saila.com: Living Can Kill You Feed

5 steps to CBC success

How to program a national public broadcasting corporation:

Operate a respected international cable news channel.
Create an innovative, ground-breaking television program using all the techniques of social media Web sites more than five years before it becomes cliched.
Get praise for the former, and inspire a former vice-president to copy the model outright.
Stop producing content for the respected news outlet so said ex-vice-president can use the channel to host the aforementioned copy.
Wait about four years, and strike a deal to create a Canadian version of the groundbreaking news channel that resulted from those deals.

Holy Fuck!

Ironically, I never saw the Toronto band name-checked in the title when I lived in that city yet I heard lots about them (and again missed them) when they played a few block away from where I now live in Seattle. The band got rave reviews for their two recent performances and helped raise Toronto and Canada’s reputation amongst the often jaded scenesters in that U.S. city. Not good enough for the government of Canada who cites Holy Fuck as a reason for cutting funding to Canadian artists.

Toronto itself tried to cut another art institution today, but this time it was a tree. After the famous Queen West graffiti tree at Queen West and Peter feel over yesterday, the city was going to turn it into mulch. Thankfully, it was not to be.

That being said, another institution of my Toronto Years (as I think I’ll call them) is not so lucky. The Lakeview Lunch dinner has outlived its post-Cocktail revival. For a few years it was the highlight of Dundas west Bathurst but it quickly declined in direct contrast to the meteoric rise Ossington’s transformation into a the city’s destination strip.

CBC: near- or farsighted?

Recently Canada’s public broadcaster urged the CRTC to “reject old assumptions about new media” and claimed that the consumption of broadcast media is not being negatively effected by the Internet.

This defies the observable evidence yet manages to be based in some careful shaped facts. For example, CBC’s paper claims that:

Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool. … These are the types of activities that are driving Canadians to spend time using the Internet. They are not activities that are substitutable with TV and radio usage: these activities are completely different than the time spent with traditional media.

Additionally, it claims one percent of Canadians watch television online. While the claims may be technically true, the arguments are on very weak ground.

True, the government’s research arm found almost everyone emails or searches for information online; but it also determined 65 percent “view news or sports” online and 28 percent listen to online radio.

In fact, in the past three years, there was a 60 percent increase in the number of people watching TV or movies online (20 percent in 2007). Seeing how people consume TV online in the U.S., I will confidently conclude there will be a similar increase in Canada after another three years.

Similar narrow-sightedness can be found in its discussion around online revenue opportunities (which is too broad for me to discuss in detail, but I will mention online ad spending continues to increase and is predicated to surpass radio advertising).

Everyone likes to shape facts to support their own perception of reality, and the CBC, like many media institutions, could be seen to be struggling to maintain its default top-down organization structure. (As evidence: people in the trenches have continually been doing some incredible things at the CBC as it relates to the online world, but the upper management seems oblivious to the realities.)

My hope is, like the Canadian newspapers before, the CBC has merely crafted a report to discourage the CRTC from regulating the Internet (or at least the Canadian media companies online) and is not merely a result of a lack of vision.

Minor changes for big effect in iPhone 2.0

Sure, there are some new applications to download, but the big win with the iPhone 2.0 software is the subtle changes to the user experience, proving, once again, how attention to details can exponentially increase the perceived value of a product. (The other part, though, is making sure people can access that product.)

The four most appreciated improvements were:

The call-forwarding option seemed to be more readily available and appears as the first option on the phone setting screen (it may have done that before, but I feel like I’m doing less finger flicks to get there).
There is a new icon on the home screen for Contacts, meaning I don’t have to search around for it before remembering contacts are listed in the Phone application.
When entering passwords, the last character stays unobscured for a few seconds, providing you a chance to confirm your fat fingers actually hit the right virtual key.
In email fields the spacebar is replaced automatically with “@” key — which is brilliant, since email addresses can’t have spaces but do require the at sign.

As for those aforementioned apps: when you download them a progress bar is overlaid on the apps’ slightly transparent icon. Once it’s installed, the bar disappear and the icon becomes opaque.

Overall, the apps I’ve played with have all seemed well-executed, maintaining the good level of quality established by Apple’s original applications. Still, there are some that seem merely to be upgrades to the mobile Web experience (The New York Times application, Google, and a few others).

In many ways, the iPhone app experience as a whole reminds me of last year’s Facebook app rush and, to a lesser extent, the shareware environment a decade-and-a-half ago. Like those periods, I expect iPhone app developers will soon get comfortable with this environment and start building apps that truly make use of the Apple’s impressive mobile platform.

(Despite some wondering whether there’s a sustainable business model for app development, the market should be robust. People did spend tens of thousands of dollars on applications before the store was even officially selling them and Canadians are even lining-up to pay exorbitant prices for the iPhone alone.)

iPhone apps

Tomorrow, Canada will get its first legal iPhone, but, as well-covered in the press, it will pay an unbelievable price for the privilege. Coincidentally, I’ll be getting my second and handing the first one — the iPhone that introduced me to Seattle — to the same person who made packing tape a necessary feature for the phone.

Today, though, almost everyone with an iPhone seemed to be testing out the new 2.0 software and downloading apps as fast as they could. (People were walking blindly through hallways twisting their phones in frantic ways playing Super Monkey Ball.) No doubt there will dozens of “best of” lists in the coming days, but this is my attempt to keep track of those ones most interesting to me:

Remote
AIM
Twitterific
Evernote
NYTimes
PayPal
PandoraRadio
Things (expensive at $10, but for me, very worth it)
Shazam
PhoneSaber
Either Cro-Mag Rally or the aforementioned Super Monkey Ball

Add you recommendations in the comments.

BarCamp Seattle: The Father’s Day Edition

Sunday morning and another Seattle bus adventure means arriving once again late for BarCamp Seattle, thankfully, the sessions also got underway a bit later. Today begins (for me) with a discussion on social media design where I promote Pownce’s friend/fan and group pattern (potentially to be added to the new social media repository announced in the session) and will end with, apparently, Diet Coke and Mentos.

Yesterday’s session were a solid mix, starting with more formal presentations and easing into casual discussion outside in the sun by the end of the day. Seattle was finally starting to get the BarCamp spirit. In fact the tipping point seemed to be a session on Starbuck vs. Samwise — it was a relaxed, loose conversation that was tangentially about the attention economy. Other sessions on the economy, mobile “microformats” and accessibility provoked some good discussions that were almost all cut short by the time limit of 30 minutes. This was most notable during a discussion on standards and search; one statement about using only one anchored link per page could have spawned an entire 60 minutes worth of argument.

Today, it’s about 45 minutes, which seems to be far more comfortable a timeslot, as evidenced by the social media talk and a demo of drawball.com. People seem to be a lot more comfortable and ready to participate…

OH: “What’s next!?”

Answer: How to be a superhero, by Tantek Çelik.

First impressions of BarCamp Seattle

Probably a result of the venue, what with its actual class rooms filled with podiums, projectors, and microphones, the formality of this Seattle BarCamp is far more implicit than ever it was at the Toronto BarCamps (except for the one held, coincidentally, at the MSN Canada offices). Lots of hallway buzz, but the sessions have been sadly distracted by the jackhammering going on outside the Adobe building.

That being said, the level of discourse is excellent and the snacks are great (no Starbucks coffee [but no keg of beer that might get stolen]). In fact, the attendees are actively engaged in each of the half-hour sessions I’ve been in (there are three rooms and a packed grid).

Best tip so far: Judo can help Web standards.
Best moments so far: Seeing all the organizers wandering around in housecoats.
Weirdest moment so far: Seeing all the organizers wandering around in housecoats.

Heading to BarCamp Seattle

This is being written on a bus (the 30) as I tardily trek to BarCamp Seattle — only the first of many differences between my experiences with the BarCamp scene in Toronto (although, coincidentally, on my way to the first Toronto BarCamp, I spotted some infamous graffiti on the outside of a Starbucks franchise).

Toronto held its first BarCamp in November 2005 and the community that’s grown around it has helped energize the tech and Web development community there (and potentially created a baby boom).

This weekend, marks my ~~third~~ fourth BarCamp, but the first in a city (my new city) where the tech community is so dominant in mainstream life. Although Seattle is four-and-a-half times smaller than Toronto, this weekend's BarCamp Seattle includes some of the Web/tech community celebrities and is being held in Adobe Seattle campus (which is right beside Google and Getty and across the channel from Newsvine [Microsoft is a bit further away]).

All of this is leading to some high expectations for the proceedings ahead, and I hope, as the weekend wears on the chronicle some of them here.

Web Directions North â€™08 kicks off

Coming to this year’s Web Directions North provided me with a very memorable first: entering Canada for the first time as a U.S. resident. (Explaining to the border guard that we actually did live in Seattle and weren’t actually re-entering the country was…interesting). Thankfully, once we made it across I was happily re-united with my former co-workers at The Globe for an amazingly cooked meal at toothpastery’s house.

Day one started with more reunions — including a few Torontonians, some of the Web Directions 2007 crowd, a co-worker — and a very enjoyable keynote by Zeldman (he spent a good hour offering an eye witness account how The WaSP and Web standards actually came in to being).

Next on my list was Derek’s talk on real world accessibility and how it can affect usability (ask him about king-size bed’s in London), followed by Kimberly Elam’s in-depth session that I am currently in: five essential tools for Web typography.

I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging too much during this conference, but you can follow my Twitter-stream or the conference’s own pseudo-tumble log for a better sense of what is happening.

By the way, if you are attending, and see me, please come by and say hey.

Thank Hotwired, Saila suggests

Although my first thought was to Twitter this (apparently the frequency for which I do that is starting to make cats salivate), but it deserved more than 140 characters. That being said, had it been a little tweet it would have said this:

@veen: increasingly, it’s clear that everything I learned, I learned from HotWired

I’ve mentioned it before in a couple of posts, and in person to Mr. Veen, but as I do some work for a media client examining their competitors and forming some online strategies and best practices, that site and its primary colours raced back in mind.

Maybe it was the electronic music being streamed into my headphones (the first online music I regularly listened was webcasted from HotWired via Beta Lounge).

Maybe it was that nearly every guideline I outline was done by that crew back in in the mid-1990s.

Maybe it was the nature of my client’s business.

Maybe its the the current debate over “purpose.”

Nevertheless, it’s inspired me to collect my thoughts and respond to a point I made a few weeks ago. After the Online News Association’s conference in Toronto, one of my posts alluded to the fact that mainstream media has failed to pick-up on some of the independent Web’s best practices.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll start posting some longer essays collected under the tentatively group under the title of “Saila Suggests” that will respond and expand on those best practices.

The first, appearing this weekend will be an overview, and will be followed by an piece on created user-friendly Web addresses. Although my self-imposed schedules are infamously erratic, I hope to a have a few more posted before the year is out.

Smells like Seattle

Almost exactly five months ago , I started my first major foray into the world of self-employment and began working with a series of exceptional clients to develop web applications and advise about online strategy. The quality, and quantity, of work surprised me, and I savoured every moment of it.

Yet, as the savvy may have already surmised, I’m referring to this work in the past tense.

Although I still have some projects to wrap-up, by the holiday season, my time as a self-employed Web guy will have, unexpectedly (but happily), ended. In the new year, I will be moving to Seattle to take a position with a forward-thinking media company, and a pioneer in online news: MSNBC.com.

The company has been undergoing some incredible changes over the past while — including the dramatic new redesign and the purchase of Newsvine — so the opportunity to be involved in the future plans was too good to refuse. (Ironic Moment: the day the MSNBC/Newsvine deal closed I was actually in Seattle and was planning to meet-up with some of the Blue Flavor guys, and coincidentally with MikeD and the MSNBC.com crew. Alas, plans were dashed by my car and my decision not to get an iPhone.)

My role will be, in part, to work with the team to continue the evolution, carrying the new design to all parts of the site, and helping MSNBC.com learn from Newsvine’s tremendous online efforts. But a job is only as good as the people one works with, and judging by the time I spent with them in Vancouver, Seattle, and even Toronto, this is very much worth a move across the continent.

Yet, as great as Seattle will be, Toronto will always be “home,” and I’ll truy miss my little portion of it. In my remaining weeks as a Torontonian, you may see me in some my favourite haunts but you most definitely can find me on December 1st to December 2nd at 201 Niagara St. for the “Smells Like Seattle” farewell party — if you’re in Toronto that night, it’d be great to see you. And for those of you on the left coast, I hope to be (iPhone-enabled and) seeing/meeting you soon enough, too.

(P.S.: Have any Seattle tips? Let me know as there’s a good possibility I’ll be starting a new blog about my adventures there.)

Online journalism still needs to learn

Day two of the Online News Association’s conference has had, at least for me a much more engaging set of panels and conversations, starting with Holovaty’s through to integrating interactives into the site (which featured a tremendously strong panel). The day closes with what is dubbed the “Superpanel;” after is the ONA awards.

What has become increasingly clear is that, despite the long-standing trend, some news organizations in Canada (I’m looking at you globeandmail.com), are in fact ahead of many U.S. sites. The lessons we have learned are now being discovered by many major sites, including USA Today. In fact, my general sense, is that the online news industry is ignoring the entire blog/Web 2.0 world (except to look at in fear), and, as a result, are missing a lot of the lessons and user experience conventions many Web users have learned over the past few years.

Holovaty at the ONA conference

Adrian Holovaty started the day with his session on evangelizing reporting and making data in news articles available for machine parsing (as evidenced in ChicagoCrimes.org). Although I arrived late (something about the Queen St. streetcar trying being diverged, and partly a result of a late night hunt to find a Gypsy jazz band and a Yahoo party), I’ve seen his talk on this before (and he is a good speaker), but it is heartening to see that it was incredibly well attended.

As he has readily admitted, it’s not rocket science, but it is a very original concept to the vast majority of the news industry, including those in the session. Each time he talks, and people see the results (both direct or indirect) of his work, there’s hope more news organizations will begin doing this kind of kind of interactive journalism, along with the more typical multimedia presentations.

From my experience, the two hurdles are:

finding the resources (both human and technical) to build out these applications;
and making it user-friendly for the reporters to input the data (i.e., creating a WYSIWYG interface).

The first is not insurmountable; there are a lot of talented journalist and Web developers who would be willing to do this kind of work. The second would require a more concerted project effort and training, but the results would continue to pay-off the years.

Midday at ONA, Day 1

So far, Toronto Hydro is failing me, hotel rates are too high, but I do have a recharged laptop (I still can’t believe there’s no free WiFi at an online journalism conference). Thankfully, I’ve been able to catch-up with a lot of people, some of which live in my city, or I’ve just met. And that was one of my hopes in attending this conference.

Of the two of the panels I’ve attended, the one on serious gaming was the most interesting. Essentially, the panelist just spoke about the relationship between online (educational) gaming and interactives. That simple notion sparked a lot of ideas that I was hastily jotting down in my trusty Moleksin. The second, post-lunch, was an all-star panel (Rob Curley, J.D. Lasica, Dan Gillmour, and Jay Rosen) that was interesting thanks mainly to Curley’s willingness to dive deep into how they are doing local blogging.

Many of the panels seem to be “ideas-based” and a lot of “wouldn’t it be great if…” Perhaps because I already believe what’s being preached, and have myself preached the same, that I find the tone a little too academic.

The nosepicker is that I have spoken to others here that are completely wowed by those concepts, which is good, very good, for this industry.

Two more sessions today, and I expect at least one more post.

ONA conference starts

Arriving for an early start at the Online News Association’s conference here in Toronto, and I have, so far, have run into colleagues I’ve worked with, might have worked with, and could be working with. Apparently the rare, and heavy Toronto fog has closed the airport, preventing some from arriving, but still it is quite packed.

The plan was to live blog this session, but in my rush to get a coffee, I forgot my power cord and my “typewriter” ribbon is running low. That, and I’m using Toronto Hydro’s wifi network — I did manage to connect, but its slow…

Keynote by Yahoo’s Hilary Schneider is interesting, if not quite enlightening overview of the Web 2.0 tools and how theoretically it could be applied to journalism. (Best line: “rapid failure” is good.) Elections, methinks, is going to be a big trend (the U.S. is due for one in a year, and Canada…well who knows), she just mentioned it in the keynote, and there’s a whole session on it later today.

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