Dear EarthChef,
please look up the meaning of the word “exclusively.”
(Yes, I know they’re all owned by the same company, but that doesn’t make this assault on logic less wrong)
Category Archives: Technology
Cyberpresse redesigned
Cyberpresse today went live with a redesign of its entire site, ditching the old coloured box motif in favour of a grey, white and red OMGWEB2.0 deal that seems to be in vogue with media sites recently.
The first thing you notice, as you do with all these new news websites, is that it goes on forever. You see, some web marketing genius decreed that users no longer care about vertical scrolling (which is true) and some web designer at an important media outlet decided this meant the homepage should be infinitely long vertically. And now everyone is mindlessly copying each other with these layouts that have no structure and look absolutely haphazard as far as placement of stories on the homepage:
Cyberpresse homepage goes on and on and on and on and on...
Still with me? Good. Since the page is so freaking long, I had to shrink it down considerably, so let’s take a zoomed-in look here:
Top of the Cyberpresse homepage
It’s a very boring, unoriginal layout. Some account-specific links at the top, then a horizontal bar for links to individual sections. Oh wait, it’s actually two horizontal bars. One is for sections, the other is for “websites” that Cyberpresse owns for sections special enough to get their own domain. If you’re not familiar with that system, you’ll probably get confused here and have to read the entire thing a couple of times to figure out which link is the best one to click on. Below that are main stories on the left, a search box on the right and some editor’s picks. Looks OK so far.
Middle part of Cyberpresse homepage
Here’s the meat below. It goes on like this for about four or five screens worth, and they’re all basically the same. Can you tell the logic behind what goes in which columns?
If you answered anything coherent to that question, then you’re wrong. The first column has sections like news and business, except for fluff sections like home, auto, environment, movies that are in the second column, except for arts, technology and lifestyles which are back in the first column.
Oh, and they have names like “Automobile” and “Maison” even though their names are “Mon Volant” and “Mon Toit” elsewhere. Whatever, consistency is for losers.
The third column at least has some consistency. It’s where all the interactive stuff goes. The polls, the “most emailed stories,” the user-generated content, etc. In fact, you’re encouraged to submit your own content (click on “Soumettre une nouvelle,” a page I can’t link to directly), which requires you fill out a form and agree to an 800-word terms of service (which I also can’t link to directly) with gems like these:
- Lorsque vous soumettez Votre contenu à Cyberpresse, vous concédez à Cyberpresse une licence mondiale illimitée, irrévocable, non exclusive, perpétuelle et à titre gratuit : i) d’utilisation, de reproduction, de stockage, d’adaptation, de traduction, de modification, de création d’œuvres dérivés, de transmission, de distribution, d’exécution publique ou de mise à la disposition du public de Votre contenu à quelque fin; et ii) de concession en sous licence à des tiers du droit illimité d’exercer l’un ou l’autre des droits précités. Outre la concession de la licence susmentionnée, par les présentes, vous i) convenez de renoncer à l’ensemble des droits moraux dans Votre contenu en faveur de Cyberpresse; ii) reconnaissez et convenez que Cyberpresse ne saurait être tenue responsable de quelque perte, endommagement ou corruption de Votre Contenu; et iii) reconnaissez et convenez que Votre Contenu sera considéré comme non confidentiel.
- Vous devez être âgés de 14 ans ou plus afin de pouvoir soumettre Votre Contenu à Cyberpresse.
- Les Règles de Contributions des Utilisateurs peuvent être modifiées en tout temps par Cyberpresse à son entière discrétion.
- Vous vous engagez à coopérer avec nous dans la contestation de toute réclamation.
Well, when you put it that way…
One thing the website emphasizes is its Dossiers, in which stories on a single topic are packaged together, like the U.S. presidential election. Organizing stories by topic instead of more broadly by section is something you’d think media web types would have concluded long ago was boneheadedly obvious, but the news sites are only now really picking up on that. And there are plenty of important, recent topics that don’t have their own pages yet and really should.
Cyberpresse’s launch article also mentions a more powerful (i.e. less crappy) search engine that better finds what you’re looking for. I typed in “Patrick Lagacé” and was pleasantly surprised to see a photo, biography and even email link. Except nowhere do I find a link to his blog. I tried again with “Patrick Lagacé blogue” and the response was “Aucun résultat.” Bravo.
Putting in other search terms for important stories of the past few weeks, I become even less impressed with the search engine.
The blogs also got a redesign. The authors’ pictures are moved to the side, leaving a big space for “le blogue de X”in stylized letters. (Though it seems poor Sophie Cousineau and Nelson Dumais got left behind.) These designs range from the obvious clichés to the we-don’t-know-who-this-is-or-what-she-writes-about generic.
Finally, there’s the RSS page, which has lots more feeds for specific topics. This is good, though the wording on many of these feeds is strange and confusing (what does “ctrl::dossiers cbp” mean?). I managed to decode a few of them which have been added to my Google Reader.
And now, the really bad intro videos
Patrick Lagacé gives us a tour of Cyberpresse
Oh, and I just noticed there’s a video tour of the new website (honestly folks, if you have to give a video demonstration of how your website works so people understand it, then you didn’t design it properly in the first place). I say “just noticed” because the article announcing the new website has no link to the videos nor does it even mention them.
The videos star some tech dude or blogger I’ve never heard of. His intro video is unintentionally hilarious, as he invites people to see another video “en cliquant ici” (clicking on the video per his instruction does nothing), and then sits there and does nothing but stare at the computer screen for a minute and a half while we make up our minds.
Lagacé does his best blogger imitation on camera
In fact, it goes on for so long that he twice looks off camera wondering if he can stop yet:
Lagacé telepathically pleads with the director for permission to leave
The content of the video is basically him repeating the same thing that was in the introductory article, although he strokes his ego by using himself as a search example. Even though he got the same result I did (i.e. a picture of himself but no link to his blog), he pretends that it works.
Other than all that the site is great. I mean, it’s got gradients and JavaScript-controlled content tabs, so how could it not be?
P.S. WTF?
UPDATE: Michel Dumais has a positive review of the new Cyberpresse. Steph looks at it from a Web 2.0 perspective.
Akoha: Is that all?
Last week, we got our first true glimpse into the über-secret world of Akoha (formerly Project Ojibwe, aka Austin Hill’s new project), after they presented the project at TechCrunch50.
I find myself feeling for Akoha something similar to what I felt about Standout Jobs when it launched in public beta: disappointed.
Not heartbroken. Not “wtf this is crap,” but more a feeling of “a team of computer programmers spent months in super-secret hiding for this?”
Added to that was the fact that both did a lot of talking about supporting the local community, but when it came to actually launching, they both took off for the other side of the border.
Based on the presentation, the comic on the website and Roberto Rocha’s article, Akoha is some sort of game where you buy cards and have to do what the cards say. And then you go online and tell everyone you did what the cards say. And then you feel good.
Mark MacLeod points out some of the issues Akoha will have to deal with, like marketing, user retention and monetization. I’ll also add authentication: How do we know that someone’s claim to have done something is true?
But the biggest problem, I think, will be keeping a critical mass that goes beyond the fad. People will be interested, at first, but without that Facebook-like regular activity and new information, I can see people using Akoha less and less until the playing cards start collecting dust at the back of the closet.
But then, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. TechCrunch liked it, as did Scoble. So maybe it is the next big thing.
Tory Tweets, Gritty Twits and Dippy Twats
I’m informed by email that electopinion.ca, the five-party Twitter snapshot site, has tweaked its automated search terms so it stops showing stuff unrelated to the Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Bloc and Green parties.
Still no RSS feeds, though. Not to mention my general distaste for things Twitter.
Txt the vote!
A lack of interest by youth in politics is a problem in many developed countries. I’m not sure exactly why the youth is so disinterested. Perhaps they don’t understand how important democracy is. Perhaps they’re jaded by our first-past-the-post system which makes their vote pointless. Or perhaps with school, relationships, finding a job and smoking pot they’re just too busy to care.
But if you took a poll of young non-voters, I’m pretty sure that “inability to text-message party leaders” would not rank highly on the list of reasons they’re not participating.
So why do people pretend that this will make a difference?
I’m all for making things more accessible and increasing the avenues of communication. But when old people reduce youth to nothing more than text messaging and Facebook, I find that just a bit insulting.
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph archives on Google
As part of a big announcement this week that Google would be offering to digitize newspapers’ archives (with their permission) and put them online for free, the Quebec Chonicle-Telegraph, North America’s oldest newspaper and the only anglo paper in Quebec City, has jumped on board and some of its archives are already available on Google’s site, mainly from the 50s and 60s. (The QCT even got some link love on the Google Blog.)
(via Le Devoir)
Dominic Arpin also wants to be your friend
Just use YouTube
Bruno Guglielminetti, seen above giving a video update from what appears to be an airport bathroom stall, has become the latest journalist to discover that it’s easier to simply upload videos to YouTube than deal with his company’s complicated proprietary system.
The advantages of YouTube are pretty astounding:
- Free storage space, which means you don’t have to worry about server maintenance, technical support or web programming
- Familiar interface to web users, instead of the Windows Media, RealVideo or Quicktime systems that half the audience might not have the proper plugin for
- A much, much, much larger audience of millions of web surfers who might stumble upon your video through search, instead of the few dozen people who might reach it through a direct link from the media outlet’s website
- The ability to share advertising revenue with Google, a company that understands Internet advertising a heck of a lot better than those kids you have trying to sell print ads.
Given that, why don’t more non-television media outlets mothball their video systems and just switch to YouTube?
The main reason is control: They want 100% of all that ad revenue they’re not getting. They think they can do everything because they did everything in print. They don’t trust some outside company to handle this for them. And they don’t want to throw away something they spent thousands of dollars getting the CEO’s nephew to develop over the weekend.
On the other hand, many of these same websites use Google Ads, Google Analytics and Feedburner.
When it comes to video, I think they’ve hit the wrong side of this equation.
The evidence can be seen on their own blogs. Look at how many of them embed YouTube videos, or even unofficially upload their own videos to YouTube because they can’t figure out their company’s proprietary system.
Bruno’s step makes sense. Let’s hope others follow. And not just with YouTube. They should have channels on Vimeo, Blip.tv, Metacafe and others. Their business shouldn’t be in distribution, it should be in content.
Globe thinks colour will solve newspaper crisis
The Globe and Mail and Transcontinental have signed a $1.7 billion, 18-year deal for the Montreal-based printer to print the newspaper everywhere but the prairies.
The highlight of the deal (from the Globe press release) is a promise from Transcon to buy new presses capable of printing full-colour on all pages. Currently newspapers have to budget which pages get colour and which stay black, mainly because colour is a four-plate process (CMYK) and black requires only one plate and one colour ink. (The change will also mean a shorter paper and another redesign)
That sounds pretty cool. But spending $200 million on new presses to satisfy an 18-year deal (2010-2028) when we’re not even sure that newspapers are going to last that long?
Like the New York Times and other larger papers, the Globe will probably weather the crisis a bit longer than most (the fact that it hasn’t drastically cut the number of journalists recently certainly helps). But 20 years is a long time in the future, especially when you consider where we were 20 years ago. In 1988, newspaper staffs were at their peak, television production values practically nonexistent, and nobody knew what the Internet was.
Crocs needs copy editors
As a copy editor and therefore grammar nut, I’m especially attuned to errors of grammar, spelling and punctuation. But I realize not everyone can be as prefect as me when it comes to proofreadign, so I’m willing to cut them some slack.
Crocs.ca, for example, the website of those awful-looking plastic shoes that everyone seems to love. I can forgive their awkwardly-phrased taglines like “men: that’s all you need!” or “lifestyle: every day with style” or “work: even at work!”
I can forgive their aversion to the use of capital letters, their tenuous grasp on the rules of proper hyphenation and their missing commas.
I can forgive small mistakes like neglecting to superscript the “TM” that comes after their trademark.
I might even, on a good day, forgive an accidental misspelling of one’s own trademark.
But when your business is creating “comfortable” shoes and you misspell “comfort” multiple times in prominent places right next to the correct spelling, that’s just unforgiveable.
I don’t know what world these people live in, but translation isn’t something companies should hire amateurs to do.
UPDATE: I just checked the website’s terms of use, which apparently doesn’t allow me to link to it:
you may not create links from other websites to this website, except if expressly permitted by the site owner. (to obtain permission, contact our website administrator at support@crocs.ca.)
Just for kicks, I’ve gone ahead and asked permission. I’ll let you know what their response is. The email was rejected by the server because support@crocs.ca doesn’t exist.
Beijing Games online coverage analysis
As the halfway mark of the Beijing Games passes, here’s some thoughts on how the major news websites are covering the Olympics with their special Olympics sections. Some have improved on their “road to Beijing” sites since I looked at them a month ago. By now they should have ironed out any kinks.
(Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail provides an analysis of CBC commentators at the games)
CBC
The CBC website is a class above all the others, as well it should be since they have the broadcast rights.
Naturally, there’s plenty of video, including most importantly live video feeds from various events. Unfortunately, they’ve Windows Media and never worked for me properly, making them kind of useless. The schedule is tied to broadcasts, which means you don’t get the schedule for individual events and races. Items in the schedule also aren’t linked to more information about them or lists of Canadians who will be participating.
The “Higher Faster Stronger” page has video profiles of athletes, but they’re not sorted in any useful way. The videos themselves are also pretty uninteresting. The athletes give one-liners saying where they’re from and what sport they play, and then finish off with meaningless inspirational statements like “I refuse to let fear dictate my actions”
Medal standings page allows you to sort by G/S/B and total medals. Each country also links to pages showing who won medals for that country.
There’s also a blogs page with blogs from both Olympic athletes and CBC personalities.
What’s unique: Mandarin-language video highlights for each day of competition, special iPhone-friendly page.
Bottom line: This is everyone’s first destination for Olympics news. It does what it’s supposed to do well, but there’s definite room for improvement.
The Gazette/Canada.com
(Disclaimer: I work for The Gazette, though I had nothing to do with its Beijing website)
Canwest Interactive created a Beijing Games portal which has been copied for reuse by all Canwest papers. Stories are updated automatically on all websites without individual papers having to deal with them. With the exception of some local pointers to paper-specific pieces, all the websites are identical.
The design is visually appealing. The main feature is a “photo of the moment,” which cycles between four recent photos. While it looks good, it also pushes the main story downpage, so visitors have to scroll down to find out the biggest story. The photos are also not linked to the Olympic events they feature, so even though the main photo might be of a Canadian athlete winning a gold medal, clicking on it won’t get you the story of how awesome that was. You have to scroll down to find it.
URLs are unfortunately excessively long. Though the papers provide shortcuts, they disappear the moment you put them in, which doesn’t aid in memory retention. The Gazette’s Olympic homepage is at http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/sports/beijing2008/index.html.
The stories almost all originate from Canwest News Service. On one hand this is good, because you want to promote your own stories (the wires have hundreds of Olympic stories running every day). On the other hand, it means every story has a Canadian angle. Unless a columnist writes a story about Michael Phelps or other non-Canadian athletes, the stories won’t appear here.
There are separate sections for each sport, which include stories, (some) athlete profiles, schedules and results, all copied from the Beijing database.
Though Canwest has been making a big effort online for these Games (even sending an online editor to Beijing), a lot of the content clearly seems to have been destined more for newspapers than websites. This list of Canadians to watch, for example, is horribly formatted, includes no times and no links for more information on these athletes or their events.
There are news videos and animations of event rules, but both are provided pre-packaged by Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Same with things like medal standings.
There are some mistakes that make a perfectionist cringe. “Mens” and “Womens” aren’t words, for example. And clicking on “schedule” gives the schedule for Day 1 instead of the current day (and unless you remember that it’s Day 11 you have to guess at what the current schedule is).
Finally, it includes a trivia “game” with questions such as this:
Why not just say "Please select answer C"?
What’s unique: Little separates the sites from other similar ones, but the stories, which are the most important, are Canwest-produced.
Bottom Line: All in all, a good effort, and good copy from Canwest’s journalists, but a bit too reliant on repackaging non-story information from other sources.
Globe and Mail
Homepage looks good, with a main story and matching main photo (like most websites, you’ll notice their layout requires horizontal photos). Design for medal counts/results is also sleek, with circular cropped flags (rectangles are so 2004).
A proper schedule page (with times and everything), but no indication there what events feature Canadians, which is what we want to know.
It includes a podcast page, which apparently nobody at the Globe looked at because the thumbnail images next to audio links are actually 6 megapixel images (over a megabyte in size) that the browser has to download in order to shrink to 1,000th of the size. The latest podcast is now four days old, and is just a series of interviews with Globe writers in Beijing. No interviews with athletes or audio of anything even remotely interesting. (There are athlete interviews like this one, but those are linked to from different pages
URLs are simple, short and sensical. globeandmail.com/beijing2008 for the main page. The boxing page is at globeandmail.com/beijing2008/boxing, as you would expect. URLs for individual stories, however, follow the standard Globe template and are far too long.
Stories are provided from eight Globe journalists in Beijing, but most comes from Canadian Press/Associated Press, and little to no time is spent formatting stories for the web.
What’s unique: “Games on the Box“, a blog about TV coverage (mainly from the CBC and NBC).
Bottom Line: In many ways, the Globe has led Canadian media in its approach to online, in terms of design and ideas. Audio interviews, podcasts and blogs certainly shows that. But this website is a pretty big disappointment from Canada’s national newspaper. I expected better.
CTV
A repackaging of Canadian Press content along with some videos produced for CTV National News and Canada AM. A joke of a website that I won’t dignify with a review. This is from the people who are going to bring our TV coverage of the 2010 games in Vancouver?
Toronto Star
A nice homepage with a simple URL (olympics.thestar.com). You have to dig a bit to get pages for individual sports, and results pages for those sports are nothing but (badly) rebranded pre-packaged pages from The Sports Network. Medals page (from CP) allows you to sort by total (ascending and descending), but in order to sort by gold you have to click on “POS”.
There’s a videos page with a mix of Torstar and CP-produced videos (sadly you don’t find out which is which until the video starts). Instead of simply being embedded on the page, clicking on a video brings a video browser in a pop-up window (and then doesn’t show the browser part). It’s more hoops than should be necessary here.
Schedule page provides a list of what sports are on what days, and clicking those sports gives a schedule for that sport on that day. Very good. But no hints at sports with Canadians in them, and there’s no general page with a schedule for all sports on a certain day.
What’s unique: There’s a Star-produced Olympic history timeline, and an interesting “in Chinese” page, with content provided by Sing Tao newspapers. The best part is probably the Athletes page, which lists all the athletes and provides pages for each one. Those pages include the standard CP biography plus links to stories that mention the athlete. It’s simple yet elegant.
Bottom line: It’s not perfect, but a very impressive effort from a single newspaper without the mega Canwest or Sun Media empires behind it.
Canoe.ca (Quebecor/Sun Media)
URL is simple but needlessly repetitive: http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Olympics/2008Beijing/home.html
The events page is called “Events”, “Disciplines” or “Sports”, depending on whether you look at the URL, the navigation bar or the page title. The individual pages there are needlessly gray, and the content provided entirely by AFP. (The country flags, where used, look like they were designed by three-year-olds using MS Paint).
Schedule page (also provided by AFP) distinguishes between competition and finals, but otherwise provides no details.
Athletes page sorts by publication date, not by name or sport, which kind of makes it useless.
What’s unique: a “comments” page, where people can give their opinion on controversial Olympics issues, like whether Quebec flags should be allowed there.
Bottom line: Far too reliant on AFP and other wire copy. No reason to choose this site over any other.
Cyberpresse (La Presse)
Page is the kind of boxy layout you come to expect from Cyberpresse. Main difference is that it includes a bunch of Flash-based widgets from Presse Canadienne which slow down page loading.
The URL is short but non-intuitive (like all Cyberpresse pages), with sections called “CPPEKIN01”, “CPPEKIN02”, etc.
Athletes page doesn’t include a list of athletes, but a list of profiles sorted by publication date.
There are separate sections for athletics, “acquatic sports”, gynmastics and “other” instead of having one for each discipline. (The “other” page includes “team sports” “racquet sports” “combat sports” and “other” — how insulting is it to be on the “other” “other” page?)
Schedule page is very basic, with times but no other information
What’s unique: A photo album from La Presse photographer Bernard Brault.
Bottom line: Not much to write home about. There are good stories here republished from the paper, but the website design is severely lacking.
Le Devoir
No Olympics website to speak of. A single page includes wire stories that were printed in the paper. Epic fail.
I have hair too!
"Yé tellement cute!"
Dammit, I want two cute girls to be (fictionally) talking about how awesome it is to be interviewed by me because of how amazingly cute I am.
Damn you Lagacé!
(Note to Chez Jules: I don’t understand the reasoning behind making it impossible to link to individual episodes, and hence I can’t here. Too bad.)
Invisible arms!
Superhuman athletes
Apparently Concordia has two alumni at the Beijing Olympics in wrestling. Not only do they both glow, but David Zilberman has arms that fade into invisibility. That sounds like it would be an awesome advantage in wrestling.
By-election politicians on Facebook
As a follow-up to my overview of the candidates in the Sept. 8 by-election in Westmount Ville-Marie, here’s a quick rundown of the campaigns’ Facebook strategies (sorted by number of supporters):
(UPDATE Aug. 19: Mr. Larivée has joined the club, so I’ve updated the list as of today)
Anne Lagacé-Dowson (NDP)
- Fan page: YES
- Supporters: 511
- Personal page: NO
Marc Garneau (Liberal)
- Fan page: YES
- Supporters: 370
- Personal page: YES
- Embarrassing personal information on personal page: NO
Claude William Genest (Green)
- Fan page: YES
- Supporters: 178
- Personal page: YES (Though his profile pic is of a chimp hugging a bird)
- Embarrassing personal information on personal page: Open wall, “flirt” box on his profile page, and photos of him dressed as a pimp. Does that count?
Charles Larivée (Bloc Québécois)
- Fan page: YES (though it’s actually a group, not a fan page)
- Supporters: 120
- Personal page: YES
- Embarrassing personal information on personal page: Nope, it’s wiped clean
Judith Vienneau (Rhino)
- Fan page: YES (but no photo)
- Supporters: 8 (ouch)
- Personal page: YES
- Embarrassing personal information on personal page: Plenty of TMI boxes on the profile page. Also, apparently wanted to be leader of the Libertarian Party. Maybe Rhino was her second choice?
Guy Dufort (Conservative)
- Fan page: NO
- Personal page: YES (private)
Many politicians have fake “personal” profiles setup, which I think is largely irrelevant since Facebook invented the fan page. So I won’t take any marks away from Lagacé Dowson for that. But Dufort and Larivée not having any Facebook exposure at all? That’s just not right.
Koodo using crappy game to get attention
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
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
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
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.