Crocs.ca, for example, the website of those awful-looking plastic shoes that everyone seems to love. I can forgive their awkwardly-phrased taglines like “men: that’s all you need!” or “lifestyle: every day with style” or “work: even at work!”

I can forgive their aversion to the use of capital letters, their tenuous grasp on the rules of proper hyphenation and their missing commas.

I can forgive small mistakes like neglecting to superscript the “TM” that comes after their trademark.

I might even, on a good day, forgive an accidental misspelling of one’s own trademark.

But when your business is creating “comfortable” shoes and you misspell “comfort” multiple times in prominent places right next to the correct spelling, that’s just unforgiveable.

I don’t know what world these people live in, but translation isn’t something companies should hire amateurs to do.

UPDATE: I just checked the website’s terms of use, which apparently doesn’t allow me to link to it:

you may not create links from other websites to this website, except if expressly permitted by the site owner. (to obtain permission, contact our website administrator at support@crocs.ca.)

Just for kicks, I’ve gone ahead and asked permission. I’ll let you know what their response is. The email was rejected by the server because support@crocs.ca doesn’t exist.

See also:

• November 16, 2007 — Future Shop needs translators

(Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail provides an analysis of CBC commentators at the games)

CBC

The CBC website is a class above all the others, as well it should be since they have the broadcast rights.

Naturally, there’s plenty of video, including most importantly live video feeds from various events. Unfortunately, they’ve Windows Media and never worked for me properly, making them kind of useless. The schedule is tied to broadcasts, which means you don’t get the schedule for individual events and races. Items in the schedule also aren’t linked to more information about them or lists of Canadians who will be participating.

The “Higher Faster Stronger” page has video profiles of athletes, but they’re not sorted in any useful way. The videos themselves are also pretty uninteresting. The athletes give one-liners saying where they’re from and what sport they play, and then finish off with meaningless inspirational statements like “I refuse to let fear dictate my actions”

Medal standings page allows you to sort by G/S/B and total medals. Each country also links to pages showing who won medals for that country.

There’s also a blogs page with blogs from both Olympic athletes and CBC personalities.

What’s unique: Mandarin-language video highlights for each day of competition, special iPhone-friendly page.

Bottom line: This is everyone’s first destination for Olympics news. It does what it’s supposed to do well, but there’s definite room for improvement.

The Gazette/Canada.com

(Disclaimer: I work for The Gazette, though I had nothing to do with its Beijing website)

Canwest Interactive created a Beijing Games portal which has been copied for reuse by all Canwest papers. Stories are updated automatically on all websites without individual papers having to deal with them. With the exception of some local pointers to paper-specific pieces, all the websites are identical.

The design is visually appealing. The main feature is a “photo of the moment,” which cycles between four recent photos. While it looks good, it also pushes the main story downpage, so visitors have to scroll down to find out the biggest story. The photos are also not linked to the Olympic events they feature, so even though the main photo might be of a Canadian athlete winning a gold medal, clicking on it won’t get you the story of how awesome that was. You have to scroll down to find it.

URLs are unfortunately excessively long. Though the papers provide shortcuts, they disappear the moment you put them in, which doesn’t aid in memory retention. The Gazette’s Olympic homepage is at http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/sports/beijing2008/index.html.

The stories almost all originate from Canwest News Service. On one hand this is good, because you want to promote your own stories (the wires have hundreds of Olympic stories running every day). On the other hand, it means every story has a Canadian angle. Unless a columnist writes a story about Michael Phelps or other non-Canadian athletes, the stories won’t appear here.

There are separate sections for each sport, which include stories, (some) athlete profiles, schedules and results, all copied from the Beijing database.

Though Canwest has been making a big effort online for these Games (even sending an online editor to Beijing), a lot of the content clearly seems to have been destined more for newspapers than websites. This list of Canadians to watch, for example, is horribly formatted, includes no times and no links for more information on these athletes or their events.

There are news videos and animations of event rules, but both are provided pre-packaged by Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Same with things like medal standings.

There are some mistakes that make a perfectionist cringe. “Mens” and “Womens” aren’t words, for example. And clicking on “schedule” gives the schedule for Day 1 instead of the current day (and unless you remember that it’s Day 11 you have to guess at what the current schedule is).

Finally, it includes a trivia “game” with questions such as this:

Why not just say "Please select answer C"?

What’s unique: Little separates the sites from other similar ones, but the stories, which are the most important, are Canwest-produced.

Bottom Line: All in all, a good effort, and good copy from Canwest’s journalists, but a bit too reliant on repackaging non-story information from other sources.

Globe and Mail

Homepage looks good, with a main story and matching main photo (like most websites, you’ll notice their layout requires horizontal photos). Design for medal counts/results is also sleek, with circular cropped flags (rectangles are so 2004).

A proper schedule page (with times and everything), but no indication there what events feature Canadians, which is what we want to know.

It includes a podcast page, which apparently nobody at the Globe looked at because the thumbnail images next to audio links are actually 6 megapixel images (over a megabyte in size) that the browser has to download in order to shrink to 1,000th of the size. The latest podcast is now four days old, and is just a series of interviews with Globe writers in Beijing. No interviews with athletes or audio of anything even remotely interesting. (There are athlete interviews like this one, but those are linked to from different pages

URLs are simple, short and sensical. globeandmail.com/beijing2008 for the main page. The boxing page is at globeandmail.com/beijing2008/boxing, as you would expect. URLs for individual stories, however, follow the standard Globe template and are far too long.

Stories are provided from eight Globe journalists in Beijing, but most comes from Canadian Press/Associated Press, and little to no time is spent formatting stories for the web.

What’s unique: “Games on the Box“, a blog about TV coverage (mainly from the CBC and NBC).

Bottom Line: In many ways, the Globe has led Canadian media in its approach to online, in terms of design and ideas. Audio interviews, podcasts and blogs certainly shows that. But this website is a pretty big disappointment from Canada’s national newspaper. I expected better.

CTV

A repackaging of Canadian Press content along with some videos produced for CTV National News and Canada AM. A joke of a website that I won’t dignify with a review. This is from the people who are going to bring our TV coverage of the 2010 games in Vancouver?

Toronto Star

A nice homepage with a simple URL (olympics.thestar.com). You have to dig a bit to get pages for individual sports, and results pages for those sports are nothing but (badly) rebranded pre-packaged pages from The Sports Network. Medals page (from CP) allows you to sort by total (ascending and descending), but in order to sort by gold you have to click on “POS”.

There’s a videos page with a mix of Torstar and CP-produced videos (sadly you don’t find out which is which until the video starts). Instead of simply being embedded on the page, clicking on a video brings a video browser in a pop-up window (and then doesn’t show the browser part). It’s more hoops than should be necessary here.

Schedule page provides a list of what sports are on what days, and clicking those sports gives a schedule for that sport on that day. Very good. But no hints at sports with Canadians in them, and there’s no general page with a schedule for all sports on a certain day.

What’s unique: There’s a Star-produced Olympic history timeline, and an interesting “in Chinese” page, with content provided by Sing Tao newspapers. The best part is probably the Athletes page, which lists all the athletes and provides pages for each one. Those pages include the standard CP biography plus links to stories that mention the athlete. It’s simple yet elegant.

Bottom line: It’s not perfect, but a very impressive effort from a single newspaper without the mega Canwest or Sun Media empires behind it.

Canoe.ca (Quebecor/Sun Media)

URL is simple but needlessly repetitive: http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Olympics/2008Beijing/home.html

The events page is called “Events”, “Disciplines” or “Sports”, depending on whether you look at the URL, the navigation bar or the page title. The individual pages there are needlessly gray, and the content provided entirely by AFP. (The country flags, where used, look like they were designed by three-year-olds using MS Paint).

Schedule page (also provided by AFP) distinguishes between competition and finals, but otherwise provides no details.

Athletes page sorts by publication date, not by name or sport, which kind of makes it useless.

What’s unique: a “comments” page, where people can give their opinion on controversial Olympics issues, like whether Quebec flags should be allowed there.

Bottom line: Far too reliant on AFP and other wire copy. No reason to choose this site over any other.

Cyberpresse (La Presse)

Page is the kind of boxy layout you come to expect from Cyberpresse. Main difference is that it includes a bunch of Flash-based widgets from Presse Canadienne which slow down page loading.

The URL is short but non-intuitive (like all Cyberpresse pages), with sections called “CPPEKIN01″, “CPPEKIN02″, etc.

Athletes page doesn’t include a list of athletes, but a list of profiles sorted by publication date.

There are separate sections for athletics, “acquatic sports”, gynmastics and “other” instead of having one for each discipline. (The “other” page includes “team sports” “racquet sports” “combat sports” and “other” — how insulting is it to be on the “other” “other” page?)

Schedule page is very basic, with times but no other information

What’s unique: A photo album from La Presse photographer Bernard Brault.

Bottom line: Not much to write home about. There are good stories here republished from the paper, but the website design is severely lacking.

Le Devoir

No Olympics website to speak of. A single page includes wire stories that were printed in the paper. Epic fail.

See also:

• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 13, 2008 — Olympics blogs ahoy!
• August 27, 2008 — Just use YouTube

"Yé tellement cute!"

Dammit, I want two cute girls to be (fictionally) talking about how awesome it is to be interviewed by me because of how amazingly cute I am.

Damn you Lagacé!

(Note to Chez Jules: I don’t understand the reasoning behind making it impossible to link to individual episodes, and hence I can’t here. Too bad.)

See also:

• August 28, 2008 — Patrick Lagacé wants to be your friend
• August 12, 2008 — Coiffeur, do your thing
• August 11, 2008 — Montreal North riot OMG BBQ

See also:

• August 27, 2008 — Just use YouTube
• August 19, 2008 — Beijing Games online coverage analysis
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog

Though I don’t agree with the sentiment that newspapers should get out of the printing business (yes it’s expensive, but newspapers are highly qualified to do it), I can’t help but agree about the technology stuff. A quick comparison of any media website’s proprietary hacked-together, flash-based video viewing system and something simple like YouTube and you wonder why they even bother.

So why don’t media companies take advantage of sites like YouTube and Flickr? They’re cheaper, they function better, and they provide a much wider audience for content.

The answer is, sadly, that it represents a loss of control. Newspaper websites want 100% of the ad revenue, even if they’re bleeding through the nose on IT staff to keep their own video portals running. They don’t trust YouTube and Flickr (even if some of their own journalists make liberal use of those sites when management isn’t looking).

That’s a mentality that needs to change. Either news websites’ content management systems need to improve drastically, or they should abandon them and use off-the-shelf systems that have proven popular.

Believe me, I had to deal for years with a hacked-together CMS (that I myself chose and installed) at a student newspaper. Killing all that work is painful, but it needs to be done.

See also:

• August 27, 2008 — Just use YouTube
• August 19, 2008 — Beijing Games online coverage analysis
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog

The CBC and Toronto Star didn’t waste any time and have already launched iPhone versions. Sadly, neither appears to be customizable (or if they are, it’s hidden).

See also:

• July 13, 2008 — Olympics blogs ahoy!
• November 26, 2007 — Why are errors in online articles not corrected?
• August 27, 2008 — Just use YouTube

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Thurai Moorthy <xxxxx>
Date: Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Subject: United Earth Day, June 21, 2008, Saturday 5:00-11:00 PM, at 4775 Anthime,Pierrefonds, Quebec H9H 4L3, Please Publsh and Send a Reporter
To: letters@thegazette.canwest.com

www.ueog.org

United Earth Organization (UEOG)

United Earth Day, June 21, 2008, Saturday 5:00-11:00 PM local time, everywhere on Earth, (local location at 4775 Anthime,Pierrefonds, Quebec H9H 4L3) in your own space.  Neighbours, friends, relatives. Inform everyone from Tokyo to Vancouver. Visit www.ueog.org starting at 5:00 PM Tokyo time and continuing east ward at 5:00 PM local time around the globe. United Earth Organization (UEOG), Presentation, Music, Dance. Vegetarian potluck, No disposables.

Folowing ing messsage is meant for the editor and not for publication:

Please send a reporter to cover the above event.

Regards,

[Contact info here deleted]

Some suggestions:

1. This is a blog. I don’t have a reporting staff.
2. Your luck with media outlets is usually much better if you’re not obviously forwarding an email you sent to another media outlet.
3. Media outlets have dedicated public addresses for assignment editors. They don’t start with “letters.”
4. Don’t ask the media to convert Tokyo time to local unless it’s necessary.
5. Your event listing appears to be missing what the whole point of the event is.
6. Is SeaQuest DSV coming back?
7. I’d list the things wrong with the website, but let’s just say it’s everything, from the constant text colour changes to the lack of any specifics about what exactly this organization does.
8. All that said, good luck with creating that united Earth government that controls the world.

See also:

• July 30, 2008 — Back in the closet
• June 18, 2008 — I have a hot tip, officer
• February 29, 2008 — Santobama

Official “launch” of the new, crappy station is scheduled for July 1.

Meanwhile, I should mention there have been rather large, visible ads for CBC Radio One and CJAD in the Gazette suggesting that people listen to them for news and information. Hint, hint.

UPDATE (June 18): Mike Boone today has a hilariously scathing review of 940’s new format:

The Mozart Requiem was composed in 1791. But its sombre, funereal tones would be perfect for a radio format that will be DOA.

See also:

• June 25, 2008 — MP3 isn’t good enough for Corus
• June 24, 2008 — Natasha has a new job
• June 6, 2008 — 940 News switching formats, slashing staff

The next step will be having feeds for each individual keyword (they’ve been tagging articles with keywords for quite a while now, but haven’t done anything useful with it online yet)

See also:

• November 15, 2007 — More pay walls coming down
• August 27, 2008 — Just use YouTube
• August 19, 2008 — Beijing Games online coverage analysis

Craig Silverman, who has been pushing for such pages on newspaper websites for quite a while on his Regret the Error blog, celebrates by using one of The Gazette’s corrections against it.

See also:

• September 10, 2007 — Crackerjacks at the Gazette
• August 19, 2008 — Don’t mess with the readers
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog

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?

See also:

• August 14, 2008 — Têtes à claques en anglais
• July 28, 2008 — “Nuked the fridge”? Please
• July 20, 2008 — Ceci est Sparta indépendantiste

1. Bell.ca, which doesn’t work with Safari.
2. Radio-Canada.ca, whose address they got wrong, and which opens audio content in strange 1px-by-1px pop-up windows.
3. Desjardins.com, which won’t let you me log into electronic banking with Firefox, and whose top-notch security includes such impossible-for-anyone-else-to-guess questions as “what high school did you graduate from?”
4. Videotron.com, which admittedly I haven’t had issues with, even if their cable and Internet service has much room for improvement.
5. Metro.ca, which uses Javascript needlessly, has a badly-designed site map page (the stupid web 2.0 sharing buttons hides some of the text) and shows 0 stores in Montreal with delivery service available.

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.

See also:

• July 22, 2008 — XM digs moderately into pocket for Canadian artists
• June 17, 2008 — Gémeaux includes web video category
• May 28, 2008 — Heinrich wins CAJ award

These things really annoy me for a few reasons:

1. They’re entirely unnecessary. I already have a bookmarklet to save pages to del.icio.us. For any other purpose, it’s simple to copy the URL and paste it where needed.
2. There are far too many of these. Del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Slashdot, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Furl, etc. There are so many, in fact, that other services have been created to be the middleman and make sure they’re all supported. If you’re not using one of the top three services, you’re not going to find those links on all pages, and so you have to find an alternative, and so #1 comes back into play.
3. They’re ugly.

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.

• Text size: Toggles between only three sizes (the default is the smallest). Changes only the article text, not the text of other type on the page.
• Print: Normally, you’d expect this to provide a specially-formatted print-friendly version of the article. No, instead it just calls the print function through Javascript. Oh, and there is no specially-formatted print-friendly version, so you get the background image, navigation, headers and footers, and all the ads.

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?

See also:

• July 13, 2008 — Cyberpresse launches widget, fails
• July 13, 2008 — Steep learning curve
• April 26, 2008 — Fagstein in search demo video

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)

See also:

• April 11, 2008 — Team 990, RadCan to air Impact games
• November 6, 2007 — Respect? Pleasure? On Montreal radio?
• September 28, 2007 — Big media mergers remind us of past mistakes

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.

See also:

• May 1, 2008 — Goodbye Claire
• April 5, 2008 — Why don’t the Habs stink?
• December 3, 2007 — On the importance of online copy-editing

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.

See also:

• March 5, 2008 — Gazette creating West Island hyper-local website
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 13, 2008 — Olympics blogs ahoy!

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.

See also:

• July 30, 2008 — More mobile options for bus times
• August 26, 2008 — STM adds service, but still short on buses
• August 6, 2008 — 11 problems with STM’s new magnetic fare card

Sur le Web is a very strange animal in the local blogosphere:

• Each post is paired with a tiny video of the blogger’s talking head explaining what we’ve just read.
• Permalinks are created with page anchors as opposed to individual pages, meaning they become useless after a couple of days.
• The site’s RSS feed has no text for its posts

Now this. I’m seriously tempted to unsubscribe as a protest, and would have done so long ago had the site been any less useful for information. But the fact that it seems to intentionally make it as difficult as possible to use annoys me to no end.

I couldn’t care less about comments. Fix everything else first.

But the fact that a blog about links to stuff online doesn’t allow links in its comments? That’s insane.

Among some of RadCan’s other draconian rules:

• No comments in languages other than French
• No anonymous or pseudonymous comments
• No more than three comments per person per discussion

If similar rules had been put in place at CBC.ca, we’d be hearing about it. Maybe we need a Radio-Canada version of Inside the CBC?

See also:

• August 2, 2008 — Nobody wants to read 1,000 comments
• July 31, 2008 — Decapitation leads to passioned debate
• June 13, 2008 — No more glass ceiling at RadCan

The Gazette has been working on a West Island portal (called “West Island +” though its address is westislandgazette.com), a mix of newspaper stories and user-submitted content that pretty much fits that “hyper-local” mold that everyone’s talking about these days.

Its key feature is that stories are categorized based on location, allowing you to search for all things that take place in Pierrefonds (for example). The locations fall pretty well along the same borders as the former municipalities (though the 40 people who live in Ile Dorval might get ticked off at being lumped in with the bigger city). It also includes Ile Perrot and Vaudreuil-Dorion/St. Lazare/Hudson, which are also included in the Gazette’s West Island delivery area.

The site is still not quite ready for its official launch, which is expected later this month.

Thoughts?

I think there are a lot of good things about it, and a lot that can be improved (it’s a bit wide for me, forcing a horizontal scroll bar for those dozen or so pixels off the side).

The big question, of course, is whether user-generated content will turn this into the online destination for thousands of West Islanders, or whether the signal-to-noise ratio will be too low for people to wade through it all.

There’s only one way to find out.

UPDATE: Craig Silverman, a freelancer and blogger, takes issue with the terms of service, which he accuses of “bad faith” because it demands you waive moral rights (i.e. the right not to have your work distorted to say the opposite of what you mean, or the right to not have your name and image used to endorse a product without your permission), it demands free reign to publish and sell your content to others (”in perpetuity throughout the world”) and it demands that you waive the right to sue them for defamation or anything else no matter what they do to you.

It’s the kind of clauses you’ll find on just about any big corporate website, whose administrators throw it on there without thinking about it (or even probably reading it). But that doesn’t make it right.

See also:

• March 27, 2008 — WestIslandGazette.com launches
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 13, 2008 — Olympics blogs ahoy!

I subscribe to your “media news” feed, because I have a keen interest in journalism and the media.

I do not, however, have any interest in Britney Spears or Michael Jackson. What do celebrity gossip stories have to do with the media, other than showing us that non-paparazzi outlets will stoop to this level too?

Please separate your celebrity gossip from your media-related stories.

Thank you.

See also:

• August 25, 2008 — Top 10 worst moments of the Beijing Olympics
• August 12, 2008 — National humility in contrast
• August 7, 2008 — CBC’s awful hockey theme contest