We live in Victoria, but spend a lot of time in Vancouver. For the first couple of months of this year, when teaching a course at UBC, we were over every week. I actually don’t mind the ferry ride itself. I enjoy the opportunity to get an hour of work done without the distraction of the internet.
It’s the bus trips between Victoria and Sidney and Tsawassen and Vancouver that suck hard. They’re long, tedious and you can’t really work. Plus, I’m inevitably sitting near some cell-phone-talking douchebag who wants the whole bus to know about their new Ugg boots, or whatever.
I heard about a possible new passenger ferry service between downtown Vancouver and Victoria (here’s a short piece from Global, after the ad, thanks to 8chocolate for the link). Nautisol is still in the market research stage, and we’ll probably be living elsewhere if and when they put boats in the water, but I was still intrigued. From their website:
90 minute travel between city centers Victoria-Vancouver
Economy or Business Class
E-Ticketing with multi-language function
Kiosk ticket vending with multi-language function
Telephone ticketing
Terminal locations integrated with existing public and private transportation systems
Full service terminals to include Wi-Fi, ATM and Food Kiosks
Bicycle racks
Shuttle Bus Services
I see somebody caught the capitalization plague.
They’re running a rather peculiar customer survey, full of push questions (”Liquid Natural Gas is the fuel used to power this ferry service. LNG is one of the safest and cleanest fuels available.”), but I’m intrigued. Two attempts at providing alternative services have failed in the past. There’s the infamous PacificCats, rusting away in North Vancouver shipyards. Before that there was the Royal Sealink Express, which I remember taking a few times as a student in the early nineties. It’s a pity that didn’t work out–it was very convenient. The last time I was in the SeaBus terminal at Waterfront station, I’m pretty sure I saw a fading Sealink brand on an office door.
I’d imagine that, at some point, there will be enough people wanting to shuttle more efficiently between Vancouver and Victoria to make such a service viable. Has that day come?
Over the past year or so, we’ve been running a lot of one-day training sessions on all this social media marketing stuff. Combine that with the fact that our social media marketing course at UBC was full and had a sizable wait list, and we’re seeing a lot of demand for this kind of training. Seeing as we already have the curriculum prepared, we thought we’d run a couple of day-long workshops in Victoria and Vancouver. Here’s the blurb:
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. We're running one-day workshops to teach communicators and marketers, as well as small business owners, how to:
Bring more visitors to your website
Increase your company’s visibility online
Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services
Get your website social media ready
Craft a potent social media pitch
Incorporate online channels like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into your marketing programs
Avoid campaign killers and online faux pas
Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don'ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.
Students will leave with:
A copy of our social media marketing ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook
Templates for creating a social media marketing plan
The workshop is $299, all in after taxes and fees. There’s a way you can get a discount, though, and another way that you can attend for free:
You can save $50 off that price by blogging about the workshop on your own established (meaning not brand new) site. Don’t have a blog? Ask a friend or a local blogger if you can write a guest post for their site.
We’re giving away one seat for free for each event. All you have to do is tweet a link to the page on Capulet’s site (here’s a shortened one: http://capulet.com/smm) and include the hash tag #smmvic or #smmvan, depending on the session you want to attend. So, a sample tweet might look like:
OMG, I really want to attend this event: http://capulet.com/smm. It looks awesomesauce! #smmvan
Or, you know, something along those lines. We’ll randomly choose a winner for each event about two weeks before they occur.
Last night I finally got a chance to watch the Battlestar Galactica finale. Early on in the show, at about the 2:00 mark, the camera pans across a futuristic cityscape. At one point it passes over an inlet or river. There’s a bridge in the foreground and a geodesic dome further back. Here’s a screen capture:
Does that remind anybody else of False Creek, the Cambie Street Bridge and Science World? I couldn’t find a perfectly analogous photo (I suppose I could install Google Earth and see how it looks), but this one gives a lower perspective:
Obviously the show is shot in Vancouver, and I’d imagine that the special effects are done locally, so it’s only natural that we might recognize bits of the city in the finished product. This is the first time, though, that I’ve noticed renderings of Vancouver in a CG-only shot.
Warning, Spoilers Ahead
As for the finale itself, I give it a ‘B’. Some random notes: the final battle was reasonably satisfying, in an SDF-1 Macross sort of way. In retrospect, I’m still unclear on why Hera was so important to everybody, practically speaking.
I’m glad they found Earth, but it was a bit silly when they’d already found an ‘Earth’. It seems highly implausible that, after four years of a brutal struggle for survival, that the humans would send all their remaining assets into the sun. But what do I know?
The bit with Gaius and Caprica 6 each having a kind of Swayze-esque ghost was charming the first time I saw it, but they pushed their luck. That whole present-day New York denouement to the denouement was incredibly cheesy, and really should have been cut.
My unanswered questions:
What was Starbuck in the fourth season? A corporeal angel? I noticed that nobody called her “Starbuck”, which I suppose meant something.
How many cylons are left? Aren’t there a bunch of baseships out there still, roaming the galaxy?
What will future generations of humans do when they find the lyrics to Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” written on some cave wall?
UPDATE: I spoke to a member of the visual effects team who said that since the Caprica City scenes are shot on location in Vancouver, it made sense to base the look of the CG city on Vancouver, but with a few extra “futuristic” buildings thrown in.
The auction location is 8275 Manitoba St. in Vancouver, BC. The auction starts at 10AM on Friday, March 7th, 2009. Merchandise previewing is this Friday March 6th, 2009 from noon - 6PM.
This is a happy coincidence, because earlier today I was chatting with somebody who’d invited me to speak at their event. I’d written up the usual session description, and she’d asked me to swap out the phrase “real-world case studies” for “local examples”. I asked why, and she said:
Some of the feedback that we’ve received from other social media sessions say, “That’s great for those in New York, Toronto, etc., but what are people here doing?”
And here, lo and behold, is a local auction house making effective use of YouTube:
That clothing video has already had 3500 views (it would have had more if they’d used a description title and written up a description of the video, including a link back to their auction site). A nice result for the tiny effort it took to create.
A colleague who runs an online business is looking for a developer for a project. Here’s the brief, admittedly vague spec:
Our site is programmed in PHP and we use MySQL for our database. We currently have an inhouse developed shopping cart which uses two payment gateways, one that tracks credit card info for recurring members and one that processes the payments. The one that processes the payments now offers a service that tracks recurring, making the former redundant. So we are looking for a programmer that can implement the transition from one gateway to the other.
If you’re interested, send me an email at darren at darrenbarefoot dot com. I’ll forward the email on to my colleague, and he’ll get back to you if the’s interested. I really must get that Jobs page up and running on this site.
Note to future searchers who find this page: Please note the date on this post. If it’s later than April 1, 2009, it’s too late, so please don’t email me.
I particularly like the quiet “balls, balls” at the end, which is a little guest voice-acting action from Monique.
That video also stars Jay of Giant Ant Media fame. He sent me an email about some videos they created for Vancouver Adaptive Snow Sports. He tells me that it’s “a really wicked program dedicated to making the mountain available to those with disabilities”. Here’s one of them:
It’s been my impression that, at least in West Van and downtown Vancouver, there are fewer gas stations than there used to be? Is this true? Did a lot of the gas stations move out to the suburbs?
I rarely drive, so it’s not really a pressing concern for me, but I think I’ve observed this trend over the past fifteen years. I’m particularly aware of it because former gas station land has to lie fallow for a long time, so you become familiar with these weed-choked cement lots waiting for redevelopment.
Hang on. I did some further searching, and came up with some data courtesy of UBC. It’s not particularly current, but it confirms my observation:
The table below shows the number of gas stations in Vancouver in 1970 and 1998. There has been a reduction of 209 gas stations in this time period. However, there are 39 new sites, so the number of abandoned sites since 1970 is 248.
I also found this article about disappearing gas stations in Manhattan:
Since 1999, the number of gas stations in Manhattan has declined by 18 percent, to 207, according to the Fire Department, which maintains a record of gas stations in the city. Cropping up in their places are everything from condos to clothing stores.
It’s not surprising, really. If you have ten gas stations in a city, and get rid of five, you get more efficient and the number of possible customers remains the same.
I liked this cheeky sign at the, uh, coffee prep station at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s cafe:
I’m going to miss the VAG cafe when the gallery moves to its new waterfront location. It’s a lovely, European-style cafe and an oasis of quiet in the downtown core. It always feels a little elicit illicit to be eating and drinking there, like you were having an affair behind the city’s back.
I’ll miss the gallery being at the centre of downtown as well. I’m far less likely to want to visit the Vancouver Museum (I won’t have the delightful experience of becoming a member), which, I gather, is the probable new tenant in the courthouse building. That said, I do think the Vancouver Museum deserves a more central location, and they’re a worthy replacement for the VAG.
Late last week, I got an email from BCIT about a new site that they launched: WhatWouldYouChange.ca. From their About page:
Change starts with one person, one idea. Change happens when one person acts on their idea helping it take root and grow into something greater. What is your idea for change?
That’s what this site is all about.
It’s a place to share your thoughts on what you’d like to change about pretty much anything, and have some fun along the way. Maybe you’d like to change something about the world or perhaps it’s personal change you’re after. Whatever, we’d like to hear about it!
As far as I can figure, it’s kind of a soft-sell recruiting effort, that combines various roll-your-own social media angles on a Drupal platform. You can talk about what you’d change on video, make a kind of photo collage about it or devise short, Tweet-esque messages of change.
I traded emails with Janeen Alliston, one of the project managers on the project. I asked her why they opted for these three particular flavours of social media. Here’s her reply:
The three pronged approach was the result of a user experience document created to guide the project. We thought about what would initially engage our target demo (16-25 years olds) and what would open the door to deeper engagement with other site members as well as BCIT faculty, students and alumni. Our goal was to provide opportunities for people to interact with the site in ways that are comfortable for them. Some are happy to view videos and perhaps share them online, others may be visually inclined but not good with the written word or vice versa.
With a little help on the Drupal and Flash fronts, they conceived, designed and built the whole thing in-house–quite an achievement. I think it’s got a pretty fun aesthetic, and I think I recognize that coffee stain in the upper right-hand corner from a familiar Photoshop brush.
What Would You Change? Everything
Locals may recognize a striking similarity between the concept of WhatWouldYouChange.ca and VanCity’s ChangeEverything.ca (here’s what I wrote about that project back in 2006). I asked Janeen about this:
We became aware of ChangeEverything.ca well into the development of whatwouldyouchange. We are targeting a much younger demographic with a more whimsical take on the notion of change.
I’m not sure what to say about that. I believe that they weren’t aware of ChangeEverything.ca at the outset of the project. But I would have been given serious pause whenever I learned about ChangeEverything.ca, and might have changed the new site’s focus (or at least its brand). The lesson, I guess, is to ask around when you kick off a project like this, and really do a thorough survey to understand what else, in terms of “competition”, is out there.
With my marketer’s hat on, I’m always a bit skeptical when organizations build their own social network. This isn’t quite that, but there are already existing places–YouTube, Facebook, Twitter–where this behaviour is taking place. In our experience, it’s really difficult to drag users out of those spaces and onto your own nascent site. You’re often better off working with your customers where they are, instead of where you want them to be.
But, then, I’m very frequently wrong. And this might be precisely the kind of site that’s attractive to young British Columbians (besides, you know, the fact that they’re asexually reproducing on Facebook). Best of luck to BCIT and the project team.
When we were in New York, we set one afternoon aside for shopping. We meandered through Nolita and Soho, checking out the boutiques. I was dismayed to discover that there was nary a men’s shop in sight. I later checked with my fashion designer aunt, and she told me most of the men’s boutiques were in Chelsea (home, of course, to a large population of gay men).
So I came back from New York with nothing but new socks. I still needed clothes, so I asked local fashion blogger Victoria for some recommendations. She wrote a great post describing nine stores, most of which I’ve never visited. It’ll be very handy the next time I need some cool clothes.
I’d add a couple of stores to Victoria’s list: You and Whose Army (I couldn’t find a site for it–is it still around?) and Moule (not only a men’s store, but they had some nice clothes at very healthy discounts when I visited last weekend).
