Year: 2005

Gates on High School Education

Post ImageMany of my friends are in, or have graduated from, the Faculty of Education. I guess that means that whether or not they become teachers, they have some interest in education, and indeed a vested interest in seeing education move forward. Yet I have often said that I don’t think the way we do things is right. I have wondered aloud to these friends that perhaps a move back to the old “master and apprentice” way of learning would be more appropriate! Today I came across these remarks from Bill Gates made back in February:

When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion:

America’s high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

I’d say that’s a fair assessment. Almost since day one of my University career, I have thought there must be a better way to do this. After the first two years of University, Grade 11 and Grade 12 largely seemed like a waste of time. Or maybe not a waste of time, but an inefficient use of time. Maybe I’m just cynical, I don’t know. I know there are teachers who care, but there’s often not enough resources. And some of the things that students need, they don’t have the opportunity to obtain.

I don’t really have a suggestion for alternatives though either – I simply haven’t given it enough thought. I do know however, that I want my kids to have the best education possible. There’s so much that we could be doing in high schools that we aren’t.

Read: Bill & Melinda Gates

Preliminary Podcasting Survey Results

Post ImageVia Derek I came across Peter Chen’s preliminary statistics from his podcasting and videoblogging survey. He makes it clear that the results are preliminary, and that follow-up data is being requested with more analysis to come. Having said that, the results are quite interesting! Here are some highlights I picked out:

  • Looks like the majority of podcasters publish content weekly. (48.77 %)
  • Average episode length is just over 29 minutes.
  • The average number of minutes spent producing an episode is almost 260! That’s an incredibly high number that we hope to reduce with our solutions. I know how much time it takes – that’s one reason I stopped BlogosphereRadio to focus on building the tools!
  • About 61% of respondents say they have no business model – they do it as a private endeavor. Sounds like my Average Joe Podcasting post was spot on!
  • English is overwhelmingly the most commonly spoken language. (85.75 %)
  • One stat that surprised me – around 83% of respondents were male. For some reason, I expected that to be a little lower. I think it’s because of the recent push in blogging to find female voices; I probably figured that podcasting would benefit.

Very intriguing results. I look forward to seeing what Peter comes up with next. I also wonder just how representative these numbers are – there’s no margin of error or anything posted (probably because they are preliminary results).

Read: Peter Chen

Ring Tones

Post ImageRing tones seem to be everywhere these days. You can’t buy a cell phone without seeing customizable ring tones as a selling feature, and chances are you can’t watch five minutes of MuchMusic without seeing a commercial for something related to ring tones. I personally don’t understand why the idea of changing your ring tone is so enticing – then again, I usually have my phone set to vibrate. Maybe I can get custom vibrations? Like a variation in the length or something. Anyway, I digress.

David Carr wrote a piece for the New York Times yesterday in which he explained that today’s youth are accustomed to getting things for free. They download music and movies, and would rather record a TV show using a VCR than plunk down some cash for a TiVo or similar device. The only form of media youth spend money on seems to be ring tones:

Earlier this month at the Web 2.0 conference, John Battelle, an author of a book on search and one of the organizers of the conference, empaneled a group of teenage consumers that he assembled (at no charge, by placing an ad on Craigslist). They dutifully admitted that they did not pay for music or news or video, but most said they still spent $40 to $60 a month on media.

So what medium finally cracked the code on youthful intransigence?

Ring tones, available for now only from their wireless providers.

Have ring tones really cracked the code? Hardly! The only reason we don’t see teenagers (and anyone else for that matter) swapping ring tones like they swap music is because the entire process is too difficult. It’s easy to share a song, download and play it, and even transfer it to a mobile device. Most people somewhat familiar with computers can figure it out (and as Rick points out, young kids are savvy enough to use BitTorrent for their swapping). Ring tones are a different story though! It’s not clear how you create a ring tone, let alone share it with your friends so they can install it on their phones too.

As soon as someone makes it dead easy to create and share ring tones (and the tool or service reaches a critical mass of eyeballs), the market for ring tones will be history. Does anyone really think that a ring tone is worth $1.99? I certainly don’t. Especially not after Apple et al. have convinced me that a song is worth just 99 cents!

Read: New York Times

Small Business Week

Post ImageLast week was Small Business Week in Alberta, and indeed all across Canada. Here are some interesting statistics about small business in Alberta:

  • Small businesses (businesses that employ less than 10 employees) account for 74% (104,000) of all businesses with employees in Alberta. (Source: Alberta Economic Development, 2004 Alberta Business Monitor)
  • In 2004, women accounted for 34% of all self-employed individuals in Alberta; this was the same as the national average. (Source: Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey 2004)
  • From 1999 to 2004, the number of people that were self-employed in Edmonton has increased by 3%. (Source: Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey 2004)

I am included in that last number! Paramagnus incorporated here in Edmonton back in 2000. Speaking of Edmonton, our small business week runs this week, from the 24th to the 28th of October (had to be different I suppose!):

From every small business success story, there is an idea, which through initiative, tenacity and the entrepreneurial spirit, becomes reality. From this entrepreneurial spirit, innovative concepts and dynamic businesses are nurtured. Edmonton Small Business Week 2005 – October 24 –28, is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements and accomplishments of small business and the entrepreneurial spirit. Share the spirit and enjoy the week of activities planned!

Blaine Yamkovy
Chair, 2005 Small Business Week

You can see the list of events on their website. Dickson and I are attending the VenturePrize Seminar tomorrow evening (you had to register previously), but other than that I hadn’t really planned to attend anything. I think they need more events!

Happy Small Business Week to my fellow smallbiz owners in Edmonton!

Read: Edmonton SBW

Dare on Google

Post ImageLots of stuff out there on Google again lately, as is usual now I guess. John introduced us this morning to Google Base, and the Google Print debate has been roaring for weeks now. My favorite comments on the subject come from Dare Obasanjo though:

By any measure, Google is multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation. However whenever its executives speak, they do an excellent job of portraying the company as if it is the altruistic side project of a bunch of geeky college kids. I don’t just mean their corporate slogan of “Do No Evil” although it is one manifestation of this strategy.

More and more the opinion pieces compare Google to the Microsoft of old – the company that everyone in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) loves to hate.

Read: Dare Obasanjo

Notes for 10/23/2005

I can’t believe it’s almost November! Here’s my weekly notes:

  • My Mom was in town on Saturday night! She was on her way to Toronto for some training for her new job, and she’ll be back here in two weeks on the way back. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, so it was great she could stop in Edmonton!
  • Tomorrow (or technically today – October 24th) is United Nations Day – the day the UN officially came into existence when it’s charter was ratified by the majority of signatories. This also happens to be the UN’s 60th anniversary.
  • I went to see A History of Violence tonight with Sharon and Megan. I can only describe it as deliciously violent.
  • Sharon’s sister asked me to sponsor her while I was there tonight too, so I did. I gave her $10 towards her run. They are raising money to build a school in Africa.
  • I really like the Hypnotiq Beach at Earl’s – so yummy!
  • When I was a kid, our family had an original Atari 2600. I never knew what happened to it until recently, when I found out my parents still had it. I was quite interested, so my Mom brought it down with her last night. There’s lots of games and controllers – only the power supply is missing. I won an auction for one on eBay a few hours ago though, so we’ll be playing Atari in the Paramagnus office soon enough!
  • I am tempted to listen to 96X this week just to see if anything came of the boycott. If you hear anything, leave a comment!

Flock Developer Preview

Post ImageAn application called Flock has been hyped and hyped again recently. Naturally, I had to see for myself if it lived up to the hype, so I went and downloaded the Flock Developer Preview this afternoon. What is Flock?

Flock is based on the open source Mozilla code base. All of our modifications to Mozilla code are released under the MPL, GPL and LGPL licenses. 100% of the Flock-created code to date is released under the GPL license. Going forward, we may incorporate some proprietary code from partners, or even created in-house, but our plan is for the vast majority if not all of our code to be open source for the foreseeable future.

I guess the idea is that Flock is a so-called “Web 2.0 browser” based on Firefox. So far it connects up to del.icio.us and Flickr. As others have noted, it’s still very early in the application’s development so I’ll try not to knock it too hard.

Let me get a few things out of the way first. Their website sucks. They don’t have any images (not even a logo!). The download is huge compared to Firefox. The browser itself runs incredibly slow compared to Firefox (who knows what they did – it’s supposedly based on the very quick Firefox). I don’t see how they are going to make money – their “roadmap” is kinda funny. Much of what Flock promises can be accomplished via extensions, and there’s reason to believe such features will be rolled into Firefox and featured in the next IE version anyway.

Never say never, but I don’t see myself using Flock in place of Firefox or IE anytime soon. I’m not sure that del.icio.us, blogging and Flickr integration would be enough to tempt me either!

Ah that feels better. The only thing worse than a hyped application is a hyped application that sorely disappoints. Keep in mind this is only the developer preview, but I’m not holding my breath. Mark Evans wrote about Flock today too.

Read: Flock

96X Boycott?

Post ImageToday I received a rather interesting email forward. The original email was from Matt Ashdown. I’ll let you read it first before I comment:

Between 9 and 10 am on boh October 12th, and 19th, 96X had on their station what they called the “ADHD HOUR.” During this hour, they only would play the first 90 seconds of each song, and between the songs they would have short vignettes that devalue people with ADHD through humiliation, embarassement, and slander. Essentially what these vignettes are implying is that people with ADHD are stupid. I am quite distressed that after so much human rights legislation, and work has been done, a main stream radio station thinks it is humerous to discriminate against a minority population and gets away with it.

I challenge you to boycott 96X until the “ADHD hour” is removed from the air. Write a letter to the program manager and submit it through either their web site or through me. I will be sending in massed letters next Wednesday October 26th. And finally, you can help through spreading the word to as many people as you can.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to email me at mattashdown@hotmail.com

Actually, they played it again this morning at 9 AM, and I am pretty sure it’s called the “ADD Hour” – the old acronym for the disorder. Regardless, I don’t think we need to take the show off the air (it’s kind of neat actually) but I would support a name change. It’s probably not the most appropriate name in the world, that’s for sure. You have to give them credit though for at least trying something new. Anyway, now I’ve done my part, by letting you know!

Read: 96X

The New Splog

Post ImageBack in April of 2004 I was posting about something I called “splogging“. Basically it was the repeated and never-ending activity of leaving comments on someone’s blog post, essentially, spam comments. At the time, it was funny, because I was using this against friends! Eventually spam comments became a real problem, and it was no longer funny. I first experienced huge amounts of spam on my blog in October of 2004, which forced me to introduce a Human Interaction Proof control, commonplace on the web now.

The term splog is changing though. No longer does it mean spam comments (which, fortunately have declined in numbers). Instead, it refers to fake blogs setup for the sole purpose of creating link farms. Here’s what the sploggers do:

The splogger executed a script that ran searches on blog search engines for specific keywords, said [PubSub’s Bob] Wyman, notably names of some of the A-list bloggers, like Dave Winer and Chris Pirillo. Then the splogger took the results, went to Blogger-BlogSpot and, using the service’s application programming interface, or API, automatically created tens of thousands of blogs that contained text from the bloggers’ real Web sites, Wyman said, along with links to the mortgage and other sites.

People querying the well-known bloggers’ names in blog search engines, and people who track these bloggers and their write-ups via services like PubSub, Technorati and Feedster, then received feeds to the fake blogs, jamming RSS readers with useless links, Wyman said.

I am by no means an A-list blogger, but I have noticed it happening to me too. If you search Google for mastermaq, the results are littered with results for fake blogs. Most of the ones that affect searches for me are not hosted at Blogspot, but some are. And that’s where most of the problem has originated from.

The problem has gotten really bad lately, as described in the CNET News.com article I quoted above. Who knows what will happen, but we need a resolution! To get things started, Chris Pirillo has posted Ten Suggestions for Google’s Blogspot. I particularly like suggestions two and six – no brainers in my opinion.

Read: CNET News.com

Average Joe Podcasting Revisited

Post ImageYou might remember that way back on August 18th, 2005 I wrote a post entitled Average Joe Podcasting. Let me highlight the main point of that post for you:

Not everyone who starts a podcast is going to want to make money from it, just like not everyone who blogs does so with the intention of making a living. I read a lot about podcasting – news articles, blog posts, etc., and I can’t help but feel that far too many individuals and organizations focus on the “making money from podcasting” idea.

As soon as starting and maintaining a podcast is as simple as starting and maintaining a blog, I think we’ll see the same breakdown in podcasting [as in blogging].

You should read the entire post to get the full argument in context, but that’s the main idea – that individuals will likely start to podcast for themselves, and that they’ll become a major segment of the podcasting world.

Almost exactly two months after I wrote that comes a post from Odeo’s Evan Williams, entitled Podcasting for Regular People. Here’s the main idea in his post:

While blogging can be about playing on a world stage to influence, gain audience, and, potentially, monetize (the same goals as most other media), there are millions of people who are happily pubishing daily without those motivations. For them, it’s more about expression, self-reflection, and communication.

I call these people “casual content creators.” It’s not just that they’re amateur or part of the great, unwashed, Long Tail. It’s that they’re playing a different game.

The idea of casual content creation in the realm of audio is a powerful one. And I think it’s a yet-to-be-duly-recognized segment of the (potential) podcasting world.

Sound familiar? I thought so.

Read: Odeo Blog