How to be a Laptop Bedouin
 This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on October 1, 2008. |
If you spend much of your day anchored to a keyboard and monitor in a dull cubicle with a crowded commute – you can change your life.
With easily accessible online tools, you literally can work from anywhere: Europe, the beach, even the middle of the ocean.
Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot run Vancouver’s Capulet Communications. For most of the spring, the couple worked at a handcrafted pine desk in an open office that echoed with the squeals of seagulls mixed with the scuffle of children chasing a soccer ball through the back alleys of Essouira, Morocco.
And that’s just one stamp on their passports. They’ve also run their company during extended stays in Ireland and Malta.
When choosing a work-worthy destination, Julie says the deal maker is simple: “Broadband internet.”
The reliability and speed of a web connection is the first thing the couple investigates when looking for an overseas “office” and the exact opposite of what solo rower Roz Savage found herself with on her summer adventure rowing across the Pacific.
Roz rowed solo from San Francisco to Hawaii in the first leg of her voyage and posted a blog entry each day of the trip.
She sat cross legged on the cramped floor of her vessel and used a laptop charged by solar panels to write her posts. She then emailed them via a satellite phone to SailBlogs, a service which provides mapping and blogging solutions to the sailing community.
While it worked, it was a painfully slow 2.4kBps connection, much less than 1% of what broadband speed would be.
Roz also used the satellite phone to record a weekly podcast of her adventure to raise awareness of the state of the oceans and the environment.
“It was challenging, but hopefully it’s worthwhile,” she smiles.
When it came to communicating with the Capulet clients, Darren and Julie relied on email, but also maintained a Vancouver area number while they were out of the country and used a service called PhoneTag.
“Basically as soon as you get a voice mail, it immediately emails you [the text of the message,]” remarks Julie.
They could then return the call using Skype, a voice over internet protocol that’s cheaper than international calling rates.
“Half the time they had no idea we were out of the country.”
The time change between Europe and clients in North America allowed the couple to spend leisurely mornings exploring their surroundings before getting into serious work in the afternoon, something they long for now that they’re back in BC.
In addition to the exotic change of being overseas to work, there are also financial benefits.
“When you’re living abroad and you leave with a backpack with all your stuff and your office in it, and you intend to come back with just that backpack, you just don’t buy anything,” she says.
“When you stop buying things, it’s amazing how much money you save.”
From an ancient medina in Morocco, to a rowboat in the middle of the pacific, if you can find the internet you can get the job done. They do call it wireless for a reason.
BLOGOSPHERE BUZZ
The next portion of Roz’s Pacific rowing adventure will start in May from Hawaii. She will continue to blog the journey and take part in a regular podcast with Leo Laporte. She’s hoping to have more video of her journey, but her slow satellite modem takes 30 minutes to upload 30 seconds.
Raising awareness by using blogs and social media tools is becoming crucial for those trying to affect social change. Musician David Usher recently highlighted the need for charities to move this way on his blog. “It’s so important that ’causes’ get on board with social media right now. As messaging gets .. crowded it’s going to become harder for charities to .. gain awareness,” he writes.
Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot recently wrote Getting to First Base, an eBook on social media marketing and are turning it into a print edition this fall. Another book tracing the stories of The Laptop Bedouins, people who work online and overseas, will follow.
Jack Layton’s New Democrats are getting seriously into social media. While the Liberals and Conservatives are tossing up parody sites of each other, the NDP are handing bloggers all the tools they need to spread the message. The recently launched Orange Room is a wealth of tools, images, videos and widgets.
The Canadian Internet Project recently released a report on the web habits of Canadians. We spent, on average, 17 hours a week online last year, up from 13 in 2004. 80% of internet users or 54% of Canadians access the web via broadband connections. 97% of teens are online regularly, while more than half of those over 60 mouse around.
National Digital Media Day: The Big Kiss
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 25, 2008. |
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 17, 2008. |
This is one of those ideas you wished you’d come up with.
A few weeks ago Sean Kane received an invitation from some UVic professors to go to an election party. But the party’s not on October 14, when Canadians go to the polls, it’s on November 4 - Sean’s going to a party with Canadians to watch the American results come in.
That’s when Kane, an illustrator for the likes of Amazon.com, got an idea.
He recalled polls that had been published over the summer saying Canadians were far more captivated by the drama and personality of the American election, than our own plodding candidates.
One CTV survey had 26% of Canadians saying they would vote for Barack Obama, 5 points higher than Stephen Harper with even Hillary Clinton faring better than Jack, Gilles and Stephane.
Sean’s idea was to start a grass roots campaign: Barack Obama for Prime Minister. The idea was not so much to get him legitimately elected, but to sell tshirts, buttons and bumper stickers. In an internet age having a money making idea like that and getting it launched can happen instantly.
Sean’s idea cost him $10 for a domain name and a few hours of graphic design work.
“I registered BarackObamaforPM.com, and then through the host company I just redirected it over to Blogger for a free blog.”
When you have an idea for a cool .com site, you don’t need to worry about hosting and servers, you can point the registered address to any other webpage, and in this case Sean got his cool web address and just redirected it to a free blogging site from which he could launch the Obama for PM “campaign.”
Finding a way to have the t-shirts printed up took a little more effort. Sean didn’t want to have to buy dozens up front; he was looking for a site that would handle the fulfillment as the orders came in and just cut him in for his share of each sale.
After some poking around for a Canadian operator to save cross border shipping charges, Kane landed on TShirtMonster.ca
“Once I had that figured out, I was off and running to Photoshop to create some content. Basically within 5 hours the site was up and it was live,” says Kane.
To spread the message, Sean posted a few comments on some relevant discussion boards, and sent some emails to political bloggers, created a Twitter profile and his idea went viral.
The Obama for PM campaign is non-partisan; he’s taking a parodying shot at each Canadian party and re-working the logos to read Obama for Prime Minister, even oddly cropping in the heads of our leaders wearing the shirts and showing their support for Obama.
“It’s a lot of fun and if I can get people engaged in our own campaign here, maybe people who never would have thought about what’s going on in our Federal election, then I’d be pretty pleased.”
24hrs Blogosphere Buzz: 2008.09.17
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 17, 2008. |
Got a great internet idea that just needs a little bit of support and brainstorming or funding to become perfect? Launch Party Vancouver 5 goes tomorrow night at Unwine’d. Problem is it’s sold out. So practice your elevator pitch on the sidewalk outside to get tickets for inside.
The local blogsphere might be a little light on content this weekend as most of the hardcore writers will be part of the pilgrimage to Las Vegas for BlogWorld Expo. The Vancouver contingent will be well represented on the show floor and on the panels. Keynoters include Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary TV, Tim Ferris of the 4 Hour Work Week and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park. Don’t worry if you’re not going, I’m guessing there will be one or two blogs about it.
Wifi is coming to Air Canada, but only on American flights. The Canadian carrier has partnered with Aircell to offer the GoGo mobile broadband service on its existing US network. Starting in Spring 2009, for $12.95 per trip, you’ll be able to do all you can online from a Wifi enabled laptop or SmartPhone. “Pending Canadian regulatory approvals, we plan to eventually offer internet access system-wide,” says Charles McKee, Vice President, Marketing, at Air Canada.
WestJet is making it easier for you to pay for snacks while you fly, partnering with GuestLogix to launch a Mobile Virtual Store. The solution involves handheld devices that will aceept all forms of payment including cash in multiple currencies, credit, debit, vouchers and coupons. This means no more pleas for exact change as you scramble for a second bottle of Merlot on the way to Montreal.
The iTunes App Store is a hit. With the current path of sales, 1 billion applications are expected to be downloaded by next year, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Sure, many of the applications are free, but with Apple taking a 30% cut of each paid application, it’s an entirely new stream of revenue that is quickly turning into a river as iPhone and iPod touch sales soar.
Canadian Election Campaigns Join Web 2.0
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 10, 2008. |
Canada goes to the polls on October 14, and while this will be a campaign once again fought with lawn signs and rhetoric, this time around Canadian politicians have discovered the internet’s social media toolbox.
The NDP, Liberals and Conservatives all have sections on their official websites dedicated to social networks, YouTube channels, and Facebook pages. The Greens have a blog and the NDP go one step further by offering up blogging tools that include a video widget, official logos and photos.
Stephen Harper has set up 2 Twitter accounts, one for each official language. Jack Layton has only one and is sticking to English. Stephane Dion is twitterless.
“It was inevitable that all the Canadian leaders show up on social media sites,” says technology journalist Andy Walker. “Any politician that is not paying attention runs the risk of showing up as yesterday’s man.”
Yes, they are paying attention, but David Brodie, a former advisor to Paul Martin, sums up the current efforts with one word.
“Weak,” he wrote in a chat conducted via Twitter. “All could learn from Gordon Brown and Obama. Should [be] engaging users rather than pushing out their msg with new tools.”
Barack Obama’s campaign in the US has been engaging with his use of tools like Twitter, and his own social network, MyObama. He offers tools for voters to add logos, buttons, information, policies, videos, newsfeeds and more to their own websites or to print off hard copies and distribute within their neighborhood.
Amber Mac, a new media strategist, agrees that Obama has the social media aspect of the internet nailed.
“They’re very active environments,” she says. “You can tell its part of his priority, as far as running the campaign, while in Canada it seems like an after thought.”
The Canadian campaigns have tried to implement some of the tools, but the conversation part of social media is missing. For the most part, they are just using new media tools to bark out their message.
“On the web you need to be more authentic,” says Amber. “You can maybe fool mainstream media, but you can’t fool the online community.”
“Online communities really need to be nourished and allowed to grow. So if they really want to get invested in leveraging the web to build up loyal voters for their parties, then they need to be more present there and more active. It might be a little too late for this election.”
Still, Andy Walker thinks these applications could end up being the deciding factor in a tight race.
“I think the key social media technology will be Facebook because of its reach, at least for the youth and 20/30something vote. If the election is close, working social media is going to be the swing vote.”
A DEEPER LOOK
For more analysis of how the parties are using Social Media, including a party by party breakdown of the tools each are using, visit The Blog According to Buzz
Here is an audio stream of the full interview with Amber Mac
My Name Is Kate also has an excellent analysis of the parties, their web layouts and the effectiveness of their social media tools.
24hrs Blogosphere Buzz 2008.09.10
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 10, 2008. |
- So the parties are off to a rough start with social media. Maybe things will be better next week after the Social Media for Government Conference rolls through Ottawa. The summit promises to show federal agencies “how to engage your employees and citizens by using blogging, podcasting and the latest Web 2.0 technologies to drive communications results.”
- NetPrimeMinister has been created by the UBC School of Journalism to track social media buzz for the election. The site scans Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs etc for mentions about the candidates and the election. With not all the parties fully on board with Web 2.0, this page let’s see you see all the activity in one quick glance.
- If you want to stay on top of what the Twittersphere is saying about the election, and what the leaders themselves have to say, check out Govtweets.ca. Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor created the site that aggregates Twitter posts with Canadian election keywords. However, if you think the Canadian election is still boring compared to the one down south, visit Govtweets.com.
- With the writ being dropped on the weekend, the opening bell sounded for the UBC Election Stock Market, a financial market where real money is traded with the values of stocks representing the percentage of popular votes or seats in the House. “Through the ESM, participants learn first-hand about the operation of a financial market and they often become better informed about not only the current election but also the election process itself.”
- The Coast Plaza Hotel is host to the Internet Marketing Conference on Thursday and Friday. Darren Barefoot will be leading a session on Social Media Marketing, while William Azaroff of VanCity will be speaking about engaging community with your brand. I would encourage political candidates or directors of communication to be in the audience taking notes.
- Amber MacArthur will be giving the keynote today at the CIRA Annual General Conference at the Pan Pacific. CIRA is a non-profit, member-driven organization responsible for the management of Canada’s dot-ca domain namespace, the policies that support Canada’s Internet community, and Canadian involvement in international Internet governance.
Back to School 2.0
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 3, 2008. |
It’s not just back to school for the kids this week. Anyone can head back and learn; if you just poke around the right places on the internet.
The web is an entire world of learning at your fingertips and as more and more opportunities open up via the internet, more and more educators are harnessing the web’s power to bring more and varied content to their students, be they actual students or just people who like to learn.
iTunes U is a section of the iTunes music store devoted to audio and video podcasts of lectures from university campuses and museums across the continent. All the content on iTunes U is free and available to anyone, not just students.
Actually, you’ve probably already experienced the power of the internet at sharing lectures if you’re one of the more than 3 million who has seen Randy Pausch’s famous Last Lecture.
It’s available on iTunes U, for free, and is the most viewed lecture of the more than 50 000 found on the site.
While many use the web to broaden their own horizons, part of your web searching this fall might be to try and jog your memory to help the kids with homework.
TeacherTube is a great website for both teachers and parents.
It’s been running for about a year and is a great resource for instructional videos on everything from earth science to long division.
In addition to offering students instruction, the site is a way for teachers to share different ways of presenting educational concepts, its teachers teaching teachers.
Some teachers are even taking the idea of online learning one step further, by assigning podcasted lectures for homework.
Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams of Woodland Park High School in Colorado are putting the idea into practice by podcasting their chemistry lectures for the students to watch at home.
The teachers say the ability for students to watch the lectures at their own pace and stop, rewind, or pause has allowed for deeper understanding and better use of classroom time for more practical, hands on learning.
Jean-Claude Bradley, of Drexel University, marveled at the ability to podcast lectures 3 years ago calling it “a new way to teach,” on his blog.
“I have the chance to interact one on one with every student who needs help with the specific problems that they have. In other words, I can be a teacher again, instead of a parakeet,” he writes.
24hrs Blogosphere Buzz: 2008.09.03
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on September 3, 2008. |
The trend to moving educational content online was pioneered by MIT in 2001 when they created something called OpenCourseWare (OCW). Currently there are lecture notes, readings, videos, and exams for more than 1,800 MIT courses online for free. More than 200 universities participate in the OCW movement, including one Canadian institution, Capilano College. Business, Math, Philosophy and Computer Science are just some of the disciplines offered by Cap College through OCW.
20 years ago when I was at SFU, you could grab audio copies of some lectures from the library, now many are podcast through the university’s website within an hour after the class is over. Last year more than 450 courses and over 7800 lectures were found through the SFU Podmaster. The service is restricted to those only registered in the classes that are podcast and all information on how to access the lectures is at
For those headed back to school with an iPhone in the bag you’ll need to boost it up with some educating apps. Evernote lets you take notes on the iPhone and sync with your desktop and the internet. Lifehacker calls it “perhaps the closest option to a true universal capture tool available next to plain old pen and paper.” Even if you prefer pen and paper, by taking a picture of your notes, you can make them searchable with Evernote.
Kevin Rose, creator of Digg and spreader of Apple rumours has dropped a juicy one on the internet this week. Kevin says Apple will unveil a new iPod design this Tuesday, September 9. The new iPod Nano will be long and slim and feature a bigger screen. Kevin’s sources also hint there could be a price drop in the iPod touch to bring it in line with the pricing of the iPhone.
Google has unveiled a new browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Chrome was released yesterday and promises a more stable surfing experience that is “clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.” Much of Google’s empire is built to be accessed through the internet and a web browser. From the search engine to their suite of cloud computing apps, it only made sense for Google to crash the browsing party.
New iPhone 3G Pricing Plans from Rogers
When Rogers bowed to public pressure and offered the $30/6Gb data option for the launch of the iPhone 3G, it came with fine print saying the offer would expire August 31. Well, that’s this weekend, and Rogers is extending their little bonus for an extra month.
The Globe and Mail is reporting the proposed new plans are set to kick in October 1.
Rogers has decided to extend the current pricing plan for another month and will make it available to owners of all devices.
A new pricing model will kick in beginning Oct. 1, balancing consumer concerns and actual usage patterns, Ms. Hamilton said.
A monthly fee of $30 will buy 1 GB of data instead of 6GB. A cheaper package of $25 will give 500 megabytes, filling the needs of most customers based on early consumption trends, she said.
Other plans include $50 for 2GB, $60 for 3GB and $80 for 8GB. [Globe and Mail]
There was a lot of bitching and complaining when the data plans were first introduced, and while most people (91%) are using less than 200Mb a month, the more accurate usage rate hovers somewhere around 500-600Mb per month.
I’m guessing the wireless connection for the iPhone has a lot to do with that. I’ve kept mine turned off, just to see how far I could jack my data consumption, and despite using the iPhone as a sattelite radio receiver listening to stations from Toronto and Calgary, and streaming music through my dash via Last.fm, I’m still only at 578Mb of data.
If you’re an average user and still on the fence about the iPhone, wait until October and scoop the $25 / 500Mb plan.
Vancouver Crowd Putting the Social in Social Media
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on August 27, 2008. |
The new world of blogging, Twittering, Facebook etc is called social media. It’s about interacting with other people, building and sharing experiences and ideas and working together to create new ones. In this case, the medium truly is the message, and Vancouver’s social media fans really like to emphasize the social part.
DotComPho is one of the longest running events on the social media calendar, as creator John Chow estimates he’s been meeting with colleagues as part of a weekly ritual since 2001.
“I’ve been going for weekly Pho noodles for as long as I can remember,” he says. “And always told anyone who wish to meet up to come out for a bowl.”
Every Saturday the invitation is open to join John and friends, usually in Richmond at Pho Lan.
Michael Kwan, is one of the DotComPho regulars and appreciates the chance to meet people while doing a job that usually requires a lot of alone time.
“I work from home as a freelance writer, so I don’t get the same kind of office co-worker camaraderie that you would experience at a conventional job,” says Kwan
Raul Pachecois the organizer of the monthly Vancouver Bloggers Meetup. He’s only really been active on the local scene in the past year, but finds the social part of social media crucial to becoming a better blogger.
“Meeting people in person gives me a sense of who the blogger behind the blog is,” says Raul. “Moreover, it has helped me with my own blog, as most of the people I have met are very immersed in Vancouver’s tech scene, and they are very knowledgeable and willing to help.”
“We may not all belong to the same corporation, per se, but it’s almost like we are co-workers striving toward the same common goals,” agrees Kwan.
Every week could easily be filled with 3 or more camps, meetups, or impromptu gatherings created on Twitter called tweetups.
One such tweetup happened earlier this month, when Jordan Behan invited all his Twitter followers to join him for lunch the next day in Gastown. Sure, some of those who came along were colleagues, but some were total strangers who only knew Jordan through the web, like Karen Hamilton.
At first, Karen was a little nervous about walking up to people she had only ever followed online, and had never really “met”
“Everyone was so open and friendly,” Karen writes at tinybites.ca. “I’ll try not to be quite so timid for [the next] one!”
And that’s the message the local scene would like to spread. Whether you’re a blogstar, or just starting out, it’s called social media for a reason, get out and be sociable!
Flickr image by Michael Kwan
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