Category Archives: Technology

| In the news, Media, On the Net, Technology

Journalists, wikiscan thyself

It seems a little online tool called Wikiscanner is generating a lot of media attention. It searches through anonymous edits by IP or IP range, a simple enough concept that in itself would not be worthy of attention (in fact, Wikipedia already allows you to list the edits made by a particular IP address anonymously). What has gotten the media all riled up is the application of this: tying those IP ranges to recognized organizations like the New York Times or the White House.

It’s even got some local attention after a computer from City Hall was fingered as being behind a defacing of executive committee president Frank Zampino — though it turns out that apparently wasn’t the case.
One thing that isn’t really made clear in these reports is that the edits are being made by people who work within the organization, but not necessarily management. In fact, it’s more likely to be some schmuck working a boring office job than a high-level executive wanting to control public opinion.

And like most edits in general on Wikipedia, most of these edits are pretty benign. Fixing spelling mistakes and correcting minor facts on articles about sports teams and musicians.

But some are embarrassing, or just plain silly.

So I’ve applied the Wikiscanner to some Canadian media IPs I know. (Know any not listed here? Let me know.) Here’s some edits I found that were made from within these organizations:

CBC:

Toronto Star (and related organizations like the Kitchener-Waterloo Record):

La Presse:

The Gazette/CanWest:

| Business, Montreal, Technology

Videotron puts limits on “unlimited”

Videotron sent a letter to its Extreme High-Speed Internet customers this week saying their previously unlimited bandwidth was now going to be capped at 100 GB a month, effective October 1. After that, it’ll cost $1.50 per GB for downloading.

Some people are complaining about the change, which doesn’t come with a reduction in price.

Although not many residential customers use more than 3 GB per day, it’s the principle. It’s a substantive negative change which Videotron is trying to obfuscate by using confusing language. Their website still lists the service as “unlimited”, and there’s no trace of any notice on their website of this change in policy.

The silver lining for anyone that has Extreme High-Speed Internet with Videotron is that they can cancel their contract without penalty before paying their next bill by citing this change.

Section 3.9 of their service contract:

3.9 Modifications – Videotron may, upon at least thirty (30) days’ prior notice to the customer’s Videotron Messaging Address or by mail, modify the Services or any other provision of this agreement, including the charges and rates stipulated in subsection 3.1 . However, no prior notice shall be required with regard to a modification of Services if Videotron’s service offerings remain similar and have no impact on the charges payable by the customer. By settling the account statement accompanying any notice of modification to this agreement, the customer shall be irrevocably deemed to have accepted the modification. However, the customer may, within thirty such (30) days delay, cancel this agreement or request that it be modified in the manner provided in subsection 11.4 below, failing which the customer shall irrevocably be deemed to have accepted the modifications covered by the notice.

If any of you plan on doing that, let me know how the conversation with customer service goes.

| Media, Web design

So. Many. Ads.

I just went to a page on the Kingston Whig-Standard’s website:

Ads run amok

My God.

Un case you can’t tell, the article starts at the very bottom of the page. And there’s so much advertising on it that they can’t even fit the entire headline on the first screen.

When are mainstream media web properties going to learn how to properly place their ads online? Would you read a newspaper whose front page was almost exclusively advertising? Why are we expecting different for websites?

| Business, Media, Web design

More bad web programming

CanWest has launched a new classified website, househunting.ca, for real estate listings. It’s still in beta, which is good because it still has problems with the way it’s coded:

Househunting.ca error message

Guess this Canadian website’s code wasn’t written in-house.

There are larger problems. The search results (there aren’t enough listings to analyze whether their search is good or not) produce a MapQuest map that’s centred on some random location that’s not where you searched for. When you move the map so you can see where you actually searched, the page forces itself to reload and change the search results to wherever you have the map pointed to.

The search box also doesn’t provide fine-tuned price ranging (or, for that matter, any search beyond location, price and size). If your range isn’t in their pre-set list, you’re out of luck (or you have to search a few times).

CanWest isn’t alone in these badly-designed online classified sites. All the websites owned by big media companies have downright awful designs. When a simple site like Craigslist is so successful, you wonder why people are trying to make these overly-complicated sites work instead of stealing a good idea.

| Blogosphere, Business, Montreal, On the Net, Technology

Everyone’s a marketing/media critic

There’s something going on out there called the 1% Army Tournament. It’s a head-to-head competition between over a hundred Canadian marketing and media blogs (there are over a hundred Canadian marketing and media blogs?)

Among the local blogs participating (or having been nominated without even knowing about it), some of whom will be added to my feed reader soon:

Wow, that’s a lot.

| Montreal, Technology

Free WiFi at the Old Port

I’m sitting on a picnic table at the Old Port, after learning yesterday there would be free Wi-Fi here.

It’s a pretty standard free-WiFi setup. An open connection (QuaisduVieuxPort) that at first redirects all HTTP traffic to a special IP address so you can pointlessly click a button that says yes, you want to connect. Then, after a 10-second delay, you get a page that says you’re connected and you can start browsing.

Some more technical aspects for those curious:

  • Upstream provider is Telus
  • The system gives out unreal IP addresses (10.x.x.x)
  • The real IP address you go through has no reverse DNS entry, which might cause problems connecting to some finnicky servers
  • No apparent restrictions on POP3 or SMTP traffic, so using email shouldn’t be a problem (of course you’ll have to find an SMTP server to accept your outgoing mail from you)

Speed appears to be pretty good. Coverage is limited to the promenade of the old port itself (you can’t reach it from City Hall, the top of Place Jacques Cartier or from tiny Bonsecours Island).

I’m torn between observing that coming to the Old Port to play with your laptop is lame, and suggesting that it’s better to play with your laptop outside on a beautiful day like this.

| Montreal, Slow News Day, Web design

Blog about Tremblay! He’s so rad!

Not news: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in to talk radio and campaign for them.

News: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in talk radio and write blog posts to campaign for them.

Yes folks, mayor Gérald Tremblay and his ilk are using the power of their crappy website to harness the power of ordinary Montrealers with absolutely nothing to do. They’re encouraging people to blog about them to tell everyone how rad they are. Like that Robert-Bourassa Avenue idea. How great was that?

I might have more respect for the move if the website wasn’t so badly designed. Of the major issues I outlined two and a half months ago when the website launched, they’ve only fixed about half of them. The easier half. And the fact that the website is ungooglable is a funny afterthought by comparison.

Since nobody’s taken the bait yet, let me be the first blogger to talk about Mayor Tremblay and his brilliant administration that’s in touch with the people. And add a </sarcasm> tag after it.

UPDATE: Tristan Péloquin tries to evoke the cyber army.

| In the news, Media, On the Net, Web design

MédiaMatinQuébec.com

Just learned that MédiaMatinQuébec, the free paper being run by locked-out workers at the Journal de Québec, has launched its website at MediaMatinQuebec.com.

And it’s already more impressive than any other Quebec media website. It’s fast, lean and easy-to-navigate.

You know, the more this conflict goes on, the more I think these workers should forget about the Journal and turn MédiaMatin into a business. Sell some more ads, rent a small office building and this could really be something.

| Blogosphere, Media, Technology

Blogs aren’t special

The Star has an opinion this week on the nature of the blogosphere and its impact on traditional journalism. The conclusion is that the relationship is symbiotic, and they both help each other.

I agree with many of the article’s points (especially that blogging is more like books — anyone can do it and the quality varies widely), but it’s still a bit simplistic. People are separated into two groups: technophiles, who blog, and technophobes, who report for newspapers. There’s an implicit dismissal of those who think they’re in both categories or neither.

The other problem (and this applies to just about anyone who writes in a big-picture way about blogs) is that blogs aren’t clearly defined. Yeah, this is a blog. Is Boing-Boing a blog? Daily Kos? They say they are, so I guess so. What about Fark? Drew Curtis says no. If a newspaper uses WordPress as its content-management system, does that turn it into a blog? What’s the difference? Are web comics blogs? What about photo blogs? Or Web forums?

There’s this implication out there that blogs have changed the nature of journalism and the Internet in a way Web 1.0 didn’t or couldn’t. I disagree. There was plenty of original journalism and criticism of media before Blogspot and WordPress. There’s just more of it now.

High-quality blogs are successful because they’re highly-specialized and they’re written by people who know what they’re talking about. Even newspapers with large staff don’t have enough resources to hire a full-time astronomy reporter or a full-time public transit reporter. So people with interests in these things turn to blogs, which might be written by experts in their spare time or by professionals who get enough traffic to live on.

“Blog” isn’t a magic word. It’s just a form of content delivery. The Internet — which allows people to find exactly what they want fast — is still the problem that’s killing mainstream media. Some are learning how to deal with it, by launching their own blogs about specialized topics. Others still have cluttered homepages and make it impossible to quickly find content they’ve spent a lot of money to buy or produce.

They’ll learn eventually. They must in order to survive.

| Business, Slow News Day, Technology

Mike Boone now has home laptop location freedom

So Mike Boone had his wireless problems solved. (I guess it wasn’t his laptop after all) As you might expect, he got the gold-plated service after news of his problems with Sympatico hit the news stands. A personal call from the vice-president of customer relations (after numerous calls to regular tech support got him nowhere), no-questions-asked delivery of a new modem, and when that didn’t work, same-day on-site tech support.

When was the last time you called Bell and the guy said “Hold on, I’ll be right over”?

Naturally, the guy was clueless about Macs (been there). But the problem was solved.

To Boone’s credit, of course, he freely admits the obvious: that he got special treatment because he’s a newspaper columnist. And he’s going to use the regular-people method next time, to show he’s still Mikey from the Block and hasn’t sold out to The Man.

| Blogosphere, Business, In the news, Technology

Mark Goldberg: clueless about cluelessness of cluelessness

Patrick points us to a blog post from Alec Saunders refuting another blog post from Mark Goldberg which criticized a Gazette editorial based on an op-ed from Michael Geist on wireless rate plans in Canada. (Phew.)

The argument is over the inflated prices of data rate plans in Canada. The U.S., home to the iPhone, offers crazy-cheap plans for both voice and data, while here we have three wireless providers who offer expensive daytime service and through-the-roof prices for data transfer. (This is why I never surf the Internet from my phone.)

I won’t add comments, since they’re already criticizing each other. Suffice it to say Geist’s point still stands, and the blogs are debating irrelevant minutiae.