It was announced late yesterday that local hockey broadcaster and Canucks commentator Tom Larscheid is set to retire at the start of this coming NHL season.
“He was the colour-man on Vancouver hockey broadcasts for all but four NHL seasons since 1977, and for more than a generation of hockey fans Larscheid’s insight and instincts provided a blunt barometer of the team’s performance – good or bad.” [Canada.com]
The ever-enthusiastic “Tommy”, as fans and colleagues affectionately call him, has several Facebook and forum pages dedicated to some of his colourful quotes which are fun to browse. He’s passionate, has an infectious laugh, big bright smile, and he always has time to pose for a photo with me.
Larscheid’s character and...
Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter as a way to share and consume information but I’m tried of the coverage lavished on Twitter as a revolutionary entity.
The latest breathless article appeared in the Toronto Star earlier this week in which the author, Antonia Zerbisias, talked about how Twitter was used during the G20 meetings, and how a digital divide is being created between people who get their news via Twitter, and those receive it using traditional media sources.
It’s yet another example of how Twitter is getting far too much credit than it really deserves. Yes, Twitter is an exciting new communication tool but the praise being bestowed on it as a “game breaker” is unjustified.
It’s not just political coverage that are getting people excited about...
The CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi had an interesting “essay” a couple of days ago on his show “Q” in which he talked about how there was a place within the book retailing landscape for independent, big-box and digital stores. His comments were triggered by the closure of a small bookstore, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, after apparently failed to pay its rent.
Ghomeshi contends – and I agree – that different types of retailers meet different needs. If you’re looking to purchase the best-seller, then by all means use Indigo or Amazon, or visit the big box book store at your local mall. But if you’re looking to really experience the book-buying process and get insight from people who live and breath books, it makes sense to patronage the...
Newspapers better find online revenue streams or they will not last very much longer. It doesn't look like they are getting a bailout. I guess they can wait for Newsmax to buy them.
The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014.
An ad on the Yahoo homepage. Revenue from online ads is expected to increase in the next five years, according to a report from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report, which PwC plans to release Tuesday.
Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer...
For all the talk about Rupert Murdoch attempting to re-establishing the paywall for content, and online start-ups struggling to make free services viable through advertising or freemium plans, one thing that doesn’t get a lot of attention is how Internet service providers are happily raking in the dough.
The more people use the Web, the more services they consume, including growing amounts of video, the more they want a better, faster online connection, even if it means paying more for it. The high-speed service providers have been more than happy to meet this demand by offering new tiers of premium services. Rogers, for example, has five broadband services, capped off – for now – by an Ultimate package that delivers 50Mbps for $99.99/month.
In other words, high-speed...
I’ll admit it — I’ve kind of missed Nick Carr, and his dyspeptic blog Rough Type. After he started on his latest book, he went on a blogging hiatus, and I kind of missed reading his fulminations on a variety of things, most of which I instinctively disagreed with. I think he may have spent too long away from the blogosphere, however, encased in that 16th-century form of blogging known as “books.” Either that or the topic of his new book, which appears to be how the Internet is dumbing us down (Carr and Andrew Keen are kind of a matched set) has taken hold of him and he now believes the internet is a kind of pernicious force in people’s lives.
His latest column is about how he has come to believe — or is close to believing — that links are...
One of the most exciting parts of mesh ‘10 was having Steve Paikin and TVO’s The Agenda do a live show at the conference. For those of you who missed it, here’s the show, which focused on privacy:...
There were too many highlights from mesh2010 for me to pick a single one, but among the top moments on any list was the taping of a live version of TVO’s The Agenda with the always excellent Steve Paikin. TVO producer Mike Miner and I started talking about the idea last year, because we had always wanted to have Steve come and interview someone but it never seemed to work out — so Mike suggested taping a whole show there, and after much working out of details that’s exactly what happened. It was a fantastic show, with Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, consultant Alan Sawyer, the wonderful Joseph Menn (who did one of the keynotes at mesh), David Fewer of CIPPIC and yours truly. Thanks again to Mike and Steve and the rest of the TVO team for being such a pleasure...
In the wake of my strategic partnership with Media Profile, I thought it might be interesting to provide a snapshot of the ME Consulting “empire” (as much as you want to call a one-person show an empire!)
At the top of the pile is ME Consulting, which offers two “buckets” of services: marketing, communications and messaging services to start-ups and fast-growing companies; and social media strategy and tactics.
I’m also the director of communications for Sysomos, one of the world’s leading social media monitoring and analytics companies. I handle Sysomos’ social media activities, media/blogger relations, and help create its popular social media reports.
I have a partnership with Media Profile in which I provide it with strategic social media...
I spent last Friday in a windowless room with a bunch of men wearing a lot of pancake makeup, but it was a lot more fun than it sounds — I was taping an episode of TVO’s great show The Agenda with Steve Paikin, something I have been honoured to do more than once. This one was about the iPad and what it means (or doesn’t mean) for traditional media, and I was joined by Jesse Brown, host of Search Engine, as well as Globe columnist Ivor Tossell and Wired writer Steve Levy, who was broadcasting via Skype from a library in a small town called Otis, somewhere in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. We talked about the difference that a touch interface makes, the “lean forward” vs. “lean back” experience and how media outlets are offering to sell...
A friend of mine, Mark Simon, was in town yesterday to talk about animated news, and how it is becoming increasingly popular with news organization as a way to tell stories in a different way.
For anyone not familiar with animated news, it involves the creation of video clips that depict events such as car accidents, crimes or natural disasters. Perhaps the most famous is the video of Tiger Woods’ now-infamous car accident last November.
Mark works for Next Media, which is owned by billionaire Jimmy Lai. Next Media operates a 197-person animated news production facility in Taipei, which produces eight videos a day. Its clients include the BBC and Reuters.
Animated news is already popular in Asia so it will be interesting to see if it catches on in North America.
Below is a video...
There’s a growing amount of buzz about 3D television, which seems strange given many consumers are still enthusiastically buying large-screen LCD and plasma televisions.
In any event, 3D seems to be attracting a lot of chatter but here’s something not getting a lot of TV: If you watch 3D television, you can’t do anything else.
So, what’s the big deal about not being able to do anything else but watch TV?
Well, when most people watch TV, they’re also doing other things – reading, eating, surfing the Web on a laptop, knitting, exercising, etc. The problem is it will be difficult to do most of these other things when watching 3D television because you have to wearing special glasses that make it difficult to see anything other than the TV.
So even...
If you’re interested in the future of media, you’re going to want to be at mesh 2010 on May 18 and 19 for our media keynote: Chris Thorpe. Chris comes to us from The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers, where he is the Developer Advocate in charge of the paper’s Open Platform. This puts him at the forefront of one of the most fascinating frontiers in the media industry: namely, the transformation of traditional media entities such as newspapers into digital-information services that distribute their content in a variety of different ways online. And sometimes that involves experimenting too: an offhand remark during a lunch presentation by Clay Shirky, for example, recently led to the creation of a “ChatRoulette for news” called Guardian...
According to a new CNW study, 52% of bloggers now see themselves as journalists, compared with 33% in 2008.
You can count me among the 52% because in many respects I don’t see much of a difference between what I do now when writing blog posts, and what I did when I was a newspaper technology reporter with the Globe & Mail, National Post and Bloomberg News.
These days, I write stories that interest me and get to talk with all kinds of cool people. For example, I wanted to do a blog post on Prezi.com, the new presentation tool being used by a growing number of people at conferences these days. So, I sent an e-mail the CEO, and within a couple of days, I had done an interview and published a blog post.
The ability to “report” is one of the reasons why I...
Choire Sicha, former editor of Gawker and now co-founder of The Awl, points out that the Gawker offices have a large screen mounted on the wall that shows the top most-read stories on the site in terms of unique visitors, allegedly to motivate writers at the blog network (although it’s interesting to note that this screen is described as being in the reception area rather than where the writers can see it). Gawker also posts its top-read stories in terms of both pageviews and unique visitors, which is an interesting page to watch.
That said, however, pageviews and even unique visitors are only a couple of the factors that media entities need to be concerned about — as I tried to argue in this post (check the bottom for recent updates), based on the Twitter debate between...
I enjoy a good debate about media-related topics pretty much any time, even when I’m supposed to be on vacation with the family in Florida. Today, in between playing shuffleboard and bocce and taking the kids to the swimming pool, I had a rousing back-and-forth on Twitter with Howard Owens — who was formerly with Gatehouse Media and is now running a local news site called The Batavian — about the evils (Howard) and virtues (me) of anonymous comments. Along the way, we sucked Steve Yelvington and others into the fray as well. Did we settle the issue? Not even close. In fact, I’m not sure it can ever be settled to everyone’s satisfaction.
In a nutshell, Howard said that anonymous comments were an abomination (I’m paraphrasing somewhat) and were in fact...
This is a note to myself because I will forget how to do this. This is in Ubuntu on an HP Pavilion dv4.
In a terminal, run ‘alsamixer’.
Towards the bottom right, there are two items labeled ‘Digital’.
For the system to recognize the built in microphone, the first needs to be set to ‘Digital’ and the second to ‘Analog I’. For the system to recognize the audio input jack on the front, they must both be ‘Analog I’.
Then, open System > Preferences > Sound, or double-click on the volume in the task-bar and open preferences. Under the ‘Input’ tab, switch to whichever device shows some input levels. For the external, this is ‘Microphone 2′ but not ‘Microphone 1′. Adjust gain as necessary.
Then you can...
Work. What is work? You go to this place, do stuff with other people who are doing similar stuff, and you get to go home each day. Then, every two weeks, these digits appear in electronic form, either on your atm screen or your computer screen. 0’s and 1’s – that’s what you’re paid in. Not gold, nor even fiat debt money backed by nothing but one’s sheer faith that it will be accepted by others as “legal tender for all debts”. It’s quite strange how our notions of money have changed. Some societies have used shells, beaver pelts, or huge stones sitting on the ocean floor as money. In Greece, according to Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, they used the “Knife of Delphi” as money. It was something like an ancient...
Canada Reads starts today but I haven’t finished all five books yet! I am, however, halfway through the last one, so at least I’m in a pretty good position to know which ones I like and which ones I don’t.
I will write a proper review of Good to a Fault once I finish it. For now I’m enjoying it, and really identify with the main character, Clara, especially in the way she second guesses herself so much. Endicott is very good at making very human characters and letting us know what they’re thinking as they do what they do. I’m very interested to see how it goes.
Based only on half the book, I’d rank it above both The Jade Peony and Generation X, which I’d put at 4th and 5th respectively, but below Fall On Your Knees and Nikolski which are in...
The fourth book in my series for CBC Canada Reads is The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy.
Let’s cut right to the chase: This was an okay book, but not a favourite by any means. Of the four books I’ve head, it’s sitting solidly in third place. Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees both had some resonance with me through their stories and memorable characters, while Generation X inspired an intense repulsion. The Jade Peony was just… meh.
The novel is told through the eyes of three children in the same family in the roughly 5 to 15 age range, living in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. On the face of it this could have had very similar results to Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees, which featured multiple points of view and stories that connected in different...
miss604 posted a photo:...
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miss604 posted a photo:
Not sure if I'm supposed to take a photo of this so I watermarked it in...
In
miss604,
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2010,
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Media
When I was a newspaper reporter, a key part of the job was finding and interviewing sources who could offer information, perspective, insight and, of course, some good quotes. It required legwork and the ability to build relationships and trust with people.
While talking to sources is still an integral part of journalism, I’ve noticed a growing number of newspaper articles recently that cite or quote blog posts, blog comments or tweets. For example, the Toronto Star’s story about Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams going to a U.S. hospital for heart surgery included a quote from “Matt” taken from a U.S. Politics Online forum: “Canada keeps its costs down, in part, by neglecting the expensive business of advanced specialty care knowing that the U.S. is next...
miss604 posted a photo:...
Apparently, the New York Times is poised to take the plunge and introduce a pay-as-you go system for its content. It’s a bold move given that few consumers are willing to pay for content based on a survey done last year.
While there are critics who don’t believe newspapers will be successful in selling content, my take is that if anyone is going to be successful, it’s the New York Times.
Why?
Perhaps the biggest reason is the NYT isn’t offering a commodity product that can be accessed in a variety of other places. The NYT produces high-quality journalism that ranks among the best in the world so, in theory, it’s content with value in the same way people pay for the Wall Street Journal.
Fundamentally, any attempt to convince consumers to pay for content starts...
A few months ago, I was approached by Globe & Mail editor Noel Hulsman about a new Web site the newspaper was going to launch focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs and small business owners. The idea was to deliver relevant and valuable content that people could use to operate their businesses better, or successfully launch a business.
After a lot of hard work behind the scenes, “Your Business” launched today. It features three themes – Start, Grow and Exit – as well as extensive contents that includes a team of columnists, including myself.
My column, will appear times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday), will focus providing new business owners and entrepreneurs with everything from tips and tools and guidance from experts on how to run your business...
miss604 posted a photo:...
“Dumbo”
Evidence is an 8 minute 35mm film authored by Godfrey Reggio, during his term as director of Fabrica - a new school founded by Benetton - and a student collaborator, Angela Melitopulos. the film was shot in Rome during March 1995 and edited by Miroslav Janek, a collaborator of Fabrica, with music by composer Philip Glass.
Evidence looks into the eyes of children watching television - in this case Walt Disney’s “Dumbo”. Though engaged in a daily routine, they appear drugged, retarded, like the patients of a mental hospital. Evidence is about the behavior of children watching television - an activity whose physiological aspects have been overlooked in the current controversy surrounding television.......