Category Archives: Blogosphere

| Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Do bloggers have to fit the stereotype to be accepted?

In October, blogger Mario Asselin asked his readers to evaluate what makes a good journalist blog. He was researching an article that has just been published in Le Trente about Quebec’s journalist-bloggers. In it, he concludes there are only two who fit the proper definition: TVA’s Dominic Arpin (ironic since he’s since stopped blogging) and freelancer Nicolas Langelier.

Now, I’m not upset that he didn’t include yours truly in his über exclusive list (especially now since Michel Leblanc has my back). I’m used to being left out of the Quebec blogosphere as an anglophone (mostly because there’s an assumption that “Quebec” and “francophone Canadian” are one and the same). What bothers me more is the criteria used to distinguish a good blogger from a bad one.

It’s something I see a lot of. Because “blog” doesn’t have a very clear definition other than “website with entries displayed in reverse-chronological order,” people are making up their own definitions, putting additional restrictions on the term.

Among the restrictions Asselin and his readers seem poised to apply:

  1. Must have comments enabled for each post (and respond to those comments)
  2. Must be personal and talk about personal, behind-the-scenes issues
  3. Must produce original content (instead of aggregating the content of others)
  4. Must comment on other people’s blogs and otherwise have a presence outside their blog, like going to YULblog meetings
  5. Must update at regular intervals (at least one post a week)
  6. Must write about other bloggers (and especially competing bloggers)

Though all of these things sound great, are they all absolutely required in order to produce a good blog?

The Kate McDonnell’s Montreal City Weblog doesn’t have comments. Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error doesn’t discuss personal issues. Pierre-Léon Lalonde’s Un Taxi La Nuit has sometimes gone weeks without updates. The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out is mostly aggregation of other people’s content (including that of The Gazette), and Stony Curtis is almost entirely just reposting stuff he’s found online.

Are these not blogs? Are their authors not bloggers?

Where do you draw the line between a “real” blogger and “fake” one?

| Blogosphere, Montreal, Public transit

Toronto bus transfers: fascist?

At French School Confidential: A comparison of Montreal and Toronto bus transfers.

I would only add that the main difference between the two is that Montreal transfers are designed to be read by machine (and bus drivers who understand their codes), while Toronto transfers are designed to be read by people.

I’ve always liked our punch-card transfer system. It just works, and has so far resisted modernization efforts that have changed just about everything from mechanical to electronic: Parking meters, thermostats, car windows/ignition/steering/locks, radio tuners… How long before the transfer goes too?

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

Was Paul Pritchard a freelance journalist?

Via J-Source comes this blog post from Frank Moher complaining that the big TV outlets paid big money to Paul Pritchard, the guy who shot the video of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski being Tasered at the Vancouver airport. Dziekanski later died from injuries he sustained during the incident, and that has prompted an investigation into Taser use by police.

Normally, paying for news is outright prohibited by journalistic ethics codes. The reason is simple: It encourages people to make news for profit rather than report on events for altruistic reasons.

The media’s response is that Pritchard was a freelance journalist, who sold his footage just like any freelance reporter would sell a story to a newspaper or magazine. He wasn’t directly involved in the incident, and he had no ulterior motive other than to expose what happened.

The ever-growing field of freelance journalism, where regular people are contracted and paid for individual stories rather than employed as a part-time or full-time journalist, provides for a certain loophole in these areas. Instead of paying a source for an interview, you can pay a “contributor” to discuss a topic with a news anchor, or pay a “columnist” for insights into insider politics or whatever else they might specialize in.

How do we separate the ethical from the unethical payola? And which side does Paul Pritchard fall on?

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing

On being a B-list blogebrity

Navel-gaze with me for a moment.

B-listI checked my Technorati rating yesterday and noticed that I’m above the 100 authority level for the first time (111, exactly half that of my hero Patrick Lagacé). That level, according to this hyper-scientific calculation system, makes me a B-list blogebrity.

That sounds cool and all, but I’m still ranked 58,325, and I don’t think B-list celebrities have 58,325 people more important than them.

What gets me more is the words used to describe this blog in the local blogosphere, where I imagine the name carries a bit more weight because I focus on local issues. Small things like saying “un site plus connu” or “un influent blogueur” boost my ego enough to almost forget about the fact that I’m not paid a penny to do this (yet).

Of course, quite a bit of my Technorati rating comes from automated spam blogs that link to whichever of my posts contain their magic keyword, hoping for trackbacks that’ll send eyeballs to their ad-ridden sites.

Going through my logs, it seems apparent that I have some regular readers. About 50 or so subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed through Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines or other similar services, and more visit the site the old-fashioned way, through bookmarks, memorizing the URL or Googling “fagstein”. Many others get here through search engine searches for things that nobody else has written about. The rest are Google’s indexing bot.

So to you human readers I say thank you for reading. If I can’t have modest riches, at least I can have modest fame.

I expect the red carpet treatment at Yulblog this week. (Even though I’ll probably be at Pecha Kucha instead)

Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging. (This week’s geography trivia question is still open, with an added hint.)

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

Journalists don’t check ID

Anonymous blogger “Emma”, who was recently approached (via email) by Radio-Canada and asked to identify herself for a story, waxes philosophical about the idea of anonymous blogging, especially in the wake of the “Elodie Gagnon-Martin” scandal where an ADQ blogger turned out to be … maybe … an ADQ staffer of another name.

As a journalist who writes about blogs (and for that matter other online stories), I see both sides. But what is perhaps being forgotten in all this is the simple matter that journalists don’t check ID. Unless they have some reason to believe that you’re lying to them, they’ll take your word for it that you are who you say you are. Unless you say your name is Hugh Jass (and even then…) or the name of someone they already know, whatever name you give them is the name they’ll use.

So with that in mind, what’s the point, really? There will always be situations where journalists get tricked and have to apologize, and unless they ask for a driver’s license before every interview there’s no way to ensure that won’t happen again.

Anonymous blogs should be simply identified as such in the news: Take ideas at face value, but trust at your own risk.

| Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Free speech isn’t a right on blogs, it’s a privilege

There’s a minor crisis happening in the Quebec blogosphere over Richard Martineau’s blog. He and Canoe are being sued for $200,000 over allegedly libelous comments made by visitors to his blog about lawyer Susan Corriveau.

The concern is over what impact that might have on comment policies at mainstream media sites. Traditional media (especially local empires in Quebec) are still trying to figure out what to do with this whole Internet thing, and are entirely clueless about the implications of user-generated content. They think forcing users to click a button that says “I agree not to post libel” is enough to protect them from liability.

Coincidentally, an earlier post this week by La Presse star blogger Patrick Lagacé mentions that he’s asking for tougher moderation of user comments to get rid of the junk and even cap the length of some discussions.

Ironically, both Martineau’s blog and Lagacé’s blog require user registration before people can make comments. This stands in contrast to websites like The Gazette’s which removed the login requirement to encourage more comments. (Then again, even The Gazette is starting to move back — their only popular blog, Habs Inside/Out, has changed its policy to require moderation of anonymous comments.)

As any forum gets more popular, it starts to see problems it couldn’t predict. Spam is the first to show up, in the form of junk sent by computer to advertise some money-making venture. That can be solved by installing a spam filter, requiring registration or manually moderating comments (or a combination of these).

But then comes the problem of real people posting unwanted things. Libel, flame wars, factual mistakes, personal attacks, trolling, copyrighted works, personal information, pornographic images, off-topic comments, the list goes on. The worst ones will get deleted outright. Border cases might get a polite warning from the blogger or moderator.

For some reason, there’s the implication that the goal is to have unedited, unrestricted, free communication in the comments section of blog posts. This innocent-until-proven-guilty mentality means that a lot of useless, mean or uninteresting comments get attached to blogs, comments that are of no use to anyone and are a waste of time and space.

Little by little, big bloggers are starting to restrict that freedom and filter out the noise.

Good.

I moderate comments on this blog. I don’t require user registration (because I know how annoying it is), and I tend to let most non-spam through. But nobody but me has the right to say what is published here. I have deleted plenty of personal attacks, unhelpful garbage, trolling comments and other junk that doesn’t belong here, and I will continue to do so. At the end of the day, I’m responsible for all the content published here, and it’s my ass in the courtroom if anything crosses the line.

I welcome criticism (in fact, some of my best comments are those who reject my entire hypothesis and ridicule my interpretation of the facts), but you have to show your work. Comments like “you suck” and “you’re gay” have no place here or on any other blog.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Anglos, poutine and a gypsy

This week’s blog is Gypsy Bandito (and the Magic Flying Media Machine) by CT Moore, a social media marketing and other buzzwords-type person. His posts mainly take the form of videos of him thinking out loud while walking down the street, holding a video camera at his face. Others might think him insane, but we know better. (UPDATE: He just resigned from his job… so repeat previous sentence.)

This week’s Justify Your Existence is Gary Shapiro, a spokesperson for the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, the anglo rights group that is fighting for bilingual commercial signs. They launched last week and got quite a bit of media attention. They also ran this ad in the Suburban and Gazette on Wednesday:

OQLA: Help save the English language

My first question to Shapiro: “Is this a joke?” didn’t go over well. Though the name is a parody of the OQLF, the issues the group raises are apparently very serious.

(UPDATE: The West Island Chronicle does an informal survey of large stores and shopping malls to see what languages their signs are in. TVA also has a video report on the group, with the journalist talking to the OQLF, Mouvement Montréal Français, Gilles Proulx and just about every pundit he could talk to except Shapiro or another member of his group — no mention is made of an attempt to contact the OQLA to have them explain themselves.)

Finally, there’s also a Bluffer’s Guide on the history of Poutine. It may or may not have turned 50 this year, depending on whose story you believe. While the media tout the story of Fernand Lachance inventing it in Warwick in 1957, one restaurant proclaims it was the birthplace of the dish.

| Blogosphere, TV

Vlog in danger of cancellation

UPDATE (Nov. 13): It’s official: the show has been cancelled. See the latest post for more details.

Vlog, the TVA viral video show that airs after Occupation Double on Sundays, is apparently in danger of cancellation. Within hours of the rumour starting there’s already a Facebook group to save the show and suggestions for what host Dominic Arpin should do now. (He’s already shut down his blog, despite my objections.)

According to a funny-looking, funky-dancing, hairline-receding source at the show who I won’t name (at least not in this paragraph), the rumours have some truth to them. Director Jean-François Desmarais mentions on the Facebook page that “sad news” is coming tomorrow (Monday).

If the show is cancelled (and rumours like this tend not to propagate until after the decision has been made), that would be a shame. Despite its popular lead-in show, the start-up series has been a victim of horrible scheduling (it always starts late, and it’s on against Tout le monde en parle), insufficient advertising and a general lack of effort on the part of TVA to give it a chance to succeed.

But there’s a more important issue here: How this affects me. You see, I interviewed Arpin for an article I wrote about Vlog, which probably won’t be published for a week or two. If the show is cancelled by then, the article will be dated before it’s even printed. It’s not like I could just add a line that says “oh yeah and the show was cancelled”. So please, TVA, for my sake, don’t cancel the show (at least not until next month).

Vlog airs Sunday nights at an entirely unpredictable time between 9:30 and 10:30 on TVA. Let’s hope tonight’s episode won’t be the series finale.

| Blogosphere, Media

Francs-Tireurs aren’t that close (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

Francs-tireurs

Patrick Lagacé wants to make it very clear that he and fellow Franc Tireur Richard Martineau don’t live together and aren’t attached at the hip.

Which is surprising to me because that show always seemed to have homo-erotic undertones, what with their matching wardrobe and the way they goof around together.

Anyone up for writing some Lagacé/Martineau slash fiction?

| Blogosphere, Canadiens, Montreal, Web design

Habs Inside/Out redesigned

The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out blog (which is liveblogging the game going on right now) has undergone an overhaul, switching from Movable Type to Drupal. Among the sweet stuff coming in as a result are user registration, comment threading, comment rating, avatars, comment preview, and those annoying social bookmarking links on each post.

The design still needs some ironing out, so expect the look to change slightly (hopefully including getting rid of that awful sea-green). I also noted that “associate blogger” Kevin Mio has been promoted to having his picture on the homepage again.

The backend of the site, administered by techies John MacFarlane and Dru Oja Jay, is separate from the CanWest online canada.com nightmare, and that’s a good part of why it’s so successful.