Year: 2010

Behind the scenes at Breakfast Television in Edmonton!

On the BT Edmonton set!A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Jespersen invited me to join him on BT Edmonton for a segment on blogs in Edmonton. The idea for that segment quickly turned into live-blogging the entire show, which I thought would be a fun opportunity!

So this is my post about my experience on Breakfast Television in Edmonton. I’ll be updating it throughout the morning (at the bottom). I’m also live-tweeting, of course.

To the right, you can see my “blogging desk” on set. Cool huh? In addition to checking out all the other guests this morning, I’ve got full access to check out the set, control room, etc. And I’m doing two segments on blogging: one at about 7:20am, talking about the business side of blogging, and one at 8:40am, talking about some of my favorite local blogs that you should be following!

On the BT Edmonton set!
Behind the camera!

For my first segment on the show, we talked about blogging, how I use it, and why businesses might want to get into it. Some of the things we covered:

  • Blogs are the stars of social media! A blog can be a great hub for all of your online activity, much like how I have mine setup with the buttons at the top.
  • It’s important to post consistently. Doesn’t have be every day, but it should be a consistent schedule, so that you know when to post and readers know when to expect something new!
  • Always turn on comments. Give people an opportunity to respond, and your blog will become much more valuable.
  • A good place to get started: WordPress.

The next segment will cover some of my favorite local blogs!

On the BT Edmonton set!
The Control Room at Citytv. These are the folks that make sure everything is running smoothly!

On the BT Edmonton set!
Ryan and Victoria’s Secret Angel Candice Swanepoel on set. The studio filled with people to get a glimpse of the supermodel!

On the BT Edmonton set!
Ryan outside, discussing Miracle Treat Day. Proceeds from any Blizzards sold at Dairy Queen locations in Edmonton today go toward the Stollery Children’s Hospital!

During my second segment on the show, Ryan asked me about five of my favorite local blogs. It was a difficult question to answer, even though I obviously had some time to prepare for it. In the end, I decided to give them a longer list, and together with the producers we narrowed it down to five that made it on air. Here are some of my favorite local blogs (the first five are the ones that appeared on the show):

I read a lot more blogs than these obviously, but I check all of those pretty regularly (using Google Reader). Enjoy!

On the BT Edmonton set!
The on-air personalities getting ready to close out the show!

On the BT Edmonton set!
BT Edmonton ends today with a performance by Carolyn Dawn Johnson.

It was a fun (and early) morning for me. It’s always interesting to get a peek behind the curtain, to see how a live show like BT Edmonton works. A few other thoughts on the experience:

  • There was a little bit of chaos in the studio at times, but not as much as I was expecting actually! It seems like a well-oiled machine. I thought it was interesting that they had a schedule with times down to the second. Obviously they deviate from it a little depending on how long people talk, but they stayed amazingly close to the plan.
  • The camera guys are so important. They setup the shots, and make everyone on screen look good. They’re the ones who run the studio on the ground (I guess you could say the control room runs it “from above”).
  • The control room was, as expected, pretty cool. Love the screens all over the place.
  • I thought the 3 hours would go by slowly, but before I knew it, we were done!

You can see the rest of my photos here. You can watch both of my segments here.

Thanks to Ryan and the entire BT Edmonton team for the opportunity!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – June 2010

Welcome to the sixth 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 June 2010:

# of local users: 8178 (an increase of 127 from May)
# of tweets by local users: 422018
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 29861 (7.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 148809 (35.2%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 108225 (25.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 21092 (5.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 15355 (3.6%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates – UberTwitter has been overtaken!

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • Just over 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 9.8 tweets per minute in June (compared to 9.6 tweets per minute in May).
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was June 25 at 17106. On average, 14068 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 13894 in May).
  • Of the 148809 replies posted by local users this month, 56284 or 37.8% were to other local users.
  • A total of 1631 users posted 50 times or more in June. In comparison, 1229 users posted just once.

 

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

  1. rootnl2k
  2. DWsBITCH
  3. fraygulrock
  4. Lekordable
  5. SGT_ZamboniGuy
  6. gcouros
  7. frostedbetty
  8. Hori_canada
  9. trinamlee
  10. angelzilla

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. iNews880
  3. ctvedmonton
  4. DebraWard
  5. livingsanctuary
  6. cbcedmonton
  7. capitalfm
  8. mastermaq
  9. joshclassen
  10. bingofuel

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

  1. britl
  2. angelzilla
  3. ZoomJer
  4. frostedbetty
  5. mspixieriot
  6. SaySandra
  7. LauraSem
  8. bingofuel
  9. fraygulrock
  10. GuitarKat

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. bentrem
  3. ctvedmonton
  4. mastermaq
  5. dantencer
  6. cbcedmonton
  7. CityofEdmonton
  8. bingofuel
  9. joshclassen
  10. iNews880

Final Thoughts

First off, my apologies to those of you who have been waiting for a stats update! I’ll be getting caught up over the next week or two.

There was a slight increase in the number of users in June, and a slight decrease in the number of tweets posted. I think that decrease is due to two things: one less day than in May, and the large amount of downtime that Twitter experienced in June (it was their worst month since August 2009). I’ll have more on this in a future post, but June 20 was the second anniversary of the #yeg hashtag!

Notes for 8/9/2010

I was pretty exhausted last night, so here are my weekly notes a little later than normal:

Yesterday was Slow Food Edmonton’s annual Wild Boar and Beer BBQ, organized this year by Maria and Sharon. The weather was great, and the event went off without a hitch! Yum! You can see all my photos here.

Wild Boar & Beer BBQ 2010

Wild Boar & Beer BBQ 2010

Wild Boar & Beer BBQ 2010

Edmonton Notes for 8/7/2010

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

The annual Cariwest parade took place downtown today:

Cariwest 2010

Cariwest 2010Cariwest 2010

Edmonton City Centre Airport Design Competition Finalists

Today Simon Farbrother, City Manager, and Phil Sande, City Centre Airport Executive Director, announced the five finalists in the City Centre Airport Lands Design Competition. These finalists will now work until the end of the year on their plans to redevelop the 216-hectare site into a sustainable, transit-oriented community.

City Centre Airport Design Competition Finalists

From the press release:

“We had an overwhelming response to our request for qualifications,” says Phil Sande, Executive Director, City Centre Airport redevelopment project, City of Edmonton. “We’ve received 33 submissions with a wealth of experience in innovative sustainable design, urban design and redevelopment, engineering and architectural design.”

The five winning firms are (in alphabetical order):

  1. BNIM, Kansas City, USA
  2. Foster & Partners, London, UK
  3. KCAP, Rotterdam, Netherlands
  4. Perkins + Will, Vancouver, Canada
  5. Sweco International AB, Stockholm, Sweden

The contents of their submissions is confidential, so all we got to see were the covers of the proposals. The City also suggested the following visuals: BNIM, Foster & Partners, KCAP, Perkins + Will, Sweco International AB.

Local firms involved in the proposals include Williams Engineering, Bunt & Associates, Cohos Evamy, and Calder Bateman.

City Centre Airport Design Competition Finalists

Their submissions were based upon the Master Plan Principles that City Council approved earlier this year. The review committee included: Simon Farbrother, City Manager; Gord Jackson, Acting Manager of the Policy and Planning Branch; Rick Daviss, Manager of Corporate Properties Branch; Peter Hackett, Exec. Professor School of Business, VP Research and a Fellow of the National Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Alberta; Chris Henderson, CEO of Delphi Group, Canada’s leading strategic consulting firm in the environment and clean energy sectors; and Todd Latham, President of Actual Media Inc. which produces ReNew Canada, the infrastructure and renewal magazine. James McKellar, Associate Dean, External Relations Academic Director, Program in Real Estate and Infrastructure, Schulich School of Business, York University ensured the review process was transparent and fair.

Some additional notes from the press conference:

  • The first phase of the build out could be completed by 2024.
  • Preliminary results of the environmental evaluation show three small sites with limited contamination potential. The findings thus far were described as “very positive”. More information will be available in about 3 weeks.
  • Each firm will receive an honorarium of $50,000 to participate.
  • Phil said that consideration of Edmonton as a Winter City was important, and was something the finalists both embraced and have experience with.

Edmontonians will get to review all five submissions at the end of the year. The review committee will then be joined by Lars Franne, Retired Project Manager, Hammarby Sjöstad Sustainable Redevelopment, Stockholm, Sweden, and potentially others, and will make a recommendation to City Council, who ultimately has the final decision.

It’s great to see this project moving forward!

UPDATE: Here are the biographies of the five finalists (in PDF), provided by the City.

Edmonton’s Omni Technology Solutions brings CRM integration to the world

Last year, local software company Omni Technology Solutions celebrated its 10th birthday. They’ve had some incredible success during that time, and are well-positioned for future growth. With a focus on customer relationship management integration solutions, they’re probably not a company that you’ve heard of, unless you happen to be a customer. While almost all the leading CRMs are headquartered in Silicon Valley, it’s interesting to know that the number one CRM integration platform is developed here in Edmonton! That’s why I reached out to Trevor Poapst, Omni’s Director of Global Marketing, to learn more.

Their core offering, Riva, overcomes the limitations of Outlook CRM plug-ins that need to be installed, configured and managed on each user’s desktop, laptop and mobile device. Instead, Riva gets installed once on a server and transparently syncs CRM address book, calendar, sales and support data to all Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise email clients. Riva is compatible with the very popular Salesforce, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM, SageCRM, Saleslogix and several other leading CRM systems. What’s unique about Riva is that the synchronization all happens server-side, so there are no Outlook plug-ins required.

The company’s second product is called eControl, and it satisfies the need for a simpler, web-based alternative to the native management tools for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, Novell GroupWise, eDirectory, SAP and other systems. Though eControl has been designed to be simple enough for non-technical users to use, it is still very powerful, and features full auditing, enhancing compliance with SOX and other regulations. Omni’s customers have used eControl to manage anywhere from 500 to 50,000 user accounts, and a typical deployment takes less than 3 hours.

You’ll notice that both solutions work with Novell’s products, which is really where Omni got started. They’re one of the top three GroupWise developers in the world, and have benefited greatly from participating in the Novell ecosystem. Being focused on Novell hasn’t been without challenges, however. The first was the size of the market. There are far fewer Novell customers than Microsoft customers. In the last year or two however, Omni has successfully expanded into the Microsoft marketplace, and is working hard to continue to grow in that area.

The second challenge is one that Omni continues to deal with. Though the company has always been based here in Edmonton, very few of its customers have been in Canada because GroupWise has traditionally had a stronger following elsewhere. Winning global sales hasn’t been easy. In addition to working with partners, Omni has started to open offices abroad. Offices in Chile and Munich opened late last year, and the company recently closed its first major eControl deal in Chile as a result.

Though reaching the global market is challenging as an Alberta-based company, Trevor wouldn’t have it any other way. The company has received lots of support from the provincial government, and has benefited from having access to a highly trained workforce and relatively low business costs. Trevor also mentioned that Alberta is a great place to raise a family, in part because you don’t have to commute several hours every day. In fact, Omni’s CEO and CTO both bike to work year-round, even in the snow!

Omni just launched version 3.5 of eControl (education customers can save 70% until August 31), as well as its new Riva website. The company is planning its second annual eControl conference in Santiago, Chile. Omni is poised for growth and is looking to expand its partner network, especially now that it can tap into the large Microsoft and CRM partner communities.

It was great talking to Trevor (who is actually working from Mexico this year), and learning more about a successful Edmonton-based software company making significant inroads into the global CRM and identity management markets. I think it’s a fantastic example of the success that companies based here can have, and I wish Omni all the best as they continue to grow. You can follow Omni on Facebook and on Twitter.

Would you trust a citizen plumber to work on your toilet?

That’s one of the questions, referring to citizen journalism, that Edmonton Journal columnist Dan Barnes asked last week in this all-over-the-place piece. Was it rhetorical? Maybe, but I’ll bite anyway.

I know you’re not supposed to answer a question with a question, but I wonder what Dan meant by citizen plumber? Did he mean someone whose experience with plumbing is limited to some fancy new tool, or did he mean someone who simply lacks the license but has all of the necessary interest, skills, experience, and knowledge of a plumber-minus-the-citizen? My point is that its easy to misuse the label “citizen journalist” and to paint with too broad a brush.

It’s also really difficult to define. I wonder how Dan defines it? Maybe he thinks I’m a citizen journalist because my platform is this blog. But what about “mainstream journalists” who have blogs – aren’t they also citizen journalists then? If we can’t define it with the tools or platform, maybe we can define it with the kinds of content the citizen journalist produces. But there again, what’s the distinction between someone who rewrites a press release for a newspaper and someone who does an interview for a blog post? Is the only distinction the employer?

Why do we need that label anyway? What would happen if we dropped the term “citizen” and just called them journalists? Both tell stories, after all.

Dan Barnes and I would be on the same level, that’s what would happen. And my guess is that Dan wouldn’t be able to deal with that.

It’s worth mentioning that Dan’s argument is not new or unique. Though at least one other “mainstream journalist” has used the term “citizen plumber” before, the straw man is most often made with a “citizen neurosurgeon” or a “citizen dentist”. As always, Techdirt does a nice job of dealing with that:

Most people seem to recognize the basic difference between reporting on something and cutting into someone’s brain. And, many people also recognize that most reporters themselves are often not experts in the field they’re reporting on — and what participatory journalism and the internet enable is the ability for actual experts on the topic to take part in the discussion and reporting as well.

I don’t think it’s that difficult to recognize the differences between a plumber and a journalist, either. There are only so many ways to fix a leaky pipe, but a myriad of ways to interpret and write about something, for instance.

The reality is that journalism is not a constant, it’s not static or unchanging. Like most things worth caring about, journalism is constantly evolving, and whether Dan likes it or not, journalists who don’t work for the mainstream media are here to stay.

I can understand why we’d be hesitant to call the first guy I described above a plumber, but it’s pretty clear that the second one is a plumber. If we call them both just plumbers, do we risk cheapening the term? If we call them both “citizen plumbers”, do we risk preventing the second guy from making an impact?

What if the new tool that plumber #1 uses turns out to be a plunger, or Drano, all of a sudden enabling millions of people to deal with simple plumbing problems on their own, and thereby freeing up the non-citizen plumbers to focus on more difficult problems? That’s the real risk, in my opinion, with putting too much weight behind a label. We risk overlooking the significant contributions that both can make to plumbing overall.

Still not convinced Dan? Maybe you’ll enjoy this story (from way back in 2006!):

Witness the power of the humble tools of citizens’ media. A citizen dentist used them to become a journalist. He used them to give the world a unique and human perspective on a story where too much is unreported. He gained an appreciative and supportive audience around the world. He helped give birth to a new medium. And journalism is all the better for it.

Give a citizen dentist a blog and he’ll change the world? Maybe not, but he might just impact journalism for the better.

Notes for 8/2/2010

Hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend! Here are my weekly notes:

Sharon and I were “celebrity” judges at the Heritage Festival this weekend, along with former City Councillor Michael Phair and CTV’s News Director Glenn Kubish. It was lots of fun, especially getting to drive around in a golf cart! You can see all of our photos here.

Heritage Festival 2010

Heritage Festival 2010

Photo Tour of Apron 2 at the Edmonton International Airport

Last week I had the opportunity (with a few other local bloggers) to tour the General Aviation Services at the Edmonton International Airport (EIA). As with the ECCA tour, Traci Bednard, VP of Communications at Edmonton Airports, was our guide. We ran into some challenges getting a vehicle to take us to Apron 2, but we eventually made it. Here’s what we saw.

EIA General Aviation Tour

This is what most people think of when they think about EIA. The number of passengers has grown significantly since scheduled service was consolidated at EIA in 1996. EIA now handles roughly 6 million passengers each year, and is in the midst of major expansion, known as Expansion 2012.

EIA General Aviation Tour

Apron 2, on the north side of the airport near by runway 02/20, is where a significant amount of general aviation (GA) activity takes place. Approximately 380,000 landed seats are served through Apron 2 each year. Edmonton Airports has committed just under $20 million for GA facilities & support at EIA this year.

EIA General Aviation Tour

There are currently two Fixed Base Operators (FBO) at Apron 2 – Executive Flight Centre and Shell Aerocentre (Shell also operates at ECCA). FBOs provide a variety of services, such as aircraft maintenance, fueling, passenger services, cargo services, etc. They operate hangars, passenger lounges, executive lounges, and customer parking. Shuttle services are available to/from the main terminal, enabling passengers to connect with scheduled service.

EIA General Aviation Tour

We got to see one of the Executive Flight Centre’s facilities. The VIP lounge pictured above serves the Edmonton Oilers, Edmonton Eskimos, and many others. One of the most recent VIPs to use it was Kevin Costner. Oilers players are provided with valet service, so they can drive up and get on the plane (and when they return, their vehicles are ready to go). The Executive Flight Centre will honor almost any request, including catering, ground transportation, etc. The Executive Flight Centre also provides ample hangar space, and can even accommodate a Global Express.

EIA General Aviation Tour

A number of GA charter companies operate at Apron 2, including Alta Flights, Flight Tech Aviation, North Cariboo Air, and Sunwest Aviation. Other users include the military, and private operators such as Cathton Aviation.

EIA General Aviation Tour

EIA is the primary airport serving the north. At EIA, 70% of northern departures are scheduled service, 18% are non-scheduled, and 12% provide oil sands related crew changes. As many as 1200 CNRL Horizon workers per day pass through Apron 2. Other northern projects that rely on EIA include the Mackenzie Gas Project, Diavik Diamond Mines, and Athabasca Oil Sands.

EIA General Aviation Tour

EIA could easily accommodate the GA activity that currently takes place at ECCA. There are many large hangars sitting empty, such as the old Spar hangar, pictured above. It offers 120,000 square feet of hangar space, with an additional 35,000 square feet of office space attached. Thanks to recent investments that Edmonton Airports has made at Apron 2, there is also plenty of space available for customers who want something different to custom-build.

Thanks to Traci and Edmonton Airports for the tour. You can see the rest of my photos here.

Edmonton Notes for 7/31/2010

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Braised Tilapia with Leeks and Tomatoes

Summer is for eating outside!