Category Archives: Opinion

| Business, Montreal, Opinion, Public transit, Technology

Koodo using crappy game to get attention

Interactive Koodo ad at Peel metro

Interactive Koodo ad at Peel metro

Last weekend, some metro station platform ads were replaced by a television screen inviting people to “train” with some Koodo-branded games. Koodo, you’ll recall, is the Telus-owned “discount” cellphone service which competes with Rogers’s Fido and Bell’s Solo Mobile services. It unexplicably uses cheesy 80s workout clichés as the basis for its branding.

A user interacts with a Koodo ad at Berri-UQAM metro station

A user interacts with a Koodo ad at Berri-UQAM metro station

Lo and behold, it worked. People on a metro platform waiting for a train are a notoriously bored bunch (even if they’re in a hurry). Shiny things with buttons will quickly find people willing to press them.

Unfortunately, the games themselves weren’t that good. In fact, one wasn’t even a game, it was just a menu filled with information about Koodo’s cellphone plans. The only actual “game” is a Where’s Waldo-style search game that requires the user to “scroll” through the map because it doesn’t all fit on the screen.

The game had clearly not been usability tested, because I couldn’t figure out how the scrolling worked. Tapping near the corner caused it to slowly scroll in that direction by about an inch. Dragging a finger toward the corner caused the screen to quickly scroll in that direction and then quickly scroll back. Dragging a finger away from the corner caused about the same thing to happen. (UPDATE Aug. 27: I’m not the only one to notice this failure.)

Also:

Unexpected click gives a 404 error

Unexpected click gives a 404 error

I’m not quite sure how I did this, but I somehow created a new tab in Internet Explorer (which this apparently runs on) and sent it to a page which doesn’t exist.

Closeup of Koodo ad 404 error

Closeup of Koodo ad 404 error

So apparently these ads are running on Windows servers using a two-year-old version of the Apache web server. (On the plus side, the system resets itself after a minute or two of inactivity)

I have to give Koodo credit for this one. After all, I’m blogging about it, which was the point. But it doesn’t make me want to get a Koodo phone plan any more.

| Media, Opinion

MédiaMatinQuébec is dead

MédiaMatinQuébec's final issue: August 8, 2008

MédiaMatinQuébec's final issue: August 8, 2008

After more than 15 months, 317 editions and 12.5 million copies, MédiaMatinQuébec, the paper put out by striking and locked-out workers from the Journal de Québec, published its final issue this morning (PDF). Next week, the 252 workers return to the Journal de Québec and start re-learning how to do their jobs (which now will include increased use of multi-media for journalists), thanks to the deal that was approved last month.

In other words, it’s ok to like the Journal de Québec again (though it remains to be seen what it will take in from all that the employees have learned from putting out a paper over 15 months).

The MMQ’s final issue, at a staggering 80 pages, is filled with congratulatory ads from local businesses and unions, as well as retrospectives on the paper and the union’s long fight. In fact, other than the crossword and horoscope, that’s all that’s in those 80 pages. Stories about the 15 months of the paper’s existence, a collage of the best photos used in the paper, and mostly first-person retrospectives from dozens of employees who struggled through 15 months working in a cramped office, getting up early and standing in traffic handing out newspapers for pennies of strike pay. (Michel Hébert has a more poetic obit on his blog as well as a copy of his final column.) It’s also interspersed with comments from readers who say they’ll miss the free paper with no filler material, no wire services and 100% local news compiled by dedicated professionals.

You’ve never seen so many people happy to see their paper cease to exist. But then, that was its goal all along. The deal reached with the Journal wasn’t what either side wanted, but it was fair. And now everyone can return to work and start receiving a proper paycheque again.

More importantly, MédiaMatinQuébec may have changed the face of media union pressure tactics forever. Taking what happened during the CBC lockout to the next step, they put away their baseball bats and picket signs and protested by doing their jobs. And the public loved them for it.

MédiaMatinQuébec is dead. Long live MédiaMatinQuébec.

| Humour, On the Net, Opinion, TV

CBC’s awful hockey theme contest

40 years ago, when composer Dolores Claman was given the task of coming up with a theme to a hockey broadcast, she envisioned the music you’d associate with Roman gladiators wearing skates (assuming you could imagine such a thing in the first place). The theme she came up with became synonymous with CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada for 40 years, and has become this country’s unofficial second national anthem.

Then, in June, all that changed when CTV announced it had acquired the rights to the theme from its original composer, who was still involved in contractual disputes with CBC over the terms of its license.

The CBC, left with its pants around its ankles, dusted off Plan B: Run a contest to find its replacement.

A contest to replace the most epic song in Canadian history. No problem.

The CBC’s Anthem Challenge, which has been promoted endlessly in order to drive up interest, has been surprisingly successful at doing so. Thousands of submissions each take a legitimate shot at being the theme’s successor, mostly by trying to copy it with slightly different notes.

Some come close to what you’d expect the winner to sound like, but are still missing that punch that truly gets you ready for a hockey game. They might sound more appropriate for a Megaman level than a hockey show.

Others miss the beat entirely, spanning the range of genres from cheesy ’80s sitcom themes, elevator music, electronic music, pop songs, even cheesier pop songs with lame lyrics, Randy Bachman, and other types of music entirely inappropriate for a hockey show theme.

Some include annoying personal introductions, others repeat the same chords over and over, or include sounds of people cheering.

Considering all these people got paid exactly $0 for the submissions, they’re not bad.

But these were the most popular ones. Imagine the ones that sucked.

The big question I have here is: Is this the kind of thing that should be trusted to Joe Schmo next door? Claman was a professional, not some person they picked off the street. Why should we think that amateurs would do a better job this time, clinging to the faint hope that maybe they might be the one lucky one out of thousands to win the $100,000 grand prize and get all the fame and glory that comes from not having the right to play your own song because you’ve signed away the copyright?

It’s perhaps partly to prove this point that a member of Something Awful posted “Hockey Scores,” a collection of random annoying sounds designed to sound as bad as possible, and encouraged others to vote for it. Because Something Awful is so powerful, the song rocketed to the top, where it sits as the most popular, most viewed and most commented entry.

That has garnered the attention of mainstream media, its blogs and even the CBC itself, which points out that the number of votes is not the only factor it must use according to the rules in determining the semifinalists that will be presented to the nation in October (though it will likely be the determining factor in choosing finalists from those semifinalists, and then the winner from the finalists).

But little of that coverage is mentioning the larger issue: When rich media organizations “crowdsource”  something that’s going to make them a lot of money, expecting people to work for free, they’re just begging to get a bunch of crap.

Something Awful just helped the process along a bit.

The contest continues to accept entries until Aug. 31. Semifinalists will be aired and voted on by the public in the beginning of October.

UPDATE (Aug. 9): The Globe has a piece on the contest, which of course includes not a single link to all the entries it talks about, nor the contest itself.

| Montreal, Opinion, TV

Global Quebec’s fake local news

In October, you’ll recall Global TV announced a major overhaul of its local news outlets. As part of the plan, sets would be demolished, staff would be laid off and instead of a proper studio, local anchors would deliver the news in front of green screens to cameras controlled remotely out of Vancouver. Story packages would be shipped off electronically to a centralized news processing centre, and virtually all the production would be taken out of the hands of local workers. (The results, of course, left much to be desired)

At the time, Global reassured local viewers that their broadcasts would still be local:

News staff in each market will continue to generate local content. All content will be delivered to a Broadcast Centre and packaged into a program format for air. Local anchors will continue to deliver the news from their local stations.

Well, apparently that’s not quite the case anymore. Because being in front of a green screen means you can pretend to be almost anywhere, Global is exploiting this to make its news anchors pretend to be in places they’re not.

Hannah Thibedeau anchors Global Quebec's evening news from who knows where

Hannah Thibedeau anchors Global Quebec's evening news from who knows where

The three of you still tuning into Global Quebec’s evening local newscast might notice some unfamiliar faces on your screen. Hannah Boudreau Thibedeau is anchoring the 6pm newscast for what I’ll assume is a vacationing Jamie Orchard. Except Thibedeau isn’t part of the Global Quebec team, she’s Global’s Parliament Hill correspondent based out of Ottawa.

But that’s not conclusive proof. She could have driven into town to fill in, the local staff stretched too much as it is with summer vacations and all.

Anthony Farnell doing Global Quebec's local forecast

Anthony Farnell doing Global Quebec's local forecast

More conclusive is weatherman Anthony Farnell, since on the same day he appears on both Global Quebec’s local newscast (above) and Global Ontario’s local newscast (below).

Anthony Farnell does Global Ontario's local forecast

Anthony Farnell does Global Ontario's local forecast

Unless he has a special helicopter to shuttle him back and forth between Montreal and Toronto, he’s clearly doing both weathercasts from the same location, in front of the same green screen.

That in itself isn’t too much of an issue. I mean, any idiot can do the weather.

The problem is that he’s being dishonest about it. In both newscasts he uses the word “we,” as in “we are going to see heavy rain over the next couple of days.” For the Quebec newscast, he cut to clips of Montreal traffic. And yet nowhere is it mentioned that he’s doing this newscast from a green screen in Toronto.

Lying about your location goes well beyond the usual fakery we see on TV news. It’s dishonest an unacceptable from an organization that is supposed to be trustworthy about bringing the truth to its audience.

It’s hard being the No. 3 newscast for a community of only a few hundred thousands anglophones. The fact that nobody watches the newscast does justify cost-cutting (though that only continues the hopeless ratings death spiral). But you have to be honest about it. Level with your viewers, explain the reasons behind your decisions and even if they don’t like it, they’ll at least understand.

Saving money by lying to people is just one step above fraud.

| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

11 problems with STM’s new magnetic fare card

Nameless new STM fare/transfer card

Nameless new STM fare/transfer card

This spring, after outfitting all buses and metro stations with new equipment, the STM introduced a new, smarter fare system which uses smart cards instead of magnetic-strip passes, and cards with magnetic strips instead of … tickets with magnetic strips. Both not only serve as fare payment, but also as transfers.

Though Opus, the smart card, is the sexier and more revolutionary of the new fare cards, the STM started with this flimsy paper thing that has caused nothing but confusion and problems (even its website is down)

Below is a list of the problems I’ve noticed with the non-Opus paper card, even though I’ve never actually used one:

  1. It doesn’t have a name. Unlike the Opus smart card, which has a whole branding effort behind it, this paper magnetic card has neither a proper branding name nor any simple two-word description. The result is that people can’t describe it in a way that obviously differentiates it from the Opus card.
  2. The card was announced in the same breath as the Opus card, further leading to confusion.
  3. The card is neither reusable nor recyclable. The result is that they fill trashcans and litter streets.
  4. The card also acts as a proof-of-payment system, which means it must be carried until the end of the trip. This is a departure from the current fare payment system which has not adequately been explained. Since proof of payment isn’t enforced in the system (because some people still use old tickets and old metro transfers), it leads to even more confusion.
  5. The card replaces both single fares and strips of six tickets. This has led to a problem where users insert the card into a turnstile and then don’t retrieve it, losing the other five tickets. That has resulted in a change of policy, and they now issue six cards with one fare each, instead of one card with six fares. This leads to more waste.
  6. Metro turnstiles don’t open until the user retrieves the card. Many users have no reason to retrieve the cards because they’ve already paid their fare.
  7. While the Opus card arguably makes fare payment faster, this card makes it take longer. The machines on buses take five seconds to process a card or eject a new one, from the time payment is accepted and the green light appears. Five seconds may not seem like much, but multiply that by a dozen people getting on, and the bus is already a minute late. A bus that gets a lot of tourists or occasional riders is going to experience significant delays.
  8. Bus fare boxes issue cards for every fare paid. But because they’re treated as optional transfers, users who aren’t planning to transfer move to the back of the bus before the card is issued. Drivers have to manually collect the cards, which they then give out when other users pay using tickets. When the number of people paying cash and not wanting a transfer outweighs the number paying tickets and wanting one, a surplus emerges which the driver has to dispose of.
  9. When inserted into a fare box, no feedback is given other than a green light (fare accepted) or red light (fare rejected). Because the cards act as both fare payment and transfer, there’s no way to tell until after the fact whether the fare box has accepted a transfer or deducted another fare. (This is a larger problem with the Opus card, which has no human-readable indication of how many fares remain on it.)
  10. Because the card is designed for disposability, it isn’t very tough. As a result it gets folded and wrinkled and then becomes unreadable, causing further delays.
  11. The cards are not accepted on minibuses or collective taxis.

Have you noticed any problems with the card apart from these? Comment below and I’ll add them to the list.

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

Nobody reads fine print (except ours, right?)

The Gazette has a Canwest-penned article in today’s paper (complete with adorable photo of Montreal-guy-who-visits-websites) about how people don’t read the fine print when visiting websites and entering into contracts with web companies. It cites their obscene length as a key factor:

In the case of online ticket purchases, if you actually click to read Ticketmaster’s fine print before buying concert tickets, the terms run nearly 6,200 words. It takes far longer to read than the three minutes and 15 seconds Ticketmaster gives you to make a decision to buy tickets.

It also points out that the terms can be abusive to the point of absurdity:

They’re often lengthy and complicated. Sometimes they can be changed unilaterally by the company, and they usually include a limited corporate liability clause.

Readers are encouraged to comment on this article. In order to do that, you have to agree to this 785-word license release, which also requires you to read and agree to this 10,509-word general website terms of service. Both contain an absolute liability waiver, and the latter contains a clause that allows the company to unilaterally change the terms without notice. It also contains gems like these:

  1. Except as provided herein, you agree not to reproduce, make derivative works of, retransmit, distribute, sell, publish, communicate, broadcast or otherwise make available any of the Content obtained through a canada.com Site or any of the Services, including without limitation, by caching, framing, deep-linking or similar means, without the prior written consent of the respective copyright owner of such Content.
  2. You shall not have any right to terminate the permissions granted herein, nor to seek, obtain, or enforce any injunctive or other equitable relief against canada.com, all of which such rights are hereby expressly and irrevocably waived by you in favour of canada.com.
  3. You acknowledge having obtained independent legal advice in connection with this license, release and waiver, failing which, you shall be deemed to have voluntarily waived the right to seek such independent legal advice.

Don’t let it be said my bosses don’t have a sense of humour.

(By submitting a comment to this blog post, you hereby agree that Fagstein is awesome.)

| Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Nobody wants to read 1,000 comments

Patrick Lagacé brought up a point about comments on blogs, and how he’s not entirely sure what good they do him. Being a popular blog, it gets a lot of trolls and other pointless and unhelpful commentary. Comments easily reach into the dozens, sometimes hundreds.

That was also the subject of an interview Pat did on CIBL with Michel Dumais (Mario Asselin has the details) in which Pat totally name-drops me (near the end of the audio clip):

Dumais: … Vous êtes très fréquenté, vous générez beaucoup de commentaires. Mais ça serait pas intéressant pour vous peut-être de commencer à fréquenter aussi des autres blogues et à laisser des commentaires? …

Lagacé: Oui, j’essai de faire un peu. En fait le seul blogue ou je le fait, j’estime que c’est le meilleur blogue de couverture médiatique à Montréal, c’est le blogue de Steve Faguaiylle … Faguy… son blogue c’est Fagstein — qui couvre les médias montréalais, surtout anglo, mais un peu québecois… francophone aussi. C’est le seul ou je vais. Les autres, je sais pas. Un peu de manque de temps, un peu de manque d’intérêt.

(If my blog were a movie, that quote would go at the top of the poster.)

Although the number of comments on Pat’s blog causes a bit of professional jealousy on my part (second only to hair jealousy), it’s very rare that I’ll read the comments attached to one of his posts. Not so much because of the trolling (though it is apparent), but because there’s just so darn many of them. I don’t have time to read all the posts on blogs I’m subscribed to as it is. I certainly don’t have time to read 50 comments attached to each post, especially when they don’t have anything interesting to add.

And then there’s situations when the number of comments simply gets out of hand. The decapitation-on-a-bus story I talked about earlier now has 1,700 comments, most of which are repetitive. Has anyone read them all?

One easy solution is to stop approving troll comments. We set minimum limits (usually legal ones) for the types of comments we approve in moderation, but why set the barrier so low? Why not set them to the same level as we do letters to the editor? Just because there is space for more doesn’t mean we should bury any truly interesting comments in a pile of useless junk.

But even then, the number of comments can still be unbearable in very popular blogs or news stories or anywhere else one might have an attached discussion forum. When that happens, it’s time to start removing comments that aren’t really interesting (comments that simply agree, disagree, approve, disapprove, or otherwise give a comment without explaining it or adding anything new, as well as those that repeat things already said by others).

The standard response to that is: That’s censorship. It’s not though, it’s moderation. Nobody’s stopping you from posting your useless comments about my blog post on your blog or on some other forum somewhere. When I disapprove a comment it’s because I find it of no use to my readership.

But some still think that’s too far. So is there another method to get these runaway comments under control?

Well, Slashdot answered that question years ago with its comment system. The website, whose format looks very similar to blogs even though it predates them, has a threaded comment system, so comments can be traced back to their parents and sorted according to thread. This level of organization (and the ability to turn it on or off as needed) helps a big deal when dealing with a large number of comments.

More importantly, though, Slashdot has a peer moderation system that allows users to rate each others’ comments. Positive reviews increase a comment’s rating, and negative reviews decrease it. The result is that each comment is assigned a numerical rating (from -1 to +5), and readers can filter comments based on that rating. Set it to zero to get rid of just the trolls. Set it to +5 to get only the dozen or so truly exceptional or interesting or useful comments you need.

I’m surprised that every large-scale blogging system ever made hasn’t copied this system in some way. Instead, you see unthreaded comments with no rating system. The only judgment made is whether they meet the minimum requirements for posting, and that’s not good enough when our attention is so limited.

My blog, though it gets quite a few comments, doesn’t get near enough to start implementing stricter screening or peer moderation, but if I had 500 comments a day, I would certainly seriously consider it.

| Opinion, Slow News Day, TV, Video

Flying babies are awesome

Patrick Lagacé points to this report about a kid in Georgia who bounced a baby across a room by jumping on an inflatable pillow. He’s now facing charges for child cruelty.

Of course, because there’s video of the incident, TV news was all over this story. Sure, the video is disturbing, but people will watch it. So they play it over and over. That’s an average of one baby launch every 7.5 seconds.

Did they think we’d forget after the first 15 times what it looked like?

| In the news, Opinion

Decapitation leads to passioned debate

There are hundreds of comments (thanks to a bit of Farkage) on this rather disturbing CBC story about a man who suddenly stabbed and killed (and decapitated) a sleeping fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus.

The comments are all debating three different topics:

  1. What should the passengers have done? Some say they should have intervened, even at personal risk:

    37 adults could not stop this poor child from getting decapitated. 37 adults chose to cowardly permit a haneous murder right under their noses. These 37 cowards may have saved a few scratches on their skin to lose their souls.

    Many many more sane people say that a large man with a large knife in an insane homicidal rage can’t be safely disarmed on a bus by civilians. As it is they barely escaped serious injury.

  2. Should the death penalty be brought back for cases like this? This debate, tied somewhat with the debate on how mentally ill criminals should be treated (and whether or not the man in question was mentally ill), doesn’t deal with the facts in this case much.
  3. Should we allow concealed weapons on buses? Gun control can’t possibly not be a debate here, even though no guns were involved. My favourite comment:

    If Canadians were permitted concealed carry of firearms, one of the other passengers would have plugged that psychopath before he had the chance to cut the poor victim’s head off. Just another example of Canada’s soccer mom gun laws working against the interests of honest citizens.

    See if that guy tries to ever cut MY head off… staring at the barrel of my .357

    Never bring a knife to a gun fight, psychoboy.

    That sounds like rock-solid logic. (Unless of course the psychopath had a concealed firearm and killed his victim in one shot, leading to the same result.)

  4. Should police have shot to kill once they got on scene? The victim had already been decapitated by this point, so I guess the odds of recovery were slim. But some people seem to think that summary police execution is justified in cases like this.

    What I really wonder about is why didn’t the police shoot the perpetrator as soon as they could? With that many witnesses, the perpetrator showing off the head of his victim, the amount of blood that had to be on the scene,would there be any need for court to determine his guilt?

    Others suggest that’s not a very rational way of thinking:

    There should be some minimum age or education required to post on this news site. How many more people are going to say that we just kill this guy without a trial? What the hell country do you think you are living in?

  5. Should we install metal detectors in bus terminals? How far do we want to go to ensure our safety? This far?

    Never mind the metal detectors. We can’t be safe until we are all locked up so we can’t harm others or harm ourselves.

    Think how much safety would be improved on planes and buses if we were handcuffed to our chairs by security guards while in transit. This would stop every assault and every hijacking attempt on an aircraft or bus.

    Perhaps the human equivalents of pet carriers are what is needed to ensure our safety. Any time we go out in public, we can be locked into a sort of rolling sarcophagus, and can be wheeled around wherever we need to go by security guards.

    These kinds of measures may seem extreme, but no sacrifice is too great to make for safety.

There. Now you don’t have to spend hours reading the comments.

UPDATE: 1,500 comments and counting in under 24 hours.

| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit, Slow News Day

STM, media need to learn Bullying 101

The local media is busy rewriting this STM press release (or republishing this Presse Canadienne piece with its incorrect web address) about how students will be forced to use the new Opus smart card as a transit pass this fall. The card, valid for two years, will have a picture and personally identifiable information on the back.

For some bizarre reason, the STM started this campaign without updating its web page on the card so that students could learn more about the new system.

One of the claims by the STM, as highlighted by The Gazette, is that the card will eliminate fraud and, hence, taxing by fellow students. The way this will be done, it suggests, is by revoking the card’s credentials once it’s reported stolen.

Let me repeat that: Once it’s reported stolen (This is assuming, of course, that the student in question knows the serial number of the stolen card or the STM can search a large database of personal information to find it).

Now, to those who have never been bullied in high school: What do you think is going to happen after someone has taxed you for your transit pass and you report it stolen?

Of course, the fact that ID and pass are on the same card, and that ID should be checked any time the card is used, should automatically make it impossible to use the card of anyone but an identical twin. But, as we all know, verification of student ID cards is hardly 100 per cent.

| Media, Opinion

Online articles should be corrected

Montreal City Weblog has a post about a story that updated quickly enough that different sources had different versions. The story is about a girl in St. Sauveur who said she escaped a kidnapping attempt. The only problem is she made it all up.

Here’s the thing: The original CBC.ca story is still up there, with no indication that the kidnapping didn’t happen. No correction, no update, no link to a new story.

This isn’t a problem limited to the CBC. While major outlets like the New York Times will put a “correction appended” notice on articles that are updated, most don’t bother. They’ll put up a new story when new developments happen, and leave the old one to be spread among blogs, spidered by search engines and continue to give out misinformation to an unsuspecting public.

Among the news outlets that left original stories up with no indication of corrections or updates:

News outlets that replaced the original stories with new ones saying the kidnapping was a hoax:

The fact that there’s a second list is comforting, but the first one (most of whom simply recopied the Canadian Press story) is still far too long.

There’s no excuse for allowing incorrect and incomplete information once correct information is known. News media (traditional and new alike) have to shape up and fix that fatal flaw if they’re to be trusted to give us accurate information.