Category Archives: Blogosphere

The end of a blog is not the end of the world

Patrick Lagacé talks this week about local bloggers getting tired and shutting down their blogs, and suggests group blogging as a solution to this problem.

There’s an important point there: a blog about something (motherhood, drunk taxi customers, puppies) will be more interesting to a large number of people than a simple blog about what you ate for breakfast.

Whether group blogging is better than single blogging is up for debate. Compare Metroblogging Montreal with Montreal City Weblog and each has its strengths and weaknesses.

But there’s another point I’d like to make here: lack of time isn’t really a good reason to shut down a personal blog. Lots of bloggers seem to be under the impression that unless they can put up a new post every day like they used to, they have to have a dramatic goodbye post to solicit “please don’t go!” comments from friends and acquaintances.

There are plenty of great blogs that aren’t updated that often. Yeah, it sucks for people who check blog updates the old-fashioned way, but with feed readers becoming a more common way for people to keep updated on their favourite blogs, you end up not even noticing that a blog has stopped being updated until you notice the “goodbye” post (followed inevitably by the “and just one more thing” post and the “maybe I’ll update every now and then” post).

If you can’t update as often, we understand. If you don’t enjoy blogging anymore, we understand. If you’re moving to a country that doesn’t have Internet access, we understand. But don’t get all emotional just because you’ll only want to update once a week instead of once a day.

There’s no “use it or lose it” law for blogs.

OMG. Puppy!

This week’s blog is Christelle FV, whom I emailed almost six months ago. So long, in fact, that the primary focus of her blog, Happy the Most Adorable Puppy in the World, wasn’t even a factor back then.

For those who don’t know, Happy is a Mira dog, part of the foundation’s Foster Families program, where you get to take in a puppy, do basic training and then give it back so it can get specialized training to be a guide dog or service dog.

Imagine: taking in a puppy, and exchanging it for a new puppy when it gets old. All for a good cause!

Looking for me? I’m hiding in the dark

No blog this week from me. Instead, Gazette intern and guest blogospherophile Jasmin Legatos has a profile of MTL Street. Don’t worry, I’ve got some more in the pipeline.

For those of you who desperately need a Fagstein Fix (and really, who doesn’t?), you can find me a couple of pages down as I present a Bluffer’s Guide to the new NASA Beyond Einstein program.

Funny story about that piece: Editor Peter Cooney (also the paper’s soccer blogger) called me up on Thursday and asked me to put together a Bluffer’s Guide for him. I’ve developed a reputation as someone who can be counted on to file last-minute, due to a combination of my lust for money and having no life. He suggested one about NASA, and I agreed, and started putting one together.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening properly, and wrote about the wrong mission. Instead of Einstein probes and dark matter, I wrote about the Dawn mission, exploring the two largest asteroids in the asteroid belt.

Oops.

I ended up getting a call at 9:30 Friday morning. Fortunately I didn’t have anything to do (except sleep) that morning, so I put together the one you see here.

Let that be a lesson folks: NASA’s up to a lot of stuff, and you shouldn’t get your deep space probe missions confused.

A new Montreal news source?

There’s some buzz going around about a new super-secret startup called YulNews. The details are, of course, sketchy, but common sense suggests it might be a user-generated news site.

If that’s the case, I’d have to say I’m a bit skepitcal. In the big picture, sites like NowPublic.com are still trying to find their sea legs. Nothing has really reached the critical mass necessary for another Wikipedia. Instead, we get stories that link to or generously quote mainstream news stories, stories written about the website itself, or “call to action” stories about someone’s injustice that his friend wrote about.

Wikipedia is great, but it’s not an original source for news. Wikinews, its open news sister site, is still not at the level it needs to be to be trusted as a news source.

Citizen media are useful for things. They can provide unfiltered eyewitness testimony, they can write interesting opinions, or they can get insider information. But we still need professional journalists, the people who are paid to spend an entire day in a courtroom, who can file a story in a half hour, who have the time and expertise to bring the news out.

So is this going to be a place where ordinary Montrealers can share information about what’s going on in their city that the mainstream media isn’t talking about, or is it going to end up like a substandard version of Montreal City Weblog? Or something else entirely?

We’ll see.

Lots of words, no information

Nicolas Ritoux, my francophone counterpart who freelances for La Presse, has a long post on his blog about a super-secret new project he’s working on with Evan Prodromou. Probably more interesting is that he’s no longer writing, throwing his weight behind this super-secret project that we don’t know anything about (other than the fact that it’ll be bilingual).

The announcement will be on the agenda along with a demo at DemoCamp on July 24. Evan certainly has the experience in startups. We’ll see how good an idea it is when we actually hear the idea.

DOA

Dominic Arpin has made it official: he’s no longer a journalist. He’s leaving TVA’s newsroom to start a new show called Vlog where they show videos they got (and hopefully licensed) online. His co-host is Geneviève Borne, so you know which one is the eye candy. (His blog, meanwhile, will continue as is.)

I’ve got to give the Domster some credit: At least he doesn’t call what he’s going to do journalism. It’s entertainment, produced on the cheap since they just have to find other people’s original ideas instead of coming up with their own.

I’m not sure how successful this show is going to be. It’s hard to say especially knowing so little about it. But I’m not holding my breath. I hope Arpin surprises me.

His post about the new show is interesting, because he talks about leaving the comfort zone of a unionized job for a high-paying, high-profile but incredibly risky gig that he can be fired from at any time.

Dominic: If you find yourself out of a job after a few episodes, you can always come work for Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd., provided you don’t mind being paid in Froot Loops.

How to drive like an idiot

Adrian points us to a video on YouTube (among other places) called “Late for Work” of a young driver zigzagging through light traffic on the West Island. There’s a second video out there (I won’t link to it because it’s on a porn site) called “Late for School” of a similarly dangerous trip down Highway 40 in St-Laurent. Both videos are sped up, but it’s clear from the rest of the traffic that this guy is going fast.

What gets me about the video is not so much that some idiot is filming himself doing this, but the route he takes in it:

Late for Work route

Google Maps says the logical route above would take 11 minutes, which sounds about right. The video is about 3 minutes long. Assuming it’s sped up at about 5 times normal, that means not only did he act like an idiot speeding, but he also lost time.

Idiot.

How newspapers can flourish online

Montreal Tech Watch has a poll running about what you would do if you were running a media outlet and had to decide what to do about its online presence.

None of the answers given satisfied me, so I wrote my own response:

None of the above.

The things you have listed here are exactly what’s wrong with current media thinking. They have no clue what they’re doing online, so they figure they’ll just sprinkle some Web 2.0-ness onto their crappy web properties as if that’ll magically attract more readers and advertising dollars.

Here’s some other suggestions:

  1. Stop crippling websites out of fear that your subscription rates will go down. For $20 a month, very few people will make their subscription decisions based on what stories are free online vs. what needs subscriber access.
  2. Learn Web 1.0 before Web 2.0. Hire people at more than $8 an hour to put print stories online. Link related stories together. When documents or websites are mentioned in stories, link to them. Spend more than three seconds on the formatting to ensure that hard and soft returns are fixed, or that tables don’t look like garbage.
  3. Focus on the content. People go to newspaper websites for articles, not all the gimmicks, badly-produced videos, audio slide-shows and other stuff you throw at us on the homepage. Make the articles prominent in your design, and make finding them easier.
  4. Use word-of-mouth to your advantage. This is one of the lessons of Web 2.0. Make linking to articles easy with short URLs, no pop-ups or crazy javascript toys that cripple the browsing experience. Encourage people to share excerpts from articles instead of threatening them with copyright warnings. Keep them online for more than a week as links to them propagate.
  5. Allow moderated comments on all articles. Approve those that add anything useful to the article, like clarifications, corrections, responses, different points of view.
  6. Get a real domain name and use it. Of the Montreal newspapers, only Le Devoir actually hosts its articles on a website with its domain name. Using canada.com, cyberpresse.ca and canoe.ca might make the corporate bosses happy, but it just confuses your readers and makes them take longer to find you.
  7. Shorten your URLs, or at least have them make sense:
    http://www.cyberpresse.ca/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=CPBLOGUES14

    http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/tech/default.aspx

    These are the homepages of these blogs. Individual post links will be even longer. I’m sure both have cute shortcuts that only their authors really use. But shouldn’t that in itself be an indication that there’s a problem to fix here? (At least Canoe got it right with their redesign: Dominic Arpin’s blog URL is the short (though redundant) http://doa.blogue.canoe.com/dominicarpin)
  8. Put online advertisers on a leash. I have to close web pages with newspaper articles because my CPU time is being gobbled up with dozens of overly-complicated ads desperate to get my attention. Stop these automatically-playing videos, whether they have audio or not. Stop these ads that assume because you swiped your cursor over them to get to the close button that this is permission to take over your computer and block the editorial content. Limit ads on the homepage so people can find their way to inside content (would newspapers put this many ads on their page one?)
  9. Pick a layout and stick to it. I want a simple homepage with links to individual sections. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes while my computer figures out how the 30 sections of this homepage, each with its individual layout logic, are put together on a page that scrolls down for eternity.
  10. Use blogs better. Put beat writers on blogs. Have blogs by experts, not laypeople. Encourage people to visit and comment. Don’t force people to go through your 20-page registration process before they can comment on a blog or story.
  11. Hire professionals if you’re branching out. I don’t want badly-lit videos of talking heads shot by writers.
  12. Encourage, but do not rely on, user-generated content. Yeah, finding people who have been screwed over by companies or the government will be easy. But crowdsourcing is not going to make you money. You still need qualified professionals with the time and skills to do quality work.
  13. Put your archives online. You have huge databases of content that just sits there for some unknown reason. Blogs stay online forever, and you’re just losing ad money and reputation when someone following a link comes to a page that says “this article is no longer available.”
  14. Don’t hire newspaper people to do online work. Hire web professionals and listen to what they have to say. Make them work alongside real newspaper people who can concern themselves with putting out a quality pulp product instead of trying to figure out your online content management system.
  15. Hire me as a consultant ;)

Plagiarism from those who should know better

Shouldn’t TVA know by now that grabbing whatever comes up under Google Image Search isn’t free for you to use as you wish?

TVA plagiarism

Apparently not. On the left here is a screenshot from a TVA news report. On the right is the photo they used, taken by a Montreal blogger who isn’t happy about it being used without his permission. (For those who think it’s a coincidence, check out the train in the lower right corner of the photo.)

Meanwhile, Canoe, the Quebecor-owned web portal, also used the same photo to illustrate a Journal de Montréal story (not sure if it was in the paper itself), though they credited the author, as if that somehow gives them free reign to use other people’s copyrighted work without permission or compensation.

As a freelancer, you can imagine how much this annoys me.

Newspapers still need to learn how to use blogs

The Gazette today launched a Jazz Festival blog called “Offbeat” (better than “beatoff” I guess) written by saxophonist Adam Kinner and freelance writer Natasha Aimée Hall.

The blog reads like a diary, which got me thinking about mainstream media outlets and their use of these curious creatures they still don’t quite understand. Some blogs make sense, like The Gazette’s wildly successful and very high-quality Habs Inside/Out blog, which gives the paper’s experienced hockey writers a place where they can share late-breaking behind-the-scenes rumours and other news directly with a niche audience.

Others, however, read more like personal blogs which catalog the hourly events of its authors but doesn’t provide anything interesting to anyone outside the immediate family of the blogger.

It’s not the fault of the bloggers, most of whom (including Hall) are very talented writers. The problem is a lack of direction from the media outlets that create them. They give them this platform, tell them to “go and blog” and don’t give them much else to work with. The bloggers are left with nothing else to write about than their own personal stories, as mundane as they may be.

Blogs by beat writers is one thing. It’s pretty clear what the blog is going to be about. But for anything beyond that, the media have to answer the question “what information would I go to this blog to learn?”

If the answer is “what someone did for a couple of weeks”, then I think it needs some rethinking.

Tremblay speaks out about Zeke’s suit

Michel Leblanc has comments from Pierre-Antoine Tremblay justifying his court cases against blogger Chris Hand.

Tremblay’s side has some valid points:

  • This isn’t a case of freedom of speech, it’s a libel case. Bloggers are just as responsible as media outlets as far as not using their right to free expression maliciously. Assuming Tremblay’s interpretation of the original post is true (that Hand accuses him of fraud and links to the mafia), those are certainly things that someone could make a legitimate libel case out of.
  • Tremblay hasn’t been charged with any of the crimes he’s been associated with. His dispute with Loto-Quebec was settled out of court (the result is sealed), the paintings are still on display, and he hasn’t been accused of any direct links to Frank Martorana or other members of the mafia.
  • He’s not a rich mogul looking to shut down a blog. His injunction is very specific, and doesn’t even prevent Hand from discussing Tremblay, just from repeating the allegations.
  • Hand was clearly exacerbating the situation through other media until recently when his lawyer told him to clam up.

On the other hand, he doesn’t answer some of Chris Hand’s main criticisms:

  • Why hasn’t Tremblay attempted to contact Hand about all this, instead of issuing threatening lawyer’s letters every couple of weeks?
  • Why not have Hand simply correct the post, which he indicates he was perfectly willing to do, instead of bringing him to court?
  • Why is the Loto-Quebec press release, which Tremblay says is false, still available to the public? How are we supposed to know that the paintings weren’t fake (if that is indeed the case) if the settlement is secret?
  • Why is he suing for $25,000, and now trying to increase that to $60,000?
  • Why not simply try to settle the case out of court, since both sides are poor and the only people to win here are the lawyers?

Either way, unless these two can start talking to each other like humans, a judge is going to decide which story is more sympathetic. And lots of money and time is going to be wasted on both sides.