Category Archives: Technology

| Media, Web design

NFB website redesigned

Matt Forsythe wants me to mention that the National Film Board just launched its redesigned website. The NFB has been working pretty hard getting various films online for people to watch them for free.

One of the big new features is playlists, which includes suggested playlists from experts. It’s a good way to get started if you’re overwhelmed by the selection and want to find something new.

More details are in an NFB blog post.

I haven’t had a chance to fully explore it, but at first glance the design seems slick. The homepage is unfortunately a bit cliché: Flash-based main story box which cycles between five items; grid of features below it, each with its own picture; link-farm at the bottom that’s meant more for Google than for human eyes.

But if that’s the worst thing I can say about it, it can’t be too bad.

| Humour, Technology, TV

Comedy Network website wants your help to suck more

Comedy Central videos all look like this

Comedy Central videos all look like this

TheComedyNetwork.ca has launched a new user-generated-content vehicle called Upload Yours to get random people to upload their own videos (kicking it off with Debra DiGiovanni, who CP says is from a show called “Video on Trail”).

Hey, you know what would make a really funny video? Having someone from Canada try to watch a clip from the Daily Show and his reaction at seeing the image above.

Someone should do that.

| Business, Media, Technology

Gazette takes classifieds online

Not many of you read the print version of my newspaper. Probably even fewer of you look at the classified section anymore. Craigslist and others like it have gutted what was once the most reliable of revenue sources for newspapers. What used to be the thickest section of the paper only a few years ago (recent enough that even I remember it) has now become the smallest, even when you include the comics and puzzle pages.

But while inexpensive listings like furniture and electronics have almost completely disappeared, high-ticket items like cars and homes are still around. The few bucks it costs to put a listing in the paper is still such a tiny fraction of the total cost that it still makes sense. And so the classified section, though skewed toward those two categories (plus employment ads), lives on.

Last week The Gazette redesigned its classified section. At least on days when the classified section is its own section. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays it’s in the Driving section. Saturdays it’s in the Homefront section (which now also includes the Working section), and Sundays it’s an insert in the Sunday Sports tabloid.

The Gazette's old classified layout

The Gazette's old classified layout

The Gazette's new classified layout

The Gazette's new classified layout

The new layout is a standard one which also appears in the Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen:

Ottawa Citizen classified section

Ottawa Citizen classified section

It’s not just a new layout, though. The point of the redesign is to emphasize Canwest’s new classified websites, powered through a deal with California-based Oodle. The new classified websites combine paper listings (through Canwest’s niche classified websites like househunting.ca and driving.ca) and online listings, some of which are free. The Gazette-branded page is here.

Gazette classified website, powered by Oodle

Gazette classified website, powered by Oodle

The biggest change that’s being hyped is that the paper will finally begin accepting classified ads online for the newspaper and the website. Some are free online (garage sales and community events, which people wouldn’t pay to post anyway), and others are still very expensive (like employment ads), which will serve to weed out the cheap stuff and hopefully bring in some of that desperately-needed revenue.

The flip side to accepting classifieds online is that there will be less work done on the phone. Opening hours have been reduced from 68 hours a week to 38 as weekday evening hours and Sundays are cut. The union worries that effeciencies will eventually lead to redundancies and layoffs of classified staff.

But it’s a long overdue move considering the staggering decline in classified advertising and the labour saved in having people type in their own ads online.

| Business, Technology

Bell answers to no one

A standards body that Bell Canada doesn’t belong to has reached a decision in a case that Bell refused to participate in, where the only evidence was heard by Bell’s chief rival (Rogers), and has ruled against Bell, only to have Bell outright reject the ruling and do nothing about it.

Doesn’t that make you feel better?

Now Bell can continue to claim to be Canada’s fastest network, even though a ridiculously one-sided decision has said that’s not true.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Hudson plane crash proved nothing about Twitter

Mere hours after a U.S. Airways jet crash-landed in the Hudson River next to New York City, stories about the influence of Twitter were being ejaculated left and right. They were all fawning over how news of the crash hit Twitter minutes before the big media outlets, and one person even posted a picture of the downed plane which got heavily circulated. This was described as a “scoop” for “citizen journalism”.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is a powerful tool, despite its really stupid self-imposed limitations. They will break these kinds of stories first and traditional news outlets should mine it for information (which they can then use for free!). But all it was were some eye-witness reports, in a city that has no lack for actual journalists. All we learned from Twitter was that a plane had landed on the Hudson River and that people were standing on its wing.

(Mind you, listening to CNN’s mindless filler yesterday afternoon, it was clear they didn’t know much more than that either).

But the rest of the story didn’t break on on Twitter. It broke through CNN or the New York Times or other outlets that could assign a journalist to chase the story.

Phil Carpenter, a Gazette photographer who recently started his own blog, points out that journalists who just repeat something they’ve heard (say, by rewriting a press release) don’t earn bylines because what they’re doing isn’t really journalism.

Perhaps we should consider that when we compare an eyewitness account to the work of a professional journalist.

UPDATE: J.F. Codère and I are happy to have found someone else who feels the same way.

| Media, On the Net, Technology

Live Toronto fire info on Twitter

In my suggestions for 2009 in Hour, I included a request for emergency services and public transit to have live information online, which would democratize police-blotter reporting and free reporters to write about more important stories:

[…That] Montreal police and other emergency services post their breaking news about car accidents, fires and murders online so that curious Montrealers can check for themselves what’s going on instead of having to wait for one of the media outlets to take dictation from the PR guy

Just recently I’ve learned that the Toronto Fire Department is doing exactly that, and this guy has already turned that into a Twitter feed.

When is Montreal going to follow in its footsteps?

| Humour, Opinion, Technology, Video

Young Girl Talking About Herself

Guillaume sent me this video, from the maker of Hampster On a Piano (Eating Popcorn)

To most of us, YouTube is a giant library of random videos, some of which were even posted by the copyright owners.

But to many others, YouTube is a community of video bloggers, and people who talk to each other by staring into a low-quality webcam and posting their unedited thoughts to their channel in an effort to get friends and seem cool … or something.

Personally, I’ve always wondered: Who, other than pedophiles, wants to watch a 16-year-old girl spend five minutes saying nothing of consequence about herself?

Heck, even pedophiles have to be pretty bored to watch some of this stuff.

| Web design

Worst government website ever

Remember the 90s in website design? The random colours, the clip art, the Geocities horizontal line images, the bad anti-aliasing?

For all that and more, I give you the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat! That’s the organization that supposedly organizes conferences and such between the provinces and federal government.

Its website, however, looks like it’s for organizing a church bake sale.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Does YouTube have more Cancon than CTV and Global?

Google spoke, and naturally everyone listens. Roberto Rocha and the CBC write about its submission to the CRTC about new media regulation. As you might expect, the company prefers a hands-off approach to the Internet.

Google’s argument is that with no government regulation whatsoever concerning content, YouTube still manages to have plenty of Canadian-produced videos, and if measured quantitatively, it has more Canadian content than Canadian TV networks.

Rocha pokes some holes into that argument, mainly by pointing out most videos posted to YouTube are of little public interest. Test videos, family videos, copyright infringement, personal vlogs and just utter crap. There are no professionally-produced scripted dramas produced by Canadians online, and you could probably count on one hand the number of people making a living from posting videos online north of the border.

Quebecor, which has both a broadcasting interest in TVA and an online interest in ISP Videotron, also argues against regulation. To back up its point, it mentions its web portal Canoe:

Quebecor Media believes that the Canadian footprint in the new-media broadcasting environment is significant and continues to expand rapidly. One indication is that the Canoe.ca network is among the top 12 Canadian platforms in terms of unique visits.

OK, hands up those of you who can name 12 “Canadian platforms”. Yeah.

Non-regulation isn’t perfect. It encourages profit-seekers to go after the lowest common denominator. While there’s plenty of “user-generated content”, there’s very little professional production. Even with the almost non-existent barriers to production and distribution, the difference in value between what is produced for television (even cable channels) and what is produced online is still very large. It’s unclear at this point whether that gap will narrow.

But online is also the great equalizer. There are no public airwaves to portion out. There are no limits whatsoever, and so there should be no regulation, just as there is no regulation of newspapers.

Where conventional TV networks sign import deals and use simultaneous substitution law to effectively print money importing U.S. shows, there is no such rule online because there are no international barriers. Sure, some are trying to put up barriers to make our lives difficult, but the majority of content is available to Canadians as much as Americans, no matter which side of the border it comes from.

It hasn’t arrived yet, because many media owners still think that paying for cheap wire content and slapping your brand on it is a good idea, but eventually media outlets will learn that they’ll have to produce original content to get any audience (and advertising money). It’ll be creative ideas, not cross-border dealmaking, that will create wealth for Canadian media companies in the future.

At least, we hope.

In any case, it would be pointless for the CRTC to try to regulate the Internet, simply because it can’t.

| Media, Navel-gazing, Web design

New montrealgazette.com now live

Take a look, take the tour, read the note from the editor.

The biggest change is that it’s wider (setup for 1024px instead of 800px) and it uses its own domain and branding. There’s also a lot of technology behind it that dates from this millennium, which allows you to comment on each article and see which articles are popular.

Feel free to comment there (or here, and I’ll pass them along) about the redesign, which took about seven months to complete, and is chain-wide (the Vancouver Sun site is also up, and the first review is positive).

UPDATE: See similar comment threads on redesigned Canwest newspaper sites:

UPDATE (Dec. 3): And if you need it in marketingese, that can be arranged. Nothing is more hip and in touch with young people of today than a press release quoting the general manager and senior vice-president of digital media saying that “Each execution will be customized and branded to reflect the values and personality of each local newspaper.”

| Media, Opinion, Technology

RadCan gives us another pointless Twitter feed

I’m not a fan of Twitter, for a few reasons:

  1. It has artificial limitations, such as the character limit and the inability to include pictures. Rather than being faults, they’re seen as key advantages somehow.
  2. Most of the “tweets” as they call them are not worth your attention. They’re pointless status updates or what should be private conversations with other people
  3. Almost all URLs are in the form of TinyURLs (or its clones), obscuring the final destination.
  4. When big media organizations use Twitter, it simply inputs an RSS feed into a Twitterizer which spews out a headline and TinyURL link. Why not just give people the RSS feed?

RadCan’s latest Twitter feed on the Quebec elections is an example of No. 4. Some of the headlines are even cutoff midsentence. Why bother following that when I can just read their elections RSS feed?

Have I just not been drinking enough of the Twitter Kool-Aid? Do I not spend enough time with my cellphone connected to the Intertubes? What is the point of this?

And if making Twitter accounts out of RSS feeds is useful, why doesn’t Twitter just do this internally?