Category Archives: On the Net

| Business, On the Net, Technology

Scoble has (some) scruples (UPDATED: Is Scoble noble?)

Casey McKinnon, my future wife the co-host of Galacticast (which promises to have a new show some time in the next eon) is speaking out about being burned by PodTech.

It’s a good lesson for techy startup companies who think that because they’re cool they don’t have to treat people with the same professionalism that other companies do.

Ripping off a photographer is a prime example. I’ve heard countless stories of small magazines asking for people to provide high-quality content free in exchange for only the “publicity” they would get from having their name beside it, and perhaps one day getting a few dollars.

Not having enough money to properly get your startup off the ground is one thing. But PodTech isn’t poor, it’s just lazy.

UPDATE: Credit where it’s due. Scoble has responded both here and on Casey’s post. It doesn’t negate the criticisms, but it mitigates them somewhat. Hopefully PodTech’s act will improve as a result.

| Montreal, Public transit, Video, West Island

Da train! Da train!

The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai has an article about some railway buffs criticizing Montreal’s plan for commuter rail service, specifically the route of the Train de l’Est (stupidly running from Terrebonne east to Repentigny instead of running west through Laval, using existing tracks, to the de la Concorde metro station) and the apparent abandoning of the plan to use the Doney Spur, which splits from the Deux-Montagnes train line near Highway 13 and runs between Hymus and the 40 west to Stillview.

One important correction to the story: It mentions the building of a Home Depot west of St. John’s Blvd on top of old Doney Spur right-of-way. In fact, it’s east of St. John’s, which mean any rail link to Fairview (which would still have to cross Highway 40 somehow) would have to run through, under or around this new hardware store.

Here’s a bonus for you: A YouTube video of rail buff Avrom Shtern asking Pierrefonds/Roxboro mayor Monique Worth about the Doney Spur in March, and having her give the kind of non-answer that you’d expect to find in a first-chapter exercise of Politics For Dummies.

| Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, On the Net

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.

| Blogosphere, Media, TV, Video

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.

| Business, Montreal, On the Net, Technology

Big O: Yours free*

Microsoft is making fun of us. Apparently, with the Expos gone, the Olympic Stadium is worth nothing to them, so they’re “giving it away free” on Xbox Live Marketplace. Marketplace, for those who are unaware, is a brilliant invention of the online entertainment industry, getting normally semi-intelligent people to spend real money to get fake money to buy fake things.

But even these gullible patsies can’t be convinced to use their fake money to buy the Big O.

| Blogosphere, Video, West Island

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.

| Blogosphere, Media, On the Net

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 ;)
| Media, On the Net

Canoe.ca: Look at our new mess

Canoe.ca has undergone a redesign. And it still sucks.

The French version, especially, is a vast improvement over its disaster of a “portal”, but for some reason they’re following the same mistakes everyone else is making in trying to “go Web 2.0”, not knowing what the heck Web 2.0 is all about:

  • Headlines in blue-grey Helvetica bold, and a complete ban on serif fonts for no good reason
  • “Rotating headlines” which, in addition to sucking up your CPU time, force you to play a cat-and-mouse game (or is it mouse-and-mouse?) to click on it before it’s replaced with another one. (Did someone send out a memo somewhere giving people the impression that this is what “dynamic content” is all about?)
  • Everything portals that include thousands of links (OK I exaggerate, there are only 339 links on the homepage).
  • Pages that scroll down forever. Every inch down, an entirely new layout style appears with its own rules and logic, guaranteeing as much confusion as possible on where to find things.
  • Three separate horizontal menus.
  • Space wasted begging people to use this page as their homepage, instead of offering a page anyone would want to use as one.
  • Inside pages so jam-packed with ads you’re searching for the “print-friendly” link (pages of course don’t simply include print-friendly stylesheets) so you can just read the story in peace.
  • Duplicate links to sections like News and Sports just a few pixels apart.
  • Separate “narrow” and “wide” versions, because your monitor is only 800 or 1024 pixels wide, no matter who you are.
  • Each section page has a different brand, a different layout, and a different way of finding things.

Look for another massive redesign in a year or less when the folks behind Canoe.ca realize their layout sucks and nobody can find anything.

| Montreal, On the Net, Technology, Video

The parking meter myth rears its ugly head

A CNet blog post about a new website mentions an old YouTube video (how it’s related to classifieds is beyond me) about how easy Montreal parking meters can be “scammed”. Because putting money in an already-paid-for spot doesn’t add to its time but instead replaces it, the video alleges that you can add a nickel to a paid-for spot and cause the hapless soul parked there to get a ticket.

Missing in this vast conspiracy theory is any evidence that this actually has happened. Nobody seems to have come forward to complain that these mysterious party poopers who want to screw drivers for no reason have targetted them.

Besides, drivers are issued receipts when they pay for their parking. If these nefarious evil-doers do execute their brilliant plan, it would be a simple matter of showing up with the receipt to have the ticket dismissed.

This of course assumes that parking spots can be cancelled in this way, and that meter maids will be told that the spot is not paid for. As I understand the case (can’t find a link to the article that talked about it), this is not what happens.

So you can rest easy parking in Montreal. But, just to be safe, keep your receipts.

| Montreal, On the Net, Slow News Day

Fun with the legal system

The Internet is a pretty cool thing. In the past, to find information relating to a court judgment you’d have to have a Lexis/Nexis account or spend your life at a library going through giant books. Now, you just have to search.

It’s amazing how many legal cases are dealt with every day in this city alone. Some are big, like class-action lawsuits, union arbitration, or big companies going at it. Some are small, with small-claims court rulings about the silliest of subjects.

Here’s a smattering of some cases that were decided earlier this month:

  • Rabinovitch vs. McGill University Health Centre. Hospital loses a gold bracelet a woman had when she was admitted. She demands $800. Court agrees the hospital was negligent, but without a proper appraisal of the bracelet orders only $450 be paid.
  • Sportsplexe 4 Glaces Pierrefonds vs. Montreal (Roxboro/Pierrefonds). Building owner (who purchased the building from its previous owner) demands the court annul its 10-year lease which is about to end because of a technicality. The court points out that they had 10 years to bring this up and didn’t, plus the technicality itself (that an approval from the province was required) doesn’t apply anymore. Rejected with costs.
  • Moran vs. Montreal. Deaf guy (his deafness isn’t an issue, but for some reason he makes it one) sues the city after he fell on the ice and got a hernia for his troubles. Sues for $185,000. Court notes that on one hand, the 48-hour delay between the snowfall and the accident was too long. However, he made the decision to go out, and cities are normally not responsible for such accidents (there’s a specific law that covers it) unless there’s evidence of negligence. Decides city is 25% responsible, Moran 75%. Orders city to pay $18,750 with interest, which works out to about the $25,000 the city offered to pay.