State of the Ottawa Twittersphere – January 2010

Welcome to the first State of the Ottawa Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Ottawa, ON.

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

For January 2010:

# of local users: 8562
# of tweets by local users: 426258
# of tweets by local users containing #ottawa/#yow: 2828 (0.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 150400 (35.3%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 113889 (26.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 40243 (9.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 18104 (4.2%)

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 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 9.6 tweets per minute in January.
The day with the most local tweets posted was January 27 at 17041. On average, 13750 local tweets were posted each day.
Of the 150400 replies posted by local users this month, 41710 or 27.7% were to other local users.
A total of 1618 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 1235 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:

Final Thoughts

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with the Winnipeg stats, so learning that they don’t use a local hashtag was interesting, not surprising. But it’s safe to say that I am surprised local hashtag usage in Ottawa is so low (unless they use one I’m not aware of): I counted just 112 tweets tagged with #yow, and just 2716 with #ottawa. As you can see above, that’s less than 1% of all tweets posted during the month. Maybe some of that is due to the federal/national focus that is natural for Canada’s capital city. Ottawa users do reply to one another more frequently than Winnipeggers do, however.

Another surprise: there are a lot of users in Ottawa and they post a lot! I’m looking forward to seeing if the numbers grow.

Christmas Charity Auction Dinner at Ric’s Grill

When Graham Hicks asked if I wanted to be involved in the Edmonton Sun’s annual Christmas Charity Auction back in October, I was flattered. And to honest, a little worried. I would host one of the “media dinners” – local media personalities paired up with a restaurant. With well-known local celebs like Global TV’s Gord Steinke and Lynda Steele (who went for $2255), who would bid on me, I wondered? What if no one bid on me?! Still, I relished the opportunity to represent Edmonton’s social media community, not to mention partake in two of my favorite things: meeting new people, and food.

It turns out there were 16 bids on my media dinner, with the final bid going for $140. Not bad! The auction supports the Edmonton Christmas Bureau, Sign of Hope, Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation, and the United Way. A total of $240,000 was raised last year, down from the $350,000 raised in 2008 but still quite good. Since 2003, the charity auction has raised an impressive $1.3 million!

Last Wednesday, Sharon and I were joined by winning bidder Terri Lynn and her friends Kelly, Sue, and Ginette, at Ric’s Grill downtown. The foursome had participated in the auction in years past, winning a very enjoyable dinner with CBC’s Ron Wilson and Peter Brown (with Gurvinder Bhatia at Bistecca). An evening with those guys is pretty hard to top, but I thought our dinner went really well!

After introductions (and thanks to Terri Lynn for bidding on me) our conversation shifted to food and local restaurants, given that all of us are such fans. Terri Lynn shared that she reads Sharon’s blog every morning, something that I think an increasing number of Edmontonians do! We talked a little about memorable blogging moments, given that the Alberta budget website thing had just happened, and of course about how Sharon and I got into blogging.

Dinner was great too – I especially enjoyed the almond goat cheese crostini starter. Sharon wrote more about the dinner here.

Thanks again to Terri Lynn, Kelly, Sue, and Ginette, as well as Ric’s Grill, for a great evening, and congratulations to Graham Hicks and the Edmonton Sun for another successful auction!

State of the Winnipeg Twittersphere – January 2010

Welcome to the first State of the Winnipeg Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Winnipeg, MB.

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

For January 2010:

# of local users: 4107
# of tweets by local users: 211554
# of tweets by local users containing #winnipeg/#ywg: 1958 (0.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 73028 (34.5%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 53271 (25.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 13894 (6.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7024 (3.3%)

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 4.8 tweets per minute in January.
The day with the most local tweets posted was January 25 at 8408. On average, 6824 local tweets were posted each day.
Of the 73028 replies posted by local users this month, 13608 or 18.6% were to other local users.
A total of 831 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 558 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:

Final Thoughts

It turns out users in Winnipeg do not use the airport code hashtag that many other Canadian cities have adopted! I recorded just 7 tweets by local users tagged with #ywg in January (interestingly, Edmontonians mentioned #ywg 20 times in January). Even #winnipeg isn’t that popular, with just 1951 tweets. In addition to the lack of hashtagging, Winnipeg users don’t seem to reply to one another as much as other cities do.

Now that we have the data, it would be interesting to dig deeper to find out why a community like Winnipeg doesn’t get as organized online as some others. I’ll continue tracking (and improving my tracking).

CTV Edmonton launches Inner Tube blog

On Friday afternoon, just hours before the start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, CTV Edmonton launched a new blog called Inner Tube. I’m not sure if the timing was just a coincidence or if CTV Edmonton purposefully wanted to “soft launch” the blog, but either way, this “online experiment of sorts” is something that’s worth paying attention to.

First, the key points:

Inner Tube is a group blog. Entries will be written by a variety of people at CTV Edmonton, including Carrie Doll and Josh Classen.
This is an Edmonton project, not something that came from Toronto.
Posts are edited for clarity, comments are moderated.
From the about blurb: “You’ll read stories about the inner workings of the news process, how we develop our stories, or just casual observations about what makes north central Alberta so special.”

I called Stewart Shaw, web guru at CTV Edmonton, to learn more about the site that he has been working to launch for the last six months or so. My first question was why it took so long! Stewart very democratically explained that many people just aren’t as comfortable with technology as the rest of us, and that convincing all of the necessary people took time (as it would have in any typical corporate environment). He was pleased with how things progressed.

Stewart told me that CTV Edmonton sees this as an extension of what they’ve been doing for more than 50 years. The station has always felt that it was part of the community, and the blog is just a modern way of ensuring that remains true. And while the CTV Edmonton account on Twitter has been quite successful, and most stories on the news website offer the ability to leave comments, neither offers the same kind of connection that the blog can (though Carrie Doll, Josh Classen, and other personalities regularly interact with other Twitter users). Stewart said that the Save Local TV open house last year opened some eyes – it was the first time in a long time that CTV Edmonton had invited the public to the station, and they were overwhelmed by the response. The idea with Inner Tube is to open up a little, to provide a glimpse behind the curtain from the people that make CTV Edmonton tick.

Local media blogs are not new, of course. The Edmonton Journal, iNews880, and Edmonton Sun have had blogs on their websites for a long time, with varying levels of success. The difference is that CTV Edmonton has created a group blog that everyone will contribute to, rather than individual blogs for each employee or personality. The idea is that it’ll be a little easier to keep fresh, and also to build a following with. I think the jury’s still out on which approach is more successful, but I like that CTV Edmonton is experimenting with something different.

Inner Tube is off to a good start, with roughly half a dozen posts already up on the blog. It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves – I hope it opens the door to even more online activity from the local media. Congrats to Stewart and everyone else at CTV Edmonton for launching Inner Tube, and good luck!

Valentine’s Day in Edmonton: Deal or No Deal?

Sharon and I decided to collaborate on this post. Enjoy!

Sharon:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a holiday where consuming chocolate is the national norm, and for an occasion that is marked with an indulgent feast. And though I realize that Valentine’s Day has been escalating in its commercial nature over the past two decades (and one that that Mack and I embraced wholeheartedly last year), a gander at one too many pre-fixe restaurant menus sent me over the edge this time around.

Of course, restaurants shouldn’t be blamed for feeding a consumer-driven hunger for extravagance, excess, and unbridled expense on February 14. No doubt, some meals, and the ultimate experience of spending time with your sweetheart could be worth every penny. Also, some restaurants do offer embellishments – providing a rose to the lady, employing a musician to set the ambiance, offering a treat at meal’s end – but could it really be worth the heightened price tag? How much more are patrons charged on Valentine’s Day, compared with any other day? With Mack’s penchant for statistics and graphs, we set to find out.

Mack:

Coming up with the data was harder than we thought! Finding the set price of the Valentine’s Day menu was easy, but finding something to compare it to was not. We decided to generate a comparable figure using the closest dishes we could find on the regular menu. Definitely not scientific, but fairly representative.

We started by finding as many restaurants with Valentine’s Day menus as we could, and then narrowed it down to those which also had regular menus online. We ended up with 12 restaurants:

The average Valentine’s Day menu price was $71.08 per person, with prices ranging from $35 per person at The Dish to $160 per person at Red Ox Inn. The average regular menu price was surprisingly similar at $69.65 per person. On average, Valentine’s Day menus featured 4 courses.

So what’s the best deal? By far, Madison’s Grill. Their 6 course Valentine’s Day menu is just $85 per person – the regular menu would cost roughly $116 per person. Of course, we’re not sure about portion sizes, but based on our recent Farmers’ Market Dinner experience, we expect they will not be small. The worst deal? Hardware Grill – you pay $31 more for the Valentine’s Day menu than you would on a regular day.

I wouldn’t cite any of this data in an academic paper, and the numbers don’t take into account ambiance, food quality, freedom of choice and service, but it was fun to generate just the same. I was surprised to discover that the Valentine’s Day menus aren’t that much more expensive after all!

Sharon:

So numbers aside, after scrutinizing more than a dozen pre-fixe menus, I can tell you that considering the menu options only, both Mack and I agree that Hardware Grill wins, hands down. We were salivating as we read through each course (butternut squash-mascarpone tortelloni with truffle butter cream sauce and fresh chanterelles? Porcini crusted sea bass, lobster-truffled potato crêpes, white corn-arugula & gulf prawns? Where do we sign up?).

While I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend any one restaurant (personal choice being that last intangible), based on our experience, Madison’s Grill and The Dish would top our list. If you’re looking for innovative, creative food that celebrates local producers, there would be no better choice than Blair Lebsack’s dining room in the Union Bank Inn. However, if you desire something more casual and comforting, The Dish is a great choice with its consistent kitchen and friendly service.

Mack:

You could, of course, avoid restaurants altogether and cook that special someone a tasty meal at home! Because as Sharon pointed out, Valentine’s Day is about spending time with your sweetheart, not spending lots of money. If you do go the restaurant route, keep in mind that there are more to choose from than the dozen we mentioned here.

We hope you enjoyed this light-hearted look at “Black Sunday” (a la Eater) in Edmonton, and we wish you a very happy Valentine’s Day!

What would make you attend the Open Data event on March 6?

As you might have seen on Twitter, the City of Edmonton is planning another open data event for Saturday, March 6, 2010 at City Hall. If you haven’t already, block that day off in your calendar! It’ll be a great opportunity to connect with others who are interested in open data and open government, as well as a chance to provide feedback to the City on its data catalogue and plans for the future.

And who knows, if we’re lucky, there might even be some new data to play with! For more information on the data catalogue, which launched last month, click here.

The details for the event will go up on the website soon I’m sure, but first we need to have a better idea of what everyone wants to get out of the event. Here are some ideas:

An unconference, followed by a hack night. Maybe a keynote to kick things off, then time for unconference-style discussions about open data and open government. The hack night could take a variety of forms, and the discussions could be wide-ranging.
Discussing how to frame open data in terms of citizen benefit might a potential topic. Why would my parents or grandparents be interested in open data?
One idea for the hack night is to get some developers together to try to improve the tooling around OGDI. This might be writing custom formatters (CSV, plist, etc) or perhaps something else. All of this would be contributed to the community.
Another idea is to hold a competition – what can you build in just one evening?!
Or a twist on that, a competition where teams produce mockups & ideas, not necessarily a working app.
Or the hack night could be as simple as a walk-through of how to use the open data catalogue, etc. Or maybe it’s a longer “hack day”.

What do you think? What would make you attend the open data event on March 6? Either leave a comment below, or email opendata@edmonton.ca with your suggestions.

It would be great to have representatives from a variety of organizations too, not just the City and developers. If you’re at all interested in open data or open government, please join us. Hope to see you there!

State of the Victoria Twittersphere – January 2010

Welcome to the first State of the Victoria Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Victoria, BC.

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

For January 2010:

# of local users: 1246
# of tweets by local users: 48817
# of tweets by local users containing #yyj: 5826 (11.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 15655 (32.0%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 15152 (31.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 4594 (9.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 2086 (4.3%)

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 54% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 1.1 tweets per minute in January.
The day with the most local tweets posted was January 22 at 2108. On average, 1575 local tweets were posted each day.
Of the 15655 replies posted by local users this month, 4706 or 30.0% were to other local users.
A total of 207 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 60 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:

Final Thoughts

First of all, thank you very much to Janis La Couvée for prompting me to put this together, and for helping out with the data. Follow Janice for all things Victoria on Twitter, and also check out @victoriatweetup, @smcvictoria, and Twestival Victoria.

I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of the data, but when going through the stats I was struck by how similar the results are to Edmonton in January of last year. Maybe Victoria is poised for lots of Twitter growth! I’ll continue tracking (and improving my tracking).

Alberta Budget 2010 website – security through obscurity

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!

Pecha Kucha Night: Edmonton #6

Edmonton’s sixth Pecha Kucha Night took place tonight at McDougall United Church downtown, a really fantastic venue. It was pretty full, but I’m not sure what the final attendance numbers were. Pecha Kucha is always a great place to meet new people, and tonight was no exception. Many people in the audience had never been to a Pecha Kucha Night before, which was great to see!

True to its name, there was lots of chatter about PKN6 tonight, in person and online. At one point this evening, the hashtag #pkn6 was trending in Canada, but not for the reason you might expect.

In order of appearance, tonight’s presenters included:

Mari Sasano, Winter Light
Merna Schmidt, Outreach Coordinator of A Child’s Hope
Rikia Saddy, Strategist
David Demian, President of JCI Edmonton
Jessica Roder, Urban Planner
Ken Chapman, Cambridge Strategies and Reboot Alberta
Chris Ford, Program Director for Action for Healthy Communities
Matthew Capowski, Activist
Liz Lepper, YESS volunteer
Chris Moore, CIO, City of Edmonton

Before I go any further, let me just point out a few facts:

It takes guts to stand up in front of a couple hundred people to talk for 6 minutes and 40 seconds, I get that.
Christmas and the New Year are probably not the most opportune times to find presenters, as everyone is busy with work and life.
You’ll never please everyone, because each person has a different set of expectations.

With that out of the way, I can honestly say that PKN6 was probably the worst of the Pecha Kucha events we’ve had here in Edmonton. I’m saddened by this, primarily because the main issue was not something new or unforeseen. Here’s what I wrote about PKN3:

Tonight’s event didn’t have a theme, but I think perhaps it should have. In comparison with the previous two Pecha Kucha Nights, I found the presentations this evening rather weak. There was far too much self-promotion going on.

PKN4 was better, except for the presentation by Edmonton Next Gen themselves:

Finally, some of the Next Gen members gave an overview of the organization. I’m not sure it was the most appropriate presentation, but it was probably good for those in the audience who were new to Next Gen.

At PKN5, self-promotion surfaced once again:

I thought all the presenters did a pretty good job tonight. I wasn’t as interested in Dawn’s or Jeffrey’s, but others in the crowd seemed to be. My least favorite was probably Nadine’s though. Yes most of the talks are self-promotional in nature, but hers really seemed like a commercial for the United Way (and their campaign is on now).

But tonight, at PKN6, self promotion was taken to a whole new level. With the exception of Rikia’s odd Canadian immigration history lesson and Jessica’s interesting discussion of evolution, all the talks were self-promotional. Ken’s is perhaps unfairly labeled as such; although it wasn’t overt, it was ultimately about Reboot Alberta. It was also probably the best talk of the evening, thanks in large part to how great and engaging a speaker Ken is.

An evening with less self promotion isn’t just my idea of a good event, either. Many people were chit-chatting on Twitter about it. Here are a few select tweets:

paulzy: I think I’m leaving #pkn6 less inspired than when I came in. Rally caps?
sarahdotb: The energy level in this room is nonexistant #pkn6
bingofuel: Too many of these presentations are like, "hey, check out my organization!" #pkn6
KendallBarber: Appreciate people’s enthusiam for own happenings, but too much promotion #pkn6 – there’s better things to say.
ALeNeve: A little disappointed with the shameless self promotional aspect at #pkn6 #yeg hope the 2nd half ISA bit more inspiring

And, here’s what the official Pecha Kucha: What is it? page says:

Good PechaKucha presentation are the ones that uncover the unexpected, unexpected talent, unexpected ideas. Some PechaKuchas tell great stories about a project or a trip. Some are incredibly personal, some are incredibly funny, but all are very different making each PechaKucha Night like ‘a box of chocolates’.

Enough about self promotion, let’s talk about the theme. I’m not sure why they bothered with one tonight:

PECHA KUCHA NIGHT 6 explores our City’s best and worst kept secrets, furtive futures, ancient enigmas, cosmic quandaries, unsolved mysteries and how-to-guides for pressing problems.

Only Liz from YESS attempted to highlight a best kept secret in our city. Maybe the theme was kept secret from all the presenters? The theme of PKN4 worked amazingly well, and I think future Pecha Kucha Nights should also have a theme. Something must have happened for that event (ICLEI?) that didn’t happen this time, however.

Another thing that obviously didn’t happen tonight – screening of presenters. Maybe there weren’t enough submissions, or maybe they all did a good job of convincing the selection committee, but something clearly went wrong. There were two main issues, in my opinion: the order of the presentations, and the quality.

Mari’s presentation was funny at times, even if it was a giant commercial for Winter Light. But it was immediately followed by Merna’s depressing presentation about less fortunate children. It’s an important subject, absolutely, but the difference was extremely jarring. It happened again in the second half. Ken’s presentation was energetic, and really got the crowd into things (finally). That was followed up by a bizarrely bad presentation and then an extremely abstract talk on thought. There was absolutely no rhythm to the evening.

As for the quality of the presentations – Chris Ford’s was probably the worst I have ever seen at Pecha Kucha. Totally disconnected images, long awkward pauses, extremely overt marketing of the organization and its upcoming event, a clear lack of preparation…it was brutal. I’m sure Chris is a great guy, and his organization does good things, but his presentation just completely missed the mark. Compared with previous events, I thought the presenters tonight were clearly nervous, at times quiet, and mostly unenergetic (the notable exceptions being Chris Moore and Ken).

At the end of the evening, Cary asked me to come up to the front to be the “celebrity” who drew tickets for the prize giveaways. I joked afterward that he asked me to do that so I’d stop Twittering about the event! My tweets and this post are my initial thoughts on the event, and I’ll absolutely give it more thought so that I can provide more concrete, constructive feedback to Next Gen.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from checking out the next Pecha Kucha Night either! I attend a lot of events, so perhaps my expectations aren’t average. And despite all of the negative things I mentioned above, PKN is still an awesome way to meet new people and to reconnect with old friends. As the saying goes, don’t knock it ‘til you try it!

Finally, please fill out the survey for PKN6. It won’t take very long, and it’s a great way to provide Next Gen with some feedback they can use when planning PKN7. Let’s hope they take note of some of the things that were highlighted tonight!

You can see a few more photos here.

UPDATE: When I originally posted, I had the order slightly incorrect – fixed now.

UPDATE 2: I should mention that there was an after-party at Red Star, which sounds like it was fairly well attended and lots of fun!

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