When @gradontripp Met @megfowler
 This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on October 22, 2008. |
Modern dating can be so complicated - especially when you try too hard.
How’s this for an opening line. “Hey, I started following you and checked out your blog.”
Whoa. That would put the brakes on pretty quickly in a bar, but online, when the rest of the line says: “Thanks for writing such an honest, personal blog;” it can work.
That’s the opening line Gradon Tripp used on Meg Fowler back in February, but it wasn’t really a line, he was just introducing himself via Twitter. Yes, Twitter, the place that social media superstar Robert Scoble calls “the worldwide talkshow,” where following is encouraged and active participation means blogging.
So is it surprising then, that a couple of hearts were set a flitter on Twitter?
“Everyone is used to the creepy horror stories about folks that don’t match up with their profiles, or the ‘was that even a photo of you?’ people,” says Meg. “But we started as friends, not eHarmony auditions.”
When Gradon and Meg met, they met as two people with shared interests. They chatted as friends; it didn’t have all the pressure of a “date,” since they didn’t meet on a dating site.
“After a few weeks of friendly back and forths, the DMs started,” Gradon writes in a blog entry called Twitter Helped Me Steal Canada’s Greatest Natural Resource. “Then IM. Eventually, phone calls. Skype. Video chat.”
“Finally, just a couple weeks ago, after 10 months of talking Meg flew to Boston and we “met” each other for the first time,” he continues. “After about 5 minutes of awkward giddiness at the airport, we were normal, as if we’d known each other for ages.”
Gradon’s post is sweet. But to really be immersed in this gushingly cute love story, you need to click back and read Meg as she chimes in on her equally romantic entry.
“See, we were comfortable in mere moments,” she writes. “Not just comfortable like you might be with an affable stranger in a lineup at a grocery store, but comfortable like I’d known him for years.”
Meg went to Boston to help Gradon with an event called Social Media for Social Change. It was a group of net savvy people trying to make a difference in the lives of others. They were using their web connections to affect change, and as they did that for others, they ended up doing it for themselves too.
“This, on a very personal scale, is the power of social media,” Gradon continues. “The tools of social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs) introduced us into each other’s worlds. It allowed us to learn and share things about one another.”
“Think social media is useless? I can honestly and confidently say social media made my life infinitely better. Thank you, Twitter.”
BLOGOSPHERE BUZZ
If you use Twitter, you’ll want to sign up for Qwitter. It’s a service that will notify you when someone unfollows you and the last thing you said that sent them off. Some say it adds a bit too much drama to the mix, I think it will let you know when you get out of line.
If Twitter dies a slow and irrelevant death, you can look back at this week as the stroke that did it. Britney Spears is now on Twitter as @therealbritney. So does this mean twitter has it jumped the shark? Nuked the fridge? Or is it just about to go mainstream?
If all this Twitter talk is a little over your head, The Centre for Digital Media is offering a web marketing workshop this weekend. Experts in advertising, analytics and social media will lay out the fundamentals of online promotion, marketing and advertising to help optimize and drive traffic to websites.
Social Media is becoming increasingly important for industry. Rachel Hawkes, of Social Media Portal, is quoted this week as saying “Blogs will continue to play an incredibly important role for brands and they should be looking not only to be managing their own blog, but rather becoming part of the blogging community and contributing.”
The Real Genius of the new iPod
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on October 15, 2008. |
When the newest generation of iPods was announced last month, it was once again a newsworthy event splashed across the web and newscasts continent wide.
But if you really look at the new iPods you’ll see there’s not much there that we already didn’t have. The next gen nanos were simply dipped in fresh colours and had the screen turned on its side, bringing the nano back to a familiar candy bar shape, instead of a squat sumo configuration.
The new iPods look different, but they really aren’t different. They’re music and video players. It’s the digital equivalent of what automotive manufacturers do every three years. To sell more products, you change the appearance, even after feature innovation has slowed.
The real new feature for the iPod came in an update to the iTunes software you run on your computer to manage your library. iTunes 8 has something called the iTunes Genius, and it’s receiving rave reviews as fans are using it to discover new music.
Simply select a song in your library, and the Genius will suggest songs your library may be missing from that artist, or ones that sound similar and it thinks you’ll enjoy.
Urban Rush co-host, Fiona Forbes, is quite adamant in her admiration.
“Love, love, love the new Genius!” she exclaims.
“I’m a music junkie and am always looking for my new favorite song. Have to say I am more confident in making my purchases with the Genius suggestions. Since the release, I’ve bought over a hundred new songs and like (almost) all of them!”
The iTunes Genius can also help to create playlists. Simply select a song in your library, and then select the Genius icon in your taskbar. A 20, 50, or 100 song playlist will be instantly generated from the music in your library based on the sound of that song. As you might guess, Fiona is excited about this feature too.
“I am a bit of a music nerd and have a 40 gig iPod that’s almost full, so it’s not always easy to remember what I have on there,” she explains. “The Genius got me listening to a bunch of great stuff I had forgotten about like Portishead, Bill Withers, Ella Fitzgerald… I could go on for 40 gigabytes!”
The Genius playlist feature is also available on iPods and iPhones so you can create playlists from your library on the go.
BLOGOSPHERE BUZZ
While the iTunes Genius is loved, it’s hardly revolutionary. Pandora has been pioneering something called the Music Genome Project for the past 8 years. A team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to the history of music, one song at a time. They are collecting close to 400 musical details on every song - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals and more, all with the idea of helping people discover new music.
Duane Storey and Dale Mugford, better known as BraveNewCode, were pleasantly surprised to find themselves nominated for a BC Country Music Award for website design this week. The duo is no stranger to the music business, Dale was once responsible for MatthewGood.org and, when he’s not coding, Duane is often found in the photo pit at major concert events. “There are some really nice websites also up for the award, so the competition is definitely stiff,” says Storey. “Now all I have to do is find a date!”
The social media crew calls it “crowdsourcing” - taking a big task and breaking it down into little pieces that are easily managed by an individual. Dot Com mogul, John Chow, took it to the extreme this weekend when he asked his readers to make donations for the Union Gospel Mission Thanksgiving dinner. In just a few days John had more than $3000 in donations, which he matched, to feed more than 2 300 people on the Downtown Eastside.
Now that the Canadian election campaign is over, it will be interesting to see if the politicos stick with the strategies they were using throughout the election. From Twitter, to Facebook, to websites with blogging tools and widgets, the leaders reached out to Canadians to spread the message. Will the transparency continue now that the election is over and they don’t “need” our support? Hit them up on Twitter to keep them honest.
HP Goes Green with Eco Highlights and SmartWeb
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on October 8, 2008. |
Checking labels is a part of any grocery shopping experience. Fat, calories, carbs, we know where to look to find them. HP is also now making checking the label a part of shopping for electronics.
The new Eco-Highlights label on HP products gives consumers details on energy consumption and the recyclability of the product.
The layout of the label will be familiar to shoppers as it looks very similar to the food labels we see in the grocery store.
“When you compare 2 printers, you can look not only at what they do, but you’ll understand the environmental footprint as well,” says Vernon Coutinho of HP Canada.
The Eco-Highlights label is just one of 3 steps HP is taking to reduce the impact printing can have on the environment.
48% of printing at home is simply printing off web pages. Usually we only want a small piece of information from a web site, and since the pages aren’t always formatted for printers, we end up reeling off a dozen or more pages of banner ads and useless text along with the few sentences we actually wanted.
HP’s free SmartWeb program works as a simple plug-in for Internet Explorer. It lets you drag a box around items you’d like to save from a webpage, and then cuts and pastes them into a document that easily prints only the information you need.
SmartWeb works with any printer, not just those from HP, and can cut down nearly 2/3 of your printing from the web.
In a demo, Vernon took 8 pages of winter vacation research, and using SmartWeb, printed all the information on only one page, even though he was using different websites.
You can also save your SmartWeb data as a PDF for future reference, or to easily email to your vacation partner.
The final piece of the HP green platform is recycling.
It’s not something new, there have been internal recycling efforts ongoing for nearly 20 years and for more than 10 at the consumer level – HP is just adding things like the Eco-Highlights label to bring more awareness to environmental conscious consumers.
“Printer cartridges are 100% recyclable, by HP,” says Coutinho. “We don’t just take some of the parts, we take all of it. Right now we’re making 200 million cartridges a year from recycled parts.”
Getting the used cartridges back to HP couldn’t be easier.
Many new ones come with a prepaid envelope to mail back when it’s empty. If you lose the envelope, you can go to hp.ca/recycling to print off a label and send it back for free. You can also return the empty cartridges to participating retailers, like Staples, and HP picks them up from there.
24hrs Blogosphere Buzz 10.08.2008
| This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on October 8, 2008. |
If you’re a fan of a browser other than Internet Explorer, you can also look for the Eco-Safe as alternative to SmartWeb. Instead of printing off pages you find interesting, Eco-Safe will turn them into a PDF that you can download, or email to yourself to save for future reference.
Eco-Safe.com
Environmental issues are being pushed aside by economic concerns in the Canadian Election campaign, but Vancouver blogger Kevin Grandia is trying to keep them front and centre. His website, Vote For Environment, is helping Canadians vote strategically, according to the candidate with the best chance of forwarding environmental concerns. And it’s not always who you might think.
VoteForEnvironment.ca
Translink has launched a mobile version of their website for those with iPhones. Vancouver’s Handi Mobility developed the page for iPhones as an addition to the Next Bus texting service. Schedules and maps for all Translink services are available through the mobile website along with the ability to save routes for future reference.
m.Translink.ca
The launch of the Do Not Call list last week had thousands of Canadians scrambling to get their name off telemarketer’s call sheets. However there are a number of exceptions to the list that could still call you, unsolicited. That’s why Michael Geist created iOptOut, an online tool that will automatically send requests to remove you from an even deeper list of data bases.
IOptOut.ca
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.”
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.
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.
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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About cyberbuzz
buzz bishop is the host and writer of cyberbuzz, a one minute daily radio feature, and a weekly column in 24hrs, about the internet and wired culture.
buzz takes a quick and youthful look at the online world from the perspective of someone who understands new trends, but still speaks your language.
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