Yesterday Julie wrote about the Skate Bug, a kind of auditory aid for getting from (to borrow Lee and Sachi’s metaphor again) A to G:
At the Four Continents Championship in Vancouver last month I saw the ‘Skate Bug’ for the first time. It’s a radio device that connects listeners with live event commentary. One part fits in your ear; the other part is hand held. With the Skate Bug, listeners can get real-time event commentary–even more detailed than those watching the event on TV at home–and can even ask questions about elements or scoring via text message during the event. The device is meant to make figure skating more understandable and fan friendly, according to this article in the Vancouver Sun.
It’s kind of like a real-time tutorial in your ear. I remember watching figure skating on the BBC during the 2002 Olympics. The eloquent commentators did an astonishingly good job of articulating the nuances of the sport and the judging system. This was critical, as the Beeb’s audience probably only sees figure skating once every four years. I often feel that this is an explanation failure of North American coverage of the sport–the hosts assume that their audience know more than they do.
Apparently Skate Canada is offering this device directly, as a means of recruiting new fans to the sport. In their press release, they say they’re introducing “a new multimedia tool at Skate Canada events”. That’s a misnomer, isn’t it? I mean, it only offers the one media.
The next step would be to offer the feed in stream audio, so that neophyte fans at home could tune in. And it’s easy to imagine that these could be offered for other sports, too. The first time I go to a cricket game, for example, I could seriously benefit from one of these.
When you spend as much time as I do exploring the shiny and the brand new in the technology world, it’s easy to forget that the middle of the bell curve is receding into the distance. I sometimes get frustrated when Normal Humans, who (quite legitimately) don’t know any better, make poor decisions about their web presence.
Take, for example, the Victoria Fringe’s website. It’s nicely-designed, and accommodates almost all of my Fringe-going needs. There’s one glaring exception: the online schedule. They appear to have just converted the offline, hard copy schedule into HTML and dumped it on the site.
As you can see, it’s sorted by venue. There’s one page for each location where shows are running. That’s possibly a reasonable option for the printed schedule. On the other hand, it may be evidence of a classic information design mistake, where the designer chooses a structure that fits their needs instead of their users’. After all, the Fringe sorts its volunteers, technicians and shows by venue. You’d expect Fringe organizers to think of the schedule in those terms, too.
However, users may want to browse or search the show listings in different ways:
They may only be in town for a couple of days, so they only want to see shows for a particular date range.
They may only want to see comedies.
They may only want to see shows from out of town. All things being equal, traveling performers tend to produce better shows.
They may want to search for performers they’ve seen in previous years (either by the performer’s name or, for bonus points, by the titles of old shows).
Happily, this is a problem that the geeks have already solved. We can think of each show listing as ’structured data’–each listing (or database record, if you like) has an expected series of values–show title, performers’ names, venue, dates, times and so forth. It’s really easy to host this information in a database and display it so that it’s easy to browse, sort and search.
I’m not sure about front-ends for these, but free database services like Google Base or Dabble DB would be a natural place to start. Even if the user interface was a little clunky in the first year, or a little messy to look at, I’m betting it would be an improvement on the current approach.
The problem, of course, is that this looks like a hard problem for a Normal Human. We need more Common Crafts, who are expert explainers of the new.
Savvy readers will recognize this style as quite similar to Common Craft’s highly successful and excellent explanation videos (here’s their latest). Citizens Bank actually credits Common Craft with a link to YouTube at the bottom of the aforementioned page:
Inspired by Common Craft and their RSS feed video.
There’s no credit given on Citizens Bank’s YouTube page, or in the video itself.
Lee and Sachi are so nice, I’m sure they’d be pleased to be imitated (and I’m guessing that Citizens Bank isn’t the first copycat). And I’ve got to say, the Citizens Bank video is quite good. It uses too much cheesy clip art and lacks the secret sauce of Common Craft, but does a really good job of explaining how RRSPs work.
So is this a rip-off or an homage? Should I rise in defense of my friends Lee and Sachi? Or have they just invented a new kind of video, and there’s no point in raging against a tide of imitation? A good analogy is the screencast. I’m sure the second guy who created a screencast was emulating the first, but did he have a right to? Or, on a more personal (and much smaller) scale, sooner or later somebody’s going to copy our comic or love note pitches to bloggers.
In truth, I going with “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” on this one. It’s the price you pay for being original. Plus, I might want to copy their technique some day.
As regular readers know, I’m a huge fan of Lee and Sachi’s awesome paper-based videos. As part of our blogger outreach strategy for promoting our ebook, we’ve created a number of personalized video messages. We created something particularly special for Lee and Sachi. It’s our own very awful parody of their videos:
In particular, I have no idea why Sachi acquired a certain Queen Elizabeth accent halfway through the thing. I take full responsibility.
Putting aside online documents and media releases, Lee and Sachi have created a new educational paper-based video that can help us all:
Despite the suggestion that BC is a hotbed for the undead, I dugg their video.
I have two related thoughts:
There’s a remarkable amount of zombie-based stuff on the web. Lee points to the always useful Zombie Survival Wiki. A couple of years ago I linked toa Kuro5hin article on the same subject, and people continue to drop by and leave comments on that post.
Seeking vapid reading material for a recent long-haul flight, I picked up the Zombie Survival Guide. To be frank, it was unoriginal and poorly written. It did, however, while away the hours between London and Toronto.
Like our apartment in Vancouver, our house here in Malta is wired with halogen lamps. They last longer than incandescents, but they’re power-hungry. I did a quick search, and couldn’t find any CFL replacements for halogen bulbs. I did find some far more efficient and longer lasting versions of the standard halogen bulb, though.
Incidentally, NFL fans should also convert to the Canadian Football League. It, too, is far superior.
