I know Getty Images likes to … play … with its photos to enrich their colour (make the Red Wings’ red uniforms look like they’re almost glowing).
But this photo by Bruce Bennett really takes the cake.
Unless Dallas Drake really did get his teeth ultra-whitened before lifting the Stanley Cup. (And Johan Franzen really is a vampire.)
Just a few days after the CBC.ca network went down, Canada.com was out for most of the day yesterday, making the websites of 10 Canadian daily newspapers (the National Post has its own server and was unaffected) inaccessible. Though back up now, the server is running noticeably slow.
Coincidence? Probably. Inside the CBC talks about an internal server data failure, while the rumour at Canada.com is a DOS attack. (Besides, who would want to take out the commies and the fascists?)
Jack Todd needed four tries to file his story yesterday. (Go ahead, make your jokes)
UPDATE (June 3): Kate points out problems at Cyberpresse this morning, wondering if there’s an evil conspiracy afoot. I think it’s Julie Couillard’s exes out to destroy the media.
So apparently some intern law students have filed a complaint against Facebook for having the audacity to allow people to share their personal information with others.
Facebook certainly has privacy issues, as I’ve previously explored, and there’s no doubt that they’re trying to exploit this information for all it’s worth.
But the fact remains that, as Facebook points out, all this information is shared voluntarily. If you don’t want people to know your religion, don’t publicize it online.
The Facebook problem is a problem of user education, not Big Evil Corporations. People need to learn that as the Internet becomes more efficient at connecting and compiling information, they can’t rely on privacy through obscurity anymore. We must assume that anything we type into our computer and send over the Internet will eventually be plastered on a billboard for our parents, employers and ex-girlfriends to see and mock. And we must be vigilant about keeping our private information private. No matter how fun it might seem to break that rule just once.
xkcd has gone mainstream. Now I need something else to like that’s cool and ensures my geek cred. The Daily WTF isn’t enough.
(And yeah, you’re damn right I’m going to use this as an excuse to post a comic)
RadCan’s Sur le Web makes an interesting point (I’d link to the post directly, but I can’t) today about the Tourism Toronto website (which should probably be called the Toronto Tourism site considering its URL, but who am I to judge?) that was featured in a recent Globe and Mail article about the increase in domestic tourism to the city.
Tourism Toronto doesn’t have a French version.
It took me about five minutes to find the links to different language versions (they’re on the bottom of the page), in the form of flags for different countries under the banner “international sites.” There’s a Chinese version, a Korean version, a Japanese version and a Spanish version. But no French. (Incidentally, there are flags for Spain and Argentina which link to TorontoTourismMexico.com, which I’m sure isn’t going to offend anyone, right?).
I haven’t asked the site’s creators what their motives are, because that’s no fun. So let’s speculate about them here. Did they forget? Are Korean tourists more valuable than French ones? Is there some other website for francophone Canadian tourists? Are they trying to get back at us for winning the bagel war?
Anywired has an interview with Patrick Tanguay about Station C, the coworking space I wrote about in December and which opened in February.
Tanguay says they haven’t been open long enough for any dramatic conclusions, but he’s still getting used to having a regular schedule, and says he’d advise people to bring headphones to cut out distractions when you’re working to deadline.
Some consulting firm we’ve never heard of has released its rankings of the top 25 consumer-oriented commercial websites in Quebec. At the top of the list:
Of course, when you judge websites through a mathematical formula that suggests quality of a website is directly proportional to the size of the organization running it, this is what you get.
Like every other OMGWEB2.0WE’RE S000K001!!!111 media website around, Cyberpresse has added those dreaded share links to the bottom of every story. You know, the ones you click on and, through the magic of URL variables brings you directly to a del.icio.us bookmark-save page, Fark submission page or prefabricated Facebook post.
These things really annoy me for a few reasons:
This unnecessary help doesn’t end there. Cyberpresse, like many of its bretheren, also has plenty of other buttons and links that pointlessly duplicate existing browser functions, badly.
It’s all just a waste of HTML, much like everything else on the page that’s not the article I want to read.
Meanwhile, their entirely Flash-based video site provides no way whatsoever to share links to individual videos. I can’t bookmark them, send them as emails, save them to social networking sites, or post them to blogs.
Maybe you should start working on that instead?
Austin Hill’s Akoha project just announced that they have $1.9 million in funding thanks to a dozen angel investors.
For those who don’t know, Akoha is … uhh … what does the “About Us” page say again? Something about fun and play and sharing and making the world a better place.
It could be a social-networking site for fundraisers or it could be a giant multiplayer Pong game with the Sesame Street theme playing all the time. They’re still kind of being coy about it.
I’m not much connected to the investor/rich-people market (if I did, I’d probably have a better apartment and/or life), so the names don’t quite impress me. The one I do recognize is Jonathan Wener, who sits on Concordia University’s board of governors and its real-estate committee. He’s a big reason behind the new buildings they have, to the point where I don’t know why he doesn’t have one named after him yet.
More importantly, he’s very rich and not one to waste money on some go-nowhere startup without a plan. That alone makes me think Akoha’s got something here.
The PQ’s Daniel Turp is flogging the idea that the Internet should have a .qc domain. Separatists with nothing better to do are angry over having to type “.qc.ca” to get to Quebec-based websites
It’s this kind of thinking that has forced Quebecers to file two tax forms every year, pay two different kinds of sales taxes, and deal with all the other pointless duplication of federal services just to make us be different for difference’s sake.
And until Quebec reaches the promised land, which PQ hard-liners unilaterally declare to be an eventuality, websites based here will need to have both a .qc and .qc.ca domain.
Can someone tell these people that they lost the referendum? Twice?
UPDATE: Wow. 14 comments. Most are, of course, insulting, but I’ve responded to some of the counter-arguments brought up below.
Top sports story on Mix 96’s website tonight: “Sharapova beats Garrigues to advance at Bausch & Lomb Championships”
It’s not like anything more important happened or anything.
(I realize nobody’s going to go to Mix 96’s website as their source for news, which just makes me ask why they bother subscribing to Associated Press in the first place)
UPDATE: For good measure, the Team 990’s website’s current top sports story: “Jets agree to long-term deal with Rhodes” (and I can’t find out more details because their website is misconfigured)
Dear Macleans,
I’m not a very frequent visitor to your website, but even I’ve begun to be disturbed by this photo of Claire Danes, which has appeared on every article page for over six months now. It draws attention to the fact that your “weekly newsmakers” photo gallery hasn’t been updated since August.
More importantly though, she’s starting to really creep me out. It’s kind of a mindless expression in the first place, as if she was just turned into a zombie or something, but with none of those rotting scabs and messed-up hairdos they all have.
If you don’t intend to update it (Nissan not paying the bills any more?), could you delete it from your template, along with all the other stuff that’s gathering dust on a virtual shelf somewhere?
Thank you.
There are various levels of immorality on the Internet that people with no shame have exploited for their own ends:
Well now we have all the above rolled into one:
Someone has taken a YouTube Dawson College shooting tribute video (one of those lame wire-service-still-photos-combined-with-sad-song montages) and re-uploaded it with an ad for a porn site at the bottom.
The reason? The original video had “college” and “girl” in its description.
Why don’t porn spammers have better quality control?
WestIslandGazette.com, The Gazette’s “hyper-local” website serving West Island and western off-island communities, officially launches today. Page A2 in today’s paper has an article from editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips discussing the new site.
The site is pretty well unchanged since last time I mentioned it, except it has fewer bugs and more updated stories. (No changes based on Craig Silverman’s comments, for example.)
Phillips’s article also mentions upcoming changes to the editorial page, which will reduce space given to editorials and increase space given to letters to the editor (a change I think most people will welcome). There will also be more web-only opinion content, and Phillips’s blog, which I mentioned last week. The changes all go live on Monday.
The Vancouver Sun’s Kirk Lapointe points to a new survey that shows the Internet doesn’t connect well with older people.
Besides the obvious “well duh” response to this, allow me to turn it on its head a bit: Is it that the Internet appeals to the young, or that traditional media sources appeal to the old?
Let me give you an example: Open your Saturday newspaper. And if you’re under 35, open your parents’ Saturday newspaper. Take a look at the sections:
The reason behind these are obvious: That’s where the ad money is. Car companies pay for the biggest ads, so their sections are the largest, even though buying a new car is hardly the most important thing you have to deal with on a weekly basis.
I’d be willing to forgive these things if they were counterbalanced with sections that appealed to young people. But look for sections on gaming, education, the environment, Internet issues, technology or science and you come up far short, if you find anything at all. When a paper does cover some of these issues, they cater even those articles to their “general” audience, which means they have to explain what a blog is and what Facebook is all about. It comes off sounding patronizing and very uninformative.
So without newspapers and other traditional media to turn to, is it surprising that they’re finding what they need online?
Here’s an interesting little website: busmob.com. It scrapes the STM’s website for bus departure times and reformats them in an easy-to-read-on-mobile-phones page.
It’s not perfect (it doesn’t do holidays and other special situations, for example), and in many cases it’s probably easier to call the AUTOBUS number and get the automated voice to tell you departure times. But if for some reason the STM’s website is too cumbersome for your cell, this site might just be useful for you.
UPDATE: And here’s a website that acts as a Google Maps frontend for the STM’s Tous Azimuts service.
CBC.ca has a story* about an industry-commissioned survey that shows Canadians don’t quite understand everything about HDTV. Sharp, which commissioned the survey, pulls right out of its ass the theory that “jargon-laden tech reports” are to blame for the problem, especially among women. It’s the media which is not doing a good job explaining HDTV’s technical intricacies to consumers.
While technology articles in newspapers and tech segments on TV news are, indeed, either confusingly jargon-laden or condescendingly over-simplifying, I don’t think they’re the reason for all the misinformation about HDTV.
Instead, I blame the industry itself:
But I don’t expect Sharp to bring that up when they’re busy masturbating over how great they are.
*Dear CBC: If you’re going to rewrite a press release, maybe you should make it slightly less obvious that you’re doing so. For example, you could change the headline. Or you could find another source to quote. Or you could not copy and paste half the press release into your article.
For example:
The knowledge gap persists despite a truly healthy market for flat panel TVs. Overall, the market grew by 72 percent last year, with sales of LCD TVs growing by 84.4 percent. For 2008, projected sales figures from the Consumer Electronics Marketers of Canada (CEMC) indicate a market demand of 2.75 million units.
The poll reports Canadians have a basic understanding of the differences between flat screen technologies - 53 percent prefer LCD to plasma screens - yet few Canadians feel themselves to be truly knowledgeable about the technology.
Women are especially unaware of HDTV features; almost 60 percent said they were not at all knowledgeable about the latest advancements, compared to less than 40 percent of men polled across the country. The jargon-laden language of tech reports may be an issue, with 29 percent of Canadians getting their information about new models from TV ads and programs, compared to only 20 percent from print media and 16 percent from weblogs and product websites.
That was from the press release.
This is from the CBC story:
The knowledge gap persists despite a truly robust market for flat-panel TVs, according to the findings from Nanos Research, commissioned to do the survey by Sharp Electronics of Canada.
Overall, the market grew by 72 per cent last year, with sales of LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) TVs growing by 84.4 per cent, Sharp said. For 2008, projected sales figures from the Consumer Electronics Marketers of Canada (CEMC) indicate a market demand of 2.75 million units.
The poll reports Canadians have a basic understanding of the differences between flat-screen technologies — 53 per cent prefer LCD to plasma screens — yet few Canadians feel themselves to be truly knowledgeable about the technology.
Women are especially unaware of HDTV features, the survey suggested. Almost 60 per cent said they were not at all knowledgeable about the latest advancements, compared to less than 40 per cent of men polled across the country.
The jargon-laden language of tech reports may be an issue, with 29 per cent of Canadians getting their information about new models from TV ads and programs, compared to only 20 per cent from print media and 16 per cent from weblogs and product websites.
Notice some similarity? (I’ve bolded all the changes the CBC made.) I’m just going to go ahead and assume the CBC did not, in fact, check to make sure these statements were true.
(And another thing: “weblogs”? If people don’t understand what a blog is, what makes you think they’ll understand “weblogs”?)
I’m experimenting with some plugins and widgets and toys in order to boost my visitor count make this blog better for its loyal readers.
One thing you may have already noticed is that individual post pages now have links to related posts (as determined by that post’s tags). Since I tend to write about similar things, you’ll likely find those posts interesting. Related posts are also included in the RSS feed, which you should subscribe to.
Meanwhile, I’m still experimenting with some social bookmarking techniques. I’ve setup an account at del.icio.us, which allows me to share websites and pages I find interesting. I also have my Google Reader shared items, which allows me to share some of the blog posts I read that I find particularly interesting. You’ll find that feed currently being burned so I can track its popularity.
Unfortunately, I’m having trouble combining the two together and/or automating their inclusion into the blog. del.icio.us has a feature that automatically posts links to your blog (as you see below), but it’s not very configurable, and I don’t find that many links that would necessitate a daily post.
If anyone has any ideas on how I can automate, say, a weekly roundup of my del.icio.us (God that’s annoying to type) bookmarks and Google Reader shared items into a weekly blog post, please let me know. Surely someone has thought of this before, but Google hasn’t helped me.
In today’s Business Observer section, I have an article about whether or not companies setting up user-generated websites should consider paying those users for their content.
Revver tried it (paying users $1 million in its first year), but the overwhelming reach of YouTube has greatly limited their success. People who post videos to Revver have to also post them to YouTube or find someone else doing it for them.
And, of course, there’s Capazoo, whose business model involved having its users “tip” each other and getting a cut of that pie. This week, they appear to have died a horrible, horrible death, though it seems to have been more about bad management than a bad business idea.
I spoke to Evan Prodromou, who wrote an essay last July about the problems inherent with paying wiki contributors. The arguments hold true for video-sharing sites, blogs and just about anything where users are expected to work to give your site value.
His conclusion is that “it just doesn’t make a lot of sense” that websites pay for users, because payment makes it seem like work. Instead, they should focus on building communities, where work is valued in a non-monetary sense, and more importantly where the contributions provide value to the users themselves. YouTube allows you to share videos and give them a global reach. Same with Flickr on the photo side. These are user-generated websites, but they’re seen primarily as free services to users.
Many clueless latecomers to the user content game (and especially many media organizations) have been trying to push user participation to the point where they’re beating us over the head with it. Newspapers cut and paste uninteresting, anonymous comments from their message boards. TV weather presenters introduce photos of snow (and dogs in snow) taken by viewers. They all plead with you to share your news tips so they can get the exclusive (and not credit you for it) — provided that news tip doesn’t require too much investigation, of course.
When you try to share your family photos or stories about grandma, shocked that such dreck actually gets published/broadcast, you’re met with 1,000-word user agreements that state IN ALL CAPS that you give up all rights to your content including moral rights and (effectively) copyright, and they can do whatever they want with it without asking you or paying you a dime, even if it has nothing to do with the reason you submitted it. Oh yeah, and it also gives them the right to seize your home, take your dog and copy everything from your hard drive. Didn’t you read that part?
The result is that we get a lot of fluff, but very little useful information. Uninformed opinion, but little news. In other words, a whole lot of junk.
As a freelancer, I’m tempted to say that paying people is the answer. Forget this user-generated crap and get real journalists, photographers, videographers and writers to give you quality news and information. But that plea would fall on deaf ears of money-crunching media executives who see Web 2.0 as a magic ticket to free labour.
One of the lessons that should probably be taken away from this is that in order to get good content from your users, you have to respect them and at least not seem to be evil. They have to feel like they’re doing something valuable that’s worth their time (paid or not). Right now, getting your picture in the paper or on TV is still a pretty big reward for those seeking their 15 minutes. But if nobody reads that paper or watches that TV station because they don’t have quality content, will that continue?
As the article mentions, there are some coming out on the pro-payment bandwagon. Jason Calacanis says that top contributors (that 1-2% who represent the majority of content) are providing much more value to these websites than they’re taking back, and it makes sense to pay them if only to keep them loyal.
Even Wikimedia (which runs Wikipedia and related sites) is paying contributors for the first time with its Philip Greenspun Illustration Project. It’s an exceptional case, with money donated for a very specific purpose. But it represents a step toward paying users for their work.
Prodromou himself agrees that some work should probably be paid for. Administrative work, editing and other non-sexy contributions probably wouldn’t get done otherwise. It makes sense to have a small staff of employees to concentrate on that work. At the same time, web projects must be careful about not instilling a sense of resentment among its non-paid users. It’s a fine line to travel.
But what do you think? Does paying users cheapen what they contribute? Should only extreme superusers get paid for what they do? Or should the economy be allowed to give a monetary value to even the smallest contribution, even though for most people payment would be orders of magnitude less than what we would consider a minimum wage?
(Side note: This article sets a new record for the delay between filing and publication. I completed the article in November, and it sat on the shelf while the Business Observer section was being planned. Since it wasn’t particularly timely, it stayed there until just this week.)
I understand this photo was one of the rare good ones taken on the day Conrad Black began to serve his sentence. But does this photo really need two watermarks? Is someone selling it on the black market or something?
