Northern Voice 2009: Teh Funny

No, that’s not a typo! Rob Cottingham (@RobCottingham) was the second keynote speaker today, and he led us on “a lightning tour through both the intentionally and accidentally hilarious sides of social media.” I couldn’t really blog this keynote – it’s one of those things you needed to experience. I laughed a lot, as did everyone else in the room.

Rob CottinghamNorthern Voice 2009

Which are funny?

  • Podcasting – Really funny.
  • End-User License Agreements – Yes, funny!
  • Beta – Not funny. Maybe kinda funny.
  • Memes – No, not funny.
  • Blogging – Funny!
  • Business – Rob thinks it’s hilarious, the audience isn’t so sure.
  • LOLcats – Audience is 50/50, Rob says it’s a matter of taste.

Some of the non-funny things Rob said:

  • At the heart of social media is creative self-expression and the need to connect.
  • The first Northern Voice was a techier crowd than it is today.
  • Teh funny is a big part of the way we connect on the social web. Shared laughter is something primal.
  • If you’re already doing teh funny, please, keep it up!

Two other interesting things about Rob’s keynote – first he attempted to become the first comic in history to heckle himself. He setup some scheduled tweets using HootSuite, very funny. Second, Nancy White drew an “illustrative interpretation” of Rob’s talk on the board behind him. It actually turned out quite well!

Fantastic keynote. I hope someone has some video to share!

Northern Voice 2009: On Buried Hatchets and Better Tomorrows

The first keynote of the conference was from Nora Young (@nora3000), a well-known Canadian broadcaster and podcaster. She is perhaps best known as the host and creator of Spark. I thought it was really interesting that she didn’t use any slides. Instead, she just stood at the front of the room and spoke, occasionally playing an audio clip.

Nora Young

Here are some notes I took during the first part of her talk:

  • Consider the telephone. When it first arrived, people didn’t know what to do with it! There’s always a learning curve with new communications technologies. Apparently people debated whether to say “ahoy” or “hello” when the phone was brand new.
  • Nora says we’re at the beginning with social media, and it’s up to us to shape the conversation about whether we use “ahoy” or “hello”.
  • Challenges for mainstream media: being transparent and not being the sole authority.

Looking ahead to the new “ecology of information”:

  • Mobile devices are important. More and more people are continually connected using their phones, and most people in Asia access the Internet via a mobile device.
  • If the web of 1990s was about globalism and anonymity, the web of today is about creating a layer in between online and offline.
  • The web doesn’t have to be global – it can be local, or even hyperlocal. Crime maps are a good example today.

Conclusions:

  • A huge caveat is that many people lack fast, reliable access to the Internet. Another is the digital information divide around the world.
  • The new ecology of information implies that we’re just starting to see a big shift in the economy and in culture.
  • If the information you’re getting is based on the people you know (as is often the case in social media), what does that mean? What kind of an impact does that have?
  • If public broadcasting had never existed, how in 2009 would you make the case for it? Nora says it would be based upon social media.

So what’ll it be everyone? Ahoy or hello?

Northern Voice 2009: Borrowed Content

I did a presentation today at Northern Voice in the “bootcamp” stream called Borrowed Content: What’s OK, What’s Not. The session was intended to cover the basics of copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons for bloggers. I didn’t really know how advanced the audience would be, so I decided to keep things simple. I didn’t talk about Bill C-61 at all, instead pointing people to Michael Geist’s blog. I tried to cover the very basics, and had two key takeaways:

  1. When in doubt, just ask!
  2. Remember the Golden Rule

Basically, if you don’t know whether or not you have permission to use a piece of content, ask the person or organization who owns the rights to it. Chances are pretty good that they’ll say yes. The golden rule is of course to treat others the way you’d want to be treated – give attribution, link where possible, and say thank you.

Here are the resources I mentioned during the talk:

Thanks to everyone who came to the talk and to the folks to contributed with questions/comments/suggestions!

Download the slides for this session

Northern Voice 2009: Stewart Butterfield Keynote

The first keynote of the conference was from Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr. I really liked his session, mostly because as he said “I don’t need to have a point right?” He started out by sharing his history on the Internet – starting with his schooling at UVic, usenet groups, etc. His first three handles were “ui503”, “sbutterf”, and “dsb26”. Stewart is only ten years older than I am, but that’s enough for many of his first experiences on the net to be unknown to me. Very interesting stuff.

Stewart Butterfield Keynote

Stewart repeated this phrase throughout his presentation: “This is who I am.” He said he didn’t want to talk about identity too much, but he started with that and made his way toward talking about community. Stewart says that community changes the phrase to: “This is who we are.”

Next, he moved on to Flickr and photography. Stewart identified three trends:

  1. Ubiquity of capture devices
  2. Spread of the network
  3. Change in perceptions and attitudes – participation is no longer weird

He said that the desire to participate is becoming widespread. I think I agree with him that one of the most interesting aspects of “Web 2.0” is the drive toward participation.

Stewart’s last point was that we’re in an era of “relationship-based computing”. I think that’s a good way to describe it.

He finished by saying he loves the Internet. Me too!

I think this was a great way to start the conference – entertaining, and not too much thinking required.

New Business Cards

For most of 2008, I didn’t carry any business cards with me. It was sort of an unofficial experiment to see if I could simply say “Google me” when asked for one. Of course, it wasn’t a very good experiment because I have no way to measure how successful it was. I did get the impression that people like something physical however, so I decided I’d once again carry cards in 2009. I now have three:

New Business Cards

I received both the Techvibes and Questionmark cards in December/January. There are times when I am specifically representing one or the other, so they’re good to have.

I just picked up my third card, pictured front and back on the right side, this week. It’s a little hard to see in the photo, but the front is white and the back is a light grey. What I tried to do with the design was make it as “webby” as possible:

  • MasterMaq is in big letters and matches the header of my site. Hopefully people just type it into Google, click to my website, and see right away that they’ve arrived at the correct place.
  • There is no phone number because I prefer email. If someone really wants to call me, they can find my number on my website.
  • There’s a nice big tag cloud on the back with the words I hope people associate with me. My thinking is that if someone is looking at the card, wondering where they met me, the tag cloud will jog their memory.
  • The tag cloud also serves as a quick way for people to discover other things I’m up to. Plus I think it looks cool.

So far I’m pretty happy with the card. I’m bringing a stack to Northern Voice with me this weekend, so I’ll update this post if I get any comments one way or the other. For the designers reading this, I used the Philly Sans typeface for “MasterMaq” and everything else is Helvetica.

What do you think?

Edmonton Transit (ETS) officially launches Google Transit trip planning

As you may have heard yesterday, Edmonton Transit (ETS) now officially supports Google Transit for trip planning. What that means is that you can enter an address in Google Maps and get directions using public transit to another address. You can look up trip plans from any device that supports Google Maps, including the BlackBerry and iPhone. This has actually been possible since late October, as I mentioned in a previous post.

Edmonton is the 8th Canadian city to support Google Transit. Councillor Don Iveson demonstrated the service today at City Hall. You can read the press release here, and you can check out the official ETS page here.

ETS Google Transit Press Event

You can see more photos and video from today’s event here.

So what’s new?

First and foremost, the data is up-to-date and accurate (more on this below). You generally don’t have to worry about relying on the data in Google Transit. Secondly, Google Transit now understands ETS landmarks. This means you can type your home address as a starting point and “Millgate Transit Centre” as the destination, and Google will understand what you mean. These are the two primary reasons that ETS didn’t officially launch this back in the fall.

How does it work?

ETS has an agreement with Google to provide them with up-to-date data once a week (this time period can be different for each transit agency). If there’s a change in the accuracy of the data, ETS must provide Google with an update. This means there may be a small window of time during which ETS has more accurate information than Google, but in practice that’ll only happen for emergencies as most changes are planned and announced in advance.

The data is transferred in a format called the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). It’s up to ETS to ensure the GTFS data they provide is valid. Now that the “preview” period is over, Google automatically fetches the most recent data from ETS servers and applies it to Google Maps.

Why is this service important?

The Google Transit service offers a number of benefits. It’s really easy to use – just enter a start and end address and click get directions. I think it’s great for attracting more ridership to ETS as well. Young people are already familiar with Google Maps, and the thousands of individuals walking around with smartphones now have trip planning with them at all times. Visitors to our city are another group that will benefit, as they’re likely already familiar with Google Maps and no longer have to figure out the ETS trip planner.

What’s next?

Marketing will be the biggest thing initially. This service is only useful if people know about it! Edmonton was just listed on the Google Transit site, and information about Google Transit was just added to the ETS site this morning. Presumably introductions to the service will be added to all of the ETS information and promotional materials as well.

Though ETS is working on improvements to its own trip planner (which originally launched back on June 21, 2004), they fully expect usage to decline as people switch to Google Transit. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t provide transit agencies with statistics of any kind, so ETS won’t know exactly how many people are using the new service. Both services will co-exist.

Can we get the data now please?

I hope access to the GTFS data will be made available soon. Now that ETS has sorted out the process for publishing the data for Google, hopefully it’ll be simpler to come up with a process for getting the data to the rest of us too. Many other municipalities already publish their GTFS feeds for public consumption. There are lots of resources available for developers too, such as the GoogleTransitDataFeed open source project. Access to the data is the first step toward building an API for Edmonton Transit (ETS).

In the meantime, trip planning in Edmonton is now faster and easier! Click here to get started.

Can Facebook become the new default?

I find Facebook incredibly useful, if not particularly exciting. My usage reflects that – I like to add people on Facebook in order to maintain connections, and I like to keep my profile looking fresh, but I rarely surf Facebook like I used to. Yet there’s no escaping Facebook. The numbers tell the story. Check out these statistics compiled for a recent Fortune article:

  • 175 million members
  • 3 billion total daily minutes of use
  • 850 million photos uploaded each month
  • 15 million who update their status daily
  • 24 million pieces of content shared each month

Very impressive. Also in the sidebar, Fortune looks at the race to 150 million users. That feat took Facebook 5 years, versus 7 years for the iPod, 14 years for the cell phone, 38 years for the television, and 89 years for the telephone. Obviously it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but you get the idea (and notice how other technologies such as Google or Windows are left out).

With numbers like that, it’s not hard to listen to Mark Zuckerberg and actually think he’s got a shot at achieving his new goal:

"We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone’s name, find the person you’re looking for, and communicate with them," he told a German audience in January, "that’s a really valuable system to be building."

In the article, author Jessi Hempel positions Facebook as the new phone system, but I think the new email system is perhaps a more reasonable comparison. I think the “default” right now when you make a connection is to get an email address. You collect business cards at events and they all have phone numbers and email addresses but how many people actually pick up the phone? Email is the default.

What if Facebook could become the new default? Clearly, that’d be a big deal.

Already I think Facebook is the default platform for events, and most people seem to think it’s the default for photos. Can it become the default for communication in general? As I’ve said before, I think Facebook Connect is a step in that direction.

DemoCampEdmonton6

It’s DemoCamp time again here in Edmonton! In just three short weeks we’ll once again converge at the University of Alberta to see what local tech entrepreneurs are up to. Following the demos we’ll head over to a local pub for Edmonton’s best networking opportunity for tech professionals (we’ll probably be at Hudson’s on Campus this time, instead of The Windsor). You can read about our last DemoCamp here. Here are the details for #6:

Date: Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Time: 6:30pm (and drinks/networking afterward)
Location: E1 013, ETLC, University of Alberta (map)
Cost: Free

The rules for DemoCamp are simple: ten minutes to demo real, working software, followed by a few minutes for questions. No slides allowed. If you’d like to demo, make sure you’ve attended at least one DemoCamp in the past, and add yourself to the signup list.

Please help us spread the word – we’d like to make this the biggest DemoCamp Edmonton yet! Let’s fill the room. Check out the BarCamp Edmonton blog, our Facebook group, the Facebook event, and the wiki page. Be sure to tag your tweets, posts, photos, and other content with democampyeg.

See you in early March!

Notes for 2/15/2009

Here are my weekly notes:

Edmonton Notes for 2/14/2009

Happy Valentine’s Day! Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

UPDATE: Forgot to mention the Agile Edmonton social, taking place on Tuesday evening at Hudson’s downtown. More information here.