Category Archives: Technology

| Montreal, On the Net, Public transit, Web design

Bus schedules formatted for cellphones

Here’s an interesting little website: busmob.com. It scrapes the STM’s website for bus departure times and reformats them in an easy-to-read-on-mobile-phones page.

It’s not perfect (it doesn’t do holidays and other special situations, for example), and in many cases it’s probably easier to call the AUTOBUS number and get the automated voice to tell you departure times. But if for some reason the STM’s website is too cumbersome for your cell, this site might just be useful for you.

UPDATE: And here’s a website that acts as a Google Maps frontend for the STM’s Tous Azimuts service.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Industry is at fault for HDTV confusion

CBC.ca has a story* about an industry-commissioned survey that shows Canadians don’t quite understand everything about HDTV. Sharp, which commissioned the survey, pulls right out of its ass the theory that “jargon-laden tech reports” are to blame for the problem, especially among women. It’s the media which is not doing a good job explaining HDTV’s technical intricacies to consumers.

While technology articles in newspapers and tech segments on TV news are, indeed, either confusingly jargon-laden or condescendingly over-simplifying, I don’t think they’re the reason for all the misinformation about HDTV.

Instead, I blame the industry itself:

  • An industry that defines “HDTV” as anything above NTSC standard, which could mean a bunch of different formats because the industry couldn’t set a proper standard.
  • An industry that compresses video signals over digital distribution systems to cram more channels in, making some digital signals better than others.
  • An industry that combined HDTV with a change in aspect ratio that served to confuse people into thinking the two were the same.
  • An industry that can’t agree on an optical media format for HDTV.
  • An industry that uses terms like “1080p” which means nothing to people like me, and then tries to develop brand names like “Full HD” which makes even less sense. (Is there a “Partial HD?”)
  • An industry that has developed five different types of cable connectors for video
  • An industry that uses closed, proprietary protocols so that consumers are forcibly tied to cable boxes forced on them by their cable or satellite companies instead of being able to buy televisions with digital tuners built-in.
  • An industry that converts HD to SD to HD, or SD to HD to SD, resulting in black bars all around images once they’re actually shown on TV screens.

But I don’t expect Sharp to bring that up when they’re busy masturbating over how great they are.

Another example of investigative journalism

*Dear CBC: If you’re going to rewrite a press release, maybe you should make it slightly less obvious that you’re doing so. For example, you could change the headline. Or you could find another source to quote. Or you could not copy and paste half the press release into your article.

For example:

The knowledge gap persists despite a truly healthy market for flat panel TVs. Overall, the market grew by 72 percent last year, with sales of LCD TVs growing by 84.4 percent. For 2008, projected sales figures from the Consumer Electronics Marketers of Canada (CEMC) indicate a market demand of 2.75 million units.
The poll reports Canadians have a basic understanding of the differences between flat screen technologies – 53 percent prefer LCD to plasma screens – yet few Canadians feel themselves to be truly knowledgeable about the technology.
Women are especially unaware of HDTV features; almost 60 percent said they were not at all knowledgeable about the latest advancements, compared to less than 40 percent of men polled across the country. The jargon-laden language of tech reports may be an issue, with 29 percent of Canadians getting their information about new models from TV ads and programs, compared to only 20 percent from print media and 16 percent from weblogs and product websites.

That was from the press release.

This is from the CBC story:

The knowledge gap persists despite a truly robust market for flat–panel TVs, according to the findings from Nanos Research, commissioned to do the survey by Sharp Electronics of Canada.

Overall, the market grew by 72 per cent last year, with sales of LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) TVs growing by 84.4 per cent, Sharp said. For 2008, projected sales figures from the Consumer Electronics Marketers of Canada (CEMC) indicate a market demand of 2.75 million units.

The poll reports Canadians have a basic understanding of the differences between flat-screen technologies — 53 per cent prefer LCD to plasma screens — yet few Canadians feel themselves to be truly knowledgeable about the technology.

Women are especially unaware of HDTV features, the survey suggested. Almost 60 per cent said they were not at all knowledgeable about the latest advancements, compared to less than 40 per cent of men polled across the country.

The jargon-laden language of tech reports may be an issue, with 29 per cent of Canadians getting their information about new models from TV ads and programs, compared to only 20 per cent from print media and 16 per cent from weblogs and product websites.

Notice some similarity? (I’ve bolded all the changes the CBC made.) I’m just going to go ahead and assume the CBC did not, in fact, check to make sure these statements were true.

(And another thing: “weblogs”? If people don’t understand what a blog is, what makes you think they’ll understand “weblogs”?)

| Navel-gazing, Technology

Playing with new toys

I’m experimenting with some plugins and widgets and toys in order to boost my visitor count make this blog better for its loyal readers.

One thing you may have already noticed is that individual post pages now have links to related posts (as determined by that post’s tags). Since I tend to write about similar things, you’ll likely find those posts interesting. Related posts are also included in the RSS feed, which you should subscribe to.

Meanwhile, I’m still experimenting with some social bookmarking techniques. I’ve setup an account at del.icio.us, which allows me to share websites and pages I find interesting. I also have my Google Reader shared items, which allows me to share some of the blog posts I read that I find particularly interesting. You’ll find that feed currently being burned so I can track its popularity.

Unfortunately, I’m having trouble combining the two together and/or automating their inclusion into the blog. del.icio.us has a feature that automatically posts links to your blog (as you see below), but it’s not very configurable, and I don’t find that many links that would necessitate a daily post.

If anyone has any ideas on how I can automate, say, a weekly roundup of my del.icio.us (God that’s annoying to type) bookmarks and Google Reader shared items into a weekly blog post, please let me know. Surely someone has thought of this before, but Google hasn’t helped me.

Links for 2008-03-22

| Business, My articles, Opinion, Technology

Don’t pay contributors (but don’t treat them like crap either)

In today’s Business Observer section, I have an article about whether or not companies setting up user-generated websites should consider paying those users for their content.

Revver tried it (paying users $1 million in its first year), but the overwhelming reach of YouTube has greatly limited their success. People who post videos to Revver have to also post them to YouTube or find someone else doing it for them.

And, of course, there’s Capazoo, whose business model involved having its users “tip” each other and getting a cut of that pie. This week, they appear to have died a horrible, horrible death, though it seems to have been more about bad management than a bad business idea.

I spoke to Evan Prodromou, who wrote an essay last July about the problems inherent with paying wiki contributors. The arguments hold true for video-sharing sites, blogs and just about anything where users are expected to work to give your site value.

His conclusion is that “it just doesn’t make a lot of sense” that websites pay for users, because payment makes it seem like work. Instead, they should focus on building communities, where work is valued in a non-monetary sense, and more importantly where the contributions provide value to the users themselves. YouTube allows you to share videos and give them a global reach. Same with Flickr on the photo side. These are user-generated websites, but they’re seen primarily as free services to users.

Many clueless latecomers to the user content game (and especially many media organizations) have been trying to push user participation to the point where they’re beating us over the head with it. Newspapers cut and paste uninteresting, anonymous comments from their message boards. TV weather presenters introduce photos of snow (and dogs in snow) taken by viewers. They all plead with you to share your news tips so they can get the exclusive (and not credit you for it) — provided that news tip doesn’t require too much investigation, of course.

When you try to share your family photos or stories about grandma, shocked that such dreck actually gets published/broadcast, you’re met with 1,000-word user agreements that state IN ALL CAPS that you give up all rights to your content including moral rights and (effectively) copyright, and they can do whatever they want with it without asking you or paying you a dime, even if it has nothing to do with the reason you submitted it. Oh yeah, and it also gives them the right to seize your home, take your dog and copy everything from your hard drive. Didn’t you read that part?

The result is that we get a lot of fluff, but very little useful information. Uninformed opinion, but little news. In other words, a whole lot of junk.

As a freelancer, I’m tempted to say that paying people is the answer. Forget this user-generated crap and get real journalists, photographers, videographers and writers to give you quality news and information. But that plea would fall on deaf ears of money-crunching media executives who see Web 2.0 as a magic ticket to free labour.

One of the lessons that should probably be taken away from this is that in order to get good content from your users, you have to respect them and at least not seem to be evil. They have to feel like they’re doing something valuable that’s worth their time (paid or not). Right now, getting your picture in the paper or on TV is still a pretty big reward for those seeking their 15 minutes. But if nobody reads that paper or watches that TV station because they don’t have quality content, will that continue?

As the article mentions, there are some coming out on the pro-payment bandwagon. Jason Calacanis says that top contributors (that 1-2% who represent the majority of content) are providing much more value to these websites than they’re taking back, and it makes sense to pay them if only to keep them loyal.

Even Wikimedia (which runs Wikipedia and related sites) is paying contributors for the first time with its Philip Greenspun Illustration Project. It’s an exceptional case, with money donated for a very specific purpose. But it represents a step toward paying users for their work.

Prodromou himself agrees that some work should probably be paid for. Administrative work, editing and other non-sexy contributions probably wouldn’t get done otherwise. It makes sense to have a small staff of employees to concentrate on that work. At the same time, web projects must be careful about not instilling a sense of resentment among its non-paid users. It’s a fine line to travel.

But what do you think? Does paying users cheapen what they contribute? Should only extreme superusers get paid for what they do? Or should the economy be allowed to give a monetary value to even the smallest contribution, even though for most people payment would be orders of magnitude less than what we would consider a minimum wage?

(Side note: This article sets a new record for the delay between filing and publication. I completed the article in November, and it sat on the shelf while the Business Observer section was being planned. Since it wasn’t particularly timely, it stayed there until just this week.)

| My articles, Technology

Facebook watches you poop

Facebook

This morning’s paper features a big story by yours truly on the issue of privacy on Facebook.

Specifically, it talks about Montrealer Steven Mansour, who last summer found out that in order to delete his Facebook account he would have to first delete every wall post, comment, photo, note, everything he had ever done since he first registered his account. One at a time. It took him 2,504 steps. He’s not crazy about having to go through all that effort.

The same issue annoyed UK blogger Alan Burlison and others, but Facebook wouldn’t budge until the New York Times took it up last month. That led to the company proclaiming it would be easier, without making clear exactly what it was changing about the process.

Currently, on Facebook, you can “deactivate” accounts, which makes them inaccessible (though reports of fragments being left behind are common). But deleting them completely requires an outside-the-box email exchange with Facebook staff.

Not unexpectedly, Facebook didn’t respond to my request for a clarification about their policy.

Neither did Canada’s Privacy Commissioner’s Office, when I asked whether it had received a complaint from Mansour and/or were investigating Facebook. The office’s PR contact got back to me finally, and says he’s looking into whether there are any investigations concerning Facebook.

Mansour has a roundup on his blog of reaction to his story and other Facebook privacy issues. Only some involve conspiracy theories about links to the CIA and stuff.

The article also touches on TRUSTe, an organization that counts Facebook as a member and seems to do nothing to rein them in; Facebook’s draconian terms of use; and what Mansour thinks needs to be done to safeguard privacy rights online.

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion, Web design

Sur le Web: Get a clue

RadCan’s Sur le Web, a blog-style page with links to interesting things online, has added the ability for users to comment, except with a strange rule: No links. Period.

Sur le Web is a very strange animal in the local blogosphere:

  • Each post is paired with a tiny video of the blogger’s talking head explaining what we’ve just read.
  • Permalinks are created with page anchors as opposed to individual pages, meaning they become useless after a couple of days.
  • The site’s RSS feed has no text for its posts

Now this. I’m seriously tempted to unsubscribe as a protest, and would have done so long ago had the site been any less useful for information. But the fact that it seems to intentionally make it as difficult as possible to use annoys me to no end.

I couldn’t care less about comments. Fix everything else first.

But the fact that a blog about links to stuff online doesn’t allow links in its comments? That’s insane.

Among some of RadCan’s other draconian rules:

  • No comments in languages other than French
  • No anonymous or pseudonymous comments
  • No more than three comments per person per discussion

If similar rules had been put in place at CBC.ca, we’d be hearing about it. Maybe we need a Radio-Canada version of Inside the CBC?

| Opinion, Slow News Day, Technology

Online survey shows people are online

I just got alerted to this OMG EXCLUSIVE OMG story at Branchez-Vous, which claims that 1 in 4 francophone Quebecers over 18 is on Facebook, and that number goes up to 54% when you limit it to adults 18-24.

Those numbers seemed suspiciously high to me, especially since before this week Facebook was an English website and therefore its reach in Quebec was lower than the rest of Canada.

Then I came across this:

Ce sondage a été effectué en ligne auprès de 1257 répondants du 11 au 15 février 2008. Sa marge d’erreur est de 2,8%.

So this was an online survey. Not only does that outright dismiss the non-trivial (albeit dwindling) portion of Quebecers without regular Internet access, but online surveys are notoriously unreliable. More importantly, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that those willing to take online surveys are more likely to have the kind of free time to waste online that would make them more likely to be members of Facebook in the first place.

So take those results with a grain of salt.

| Media, On the Net, Web design, West Island

Gazette creating West Island hyper-local website

I was sworn to secrecy, but Roberto let the cat out of the bag so he can take the flack if it’s still supposed to be a secret.

West Island Plus

The Gazette has been working on a West Island portal (called “West Island +” though its address is westislandgazette.com), a mix of newspaper stories and user-submitted content that pretty much fits that “hyper-local” mold that everyone’s talking about these days.

Its key feature is that stories are categorized based on location, allowing you to search for all things that take place in Pierrefonds (for example). The locations fall pretty well along the same borders as the former municipalities (though the 40 people who live in Ile Dorval might get ticked off at being lumped in with the bigger city). It also includes Ile Perrot and Vaudreuil-Dorion/St. Lazare/Hudson, which are also included in the Gazette’s West Island delivery area.

The site is still not quite ready for its official launch, which is expected later this month.

Thoughts?

I think there are a lot of good things about it, and a lot that can be improved (it’s a bit wide for me, forcing a horizontal scroll bar for those dozen or so pixels off the side).

The big question, of course, is whether user-generated content will turn this into the online destination for thousands of West Islanders, or whether the signal-to-noise ratio will be too low for people to wade through it all.

There’s only one way to find out.

UPDATE: Craig Silverman, a freelancer and blogger, takes issue with the terms of service, which he accuses of “bad faith” because it demands you waive moral rights (i.e. the right not to have your work distorted to say the opposite of what you mean, or the right to not have your name and image used to endorse a product without your permission), it demands free reign to publish and sell your content to others (“in perpetuity throughout the world”) and it demands that you waive the right to sue them for defamation or anything else no matter what they do to you.

It’s the kind of clauses you’ll find on just about any big corporate website, whose administrators throw it on there without thinking about it (or even probably reading it). But that doesn’t make it right.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Wikis in the news

Two stories about wikis hit the news this week:

Guess which one is getting more media and blog attention.

Go ahead. Guess.

| Media, Opinion, Technology, TV

CBC report is a no-brainer

This week the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage came out with a report on the CBC (PDF link). In it, the group of MPs make important recommendations about the future of Canada’s national public broadcaster.And by “important,” I mean “mind-numbingly obvious.”

Reading the recommendations spread over 200 pages, it seems clear MPs were phoning this one in, wasting paper to convince the boss that they were working hard, but in essence just regurgitating what they were told without any new insight whatsoever.

After meeting with dozens of high-profile witnesses, here are some of the recommendations they’ve come up with:

  • More regional programming
  • More drama
  • More diversity
  • More Canadian content

Wow. Really? Way to go out on a limb there.
The best, though, was their recommendation about the Internet, an area that the CBC has been pioneering, not just compared to other broadcasters but most newspapers as well:

The Committee recommends that CBC/Radio-Canada continue to develop its Internet presence and to make its content accessible online for Canadians.

Scandalous, isn’t it?

There are some few nuggets of thought buried here, although they’re all vague on the detailos:

  • Encourage net neutrality, because of the “serious consequences” it might have on the CBC. (Read Geist’s take on this)
  • Force an analog TV shutoff date, like the U.S. will have next year. Their reasons: everyone else is doing it, and not having HD here has left us behind. To deal with the number of people who like to receive over-the-air analog TV (like people in Kamloops), they propose someone else come up with the solution, which might involve having the government pay for free converter boxes for everyone.
  • Develop partnerships with the National Film Board, and get the CBC involved in making feature films (a recommendation the Conservatives call “unacceptable” because it is outside the CBC’s mandate)
  • Decrease reliance on television advertising. Here, even the Conservatives agree that more government funding to make up for less advertising is the answer here.
  • More transparency in funding, including an annual report that allows people to make comparisons between the successful Radio-Canada and the sucky CBC.

What gets me most about this report is how much they drop the ball. Instead of being leaders and making tough calls or bringing forth new ideas for the CBC, this committee takes almost every major issue and asks the CBC to come up with its own solution.

I realize Members of Parliament aren’t experts in broadcasting. But if they’re too useless to come up with anything good, especially after talking to so many real experts, why are we wasting all this time and money on this report?

I don’t read many Commons committee reports. Maybe they’re all like this. If so, colour me jaded.

The least they could do is hire some copy editors. Its formatting is horrible, there are plenty of typos, and it even gets Radio-Canada’s website wrong.

I’d like to think the government is better than this.

(Strangely, the Conservative Party’s minority report makes a lot more sense to me, showing that the real policy wonks are wearing blue, not red. They argue that the report was supposed to be about public broadcasting in general, not the CBC in particular, and that making recommendations about the CRTC is outside the report’s mandate. It also points out not-so-subtly that many of the recommendations are obvious no-brainers.)

If you want more sleep-inducing word-filler, read the CBC’s brief response that says nothing.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Conventional wisdom is crap

This article says so many good things about how newspapers have no idea how to run websites, I feel I should quote it all. But some brief points I wish I could spraypaint on a local overpass:

  • “Conventional wisdom says that newspapers are caught in a business model which doesn’t support the changes to digital media, and despite huge efforts, the newspaper industry is in decline. Maybe there’s no longer a place for traditional newspapers. That’s what the Register’s publisher seems to be saying. The conventional wisdom is crap.”
  • “Most digital operations are seriously under-staffed and under-resourced. They don’t employ even the basic traffic-building strategies that independents are using with great success.”
  • “Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and others are experimenting with community selection of news, while newspapers pay little more than lip service to reader involvement.”
  • “Social networking has changed the way young people interact, yet newspapers have failed to meaningfully take the plunge.”
  • “The back end digital news production structure at most newspapers is a mess.”
  • ” Reporters and editors are pressed to add digital duties – blogs, podcasts etc – as add-ons to their “regular” jobs instead of incorporating the digital world as essential tools that should make their ability to gather and tell stories and interact with their communities easier.” (I would add: They’re expected to add these duties without extra pay, which means they’re absolutely unmotivated to do so.)
  • “So I want to advertise on the website of my local paper. How about those 2.2 million P-I readers? I go to the website. Look for how to do it. Not easy. I have to call someone, negotiate a deal.” (Small, niche advertisers should be able to buy online ads in minutes with a credit card, and without having to call anyone.)

Makes sense, no?

| Media, Opinion, Web design

Media != celebrity, CBC

Dear CBC,

I subscribe to your “media news” feed, because I have a keen interest in journalism and the media.

I do not, however, have any interest in Britney Spears or Michael Jackson. What do celebrity gossip stories have to do with the media, other than showing us that non-paparazzi outlets will stoop to this level too?

Please separate your celebrity gossip from your media-related stories.

Thank you.

| Montreal, Opinion, Technology

Videotron’s new service could cost you $24,315.00 a month

Videotron is rolling out a new ultra-super-mega-speed cable Internet service, 50 megabits per second, starting in Laval. Unfortunately there are two problems with it:

  1. It’s expensive. $90 a month ($80 with a 12-month subscription)
  2. There’s a 50GB cap (combined upload/download), $1.50/GB after that, with no upper limit on bandwidth-related overcharges. This cap is actually lower than their 10 megabit “Extreme High-Speed” service, which is only $75/month and has a 100GB/month cap.

According to my l33t math skills, it would take just over two hours at the maximum download speed to surpass the cap. In the theoretical (but practically impossible) situation where you were using that bandwidth non-stop for a 30-day month, the overage charges would amount to $24,225.00.

Roberto offers that you won’t be using the top speed all the time, which is true. At just about anything beyond 10 or 15 megabits, the bottleneck is going to be on the other side.

But if you’re not going to use the top speed, why pay for it? The 30-megabit service is $15 less per month, and still faster than you’ll really need unless you have a dozen people in your family downloading movies at the same time.

This service sounds good on pamphlets and in press releases, but the cap ensures that the people who would really find such service useful aren’t the ones they want using it.

UPDATE (March 15): Criticism of Videotron’s marketing campaign, which seems to be targetted at movie downloaders.