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Edmonton in 2008

What do you remember most about the past year in Edmonton? I think I’ll look back on 2008 as the year that I started to fully appreciate everything that our city has to offer. I learned a lot about Edmonton this year, and I look forward to learning even more in the years to come. Hopefully I can have a positive impact on the city as well!

Edmonton Skyline

Obviously a topic as large as an entire city is impossible to recap, but that doesn’t stop everyone from trying. Makes for interesting reading, right?

Here are some Edmonton-related year in review articles from around the web:

Know of another list or article that I missed? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll add it.

Now for a list of my own! Here are the 5 most popular Edmonton-related posts on my blog from the past year:

  1. Big Earl 96.3 is now Capital FM
  2. The Apple Store opens in West Edmonton Mall
  3. Edmonton is home to the future of Future Shop, and very close behind that, A look at Edmonton’s new Future Shop
  4. Use Google Maps to find Edmonton Transit schedules and trip plans
  5. New Concept for Edmonton Arena in The Quarters Downtown

All of those posts were written in 2008. If I had included the popular ones written in 2007 and earlier, four of the five would be related to Edmonton radio stations. Work at a radio station, particularly a NewCap radio station? You need to improve your web presence!

These three were close to making the list also:

Finally, here are some facts and figures from 2008 that I’ll likely want to refer to again at some point:

  • Population of Edmonton: 752,412 (source)
  • Edmonton Oilers record (calendar year): 42-31-5
  • Capital EX attendance: 743,374 (source)
  • Homeless Count: 3079 (source)
  • Number of homicides: 35 (source)

If you have another fact or figure for the list, leave a comment or email me.

I’m looking forward to a wonderful 2009, thanks for reading!

Edmonton Tech in 2008

Now that 2008 has come to a close, I think it’s safe to say that the Edmonton tech scene has had a fantastic year. It feels like the community grew tenfold, but I know that’s probably not true. Instead, I think the community just became more integrated and public. We had far more events than ever before, which resulted in lots of opportunities for everyone to meet one another.

DemoCampEdmonton2DemoCampEdmonton3Cam LinkeEdmontonTweetup2Lined up outside the Apple StoreNAIT Digital Media ExpoNew Future Shop in Edmonton

Geoff Hayward, DataGardensnovaNAIT Challenge 2008Local Twitterers!Lift Interactive OfficeReg assembles the agendaFree Wifi @ DemoCampEdmonton3EdmontonTweetup

There were many tech groups active in Edmonton this year. We held four DemoCamp events (one, two, three, four), and one BarCamp. It was great to see attendance increase with each one. In November, we held the 3rd annual Code Camp event for developers. We also held three Tweetup events (one, two, three) this year. The Edmonton .NET User Group, Edmonton Microsoft User Group, and Edmonton Flash User Group all held fairly regular meetings throughout the year. The Agile Edmonton User Group was established this year and held a few meetings. A few other meetup groups got started toward the end of the year, and should be quite active in 2009 – Edmonton Web Design Meetup, Edmonton Social Web Meetup. There were a number of other tech events that took place throughout the year as well, such as the ICE Technology Conference, Moonlight in the Meadows, and the NAIT Digital Media Expo.

Here are some of the year’s most interesting Edmonton tech stories from my blog, Techvibes, and elsewhere:

And here’s the collection of Edmonton Startup Index posts at Techvibes (prior to September all of Alberta was grouped together – yet another sign Edmonton is getting stronger):

I’m really impressed with the way Edmonton’s tech scene grew both larger and stronger this year, and I think 2009 can be even better. Thank you to everyone who helped make it happen.

REVIEW: Staples Copy & Print Centre Online

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! I did, and enjoyed a small break from blogging too. Time to get back into it!

staples logo One of the things I got Sharon for Christmas was a food calendar. I wanted to get her something related to photography and food, but another picture frame just didn’t seem that interesting. When I was in Staples one day, I noticed their advertising for the Copy & Print Centre, and specifically for the calendars. I took a card from the counter, and checked out the website when I got home. A couple of hours later and I had a professional looking calendar, filled with photos of food we’ve made together or of restaurants we’ve visited.

I found the website very easy-to-use, if a little basic. You can do pretty much everything online that you can do in the store. Want to print or copy something? Simply upload a file and go. You can also order custom items, such as business cards, labels, greeting cards, bookmarks, agendas, and calendars (you can download the price list in PDF here). Obviously I was interested in the calendar option.

There are four calendar styles to choose from: deluxe, classic, express, and year in view. I went with the deluxe, which lets you completely customize a full color calendar in two sizes (8.5” x 11” or 11” x 17”) and either 12 months or 18 months. Once you’ve picked those options, you can get started creating your calendar. They display some tips and tricks before you get started, which I skipped over the first time. I later went back and read them. They suggest organizing and uploading photos ahead of time rather than on the fly, and that turned out to be really good advice. By uploading your photos first, you can save your calendar before it’s finished and return to it later. It also makes it a bit faster to customize each page.

I chose a template in the 11” x 17” size and got to work. It took me quite a while to get all the images uploaded and organized and placed on the appropriate pages, but it was worth it. After you submit your order and select a store for delivery, you can download a digital proof in PDF (mine was just under 7 MB). A few days later, you’ll receive an email notifying you that your calendar is ready to pick up! Simply pay in store and you’re done. Very easy.

A few other quick comments on the website: it appears to be written in ASP.NET, which I thought was kinda cool. They also make use of some Telerik controls, such as the RadUpload component. Interestingly, I can’t find a single link back to the main Staples website – the Copy & Print Centre seems to be completely separate.

I was really impressed with the result (the photo above is from the proof). It actually does look like a professional calendar that you’d buy in a store! It helps to have high resolution photos too, I guess. On the very back of the calendar is the Copy & Print Centre logo, but otherwise it’s completely free from logos or advertising. I wonder if you could pay to have that removed? Maybe for large orders.

I’m happy to report that Sharon loved her calendar! So did her sister actually, so much so that she set about creating her own soon after seeing Sharon’s. It’s a unique, easy-to-create gift. Based on my experience, I’d definitely recommend the Staples Copy & Print Centre online.

Tracking Santa in 2008

It’s that time of year again! Santa has started making deliveries around the world and will be coming down your chimney before you know it. He just arrived in Pinsk, Belarus according to the noradsanta account on Twitter! Santa is getting some help from Bitz the Twittering elf, who is keeping the account up-to-date. Very cool.


“Santa Claus is coming to town” by Zanastardust

There are a number of different ways to track Santa this year. Here are some of my favorites:

For a few more options, check out this post at Search Engine Land.

Happy Holidays!

Edmonton’s BrightNights goes green

Holiday Light Up!Ever since the BrightNights festival opened for the year on November 22nd in Hawrelak Park, I’ve been meaning to write about it. Not because I love it and am keen to promote it, but for quite the opposite reason actually. I attended back in 2006, and came away unimpressed. I’ve got two major issues with the event – it’s relatively expensive and it’s terrible for the environment. Or at least it was.

This year, the organizers went with a “green theme” to make the 2008 edition of the festival the most environmentally friendly ever (didn’t you know green is the new black!). I noticed a video on the Edmonton.ca site recently talking about the improvements and changes (unfortunately they don’t use permalinks so I can’t link to the video) and took some notes:

  • BrightNights is operated as a not-for-profit.
  • The drive-through lights display runs from November 21st until January 4th, and covers 2.5 km of road.
  • Food Bank donations are encouraged, and any extra funds go to the hot lunch program.
  • The goal this year is to be carbon neutral. They’ve purchased carbon credits to offset emissions from both the power used in the park and from vehicles driving through.
  • All the lights are on timers this year, to avoid human error of forgetting to shut them off. Also, the hours of operation have been reduced from 6 per day to 5.
  • Enmax has joined as a sponsor for three years, and is working to ensure energy consumption is powered by wind.

The website also mentions high-efficiency lighting and certified forestry managed paper for marketing materials. Additionally, BrightNights has teamed up with Climate Change Central to help educate Edmontonians about going green at home.

Apparently the cost has gone up from $15 per vehicle to $20, so the event hasn’t become any more affordable. I’m not sure what kinds of displays they have, but I suspect it is similar to previous years.

Even though I’m still not that excited about BrightNights, I am quite happy to see the changes they’ve made to become more environmentally friendly. The City of Edmonton hopes to have a number of events operating green within three years, and BrightNights is just the first. I hope more festivals and events in Edmonton follow suit.

Old & New Media: Why can’t we work together?

This morning I attended a press event at NAIT where the winner of the 2008 novaNAIT challenge was announced. Congratulations to Stephane Contre who won first place with his crime forecasting software. You can read more in my post at Techvibes.

There was an impressive number of media people present – perhaps, as one of the NAIT representatives remarked, because everyone is sick of doing Christmas stories. Or maybe they were there simply because it’s their job to be there. While I was standing around, I happened to overhear a conversation between a couple of the camera guys. One guy did most of the talking, and though I only heard part of it, I think I caught enough:

“Why would you put this on the web? No one cares about this kind of story. You basically have to force-feed it to them during the evening news.”

Not word-for-word, but that’s the gist of it. I’m not sure who he is or which organization he’s from, so his job is safe (not that I’d name names anyway). If I were his boss however, I’d have fired him on the spot had I overheard that remark. He clearly doesn’t get it.

novaNAIT Challenge 2008

Why wouldn’t you put this story online? Give me almost any topic, and I’ll find you a community of people who care about it on the web. That’s one of the greatest things about the web – it makes it easy for small, geographically separated groups of people with similar interests to come together. And when they do, they’re not so small anymore.

Anyway, I don’t know what he was talking about. Technology and entrepreneurship, especially together, are topics that tons of people care about. Such as the community of people that read Techvibes.

Here’s a better question – why bother sending that camera guy for a story like this? I arrived with a point-and-shoot and my Flip video camera. The media guys all had DSLRs and large fancy video cameras, complete with lighting and microphones and other equipment. Obviously they acquired some higher quality content, suitable for broadcasting, but one camera could have done that – half a dozen wasn’t necessary. Heck, give one guy a Nikon D90 and he could have recorded high quality stills and HD video for the evening news. It seems like an incredible waste of resources the way news is gathered now.

Basically, what many people have been saying became real for me today. Local media organizations should be doing what they do best, and linking to the rest. This wasn’t a “breaking news” kind of story – why not let the citizen journalists gather the news and use the organization’s resources for something else? Why can’t we work together?

Of course, most local news organizations don’t know the meaning of the word link. They can’t even be bothered to hyperlink the URLs they include inside their own stories!

Here’s the funniest part of all this. This story will probably get a sixty second spot on the evening news, and the folks who are interested will fire up Google to find out more (I remain unconvinced that anyone uses those annoying “links in the news” sections of TV station websites). And guess where they’ll end up? Potentially here, and definitely at Techvibes (and they can then follow a link to all my photos and videos from the event). Heck, four of the top ten results in Google for “novaNAIT challenge” were created by me and all I did is write a couple of posts and upload some photos. So, thanks in advance camera guy!

Critiquing Edmonton’s Winter Light website

winter light 2009 Two weeks ago, I wondered where the website was for Edmonton’s new winter festival. A few days after that post, the official website was launched. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at it, I thought I’d post a bit of a critique. But first, here’s some new information that was released at the same time:

Opening Ceremonies and the Winter Light Gala will launch the event January 8 at 10:00 AM in City Hall and Churchill Square. The Opening Ceremonies will preview highlights of Winter Light 2009 programming with outdoor performances, a "Blessing Fire", and a media launch with special guests, dignitaries and hot chocolate.

"I think winter has been one of Edmonton’s best kept secrets for too long," says event director Pamela Anthony. "Our goal is to showcase all the wonderful aspects of our winter city – the incredible recreation opportunities, the gorgeous river valley environment, and the culture and heritage of winter peoples."

I wanted to point out that quote, because it contains a lot of imagery that I’d love to see showcased on the website. Unfortunately, it’s not there at the moment. The first thing you see at the website is an annoying ten second flash intro. Totally useless, totally a waste of my time. Once you’re past that however, things start to improve.

The main page features a nice winter scene, with the city skyline, people participating in winter activities, and the catchphrase written in the style of northern lights – let it glow, let it glow, let it glow. The site is broken up into five main sections – Winter Light (about the festival), events, calendar, resources, and contacts.

Winter Light 2009 Website

Here are the things I really like about the site:

  • The integrated Google Map (available on event pages and the resources page) is great. Very quick way to see where everything is happening.
  • Using Google Calendar in place of yet another custom calendar was very smart. Well done. Makes it easy to add things to your own calendar too.
  • Consistent layout and colors.

And here are some things I’d like to see improved:

  • The RSS feed is currently empty. Make use of that! Better yet, add a proper blog to the site.
  • Get rid of the “people” banner that appears above the content on most pages. It’s unnecessary, and increases the amount of scrolling people have to do.
  • Integrate a photo sharing site like Flickr into the photos page. I’m not going to email you my photos (see my reasoning here)!
  • Add some actual resources. Showcase the river valley! Teach me about the culture and heritage of winter peoples! The website doesn’t contain any of that.
  • Update the site frequently during the months the festival is active. Change the main page to showcase the current and/or next event taking place.

For the techies reading this – the site was built using Joomla, and it appears to be hosted by Webcore Labs (a Calgary company!). Not sure if it was built in-house or by a design firm – anyone know?

I also wanted to mention that I love the Winter Light logo. It’s simple and attractive, and the two color schemes work well (white/light blue/blue for dark backgrounds, and light blue/blue/dark blue for white backgrounds). Making the word “winter” bold is a nice touch, and reinforces the idea that the event is all about celebrating the season most love to hate. Well done on the visual identity I say.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not critiquing the website just for the fun of it! I have two main goals with this post. First, I am hopeful that someone from the team will read my comments and consider making the suggested improvements. Second, I am looking for lessons that can be applied to the Halloween Edmonton website, as that festival would be very similar – an umbrella for existing events along with a few new ones.

So far, so good!

Thoughts on the updated Windows Live Essentials Beta

Like many of you, I’ve been using the various Windows Live desktop applications for a long time now. Until fairly recently however, they all looked and felt different from one another. There wasn’t much cohesion. That changed when Microsoft began to make the UIs similar and launched the Windows Live Installer which integrated all the apps. Recently, they gave the suite a better name (Windows Live Essentials) and did even more work to achieve a consistent look and feel. On Monday, they released the latest beta refresh.

windows live

I have most of the apps installed – Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, and Toolbar. The only one I don’t have is Family Safety. I use Messenger, Photo Gallery, and Writer every day, and the others I use less. The install also includes the Office Outlook Connector, Office Live Add-In, Silverlight, and the Microsoft Sync framework.

I’m fairly impressed with the suite so far, but I still think it’s far from perfect. Here are a few of the things I really like:

  • The new icons look great and are consistent.
  • I love the simplified presence indicators in Messenger (these were in the previous beta too – now there’s just Available, Busy, Away, and Appear Offline).
  • In the old beta, Messenger would always sign out if I switched from Appear Offline to something else. That has been fixed, thankfully. Seems faster too.
  • Writer is easily the best blog publishing tool I’ve ever used. It just works the way I want it to. I don’t know what to say specifically, but it’s awesome.
  • Person recognition and tagging in Photo Gallery absolutely rocks! Very cool feature, useful too.

And here are a few things I really dislike:

  • Photo Gallery is ridiculously slow to load. Once it’s open it seems fine, but from launching the app to being ready to use takes forever. I’ve only got about 36 GB of photos on this machine, so I’m sure there are users with far more.
  • In Messenger, you can no longer control the color of your chat windows. It’s based on the theme/color of the person you’re chatting with. Not sure I like that…it’s a window on MY computer, after all.
  • Speaking of colors, I still don’t like that the apps are inconsistent. I can set Messenger to look black, but Writer looks grey (even though I’ve set the color to be the same as Messenger), and Photo Gallery looks light blue and lacks a color setting button. Why there isn’t a color setting like the one in Office 2007 is beyond me. It can’t be that hard!

In general, I like Windows Live Essentials. It’s definitely something I’d install when setting up a new computer. I look forward to the final release!

All browsers have security issues

ielogo You may have heard in the last day or so about a critical flaw found in Internet Explorer. Microsoft says that “the vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer.” The risk is mitigated if you run an account with fewer privileges or if you run IE in the High security mode. As always, you should ensure your machine is up-to-date with all of the latest patches at Microsoft Update (you can also find downloads at the Microsoft Download Center).

Unlike most zero day exploits, this one is actually infecting systems fairly quickly. That’s probably why Microsoft decided to take immediate action. As the Zero Day blog points out:

Researching, fixing, testing, and releasing a security patch within an eight day window is an incredible feat — especially given the need to support all versions of IE across all platforms and languages.  This is an ‘all hands on deck’ response from Microsoft – I don’t think we’ll see this as the norm for less critical patches in the future as it is quite disruptive to their own processes.

Make sure you update soon! Like right now!

When a vulnerability like this is disclosed, a common suggestion is to install and use a different browser, such as Firefox. That’s not a bad idea, but don’t think that will solve all of your problems! All browsers have security issues. Yesterday, for instance, Opera released an update to address at least seven security vulnerabilities. And today, Firefox released updates to both versions 2 and 3 to patch roughly a dozen security holes. And no, Chrome and Safari are not off the hook – just two days ago, they tied for last place in a test of password security.

Always make sure you’re running the latest version with all patches installed, no matter which browser you’re using. On top of that, be careful, pay attention, and use common sense when clicking links and opening files.

Northern Voice 2009 Speaker Submission: Examining Twitter’s Impact on News Media

artwork by basco5I’ll be making my way to Vancouver once again this February for Northern Voice – Canada’s blogging and social media conference. I’ve attended every year since the event started in 2005, with varying levels of participation. In that first year, I was on a media panel. In 2006 and 2007, I did some recording and podcasting of the sessions. And last year, I was just a regular attendee. This year, I’d like to throw my hat in the ring to be a speaker. What would I like to talk about? Why, Twitter of course!

The deadline for speaker submissions is Friday. My intent with this post is to get some feedback – do you think what I’m pitching here would be an interesting and worthwhile session? Here’s what I’m thinking:

Examining Twitter’s Impact on News Media

Whether you “get it” or not, Twitter has changed news media forever. The microblogging service continues its push into the mainstream, and is wreaking all kinds of havoc along the way!

In this session we’re going to see how Twitter is impacting news media around the world. We’ll take a look at some notable examples from 2008, with particular focus placed on the American and Canadian political events. We’ll see why Twitter is the best place for breaking news, and how large news media organizations are starting to take advantage of the service – both for broadcasting and listening.

Local news is also being greatly affected by Twitter. We’ll examine one Canadian city in particular, Edmonton, to see how Twitter is used throughout the month of January 2009. Using data retrieved primarily from Twitter Search, we’ll examine the statistics (such as number of tweets posted, what time of day is most active, etc.) to identify trends and to help us correlate tweets with the local events and news of the month.

Finally, we’ll quickly examine how Twitter’s impact on news media translates to other industries – no one is safe!

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback you might have, as well as any suggestions on how to improve the session. Leave a comment below, or email me if that’s more your thing. I’d also encourage you to keep an eye on the Northern Voice site for updates! Thank you in advance!