This is the second in a series of blog posts in which, well, I learn about things. Previously, I learned about the WNBA.
Yesterday I was invited to a Facebook group entitled “Save the Rifle Registry. No to C-391″. That made me realize how little I actually knew about the Canadian Firearms Registry. I don’t have enough information to know whether it’s a good thing or not. So, let’s learn.
What is the Firearms Registry?
Established in 1996, it’s a program that requires the registration of all firearms in Canada. Interested in getting a gun? According to Wikipedia:
Any person wishing to obtain a firearm must first acquire a Possession and Acquisition Licence or PAL. The PAL carries a fee of $60 for non-restricted, $80 for restricted, and is renewable every five years. Expiry dates are set on the holder’s birthday following the fifth anniversary of the initial issue of the licence
How do you register firearms?
You can do it online, apparently. I can’t get past the first step, as I don’t have any firearms license numbers handy, but it looks straightforward.
Why require citizens to register their firearms?
The big argument that I see again and again is that the registry is a useful asset for police. Police across the country apparently query (PDF) the database more than 13,000 times a week. That number sounds ridiculously high to me (though a CBC article claims it’s used 6,500 times a day), but the RCMP’s site makes similar claims about office safety: “Without a firearms registry, when police are called to a residence or stop a vehicle, they would have to take the word of the occupant whether firearms are present or have been surrendered.”
How much does the registry cost?
This is the big knock against the program. By 2004, eight years after its inception, the total program costs had risen to over $2 billion. Annual operating costs are reportedly anywhere from $15 to $80 million. The Conservative Party of Canada has introduced Bill C-391, a private member’s bill, which aims to eliminate the program. The Conservatives argue that the money spent on the registry could be more effectively spent elsewhere in law enforcement.
The other question, which I was unable to answer, is ‘what percentage of firearms-related crimes involve an unregistered gun?”
So where does that leave us? It’s an expensive but apparently useful program. To be honest, I’m no closer to forming a strong opinion on this one. What do you think?
Our book’s release is imminent. We should have it in our hot little hands on November 20 or so, and it will be in stores virtual and actual shortly thereafter.
We’ve been doing some marketing for the book–mostly soliciting blurbs and reviews. However, we’re going to fire up our book blog for at least a couple of months (here’s the RSS feed), and have plans to make a short-lived podcast that will feature readings from the book.
We adapted our book site from our old ebook site, which is why it may look familiar to a few of you. My first blog post over there is about a lack of magic beans:
We can often, however, divide our students into two big groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. Those who get it nod when we talk about the exciting possibilities of Foursquare, and say they’re inspired by the case studies we share. Those who don’t tend to fret about and focus on perceived barriers like copyright and privacy. They look for reasons to discount social media as a viable marketing channel.
On a related note, we were debating as to whether we should set up a Facebook page for the book. I wonder if it’s worth the effort, given that we don’t have the bandwidth or attention span to make it a longterm, sustained online community.
A Matter of Priorities
On another related note, at BookCamp Vancouver, I participated in a panel with the lovely and super-smart Monique and Deanna. Somebody asked me why, when they visited this site, they couldn’t find any information about the book. Given that we were advocating that authors need to become more engaged online, they asked it with a certain amount of relish. I may have even seen them high-five their colleague at the back of the audience.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way I answered the question, and wanted to give it another crack. To me, the stuff I promote on my site is a balancing act. I don’t want to inundate people with ‘asks’, so I generally try to limit myself to one item at a time. Before October 15, I was running a Blog Action Day badge. Now, on internal pages at least, I’m running a banner for TckTckTck.
Will I eventually stick up a little ad about the book? Yep, though if you’re a regular reader, you already know about the book. You’ll buy it, or you won’t, and the ad probably won’t change your mind. Besides–and I don’t want to sound ungrateful here–the book is just one project among a bunch of things I’m doing. So I don’t feel a need to pimp it more aggressively than I am.
A while back I wrote about Couch to 5K, an iPhone app that helped me run–you guessed it–five kilometers. I’ve graduated to a new app, RunKeeper, and recorded a quick screencast about it (apologies for the mumbling):
One additional point I should have made in the video: this app really bleeds your iPhone battery. I’m told it’s because the GPS is making a query every second or two to determine your location, and that requires a lot of power.
I met Helen Stortini (no relation to Zack) at a recent Net Tuesday event, and she told me about her entertaining project. She was laid off earlier this year, and instead of accepting a new job that she maybe didn’t want, she decided to do a tour of a bunch of possible jobs she could have:
I’m shadowing people at work to find out what they do, what sort of skills they need to do it, and whether or not it would be a match for me. In a sense, I’m still hopping around in the career bouncy castle, but this time I’m looking before I leap.
It’s kind of like bring your daughter to work day, but it’s bring your unemployed 33-year-old friend instead. It’s an opportunity for me to test drive careers, but also to explore the myriad of work (be it weird, wonderful, or ordinary) that people do everyday. And to find out what it is that makes people truly enjoy the work that they do.
So far she’s tried a melange of jobs, such as stock broker, chef and reporter. It’s a fun project, and exactly the sort of thing that gets one a book deal.
Helen comes into your workplace for a day and kicks the tires. She’ll do “whatever menial or mundane task that needs to be done” assuming it’s legal and doesn’t involve removing “all of my clothing”. Can you provide a new stop on her tour?
In our UBC course last Monday, we wanted to teach the students a lesson about real-time collaboration. We divided them into groups of four and assigned them the following tasks:
You’re going to create a soup recipe. Collectively, decide what kind of soup you’re going to write about.
Each of you works on a different section of the recipe. One person lists ingredients, another writes the procedure, a third writes a review of the soup and the fourth finds links to other similar soups.
Open up a Google Docs document and start working.
After you’ve all contributed, review each other’s work and make changes and corrections.
It went surprisingly well–we achieved five apparently tenable (and all vegetarian, as it happens) soup recipes. Here’s what they came up with:
For no reason in particular, lately I’ve been mentioning lost animalposters. The other day I saw a poster for a lost chinchilla named Finn. Is the name important? Do chinchillas come when they’re called?
In any case, I’d assumed that poor Finn was probably caught and consumed by a dog, coyote or particularly large cat. However, it turns out that he survived:
I appreciate that the owner went around and actually marked up all the posters with the good news. I always wonder what the success rate is on lost pets. It’s a little weird that the owner wrote the follow-up note in the first person, isn’t it? But, then, I gather chinchillas are excellent jumpers.
By the way, this is the best photo I’ve seen in Wikipedia for a while.
Last week was a research-intensive week, and in my online travels I encountered three interesting new blogs. I have little sense of their relative popularity, so apologies if you all have seen them already:
Regretsy - You’re likeliest to have seen this one, which is kind of a People of Walmart for crafting. The site features the worst and strangest products advertised on Etsy. Speaking as a craft-free zone over here, the site comes off as rather cruel: “ha, ha, look at the crap people are trying to sell”. But, each to their own.
Hey Oscar Wilde - “This website, now in its tenth incarnation since being launching in June, 1998, is an extension of a personal art collection of various artists interpreting their favourite literary figure/author/character.” A source of excellent illustration and portraiture work–I quite like this vogon.
2000 Dollar Wedding - These folks are, you guessed it, planning their $2000 wedding online. I found this site because she was a Blog Action Day participant.
Last February, I wrote about the dying business model that is printed phone directories. Like Lee before me, I argued for a shift from ‘blanket the country with 30 million phone books a year’ to ‘let people opt in to receive them’.
Today I read on Rebecca’s site that the Yellow Pages Group has finally implemented an opt-out option. They’ve framed it, rather absurdly, as a ‘Custom Delivery Program’:
You can now choose to receive more copies or to be removed from the distribution list. At all times, you can also consult our online directories YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca. In addition, you can select gadgets and mobile applications to access our Yellow Pages™ directory content on the go.
The deadline to opt out of the next delivery is November 19, so if you don’t want the Big Useless Stack of Yellow Paper, get thee to this web page and decline your copy.
I’m not going to fall all over myself giving credit to Yellow Pages Group for this because:
It’s 2009, and they could have easily implemented this five years ago. Heck, they could have done it 25 years ago by including a comment card in the physical directory.
You’re not declining delivery permanently. From their frequently asked questions (PDF): “Your registration is valid for two directory deliveries. After that time, you must register again at www.ypg.com/delivery.”
It remains an opt-out system, meaning that waste will be reduced, but it certainly won’t be eliminated.
The Devil and the Details
I wanted to explore a few of the nuances of how they’ve implemented this program. The home page for this section is interesting in and of itself. There are two text links in the introductory text which are far more visible than the ‘Continue’ button, which is buried unobtrusively in the bottom righthand corner. It’s surprising, but we often see links in text receive higher clickthrough rates than graphical buttons:
Why are the frequently asked questions presented as a PDF? Is there a more effective way to discourage people from reading them? Additionally, the page doesn’t render correctly on my version of Safari (BroswerShots confirms that it’s not just my machine–note the overlapping text and oddly placed field):
That’s a bit ironic, if user stereotypes hold true. It seems to me that your average Mac user is far likelier to want to opt out than your average Windows user.
Lower down on the page, after you’ve entered your details, they offer some alternative apps for your mobile device. I don’t care to marketed to when I’m engaged in a customer service experience, but that’s their prerogative. What I do object to is the explanation-free captcha at the bottom of the page:
You need to complete this captcha to move to the next step in the opt-out process. To veteran web users, the captcha’s function is obvious and it’s easy to complete. However, I’d guess that many (a majority of?) Canadians have never completed a captcha, and has no idea what to do with one. Yellow Pages Group offers no context or instructions regarding what it’s for or how it works. It thus presents a significant barrier to the opt-out process.
Why do they need a captcha in the first place? Otherforms on their site don’t include captchas. Do they really think they’re going to get a ton of spammers opting into or out of receiving directories? And isn’t it rendered unnecessary by the subsequent email confirmation step?
Finally, there’s the confirmation step:
The heading is oddly worded, considering that I have declined, not ordered a delivery. And they’ve included another commercial offer, despite the fact that I was viewing the page with Safari.
Am I picking on the Yellow Pages? Yes, and I probably shouldn’t, because I want to encourage sustainable behaviour. I’m obviously underwhelmed by this effort, though. In web design and usability, the devil is in the details and the mistakes I’ve outlined are pretty obvious ones.
This opt-out process seems designed to create barriers between the a site visitor and their desired outcome. Here’s the fundamental question: have they made it as easy as possible to opt-out? I’m afraid the answer is obvious.
The other day I was scheduling a meeting at the sushi restaurant on Granville Street that’s really near Cherry Bomb and Fluevog. I couldn’t remember the name–maybe I never knew it–so I brought up Google Street View to have a look.
When I went to drag the little Street View orange man over Granville Street, it didn’t turn blue like the rest of the map:
That’s because, earlier this year, when the Google Street View car drove by, Granville Street was under construction or otherwise restricted to pedestrian traffic.
This isn’t that big a deal here, but what about the great pedestrianized streets of Europe and Asia? I’m thinking here of Dublin’s Grafton and Henry Streets, which are long and restricted to walkers and cyclists.
Maybe Google needs to expand into other vehicles. A Google Street View tricycle, perhaps? Or maybe something mounted on a human, like a four-way SteadiCam?
Today I attended BookCamp Vancouver at SFU. It’s was a well-run, well-organized event that frequently featured an engaging exchange of ideas. It probably could have used a few more of the unconference features that make BarCamp so special. I expect some industries are more comfortable than others with this kind of open, egalitarian model, so better baby steps than none at all.
Throughout the day, I recommended a number of articles to various writers, editors and publishers. I figured I might as well gather them here in case they’re of interest. Long time readers have probably seen me recommend one or more of these articles before:
The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - From 1994, but still pretty relevant today. Extremely prescient for the time. “Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed - floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages - will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one. “
The Next Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - Six years later, and even more insightful. I’ve been saying this next sentence ever since I read this piece: “Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to “content” is like praying in swear words.”
1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly - I recommend this to every artist I meet, regardless of medium. It’s an extremely elegant way of thinking about fostering community and building an audience. For some reason it reminds me of the central metaphor in Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”. “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”
I wanted to offset those first three from the next two because the former are truly remarkable, visionary pieces. The next two are smart thinking and worth reading, but might pale a bit by comparison.
The 10 Principles of Lean Publishing by Peter Armstrong - Some very useful thinking about what publishing can learn from software development. Includes concepts like “fail fast” and “a book is a lean startup”. Now, Peter, go write a great, simple manifesto, instead of a waffly top-ten list.
