Tag Archives: The Gazette

| Business, Montreal, On the Net

The TVboxset.com scam

This story from this morning’s Gazette is hilarious. Apparently customers are complaining that they’re being ripped off by Montreal-based TVboxset.com, which has been promising them great deals on DVDs of TV shows, and then never delivering them.

What’s interesting is that those who do get the DVDs delivered quickly find out that they’re low-quality pirated versions recorded straight off of cable (they even have the network logos in the corner).

A quick scan online shows plenty of other people with similar complaints. In some of them, a representative of the company responds with a form letter about “misplaced orders”, but never answers the charges of blatant pirating.

The article quotes him as saying they “buy bulk and resell”, and that they don’t verify stock before they send it out. As if any idiot couldn’t spot such obvious fakes from a hundred feet away.

Garcia Media Group, which owns the website, isn’t under investigation by the Quebec consumer protection bureau, because apparently nobody’s complained to them yet (isn’t bureaucracy wonderful?), the Better Business Bureau can’t do anything because the company isn’t a member, and the police won’t say whether they’re investigating. Only Canada Post is looking into the matter.

Hopefully, unless the claims that this is all a smear campaign from a competitor are true (right, sure), this company will be quickly shut down and its owners prosecuted before they scam more people.

UPDATE (Oct. 7): Slashdot has a story on the lack of action in this case.

| Montreal, Slow News Day

Watering lawns makes baby Jesus cry

At least one Pincourt resident is complaining that a ban on outdoor watering, put in place because of demand might exceed supply during the hot summer months, is literally going to turn her lawn into a desert.

Cry me a bloody river.

There are plenty of things people can do to help the environment. Drive less, use less electricity, recycle more. Wasting less potable water is on this list. It costs energy to purify water for drinking, and there’s not much fresh water left in this world.

On the other hand, we need to water our lawns. I mean, it’s not like they water themselves, right? It’s not like some mystical, magical force somehow causes water to spontaneously fall from the sky in large quantities every few days.

Oh wait, THERE IS!

It’s called rain. And if it’s not enough to keep your lawn green and healthy, then there’s something wrong with your lawn, and it doesn’t belong in this environment. Do something green for a change and don’t waste so much energy trying to override nature.

| In the news, Montreal

Montreal is still pedophilia-central (but don’t worry)

The Gazette has a long story today about pedophilia websites being hosted in Montreal. It talks about some of these sites, all of which are hosted by Epifora, which I told you about in May. Unlike last time when they were coy about giving away addresses, this story repeats one address almost a half-dozen times. Another one is repeated twice even though they get it wrong both times (it’s a .org, not a .com).

Epifora is a small-guy operation (fully aware of what sites it’s hosting) that’s getting its space from Steadfast Networks. That’s the company people should be targetting with their complaints.

Meanwhile, the children’s festival which brought all this into the limelight in the first place isn’t adding extra security, instead relying on parents to be extra paranoid vigilant.

| 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.

| Blogosphere, Slow News Day

Editorialist, criticize thyself

The Gazette has an editorial today about the Beaver survey and it notes that — gasp — online polls shouldn’t be taken too seriously:

Talk-shows hosts, bloggers, columnists, pundits and letter-writers have all had fun with that online poll, organized by the august historical magazine The Beaver, in which respondents named Pierre Trudeau “the worst Canadian.”

…

It’s all good fun, we suppose, but it should also be a reminder online polls of this sort are not worth the paper they aren’t printed on.

I looked up the story, and most of the bloggers I’ve found saw right through the lame, transparent attempt to get free publicity. The paragraph leaves out the paper itself in those it names as having “had fun”. After all, it put the non-story on its front page Tuesday morning, one day after the Beaver issued a press release about it. (Little tip folks: Get something on Canada Newswire that’s not business-related and some paper somewhere will rewrite it into a story to fill space. Don’t bother trying to support your outrageous claims with facts, nobody cares about those.)

The editorial makes a couple of points: that online reader surveys shouldn’t be taken at face value (duh), and that “participatory journalism” has its problems:

Reader-participation journalism, a clear trend in print as well as online, has many virtues and can be a valuable tool.

But without the constraints of rigorous sample-selection techniques and careful choice of questions, the findings of some such processes are not only laughable, as with the Trudeau choice, but they can also be potentially dangerously misleading.

Just in case it wasn’t clear yet that mainstream media has no clue what participatory journalism is, here we go.

At the risk of repeating myself, the following things are NOT participatory journalism:

  1. Letting readers vote in multiple-choice online polls and writing a story about the results.
  2. Blogs written by columnists and newspaper staffers
  3. Publishing “online extras”
  4. Writing about what you found on Facebook
  5. Writing about what readers posted as comments to your blog
  6. Republishing blog posts as articles
  7. Republishing articles as blog posts
  8. Asking readers for stories and quoting from them
  9. Publishing writers’ email addresses with their stories

Many of these things are good ideas, but they’re not participatory journalism.

Sorry, mainstream media, but you got suckered in by a press release about an outrageous unscientific survey. Don’t blame it on bloggers and new forms of journalism that are entirely irrelevant here.

| Business, In the news, Montreal

Cours Mont Royal is watching you pee

Someone complained to the Gazette about video cameras in the men’s room at Cours Mont Royal. Apparently, according to the proprietor, the cameras aren’t running, due to that minor matter of it being illegal to film someone in a bathroom.

But they say it’s working, deterring illegal acts like drug dealing, vandalism, gay sex, peeing on the floor, and, of course, forgetting to wash one’s hands.

I just hope Jeff Goldblum doesn’t get his hands on it.

| In the news, Montreal

Do gays have to be so … gay?

Every year after the Gay Pride Parade, some prude writes in to the newspaper complaining that the sexual flamboyancy is offensive and shoving the thick, throbbing gayness down everyone’s throats is obscene.

This year is no exception. The token prude is Shamus Birch (the same Shamus Birch who’s “every mother’s dream for a son-in-law” and found Jesus after he was stupid with his virginity? Nah, that guy’s in Britain), who is totally not a homophobe, but says gays “should stick to the old-fashioned way: Earn the respect and recognition on a person-to-person basis, not as an overdone circus demonstration.”

(UPDATE: A brief but well-thought-out response in Wednesday’s paper, and another one in Friday’s)

Ah, remember the good old-fashioned days? When gays were shunned, blacks were slaves, and everyone died of tuberculosis by the age of 40? Why can’t we have those back?

Well, blame Theo Wouters and Roger Thibault. Remember them? They’re the old gay couple in Pointe-Claire who were harassed by their neighbours for being gay. This was back in 2002 when gayness wasn’t as cool as it is now.

The Quebec Human Rights Commission has awarded them $10,000 from the kids who teased them.

Quote Wouters:

“I don’t think that a bunch of morons can chase us out. I mean, the black people, if they hadn’t stood up, they’d still be in the same position, and we feel for us, it’s the same way.”

Oh gay. It’s the new black. A flamboyantly-coloured new black. And apparently it’s distracting to some people.

| 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.

| Montreal

The media is always biased when it doesn’t agree with you

It’s funny how groups on the political fringes make sweeping generalizations about newspapers being biased against them are quick to promote those newspapers’ articles when they are in agreement. (Though, at least some admit they’re “surprised” when a newspaper takes a public stance that is not, you know, evil)
Don’t get me wrong: There are legitimate criticisms of CanWest news coverage, but they are almost always heavily exaggerated in the minds of the grassroots activists out there.

| 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.

| Blogosphere, Fun, Montreal, My articles

The ultimate Transformers geek

Two articles this weekend by yours truly:

This week’s blog is Urban Photo (or should I say “URBANPHOTO”?) by freelance writer Christopher DeWolf. It’s one of the ones that’s been on my list for a while (long before he asked me to write about it). It covers urban life and design with an emphasis on photography. Its contributors include blogosphere familiars like Kate McDonnell and A.J. Kandy.

Also this week is a Justify Your Existence profile of Transformers collector Daniel Arseneault. He has 1,700 of the action figures but still manages to have a normal-sounding life. Yeah, he lives in his parents’ basement (with a staircase that forces you to bend down as you descend lest you hit your head), but he’s an auto mechanic and sport enthusiast with a fiancée. Read up about him here and on his website, or join his Montreal Transformers Fans Facebook group.

And while you’re checking out Montreal Diary this week, you can read Amy Luft’s recounting of last week’s water fight.

| Business

Crowdsourcing? I don’t think so

Roberto Rocha’s “interactive series” on customer service has come to an end, a full two articles after it began, with a feature story in today’s Gazette. It quotes readers who have been screwed over by customer service, as well as a few industry experts.

The Gazette claims the series is a breakthrough an innovative, paradigm-breaking exercise in “participatory journalism” and “crowdsourcing”, because it asks for readers to provide their stories, and the reporter blogs about his interviews before writing his articles.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence of either participatory journalism or crowdsourcing here. Instead, my earlier criticisms seem perfectly justified. There’s nothing new here. Asking readers for their stories has been done since the dawn of time. In fact, columnist Jim Mennie has used the tactic successfully many times. And while blogging about interviews is a good idea, the first anyone saw of the finished product was when it appeared in the paper this morning. No drafts were published online to get the “crowdsourcers” to comment, correct, improve or update it.

The story comes with a navel-gazing meta-sidebar about how the series worked and how (real) participatory journalism can change the way businesses operate. There’s also a version published on Roberto’s blog. The two contain an important difference: The blog version talks about where the series failed and what areas need improvement. One was unavoidable: Roberto left for a week to cover the Governor-General’s visit to Brazil. The other is a problem with the Gazette in general: It wasn’t publicized enough and too few people got involved (more on that below). A conspiracy theorist might question why these important paragraphs were removed from the paper version, but I’m sure it was just edited out for space.

The story is also supplemented with an online video (like all CanWest videos, there’s no built-in way to easily link to them, so I have to use my computer-science skillz to hack a link together). The video is another example of newspapers misunderstanding the Internet. It’s nothing more than a talking head (Roberto) supplemented with B-roll of him walking down a hallway and using his computer. There’s nothing here (besides knowing what Roberto’s voice sounds like) that needs video and couldn’t be simply read in text form.

Roberto’s claim that the project wasn’t publicized enough was, I think, misguided. Sure, there was only the single article written about it, but it’s been hyped on the website and on Page A2 of the paper almost every day since. The problem is with the Gazette’s website in general.

  • I put the Gazette’s homepage through an analyzer. It contains an astonishing 188 objects, including 171 images and 8 CSS files, accounting for about 690KB. With the Flash-based ads now popular, it’s gotten to be such a memory hog that I have to be careful how many web pages I have open at Canada.com. (To contrast, this blog’s homepage has only four objects totalling 140KB, and most of that is one complex image I used to illustrate a post.)
  • Besides being a pain for the browser, the page is also far too busy visually. To see the top story in the paper that morning (which, one would think, would be a common activity for people going to a newspaper’s website) requires hitting PageDown three times (meaning it’s on the fourth page down) on my 1024×768 screen. This isn’t just the Gazette’s problem. It’s a rampant issue across media websites who think people would rather spend 20 minutes reading everything on a “portal” homepage to maybe find what they want instead of clicking on category links to refine their search.
  • The blog’s homepage is at http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/tech/default.aspx. Nobody actually types that into their address bar. Individual post URLs are too long to even fit on my screen. Compare that with the Gazette’s crazy-successful Habs Inside/Out blog at http://www.habsinsideout.com/. A banner ad, small Gazette logo and a few links at the top. The rest is simple, unbusy and uncomplicated, and doesn’t include links to every single other CanWest property at the bottom.
  • The blog itself has layout issues. Paragraph spacing is inconsistent, the text is in a sans-serif font instead of the easier-to-read serif you see here, text (and especially meta-text) is too small to read (some parts — including the link to post comments — go as low as 8pt!)

As for my opinion on the state of customer service, I think it’s horrible, and it’s not going to get better. Roberto and the companies talk a great talk about how they’ve “owned up” to the problems and are “correcting” their mistakes. But talk is cheap. It costs nothing to apologize.

The reality is that large companies couldn’t care less about you. If you have an unusual situation that requires more than a few minutes of their time, you’re costing them money. The old threats of “I’ll never do business with you again” and “I’ll go to the press” are meaningless now. They don’t care if a few bad apples (who would otherwise bother their expensive customer service centres) end their service and go to a competitor. There’s plenty of other fish in the sea. And going to the media, which is a horrible nightmare for small businesses, doesn’t bother the big companies because they know their competitors have reputations that are just as bad.

Besides, nobody checks out customer service before signing up. They check prices. That’s why the small fries, who have great customer service but slightly higher prices, soon find themselves going out of business.

From a strict cost-benefit analysis, it’s better to provide crappy customer service (but have your PR guys talk about how you’re improving to the media) and lower prices than to raise prices and have qualified, local people answer the phone.

And that’s not going to change until more people start demanding better.