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Edmonton Notes for 3/20/2010

By Mack D. Male | March 20, 2010 at 6:01 pm

Welcome to Spring! Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Good news for supporters of the swimming pool at MacEwan – officials have decided to keep it open for at least another year.
The Journal’s weekly readership increased by 14,700 last year. At The Sun, weekday readership grew by 7%. Also, The Journal earned a record six National Newspaper Award nominations for its work in 2009.
Attendance at Winter Light this year passed the 100,000 mark.
I knew the City Centre Airport issue wouldn’t end with Council’s decision. Airco is seeking an injunction to keep the airport open. A hearing could come as early as the end of April.
Great post from Sharon: My 2010 Wish List for Edmonton’s Food Scene.
More than 500 students marched on Thursday to protest proposed fee and tuition hikes.
LRT passenger counts in 2009 were up 20,900 per day. Can’t wait for the new stations to open in April! Looks like the City is going ahead with an RFP for licensing mezzanine space in the downtown stations.
The City has received far fewer property assessment complaints this year: just 516 have been filed, compared to 3860 in 2009.
Looks like the Williams Engineering building downtown may be getting a green roof!
The Valley Zoo introduced a baby squirrel monkey this week. It hasn’t been named yet.
Don’t miss this great roundup of local happenings at I Heart Edmonton.
Here’s the latest Edmonton NextGen weekly newsletter.
The Mustard Seed Society will receive $12 million from the Alberta government to build 112 housing units for the homeless in Calgary in Edmonton.
In case you missed it: State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for February 2010.
More than 30,000 people have visited the Art Gallery of Alberta since it opened on January 31.
Great post from Dave on closing inner city schools in Edmonton.
The deadline for submissions for the Edmonton Food Bank’s Expressions of Hunger contest is fast approaching! Get your images, poems, or prose in by March 31.
Monday night will be the 23rd Annual Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts (on ShareEdmonton).
If you’re downtown on Wednesday, why not check out the free yoga session at City Hall?
Thursday night is GalaGuru and Edmonton Twestival (on ShareEdmonton)! Hope to see you there (RSVP) – bring a donation for Twestival!
Of course next Saturday is Earth Hour (on ShareEdmonton).
See you in an hour or so at YEG Swap!

We had a really awesome sunrise in Edmonton this week:

Tags: edmonton, events, news
Categories: Edmonton Notes | No Comments »

How much traffic do the Edmonton Journal and iNews880 get from Twitter?

By Mack D. Male | March 19, 2010 at 11:00 am

Depending on who you talk to, Twitter is either killing news media or saving it. A recent analysis by Hitwise found that less than 0.2% of people who use Twitter wind up going to news and media sites (thanks to Karen for the link). Their analysis looks at Twitter as a whole though, and I’m not sure how well it accounts for local news sites. I believe very strongly that social media has the greatest impact at the local level (more on this in a future post). Given that, I have long wondered how Twitter has impacted local news media here in Edmonton. Last night, I finally did some analysis. I decided to explore how much traffic the Edmonton Journal and iNews880, Edmonton’s two top tweeting media outlets, received from Twitter last year.

@EdmontonJournal

First up, the Edmonton Journal. They’ve been tweeting news articles since at least January 2009, so I had lots of data to play with. They used tweetburner to shorten links until September when they switched to bit.ly. Using the APIs available from those services, I added up all the click stats for all the links posted by The Journal. Here’s what I found:

Lots of variation, as you can see. Some of that is down to the use of two services, some of it is because of the number of Twitter users. There are probably dozens of other factors too.

For the period January 30 through December 31:

A total of 153,968 clicks were recorded on 4737 links.
That’s an average of 33 clicks per link, and an average of 15 links per day.
According to the stats on the bit.ly links, 95.4% of clicks come from the Edmonton Journal’s hash*.
The link with the most clicks (700) was this one, on May 26. It doesn’t work, because annoyingly The Journal doesn’t display old articles for some reason, but it appears it was about Edmonton’s Poet Laureate Roland Pemberton.
The day with the most clicks, September 14, doesn’t appear to be special…just lots of clicks that day for some reason (any ideas?).

@iNews880

Next up, iNews880, one of the first local media organizations to join Twitter. They used tinyurl.com until July, when Twitter switched the default to bit.ly, so unfortunately I only have data for the latter half of the year:

For the period July 14 through December 31:

A total of 90,500 clicks were recorded on 3811 links.
That’s an average of 24 clicks per link, and an average of 22 links per day.
According to the stats on the bit.ly links, 93.8% of clicks come from iNews880’s hash*.
The link with the most clicks (1933) was this one, on August 2 (that’s the huge spike in the graph above). The link goes to the report on the Big Valley Jamboree stage collapse, and it was popular because it included before and after photos.

Edmonton Journal vs. iNews880

I wanted to do a quick comparison, so I chose the period September 17 through December 31, because both sites used bit.ly for links during that time. Here’s what it looks like:

During that time:

The Edmonton Journal posted 2369 links (23 per day) and iNews880 posted 2261 links (22 per day).
A total of 79,519 clicks were recorded on Edmonton Journal links (an average of 751 per day or 34 per link).
A total of 53,815 clicks were recorded on iNews880 links (an average of 508 per day or 24 per link).

Thoughts

That’s a lot of clicks! Clearly Twitter and other social networking sites (where most shortlinks are posted) are having an impact. But how much? According to the latest report by the Newspaper Audience Databank (NADbank), weekly online readership at EdmontonJournal.com increased by 35% last year to 115,900 from 85,800 in 2008. That’s an increase of 30,100 readers per week. According to the click stats above, The Journal received 3208 clicks per week in 2009. So what does that mean?

Roughly 10.7% of the Edmonton Journal’s online readership increase in 2009 came as a result of posting links to Twitter.

And if I had to guess, I’d say my analysis probably underestimates things. Apparently the NADbank data is based on surveys, so I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it’s probably within acceptable margins of error. I’m also not sure what exactly a “reader” is – a page view, a visit, etc.

Caveats

I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, but I can’t make any guarantees!

All the click stats are current as of last night.
I’m suggesting that all the clicks come via Twitter, when that’s probably not entirely true. Links get passed around, displayed on websites, etc. But the shortlinks do originate at Twitter.
It’s possible that The Journal or iNews880 posted a link to somewhere other than their own sites, but uncommon. I did remove one link from the iNews880 dataset, because it pointed to an Environment Canada site (it was obvious, lots of total clicks as others have linked there too). For the rest, I’m making the assumption that the links point to the news sites.
I don’t know how reliable the stats from bit.ly and tweetburner are. I suspect they are quite a bit different than server logs or Google Analytics metrics.
I would assume that both services tweaked the way stats are calculated throughout the year, so 15 clicks on a bit.ly link in May is probably different than 15 clicks on a bit.ly link in December.

* – When you shorten a link using bit.ly, you get a unique hash. If I shorten the same link, I get a different hash. The stats are recorded and made available individually and in aggregate, however.

Tags: edmonton, edmonton journal, inews880, media, micromedia, news, statistics, trends, twitter, web
Categories: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

State of the Ottawa Twittersphere – February 2010

By Mack D. Male | March 19, 2010 at 9:30 am

Welcome to the second State of the Ottawa Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Ottawa, ON. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 9366 (an increase of 804 from January)
# of tweets by local users: 452190
# of tweets by local users containing #ottawa/#yow: 2719 (0.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 161654 (35.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 109478 (24.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 25947 (5.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 13205 (2.9%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 11.2 tweets per minute in February (compared to 9.6 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 23063. On average, 16150 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 13750 in January).
Of the 161654 replies posted by local users this month, 45323 or 28.0% were to other local users.
A total of 1732 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 1461 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

As with the other Canadian cities, the busiest day in February in Ottawa was the 28th due to the gold medal hockey game. The second busiest was the 12th, the day of the opening ceremonies for the Olympics. The growth in the Ottawa twittersphere this month is similar to that of Calgary. Still a severe lack of tagged tweets though!

Tags: microblogging, micromedia, ottawa, statistics, twitter, twittersphere, yow
Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments »

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – February 2010

By Mack D. Male | March 18, 2010 at 10:00 am

Welcome to the second State of the Calgary Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 8190 (an increase of 819 from January)
# of tweets by local users: 390224
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 11486 (2.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 116346 (29.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 112937 (28.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 20679 (5.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 13422 (3.4%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 48% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 9.7 tweets per minute in February (compared to 7.9 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 21292. On average, 13937 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 11334 in January).
Of the 116346 replies posted by local users this month, 31507 or 27.1% were to other local users.
A total of 1434 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 1319 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyc:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

As with Edmonton and Victoria, the busiest day of the month was February 28 at 21292 tweets thanks to the gold medal hockey game. Calgary actually broke the 20000 mark twice this month – the other day was February 12, the day the opening ceremonies took place. It was a pretty impressive month for stats, especially given that it was three days shorter than normal!

Tags: calgary, microblogging, micromedia, statistics, twitter, twittersphere, yyc
Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

State of the Victoria Twittersphere – February 2010

By Mack D. Male | March 17, 2010 at 10:00 am

Welcome to the second State of the Victoria Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Victoria, BC. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 1759 (an increase of 513 over January)
# of tweets by local users: 60185
# of tweets by local users containing #yyj: 6493 (10.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 17277 (28.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 19753 (32.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 5013 (8.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 2339 (3.9%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 1.5 tweets per minute in February (compared with 1.1 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 3408. On average, 2150 local tweets were posted each day (compared with 1575 in January).
Of the 17277 replies posted by local users this month, 5385 or 31.2% were to other local users.
A total of 270 users posted 50 times or more in February. In comparison, 107 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyj:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

A nice increase in numbers over January! Like Edmonton, the busiest day of the month was February 28, when Canada won Olympic gold in the mens hockey game. We’ll have to see if the bump carries over into March.

Tags: microblogging, micromedia, statistics, twitter, twittersphere, victoria, yyj
Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

2010 TEC VenturePrize Awards Luncheon

By Mack D. Male | March 16, 2010 at 9:25 pm

As longtime readers will know, I was one of the finalists in the VenturePrize business plan competition back in 2006 (along with Yardstick Software). It was a great experience, and I learned a lot. I also know how much effort goes into it, so I have great respect for all the competitors who came after me!

I’ve been able to attend the awards luncheon the last few years thanks to Chris & Don from Yardstick, which has allowed me to meet some really interesting individuals and companies. I’ll be attending again this year, thanks to TEC Edmonton. I’m really excited, for a few reasons:

I know a couple of the teams competing this year quite well, and was able to act as an advisor/mentor a little bit. I’m pulling for them!
There’s always an interesting keynote speaker and lots of great people to meet.
Ken Bautista will be there!

Here’s the description for this year’s luncheon:

Now in its 8th year, this province-wide business plan competition provides budding entrepreneurs with training and guidance as well as an opportunity to win a share of over $150,000 in prizes!

The keynote speaker will be Duncan Stewart, currently Director of Deloitte Canada Research: Technology, Media & Telecommunications, Life Sciences and GreenTech. He has over 20 years experience working in capital markets, helping raise and invest more than $2 billion.

In addition, Ken Bautista will provide an update on the successes of his startup, CIE: Seek Your Own Proof, since winning the grand prize in last year’s TEC VenturePrize Business Plan Competition!

The event takes place at the Westin Hotel on Thursday, April 15 from 11:30am until 2:00pm (on ShareEdmonton). As of last week, tickets were already 60% sold, so if you want to attend you better get yours soon. Hope to see you there!

Tags: business, edmonton, entrepreneurship, events, tec edmonton, technology, ventureprize
Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments »

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – February 2010

By Mack D. Male | March 16, 2010 at 10:30 am

Welcome to the second State of the Edmonton Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 6471 (an increase of 630 from January)
# of tweets by local users: 334127
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 20438 (6.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 117188 (35.1%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 73834 (22.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 16658 (5.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 12397 (3.7%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 8.3 tweets per minute in February (compared to 7.4 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 19372. On average, 11933 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 10588 in January).
Of the 117188 replies posted by local users this month, 37648 or 32.1% were to other local users.
A total of 1256 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 970 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

A relatively big increase in the number of active users this month! I’m not 100% sure what the cause was, but I suspect it was the Olympics. The two busiest days this month were February 12 with 17281 tweets posted and February 28 with 19372 tweets posted – the opening ceremonies, and the hockey game & closing ceremonies, respectively. I’m planning to analyze those tweets further (when I have some time).

More stats on the way soon!

Tags: edmonton, microblogging, micromedia, statistics, twitter, twittersphere, yeg
Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Recap: TEDxEdmonton

By Mack D. Male | March 15, 2010 at 12:00 pm

On Saturday I spent the day with about 100 other creative Edmontonians at the TransAlta Arts Barns in Old Strathcona. We were there for TEDxEdmonton, the local edition of TED’s popular independently organized event series. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated by volunteers in each community, but all feature TEDTalks videos, and TED’s celebrated format:

A suite of short, carefully prepared talks, demonstrations and performances on a wide range of subjects to foster learning, inspiration and wonder — and to provoke conversations that matter.

That’s what TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is all about. Inspiring conversations. If you’ve never seen a TED video, I encourage you to take some time at the TED site. There are tons of “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.”

The theme for the first ever TEDxEdmonton was “Cultivating the Creative Economy”:

Creative Entrepreneurship – At the intersection of creativity and innovation is opportunity. Where there is opportunity, there are entrepreneurs building companies and working towards social change.

Creative Sustainability – Sustainability has become part of every industry from design to green technologies. We’ll explore concepts and emerging practices that are reducing negative impact on the environment.

Creative Technologies – Creative technologies are shaping the future of the global creative economy. We’ll explore emerging technologies that are impacting successful creative economy growth.

The organizers did a great job of selecting local talent for the event. In total, nine influential people with ties to Edmonton shared their ideas, entertained us, and participated. They also did a good job of picking a diverse group of attendees (you had to apply to attend). I can safely say that my $99 ticket was well worth it.

Here’s how it all went down.

It became immediately clear to me upon arriving at the venue around 9:15am that the day was going to be memorable. Already lots of conversations were taking place, and despite the lack of coffee, I couldn’t help but notice the attention to detail. Each attendee received a lanyard and name badge, which, I realize, is standard fare. Except that these name badges featured the TEDxEdmonton design in addition to our names, on both sides, so that when it inevitably got flipped around, you could still read the name. Such a nice touch. Same goes for the tables that were setup – each had a little “idea tree” on it, with words like “Create” or “Inspire” on cards.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone was pretty blown away by the stage after entering the actual theatre. Designed and created by the University of Alberta Student Design Association, it was colorful, interesting, and impressive. It really “set the stage” for the day!

The day was broken up into four sessions. The first was “Creativity & Innovation”, hosted by Michael Brechtel. In addition to the speakers for each session, we also watched one TEDTalk, picked by the host. Michael chose Rory Sutherland’s Life lessons from an ad man, filmed in July 2009. Very entertaining!

The first speaker of the day was Tim Antoniuk, Associate Professor in the Industrial Design Program at the University of Alberta. He talked about Creative Economic Emergence, and shared a number of statistics about creative economics around the world (mostly from the UN’s Creative Economy Report 2008). He highlighted China as the fastest growing creative economy, noting the shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China”. Tim also spent some time talking about epistemology, “social shapers”, chaos, the rise of Richard Flordia’s creative class, and waste. He noted that 60-80% of environmental impact is determined at the design stage. Tim finished by saying we need to foster emergence, and shared this Peter Drucker quote: “The basic economic resource is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.”

Our second speaker was Shawna Pandya, an Edmonton-born entrepreneur working at NASA-Ames in Silicon Valley. She began with a song, stating that fostering innovation requires “thinking and acting differently.” Shawna encouraged everyone to share their ideas, saying that “life is too short to be proprietary” with them. She also talked about entrepreneurship, and noted that “anywhere you have stasis and stability, you are not going to have startups.” Perhaps her most tweeted remark was that “a crisis is not a tragedy, but an opportunity.” Shawna finished with a call to action – to shift from linear thinking to exponential thinking – and a really creative exercise called Innovation Mad-Libs. Essentially: think of a problem that is unique to Edmonton, come up with one crazy and daring way to approach it, and then ask someone for their thoughts on it.

Andrew Hessel, a genomic scientist who founded the Pink Army Cooperative, was our third speaker. He focused on the rise of do-it-yourself biology, and compared bacterial networks to computer networks. Andrew delighted us with lots of interesting ideas, like word processors for DNA, cancer-fighting beer, DNA hacking kits, DNA printers, and “fields of chairs being grown in the future”. He said that one day we’ll be able to print new hearts and that we can already cure blindness from vitamin deficiency with goldren rice, but noted that current GMO standards scare people. Andrew also talked about 23andme, PatientsLikeMe, and discussed the sorry state of the pharmaceutical industry (it takes 10-15 years to bring a new drug to market). He closed with some thoughts on biomanufacturing, and a little bit on Pink Army, which aims to make individually-tailored cancer drugs based on an individual’s genetic makeup.

Stephani Carter hosted the second session, on “Creative Sustainability.” The TEDTalk she picked was Cameron Sinclair on open source architecture, filmed in February 2006.

The fourth speaker of the day was Shafraaz Kaba, architect and partner at Manasc Isaac. He talked about the importance of materials, and said that what you get from combining wood magnents and glass depends on the designer! His firm recently redesigned the old Dell call centre building in the Edmonton Research Park, because the original design was horribly energy inefficient. Shafraaz showed a great heat loss visualization of the building, and pointed out the lack of natural light, both problems they were able to solve. Through his examples, Shafraaz demonstrated that great ideas almost always come from somewhere unexpected, and said we should embrace that!

Theresa Howland, Vice President for the Western Region at Bullfrog Power, was our fifth speaker. She started by saying that 80% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, the result of decisions based on the lowest cost. She then shifted into wind power, noting that Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta currently produce the most wind power in Canada (about 1,000,000 homes can be powered by wind power across the country). Theresa noted that wind power is not new, but that until economic incentives exist, it will not be fully developed. Wind power works with the natural environment, and in conjunction with existing land use (oh and it doesn’t kill birds!). She closed by encouraging us to make decisions that have a positive impact, stating that individuals really can make a difference!

After a break for lunch (featuring some yummy lasagna) Cam Linke hosted the session on “Creative Entrepreneurship”, and showed us the TEDTalk by Seth Godin on standing out (purple cows), filmed in February 2003.

Our first speaker after lunch was Grant Skinner, a local Flash guru and “tech rockstar”. He walked us through cultivating the creative economy on a personal level, sharing some anecdotes from his own work in a very reflective talk. Grant defines success through challenge, contribution, novelty, diversity, and the people he interacts with. He encouraged us to celebrate “play” and said that passionate procrastination is a good thing. Seek inspiration outside your area of expertise, explore limits, cultivate relationships, avoid extremes, and create new things, however minor, were a few of the other thoughts Grant shared. He closed by demoing some of the really interesting projects he has worked on over the years.

Next up was Cameron Herold, a successful business leader who created 1-800-GOT-JUNK. His topic was teaching entrepreneurship to kids. He said we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers, not because he hates lawyers, but because he feels we should treat entrepreneurship with the same level of distinction. Cameron thinks that we focus too much on teaching what they not do, and that we should do better at helping cultivate the things they are good at. A couple of Cameron’s most emphasized points were that allowances teach kids to expect a paycheck, and that we should not medicate them for attention deficit disorder (except in the most extreme medical cases). Cameron finished by sharing the fantastic video, entrepreneurs can change the world.

The driving force behind TEDxEdmonton, Ken Bautista, hosted the last session on “Creative Content”. The TEDTalk he shared was a really eclectic one from John Hodgman on aliens and love.

The last speaker of the day was Sean Stewart, an award-winning science fiction novelist and influential writer of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). He talked about the evolution of storytelling, and said that any way humans have invented to lie to one another should be part of your storytelling kit! The latest iteration of storytelling is transmedia, interactive, and social, according to Sean. He talked about fanfiction.net, and noted that the vast majority of words ever written about Harry Potter were not written by JK Rowling. He closed with perhaps my favorite remark of the day: “Art at this point is not about dictating to another person, it’s a dance. Hold out your hand and ask, do you want to play?”

To close out the show, award-winning soul and jazz singer-songwriter Krystle Dos Santos performed, with some help from Mitch Holtby. She sang a number of songs, and Mitch wowed the audience by playing at least four different instruments throughout the set, including a really interesting drum machine. It was a fantastic way to end the day!

Well, the formal part of the day anyway! Many people headed over to Suite 69 for drinks and appetizers, and then back to the TransAlta Arts Barns for the official TEDxEdmonton After Party. Conversations continued with drinks, music, slideshows of the day, and a photo booth. It seemed fitting to end such a great day with a party, even though I think many people were intellectually drained.

TEDxEdmonton was webcast for free online, with dozens of people watching. Twitter also played a big role in the event – we were the #1 topic in Canada for much of the day, thanks to the more than 900 tweets posted by Edmontonians during the event.

I think Ken said it nicely in his recap post:

Everyone needs to know that Edmontonians are working here and beyond, changing the world in their own ways – in science, technology, entertainment, design and more. We wanted TEDx Edmonton to be a spark that would ignite and connect the entrepreneurial and creative energy we’ve always had in our community.

It worked. TEDxEdmonton was a huge success, and I think everyone who participated in person or online felt a positive lift. I suspect there are more than a few Edmontonians with an extra jump in their step this week! Congratulations to Ken, Cam, Michael, Cindy, and everyone else who worked so hard to bring Edmonton such an incredible experience. I can’t wait until the next one!

You can see more photos here and here (some by me, and some by Jason Everitt, Aaron Pederson, and Dallas Whitley), and you can read the liveblog archive here (written by Doug van Spronsen and myself, incorporating tweets). Stay tuned to the TEDxEdmonton site and Twitter for updates, and links to the videos when they are posted.

Tags: artsscene, business, creativity, design, edmonton, events, technology, ted, tedxedmonton, tedxyeg
Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Notes for 3/14/2010

By Mack D. Male | March 15, 2010 at 1:11 am

Here are my weekly notes:

I want my hour back!
I had a busy week last week, preparing stuff for the 2010 Questionmark Users Conference.
And a busy weekend, with both TEDxEdmonton and the Grilled Cheese Olympics!
Tomorrow, March 15, will mark 25 years of .com domain names.
This is so true: the 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get.
Sharon and I watched The Cove this weekend. I thought it was really well done, not to mention shocking!

Tags: mastermaq, notes
Categories: Weekly Notes | 1 Comment »

Edmonton Notes for 3/13/2010

By Mack D. Male | March 13, 2010 at 11:22 pm

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

City Council put $17 million of last year’s $33.7 million surplus into a rainy day fund.
Wearing a seatbelt has been law in Alberta since 1987, yet many Albertans still choose not to wear one. March is Occupant Restraint Month, which means police will be raising awareness about the importance of wearing a seatbelt!
The 2010-2011 Edmonton Opera season was announced this week. They’re teaming up with The Fringe!
Here is the Edmonton Startup Index for March.
The Edmonton Event Centre, The Bank, and Mirama were all fined this week for breaking fire code regulations. Almost 300 inspections were performed by fire prevention officers in 2009.
The grass at Commonwealth Stadium will be ripped out next week, to be replaced with artificial turf.
Latitude 53 has a new Writer in Residence program, and the first writer is Carolyn Jervis.
The Christenson Family Foundation donated $2.5 million to MacEwan this week (it will be paid over 10 years).
Here are the winners of the 2009 ACE Awards!
The Winspear Centre launched a new website this week. Looks great!
More details on the City’s plan to launch an iPhone application, host an apps contest, and more.
Happy 15th birthday to local brewery Alley Kat! Also, happy 1st birthday to Alberta Primetime!
The judge who presided over the city’s first “electronic trial” says the case has offered him “a glimpse of the future.”
Lots of people are upset about the closure of the MacEwan pool. Both students and seniors have protested.
Here is the latest Edmonton Next Gen weekly newsletter.
Dragon’s Den will be in town on Tuesday and Wednesday for auditions. Details on ShareEdmonton.
Coming up next Saturday is the inaugural Yeg Swap (on ShareEdmonton), which The Journal wrote about here.

Tags: edmonton, events, news
Categories: Edmonton Notes | 2 Comments »

GalaGuru 2010 & Edmonton Twestival

By Mack D. Male | March 12, 2010 at 10:00 am

Guru Digital Arts College, a digital media school located in downtown Edmonton, is hosting an event on March 25 at Latitude 53 called GalaGuru to celebrate the co-mingling of the creative arts and technology. This is the second year they’ve held the event, which features local food, interactive exhibits, and Edmonton’s own The Be Arthurs!

Also on March 25, is Twestival Global 2010. Hundreds of cities around the world, including Edmonton, will be hosting local events to create awareness for the important cause of education. All funds raised will go to Concern Worldwide, an organization that provides education for the world’s poorest children. Founded in 1968, Concern’s current education programs reach over 700,000 people in 25 countries. Twestival is also a fun way to meet other local Twitter users face-to-face!

So we’ve got a local educational institution hosting a big party on the same day that Twitter users are rallying around education. Sounds like a great match! That’s why were joining forces:

WHO: You and all your friends!
WHAT: GalaGuru 2010 & Edmonton Twestival (on ShareEdmonton)
WHEN: March 25, 2010 at 6 PM
WHERE: Latitude 53 – 10248 106 Street
WHY: To celebrate creative arts, technology, and education!

If you’re planning to attend, please RSVP and if you’re on Twitter, add your name to the wiki. You can donate to Concern online (use the widget on the right here), or bring your donation with you to the event. Hope to see you there!

Tags: concern worldwide, edmonton, galaguru, guru digital arts, tweetup, twestival, twitter
Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Edmonton City Centre Airport Lands Master Plan Principles

By Mack D. Male | March 10, 2010 at 9:30 am

A report went to City Council today outlining the vision and principles for development of the City Centre Airport lands.

The ECCA lands will be home to 30,000 Edmontonians living, working and learning in a sustainable community that uses 100% renewable energy, is carbon neutral, significantly reduces its ecological footprint, and empowers residents to pursue a range of sustainable lifestyle choices.

You can download the report here. A few of the highlights for me:

The challenge is to be experimental, not to wait for the perfect solution to arrive.
Common goal is defined by: design excellence, empowering people, reducing consumption, offering lifestyle options, innovating, measuring achievements.
Examples mentioned: Vastra Hamnen (Western Front), Malmo, and Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm, both in Sweden, and One Planet Communities.
The goal is to achieve LEED Gold certification for all buildings, and to encourage LEED Platinum.
Under transportation: LRT is a focus, of course, but also “designs to discourage high speed traffic”, “bike paths and multi-use trails to provide fully connected routes”.
Technology is identified as a key component of the Master Plan: “A key to success in adapting new technologies will be the engagement of three major local players: EPCOR, the University of Alberta and NAIT.”
Our climate is highlighted: “It must be recognized that Edmonton has severe winter conditions, which bring their own challenges, but these need not stand in the way of achieving sustainable development.”

The report also highlights the historical significance of the lands, and states that the Master Plan must embody that through preservation, naming, interpretation, and designation:

Identify opportunities to re-use hangars as recreation facilities or other community facilities (e.g. farmers market).
Explore the idea of a “mall of museums” that would acknowledge the historical significance of structures such as Hangars 8 and 11 that are all on the Inventory of Historic Resources in Edmonton.
Acknowledge the history of the site through naming opportunities for thoroughfares, places and buildings that are associated with the past.

The Master Plan process will be guided by a new steering committee, and is broken into the Request for Qualifications (RFQ) and Request for Proposals (RFP) phases. In the RFP stage, the City is looking for 3-5 proposals. Selection would be made by “an independent jury of distinguished professionals.” Excluding formal approvals by Council, the entire process is expected to take a year.

I think the report is a great first step, but there’s still a long way to go. In the background section, there are lots of specific targets, such as the One Planet principles that include “100% of power coming from renewable energy”, “98% reduction in solid landfill waste”, “82% reduction in CO2”, and “20% of materials manufactured on site”. The section that outlines the Master Plan is largely devoid of such targets, however. I found only a couple:

At least 20% of the housing units built must be affordable housing.
Achieve an overall density of 25 units per acre minimum.

To get an idea of what 25 units per acre looks like, check out this PDF (4 MB).

Council will be discussing the report today. You can watch or listen live online here.

Tags: city centre airport, city council, development, ecca, edmonton, planning, sustainability
Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Why I went to Reboot Alberta 2.0

By Mack D. Male | March 9, 2010 at 8:19 pm

I live in Edmonton, Alberta. I’m proud to call myself a Canadian.

I don’t consider myself a progressive. To be honest, I’m not even sure I know what that label means.

I enjoy the mountains.

I reject partisan politics. If you look through the archives here, you’ll see that I have voted for every major party in Canada at one time or another, for various reasons.

I yearn for a leader. Even if that leader belongs to a party.

I like learning. I know more about politics (and life) now than I did a year ago. Time marches forward.

I love meeting new people and reconnecting with existing friends and acquaintances. You never know what will come of a relationship.

I care about the future, and I try to approach it optimistically.

I believe I can help to create the kind of the world I want to live in. The kind of world I’d be happy to leave behind.

For a few hours at the end of February, I was in the mountains, meeting new friends and reconnecting with others, discussing the future of Alberta, and learning a great deal from some very smart people.

It’s true that my expectations going into Reboot Alberta 2.0 were pretty high, but in retrospect, I think they were misplaced anyway. I was expecting outcomes of some kind, deliverables even, but instead was presented with the opportunity to think. The chance to slow down for a day, to really consider things. To listen.

Maybe if I had gone to the first Reboot Alberta I’d feel differently. I completely understand why those who did might have felt like they were rehashing the same thing again.

I agree that action is important and necessary. But so are conversations. I don’t know where Reboot Alberta will go from here, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to take part.

You can see my photos from the event here.

Edmonton Tweets during the Men’s Gold Medal Hockey Game

By Mack D. Male | March 9, 2010 at 12:15 pm

I’m sure you’ve seen by now the chart that EPCOR released showing water consumption in Edmonton during the men’s gold medal hockey game on February 28th. It’s pretty amazing how closely the data matches the end of the periods! I’m sure the game had an impact on many other parts of our lives as well. For instance, tweeting!

Here’s how much Edmontonians were tweeting during the game:

I’ve also stuck February 21 and March 7 in there, so you can see the difference from normal. We posted 27 tweets per minute from noon until 6pm on game day. That’s about three times more than normal!

Here’s what we were tweeting about:

No surprise there! I’ll have more Twitter stats up soon.

Tags: edmonton, hockey, olympics, sports, statistics, twitter, twittersphere, vancouver 2010
Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Recap: Open City Workshop

By Mack D. Male | March 8, 2010 at 11:00 am

Saturday’s Open City Workshop at the Art Gallery of Alberta was a fantastic event! Excellent turnout, great discussions, and lots of enthusiasm for the open data/open government movement here in Edmonton. We started the day with some opening remarks from Councillor Don Iveson, CIO Chris Moore, and FusedLogic’s Walter Schwabe. I really liked Don’s key values: transparency, empowerment, and collaboration.

Next up was the panel, featuring David Eaves, Nick Charney, Mark Kuznicki, and Alayne Sinclair. They talked about what open government meant to them, took an odd detour into voting, and took some questions from the audience as well. Here are a few of the key things that stood out for me:

The idea of government as a platform is not new!
It’s about empowering citizens to make the city their own, enabling them to go after their passions.
Engagement is often a sign that you need to do something differently, not necessarily that you’re doing something right.
Civil servants are citizens too!
Open government is part of a broader cultural shift, and citizens have a responsibility to become participants.

I really enjoyed the panel – it was the highlight of the day for me. It was great to finally meet David, Nick, and Mark in person too.

After some forced networking and a break for lunch, the unconference part of the day got underway. We broke into smaller groups to discuss things like the role of journalism and storytelling in open data, the digital divide, thinking beyond technology solutions, and timelines/deliverables.

I attended the role of journalism and storytelling first, and we seemed to reach the consensus that storytelling is vital for open data/open government to succeed. We need everyone to tell stories, so that we achieve a diverse range of views. We also felt that journalism has a role to play in bridging the gap that exists between those who “get it” and those who don’t. The second session I attended was on engaging residents not familiar with technology. We ended up talking a lot about deliberative dialogue, and I was left with a lot to think about – how will access to open data affect the way a citizen looks at the world? We’re naturally selective, does open data change anything in that regard? For some thoughts on the other two sessions, check out Stella’s recap.

Another really great aspect of the day was that it was streamed live online by FusedLogic in both English and French. There were dozens of people participating virtually, from Edmonton and around the world! I understand that they even held their own breakout discussion in the afternoon! Kudos to the FusedLogic team for taking on such a big task, and making it work so well.

At the end of the day, Chris Moore took the stage once again to make a few announcements:

An RFP has gone out for the design and implementation of the next generation of productivity technologies at the City of Edmonton.
The City of Edmonton is partnering on open311.org, to bring open standards for 311.
On April 19, the City of Edmonton is planning to launch an iPhone app called CityWatch, developed by local company Touchmetric.
The City of Edmonton is calling for the creation of a “Code for Canada” organization, modeled after Code for America.
There will be an Apps4Edmonton app contest in the near future, with the prizes and winners to be showcased at GTEC2010 in October.

Exciting stuff! Congrats to Chris and his team for putting on a great event.

Stay tuned to the #openyeg and #yegdata hashtags on Twitter for updates, as well as the City of Edmonton’s open city page. You can see the rest of my photos here, and you can see the City’s photoset here. You can see a list of the attendees on Twitter here.

I’ll leave you with this TED video of Tim Berners-Lee talking about open data: