. That number goes up to 33 (16.5 round trips). So in the unlikely event that you travel by bus exactly 14, 15 or 16 times a month, you're now better off getting tickets than passes.

The STL is also dramatically reducing fares on smog days to just $1, if a smog warning is in effect as of 3pm. That sounds great and all, but it takes effect during the evening rush hour, when people either have their cars at work with them or they don't. It will also require some system to inform travellers (and drivers) when the reduction takes place.

Still no word from the AMT, which controls prices of regional transit passes, on what its 2008 rates will be.

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Bid for a date with Patrick Lagacé

November 29, 2007 – 5:46 pm| Posted in Fun, Media, Montreal

Some holiday charity schemes expect you to give away your money with only pride in return. They think you'll be happy just knowing you're a good person. But La Presse has a better idea. They're offering this:

Patrick Lagacé = hot date

Up for auction are 10 lunch dates with their most popular journalists, including cartoonist Serge Chapleau, sports columnist Réjean Tremblay and teen heartthrob Patrick Lagacé (seen above with semi-exposed chest).

Though the auction is far from over, it kind of disturbs me that Lagacé and this woman:

Marie-Claude Lortie

(food columnist Marie-Claude Lortie) are bidding far below this guy:

Pierre Foglia

Pierre Foglia.

What does this say about our society?

The auction continues until Dec. 6. Proceeds go to Sun Youth, the Société Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and Moisson Montréal.

So far the leading bidder for a date with Lagacé is "R. Martineau". Surely you can do better than his paltry $550.

UPDATE (Dec. 6): The auction's over, and despite his incessant pleading on his blog, Lagacé brought in the least of the lots, only $1,900. (Foglia brought in $4,500.) He's still a winner in our book though.

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YASTGB: A trip to the Middle East

November 29, 2007 – 4:58 pm| Posted in Blogosphere

It's been a while since The Gazette launched a new blog. Fresh off the assembly line is From Oil to Dust, a blog of business reporter Allison Lampert's trip to the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. The first post recounts a conversation with a taxi driver in Dubai.

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Canoe.tv: Clueless

November 29, 2007 – 4:09 am| Posted in Media, Opinion, Video, Web design

For the first time ever, a Canadian company is going to be broadcasting videos on the Internet.

At least that's what Quebecor would have us believe. They're calling their new service Canoe.tv Canada's first Internet broadcaster. In its newspapers, it clarifies that it's the first Canadian web broadcaster "to feature specially commissioned programs in English and French", whatever that's supposed to mean.

The service, available in French and English, is basically a YouTube clone, only without any of that user-generated content junk that nobody wants. It also includes live content from networks like LCN, though the live feeds use Windows Media instead of Flash like the rest of the site.

On the French side, its content includes Prenez garde aux chiens, as well as interviews from Larocque-Lapierre, Denis Lévesque and others. Curiously, no Vlog despite the fact that Quebecor Media owns the show and the show is about online video.

The English side is even stranger. There's more content from CBC (Just for Laughs, Rick Mercer, Peter Mansbridge, etc.) than there is from Sun Media's crappy SUN TV. There are, however, plenty of Sunshine Girl videos.

But aside from their arrogance proclaiming to be the first to do something everyone else is already doing (in fact, the entire site was designed by a company called Feed Room), here's why I don't like the site:

  1. There's no way to embed individual videos in blogs
  2. There's no way to comment on videos
  3. Videos are referred to as "stories" in the "bookmark" page (that's how you find out how to link to individual videos), and have 81-character URLs (just long enough to get cut in emails -- YouTube's URLs are half that length, and they have a lot more videos)
  4. Navigation uses some sort of proprietary Flash/JavaScript system which breaks just about every tool my browser has (opening links in new windows, the back button, scrolling)
  5. Videos are undated (probably deliberately, since most of them are old)

If I wanted to design a web video portal that was doomed to failure, it would look something like this. It might get some traffic, thanks to exclusive video (though anything worth watching is available straight from the source), but it's not going to take off.

In short: FAIL.

UPDATE (Nov. 29/30): Some more reaction from the blogosphere:

InfoPresse points out that the site has virtually no fiction content, because of licensing issues. Le Devoir also has an article with detail about the problem.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): Pierre-Karl Péladeau does a very awkward-sounding presentation of Canoe.tv. In it, he says it's a "totally Canadian" site, which is laughable because it was designed by an American company.

He also says that Sun Media can do a better job than the Canadian Television Fund at producing Canadian programming. The CTF funds things like Degrassi: TNG, The Rick Mercer Report, Slings and Arrows, ReGenesis, Intelligence and Little Mosque on the Prairie, all of which won Gemini awards this year. Sun Media funds sucker-generated-content show CANOE Live and ... uhh ... that's about it.

Also, the Sun Family blog points out that 24 Hours Toronto didn't even bother to rewrite the press release announcing the network so it conforms to its style.

UPDATE (Dec. 6): CBC tech guy Bruno Guglielminetti (whose name I can spell without looking it up first) interviews Peladeau for an article in Le Devoir.

UPDATE (Dec. 11): Intruders.tv has an interview with Dominique-Sébastien Forest, who has some long title at Canoe.tv. In the overly long interview that sounds more like a press release until the last few minutes, he notes:

  • They're working on getting a real-time Flash encoder for live feeds, which are currently displayed through Windows Media.
  • Quebecor doesn't consider CBC as competition online. They're just another content provider who will share in the revenues.
  • The site is focused on professional content only (you know, like the Sunshine Girls I mentioned above).
  • It doesn't offer embedding because their content license agreements don't permit them to.
  • Nobody apparently noticed that there are no dates on the videos.
  • They're working on adding comments to videos, like Espace Canoë has
  • He's confirmed that Vlog will be coming back as a web-only show on Canoe.tv.
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Free speech isn’t a right on blogs, it’s a privilege

November 29, 2007 – 3:32 am| Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing, Opinion

There's a minor crisis happening in the Quebec blogosphere over Richard Martineau's blog. He and Canoe are being sued for $200,000 over allegedly libelous comments made by visitors to his blog about lawyer Susan Corriveau.

The concern is over what impact that might have on comment policies at mainstream media sites. Traditional media (especially local empires in Quebec) are still trying to figure out what to do with this whole Internet thing, and are entirely clueless about the implications of user-generated content. They think forcing users to click a button that says "I agree not to post libel" is enough to protect them from liability.

Coincidentally, an earlier post this week by La Presse star blogger Patrick Lagacé mentions that he's asking for tougher moderation of user comments to get rid of the junk and even cap the length of some discussions.

Ironically, both Martineau's blog and Lagacé's blog require user registration before people can make comments. This stands in contrast to websites like The Gazette's which removed the login requirement to encourage more comments. (Then again, even The Gazette is starting to move back -- their only popular blog, Habs Inside/Out, has changed its policy to require moderation of anonymous comments.)

As any forum gets more popular, it starts to see problems it couldn't predict. Spam is the first to show up, in the form of junk sent by computer to advertise some money-making venture. That can be solved by installing a spam filter, requiring registration or manually moderating comments (or a combination of these).

But then comes the problem of real people posting unwanted things. Libel, flame wars, factual mistakes, personal attacks, trolling, copyrighted works, personal information, pornographic images, off-topic comments, the list goes on. The worst ones will get deleted outright. Border cases might get a polite warning from the blogger or moderator.

For some reason, there's the implication that the goal is to have unedited, unrestricted, free communication in the comments section of blog posts. This innocent-until-proven-guilty mentality means that a lot of useless, mean or uninteresting comments get attached to blogs, comments that are of no use to anyone and are a waste of time and space.

Little by little, big bloggers are starting to restrict that freedom and filter out the noise.

Good.

I moderate comments on this blog. I don't require user registration (because I know how annoying it is), and I tend to let most non-spam through. But nobody but me has the right to say what is published here. I have deleted plenty of personal attacks, unhelpful garbage, trolling comments and other junk that doesn't belong here, and I will continue to do so. At the end of the day, I'm responsible for all the content published here, and it's my ass in the courtroom if anything crosses the line.

I welcome criticism (in fact, some of my best comments are those who reject my entire hypothesis and ridicule my interpretation of the facts), but you have to show your work. Comments like "you suck" and "you're gay" have no place here or on any other blog.

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So so so, solidarité? Is that the best you could come up with?

November 28, 2007 – 4:42 pm| Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, On the Net, Video

Montreal writers were out marching today to show solidarity with their WGA friends south of the border. Jack Ruttan has some pictures and video, as does Martine Pagé.

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