Category Archives: On the Net

| 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.

| Montreal, Public transit, Video

Video fun in the metro

Documenting the metro

It’s been the subject of advertising campaigns, design criticism and ridicule. People with lots of time on their hands have created computer simulations of it. Others have shot strange foreign-language films there (familiar-language movies too).

It has a sound system nobody understands. It has buskers, some of whom play in front of giant ads with their pictures in them.

And then there’s the (sometimes drunken) dancing. Some use the poles to dance by themselves… upside down. Others aren’t so agile. Some dance with a friend. Some straddle. Some spin. Some twist. Some groove while sitting down. Some … uhh…

And, then, of course, some people party party party with lots of friends.

Love it or hate it, our metro will live on forever thanks to amateur videographers.

Bonus: Some metro-related things you don’t see every day: Decoupling. The view from the cabin. Door chimes.

| 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?

| Montreal, Video

The camera adds 10 pounds, and 6 civil rights violations

Montreal Police (“Montreal Police Service”? I guess it’s technically correct, but it sounds really weird) is upset at YouTube videos that show their officers at work.

Their beef specifically seems to be about two videos (shot by the same person) which identifies the officers by name giving him tickets. This one refers to the officer as “conne-stable” (very original). The SPVM’s beef with this one (a five-minute argument over a parking meter) is more curious perhaps, since the officer gives his consent for the video to be posted online.

They’re just two in a small sea of videos of encounters with police. It’s perhaps telling that some people are reaching for the camera the moment they’re pulled over, assuming that the officer might pull something illegal.

| Media, On the Net

I don’t want Joe Anybody writing my news

So citizen journalism site NowPublic has received over $10 million in financing. Good for them.

I’ve always been a bit hesitant about these user-generated news sites. On one hand, they represent an unlimited potential for news gathering, where everyone and anyone can be a reporter. On the other hand, everyone and anyone is also an editor, which means news judgment is left potentially to the lowest common denominator.

This leads to things like navel-gazing, navel-gazing analysis, political mudslinging and Fark-like crap masquerading as news. Add in a few rewritten press releases and stories about missing white girls and you have everything that’s wrong with mainstream media in a nutshell (at least according to Drew Curtis).

I admit, part of my hesitation is also self-serving. As a freelance journalist, if Joe Anybodies can put together stories for free, there’s not much incentive for budget-conscious newspaper owners to hire professionals.

And these websites are new. It’s a budding concept which needs time to grow before it can be thoroughly evaluated.

But I just don’t see how they’re going to get over the problem that the crap-loving, special-interest public will tend to dominate over real, fair, honest news.

| Humour, Media, TV, Video

Rock and … pretty ears?

I’m sad to say I’m a bad Quebecer (or, should I say, a bad québécois). I don’t watch Tout le monde en parle, I rarely flick by the local French-language TV stations unless there’s big local news, and I don’t read La Presse or the Journal de Montréal regularly. As a result, I’m missing out on an entire culture going on around me. I have only vague ideas of these shows, these personalities.

So, as I sit here watching 110% (I know, I know, but hockey’s my thing), I’m discovering, for the first time, the group Rock et Belles Oreilles. For those like me who hadn’t heard of them, they’re a 25-year-old sketch-comedy group whose members include the strangely-bearded Guy A. Lepage.

Their videos, most of which are from their 25th anniversary last year, are all over YouTube. Since I’m a media buff, I’ll highlight some that deal with the local French-language media:

| Humour, Movies, TV, Video

The worst of Québécois film and television for your viewing pleasure

A friend pointed out to me today that he was planning to pop his Fantasia cherry by going to an interesting showing this evening. One mention of the words “Total Crap” and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

For those who don’t know, Total Crap is the brainchild of Simon Lacroix, who has for some reason taken it upon himself to collect the worst of Quebec television, from dancing lessons for overweight baby-boomers, to local wrestling previews, cheesy commercials and, every now and then, an appearance by Celine Dion. This is a pretty good example, but there’s much better.

Now, you might think “wow, that’s a really weird hobby”, and you would be wrong. You see, there’s someone else in town who’s doing the same thing. DJ XL5 (Myspace link, sorry) is also a local practitioner of what they call “zapping” and showing awful clips to eager audiences.

Last fall, someone had the brilliant idea to have them square off against each other. On Halloween at Club Soda, they did battle. The audience couldn’t decide between them, and there was no winner declared, but they did agree they wanted more.

So today at 7 p.m. at Concordia’s DB Clarke Theatre (Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., corner Mackay), comes DJ XL5 versus Total Crap: La revanche. Here’s the teaser.

Next Friday afternoon, DJ XL5 returns solo with a showing of some pretty insane shorts with DJ XL5’s Kaleidoscopic Zappin’ Party (Teaser).

Tickets to both are $7.50, which you can get at Admission or on-site. (Bell Mobility is running a promotion with $5 tickets if you want to play their cellphone games)

| Media, Video

It’s just cruel to not provide the video (UPDATED)

Local news is abuzz (well, kinda, when they’re not blowing Harry Potter) about Global Action Network volunteers infiltrating a Quebec foie gras producer and gathering some awful footage of what they call animal cruelty.

Today they supposedly released video of their findings. So you’d think that the news websites would at least provide a link.

So once again Fagstein steps in where others have failed. Check out the four-minute video on YouTube.

UPDATE: The above video was for some reason taken down. Here’s another link to another video with the same scenes.