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?
Thanks to an invitation from Chris Breikss, I submitted a photo to a Flickr contest being run by imagine1day, a non-profit focused on child education in Ethiopia.
The contest asks participants to “submit a photo and 50 words or less that represent greatness for your chance to win”. Here’s the photo I offered:
The photo is totally banal, but I love the story. Here are my 49 words:
This is Robben Island, a prison in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned here for 18 years, and he worked in this lime quarry. During breaks, Mandela and fellow political prisoners sat in a cave, debating politics. Together, they created the soul of an Apartheid-free South Africa.
The prize is two tickets to the premiere of “Facing Ali”, a boxing documentary I wrote about earlier in the summer. It’d be neat to go, as I’m friends with the director Pete McCormack and his partner. If you want to help me out and have a Flickr account, drop by the photo and leave a comment. That’s the criteria for winning the contest.
It’s probably the first time I was ever published, and it’s a sad little essay about being an environmental defeatist. Click to brobdingnangate (an awesome term I stole from Phil):
We talked a lot about TckTckTck, activism and social change in the five days I recently spent on the far side of Cortes Island, at the Web of Change conference. It’s the second time I’ve been.
The first time I went was back in 2006, and I found the conference a bit vexing. As with this year, the people were awesome–smart, dedicated and incredibly welcoming. However, I felt pretty intimidated by the high woo woo factor and Hollyhock’s particular philosophical–one might say downright religious–bent.
I tried to go back this year with a more open mind and a higher tolerance for the woo woo. I once again found my fellow attendees–there were only 90, so I met nearly everyone–friendly, super-smart and all seemingly world-changers. The sessions were mostly good. Zak Exley’s talk entitled “Revolution in Jesusland” stands out as particularly excellent. He’s a labour-organizing progressive who moved to Kansas and ‘infiltrated’ the Christian Right because he married an evangelical Christian. He’s been blogging about the experience, and about a remarkable thing that he sees happening in Middle America:
There is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.
In terms of our work, I was kind of an outsider compared to many other attendees. They’re advocates, campaigners and change-makers for organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation or BC Health Coalition or Knowledge as Power. Me, I run a marketing company. They know a ton about advocacy, online and off. I have never actually made a protest sign.
Still, I learned a ton and will hopefully be back next year. As with my occasional work in the arts, I’ve always found it stimulating to step a little outside of my daily focus to gain insights and meet new people. I often find that, down the road, I draw fruitful connections across these domains which I would have never otherwise seen.
Now, if I can only convince Hollyhock to serve the occasional piece of chicken.
This Saturday is Vancouver’s fourth annual BarCamp. A bit like Northern Voice, the event has doubled in scope over that time. The first one, back in 2006, had 120 people (as many as would fit in Workspace). This one apparently has 299 people coming.
Boris the BarCamp Organizer (unofficial title) hooked me up with some information about this year’s registrants. For 122 attendees, this will be their first BarCamp, which is always good news. About 20% requested women’s t-shirts, so we’re assuming that they’re either women or very svelte men.
Speaking of t-shirts, I stuck the aggregate requests for t-shirt sizes into Wordle, and produced this little tag cloud:
I’m looking forward to attending and not actually speaking. I mean, in front of people. More than three people at a time. You get the idea. That said, I will be playing the role of Room Selection Bad Cop (unofficial title) during the scheduling jam.
Sometimes I forget that the ‘rent a movie’ functionality in the average hotel is just a customized web browser, and the remote control has just replaced the keyboard:
This photo is only marginally amusing. But if you ask me, all of the humour derives from the fact that the fail message appears over a swishy Zac Efron.
Last week Julie and I spent a couple of days working from a cabin on one of the islands off the Sunshine Coast. There’s no cable or landline phone service to the cabin, so the only way we could manage this feat was by using the Internet Tethering feature on our iPhone.
For those outside the Cult of Mac, tethering transforms your iPhone into a modem for your computer. You use the phone’s 3G signal to access the web at slow but manageable speeds. You’re not going to play World of Warcraft, but it’s good enough for email or work-related web surfing.
This is kind of a game-changer for us. It means that we can work anywhere there’s 3G cell service. How much of BC is that? Not very much, but it’s a good start and I suspect that it’ll get better. Still, the promise of working remotely more–as well as always being able to access the web on my laptop in the city–is excellent news.
Canada Line, Ho!
When we’re in Vancouver, we usually stay near Cambie and Broadway. So we’ve been anticipating the opening of the new SkyTrain line for months. Since it opened last Monday, I’ve taken it like, 17 times. Okay, maybe more like six times, but it’s fairly awesome.
The trains are frequent and spacious, and it takes only 25 minutes to get all the way out to Richmond Centre. It’s a joy to ride the Canada Line right now, because it’s entirely advertising-free. All of the poster frames are empty, and the video advertising screens are off.
My only criticism of the Canada Line is that the subterranean platforms are aesthetically banal. Having ridden subways in a bunch of other cities around the world, I’ve always enjoyed it when individual stations have distinct designs. The Canada Line platforms look pretty much identical. Maybe this is due to time or budget restrictions, and there are plans to individualize the platforms down the road.
On a vaguely related note, we went out to Richmond Centre for a meeting on Wednesday morning. We walked through the mall–I don’t think I’d ever been before–before the stores were open. We passed several hundred Chinese seniors doing calisthenics to the music of, oddly, the Counting Crows. It was, I must say, a little Maoist. There was also a smaller group doing Tai Chi. I’d heard of seniors doing mall walking, but the scope of these exercising oldies was truly impressive.
I recently read about a couple of interesting bike-related innovations. The first, via Mark Evans, is Bixi Bicycles. They’re a Montreal-based commuting bike rental service, kind of ZipCar for bicycles. They’ve papered downtown Montreal with stations where, using a key system, you can take and return bikes. It costs $78 for a yearly subscription, with trips under 30 minutes free. Longer trips start at $1.50 for the first hour, and increase from there. It’s a service I would have considered using for local trips when we lived in Vancouver.
About the size of a parking space for one car, the Green Pod comes in two configurations: one with a single shower and changing room along with 10 lockers and parking for as many bicycles, and the other with double those facilities. The pod features a solar hot water system, electronic locking system, LED lighting activated by motion sensors, timed showers and a grey water treatment unit that discharges grey water into green areas. The unit can be integrated into indoor or outdoor applications, and it operates on a 12V DC system that can be powered by solar panels on the roof. Also part of the pod is a self-cleaning mechanism that can detect when no one’s inside and lock its doors for some self-cleaning, according to a report in Catapult. Access is via swipe card for registered users.
It’s developed by an Australian company, and definitely looks designed for warmer countries. Hopefully they’ll design something that’s a little less gappy for us Canadians.
I’m running a quick little survey about clickthroughs on Twitter. It applies to you if you use a link shortener like Bit.ly that enables you to track the number of clicks a link receives when you post it on Twitter (hmm…mangled sentence there, but you get the idea). It’s all of two questions, and should take you, like, 14 seconds:
I get questions like this occasionally. Sometimes they’re about a website, a video or some other webby thing I had a hand in creating. Oddly, nobody asked that question about our book or the play I wrote a couple of years ago: “I liked that comedy you wrote. What software did you use?” And I rarely hear anybody remark to a city employee, “hey, that’s a nice ditch you dug. What shovel did you use?”
I’d imagine that people who spend all their time being creative with new tools–web designers, animators and so forth–get asked this question all the time. I’m guilty of doing it myself. I remember, for example, asking Rob about his process in creating his Noise to Signal comics.
I was just curious more than anything. A lot of times, I think people are asking the “what software did you use?” question so that they can replicate your efforts. It may be subconscious, but they think “if I had that software, I could do that too”. And maybe they could.
In creative enterprises–from a pencil sketch to a feature film–the tool is the thing that matters least. What matters is that weird combination of skill, clever decisions, intuition, good fortune and the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s blessing that makes for a successful creative project. For example, Jorge Colombo drew this week’s New Yorker cover using Brushes, an iPhone app.
In thinking about this topic, I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”. Most of us don’t understand the in’s and out’s of how you create a website or a digitally-animated short. As such, we tend to ascribe the ‘magic’ of the creation to the tool, as opposed to the creators.
What do you think? Do you ever get asked this question?
At South by Southwest Interactive last week, marketer Peter Shankman said “if you say you’re a social media expert, I’m going to check how many Twitter followers you have.” This is about as useful a metric as saying “if you say you’re a professional hockey player, I’m going to count how many hockey sticks you have.” It tells only a tiny fraction of the whole story.
Shankman’s comment got me wondering: how would Twitter be different if the service didn’t publish statistics about who you’re following and who’s following you? Because these numbers are public, we’re experiencing a kind of follower arms race, where heedless reciprocal following has become the norm and popularity and leader-board sites are de rigeur (I’m still working on getting my douchebag index into the nineties). One’s list of followers has become, for better or for worse, the new unweeded blogroll–messy, too long and polluted with hastily-exchanged links. This shouldn’t be a surprise: from box office revenue to Technorati ranking, if we can count it publicly, we will.
Severalpeoplehavebegun wondering about how our burgeoning networks will scale, and how its users will deal with the growing amount of signal.
If our Twitter numbers were private, wouldn’t we be more selective about who we followed? Wouldn’t we focus on forming a conversational network based on the quality of people we followed, instead of the number of people who followed us? Wouldn’t we emphasize meaningful discussion over the “top seller” mentality that seems to pervade the tool?
Grade Eight Gym Class
It took me years to start obsessing about the web stats for this site. I eventually learned to follow my friend Dave Olson’s advice to “fuck stats, make art”. Now I’m facing a similar grindstone with Twitter. The bloggy, social media world has always been a bit too much like high school. I thought we’d begun to grow out of that immaturity, but the tyranny of Twitter stats puts us right back in the sweaty locker room after grade eight gym class.
I was talking to my friend John Keyes about how I could reduce my compulsion to watch my Twitter stats. He was sympathetic, and whipped up a Greasemonkey script that simply hides the follower numbers from the tool’s web interface. It’s only as effective a mind hack as, say, setting your watch five minutes fast. However, it’s a little reminder to chill out and use Twitter the way I want to, instead of how the popularity-obsessed web demands that I do.
UPDATE: British writer and comedian Dave Gorman has a great post that touches on a similar topic:
But yesterday I had two people contact me to tell me that I was rude for not following them. How not-following someone can be rude is quite beyond me. So I asked. And their point was that they were following me and that it was therefore only polite for me to follow them back because unless I did that I wasn’t being interactive.
Which seems to me to be a false definition of what interactivity really is. In what way would clicking a button to say I was following someone be actually interacting with them? At the moment I follow between 200 and 300 people. When I log on I normally find there are between 10 and 20 posts for me to look at from the last 5 minutes of activity. But I’m followed by over 20,000 people. If I followed all of them, there would be a hundred times as many recent posts to review. There would be no way of me actually reading - or even meaningfully scanning - 1000 to 2000 posts every 5 minutes.
I especially like his conclusion:
The difference between following someone and replying to them is the difference between stopping to chat with someone in the street or giving them a badge declaring that you know them. One is actual interaction. The other is just something you can show your friends.
The first time I saw an LCD display built into the back seat of a taxi cab, it was last New Years Eve in Mahattan. It mostly ran advertising, with intermittent weather reports and news clips. At the time, I wondered how long it would be before I saw them in BC. The answer, it turns out, is about four months.
This latest intrusion was in the back seat of a Vancouver Taxi cab. The company that offers them is Moving Media Group, a Vancouver-based company that specializes in digital screens in cabs. The screens have apparently been in operation since last November.
In my taxi, the screen replaced the headrest on the passenger side front seat. The unit is actually surprisingly thick (here’s a side view), and with the seat reclined, the screen really imposed itself on my field of view. In New York, the display was built into the back of the cab’s front bench seat. Its commercials had audio, which (thus far, at least) my Vancouver cab didn’t. As in New York, the content seemed like it was mostly advertising combined ‘breaking news’ headlines and weather updates.
Dumb Display Ads
Does anybody not find this development totally egregious? In an age where marketers and media companies are re-evaluating the fundamental efficacy of ‘dumb’ display ads, why introduce yet another distraction engine into the consumer’s view? Does the Moving Media Group imagine that we don’t yet have enough commercials and advertisements in our daily life?
Besides, I’m already paying the driver to take me from Point A to B. I’m not paying for the privilege of watching ads for the balance of my journey.
A couple of years ago I went to the bathroom in a pub. Stepping up to the urinal, I looked up to see a video display showing a beer commercial. Increasingly, we’re ceding space to useless, ineffectual advertising. This trend is particularly offensive where, in places like pubs, hockey arenas and taxis, we’re already paying for a service. Shouldn’t we be able to enjoy the experience of, say, riding in a cab or micturating without the intrusion of a commercial?
I touched the screen (I know, kind of gross, no?) only once. Following instructions, I touched the “Touch for Menu” button at the bottom of the screen. And I apparently broke the thing:
By fixating consumer attention on the screen, all advertisers can take advantage of this captive audience.
The next time I flag a cab that has a video monitor instead of a head rest, I’m going to wave the driver off and wait for the next one. I encourage you to do the same.
