Category: Uncategorized

Cleaning up Edmonton

Now that the snow is gone, the amount of garbage that accumulated on streets and sidewalks throughout the winter is becoming quite noticeable. The City of Edmonton has two primary initiatives to help clean up all of the trash – Capital City Clean Up, a year-round program that encourages civic engagement, and the River Valley Clean Up, a one-day event to give the river valley a spring cleaning.

Today I helped to clean up a small area in the Oliver community (I live on the west side of Oliver). Organized by @CaryWilliams, a block captain in the Capital City Clean Up program, about eleven of us participated: @jdarrah, @bingofuel, @thespindoctor, @stuporstar, @out_inc, @mastermaq, @jodiegiese, @sirthinks, @zoomjer, and Alanna (who I don’t think is on Twitter).

#yegcleanup#yegcleanup

We tackled the area bounded by 104th and 102nd avenues, and 112th and 114th streets. Here are a few observations from the clean up:

  • Not a surprise I guess, but there was a ton of cigarette-related garbage: butts, papers, and even empty packages. We couldn’t pick up all the cigarette butts or we’d have been there for weeks, but we did our best.
  • There was definitely a lot of Tim Horton’s garbage: cups and wrappers, but mostly lids, and tabs from the lids.
  • There have been a number of new condo and apartment buildings erected in the area in the last year or two, which means there was some construction-related trash. I was amazed how much yellow styrofoam there was!
  • We found three dead birds in total, two magpies and a pigeon.
  • And some good news: only one condom and no needles.

Everyone did a great job and nearly filled an entire bag of garbage, but the superstar today was definitely Jason:

#yegcleanup

He did an incredibly thorough job and filled three bags! He also seemed to find the most interesting trash, as you can see in the photo.

Many of us plan for a spring cleaning in our homes and businesses, but let’s not forget that our communities need to be cleaned up also! It doesn’t take very much time or effort, but it makes a big difference. You can learn more about the Adopt-A-Block program here.

Twitter Race: Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Breaking News

As you may have read recently, Ashton Kutcher and CNN are having a light-hearted contest to see who can become the first to amass 1 million followers on Twitter. At the moment, @cnnbrk has 980,761 followers while @aplusk has 980,001. It’s a tight race! If he wins, Ashton has said he will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity in honor of World Malaria Day, an offer than CNN quickly matched. Electronic Arts, Oprah, and others are getting in on the action now too.

It’s great that some charities will benefit from all of this, because it’s a silly race. Having said that, it’s also a good opportunity for me to write down some thoughts I’ve had over the last few months as more and more celebrities have joined Twitter:

  • If I were TMZ or PerezHilton, I’d be scared to death of Twitter. When celebrities themselves are breaking the stories that the gossip blogs would normally cover, it doesn’t paint a rosy picture for the future of sites that depend on getting the news first. And it’s not like they’re very good at analysis.
  • Related to that, what a great opportunity for celebrities to take back some control over what is said about them! If a negative or untrue rumor hits the net, a celebrity can post a tweet about it immediately to clear things up. Not to say that celebrities are honest 100% of the time, but you get the idea. Posting to an official website just isn’t the same as directly tweeting half a million engaged followers, who will in turn spread the word.
  • I think this’ll humanize some celebrities. I’m sure they all use Facebook, but we can’t be their friends or see their activity there. With Twitter, anyone can see whatever a celebrity posts. They don’t get anything special – they have the same account as everyone else.

As for the race, I hope Ashton wins. He’s becoming a sort of celebrity ambassador for the web and all of the cool things people are doing with it. For instance:

[Larry] King has invited Kutcher to appear on his show, "Larry King Live." Kutcher, saying "this is a saga for the Internet," asked King to come on his Internet show to settle things.

Among other things, he’s the Creative Director for VoIP startup Ooma, and he continues to experiment with online video through his company Katalyst Media. Who knows if any of his projects will be successful, but the fact that he’s out there experimenting and paying attention to what’s coming next is encouraging.

Apparently @Oprah’s first tweet will be tomorrow when Ashton is on her show. I’m interested to see what she does with the service.

What do you think? Do you care about celebrities on Twitter? By the way, CelebrityTweet is a site that tracks celebs on Twitter.

UPDATE (~12:15 AM MST): Ashton did it, he beat CNN to 1 million followers!

Twitter lovers: watch out for baseball bats!

I was in the mainstream media here in Edmonton twice today for Twitter-related stories. Basically, the local media’s love affair with Twitter continues! First up, Metro Edmonton (@metroedmonton). They asked me about politicians on Twitter, and specifically about Councillor Don Iveson, who I encouraged to join the service. Here’s my quote:

“It shows that governments are in the know, connected and paying attention to what people are passionate about,” said Edmonton tech guru Mack Male (@mastermaq). “Right now, young people seem to be big on Twitter.”

I was responding to the possibility that Councillor Iveson and others may use Twitter as a way to connect with a younger demographic. I think that’s totally possible, and I expect we’ll hear more about that at ChangeCamp. I think it’s great that Don has joined, and that it’s actually him tweeting.

Secondly today, I was a guest on CBC’s Wildrose Country phone-in program (@WRoseCBC). They were interested in my recent live tweeting of an Edmonton Symphony Orchestra event. One of the people who called in was ‘Bob’. He thought my tweeting was entirely disrespectful and said:

“mastermaq should be hit in the head with a baseball bat!”

I’m not sure why he felt the need to be so violent, but his reaction isn’t entirely surprising. Many people are afraid of social media because they don’t understand it, and they react accordingly. On air, I advised Bob and others like him not to focus on the individual, potentially meaningless tweets in isolation, but to recognize that once aggregated together, there’s incredible value in the noise that Twitter facilitates. It’s going to happen (helping you make sense of the clutter), whether Bob likes it or not. In the meantime, tweet away!

I also feel that the “disrespectful” feeling about tweeting is largely a generational thing that will change over time. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t think so. If everyone is used to others texting in a variety of situations, it’s no longer odd or abnormal. Perceptions will then fall in line.

I’m guessing that CBC will post the segment online, but I’m not sure – check the website for details. I’ll update this post with a link if they do.

Thanks to everyone who listened and sent me encouraging comments this afternoon during the CBC segment. I have to admit that having Bob on the show made the discussion a bit more interesting, and if that’s what it takes to get Twitter more accepted and into the mainstream, I say bring it on.

Just watch out for crazy people with baseball bats!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – March 2009

Welcome to the first State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. After receiving many requests for this from Calgarians after my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, combined with my own curiosity, I figured it was time to do some stats for Calgary. I only captured half of the data for March 1st, but otherwise I think these numbers are fairly solid.

Using Twitter Search, I collected anything posted by Calgarians, or about Calgary. If a user has his or her location set to Calgary, Airdrie, Okotoks, Cochrane, Strathmore, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered a Calgarian. If a tweet is “about Calgary” it contains either the word Calgary, the #yyc hashtag, or both.

For March 2009:

# of local users: 3717

To clarify, that means there were 3717 users who posted at least one tweet in March 2009 with their location set to something that makes them a Calgarian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Calgary users without their location set or that were not captured for some other reason.

# of tweets by local users: 147549
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 2936
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 51721
# of tweets by local users containing links: 28902
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 4463
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 5821

This graph shows these numbers visually:

Though perhaps a little inaccurate, here are the best numbers I could get from Twitter for the number of local users created per day during March:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): codsta, wikkiwild1, strategicsense, yuki_hime, izzynobre, darylcognito, pigazine, MitchyD, dblacombe, devlind
  • About 54% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 3.3 tweets per minute in March.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was March 31st at 6518. On average, 4760 local tweets were posted each day.
  • Of the 51721 replies posted by local users this month, 14650 or 28% were to other local users.
  • A total of 693 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 542 local users posted just once this month.

And finally, the top ten users in Calgary (as of April 11th) by # of followers: douglasi, MarkIsMusing, tessaru, VeerUpdate, nolanmatthias, strategicsense, codsta, dayhomemama, scrawforditm, CalgaryRealtor.

I may put together another post to compare Edmonton and Calgary, but in general I’d say that although Calgary seems to have more users, they don’t seem as connected to one another as Edmontonians are (as evidenced by the # of tagged tweets and replies to other local users). I’m a little surprised that #yeg is so much more active than #yyc, actually.

Thanks to @andrewmcintyre for helping me with these stats (he ranked #13 on the most active users for the month btw). If you have any comments or feedback let me know so that I can improve these statistics in future months.

Edmonton Media Organizations on Twitter – Update 1

Back on March 3rd, I posted a list of local media organizations on Twitter. At that time, there were roughly a dozen organizations with official accounts. It was easier to count the number of organizations using Twitter, than those not using it.

That’s no longer the case.

Here are the local media organizations using Twitter as of April 10th, 2009, by category.

Print

Television

Radio

Of course, these are just the official accounts. For each of these, there are employees and personalities with their own accounts. That list of names is growing ever longer!

So which organizations are missing?

  • 101.7 World FM
  • 105.9 Shine FM
  • 790 CFCW, though there is @stella790cfcw
  • Access TV, though they do have @ABPrimetime
  • AM930 The Light
  • EZ Rock 104.9
  • Magic 99
  • OMNI Edmonton
  • SEE Magazine
  • Shaw TV Edmonton
  • The Team 1260, though there is @CoreyGraham

Some of these organizations may never get on Twitter, I suppose.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve reached critical mass with regards to the local media on Twitter. It’ll be interesting now to see how they use it, especially as more and more Edmontonians join the service.

Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (EFCL) and Social Media

Can an antiquated organization use social media to become relevant to younger generations? The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (EFCL) may soon give us an answer. They’ve started to create a presence on Twitter and Facebook, and promise that more is on the way.

First of all, what is a community league? From Wikipedia:

A community league is an organization of community residents who represent their community at large in communication with a municipal government. Community leagues are organized to provide such services as providing recreational opportunities to the community, addressing municipal issues which address the community directly, and keeping community residents up-to-date on happenings within the community.

Edmonton was the first city in Canada to adopt the idea of a community-based organization, according to the EFCL history page. The Crestwood Community League was formed way back in 1917! Today, there are 150 community leagues under the EFCL umbrella.

So far, EFCL have created a Twitter profile and a Facebook page. They are “slowly slipping [their] toe into the waters of social media.” I contacted Michael Janz, EFCL’s Marketing Director, to ask for his thoughts. He quickly corrected my initial assessment of the organization:

“I would challenge the notion that EFCL is ‘antiquated’ – I think ‘established’ is a better word. EFCL has been here for 80 years. People know what it is and what EFCL can accomplish.”

He did concede that the younger generations are much less familiar with the EFCL however, which is what I meant by “antiquated”. The organization’s main membership drive kicks off in September, and the goal this year is to have a more coordinated promotional effort, making use of both traditional and social media. Michael told me that the EFCL is getting on Twitter and Facebook now to be prepared. They are “moving to where the puck is going”, Michael said.

I asked Michael about the challenges EFCL faces with adopting social media, and learned there were other, bigger challenges: “As of March 2008, only 50% of our leagues had websites. We’re now up to 70%.” Clearly having a web presence is an important first step before making the jump to Twitter! EFCL’s mandate is to serve the community leagues, and helping them get websites and email addresses setup is the focus for now. Social media tools will follow.

The first community league to follow that trajectory is Crestwood. They have a regularly updated website, full of information for members. Recently, they joined Twitter and have been posting an interesting mix of tweets – some community-specific, some related to Edmonton as a whole.

I think it’s great that EFCL is mindful of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools and services. They’re fortunate to have someone like Michael on board. I look forward to following their progression in the world of social media, first in September for the big kick off, and beyond.

Recap: EdmontonTweetup4

Our fourth “official” meetup for Twitter users in the Edmonton area was a success! About 45 people stopped by Vintage Lounge this evening. The team at Vintage deserve major thanks for handling everything so smoothly, as we had many more people show up than was guesstimated a week or two ago.

Actually, I was quite impressed with the turnout. We had about the same number as Twestival back in February, but in comparison did little or no marketing. There were certainly no front page stories in the local newspapers for tonight’s event! Once again, there was a nice mix of new and familiar faces.

EdmontonTweetup4EdmontonTweetup4

It looked like lots of orders of Mini Burgers came out from the kitchen. I ordered the Italian Sausage Macaroni for dinner, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The food menu at Vintage isn’t extensive, but it is good. Worth checking out.

Here are a few select tweets about tonight’s event:

  • @rlesueur: Tonight attended first #yegtweetup. Good evening, good people. I’ll be back!
  • @bruceclarke: Nice seeing everyone and meeting some new people at tonight’s #yegtweetup.
  • @alexismac: Had more fun at #yegtweetup than anticipated. Damn – now I have to go the next one.
  • @chrislabossiere: That was a great #yegTweetup thanks @alexismac for the wine, I owe you.
  • @thechadj: So extremely tired. #yegtweetup proves to be too much! Good times!
  • @ammneh: Ok that was fun! #yeg #tweetup
  • @ink_slinger: #yegtweetup was pretty good. Still going strong, but I’m heading out now.

Coming up next week is the NHL Tweetup, taking place at the same time and place as Techwing Wednesday, so it should be a big, diverse crowd. As always, check out the EdmontonTweetup wiki for other upcoming tweetups or to plan your own!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight – sorry if I didn’t get a chance to chat with you! A partial list of attendees is up on the wiki, so feel free to add yourself.

See you at EdmontonTweetup5!

2009 Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts

2009 Mayor's Celebration of the Arts Last night Sharon and I attended the 22nd annual Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts at the Winspear Centre. The annual awards ceremony recognizes members of the local arts community, and features a number of performances. As I said last year, it’s a good way to sample the variety offered by Edmonton’s arts scene.

We were fortunate enough to get tickets to the pre-ceremony reception from Bryan Cox of Molson, one of the event’s sponsors and long-time supporter of the arts community. It was great to meet Bryan and his colleague Ferg Devins. You can read about all of the things they are doing at the Molson in the Community blog.

The reception was held at The Citadel, in an area we’ve never been to (upstairs with the waterfall). It was a really great venue! We had some wine, sampled the food, and took in the sights and sounds. There were lots of recognizable faces in the crowd, including the Mayor himself, a number of City Councillors, and many of the people that keep Edmonton’s arts community interesting and growing.

The main event was held in the wonderful Enmax Hall at the Winspear Centre. Once again we purchased tickets for the Upper Circle and sat in the middle of the front row, which gave us a great view of the entire venue. It seemed as though there were less people in attendance than there were last year, but it was still a fairly big crowd (and the foyer was packed at intermission). CBC’s Peter Brown and CTV’s Carrie Doll once again emceed the event, and they did a great job.

You can view the full list of nominees in this PDF file. Here are the winners:

The Mayor’s Award for Sustained Support of the Arts
See Magazine, nominated by Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture

The Mayor’s Award for Innovative Support by a Business for the Arts
CIBC, nominated by the Citadel Theatre

The John Poole Award for Promotion of the Arts
Ellis Brother’s Photography, nominated by the Arts Touring Alliance

The City of Edmonton Book Prize
Jack W. Brink, Athabasca University Press

The Stantec Youth Artist Award
Roydon Tse, nominated by Ross Sheppard School

TELUS Courage to Innovate Award
Rising Sun Theatre, nominated by Gerry Potter

The Molson Award for Excellence in Artistic Direction
Shelley Switzer, nominated by Bottom Line Productions

The Northlands Award for an Emerging Artist
Kristy Trinier, nominated by the Art Gallery of Alberta

The Sutton Place Hotel People’s Choice Award
Jonathan Kaiser

ATCO Gas Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement
Timothy Ryan, nominated by MacEwan Centre for the Arts

Performers included:

  • Jeremy Spurgeon, who opened the show on the Winspear’s massive organ.
  • The Be Arthurs, who performed covers of Toxic by Britney Spears and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
  • The Raving Poets, who shared three poems set to music.
  • Chris Craddock & Nathan Cuckow, who performed a piece from their gay rap opera, Bash’d.
  • Ann Vriend, who sang three songs at the piano, including a cover of Queen’s We Are The Champions.
  • John Cameron, who encouraged the audience to sing along to a cover of Niel Diamond’s Sweet Caroline.
  • KO Dance Project, who performed an interesting interpretive dance.
  • Bomba!, a latin-jazz group who closed out the show.

My favorite performances were The Be Arthurs and Chris Craddock & Nathan Cuckow – very entertaining! I’m very glad I had the opportunity to see them perform, and wouldn’t hesitate to attend one of their shows in the future. Ann Vriend is definitely talented, but I think I liked Samantha Schultz better last year. I also thought the performances weren’t as varied as last year, which featured theatre in addition to musical numbers.

We were surprised that the event ran past 10pm, especially considering they seemed to be running at a decent pace before the intermission. Still, it was entertaining and enjoyable. Congratulations to all the nominees and winners!

You can see my tweets from the event here, and my photoset is here.

Live Tweeting at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (ESO) Sunday Masters

Last year, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra invited a number of local bloggers to live-blog Symphony Under the Sky. I remember reading Adam’s posts from the event, and thought it was a cool initiative; a rather unique way to try to get a different crowd interested in the ESO. When I was invited to do the same this year for Carmina Burana, I readily agreed (I received two free tickets and a CD previewing the 2009/2010 season).

Of course, I decided to live-tweet the event rather than live-blog it – you can see my tweets here. I tried to do a mix of details from the program and observations. Two other bloggers sat next to me, though they weren’t live-blogging: Jim Tustian (a former photographer for the ESO) and The Choir Girl. We were up in the Gallery, which was sold out despite not normally being open for Sunday performances.

The Winspear Centre

Snagged this photo before the show started, ignoring the sign about recording devices!

The first piece was Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances. It was immediately recognizable. At just 13 minutes for the performance, I was left wanting more! I’m a sucker for the contrast of Disney-esque sections and the familiar booming sections.

The second piece was Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, consisting of all eight movements: Prologue, Pastoral, Nocturne, Elegy, Dirge, Hymn, Sonnet, Epilogue. I was thankful the performance was just 23 minutes long, because I couldn’t get into it. Before the performance started, conductor William Eddins said that you need a strong tenor, strong horn player, and strong string section to perform Britten’s piece. He joked that getting all three was as likely as the Edmonton Oilers winning the Stanley Cup this year!

The main event was after the intermission – Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Again, this one was instantly recognizable, though with about 65 minutes of music there were definitely long sections I had never heard before. I enjoyed it all, but my favorite part was definitely Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, O Fortuna which both opened and closed the performance.

As I mentioned, William Eddins was the conductor. He’s currently in his fourth season as Music Director for the ESO. Performers today included Allene Hackleman, French horn, Bonaventura Bottone, tenor, Illana Davidson, soprano, and Hugh Russell, baritone. The Cantilon Chamber Chorus and the Ukrainian Male Chorus of Edmonton provided the rest of the vocals.

The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and Social Media

Before the show and during the intermission, I had the chance to ask Philip Paschke, ESO’s New Media Specialist (he must be one of the only people in the city with a title like that), about their travels into the world of social media. He told me their website needs work, and in the future will hopefully incorporate the ESO Blog, and potentially Twitter, Facebook, and other services. Like so many organizations, they are hearing a lot about Twitter and the other social media tools and are struggling to understand how to best make use of them.

I think the blogger initiative is a good one. There’s another concert being blogged on April 16th, and Philip hopes to get at least one more before the season ends. One of the biggest challenges thus far has been fielding complaints about “the inconsiderate texters” from other concert-goers. It’s definitely a challenge to make the click-clacking of keys seem welcome inside The Winspear Centre (fortunately my BlackBerry was relatively silent).

I’m not sure if my live-tweets were of interest to anyone, but I had fun doing it. If nothing else, tweets and blog posts during a concert just help to remind others that the ESO is still putting on great concerts.

Thanks to Philip for inviting me to participate – I really enjoyed the show, and I look forward to the ESO’s future adventures with social media.

My Dell Inspiron Mini 9

On January 1st, I decided to order a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. I had been reading a lot about netbooks, and was in the market for something smaller to carry around. My aging Toshiba M200 Tablet PC is fairly small and light, but it’s still quite big compared to a netbook. I went on the Dell site, customized my order, and waited for my new netbook to arrive.

And waited, and waited.

After my original ship date of January 21st was delayed, I tried to be patient. When I called for an update mid-February, I learned that my order was going to be cancelled and re-entered because of a software conflict with Adobe. I told Dell to forget it, and I cancelled my order completely. I then hopped on the Future Shop site, and ordered the same computer (minus the integrated Bluetooth) for about $100 less. It arrived a week later.

My Mini 9 has the integrated webcam, is black, and runs Windows XP. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB, and the hard drive to 32 GB (the Mini 9 uses an SSD). Even with the extra components and shipping, the total price was only about $500.

I’ve been using it for a little over a month now, and I really like it. In no particular order, these are my favorite things about it:

  • Small and light. The main reasons for getting a netbook, obviously!
  • Clean, solid design. So many netbooks have a big gap between the screen and keyboard, and that just drives me nuts. The Mini 9 is solid with smooth, rounded edges.
  • Quiet and cool. Partly because of the SSD, the Mini 9 doesn’t have a fan. It runs extremely cool, and never makes any noise.
  • It’s fast! Resume from standby, boot up, shutdown, etc. are all fairly quick. The only slowness is from some applications that don’t work well with SSDs, such as Outlook.

Nothing is perfect – here are the things I don’t like about it:

  • The battery life is pretty good at about four hours, but I wish it were much longer.
  • The keyboard is small and hard to get used to. I still have to hunt for the quote key, located at the very bottom. I often close windows by accident when I try to type an exclamation point and hit the Esc key instead. There are no F11 or F12 keys or functions. If I could redesign the keyboard, I’d get rid of CAPS Lock and the context-menu button, would move the quote key to it’s proper place, and would give the right Shift key more space.
  • There are two LEDs on the front, one with the power icon and one with a battery with a lightning bolt in it. The battery light only comes on when the device is dangerously low on power…I’d rather it lit up when the battery was recharging too.
  • It has an external display port, but the resolution it outputs is pretty weak.

Overall, I’m quite happy with my Mini 9. It was relatively inexpensive, comes with me almost everywhere, and works perfectly for surfing, checking email, blogging, and Twittering.