Tag: social media

#yeg turns ten

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the #yeg hashtag on Twitter. Here is the first #yeg tweet:

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That’s probably the only time I have used #Edmonton! Ever since then, it has been nothing but #yeg. Here’s what I wrote about that tweet back in 2009:

“If I remember correctly, I found about the #yyc hashtag while I was in Calgary for BarCampCalgary2 on June 14th, 2008. I learned from @wintr that a few Calgarians had started using the hashtag to tweet about things related to their city. I thought it might be a good idea to do something similar here in Edmonton.”

Timing counts for a lot, and my Twitter story is no different. I was in the right place at the right time and joined Twitter early, on July 14, 2006. It was a fun and frustrating time (remember the fail whale) to be on Twitter. I convinced Sharon to join Twitter fairly early on, in October 2006. Her first tweet, fittingly, was about food. (Her second tweet the next day was an attempt to turn off Twitter, which at the time worked via text message).

Being one of the first people in the world on Twitter meant I was one of the few people to follow when others joined. It also probably meant I was just statistically more likely to be the one to post the first #yeg tweet, though looking back now it is kind of amazing to me that it took two years to do so. On the other hand, it wasn’t until August 2007 that Chris Messina suggested using the # symbol for groups on Twitter and posted the first hashtag in a tweet. Tagging was popular on the web already at that point but the word “hashtag” was new. Its use grew so much that it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014.

EdmontonTweetup
That’s me speaking at the first EdmontonTweetup in May 2008

On the fifth anniversary of the #yeg hashtag in 2013 I wrote:

“People from other cities often comment on how connected and tight-knit the online community in Edmonton seems to be, and I think the #yeg hashtag is really at the heart of that. We’ve used it to make new friends, to share the news, to raise money for important charitable causes, and for thousands of other interesting and important reasons.”

It didn’t take long for Edmonton’s Twitter community to grow beyond simply #yeg. Now people use all kinds of tags that start with #yeg like the ever-popular #yegfood. It used to surprise me to see #yeg used in places outside Twitter. Now, for better or worse, it’s part of the social fabric of our city.

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Still, it wouldn’t be the hashtag (and community) it is today without all of the people that have worked to support and grow it over the years. Especially Brittney, Adam, Jerry, Tamara, Linda, and Kathleen, to name just a few.

Oh, and it’s pronounced y-egg not why-e-gee. 🙂

Here’s to the next ten years of #yeg!

Recap: 2014 Yeggies

On Saturday night at La Cité francophone the 2014 Edmonton New Media Awards, better known as the Yeggies, were handed out. This was our third annual event and with over 300 nominations across 16 categories, there was a lot of really excellent work to highlight! About 200 Edmontonians filled the room to help celebrate some of our city’s best online content creators.

If you’re reading this blog I’d say it’s a safe bet that you know what the Yeggies are about, but just in case:

“The Edmonton New Media Awards, or the Yeggies, is an annual awards show created to recognize and celebrate outstanding social media content creators in the capital region. It’s an awards show to highlight some of the amazing talent we have here in Edmonton — from people who code websites themselves, to those who write, speak, draw, all on their own time. Yeggies recipients inspire, evoke, inform, educate and entertain us, and they do it because they have a passion for it.”

As you may have heard, Edmonton has a vibrant and strong social media community. The Yeggies are an opportunity to highlight the work being done and to say thanks for providing interesting content for us to enjoy. Not to mention it’s a fun evening of networking, catching up with friends, and putting faces to the Twitter names!

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Adam and Trent were our emcees for the evening and I thought they did a great job. You might say they crossed the line once or twice, but I thought they were hilarious and kept the show running at a great pace! We went with a Back to the Future theme this year, given that 2015 is a very special year in the trilogy. Sadly no one dressed up in Doc Brown’s white radiation suit or Marty McFly’s orange vest, but as has become custom at the Yeggies, most people embraced the “cocktail comfy” dress code. It was a good looking crowd!

We had a very funny standup performance by local comedian Liam Creswick to start the second half of the show. DJ Polyesterday provided the perfect ambiance to the evening. There was food from Cafe Bicyclette, and the bar featured a special “#iheartyeg” cocktail.

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From the full list of nominees, 90 were shortlisted. Our panel of judges then had the difficult task of choosing the winners, based on the quality of their work, their impact on Edmonton, and their ability to build community, among other factors.

Here are the winners for 2014, in order of awarding:

It was great to see so many of the winners in attendance this year. Congratulations to all of the nominees and winners!

I thought Phil Wilson, aka Baconhound, had two great speeches. He acknowledged the loss of BT Edmonton, noting that many people in the room had probably been given a leg up thanks to that show and the great people behind it. And in accepting his award for Best Twitter Persona, Phil recognized the huge impact that Marty Chan has had on Twitter over the last few months, especially during the hashtag election.

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We’ve often joked about having a special lifetime achievement award, but this year it actually made sense to hand one out. Dave Cournoyer has been blogging for more than ten years now at Daveberta.ca, an incredible milestone, and without question he has had a huge impact on Edmonton and Alberta. He’s the go-to source for political news and analysis and for good reason. Dave talked about how he almost gave up on blogging until the Ed Stelmach domain name debacle launched him into the spotlight. I’m glad he kept it up!

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I want to thank the volunteers who helped us out during the show, including Carol, Julie, Lindsey, and Sharon. We couldn’t have done it without you! Thank you also to our sponsors for helping to make the evening a success: TELUS, EEDC, Kiwi Productions, Northlands, EIA, Copy City, All About Flowers, Oodle Noodle, Focus Communications, and ACME Meat Market.

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You can see the full set of photos from the evening here. Thank you Nanc Price for the incredible photos!

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to find out when nominations for the 2015 Yeggies open and for details about the 2016 event!

A look at Instagram usage in Edmonton

In this post I’m going to share some data on how Edmontonians are using Instagram1. This data was collected using the Instagram API over the 30 days between June 9 and July 8. My aim in this post is not to try to quantify every Instagram photo posted in Edmonton, but rather to give you a flavor of what Instagram usage looks like in our city.

instagram photos by day

During the month in question, I tracked 90,679 total photos posted by 15,395 different users. The average number of photos posted per user was 6, while the median number was 3. Just 4 users posted more than 200 photos over the month, while 25 users posted 100 photos or more.

Filters

One of the things I was most interested in was filter usage. Which filters are the most popular? It turns out that 59% of all photos posted did not use a filter at all! Here’s the breakdown:

instagram photos by filter

The top five filters were: Amaro, Valencia, Mayfair, X-Pro II, and Lo-Fi.

Likes & Comments

I tracked the number of likes & comments posted on each photo for a short period of time only, so some may have accumulated more over the course of the month than I captured. A total of 15,825 photos or 17.5% received no likes, while just over 64,000 or 70.7% received no comments.

instagram photos by likes

The average number of likes a photo received was 13, and the average number of comments received was less than 1. One photo received more than 4,000 likes and one received more than 260 comments.

Tags

Here’s a tag cloud of all the tags used on the photos posted during the month:

instagram photo tags

Here are the top 25 tags used:

  1. yeg
  2. love
  3. edmonton
  4. summer
  5. cute
  6. instagood
  7. follow
  8. photooftheday
  9. followme
  10. beautiful
  11. selfie
  12. tagsforlikes
  13. tbt
  14. like4like
  15. girl
  16. happy
  17. smile
  18. picoftheday
  19. canada
  20. instadaily
  21. tflers
  22. food
  23. likeforlike
  24. amazing
  25. bestoftheday

Roughly 40,252 or 44% of the photos posted did not have any tags.

Neighbourhoods

One of the interesting things about Instagram photos is that they are geotagged. That means I was able to see where in the city they were posted. A total of 349 neighbourhoods had at least one photo posted. Here are the top 25 neighbourhoods by number of photos posted:

  1. Downtown
  2. Oliver
  3. Strathcona
  4. University of Alberta
  5. Garneau
  6. Queen Alexandra
  7. Summerside
  8. Westmount
  9. Cumberland
  10. Queen Mary Park
  11. Boyle Street
  12. Ritchie
  13. Summerlea
  14. McCauley
  15. Central McDougall
  16. Edmonton Northlands
  17. Brintnell
  18. Rutherford
  19. River Valley Victoria
  20. Inglewood
  21. Alberta Avenue
  22. South Edmonton Common
  23. Silver Berry
  24. MacEwan
  25. Ormsby Place

Here’s a rough look at some of the data on a map:

neighbourhoods

The top 5 neighbourhoods accounted for 19.1% of all the photos posted.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found this look at Instagram usage in Edmonton useful! Remember, this is not meant to quantify usage, but rather is intended to give you a sense of the way Instagram is used throughout our city. Obviously it would be interesting to analyze what exactly is being posted on Instagram, but that kind of analysis is much more complicated.

Happy Instagramming!

  1. It would be more accurate to say this is a look at photos posted in Edmonton. To gather the data, I asked the Instagram API for photos posted within the limits of the City of Edmonton. While most of those were likely posted by residents, some would have been from tourists or other visitors. ↩

Media Monday Edmonton: Who’s on Instagram?

Lately I have been pretty interested in the many different ways that Edmontonians are using Instagram. Of course we use it to document the beautiful, the shocking, the curious, and yes the mundane, throughout our city. But does it have uses beyond that? Are the local media using it for news?

Instagram itself seems keen on becoming a platform for news organizations, especially with video. Some organizations are indeed using it that way, such as the BBC which launched Instafax, a short-form video news service. It’s an obvious platform for photojournalists, and many use it as part of their storytelling (here’s a good list).

Here’s a snapshot of local media organizations on Instagram (as of June 9, 2014):

Organization Followers Posts
Edmonton Journal 4,830 414
102.3 NOW! Radio 3,613 604
Global Edmonton 1,691 340
Hot 107 Edmonton 1,438 187
91.7 The BOUNCE 1,178 53
Gastropost Edmonton 1,111 32
CKUA Radio 742 449
92.5 Fresh FM 628 97
Breakfast Television 363 64
VUE Weekly 313 30
CISN Country 103.9 234 3
Edmonton Sun 27 3
630 CHED 22 1

Have I missed one? Let me know!

For the purposes of this post, I chose to focus on organization accounts. There are some prominent individuals with Instagram accounts of course, like Lochlin Cross from 100.3 The Bear, Global Edmonton’s Carole Anne Devaney, or Ryan Jespersen of BT Edmonton fame. Perhaps some organizations not listed above are represented by their employees.

So, what do local media organizations use Instagram for? The Journal seems to be posting photos captured for stories, such as the Pride Parade on the weekend or the return of the Oil Kings a couple weeks ago. 102.3 NOW! seems to be using Instagram the way it uses other social media networks – for audience engagement. They post funny or interesting photos and actively invite user feedback. Global Edmonton seems to be using Instagram for a mix of purposes, including behind the scenes, News Hour promotion, and event coverage.

Up next for Instagram? Ads. They’ve been experimenting with ads in the United States for a while now, and now ads are coming to Canada too.

You might also be interested in my look at the local media on Facebook. You can see past Media Monday Edmonton entries here.

Media Monday Edmonton: Twitter Statistics

Though numbers are only one part of the story of how local media are using tools like Twitter, I find them interesting nonetheless. I have posted Facebook statistics for the local media a couple times, but never Twitter! In this post, I have taken a snapshot of the local media’s Twitter stats.

The following numbers were all gathered today using Twitter Counter and are sorted by followers.

Organization Followers Following Tweets
Edmonton Journal 47,389 122 76,503
CTV Edmonton 43,933 658 54,336
Global Edmonton 41,037 93 22,409
CBC Edmonton 30,205 407 28,912
Edmonton Sun 20,001 4,294 41,855
SONiC 102.9 15,992 301 29,289
91.7 The Bounce 15,068 15,540 18,596
Avenue Edmonton 13,264 641 5,847
Metro Edmonton 13,125 1,196 27,204
102.3 Now! Radio 13,107 14,386 46,021
Vue Weekly 13,006 420 4,223
CISN Country 103.9 12,617 12,108 23,874
HOT 107 Edmonton 11,306 2,277 24,829
CityNews Edmonton 10,872 158 4,402
BT Edmonton 10,271 2,932 13,913
100.3 The Bear 9,531 5,376 17,506
CKUA Radio 9,049 948 6,323
iNews880 7,517 1,615 40,046
TSN 1260 7,138 746 10,768
630 CHED 6,569 424 21,509
96.3 Capital FM 6,548 571 6,115
104.9 Virgin Edmonton 6,277 306 25,396
K-97 Edmonton 6,199 3,785 11,528
Alberta Primetime 6,155 416 5,365
CJSR 88.5 FM 4,094 733 1,925
up! 99.3 FM 2,224 998 5,980
105.9 Shine FM 1,486 878 4,755
92.5 Fresh FM 1,318 542 14,085
95.7 CRUZ FM 1,292 997 11,533

You can see some other Twitter stats in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2013. Based on that data, the ten most retweeted local media accounts are:

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. ctvedmonton
  3. globaledmonton
  4. cbcedmonton
  5. metroedmonton
  6. edmontonsun
  7. 925freshfm
  8. cisncountry
  9. inews880
  10. 1049virginyeg

What do you think? Do the numbers make sense given what you know of these organizations on Twitter?

You can see past Media Monday Edmonton entries here.

#yeg turns five

#yegToday marks the fifth anniversary of the #yeg hashtag on Twitter (here’s #yeg tweet number one). Can you believe it has been five years since Twitter started to take hold here in Edmonton? I can’t. I’m also continually surprised at the impact our humble hashtag has had on this city. Here’s something I wrote back in 2009 about the start of the #yeg hashtag.

It started out simply but has exploded in use since, and not just online. Now it is common to see the tag offline, even in the names of companies like YEG Live. I’m always surprised when newcomers to Twitter discover and start using the hashtag, but I’m even more surprised when I see it out in the offline world! What is it about those three letters?

YEG didn’t start with Twitter, of course. Most Edmontonians would associate YEG with Edmonton because of our international airport, constructed around 1960. According to Tom Hinderks and Richard Skermer, YEG would likely have been assigned to us roughly a year before the airport received its operating certificate, so that would have been 1959. That means those three letters have been associated with Edmonton for more than 50 years! But it wasn’t until Twitter came along that Edmontonians really started to embrace YEG as a sort of identity for the city. It was probably a wise decision for the Edmonton International Airport to focus on EIA as its brand rather than YEG, because there’s a risk it would have gotten lost amongst the chatter.

Use of the hashtag on Twitter has grown fairly steadily over the years. Today it might not even be the hashtag that you follow most, it might instead be one of the 430+ related tags that have become popular such as #yegfood or #yegtraffic. There were nearly 1 million tweets posted by Edmontonians last year that included the #yeg hashtag or one of the related tags, and that’s up from less than 140,000 in 2009.

How do you pronounce it? I did an informal survey on Twitter in December 2011, and that was one of the questions I asked. About 61% say yegg (rhymes with egg), the rest spell it out as in why-e-gee. Around the same time I asked Chris Martyniuk, co-founder of YEG Live, how he pronounces it. “Originally we were adamant about spelling it out,” he told me. “But we gave in about a year ago, because everyone said ‘yegg live’.” However you choose to say it aloud, online those three letters have become synonymous with Edmonton.

People from other cities often comment on how connected and tight-knit the online community in Edmonton seems to be, and I think the #yeg hashtag is really at the heart of that. We’ve used it to make new friends, to share the news, to raise money for important charitable causes, and for thousands of other interesting and important reasons. The world of social media is very different today than it was in 2008, with a variety of new services like Pinterest and Instagram, but the #yeg hashtag remains as a way to bind it all together.

I had no idea that Twitter would become as popular as it has in Edmonton, nor that the #yeg hashtag would take hold and play such a significant role in creating a sense of community here. Thank you to everyone who has used #yeg to make this a richer, more interesting city to call home.

Here’s to the next five years of #yeg!

Media Monday Edmonton: Facebook Statistics

It has been a year and eight months since I last looked at the local media’s Facebook statistics, so I figured it was time for an update! According to Facebook Ads, there are 580,000 people registered on Facebook who live in Edmonton, just 20,000 of whom are under the age of 18 (about 62% are between the ages of 18 and 34).

Here’s a comparison of local media organizations on Facebook (as of June 17, 2013):

ORGANIZATION MEDIUM LIKES (% change) TALKING ABOUT IT (% change)
102.3 Now! Radio Radio 72,061 (29.9%) 11,065 (247.3%)
Global Edmonton (↑) TV 68,215 (62.6%) 8,109 (231.4%)
91.7 The Bounce (↓) Radio 59,406 (20.5%) 14,936 (722.5%)
Hot 107 FM (↑) Radio 33,184 (100.3%) 10,402 (551.3%)
100.3 The Bear (↓) Radio 30,103 (40.6%) 3,410 (90.9%)
CTV Edmonton (↑) TV 29,864 (131.9%) 16,905 (1465.3%)
104.9 Virgin Radio (↑3) Radio 24,029 (216.7%) 35,571 (4094.7%)
Sonic 102.9 (↓2) Radio 21,485 (50.8%) 2,859 (78.1%)
CISN Country 103.9 (↓) Radio 21,440 (118.8%) 3,930 (232.8%)
Edmonton Journal (↑) Print 12,576 (120.8%) 1,698 (531.2%)
BT Edmonton (↑2) TV 12,298 (138.6%) 782 (-36.0%)
Edmonton Sun (↑4) Print 11,174 (256.5%) 1,716 (178.6%)
CKUA Radio (↓4) Radio 11,047 (22.1%) 102 (-48.5%)
K97 (↓2) Radio 7,805 (42.9%) 1,479 (342.8%)
Lite95.7 (↑3) Radio 5,968 (245.6%) 1,250 (594.4%)
up! 99.3 (↓) Radio 4,306 (33.7%) 1,232 (155.6%)
630 CHED Radio 4,023 (98.6%) 2,493 (4603.8%)
92.5 Fresh FM (↓4) Radio 3,214 (-7.9%) 4,420 (2425.7%)
CBC Edmonton (↑) Radio/TV 2,944 (205.7%) 147 (390.0%)
96.3 Capital FM (↑2) Radio 2,423 (187.8%) 250 (363.0%)
The Team 1260 Radio 2,315 (145.0%) 317 (4428.6%)
Vue Weekly (↓3) Print 1,854 (89.2%) 41 (192.9%)
Avenue Edmonton (↑2) Print 1,591 (737.4%) 51 (750.0%)
Metro Edmonton (↓) Print 1,334 (66.1%) 65 (364.3%)
CJSR (new) Radio 865 37
iNews880 (↓) Radio/Online 654 (84.7%) 65 (983.3%)

Some thoughts on the data:

  • Radio continues to dominate with Now! once again out front.
  • Though Avenue Edmonton saw the largest percentage increase, Global Edmonton actually added the most new likes at 26,252. CTV Edmonton, Hot 107 FM, Now!, and Virgin Radio all added more than 16,000 likes.
  • Last time I said that I expected the Edmonton Sun to do better, and they did! They had the second highest percentage increase in likes and rose four spots.
  • The only organization to lose likes was Fresh FM. The reason, as I’ve written about before, is that they inexplicably started over from scratch when they rebranded.
  • I’m not really sure why the “talking about it” metric has changed so much. There’s some information on it here, but my guess is that Facebook has changed the way it is calculated. Or maybe some organizations really did figure out how to make that number go up.

You can see past Media Monday Edmonton entries here.

Blogging on Breakfast Television Edmonton!

This post is coming to you this morning from the BT Edmonton studios downtown on Jasper Avenue. This week has been Bloggers Week on BT, and I’m thrilled to be closing it out! This is the third time I’ve been the “blogger in residence” – the first was in 2010, and I kicked off Bloggers Week last year. It’s always fun to hang out with Ryan, Bridget, and the rest of the gang, and being a media junkie I love getting a behind-the-scenes look.

Ryan & Bridget on BT Edmonton

Yesterday Ryan interviewed Mayor Mandel in the kitchen in what turned out to be the story of the day. Mandel was very candid with this opinion on Councillor Diotte, who announced late in the afternoon that he will run for mayor in the fall election. Here’s the video:

Another big topic of discussion in the studio this morning is the Gawker story that Toronto mayor Rob Ford smokes crack cocaine:

Rob Ford, Toronto’s conservative mayor, is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements and randomly slapping refrigerator magnets on cars. One reason for this is that he smokes crack cocaine. I know this because I watched him do it, on a videotape. He was fucking hiiiiigh. It’s for sale if you’ve got six figures.

Pretty strong accusation and a number of media outlets are treading carefully with their coverage. Apparently Rogers legal has informed the Breakfast Television crews across the country that they shouldn’t talk about Rob Ford and the crack cocaine scandal.

One of the things Ryan and I talked about was this week’s big arena news. We touched on some of the outstanding questions that I think we as Edmontonians need to start looking at in more detail. Then Dave Cournoyer joined me at 7:10am to chat about who else might be running for mayor. The three of us agreed that we don’t think Mandel will run again, and Dave and I shared our thoughts on Iveson, Sohi, Leibovici, and other potential candidates for the big chair.

Bay City Rollers on BT Edmonton

Today’s musical guest was the Bay City Rollers who are in town for a show this weekend. Everyone was bobbing their head to Saturday Night, Saturday Night! Fun fact: they just sang, no instruments actually were played. In fact, the studio guys had to get something to silence the drum kit so the drummer could hit the drums!

I was able to quickly plug tonight’s Truck Stop: Ginger Beef Throwdown, taking place from 5-8pm at the Royal Alberta Museum. Four trucks, four ginger beef-inspired dishes, you decide who goes home with bragging rights. Hope to see you there! I also got to touch on the Yeggies and some of the amazing content producers that we have here in Edmonton. Ryan asked me to mention one you might not know about, so check out The Wanderer Online if you haven’t already!

Kerry Diotte and Ryan Jespersen

At 8:40am, newly announced mayoral candidate Kerry Diotte was in studio for an interview with Ryan. He took the high road in response to the Mayor’s comments and focused on some of the challenges he sees (such as our debt load). I had a good chat with him off-camera, and he sounded upbeat and ready for a long, hard campaign.

The crew in the studio is always so friendly and accommodating. Thanks Dale, Greg, and Phil!

Dale, Greg, Phil

I’ll leave you with a small blast from the past. Here’s a segment I did with Ryan on BT back in 2010 on social media – it’s what got Ryan tweeting!

Thanks to Ryan and everyone else at BT Edmonton for having me on the show today, it was fun!

My Return to Podcasting: Mack & Cheese

Today I am excited to introduce a new project called Mack & Cheese. It’s a podcast that I’m doing with Graham Hicks, who I’m sure you know from his newspaper days. He’s the “cheese” in our duo, but is it because he’s cheesy or is it because he’s the big cheese? You decide!

His five-times-a-week town-crier style column “Hicks on Six” in the Edmonton Sun and the Edmonton Sun online, was considered Edmonton’s best-read newspaper column.

I approached Graham in the fall with the idea for the podcast and was thrilled when he said he wanted to take part. You can check out the first episode here. We both love talking about current affairs in Edmonton so that’s what you can look forward to on future episodes, though in our intro episode we talk entirely too much about ourselves.

Podcasting in 2004
Me podcasting way back in 2004

For me, this is a return to podcasting. I started podcasting in September 2004 actually. To give you some context, that was just a few months after Facebook initially launched and nearly two years before Twitter existed. My friends and I liked the idea of doing our own radio show, and podcasting gave us a way to do that. We created a site called BlogosphereRadio which was a series of shows that discussed various aspects of blogging. While some of our shows probably sounded like they were created just for our group of friends, some shows attempted to be more professional-sounding. We covered the first ever blog auctions for instance, and we recorded sessions for the Northern Voice conference a couple of years. It was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work!

Podcasting in 2004
My usual setup back in the day

So much work as a matter of fact, that I decided I could build some software to make it easier. That led to Podcast Spot, a hosting service that my business partner Dickson and I launched in September 2006 (you check out some of our features here). We had limited success with the effort, and ultimately decided to shut it down in October 2008. Podcasting had lost some of its lustre by that time, and we felt our service had come to a fork in the road. That was kind of the end of my podcasting career, if you could call it that! I look back now and am pretty happy with what we were able to accomplish (we even built some cool things like a real podcasting robot, pictured below). We were ahead of the curve in some areas, but were inexperienced and up against some stiff competition. I learned an incredible amount through the whole experience.

Finished Side View
The Podbot, which we controlled wirelessly!

While I stopped podcasting and put my effort into other projects, I never did lose my interest in it. I still think podcasting is a particularly interesting method of communication, even if it’s not as “big” as we hoped it would become. Some things are best discussed in a blog post, but I think there are plenty of things that podcasting is appropriate for. I’m looking forward to exploring that further with Mack & Cheese.

Here in Edmonton, there are now some really great podcasts to choose from. I have been completely inspired by what Adam and Scott have done with The Unknown Studio (and we use their studio for our recording…thanks guys!). If you aren’t already a regular listener, you should be! There’s also UserCreatedContent, Jay n’ J, Prairie Belles, and Product People that you should check out.

I think there’s a place for what Graham and I want to do, and I hope that some of you find it interesting enough to listen to. If you do take a listen and have some feedback, I’d love to hear it!

The Yeggies will recognize and celebrate online content creators in Edmonton

the yeggiesToday was a very exciting day for Edmonton’s vibrant social media scene! Adam Rozenhart of The Unknown Studio (among other things) officially announced the Edmonton New Media Awards, a.k.a. “The Yeggies”:

Edmonton has a particularly strong social media community. It’s quite remarkable, and I think pretty unique. I know other Canadian cities have enthusiastic social media users and communities as well, but — and I’ll admit to complete and total bias here — there’s just something different about Edmonton’s community.

You know what’s missing from Edmonton’s winning formula? True, unabashed recognition.

That’s where the new awards come in!

The Edmonton New Media Awards, or the Yeggies, is an annual awards show created to recognize and celebrate outstanding social media content creators in the capital region. It’s an awards show to highlight some of the amazing talent we have here in Edmonton — from people who code websites themselves, to those who write, speak, draw, all on their own time. Yeggies recipients inspire, evoke, inform, educate and entertain us, and they do it because they have a passion for it.

I’m really thrilled that this is really going to happen – there are so many creative people in our city making interesting things online. I am fortunate enough to be on the organizing committee, so I can tell you that coming up with the categories wasn’t easy. I’m sure we’ll hear lots of great feedback on how to improve, but I’m very happy with the award categories we decided upon for the first annual awards:

  • Best in Edmonton
  • Best in Political or Current Affairs
  • Best in Sports
  • Best in Food
  • Best in Arts and Culture
  • Best in Humour
  • Best in Fashion & Style
  • Best Twitter Persona
  • Lifetime Achievement Award

Yes, this means that a sports blog could be up against a sports podcast, for example. Blogs and podcasts are two different animals, but once you go down the path of having separate awards for each service or network you quickly realize it never ends. There is a special category for Twitter, but to me that’s a recognition of the outsized impact Twitter has had on the entire scene here in Edmonton.

Want to nominate someone? You have until the end of January!

Details for the awards show are still being worked out but it is currently slated to take place in the spring. If you’d like to get involved, we’re looking for both volunteers and sponsors.

Finally, I want to thank Adam for driving this forward. I think The Yeggies are going to be a big success, and I just hope I can play a role in helping him realize his vision for the project. Take a few seconds and thank Adam for once again giving meaning to the “Make Something Edmonton” idea.