Then we would be an example of “Doing Local Right“, and newspapers around the world would look to ours for common-sense ideas on how to use top-quality content to build an online community.
Instead, we’re still hoping for the days when stories cut-and-pasted from the newspaper online are properly formatted, include links and are easily findable.
Oh well.
There are five things wrong with this “Search Results” page. Think you can spot them all?
UPDATE: My readers are quick:
With the Zeke’s saga heating up the blogosphere (did I mention I was Geisted?), the Globe and Mail has a piece by Mathew Ingram about the libel chill affecting prominent bloggers. It lists the Zeke’s case as an example (though it for some reason weasels its way out of naming the guy who’s suing him).
The issue isn’t all that difficult to understand. Blogging has created an army of citizen journalists. Some write only about the actions of their puppies, others think they’re more important than those “MSM hacks”. But they all write. And anything you publish is subject to libel law.
What’s changed is the way the Internet has democratized media. When college newspapers commit copyright infringement or blatantly libel people, nobody really cares because it’s just a few thousand copies and everyone forgets after a while. But with the Internet, a single blog post by some idiot on his couch can reach worldwide exposure with a few good links. In the case of Pierre-Antoine Tremblay, the guy who’s suing Chris Hand, a Google search of his name is littered with pages about his lawsuit, and that’s what everyone’s going to know him by.
Of course, that’s all his fault. Had he not brought the legal action in the first place, nobody would have noticed the original post, his Google situation would have been salvageable and he wouldn’t be getting all this negative publicity.
On the other hand, these blogs and those college newspapers have one thing in common: they don’t have any money. That’s the real reason why small-time publishers don’t get sued for libel: It’s just not worth it. Even if you win, you won’t get any money. It’s only when you go after the big guys that you can get rich.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop some people with sensitive egos and lots of time on their hands from launching frivolous, over-the-top lawsuits.
With great power comes great responsibility. We have to watch what we write, and hope that it doesn’t come to a point where we have to justify our words in front of a judge.
Kate has some thoughts on this issue as well.
The Montrealer and Wikitravel founder recounts his experience at the Webby Awards ceremony, where Wikitravel won for best travel site.
The Montreal version of Pecha Kucha is tonight, 8:20pm at SAT.
The premise is simple: 20 slides of 20 seconds each, to make an impression on your audience.
Hopefully that means we won’t see these kinds of slides. If so, we’ll just have to refer them to this blog.
I’m surprised police investigators using Facebook is only being thought of now.
The federal government’s new law against recording video inside movie theatres has come to its inevitable conclusion: Cinema Guzzo is now searching people who enter its theatres and seizing any type of camera, whether it takes video or not.
As you might expect, some people are not happy about this.
Guzzo can’t really be blamed for this. The law makes the cinema owner just as responsible if the law is broken, so they’re just looking after their own asses. But the idea that so much is contraband — food, drink, bags, cameras — inside a room where all they’re doing is projecting an image onto a screen kind of boggles the mind. Even aircraft luggage doesn’t get this kind of treatment.
Of course, it goes without saying that, other than proving the U.S. movie industry has our government by the ballsack, this bill doesn’t do anything. Michael Geist (whose blog should be on everyone’s reading list) has a roundup of its problems (and a cool video about it too), to which I will only add this: Movies recorded in a crowded movie theatre are of such bad quality that I’m surprised anyone actually does it.
Take this badly-camcorded Family Guy / Star Wars bit. It includes a laugh track, viewer commentary, a partially obscured, darkened, oblong screen (that the camera pans away from every now and then) and a barely-discernable original audio track. Is this kind of stuff the world’s greatest threat to the movie industry?
I’m sorry, but Comic Sans is NOT funny. The article does, however, rightly point out that it is highly unprofessional. And some people just hate it.
Following up on my previous post on RoCoCoCamp, Evan Prodromou has a post-mortem filled with links (like his brilliant proof-of-concept Wikiclock which I’m considering contributing to regularly), and recounts a sad event that shows the true face of so-called “openspace” unconferencing:
We had Open Space’s minimalist instructions posted on the walls of the SAT, so people would see and remember them. Steve pointed out that the first of Open Space’s “four principles” is grammatically incorrect: Whoever comes is the right people. He said, “In the spirit of wiki, I’m going to correct it right now!” And to applause, he got up with a marker and changed the “is” to “are”.
Before I made that change, I asked for opinions from others on how to change it. Should it be “Whoever comes are the right people” or “Whoever comes is the right person” or something different entirely?
Then, just as we were about to reach a consensus, the OpenSpacePolice came down on me hard. You see, we were working under talking-stick rules (where only the person holding a particular token — in this case a marker — could speak). The Nazi-esque nature of a particular dictating moderator meant we could not bend the rules, and I was left to my own devices. I crossed out “is” and replaced it with “are”, as the emerging consensus seemed to indicate was preferred before it was brutally silenced by the gestapo-esque proletariat.
It gets worse.
Moments later, as the marker had been passed down, some idiot gave some hippie-nonsensical BS about how “is” is better because we’re all one people. Yeah. Then he passed around some LSD and started chanting about how we should end the war. Or at least he could very well have, judging from his clearly screwed-up philosophy.
So this guy, putting his own radical political ideology over simple grammatical rules, stood up and declared proudly that he was going to “revert” my change, restoring the original wording.
At first I did nothing. I wasn’t about to start a war over this, even though I know I would have gotten more support. Later, quietly, I talked with Evan about how outrageous this all was, but he just laughed at me. Someone from the openspaceocracy got to him first, and he sided with them.
I left the “unconference” in disgust (and also because I wanted to get home to watch some West Wing reruns). But I’m not bitter about all this. Instead, I’m going to turn this into something positive.
I’m starting my own wikiconference. I’m going to call it Citizendicamp, and it will have rules that prohibit this ridiculous anarchy and peer pressure that stands in the way of true development. This new conference will be more reliable and more accountable, and will involve the use of real experts instead of these know-nothing nerdy momma’s-boys.
Who’s with me?
UPDATE: Macleans has a piece on pedophilia in Montreal in general, with a focus on Epifora.
A Seattle-based pedophilia website, with lists of events where sexual predators can find pre-pubescent girls to stalk, was shut down last month by Virginia-based Network Solutions.
Now it’s found a new home, at Montreal-based Epifora, and has re-launched.
Though the hosting provider’s terms of service state that any of its clients can be shut down for any reason, they also “accept controversial speech”, according to their homepage. They refused to comment on the pedophilia website, and it’s still online, which can only mean they support it.
Epifora is in turn hosted by Wisconsin-based Steadfast Networks, which lists “child pornography” as an example of “unacceptable content“.
Of course, the pedophilia website says it’s not doing anything illegal.
(via Digg)
I only got to see one day of RoCoCoCamp (I love technology and all, but some things take precedence), but it was enough for me to be pretty impressed at the wiki culture both here and abroad. The main floor at SAT had nine stations for discussions about all sorts of things wiki-related.
For those who missed the goodness, there’s plenty of blog posts:
RoCoCo, the Montreal Recent Changes Camp, starts tomorrow morning at SAT. The agenda is short on specifics (since this is an “unconference”, the participants will be setting the agenda), but everyone is looking forward to it (Evan Prodromou is even giddy).
For those of you who are more hippie-anarchist than techie-anarchist, there’s the anarchist bookfair tomorrow evening.
You know that shitty Internet service we’ve been providing you over the past few years?
Yeah, sorry about that. But we’ll keep your money anyway.
I’ve been following the 09 F9 thing (or as Wikipedia calls it, the “AACS encryption key controversy“) for a while now, but haven’t seen much local commentary about it (other than people posting the illegal number to their blogs).
But Galacticast, the Montreal-based sci-fi parody show, put together a brilliant parody of LOST incorporating the number. It’s worth taking a look. (They’re also shilling for charity, so check that out too.)
My take? Well, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before. It’s almost like that whole DeCSS thing. No, wait, it’s exactly like the DeCSS thing. So we’ll probably see a similar end result. The keys have already been changed, and new movies won’t be decodable with this number, so damage will be minimal. Besides, simply knowing the number won’t help the layman copy his HD-DVD and distribute it online.
But the damage to DRM’s reputation is clear, and irreversible.
Yesterday I stopped by the H-110 auditorium at Concordia University’s Hall Building, a room I haven’t been to in a few years, to see the local premiere of Helvetica, the movie. It’s a surprisingly fascinating and well-done documentary about one of the world’s most prolific fonts, with tons of pictures of signs and logos that use it and conversations with type designers (like Hermann Zapf of Zapf Dingbats fame and Matthew Carter, who created Verdana and my personal favourite Georgia).
The surprising thing about both the movie and its presentation was how funny it was (granted, the room was filled with geeks so it might not be so universally funny). The designers (type and otherwise) all had differing opinions on Helvetica, calling it ubiquitous, genius and boring. You couldn’t help but laugh at how absolute they were about their opinions.
To add to the fun, the screening staff had t-shirts that read “Helveticrew” and there was a small group of Arial enthusiasts in the crowd (they were playfully booed as they were announced and again as one of them won the first door prize – a Helvetica movie poster).
What got much fervent applause was the line right after the Arial introduction:
“We’ve stopped the Comic Sans people at the door.”
P.S. There really were a librarian, an archivist and a graphic designer among the people I knew at the screening. The librarian and designer are sisters, for what it’s worth.