Category Archives: Blogosphere

| Blogosphere, Media, Web design

TQS needs to learn web programming

I just tried to subscribe to the one blog on TQS’s website, that of Jean-Michel Vanasse. Unfortunately, I can’t, because the RSS feed for his blog is malformed.

It looks like the problem is with their advertising system. They’re adding ads as items within the feed (bound to annoy some people, but something we could live with). Unfortunately, they’re not escaping the ampersands (&), which is causing problems for any feed reader expecting valid XML.

Odd that they would not have noticed this. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll take them to fix it?

UPDATE: If you guessed “four days”, give yourself a cookie.

| Blogosphere, On the Net

All blog but no bite

Some local bloggers are flogging what’s called “Blog Action Day“, where on one day (Oct. 15), every blog around the world features a post on a particular subject (in this case, the environment).

This may shock and amaze you, but I’m taking a somewhat cynical view of this.

First of all, it’s not like the environment needs to have awareness raised about it. It’s the cause célèbre du jour, for crying out loud. It’s like trying to raise awareness of Facebook.

Secondly, it’s kind of gimmicky. Like that Live Earth concert that was more about music than the environment. I have a feeling this will be more about bloggers than the environment.

It’s well-intentioned, and I wish them well, but I just don’t see it doing anything concrete to help the environment.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, Navel-gazing, Video

I like to blog during the summer

Laurent has put up video from the August Yulblog where he went around asking people what their favourite summer activity was. (He’s been making the questions easier each month since people have had trouble answering — he threatened to make next month’s question “what’s your favourite colour” if people were still having trouble)

Of course, what you’re looking for is at 1:49: Me.

Me at Yulblog

I got at least one comment that I wasn’t recognizable from the nose up in that tiny photo at the top of my blog, so here you go. That’s what I look like.

Ladies, the line starts here.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, Public transit

It shouldn’t cost $9 to get from one shore to the other

Midnight Poutine has a rant-post about something I’ve heard a couple of times recently: when taking a trip that spans two transit networks, it’s treated as two separate trips, and you’re charged full-price for each.

So imagine someone taking public transit from western Laval to Brossard. That person would have to take an STL bus ($3), the metro ($2.75), and an RTL bus ($3.25). Total cost: $9.

We have, thanks to the Agence métropolitaine de transport, a “zone” monthly pass, which allows unlimited travel in multiple transit networks at a price considerably below what you’d pay for the different network’s passes individually. Why can’t we do something about individual trips to save people some money?

Part of the STM’s plan as they introduce a smart card system next year will be to be able to control zoning better. This will probably mean that a trip between downtown and the West Island will cost more than a trip within the downtown area. Hopefully this might also mean it’ll cost less than $9 to cross three transit networks on a single trip.

| Blogosphere, Business, Montreal, On the Net, Technology

Everyone’s a marketing/media critic

There’s something going on out there called the 1% Army Tournament. It’s a head-to-head competition between over a hundred Canadian marketing and media blogs (there are over a hundred Canadian marketing and media blogs?)

Among the local blogs participating (or having been nominated without even knowing about it), some of whom will be added to my feed reader soon:

Wow, that’s a lot.

| Blogosphere, My articles

A rare glimpse into Coolopolis Towers

Readers of the Gravenor Bros. excellent Coolopolis already know that it’s the featured blog this week.

Getting the story behind it wasn’t easy. Coolopolis Towers is located in an undisclosed offshore location and is heavily guarded. My credentials being as pathetic as they are, I would never have been allowed entry.

Instead, I sent in Mandy, a secret agent who’s been working for Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd. for many years (for reasons of security, I can’t show a picture of what Mandy looks like, but believe me she’s a knockout). Her charms easily got her past the first few layers of security, and her shameless appeal to Kristian Gravenor’s vanity quickly gained his trust. (The secret? Ask him about Azerbaijan.) Through some innocuous-sounding questions and by slipping some helpful chemicals into his drink, Mandy got Gravenor to spill the beans about Coolopolis. A hidden transmitter quickly beamed that information to my top-notch surveillance team sitting on a stealth dinghy nearby.

As the article points out, Mr. Gravenor is a fan of exaggeration. The “gorillas implanted with intelligence chips” are actually chimpanzees, and the chips are just GPS tracking devices. The “800 lb Godzilla-like dragon creature” that is supposed to be guarding the entrance can be generously described as maybe 400 lbs, and is hardly Godzilla-like at all. And “Ruprecht, Her Majesty’s Royal Mail carrier” is actually Roberto, a Mexican-born illegal alien who says his bosses haven’t paid him in weeks.

Instead of owning up to it, of course, Kristian appeals to my vanity, hoping that I’ll keep some of my findings to myself.

Not a chance. The world has to know about Coolopolis.

| 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.