Monthly Archives: August 2007

| Montreal, Slow News Day, Web design

Blog about Tremblay! He’s so rad!

Not news: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in to talk radio and campaign for them.

News: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in talk radio and write blog posts to campaign for them.

Yes folks, mayor Gérald Tremblay and his ilk are using the power of their crappy website to harness the power of ordinary Montrealers with absolutely nothing to do. They’re encouraging people to blog about them to tell everyone how rad they are. Like that Robert-Bourassa Avenue idea. How great was that?

I might have more respect for the move if the website wasn’t so badly designed. Of the major issues I outlined two and a half months ago when the website launched, they’ve only fixed about half of them. The easier half. And the fact that the website is ungooglable is a funny afterthought by comparison.

Since nobody’s taken the bait yet, let me be the first blogger to talk about Mayor Tremblay and his brilliant administration that’s in touch with the people. And add a </sarcasm> tag after it.

UPDATE: Tristan Péloquin tries to evoke the cyber army.

| In the news, Media, On the Net, Web design

MédiaMatinQuébec.com

Just learned that MédiaMatinQuébec, the free paper being run by locked-out workers at the Journal de Québec, has launched its website at MediaMatinQuebec.com.

And it’s already more impressive than any other Quebec media website. It’s fast, lean and easy-to-navigate.

You know, the more this conflict goes on, the more I think these workers should forget about the Journal and turn MédiaMatin into a business. Sell some more ads, rent a small office building and this could really be something.

| TV, Video

Watch an hour of iCaught for five minutes of YouTube videos

ABC premiered its new show iCaught tonight (hope iCaught Data Management Services doesn’t sue). It’s their YouTube clip show, in a sea of upcoming YouTube clip shows that seek to cheaply license popular clips owned by people who have no idea of their actual worth. The show’s reason for watching it instead of, say, just checking out YouTube’s most popular videos directly? They give “the story behind the videos,” which apparently means having a couple of talking heads say how cool it is and the creators say how they didn’t expect it to become this popular.

And isn’t that worth sitting through all those commercials?

Here’s a roundup of the videos they showed for their premiere:

  1. Battle at Kruger (Wikipedia entry). OMG. Animals get into fight! Film at 11! Don’t we see this stuff all the time on the National Geographic Channel? Oh wait, we do! It’s already been licensed to them.
  2. A bunch of videos about dancing at weddings. Clips from 13 going on 30, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Footloose and So You Think You Can Dance. This is an ABC News story about dancing at weddings, with the same level of silliness. Congratulations ABC, you went a whole 10 minutes before figuring out this show’s concept is stupid and abandoning it in favour of a newsmagazine-style format. The one (non-professional) video that gets more than a couple of seconds is the Wedding Thriller video, which has already been talked about to death.
  3. Venetian Princess … wait, no. She’s just thrown in as a completely unrelated intro to…
  4. The Obama crush video, which was created by an advertising executive, which is about as counter-culture as you can get, right? Sigh.
  5. Lee Paige, the DEA agent who shot himself in the foot while teaching kids about gun safety. Does agreeing to appear on this program mean he’ll be dropping his lawsuit against the government for allowing the tape to be disseminated? (The lawsuit, of course, was not mentioned on the show)
  6. The Merry Miller / Holly Hunter interview disaster. Kudos for ABC for pointing out its own failures, but it still seems fake and silly. No mention of what actually went on (she’s horribly unqualified, but Joel Siegel thought she was hot, I guess), and just some footage of her giggling about how she couldn’t interview someone without a prompter running.
  7. The Women in Art morphing video. No interview with its creator or anything silly like that.
  8. A bunch of uninteresting crime-related/surveillance camera/MySpace video news segments that sound a lot more like World News Tonight than a new primetime TV show.
  9. David Elsewhere at Kollaboration. Shots of his dad. That’s about all I remember.

In case it’s not clear enough how little money they put into this show, it’s hosted by a nobody standing in front of a white screen. It has no sets, and its stories are setup like back-to-back two-minute TV news reports, which just serves to remind us that the networks aren’t spending their budgets reporting on, you know, news.

To recap:

  • The show seems to be about running YouTube videos, but only shows clips from those videos. Not once did it show the entire thing in one sitting.
  • The show claims to tell the stories behind the videos, but there’s plenty of important facts that are left out, as you can see above. A quick check on Wikipedia will, for the most part, find you more information than you’ll find on this show. (The fact that Wikipedia considers many of these videos to have insufficient notability says something.)
  • The show tries to think of itself as cool, with its green-screen usage and “click” sounds matched to the host’s hand jabs, but the interviews are setup old-school, complete with blur filters to make everyone look younger.
  • The show tries to be new and current, but the videos are months or even years old.
  • The show tries to plug its website (well, actually, it plugs ABCNews.com), but the website provides no easy way to, you know, look at the videos featured in the show which you couldn’t actually watch because of all the fuzzy interviews going on.

In other words, it’s a complete and utter joke. Any guesses on how long it’ll keep going?

| Business, Media

Cheap content

Montreal web-media darling Casey McKinnon has an opinion in the Guardian (yeah, that Guardian) about mainstream media trying to screw over independent web producers. With all sorts of TV shows popping up that are basically just collections of popular YouTube videos, it’s rather a propos.

Of course, it’s not just web video producers that are being screwed over. Newspapers are screwing freelancers and bloggers, new media is screwing over other new media, and all media are hopping on this “crowdsourcing” bandwagon, trying to save money by getting other people to work for them for free. Then they slap their own copyright notice on it as a crystal clear “fuck you” to the community that helps build them.

That won’t change until everyone starts seriously demanding more than just seeing their creation on television.

| Montreal, Public transit

When justice fails, block public transit!

If you’re planning to take a train from Central Station next Tuesday at noon, you might want to arrive early, ’cause there’s some protestin’ goin’ on. No doubt disrupting the populace during their inter-city and commuter train travel will magically cause CN to drop lawsuits, George W. Bush to forget about a planned economic summit, and for everyone to start calling North America Turtle Island again. You know, in solidarity.

| In the news, Media, Montreal

Why does nobody care about this missing girl?

Drew Curtis of FARK.com, in his book about the news media, outlines some of the largest clichés about stories that get covered by the media. One of those is “missing white chick.” There are thousands of people missing in this world, and most of them are forgotten. If you’re, say, an aboriginal prostitute in B.C., it’ll take dozens of disappearances before anyone in the media takes notice.

But if you’re a cute, white pre-teen from a middle-class family, you’ll get all the coverage you could dream of.

That’s been the case for nine-year-old Cédrika Provencher of Trois-Rivières. She disappeared last week under suspicious circumstances, and the police and her family are using the media to try to get some leads. The media, of course, has eaten it all up. Her name is popping up everywhere, her story has appeared in over a hundred news outlets, and everyone in this province knows who she is.

The inevitable conclusion to this kind of exposure has already reared its ugly head. Police tip lines are being flooded with bogus tips. One woman called from Abitibi to say that she saw a black-and-white dog (the girl was last seen looking for a black-and-white dog, though she doesn’t have any pets). The fact that the police needed to clarify that “we’re searching for the girl, not the dog” says a lot.

I don’t mean to sound like a heartless asshole or anything, but I find it very unlikely that any meaningful tips will come from the public in Toronto, Winnipeg or Edmonton.

And if the media really does care so much about finding missing people, why aren’t they talking about Marie-Pier Cardinal?

Marie-Pier Cardinal

Never heard of her? I don’t blame you. She’s a 16-year-old girl who went missing on July 11 in Montreal. There have been no news stories about her, no national campaign to find her, and no distraught grandmothers looking for her.

Why? Is it because she’s too old? Did she not disappear from the right family? Is she not cute enough? Are those looking for her not sending out enough press releases?
Why is it that she and the dozens of other people and kids still missing aren’t having stories written about them?

| Blogosphere, Slow News Day

Editorialist, criticize thyself

The Gazette has an editorial today about the Beaver survey and it notes that — gasp — online polls shouldn’t be taken too seriously:

Talk-shows hosts, bloggers, columnists, pundits and letter-writers have all had fun with that online poll, organized by the august historical magazine The Beaver, in which respondents named Pierre Trudeau “the worst Canadian.”

…

It’s all good fun, we suppose, but it should also be a reminder online polls of this sort are not worth the paper they aren’t printed on.

I looked up the story, and most of the bloggers I’ve found saw right through the lame, transparent attempt to get free publicity. The paragraph leaves out the paper itself in those it names as having “had fun”. After all, it put the non-story on its front page Tuesday morning, one day after the Beaver issued a press release about it. (Little tip folks: Get something on Canada Newswire that’s not business-related and some paper somewhere will rewrite it into a story to fill space. Don’t bother trying to support your outrageous claims with facts, nobody cares about those.)

The editorial makes a couple of points: that online reader surveys shouldn’t be taken at face value (duh), and that “participatory journalism” has its problems:

Reader-participation journalism, a clear trend in print as well as online, has many virtues and can be a valuable tool.

But without the constraints of rigorous sample-selection techniques and careful choice of questions, the findings of some such processes are not only laughable, as with the Trudeau choice, but they can also be potentially dangerously misleading.

Just in case it wasn’t clear yet that mainstream media has no clue what participatory journalism is, here we go.

At the risk of repeating myself, the following things are NOT participatory journalism:

  1. Letting readers vote in multiple-choice online polls and writing a story about the results.
  2. Blogs written by columnists and newspaper staffers
  3. Publishing “online extras”
  4. Writing about what you found on Facebook
  5. Writing about what readers posted as comments to your blog
  6. Republishing blog posts as articles
  7. Republishing articles as blog posts
  8. Asking readers for stories and quoting from them
  9. Publishing writers’ email addresses with their stories

Many of these things are good ideas, but they’re not participatory journalism.

Sorry, mainstream media, but you got suckered in by a press release about an outrageous unscientific survey. Don’t blame it on bloggers and new forms of journalism that are entirely irrelevant here.

| Montreal, My articles, Public transit

The users provide the colour

No featured blog this week (sorry), but instead I have a short story about the Ile-Sainte-Hélène metro station (now Jean-Drapeau) and an interview with its architect and designer Jean Dumontier, for the Expo Artifacts series.

Most of the information is old news to metro buffs (like the fact that the large halls on the platforms used to house bathrooms), but I found it interesting that the lack of colourful artwork in the station was purposefully designed, since the large crowds wearing colourful 60s clothing provided plenty of colour.

The paper version also includes a (small) photo of Dumontier with a three-dimensional model of the station’s original (more elaborate) plans, which he still has at his house.

| Business, In the news

Gross negligence is an understatement

Gojit logo

Ever consider using GoJit or Dicom for deliveries? You might want to reconsider, because apparently they don’t keep track of their packages, and won’t reimburse you when gross negligence causes tonnes of merchandise to grow legs and disappear right under their noses.

Last week Quebec Superior Court ruled that the company was liable for $90,000 of boots that were lost in 2004. The company had offered a laughable $6,000 compensation when the 88 cartons over six palettes disappeared, and never called the police to report a theft.

Considering these actions take “gross incompetence” to a new level, the $118,307.65
judgment against them (plus interest retroactive to 2004) seems small.

UPDATE (Aug 8th): Just got off the phone with a VP at GoJIT. Apparently they haven’t received the decision yet from their lawyer, so won’t comment (too much) on the legal case. But apparently the compensation situation is an industry standard, and not just GoJIT policy. Look out for the interview in an upcoming article.

| Business, In the news, Montreal

Cours Mont Royal is watching you pee

Someone complained to the Gazette about video cameras in the men’s room at Cours Mont Royal. Apparently, according to the proprietor, the cameras aren’t running, due to that minor matter of it being illegal to film someone in a bathroom.

But they say it’s working, deterring illegal acts like drug dealing, vandalism, gay sex, peeing on the floor, and, of course, forgetting to wash one’s hands.

I just hope Jeff Goldblum doesn’t get his hands on it.