Category Archives: Technology

| Montreal, My articles, Technology

TWIM: Parking and Wi-Fi

This week on This Week in Me:

I speak to Ville-Marie’s Jacques-Alain Lavallée about how complicated on-street parking restriction signs are in Montreal. I’d been bounced around through about four or five people talking about this subject, but settled on the borough since boroughs set the policies for on-street parking. He notes that a lot of the restrictions come by request from residents and businesses who want space for deliveries, diplomatic vehicles, etc.

Perhaps the only controversial statement was his answer to why the signs are unilingual French:

The city of Montreal is a French organization. The signs are pretty visual and easy to understand, but as a French organization, the law allows us to have a French-only policy. All the signage on autoroutes is French (except on bridges, which are federal jurisdiction).

I’m sure that’ll satisfy the tourists who are trying to figure out what “MAR-JEU” means.

Also this week, I have a bluffer’s guide on the health risks involved with Wi-Fi. (No link because it’s not online — Page B5 of Saturday’s paper). I’ll post it in a week when the copyright clears, but in a nutshell there’s no proof that electromagnetic radiation causes cancer. The only thing it can do to human tissue is heat it up a bit. Whether that may cause long-term health effects is up for debate, but I find it unlikely to have a statistically significant impact.

| Media, Web design

UR abdicating ur responsibilities

The Sudbury Star (an Osprey Quebecor paper) is launching a new user-generated web portal, lamely called “UR Sudbury“. As they describe it, it’s a “supernova” of journalism, taking advantage of “citizen media” to expand the newspapers’ coverage and bring the community together.

But to media critics, it sounds like the Star is telling the community to “do it yourself.”

It’s another example of what happens when media managers read about “Web 2.0” from marketing books and fail to get what it’s all about. They miss that whole part about building a community and get right to the part about “crowdsourcing” and how that’s going to save them money.

But crowdsourcing journalism abandons the very strengths mainstream media have: fairness, reliability, fact-checking, sound news judgment and professionalism. It’s not so much a problem with community event listings or stories about grandma’s 100th birthday, but once it starts moving into the area of real news — even local news — then it’s attaching the paper’s name to anonymous postings on a web forum.

Right now, UR Sudbury isn’t a “supernova” or a revolution. It’s a badly-designed Craigslist.

| Blogosphere, Business, Technology

Vinismo leaves an odd bouquet

Roberto Rocha today looks at Vinismo, the wine wiki which was first presented to the masses at DemoCamp Montreal 3. (See the video)

Co-founders Evan Prodromou and Nicolas Ritoux (who naturally both blogged about the article) have been selling the site trying to get some publicity (even to the point of emailing me and asking me to blog about it). I haven’t blogged about it for the simple reason that I’m not a wine critic. I don’t even drink the stuff. I have no clue what makes a good wine, so I have no idea if it needs a wiki.

But what I do know leaves me a bit skeptical. Wine criticism is a subjective thing, and trying to build a wiki around things people disagree about is a recipe for disaster. Of course, if anyone could make it happen, it would be Evan Prodromou, who built up the successful Wikitravel.

When it comes to wikis, Wikipedia is king. It’s the one everyone knows about, and the main reason other people think wikis will be successful. But it also means people are going to go there first. So to create a non-Wikipedia wiki, you need to fill a niche that Wikipedia can’t or won’t. And that’s tough.

There are three main reasons why information would be rejected from Wikipedia and it would make sense to build another wiki database of information:

  1. The information not encyclopedic in nature. This leads to things like WikiHow (the how-to guide), Wikitravel, A Million Penguins (the collaboratively-written novel) or WikiNews.
  2. The information is too obscure or too technical even for Wikipedia. It takes quite a feat to get information that specific when Wikipedia has over 2 million articles on subjects like Simpsons pop culture references. Nevertheless, this leads to such oh-my-god-get-a-life websites as Memory Alpha (the Star Trek encyclopedia) and Wikispecies. Wikispecies, which has more serious goals, also fits into this category.
  3. The information is subjective, biased or fictional. Conservapedia and dKosopedia fall into this category, as does Uncyclopedia (the parody encyclopedia).

If it’s #3, then there’s the problem of how people can trust it and how to avoid edit wars. #2 might make sense if there was a lot more than articles about wines, which are surely allowed in Wikipedia, and it will take quite a while for it to develop enough articles to become the default resource on the topic. And if it’s #1, then comes the question: What is it, exactly?

I hope the website does well. And if it stays out of the trap of becoming a simple subset of inferior Wikipedia articles, then it probably will.

| Montreal, On the Net, Technology

Become part of the Google landscape

Google’s Street View is in the process of collecting pictures of Montreal streets. When complete, Google Maps will be able to show street-level photos of major cities in Canada like it does for New York and San Francisco.

Street View works by having someone in a car with lots of cameras on the roof drive through the city and take pictures. They’re then thrown into a giant database which creates a street view you can move around in.

Of course, if you happen to be walking along a street when the car passes by, you’ll become a permanent part of the view of that street. And that can lead to some embarrassing pictures.

Canada’s privacy commissioner has already raised concerns that, because Google doesn’t ask permission before taking photos, they might be violating Canada’s privacy laws.

| Media, Web design

Newspaper websites still doing things half-assed

Editor & Publisher has a special article on the lessons learned by newspapers’ online ventures. There are 12 in total, but they can all essentially be summed up in one:

The Web isn’t a free lunch. You have to put real effort into it before it can succeed.

But you need details, so let’s get into them. So here’s my take on those 12 lessons.

Continue reading →

| Business, In the news, Technology

Language police do good for a change

The Office québécois de la langue française has recently announced a deal with video game manufacturers concerning providing French-language games in Quebec. It will require, as of April 2009, that all games with a French equivalent sell that version here if it wants to sell and English version.

The deal, reached after months of discussions, is fair, reasonable, practical, and common-sense. It protects the rights of French consumers while limiting inconvenience to anglophone ones.

The OLF did this.

No kidding.

Hopefully this is just a first step in a change toward positive, realistic actions designed to promote the French language instead of restricting the rights of non-francophones.

| Business, Web design

I got your stocks right here

Last week I wrote about how The Gazette was trimming its Saturday stock listings because nobody actually reads them and they’re a massive waste of space.

In the post I criticized the paper for pointing to the Financial Post for stock information instead of creating its own stock pages online.

Today, it announced it was doing exactly that, and had created a Gazette-branded mini-website for stock information.

The individual pages are simple, comprehensive, clutter-free, and have a big Gazette logo at the top. That’s a very good start.

Kudos.

| Business, Navel-gazing, Technology

I can’t pay my bills, and I’m cranky

So I’m trying to pay my monthly bills tonight, and boy is it needlessly complicated. You see, I tried going to my bank’s website and logging in like I do every month, but they’re having “internal server problems”, so I’ll have to wait.

So I went to the Rogers website, where my cellphone bill has to be paid by tomorrow, and tried to login there so I can pay by credit card or something. But the site wouldn’t accept my password, and then locked my account. I tried calling them to have the account unlocked, but they’re experiencing a “higher than normal volume of calls” (at 11:30pm!), so I gave up after a few minutes.

So instead of paying my bills, I’m going to criticize Rogers on their email policies. And since I’m particularly cranky, I’m going to be harsh.

Last month, I was forced to sign up for online billing because that’s the only way Rogers will provide me with a log of what calls I make. (Actually, they don’t. Every time I try to download this log, it shows me a blank page.)

So this month, instead of a letter in the mail with my bill, I got an email that looked like this. Here’s the problems:

  • The shortcuts for “forget your password” and “forget your id” are www.rogers.com/forgot and www.rogers.com/forget respectively. And that’s not a mistake. A past-tense forgetting is about passwords, and a present-tense forgetting is about IDs.
  • The first link, to check out your bill, says www.rogers.com but actually links (in the email) to a page at www.shoprogers.com. A link that gives one domain and actually leads to another is a textbook example of a trick used in email fraud. How am I supposed to know shoprogers.com is owned by rogers.com?
  • The email does not use your name or any identifying information about you other than your email address and an internally-generated 9-digit account number.

This doesn’t inspire confidence.

| Business, Technology

Here’s your moment of Zen

A small brief tucked away in the business section rewrites this press release announcing that The Gazette has reached an agreement with a company called ZenData Marketing.

Never heard of them? Neither have I. They’re a local company whose website is high on the marketing-lingo-to-useful-information ratio (“dedicated to excellence”, “Integrated e-relationship marketing strategy (working in synergy with other elements of your marketing mix)”, “implementation of technology solutions”, etc.). Their staff seems to consist of two guys and a computer, and they’ve issued a whopping six press releases since they began a year ago.

The agreement (at least as much of it as my non-marketing-educated puny brain can decipher) will make ZenData responsible for spamming our inboxes creating “e-relationships” via email, and generating “return on investment” for the paper, as well as automating some processes I’m shocked aren’t automated already.

Hopefully this will mean I don’t get angry emails and popups every month angrily telling me my subscription has expired and to buy a new one when I have it set to automatically renew every month, and then a day later getting a thank-you email telling me my subscription has been renewed.

| Web design

Concordia’s new website fails to improve

Concordia University is changing the design of its homepage. Again. The new website, currently in beta testing, has some laudable goals: create a uniform look across the dozens of departmental websites, and introduce new features.

So far, the new website falls flat. Here’s why:

  1. The website pushes news, which was the big selling point of their current design, down the page and into a corner in favour of static content.
  2. The immensely-useful “quicklinks”, to things people actually want to reach like the student information portal, program calendar, class schedule etc. are moved to the bottom of the page or taken off the homepage entirely.
  3. The tour touts the page’s accessibility features, including the ability to increase text size (which is already available in most browsers, but they also change the stylesheet to fit too). Unfortunately, the style sheet breaks at larger font sizes and the page looks ugly.
  4. Giant header image pushes all content down.

It looks more “Web 2.0” in all the bad ways. And since it fails at the most basic test: whether it’s better than the site it’s replacing, I’ll give it a C- (assuming that their content-management system actually makes it easier for departments to make websites, which has not yet been proven).

| Business, Media, On the Net, Web design

Google the wires

Speaking of wire services, Google News, which used to be an aggregator of news content with links to full articles on their original sites (and for some reason annoyed content owners who I guess don’t want traffic from the biggest website on Earth), has come to an agreement with Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Canadian Press and the U.K. Press Association to host wire stories on its site (as evidenced by that CP story hosted on Google).

The result of this is that when you see mention of “Canadian Press” or “Associated Press” in Google News results, that link will take you on a page at Google instead of some cheap generic small-market U.S. network TV affiliate who just republish unaltered wire copy online.

What it doesn’t mean is that you will be able to directly scroll the wires on Google. You still have to go through the Google News homepage. Fortunately there are other places that give you almost-direct access to unedited CP wire copy.

It probably won’t mean a huge deal, but you’ll note that wire copy on Google is much simpler and less ad-riddled than the places you’ll usually find it, which I think will lead to more people linking to stories off Google when given the choice.

| Montreal, Technology, Video

Passing the envelope

Google has launched a collaboratively-created video to promote its Gmail service. It features dozens of people all handing over a big red M on an envelope. Among them are a couple of Montrealers dancing, which, because it appears at the exact halfpoint of the video, is the preview image YouTube uses for it.

From Alain Wong:

Just a bit of news. Feel free to bash Google, or flatter them for coming up with this collaborative video idea. I think we’ve just become the most viewed Montreal swing dancers, with over a million views in two days.

Montrealers as thumbnail in the official Gmail video by Google.
http://mail.google.com/mvideo

Google ran a contest last month in order to build a collaborative video through Youtube for Gmail. The idea was to pass the Gmail logo (an M envelope) in a creative way through video. Ann Mony and I (swing dancers from Montreal) submitted a video of us swinging out with the envelope, and we made it onto the final cut!

Selected from over 1,100 clips from fans in more than 65 countries. We’re proud to represent Montreal.

| Blogosphere, Media, Web design

TQS needs to learn web programming

I just tried to subscribe to the one blog on TQS’s website, that of Jean-Michel Vanasse. Unfortunately, I can’t, because the RSS feed for his blog is malformed.

It looks like the problem is with their advertising system. They’re adding ads as items within the feed (bound to annoy some people, but something we could live with). Unfortunately, they’re not escaping the ampersands (&), which is causing problems for any feed reader expecting valid XML.

Odd that they would not have noticed this. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll take them to fix it?

UPDATE: If you guessed “four days”, give yourself a cookie.

| Business, Montreal, Technology

A class action against Videotron?

Mere days after Videotron announced it was capping its “extreme” high-speed internet (but not its “extreme plus” high-speed service, which is $15 more a month a cap that’s curiously larger than its “extreme plus” service, with a much lower overage fee), the Union des consommateurs is trying to get a class-action lawsuit going against the company for false advertising and breach of contract.

If successful, such a suit would set a huge precedent for telecom companies changing the terms of their contracts. Currently these companies announce the change, give people 30 days to cancel (without fees), and any use after that time is considered to be acceptance of the change.

We’ll see how this plays out.