via Patrick, a new iPhone application has been launched called STM mobile that scrapes the STM website for bus arrival times and keeps track of favourite stops for easy access. It costs $0.99 through the Apple AppStore.
For those without an OMGcool iPhone, there’s the free busmob.com service, which does the same but through a light-weight website instead of an application.
Or you could just call AUTOBUS from your phone, or check the posted schedule, but that won’t make you cool.
UPDATE (July 31): Pierre-Nick has a review that’s mostly positive, but points out that it doesn’t use geolocation to find the closest stop.
Though I don’t agree with the sentiment that newspapers should get out of the printing business (yes it’s expensive, but newspapers are highly qualified to do it), I can’t help but agree about the technology stuff. A quick comparison of any media website’s proprietary hacked-together, flash-based video viewing system and something simple like YouTube and you wonder why they even bother.
So why don’t media companies take advantage of sites like YouTube and Flickr? They’re cheaper, they function better, and they provide a much wider audience for content.
The answer is, sadly, that it represents a loss of control. Newspaper websites want 100% of the ad revenue, even if they’re bleeding through the nose on IT staff to keep their own video portals running. They don’t trust YouTube and Flickr (even if some of their own journalists make liberal use of those sites when management isn’t looking).
That’s a mentality that needs to change. Either news websites’ content management systems need to improve drastically, or they should abandon them and use off-the-shelf systems that have proven popular.
Believe me, I had to deal for years with a hacked-together CMS (that I myself chose and installed) at a student newspaper. Killing all that work is painful, but it needs to be done.
The CBC and Toronto Star didn’t waste any time and have already launched iPhone versions. Sadly, neither appears to be customizable (or if they are, it’s hidden).
Maybe you should get out of the video business. Your people are great writers, but they’re not equipped to do standups in the street about business stories. It’s just embarrassing.
By all means, put up videos of things that require video to properly understand. But if the video is a talking head surrounded by B-roll, why bother?
(I’d provide a link, but Cyberpresse seems to have something against people linking to its videos)
I was busy at work today putting the sports section together (apparently there was this tennis match or something), so I didn’t check my non-work email until I got home. I came back to find 17 new messages in my inbox, which is unusually high. A lot of them were delivery failure messages, which made even less sense.
Looking through them, it was obvious someone was sending out spam mail with a forged address at my domain. I foolishly setup a catch-all for that domain so everything goes to me. None were angry messages professing eventual death, which was nice. Some were away-from-my-desk messages, others were anti-spam confirm-you’re-a-real-person messages. The rest were bounces.
Then I looked in my spam box. There were hundreds of bounces. At least 300.
Thankfully I have Gmail, so cleaning that up was pretty simple.
UPDATE: I wake up, and the same thing happens again.
The show is presented in high definition, which seems kind of unnecessary for a tech show that takes half its clips from YouTube and the rest from a handicam mounted on a tripod in front of the host (at 1280×628, it’s too large to even fit my screen). Trying to watch the 13-minute, 52MB video on his website, my computer could manage only about a frame every two seconds, making it completely unwatchable. Only after plenty of hacking sleuthing could I uncover this standard-definition version. Note to Jean-Michel: at least give people the option.
Otherwise, the show is what you’d expect from a tech show: a guy talking about games and videos in front of a Matrix-like display of floating ones and zeroes.
The website is still sparse. One thing it badly needs is a list of links attached to each episode. I’d like to see that video of Darth Vader doing the Thriller dance, and it shouldn’t be difficult for me to find it. A blog couldn’t hurt either.
Otherwise, it’s a decent effort for a first show. The only question is whether it will attract an audience large enough to pay for itself.
I’ve been following the brouhaha over the Conservative government’s new copyright bill, C-61, and specifically how the government has been responding to geeks who are finding holes in it and driving public opinion against the bill.
The more I follow it, the more I come to a rather stunning conclusion: Industry Minister Jim Prentice doesn’t understand his own copyright bill.
The big controversy, as the Globe’s Ivor Tossell explains, is over a provision about so-called digital locks (those software hacks they call Digital Rights Management, or DRM, that try to control how you access digital media). It says that users cannot bypass these locks, no matter how flimsy they are, even if what they’re trying to do with it is entirely legal.
The consequence of this is that companies just put digital locks on everything, and through a loophole in the law can claim rights they shouldn’t have in the first place.
In the above video, Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner are asked about this, and you can see them struggle to regurgitate the talking points they’ve been handed about the bill. (In Verner’s case, you might argue that language difficulties combined with an inability to hear the question might be an excuse.)
It’s also apparent in Prentice’s 10-minute interview with CBC’s Search Engine (its most popular podcast, which incidentally has been cancelled). Prentice calls common-sense hypotheticals about the law “arcane,” seems unclear about what would happen in certain cases, and hangs up on the interviewer to escape his questions.
But to me this isn’t just about a minister and a bill. It’s something that’s always bothered me about parliamentary politics: the idea that being an MP is all the expertise needed to run a federal department. You don’t need to be a doctor to manage doctors. You don’t need to have a PhD to manage universities. You don’t need to have a driver’s license to manage the transportation department. And you don’t need to understand computers to be in charge of a new copyright bill.
Of course, in many cases ministers are put in areas they would be more comfortable with. Ken Dryden being minister for sport makes sense. But cabinet shuffles being as routine as they are makes it seem as if running the military isn’t so different from foreign affairs or finance.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe being a minister is more about managing, appointing directors, making budgets, drafting legislation and shaking hands at ceremonial functions than it is about getting into the nitty-gritty.
But Prentice and the copyright bill show a clear problem with that premise.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Thurai Moorthy <xxxxx>
Date: Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Subject: United Earth Day, June 21, 2008, Saturday 5:00-11:00 PM, at 4775 Anthime,Pierrefonds, Quebec H9H 4L3, Please Publsh and Send a Reporter
To: letters@thegazette.canwest.com
United Earth Day, June 21, 2008, Saturday 5:00-11:00 PM local time, everywhere on Earth, (local location at 4775 Anthime,Pierrefonds, Quebec H9H 4L3) in your own space. Neighbours, friends, relatives. Inform everyone from Tokyo to Vancouver. Visit www.ueog.org starting at 5:00 PM Tokyo time and continuing east ward at 5:00 PM local time around the globe. United Earth Organization (UEOG), Presentation, Music, Dance. Vegetarian potluck, No disposables.
Folowing ing messsage is meant for the editor and not for publication:
Please send a reporter to cover the above event.
Regards,
[Contact info here deleted]
Some suggestions:
This is a blog. I don’t have a reporting staff.
Your luck with media outlets is usually much better if you’re not obviously forwarding an email you sent to another media outlet.
Media outlets have dedicated public addresses for assignment editors. They don’t start with “letters.”
Don’t ask the media to convert Tokyo time to local unless it’s necessary.
Your event listing appears to be missing what the whole point of the event is.
I’d list the things wrong with the website, but let’s just say it’s everything, from the constant text colour changes to the lack of any specifics about what exactly this organization does.
All that said, good luck with creating that united Earth government that controls the world.
Official “launch” of the new, crappy station is scheduled for July 1.
Meanwhile, I should mention there have been rather large, visible ads for CBC Radio One and CJAD in the Gazette suggesting that people listen to them for news and information. Hint, hint.
Le Devoir, whose RSS feed I had to unsubscribe to a while back because it was a monolithic feed that had 60 articles a day, has overhauled their feed system and now offers multiple feeds. Not only do they have feeds for different sections (their media news feed has a welcome new home back in my feed reader), but they have feeds for individual journalists, which is something I’d like to see other websites copy.
The next step will be having feeds for each individual keyword (they’ve been tagging articles with keywords for quite a while now, but haven’t done anything useful with it online yet)
The Gazette has taken the leap, putting its heart and reputation on the line in the name of accuracy, and setup a corrections page on its website. It becomes only the second Canwest daily after the National Post to do so. It’s also the first Montreal daily to have a visible, dedicated page for people to find corrections.
