Monthly Archives: July 2007

| Blogosphere, Business, In the news, Technology

Mark Goldberg: clueless about cluelessness of cluelessness

Patrick points us to a blog post from Alec Saunders refuting another blog post from Mark Goldberg which criticized a Gazette editorial based on an op-ed from Michael Geist on wireless rate plans in Canada. (Phew.)

The argument is over the inflated prices of data rate plans in Canada. The U.S., home to the iPhone, offers crazy-cheap plans for both voice and data, while here we have three wireless providers who offer expensive daytime service and through-the-roof prices for data transfer. (This is why I never surf the Internet from my phone.)

I won’t add comments, since they’re already criticizing each other. Suffice it to say Geist’s point still stands, and the blogs are debating irrelevant minutiae.

| Blogosphere, Fun, Montreal, My articles

The ultimate Transformers geek

Two articles this weekend by yours truly:

This week’s blog is Urban Photo (or should I say “URBANPHOTO”?) by freelance writer Christopher DeWolf. It’s one of the ones that’s been on my list for a while (long before he asked me to write about it). It covers urban life and design with an emphasis on photography. Its contributors include blogosphere familiars like Kate McDonnell and A.J. Kandy.

Also this week is a Justify Your Existence profile of Transformers collector Daniel Arseneault. He has 1,700 of the action figures but still manages to have a normal-sounding life. Yeah, he lives in his parents’ basement (with a staircase that forces you to bend down as you descend lest you hit your head), but he’s an auto mechanic and sport enthusiast with a fiancée. Read up about him here and on his website, or join his Montreal Transformers Fans Facebook group.

And while you’re checking out Montreal Diary this week, you can read Amy Luft’s recounting of last week’s water fight.

| Business

Crowdsourcing? I don’t think so

Roberto Rocha’s “interactive series” on customer service has come to an end, a full two articles after it began, with a feature story in today’s Gazette. It quotes readers who have been screwed over by customer service, as well as a few industry experts.

The Gazette claims the series is a breakthrough an innovative, paradigm-breaking exercise in “participatory journalism” and “crowdsourcing”, because it asks for readers to provide their stories, and the reporter blogs about his interviews before writing his articles.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence of either participatory journalism or crowdsourcing here. Instead, my earlier criticisms seem perfectly justified. There’s nothing new here. Asking readers for their stories has been done since the dawn of time. In fact, columnist Jim Mennie has used the tactic successfully many times. And while blogging about interviews is a good idea, the first anyone saw of the finished product was when it appeared in the paper this morning. No drafts were published online to get the “crowdsourcers” to comment, correct, improve or update it.

The story comes with a navel-gazing meta-sidebar about how the series worked and how (real) participatory journalism can change the way businesses operate. There’s also a version published on Roberto’s blog. The two contain an important difference: The blog version talks about where the series failed and what areas need improvement. One was unavoidable: Roberto left for a week to cover the Governor-General’s visit to Brazil. The other is a problem with the Gazette in general: It wasn’t publicized enough and too few people got involved (more on that below). A conspiracy theorist might question why these important paragraphs were removed from the paper version, but I’m sure it was just edited out for space.

The story is also supplemented with an online video (like all CanWest videos, there’s no built-in way to easily link to them, so I have to use my computer-science skillz to hack a link together). The video is another example of newspapers misunderstanding the Internet. It’s nothing more than a talking head (Roberto) supplemented with B-roll of him walking down a hallway and using his computer. There’s nothing here (besides knowing what Roberto’s voice sounds like) that needs video and couldn’t be simply read in text form.

Roberto’s claim that the project wasn’t publicized enough was, I think, misguided. Sure, there was only the single article written about it, but it’s been hyped on the website and on Page A2 of the paper almost every day since. The problem is with the Gazette’s website in general.

  • I put the Gazette’s homepage through an analyzer. It contains an astonishing 188 objects, including 171 images and 8 CSS files, accounting for about 690KB. With the Flash-based ads now popular, it’s gotten to be such a memory hog that I have to be careful how many web pages I have open at Canada.com. (To contrast, this blog’s homepage has only four objects totalling 140KB, and most of that is one complex image I used to illustrate a post.)
  • Besides being a pain for the browser, the page is also far too busy visually. To see the top story in the paper that morning (which, one would think, would be a common activity for people going to a newspaper’s website) requires hitting PageDown three times (meaning it’s on the fourth page down) on my 1024×768 screen. This isn’t just the Gazette’s problem. It’s a rampant issue across media websites who think people would rather spend 20 minutes reading everything on a “portal” homepage to maybe find what they want instead of clicking on category links to refine their search.
  • The blog’s homepage is at http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/tech/default.aspx. Nobody actually types that into their address bar. Individual post URLs are too long to even fit on my screen. Compare that with the Gazette’s crazy-successful Habs Inside/Out blog at http://www.habsinsideout.com/. A banner ad, small Gazette logo and a few links at the top. The rest is simple, unbusy and uncomplicated, and doesn’t include links to every single other CanWest property at the bottom.
  • The blog itself has layout issues. Paragraph spacing is inconsistent, the text is in a sans-serif font instead of the easier-to-read serif you see here, text (and especially meta-text) is too small to read (some parts — including the link to post comments — go as low as 8pt!)

As for my opinion on the state of customer service, I think it’s horrible, and it’s not going to get better. Roberto and the companies talk a great talk about how they’ve “owned up” to the problems and are “correcting” their mistakes. But talk is cheap. It costs nothing to apologize.

The reality is that large companies couldn’t care less about you. If you have an unusual situation that requires more than a few minutes of their time, you’re costing them money. The old threats of “I’ll never do business with you again” and “I’ll go to the press” are meaningless now. They don’t care if a few bad apples (who would otherwise bother their expensive customer service centres) end their service and go to a competitor. There’s plenty of other fish in the sea. And going to the media, which is a horrible nightmare for small businesses, doesn’t bother the big companies because they know their competitors have reputations that are just as bad.

Besides, nobody checks out customer service before signing up. They check prices. That’s why the small fries, who have great customer service but slightly higher prices, soon find themselves going out of business.

From a strict cost-benefit analysis, it’s better to provide crappy customer service (but have your PR guys talk about how you’re improving to the media) and lower prices than to raise prices and have qualified, local people answer the phone.

And that’s not going to change until more people start demanding better.

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Are you my ticket to media stardom?

Let’s give a round of applause to Montrealer Allan Wills. He’s managed to exploit two vulnerabilities of the media: their desperation for stories in the summer and their cluelessness about the Internet, to grab his 15 minutes by the gonads. A long package on yesterday’s CTV News, and a Page A3 article in this morning’s Gazette.

His story, basically, is that he put up a website (actually a blog) asking for a wife, and this not-unattractive British girl answered him. Now they’re dating.

Yeah, stop the presses.

Now, if I were a cynic, I might point out that they’re not married, and the focus of the blog has changed from finding a wife to finding an “ultimate date”, and that finding dates online is nothing new (in fact, there’s an entire bloody industry for it), and that quitting your job to go searching for dates is kind of a boneheaded thing to do.

But instead, I will applaud Mr. Wills’s media savvy, wringing his 15 minutes from an uninteresting story about a waste of his time.

(I will also applaud him for his babe of a girlfriend. And with an accent to boot!)

UPDATE July 31: A spot on Canada AM, just in case there were doubts about the non-newsiness. And check out the Daily Mail article on him for more, including pictures of his other hot dates (a redhead!).

| In the news, TV

“Pilot-reporter” says it all

When news of a mid-air collision between two news helicopters hit the news forums (read: Fark), the immediate reaction was “it was just a matter of time”. While mainstream media is slashing real reporters, they’re shelling out more and more for gimmicks like police-chase news helicopters, so viewers can get real-time updates on how some idiot is trying to get away from police.

The problem isn’t that there are too many helicopters trying to cover the same thing. It’s not that air traffic controllers are failing to separate low-flying aircraft. It’s one, simple phrase:

“Pilot-reporter”

These news choppers have two people on board: A camera operator, who focuses the video camera on what’s being covered, and the reporter, who describes what’s going on while, you know, piloting a low-flying aircraft in heavy traffic.

The fact that this is common doesn’t make it any less ludicrous. A pilot’s sole mission should be to fly an aircraft. So many aircraft crashes and near-crashes have taken place because pilots become distracted. To have a pilot in a dual-role which requires him to concentrate on some non-flying activity is just asking for trouble.

It’ll be a while before we find out what exactly led to this crash. Perhaps it was something out of both pilots’ control. But either way, I can’t imagine how separating the duties of reporter and pilot can’t lead to safer flights.

| In the news

Can you get aroused with probes on your penis?

All sorts of medical studies ask strange things of their guinea pigs. Taking new pills, sleeping, not sleeping, changing their eating habits.

But I hope the compensatory indemnity was high for the group who volunteered to have their sexual arousal monitored by taking readings of their penises, in a study to show whether circumsized men are less sensitive. The conclusion: they’re not.

| Slow News Day, West Island

Pointe Claire Village IS the West Island

The Gazette released the results of their West Island icon poll today. The story attached to the results online mentions concerns some people had about the northern half being completely left out, and reporter Max Harrold, to his credit, takes full responsibility. (Of course, had nominations been open to the public this might have been avoided, and the story that made the paper doesn’t talk about this.)

Old Pointe Claire (or the Pointe Claire Village) won with about 1/4 of the vote, narrowly beating Hudson Village (which, as I and Kate McDonnell pointed out, isn’t even on the West Island).