Media Monday Edmonton: How fast are local media websites?

By Mack D. Male · February 21, 2011 at 2:51pm

On the web, page speed matters. If your site takes too long to load, people will go elsewhere. Google proved this by purposefully slowing down its search engine. They found that even just half a second caused fewer searches. Bottom line: users love fast sites!

With that in mind, I decided to look at local media sites – how fast or slow are they? Rather than looking at page load times, I decided to use YSlow to determine the performance of each site. Lots of factors can impact the amount of time a page takes to load (your ISP, the speed of your computer, where you are geographically,etc), but everyone has to download the same amount of data for a web page, so I figured YSlow is a little more fair than a stopwatch.

Here are the fourteen sites I looked at (you can download all the data here):

As you can see, none of the sites received an “A” grade. The only one to receive a B was Only Here for the Food. The grade can be somewhat misleading, however. Here’s what the front page performance for each site looks like:

It turns out that Sharon’s blog is the heaviest of them all with an empty cache (the first time you visit the site). This is due to the large number of images she has on her site. In fact, almost all of the weight of the page is due to the images. If you look at the primed cache (subsequent visits to the site) then the Edmonton Journal is the heaviest. The Edmonton Journal has the worst performance improvement going from an empty to a primed cache:

To be fair, I decided I should compare an “article page” on each site as well. With social media in particular, an article page is more likely to be a visitor’s entry point to the site. For this test, I simply clicked on the top article on each site:

One caveat: I used the second story for iNews 880, because their top story was over 25 MB in size! Evidently they think it is fine to embed full size, uncompressed images.

As you can see, Valerie’s blog is the heaviest, again due to the number of pictures she has. Once again, the Edmonton Journal has the worst performance improvement going from an empty to a primed cache:

Final Thoughts

I thought there would be more of a difference between the new and traditional media sites, but there isn’t really. In general the heaviest part of the blogs is images and the heaviest part of the traditional media sites is Javascript, but there are exceptions. On average, the first time you visit the front page of one of these sites you’re going to have to download just over 2 MB. On a 56.6 Kbps dial-up connection, that would take you nearly 5 minutes. On a typical high-speed connection, it’s more like less than 10 seconds.

I think perceived performance is often more important than actual performance, but that’s obviously harder to measure. In my experience, most of these sites load fairly quickly. When I do notice a speed issue, it’s usually because the page I am trying to load has a lot of stuff on it.

Another thing I learned from this exercise is that all of the sites have room for improvement!

What has your experience been like? Which sites do you find slow?

Daily Deals in Edmonton

By Mack D. Male · February 1, 2011 at 7:15pm

I’m amazed at how many “daily deal” or “group coupon” sites there are in Edmonton now, let alone the rest of the world. I’m sure you’ve heard of Groupon, and maybe one or two others such as GoodNews, but did you know there are at least ten such sites in Edmonton? Here’s a list of the ones I have found:

There are also a bunch of sites preparing to launch in our city:

Daniel has created a Twitter list for some of the services here.

I don’t see how that many sites are going to succeed. My guess is that most won’t. Some are so similar in form and function that I wonder if they’re actually the same company. Others have obviously picked up on this trend, as there are dozens of “daily deal aggregators” out there so that you don’t have to sign up for each service individually. Here are some Edmonton-related ones I have found:

I’m sure there are many others that I have missed.

The most popular item on daily deal sites seems to be spa packages, so you may or may not find value in these services. I have used Groupon a couple of times, and I think they are here to stay. LivingSocial seems to be the second biggest of the sites, at least in the US. SwarmJam should be able to leverage its existing relationships with advertisers, so maybe they’ll find success. GoodNews has a bit of a twist in that it supports local charities. As for the rest – who knows.

Edmonton’s 2010 Grey Cup Festival Never Happened

By Mack D. Male · January 21, 2011 at 2:00pm

In November 2010, Edmonton hosted the 98th Grey Cup. The Montreal Alouettes defeated the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the second straight year to capture the CFL’s top prize. Of course, the event was more than just a football game. We’re festival city, and we turned the Grey Cup into a very successful festival. There was something for everyone, and downtown was full of people, which unfortunately doesn’t happen very often. It wasn’t a perfect event, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an Edmontonian who would consider it anything less than a success.

Here’s what Todd Babiak wrote (archive):

Ten years from now, only the statisticians and the really, really heartbroken will recall the winner of Sunday’s Grey Cup game in Edmonton.

What we would like to remember, in 10 years, is that many thousands of warmly audacious people from Saskatchewan came to witness Edmonton’s transition from a cosy little prairie city to something else.

I would go further and say that we absolutely need to remember what we accomplished with the Grey Cup Festival. We need to be proud of it, we need to learn from it, and we need to improve upon it.

But, the Grey Cup Festival never happened.

If you try to visit the festival website, at http://www.greycupfestival2010.com, you’re redirected to the website of the Edmonton Eskimos. As far as the web is concerned, the festival never happened. And in 2011 and beyond, the web is all that matters. Think about it for a second – less than two months after the event took place, the most important online record of it has vanished.

Ignoring the fact that the website barely worked during the festival (which is an important, but different issue), this is troubling. I have written before about the need to preserve our local, digital, cultural artifacts. The web is the single most important platform for doing so. The web is accessible and pervasive. Too often, however, it is not permanent. We can and must do better. We also need to stop thinking of event websites as only being relevant during the event.

Now obviously the festival happened. And there are other places online that provide evidence and a record of it. There’s the Wikipedia entry, the many blog posts that were written, thousands of photos uploaded to the web, etc. But all of these should be ancillary to the event website, not a substitute for it. And there’s no guarantee that they’ll exist in the future. For instance, you can read Todd’s article today, but in six months it will no longer be available on the web (hopefully my archive link is…this is a problem the Journal is aware of and hopes to address).

The saddest part about this particular instance is that I guessed it would happen. I should have spoken up sooner. The good news is that I archived the entire site on November 27, 2010. You can see the front page here.

I don’t think this is an easy problem to solve, but I believe it is important that we do solve it. I’m going to do what I can to help educate others about why this is so important, I’ll continue learning from the very smart people we have in the “archival” business, and I’ll continue doing what I can to help archive.

Alberta Budget 2010 website – security through obscurity

By Mack D. Male · February 9, 2010 at 12:13am

Tomorrow, Tuesday, is budget day here in Alberta. Like many Albertans, I am curious about what Finance Minister Ted Morton is going to deliver, so I started poking around online. First stop, last year’s budget, available at http://budget2009.alberta.ca/.

Seems logical that the 2010 budget would be at http://budget2010.alberta.ca. So I tried that URL, and was prompted with a login screen. First thing that came to mind was “administrator” and “password”. Voila:

Fortunately for Mr. Morton, the documents don’t appear to have been uploaded yet. You can see all the placeholders though, which is kind of funny. And it seems you can leave feedback.

It does reveal the theme of the budget, Striking the Right Balance. Last year was Building on Our Strength.

This is what is known as “security through obscurity”. It’s not really secure, it’s just hidden. I’d suggest that programmers working at the Government of Alberta invest in Writing Secure Code, a fantastic book on the subject.

I hope this isn’t a reflection of the budget we see tomorrow…cutting corners, etc.

UPDATE: Sometime around 9:45 AM today they changed the password, and I think pointed the virtual directory somewhere else.

UPDATE2: The Journal wrote about this today.

UPDATE3: The site is now officially live with all the budget documents. Enjoy!

We need to preserve our local, digital, cultural artifacts

By Mack D. Male · December 7, 2009 at 11:45am

As Edmonton continues its climb toward global status, I think it’s important that we consider the digital cultural artifacts that we create along the way. It’s rare that something big happens in Edmonton (or anywhere in the world for that matter) without a website or other online presence of some kind being created. That online presence is important in the weeks and months leading up to an event, but it’s just as important after the fact too. We need to start considering that from the beginning.

Think about big events that Edmonton has hosted in recent years. The 2001 World Championships in Athletics should come to mind. If you do a search for Edmonton 2001, you’ll find:

And linked from the official IAAF website and many other pages that show up in the results, is the the Edmonton 2001 website, at http://www.2001.edmonton.com/. The problem is, that site no longer exists.

What would happen if the IAAF took down the page they are hosting? It doesn’t have to happen on purpose, it could be an unfortunate side effect of a redesign, server relocation, etc. The article at Wikipedia is pretty sparse, containing mainly result information. And the mention on the EEDC site is insignificant. It’s almost as if the event didn’t happen.

Additionally, I’d argue that none of the links that still exist tell the story of Edmonton 2001. The effort that went into it, the many volunteers and organizations that made it happen, the effect it had on the city, etc. I think it’s important that we capture that information, and that we do so online, where it is easily accessible by all.

Another more recent example would be the ICLEI World Congress, held in June 2009. The City of Edmonton has a brief page devoted to the event, but most of the information exists at the ICLEI site. That’s fine, but again we’re relying on someone else for the information, and we’re missing an opportunity to tell our story. The advantage that the ICLEI had over Edmonton 2001 is that many bloggers wrote about the event and many photographers posted photos, and their content will likely continue to exist for quite some time. The new Transforming Edmonton blog will help too, I think.

The idea of digital preservation applies to smaller-scale events too. Try to find an online presence for the 2005 K-Days (now Capital EX), the year the event’s attendance record was set. Or try to find out about the 2008 Fringe festival.

I recognize that there’s costs associated with preserving our online cultural artifacts. Someone has to pay for them, and someone has to maintain them. And if we go that extra step and treat some online presences as legacy projects with updates and other information to tell our story, there’s obviously costs associated with that too. I think the costs would be quite minimal, however, and definitely worth it.

Perhaps this is something for the Edmonton Heritage Council to tackle? Or the Edmonton Historical Board? Or maybe just you and me. Either way, we need to start taking digital preservation more seriously.

Twitter promoting Search despite major issues

By Mack D. Male · July 29, 2009 at 9:30am

Yesterday Twitter launched a new home page that puts more emphasis on search and trending topics. There’s a nice big search box on top, with up-to-date, daily, and weekly trends underneath. The aesthetic is different from the rest of the site however (you don’t see any of this if you’re logged in), so don’t be surprised to see additional changes in the coming weeks.

If you enter a query or click on a trending topic, the search results appear below. It looks a lot like Twitter Search. Some of the improvements include a description of what the trending topics are (Hell’s Kitchen was given the description “A reality television cooking competition”) and search tips appear in a little box on the right.

I don’t think the new design should be a surprise to anyone – it has been clear for quite some time that Twitter Search is important.

What’s surprising is that they’re promoting search even though it has major issues:

Stale Results: Twitter itself has become very stable lately, but the same cannot be said for Twitter Search. Results routinely become stale, sometimes for as long as an hour or two (so the newest tweets to show up in the results were posted an hour or two ago). For a real-time search engine, the stale results issue happens surprisingly frequently.
Missing Tweets: Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that the number of missing tweets has increased (though I think it has always been an intermittent problem). It used to be that I could enter my username and see all replies at Twitter Search, but lately I can’t. Some tweets simply don’t appear in the Twitter Search index. I’ve submitted a support request about this, but have not heard anything back yet.
Other Intermittent Issues: There are a few good reasons that someone might not appear in search results (such as if they have a private account) but lately Twitter has had issues keeping the index up-to-date with new accounts.
Lack of Innovation: With the exception of adding the “source” property to search results, Twitter has done very little to improve the service they purchased a little over a year ago. Real-time search is new and ripe for innovation, but Twitter doesn’t seem interested. One of the oldest quirks is that user IDs returned from Twitter Search don’t match up with user IDs at Twitter itself. This is scheduled to be fixed in the next version of the API, but it’s not clear when that will happen.

Worst of all, Twitter has been terrible at communicating about the above issues. The Twitter Status blog is never updated when search results go stale, and very little has been shared regarding the future direction of Twitter Search.

The good news is that Twitter is finally starting to acknowledge that they need to improve search. Last night, Biz wrote: “We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the quality of our search results and trend analysis…”

Search is vitally important to Twitter, and I want to see them succeed. If they don’t address the above issues however, someone else is going to come along and steal their thunder.

Idea: Proud Edmonton Tech Company badge

By Mack D. Male · July 17, 2009 at 1:00pm

Things have definitely improved in the last couple of years, but Edmonton still has a reputation as something of a dead zone for innovation. Or perhaps more accurately, we don’t really have a reputation – we’re not on the radar in most cases. It’s not true of course, there are plenty of interesting and innovative projects, companies, and people in Edmonton. The challenge is making others aware of them.

There are a variety of ways to do that. One is through the media, both traditional and new. Such mentions tend to be fleeting, however. Another way is through events such as DemoCamp, though those typically benefit only the locals. These are important, and we should keep doing them, but we need something else as well.

As I thought more about the problem, it occurred to me that we could learn something from other industries. There are two organizations in particular that do a good job of boosting local companies – Original Fare and Keep Edmonton Original. You can find their logos at independent restaurants and retailers around the city, and I think seeing them reinforces the notion that we have more than just big box stores and chains. What if we had something similar for technology companies?

For tech companies, the web is important. It’s often the first point of interaction. As such, it’s always been a pet peeve of mine that so many local tech companies seem afraid to mention on their website that they are based in Edmonton:

Semanti and InviteRight don’t mention where they are from at all
PureInbox describes themselves as a “Canada-based company”
WowJobs simply says “based in the province of Alberta”
Dozens of companies only mention Edmonton in their contact information, including Cell Phones Etc., Yellow Pencil, Thinktel, ProTraining.
A few mention Edmonton in passing on their about page, such as Paramagnus, Nirix, Industry Mailout, Nexopia, Smibs, and others, but even this could be improved.

I’m not trying to suggest that any of these companies have intentionally left Edmonton out, but I do think there is room for improvement.

So here’s the idea: what if every local tech company put a badge on their website that says “Proud Edmonton Tech Company”? What kind of an impact would that have? I think it would definitely help with awareness.

For most companies, placing the badge on the front page probably doesn’t make sense. Nexopia, for instance, has a very large external audience that probably doesn’t care that the company is located in Edmonton. Others will simply want the front page to look a certain way. Nearly every company has an about page however, and it’s on that page that I think such a badge would be featured (and maybe on the contact page too). Where would the badge link to? I’m not sure. I’m not even sure it has to link anywhere.

What do you think?

Edmonton Stories – The First Month

By Mack D. Male · June 22, 2009 at 10:00am

Back on May 14th the City of Edmonton launched its Edmonton Stories website which aims to gather real stories from real Edmontonians for use in marketing. The City did a good job of getting the site started with around 60 pre-sourced stories, giving it some momentum out of the gate. I wrote at the time that while I thought the idea was good, it wasn’t without challenges. I mentioned three: quantity of content, regularity of content, and quality of content.

Were they able to feed off that momentum to overcome those challenges throughout the first month? Let’s find out.

It took about a week after launch for the first story to appear – Sheila Edmonds’ story about adventures in Edmonton was posted on May 22nd. Stories have appeared somewhat regularly since then.

Here are the stats for the period May 14th through June 14th (word counts use the Microsoft Word algorithm):

Total # of stories posted: 42 (6 by staff)
Total # of words: 16328
Average # of words per story: 389
Total # of stories with video: 4
Total # of stories with photos: 12

The longest story was Marie Drake’s My First Time on the Mindbender at 1034 words, while the shortest was Lucien Levesque’s Festival for Kids in St. Albert at 59 words (plus a video).

Here a couple Twitter-related stats, since I have them:

# of tweets mentioning #yegstories: 106
# of tweets mentioning edmontonstories: 163

Here’s a Wordle of the first month’s stories:

As expected, words like “city” and “people” are quite common. After all, it’s the people that make Edmonton great, right? I’m happy to see “bus” is larger than “car”

Edmonton Stories has been quite active online in the first month or so. They’ve amassed 247 followers on Twitter (posting more than 200 tweets), and 72 fans on Facebook. More interesting than that, at least in my opinion, is that they’ve been commenting on blogs. Here’s one example on Sharon’s blog. I think that’s smart, as long as they are making comments that add value (otherwise the strategy could backfire).

So, the verdict:

Quantity: I think 42 stories posted in the first month is fantastic!
Regularity: Not bad, but there’s definitely room for improvement here. At least one story per day would be ideal.
Quality: This is subjective, but I’d say the quality is pretty good. The average length of stories is about right. Most user submitted stories have been in the Living category however, which means the Working category seems a little less genuine. I’d also prefer that each story had a one or two line bio about the author.

Overall I’d say Edmonton Stories had a good first month – kudos! I hope they can keep it up in the months ahead.

I’ll (finally) be submitting my story this week!

Edmonton Stories

By Mack D. Male · May 14, 2009 at 10:30am

The City of Edmonton just launched a new campaign called Edmonton Stories. The goal of the campaign is to offer citizens an opportunity to share their stories about Edmonton with one another, and with people around the world. These stories will then be used in targeted marketing to attract labour and visitors to the city. There are two aspects to the campaign – the Edmonton 2030 video/vision that was unveiled at last week’s State of the City address, and the EdmontonStories.ca website.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to an Edmonton Stories preview earlier this week with a dozen or so other community members. Project lead Mary Pat Barry took us through some background information and a walk-through of the website. She explained that the City has done a lot of research into how Edmonton is perceived both internally and externally, and they found a big discrepancy. It turns out (according to their survey data at least) that Edmontonians view their city far differently than people who live elsewhere do. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite. And across almost all measures, Edmontonians view their city positively. Hence the push to get Edmontonians to share their stories.

Here’s how it works. They’ve seeded the website with roughly 60 stories covering a variety of topics. Anyone can go on the site and submit a story of their own. All entries are moderated, but the goal is a turnaround time of less than 72 hours for each one to be posted. In addition to text, you can attach images or video. Currently the site is focused on the city itself, but the entire capital region is a goal and input is not currently limited to any geographic area (in fact, “Calgary” was the default in the demo…minor glitch I’m sure). I haven’t been able to try it it yet, but posting a story looked simple enough in the demo.

Roughly $1 million was approved last year for the 2009 campaign. Most of that money is being spent on the website and the team of people who will manage and curate it. The website was built by Parcom Marketing Inc. and Yellow Pencil, and will be managed by the City of Edmonton and Parcom. I think it’s very attractive and well designed, but it’s not without flaws. For instance, there is now an RSS feed, but you really have to look for it. Also, there should be one for each category. I’m sure everything will be sorted out shortly, however.

I think the City is on the right track with Edmonton Stories. Despite being yet another place to create content, I can see how it serves a specific purpose. There are probably a significant number of people who have a story or two about the city to share, but not enough to warrant creating a blog. Edmonton Stories gives them a place to share a few things.

That said, I think Edmonton Stories faces some challenges:

Getting people to post stories is the key challenge. Will enough Edmontonians head over to the site to share something?
Ensuring stories are shared over time is another issue. To continue to have an impact, the site can’t go stale.
Maintaining a certain quality will be a challenge. What if many of the submissions are just a few sentences long? On the flip side, what if a story is clearly a marketing piece for a business or other organization? The moderators have their work cut out for them!

Not insurmountable, but challenges nonetheless.

Edmonton Stories is a more creative approach to the problem of how to market our city than the typical branding/marketing campaign, so kudos to the City for the concept. Now we’ll see how successful it is, and if it resonates with Edmontonians or not.

Take a look at the site and read the about page. What do you think? Also, you can follow @edmontonstories on Twitter.

UPDATE: There are more details on the campaign at the City of Edmonton website.