Category Archives: Blogosphere

| Blogosphere

DOA resurrection

Dominic Arpin

Dominic Arpin is setting up a new blog

Dominic Arpin is back! Over three months since he gave up blogging and two months since his show Vlog went off the air. His first post describes what he’s been up to since.

It’s about time.

UPDATE: The best part about it: Not having to register with Canoe before I leave a comment.

UPDATE (Feb. 9): Bruno Guglielminetti has an interview (Windows Bleedia, sorry) with the Domster, in which he explains the blog is an independent venture designed to build a personal brand that would outlast his career at TVA (not that he’s planning on leaving anytime soon).

Arpin, meanwhile, is red-faced over all the attention he’s getting (he was a vedette at this week’s Yulblog), even from me, whom he calls his “plus fidèle tortionnaire.” I was going to complain that he used a complicated French word which Google translated as “torturer,” but looking back at that graphic I guess I did pick on him a bit. (Writing a newspaper article that called him a thief probably didn’t help either ;)

| Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

Jamie Orchard takes the bus

Global Quebec likes to run the occasional 5-second ad for anchor Jamie Orchard’s blog. I find this odd, because she updates it about once a month, which hardly makes it qualify as a blog, much less make it advertising-worthy.

Today, she added her first new post since Dec. 4, complaining about bus service on the island. It’s an example of what not to do with blogs.

Let me explain:

  1. It’s a subject that anyone can write about. In fact, as evidenced by two letters she cuts-and-pastes into the blog post, anyone has written about it. Orchard’s experience having buses show up late and not wanting to bike in the winter are not unique and she provides no unique insight into them. Journalists’ blogs should provide new information if not personal insight. They shouldn’t repeat what everyone else is saying.
  2. It’s blowhardism instead of journalism. Instead of explaining that delays are a result of a bus shortage, she rants about how “Montreal must do more” for public transit. Such comments make us feel good but are completely devoid of meaning.

There are other minor things like the horrible formatting, but those two are the most important.

Mainstream media outlets are clueless about this blog thing and are just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a lot of junk. I don’t want my journalists to sound just like those uninformed idiots on MySpace. I want something new and interesting. The faster journalist-bloggers (and the media companies who don’t want to pay them a cent to do this extra work) understand that, the faster we’ll see blogs that are worth our attention.

And while I sympathize with people whose buses arrive late, I don’t think exaggeration is warranted here. This isn’t some third-world country. The vast majority of buses do arrive on time and take people to their destination without incident.

I lived for five years in the West Island taking a bus every day downtown to study. Up to three hours of transit time each day. Sometimes buses wouldn’t show up, and I’d be left out in the cold for up to an hour. But even when I got frustrated, I never condemned the entire system like others have. I moved closer to the city, next to a metro station where I don’t have to worry about catching a bus to get downtown.

Yes, Montreal (and Quebec, and the unions, and STM management and everyone else) should do more to ensure quality public transit. But Montrealers need to be a bit more tolerant toward small disruptions in service. Montreal’s transit network is among the most reliable in the world, and I think we’ve taken that for granted.

| Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing

Toronto Sun sorry for plagiarizing Torontoist

The Toronto Sun has apologized after Torontoist noticed an article the Sun ran copied a paragraph word-for-word from a blog post of theirs two days earlier. Though the blog considers the matter closed, Craig Silverman does his usual complaint that the apology is too brief, doesn’t explain how the error occurred and doesn’t say if there was an investigation into the reporter’s past articles for instances of plagiarism.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for one of the big papers to plagiarize one of my posts without credit. When is it going to be my turn?

| Blogosphere, TV

Local bloggers on Test the Nation

Test the Nation

Bored? CBC’s latest rendition of Test The Nation just finished on TV (though you can take the test online). Among the six teams fighting it out in studio were “bloggers” (Here are their mugshots). The team includes some well-known Montrealers:

Nulman has guaranteed that the blogger group will be victorious over celebrity look-alikes, cab drivers, backpackers, chefs and flight crews. Can they pull it off? Considering how skewed the questions are toward technology trivia (there’s even an entire section on it), I wouldn’t be surprised…

UPDATE: 26 questions in, and the bloggers are leading.

UPDATE: Nulman breathes a sigh of relief, as the bloggers easily take the competition with an average score of 50/60. Highest is Rick Spence at 57. I scored a still-respectable 47.

UPDATE: The CBC actually does a pretty darn decent job rounding up the post-test blogger reaction. They also put up some fun statistical stuff (StatsCan they are not), which shows that meateaters scored better than vegetarians, heavy Internet users scored more than light Internet users, and that Quebec outscored every other province (HA! Suck it Alberta!). The best: Nunavut. The worst: PEI.

| Blogosphere, My articles

TWIM: Ron Paul and other things sketchy

This week’s Justify Your Existence is Jacques Grondin, a member of the Montreal Ron Paul Meetup Group. Despite being a Canadian citizen, and not an American one, he’s campaigning for Paul here in Montreal, trying to raise his profile among American expatriates and Canadians who will be affected by this presidential race.

Montreal isn’t part of the U.S. Why campaign here?

Grondin: It’s a dilemma. Most of the people we talk to are Canadians and not Americans. But there are plenty of Americans in Montreal, plenty of tourists. Pierre Trudeau was very popular in the U.S. John F. Kennedy was popular in Canada and around the world. Paul fits into that class.

You’re Canadian. Why not get involved in Canadian politics, instead?

Grondin: There is no Ron Paul in Canada. The closest thing you’ll find is the Canadian Action Party, and I’m a member of that, as well. But getting into the White House is a bigger goal.

Also this week is a short profile of Matthew Forsythe’s blog at comingupforair.net. He’s an accomplished illustrator who likes to make sketches of the world around him. (He’s already put out the welcome mat for readers.)

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing

Link to me!

I’ll admit it, I’m vain. I check my logs regularly and scour the Internet looking for people who are talking about me. I get giddy when other blogs (no matter how insignificant) link to mine, and even giddier when it’s praised by people more important than me.

This week Nicolas Cossette of the Montreal Social Media blog put mine in a list of seven important local blogs. It’s a very subjective list, and it doesn’t include some smaller but very interesting blogs about Montreal, but still yay me.

Included with the entry on me is this statement:

I would say that if (traditional) journalism has difficulties to reach a younger audience, that’s partly because of blogs like his where you can find all the news about the city plus a lot more.

There’s this idea a lot of people have that my blog (and/or others) serves as a replacement for newspapers. There’s two reasons why I disagree with this:

  1. This is not the place to get your news. I see a truckload of interesting news that I don’t post about because I have nothing interesting to add. Kate’s Montreal City Weblog does a much better job covering the local news, but then it’s just news about Montreal. These blogs are great sources of information, but they should be used in tandem with newspapers, not instead of them.
  2. The primary sources for information from both my blog and especially Kate’s are local newspapers. Without them, we wouldn’t know half the stuff we do, and those links we put in our posts to read the full stories would go nowhere. It’s amazing how much people forget this sometimes.

Speaking of Kate’s blog, every month she’s consistently one of my top two referrers (traffic that comes to my blog through links from other websites). The other is Patrick Lagacé. Both have me on their blogrolls and link to me occasionally.

But when Patrick links to my blog in one of his posts, I have to pray my cheap server doesn’t fail it dwarfs all my regular traffic with a flood of curious French-speaking people (who apparently all take one look at my blog and close it). So I’m expecting something similar this month as he linked to me in two consecutive posts.

The first calls Fagstein the best media blog in the city (thank you) in an unrelated post about some silly criticism of him. (Despite how vain I am, I’ve developed a pretty thick skin when it comes to criticism. Most of it is brainless loudmouthing, which should be dismissed. The rest is useful criticism which should be embraced.)

So yeah, I’m awesome.

| Blogosphere, Media, Slow News Day, TV, Video

Craig Silverman on Reliable Sources

For those who missed it, Regret the Error‘s Craig Silverman was on CNN’s Reliable Sources this weekend, shamelessly plugging his book discussing some of 2007’s most hilarious corrections:

UPDATE (Jan. 6): The Gazette’s Bill Brownstein also writes about Silverman, crediting him as having been interviewed by CNN for his newspaper-corrections expertise.

| Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Opinion

Bilingualism isn’t a threat to Quebec

Chris DeWolf emailed me about this blog post on the two solitudes from Voir’s François Parenteau. In it, he argues that anglos are zombies (then he argues that we’re not zombies) and that we’re coming to get francophones so we can enslave them, or other such nonsense:

Et c’est vrai aussi que, d’un point de vue strictement francophone, les anglophones sont des morts-vivants. Ils sont vivants, en ce sens qu’ils marchent, travaillent, mangent, dorment, votent et font des enfants. Mais comme ils font tout ça en anglais, ils sont morts au regard de la communauté francophone. Ils ne créeront jamais rien en français. Ils ne consommeront aucun produit culturel en français. Ils ne retireront rien et n’amèneront rien à la sphère culturelle francophone. Ils la “compétitionnent” même avec la leur propre, indépendante, nourrie à même la culture majoritaire de ce zombie-land qu’est l’Amérique du Nord. Et pire encore, on le sait, ils transforment automatiquement en zombie les francophones avec qui ils entrent en contact. Il n’y a qu’à voir les communautés francophones hors-Québec pour s’en rendre compte.

My problem isn’t that he’s paranoid, or that he spews vitriolic hatred and xenophobia, painting hundreds of millions of people with one gigantic brush. My problem is how familiar this kind of language is, leading people to believe that such opinions are valid.

I wonder if I should even point out that the entire premise for the post is wrong. He says census data shows that French is the mother tongue of less than 50% of Montrealers (which is true), and that this is because of an increase in the number of English speakers. A quick look at the census data shows that almost all the change in percentages comes because of an increase in immigration and the number of allophones (who speak neither language at home). What’s more, a majority of these immigrants to Quebec are choosing French over English for the first time.

Of course, facts are irrelevant. What matters is what’s in his gut. And the irrational fear is there. Just like Americans think they’re going to get swarmed by illegal Mexican immigrants and have to speak Spanish, people like Parenteau think there’s an organized anglo conspiracy to rid Quebec of the French language, and that the percentage of francophones, now around 80% province-wide, will drop to zero.

I’m not suggesting that being surrounded by a population 50 times your size doesn’t put a melting pot pressure. It does, though nowhere near as big as alarmists make it out to be. And the shrinking population of francophones outside Quebec should be of concern as well to anyone who wants this country to promote bilingualism.

But it’s not equivalent to South African apartheid, as one commenter (who wants everyone to know he has a bachelor’s degree) suggested.

Facebook and YouTube have to change

Parenteau points to the English-only Facebook as an example of the assimilation of francophones into anglophonia. I think it’s annoying that Facebook is only now considering creating versions of itself in other languages. YouTube, which launched an English-only Canadian site despite already having translated versions, is even moreso.

But the blame for this should rest on Facebook and YouTube, not anglophones in general. And the suggestion that francophones should boycott these sites (yeah, good luck with that) is exactly how it should be dealt with.

Blaming anglos doesn’t solve anything

Even if we ignore all of that, the fact remains that Parenteau and company don’t put forward any serious solutions for the problem of “zombies” eating their brains. Some suggest sovereignty, which wouldn’t stop Quebecers from using Facebook, nor would it make French more common elsewhere in Canada. Restrictive legislation like Bill 101 just makes companies look for loopholes, which is why Momma’s Pizza House is now Maison de Pizza Maman but Burger King is still Burger King. Boycotts and popular campaigns don’t work.

And most importantly, blaming all us anglos for the problem and calling us names won’t do a thing for the cause. It’s not going to make us all run away to Toronto or start speaking French. It’s just going to get us riled up and start writing blog posts.

But I’m not going to stoop to François Parenteau’s level. I’m not going to pretend like he represents the majority of francophones. I know better than to suggest that 80% of Quebec’s population are ignorant xenophobes who want to rid the world of everyone who isn’t like them.

Why aren’t we happy with bilingualism?

Montreal is the most bilingual city in North America. It’s a place where it’s not uncommon to find people switching languages in mid-sentence. But rather than embrace that, the two solitudes are at each other’s throats. Yes, that means we have some unilingual anglophones, but they represent less than 5% of the population. Is this really the end of the world? The alien invasion? The apocalypse?

We should be celebrating the fact that we can speak two languages here. We should be promoting it as an economic strength. Instead, we have people like François Parenteau who believe refusing to speak another language makes him a better person.

| Blogosphere, My articles

TWIM: Gay religious types and copyright reform

For those of you who’ve missed my blog profiles, fear not. This week I profile The Evolution of Jeremiah, a very personal journal of a gay man studying to become a minister at Christ Church Cathedral:

“Among all the gay reads I have on my blogroll, I am the only one who writes about life and religion,” he says. “If I help change one life or I help a gay person come out and live to tell the tale, or I help an HIV-positive person live another year after diagnosis, then I say I have done my job.”

(More)

Also this week, another Bluffer’s Guide, this time about copyright reform going on in Ottawa. It’s as quick a summary of the situation as I could fit into 750 words (with lots of movie title puns that honestly were last-minute throw-ins). Those of you interested in it should check out Michael Geist’s blog.

It’s a tricky issue because nobody has actually seen the copyright reform bill that Industry Minister Jim Prentice is going to put forward next year. Most of the concerns are based on Bill C-60, an attempt by the Martin Liberals to amend copyright in 2005. It was heavily criticized as favouring the interests of big media companies instead of users, and was never passed. There are concerns this is a similar attempt, mostly because there has been no public consultation about the bill.

UPDATE: Geisted!

| Blogosphere, Business, Video

Compagnie de marde

Via Patrick Lagacé comes this video from comedian Jean-François Mercier, reciting his saga of trying to get a $100 mail-in rebate cheque from Bell Mobility, only to have them refuse to help him because of his “unprofessional” tone.

It’s eight minutes of him reading letters back and forth, but it’s probably the most entertaining eight minutes of talking-head letter-reading I’ve seen in a while. (Be sure to check out some of his other videos).It’s also why I avoid sales based on mail-in rebates and don’t count their discounts as real.

UPDATE (Dec. 17): Lagacé has a follow-up, with comments from a Videotron CSR who says we shouldn’t be shooting the messenger.

UPDATE (Dec. 18): Another follow-up from Mercier himself, who posts a video apologizing for his rude behaviour but reiterating how customer service agents aren’t servicing the customer and mail-in rebates are a scam. Naturally, his problem was solved quickly once his story hit the media, and he got a call from a high-up VP at Bell. (Sound familiar? We’ve seen this kind of blatant special treatment before from Bell.)

I’m sure Bell bigwigs think that having a VP stepping in to personally fix a situation and offer a thousand apologies gives people the impression that the company cares about customer service. But I think it just reminds people that all Bell cares about is the appearance of good customer service, treating people in the media with the red carpet and telling everyone else to stop bothering them. If Bell really cared about customer service, Mercier’s problem would have been resolved on his first phone call. It wasn’t.

| Blogosphere, Humour, Media, On the Net

Regret the Error roundup

Regret the Error presents a roundup of this year’s funny corrections and cases of plagiarism and fabrication.

No Montreal media appear on either list, though the Toronto Star gets two dishonorable mentions, for prematurely killing off Morley Safer and for bringing the Detroit murder rate up by a factor of 50. The Ottawa Citizen, meanwhile, put a photo of an innocent man on a section front, identifying him as a pedophile.