Tag: news

Edmonton Notes for 11/15/2008 – Holiday Light Up! Edition

Earlier this evening, Sharon and I went to check out the Christmas on the Square Holiday Light Up! event. Mayor Mandel and Santa were on hand to help light up the largest Christmas tree we’ve ever had in Edmonton – 83 feet tall, with over 8000 energy efficient lights on it! BrightNights was also launched, and there were choirs, free wagon rides, and a tented version of the 104th Street City Market. Great weather today meant that Churchill Square was absolutely packed!

Holiday Light Up!Holiday Light Up!

You can see more photos and video here. The neat thing about the fireworks is that they were timed to the music!

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

Edmonton Notes for 11/8/2008

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

Edmonton Notes for 11/1/2008

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

Edmonton Notes for 10/18/2008

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

  • Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer finally conceded this week to brand new NDP MP Linda Duncan in Edmonton – Strathcona. She’s the sole non-Conservative MP in Alberta. You can find some video and other news here, via britl.
  • Edmonton businesses that don’t clean up the litter on sidewalks outside their locations could face $250 fines. Bylaw officers started writing tickets today.
  • The City of Edmonton is running budget town hall meetings across the city starting on Wednesday. Various times and locations are available until November 5th. The meetings are hosted by Mayor Mandel and other members of City Council.
  • More than 1250 of Edmonton’s neediest citizens received a warm Thanksgiving meal on Monday, courtesy of the 150 volunteers that helped to make Boyle Street Community Services’ 18th annual dinner a success.
  • On Tuesday, the chair of the police commission asked City Council for a budget increase of $24 million to help keep pace with inflation and to add 86 more officers to the force.
  • Apparently the city could save up to $5 million if it delayed opening the South Campus LRT station by a year. I don’t think that’ll happen however, as things are already in motion.
  • The first public meeting on the proposed excessive idling bylaw will take place on Monday, October 20th at 7pm at the Stanley A. Milner library downtown. Details here.
  • The Oilers defeated the Flames two nights in a row, bringing their record to 4-0. They’re off to a great start this season!

Edmonton Notes for 10/11/2008

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

What's trending right now?

twitter It’s been nearly three months since Twitter purchased Summize and renamed it Twitter Search. They still haven’t integrated Twitter Search into the main site, but they have made a number of other improvements:

Those last two points are the most important, I think. When you visit the Twitter home page, it asks you a simple question: “What are you doing?” Until now, that question has been Twitter in a nutshell. Moving forward though, I think a new question becomes equally as important: “What’s trending right now?”

I’ve said for a long time (with regards to Twitter) that there’s value in noise. It might seem dumb or trivial for me to post a tweet that says I am sleeping, but what if everyone did? Heck, we don’t even need everyone, just a sizable percentage. Then we could ask the question “how many people are sleeping right now?” and have real numbers to answer it with.

Twitter seems to have two sides now – gathering the noise, and filtering it.

Lots of people already contribute to the noise on Twitter, and I think their user base will only continue to grow. So they’ve got that covered. Increasingly it seems that Twitter is working to extract value from that noise. That’s the area they need to focus on most. I’m not sure how they plan to monetize their creation, but I suspect this is a big part of it.

The Election 2008 site seems like an experiment. If it goes well, I’d expect them to launch a number of other mini-sites in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow expanded on the trending entries on the blog too.

For me, Twitter Search is already the #1 stop for news. It’s where I learned that O.J. Simpson was found guilty, and that the bailout plan had passed. I think others will increasingly turn to Twitter Search first also.

You tell Twitter what you’re doing, and they’ll tell you what’s trending. I can’t wait to see where this leads!

Edmonton Notes for 10/4/2008

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

  • Tomorrow is Homeless Connect Edmonton, an event put on by Homeward Trust to “offer our homeless neighbours kindness, hospitality and resources to assist in their progression to a safe, secure home.” Sort of related is the 2008 Homeless Count, taking place on October 21st. I’ve signed up to volunteer, and they still need more if you’re interested.
  • Initial funding for the winter festival I mentioned last week has been approved by city council.
  • Cineplex Entertainment is building a new theatre in the southwest, but it’s not just any old theatre. It has 12 screens, 6 of which are adult-only, 6 bowling lanes, and a licensed lounge. The adult theatres have “service in your seat” which seems excessive to me.
  • Adam wrote about Edmonton’s $11 House this week. It’s a contest to give away a historic house near Alberta Avenue.
  • For the last few months, Sharon has been posting a list of interesting events taking place in the city. The latest October edition was posted yesterday.
  • Found this one via Raspberry Fox: Project Porchlight will be delivering more than 130,000 free energy-efficient compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs in Edmonton. They are having a Pizza Party and Bulb Blitz on Tuesday, October 7th.
  • Edmonton’s bid for the 2015 University Games just got a little stronger, with the Federal Government agreeing to support the $400-million initiative.
  • The Oilers will be debuting their new third jersey on Tuesday, October 7th at 10 AM on edmontonoilers.com. If you sign up for the mailing list, you could win one of ten autographed third jerseys!

Edmonton Notes for 9/27/2008

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed an increasing amount of Edmonton-focused content. I didn’t wake up one morning and say “self, you need to post more about Edmonton” – it just sort of happened. I’ve always said that I blog for myself first, so I just write about whatever I am interested in. Lately, that seems to be my hometown. I’m still passionate about technology and entrepreneurship and my other favorite topics – I’m just adding some local flavor into the mix!

I’ve been tweeting about Edmonton more too. The Edmonton Twitter community continues to grow and I make an effort to follow all the newcomers. If you’re having trouble grokking Twitter, I’d suggest following people who live near you – you’ll get more out of it that way. Here in Edmonton, many of us make use of the #yeg hashtag. For example, I use it to post links to interesting articles or news related to the city.

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s “almost live”. You can use it to have a conversation. The problem with that is that it doesn’t make for a very good archive. I post lots of things that I find interesting each week, but unless you’re paying attention, it’s very easy to miss them.

To solve that problem and to help me keep track of things, I’ve decided to start doing a regular “Edmonton Notes” post every Saturday. I hope you find it useful!

UPDATE: Sunday, September 28th is Free Admission Day at City of Edmonton attractions and recreation centres. Make sure to bring something for the food bank!

Text messaging is not dangerous, get over it

cell phoneThe people who create violent video games must be breathing a sigh of relief at the moment – text messaging is the new enemy. Increasingly the media has been publishing fluff pieces about the apparent danger that text messaging poses. With news that the train engineer at the centre of the crash in California last week was text messaging at the time of the accident, things are only getting worse for the technology.

Maybe it’s just the natural progression of things – become popular enough and you’ll undoubtedly gain enemies. Text messaging is more popular than ever, with over 75 billion messages sent in the US in the month of June alone. That’s an awful lot of messages! In fact, Nielsen Mobile estimates that more Americans send text messages than make phone calls. I would guess the numbers are similar here in Canada and elsewhere in the world.

Of course, there are no facts that prove text messaging is dangerous:

Though there are no official casualty statistics, there is much anecdotal evidence that the number of fatal accidents stemming from texting while driving, crossing the street or engaging in other activities is on the rise.

“The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points,” said Paul Saffo, a technology trend forecaster in Silicon Valley.

I am sure Saffo is completely qualified to make such a statement as a “trend forecaster” so let me make a few statements of my own. I would venture to say that you lose I.Q. points while using the good old fashioned voice functionality of your phone. You probably lose 10 I.Q. points while rocking out to music on your iPod. You undoubtedly lose I.Q. points while stirring your Frappuccino as you cross the street too.

My point is that text messaging is no different than any other distraction. You’ve always got to remember to pay attention to the task at hand.

My love-hate relationship with Connect2Edmonton: Twitter & FriendFeed to the rescue?

connect2edmonton Connect2Edmonton (C2E for short) is a community website serving Edmontonians that launched on March 30th, 2006. On March 4th of this year it surpassed 3000 registrations, and announced that it receives 45,000 unique visitors per month. Those are pretty good numbers for a website all about Alberta’s capital city!

You can find all sorts of great stuff on the forums at C2E. Users post about construction projects, sports, new restaurants, you name it. Sometimes they simply post links to articles from the Journal or the Sun, other times users are breaking news at C2E. The wealth of frequently updated information on Edmonton is the main reason I love C2E.

Here’s what I hate about it: C2E looks and feels and smells like it was built in 1996. There are quite a few “Web 1.0” aspects to the site, such as the old school message boards, the lack of permalinks, and the horribly ugly URLs for the pages that do have permalinks. Instead of blogs, they have “columns”. Thank goodness the site has RSS, or I’d probably never use it.

For the moment, C2E seems to have an edge in that it has the community. I wonder how long that will last though? There are so many other up-and-coming services that could easily make C2E nothing more than a fond memory. Here’s a couple of examples that I’m involved with:

Edmonton’s Twitter Community
I still think that Twitter is changing the world, one tweet at a time. It’s transforming the way news breaks, and is making real-time conversations extremely public. Here in Edmonton we have a really strong Twitter community. We’ve had a Tweetup – follow us here – and we’ve loosely organized ourselves with things like the #yeg hashtag. Imagine if C2E users posted to Twitter with the #yeg hashtag instead of to the C2E forums! Others could reply without needing an account, they could get notifications to their mobile devices, through the API to other applications, etc.

The Edmonton Room at FriendFeed
Another thing I’ve created recently is the Edmonton room at FriendFeed. Anyone can join and start sharing messages, links, and of course comments and likes. And thanks to a recently added feature, I can add RSS feeds to the room so that entries automatically appear. So far I’ve added the Edmonton Journal and a couple of filtered blog feeds (such as the Edmonton tag on my blog). Again, this goes beyond C2E – instead of finding the Journal article and posting it to the forums, they automatically appear in the Edmonton room, ready for commenting and sharing. (I suppose I could add the C2E feed, but that’s beside the point.)

What both of these examples highlight, more than the “Web 1.0” look of C2E, is that it’s still a relatively closed system. Twitter and even FriendFeed are both much more open systems. They encourage data to be shared freely, and as a result, they are the platforms on which the news engines of the future are being built. Want an example? Check out NewsJunk.

I’m not saying that we need to abandon Connect2Edmonton. Instead, C2E should embrace Twitter, FriendFeed, and other services to make itself more open. C2E is a great service for the Edmonton community, but I know it could be so much better.

UPDATE (6/27/2008): I just tried to add the C2E RSS feed for Columns to the Edmonton FriendFeed room, only to find that the feed lacks datestamps, lacks authors, includes entries in a random order, and is otherwise useless. EPIC FAIL.