Category: Web Culture & Links

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Wanted: A twitter/comment plugin combo

When I post an entry (such as this one), I have a wordpress plugin (called Twitter Tools) that sends out a tweet (meta-linking update: like this) telling everyone that I’ve posted something. To manage comments, I use Disqus, which, amongst other systems, allows people to authenticate at twitter to then post a comment. Which is nice, and I like it.

But! Sometimes, seemingly more often than not, people will @-reply to me on twitter with a comment on my post. And I will often @-reply someone else about their post (that was announced on twitter). So here’s what I want:

  1. When I post an entry that sends a tweet, capture and store the ID of the tweet that I sent.
  2. Whenever someone @-replies or retweets that stored tweet, aggregate that to the comment-section of my blog, so that the entire related conversation is visible in one place.
  3. For bonus points, given that everything I post is also pushed as a post to Facebook & everything I tweet ends up as a status update on there too, it would be great to extract any responses to those as well, in the comments section of my site.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

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Think City Electoral Reform Survey

I’m reprinting this from Think City’s last email message out. Please read and participate!

————-

Vancouver and many other BC municipalities suffer from declining voter turnout, the taint of big money influence on elections, a lack of neighbourhood accountability, and a host of other democratic challenges.

But the laws governing local elections are going to change.

Last fall, Premier Gordon Campbell announced a new local government election task force to consider sweeping legislative changes to how municipal elections are conducted in this province.

Fair Voting BC and Think City are gathering citizen views on reforms to submit to the provincial government, Vancouver city council, and the Vancouver parks board. Make sure you have your say!

  • Should there be a ban on corporate and union donations?
  • Should the city move to a neighbourhood-based or wards electoral system?
  • Should landed immigrants get the vote?
  • Should citizens directly elect representatives to regional boards (e.g., TransLink)?

The province’s task force will submit its recommendations on modernizing local government election rules to the legislature on May 30 for implementation prior to the fall 2011 civic elections.

Please go here right now to complete the 2010 Civic Electoral Reform survey by March 1, 2010.

  • TAKE ACTION: Click here to complete the survey
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Thoughts on the iPad

Like a huge number of people, I was highly anticipating the release of the Apple iPad. After watching the announcement, my initial response was ambivalent. It didn’t hit all the notes I was expecting it to. But a few hours later (and, it should be noted, I still have not seen it in person, only watched videos) I have some additional thoughts on it:

  • Given how much I enjoyed using my iPhone as an eBook reader on my last trip, I can only imagine how awesome it will be to use that screen to read books. That being said, the page-turning animation is horrible, and should go away now.
  • Where is the multimedia magazine-reader app? Can I buy a subscription to National Geographic or Harper’s or the Walrus or anything that’s been formatted & optimized for digital reading yet?
  • The form-factor strikes me as all wrong for watching TVs and movies. As several people have noted, it’s 4:3, when virtually all visual media is in widescreen now. Why not make it skinnier and longer to accommodate that?
  • I really hope I can tether it to the iPhone for internet access. I haven’t seen anything saying I can or can’t. But I can’t afford another data plan – so I certainly hope so.
  • I’m not a big mobile gamer, or mobile video-watcher, outside of travel. And I don’t travel much. The idea of watching movies on a tiny screen, in less-than-optimal resolution, with less-than-optimal sound does NOT sound appealing. Except on an airplane, where this screen kicks-ass over the in-seat screens.
  • The idea of loading up iWork and taking that with me whenever I do a presentation is *really* appealing, and I could legitimately see many small offices buying a communal one for that reason. Plus for note-taking during meetings.
  • Why no over-the-air sync of files/music/etc with my main computer? (I ask this about the iPhone too, but with iWork, it becomes a more serious issue)
  • The lack of forward-facing camera is actually something of a deal-breaker for me – because now, when travelling, I’d still need to take my laptop with me for chatting with Leah & Liam at home. So then it just becomes another device to tote, not a replacement.
  • Overall, this seems like a pretty awesome version 1.0. I’m excited to see what apps people develop over the next year. If, say, there was a Coda for iPad, some sort of remote-desktops app & and something like Lightroom (along with some sortof dongle connector so I could upload photos from my camera to my iPad), I would suddenly become very interested in owning one of these.

Your thoughts?

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Vancouver Foodbank Tweetup Fundraiser – Dec 2 @ Library Square Public House

Let’s raise some money for the Vancouver Food Bank! This year, more than ever, the Food Bank needs our help – more people need their services, and donations are down.

So, Wednesday, December 2nd, I’m organizing a Tweetup at Library Square Public House. Please bring donations, either cash or food to donate to the foodbank. We’ll then give the donations on behalf of Vancouver Twitterers during the CBC’s foodbank drive on December 4th. Thank you to Donelly Hospitality for providing a location!

Details:
Vancouver Foodbank Fundraiser Tweetup
Dcember 2nd, 2009  5:00pm
Location: Library Square Public House, 300 W. Georgia Street

Bring: Cash to donate to the Foodbank!

When donating to the foodback, cash is best – your every $1 will buy $3 worth of food. However, we’re going to stretch that! I’m please to announce that my company, Pencilneck Software, will match the first $500 in donations, so your $1 will buy $6 worth of food. If you or your company would like to match also, please let me know and I’ll add you to the list below:

Companies/Groups matching donations (in alphabetical order):

TOTAL MATCHING DONATIONS: $900

So, are you in?

UPDATE: Can’t make the event? Donate online! My sincerest thank you to PincGiving who are awesome and have donated a “donate now” button to this event, so that we can maximize our contributions to the Foodbank. All donations made between now & December 4th through this button will be counted towards matching donations, so please give! This button will live hear and to the right of my site:

Donate Now

If you’d like to add this button to your site, simply copy & paste the following code below:

<a href=”https://VancouverFoodbankTweetUpFundraiser.pincgiving.com”><img style=”border:none;” src=”https://www.pincgiving.com/images/gateway/buttons-3.png” alt=”Donate Now” /></a>

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15 years of web development! (Bloor & Bedford)

I was reading Mark Pilgrim’s Post on the history of the <img> tag & realized that yesterday (November 1st) marks the 15th anniversary of the very first web page I ever wrote! In Fall 1994, I was in grade 13, and the only student in my school to be taking OAC Computer Science. Earlier, my teacher had introduced me to this thing called the “World Wide Web”, and were playing around with this software called “Mosaic” that allowed us to look at sites on the web. We bought a book called “The Whole Internet User’s Guide” and were using to look at what people were doing online.

As usual, I got sick near the end of October (traditionally, I’m always sick either on my birthday or halloween). I’m fairly certain Halloween was on the weekend, and so, being stuck in the house, I took a poem I had to hand in the next day to my creative writing class, and marked it up in HTML to create my very first web page, hosted on a computer at the school. I’m fairly certain that for at least a year if you went to my high school’s website, this is what would have shown up for you. Please don’t judge me on the poetry, but as the page itself is long since gone, I’m reposting it here in a wave of nostalgia:

Bloor & Bedford

It’s Bloor & Bedford
at 3 a.m.
We drive your old Fords
to bring you them

15 stacks on the curb.
Snow’s still falling.
Outside the Reverb
taxis are stalling

Back in our warm homes
we’ve left our wives.
We hand out these tomes
that rule our lives.

At home asleep
you dream of cake.
We deliver, without a peep,
try to make sure you’re not
awake

There’s a small envelope
tucked in the door.
$55.50 you hope
will help feed the poor.

It’s Bloor & Bedford
for 15 years.
You’ve grown old & bored
yet we’re all still here.

I can see from the yellowed paper I got an A for the poem – not sure how I feel about it now, but there you go. If you couldn’t tell, it’s about newspaper delivery-people, and really, all those working while we sleep or stumble home from clubs & whatnot. I don’t recall if I got an A for building a website out of this, but this was the start of the site that would eventually become this very website, although it has changed domains, names, designs & servers numerous times since then. Sadly, when I left Smartt Net as an ISP in the late 90’s I somehow lost my site & all documents on it at the time, so I can’t simply re-print the original HTML itself, which I’m sure would be interesting.

Within 6 months of this inauspicious start I completed my first paid website, a further year after that my first commercial Web App, and well, the rest is history, as they say.

(Final useless/interesting tidbit: This post is apparently #1900 on this site, which feels a significant number too.)

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BCHydro Power Outage Alerts: A suggestion

Today, when the power went out at work, the first thing I did (after getting my laptop tethered to my phone) was to go to the BC Hydro Power Outages page, then check the list of outages and finally, double-checked the map to see if that was the correct area. As I clicked on the map, I noticed that each outage has a unique ID (quite sensibly).  I then noticed that there was a mobile site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on the iPhone, because it’s a super-old-school WAP deck.

But! Here’s my suggestion. Given that there’s a unique ID per outage, why not let me “sign up” to receive updates? everytime an engineer updates the status of the outage, there could be a system in place to deliver that update to me automatically. Ideally, I’d be able to choose any number of ways of getting updated: Email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, whatever,  but the most simple to implement would probably be email updates.

That way, I wouldn’t have to constantly check the site, or worse yet for BC Hydro, call them, and everyone would be happier because they can passively receive information rather than having to actively hunt it out.

Beyond this manual per-outage-sign up idea, the next step would be for me to be able to create an account at BC Hydro and input one or more addresses that I would like to “watch” for power-service updates. For instance, I’d like to know about power issues at my house & at my office.

I don’t know if this power outage/service data is “public”. If so, this seems to be another great open data hack for some determined person to build out. If anyone from BC Hydro IT sees this, I’d certainly love to talk with you about trying to build this out – I can’t (at a quick glance) find a way to get this information easily off-site for use by a “power-watcher” app.

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Greasemonkey VPL Catalogue Listings Script for Amazon

So David Eaves posted “5 Municipal apps I’d love to see“. One of them was an extension of an existing Greasemonkey script to search local library catalogue listings when browsing Amazon. So I downloaded Bryan Larsen’s Ottawa library script, modified it to look up in the Vancouver library, and have now posted in on Userscripts.org, for all of your pleasure.

Even if the initial lookup fails, you can still do a direct title & ISBN lookup from links that the Greasemonkey script pushes into the page, directly below the title of the book:

The VPL Greasemonkey script at work on Amazon
The VPL Greasemonkey script at work on Amazon

So, install the script, and test it out on Amazon! Let me know if you have any issues

UPDATE: I’ve updated the script a couple of times since this was initially posted, with the following revisions:

1.0: basic modification of the script
1.1: updated to include a new ISBN look-up URL variable
1.2: updated the ISBN lookup to use the correct OCLC web service
1.3: Fixed getIsbn() regex to look for /,? or end-of-string to extract the ISBN.
1.4: edited the Code-matching to use a central array of codes, and loop over those to provide a simplified messaging around status, and in particular, multiple statuses.

This means that it should be *alot* easier for anyone to further modify this in the future for any other libraries they may want to hook into, as well as providing better answers for books with multiple statuses and copies.

Ideally, I’d like to have this crawl the resulting code to pull out both the branch & due-date information, but this’ll do for now I think.

UPDATE 2009-10-20: There’s now also a script for use on the Vancouver Island Regional Library too: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60170

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The power of Twitter & the “Ellen Effect”

So, on Thursday, one of my clients, the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association (VOKRA) was linked to from the Ellen DeGeneres Show’s Blog, after being mentioned on the show. At the same time, a tweet was sent from the @TheEllenShow twitter account (As an aside, the reason for all of this is that Anna Torv, who is the star of the Vancouver-filmed show Fringe, fosters kittens for VOKRA, so she’s now much cooler in my books than she was before I knew this). Because of this one-time spike, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at VOKRA stats to see what sort of effect this had on their site, particularly as I had been worried a huge flood of traffic might down our servers (for the record, they passed with nary even a flinch. The charts below will show why).

The Ellen Bump
The Ellen Bump

As you can see, traffic generated from Ellen gave VOKRA a huge, but very brief, jump in traffic, from an average of 300 visitors a day to 3900 visitors. Which is nice to see. But, given Ellen’s reach (she’s the 4th-most influential woman in media & has over 3 million followers on twitter), I had been expecting a larger bump from it.

What’s particularly interesting, however, is how that traffic arrived at VOKRA:

How Ellen Viewers reached VOKRA
How Ellen Viewers reached VOKRA

Twitter blew the link on Ellen’s blog out of the water, driving 3 times more traffic to it than the links on the blog. Of the twitter traffic, all but 100 of those clicks came either from the individual tweet or the main page of Ellen’s account – the split is about 50/50 (of those 100 remaining visitors, all but 3 came from my own tweet – thanks, followers!). Being mentioned on the show was nearly as powerful as the tweet. Breaking down those Google searches, the most common was “kitten rescue vancouver ellen“, which suggests to me that comes from people watching the show and searching. A mere 839 visitors clicked through from the blog post itself. Although, perhaps not that surprising: It takes far more investment in the topic to do that, as likely, you’ll

  1. Watch the show & become interested in the topic
  2. THEN go to the Ellen show’s website and read more
  3. AND FINALLY, click through to the end point.

Which is yes, only one extra step, but in terms of buy-in, seems much, much more to me.

A final analysis. What VOKRA wants more than anything when you go to their site is one of 2 things:

  1. Apply to adopt a kitten
  2. Donate to them

What’s disappointing is that all this traffic had almost no effect on either of those 2 goals. There were a few more applications than usual over the past couple of days – a total of 14, vs, I believe, 8 for same period the previous week. And there was no effect on donations – no increase in either number of donations or amount over the previous week (given the increase in visitors, their donations-per-visitor ratio in fact just took a huge hit).

My conclusions to the above? VOKRA’s homepage is not as effective as it should be in communicating those 2 goals, and should be looked at (hopefully this analysis will mean that I get the chance to do). Analyzing what visitors did at the site, nearly every visitor clicked on the big cat banner picture – and then nothing else. The 2nd most popular click was to the blog post about being on Ellen – and then nothing else. In fact, the links to adopt & donate did not see a similar-sized jump in clicks, whereas the blog, gallery  & about us pages all did.

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My PVR and my vision for my TV-viewing future

I’ve been thinking lately around the business model for Cable/TelCos & PVRs, and it seems to me that the current model is likely to be short-lived, with good reason, for both the companies and consumers. Why? Because it’s a one-time sale for the companies, and the storage on them is ludicrously small for consumers.

Currently, how I watch TV is that I go home, and I search my channel guide for:

  1. TV series that I want to watch, then record the series
  2. upcoming 1-off shows that I want to watch, like movies or sports, and set a recording for those.

This is all fine and dandy, except for a few problems:

  1. I have to be in front of the TV to set a new recording
  2. I have to use my remote to navigate the interface as well as “type” when searching, for which task it is most wretched
  3. I have to use the TV I recorded the show to in order to watch it (I only actually have 1 TV, but many, many homes I know have more than 1 – and can’t record a show on one TV to watch later on other TVs)
  4. I don’t have enough room to store an entire season’s worth of shows (or even several seasons) worth of shows on my PVR for later watching.

Now, the techies amongst us will say “Use a media PC!” – and that’s true, I can – that certainly takes care of some of these issues, as long as keep buying hardware to store this stuff, and have the technical know-how to link up 1 or more TVs scattered around the house to a centralized media server – certainly not something I could imagine many of my peers doing, let alone my parents. Slingbox solves many of these problems, it is true – but for the Cable/TelCo’s, it doesn’t do anything – a win for consumers that my guess is, angers the companies.

So after my rant, I suspect many of you can see where I’m heading – the cloud. Shaw is my current cable provider, so we’ll use them as the test case here for how infrastructure should be built. And note that most of it can be built on already extant technology that is currently available to consumers:.

Shaw builds a web portal for all cable customers. In this portal, I can browse listings, search shows based on any number of criteria (actors, studios, genre, directors, writers,etc) – most of this information readily available on services like IMDB, and so can simply be pulled in via Web Service for my use. Once I’ve found shows, let me set up a recording for my PVR – on the website (I believe that ComCast already offers something along the lines of this). This would then record to my PVR. Much like Tivo does, the service could very easily and quickly provide recommendations based on previous behaviour, what other customers have chosen, to allow me to extend my recordings. Take this one step further, and add a social component – allow me to share my recordings with my friends, and see their recordings. Let us recommend series/episodes/events to each other, and interact on the site regarding our shows. So now I’ve got a vastly more robust way to find & record shows. When I get weekly newsletters from things like MovieCentral, or whatever, I could easily click a link or two and have that movie set up to record – from wherever in the world that I am.

The next step is where to store these recordings, and the answer is simple: up in the cloud. Why? because then the storage is unlimited, and it can provide yet another revenue stream for the companies. For each level of subscription package, offer a certain amount of space, starting at, let’s say, 10GB – a paltry amount. But give customers the option of upping their storage, for a nominal fee – again, because storage is dirt cheap. That way, if I wanted to store the entire season of Lost, Heroes, the Daily Show for later watching, I could. Because I could just pay for more storage. At home, my interface remains the same: I click the “list” button, but instead of things stored locally, I’m now browsing my cloud storage. Of course, the list itself could download and be stored locally for ease of use/whatnot.

Once this model is working, a whole ream of future possibilities opens up for the Cable/TelCo’s to provide service (and make money), including:

  • Let me add OLD shows to my library – similar to buying an episode from iTunes – either free (or dirt cheap) with Ads still in the show (and could be current ads, not from the original air date) or more expensive, but ad-free. Again, these old episodes could be rented by me or sold.
  • Take a page from XBox Live and allow viewing parties – hell, integrate with XBox live, so I can watch a show with my friends, chatting over the mic, or with our avatars in front, what-not. It would be great fun for Leah to watch ANTM with her friends, even though they can’t all get together because of kids or whatnot. Again this could be a free, free-x-times-per-month, free-with-y-package or even a pay-per-use service.
  • Build (& sell) clients for computers, phones, anything, so I can actually watch my shows from anywhere. How great would it be to sit down in my seat on a WestJet or Air Canada plane and connect to my Shaw Library to watch shows while traveling? Or on my iPhone? Again, this could work in a pure-streaming method, or a “temporary download” or any number of any methods, depending on available technology & bandwidth.

None of the above strike me as terribly complicated things to accomplish, technology-wise. It’s possible (though I don’t know) that we wouldn’t even need new set-top boxes – just a firmware update, as they’re clearly able to connect online for the On-Demand services.

So why is this a win? Because it keeps Cable/TelCo’s in control of distribution in a way they’re rapidly losing on right now to Hulu, iTunes. It provides a more convenient service to customers, it provides a slew of new revenue streams, and what’s more, potentially huge cost-savings to these companies. Now, I highly doubt that any savings would be passed on to customers, but it could be. It keeps networks happy because they can still sell  ads that might be seen, it can provide the producers with some measurable viewing stats, because each stream of a show from the cloud could easily be tracked, which might fix the current ratings-are-down-because-people-pvr-the-show problems. And it wins because it is future-friendly – as new options become available, they only need to update a centralized service, which can easily be segmented into beta-test populations, not roll out a new hardware set-top box to millions of houses. And as/if these companies settle on some standards, hardware manufacturers can start to build hooks directly into TVs and whatnot.

What’re your thoughts?

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Vancouver Jazz Festival iPhone App

This year, the Vancouver Jazz festival added a new tool for all its attendees to use: a “Mobile Companion”, for the iphone (free, from the app store [NB: iTunes store link]). This is probably the first (that I’m aware of) of innumerable related apps. I fully expect that every major, and shortly, even minor festivals, will have a similar app. It just makes sense.

When you first open the app, after asking for your location, it’ll update with the current schedule, and present you with a screen like this:

Jazz Fest Mobile Companion main screen
Jazz Fest Mobile Companion main screen

With this, I can quickly find what’s happening right now, what’s happening soon and how far it is from me so I can guess whether I can get there.

If I click on an event, I get another screen with info on the show itself:

The Event Details Screen
The Event Details Screen

This allows me to quickly see who’s playing, the cost, where it is and gives me links to the 2 things I’d want to do next: 1) phone for tickets or 2)find out how to get there (as an aside, the only major improvement I’d like to see is a almost-real-time count of the number of tickets available, even if it was “less than 100 seats left!” or “nearly sold out!”, rather than a specific count.

Of course, because your on an iPhone, the map is even more useful, because with 2 more clicks, you can directions to where you want to go, in the means of transport of your choice:

How to get to the venue
How to get to the venue

This is extremely useful for any multiple venue’d event, such as the jazzfest, the film festival (imagine the unwieldy Vancouver Film Festival Guide, digitized on your phone, along with movie descriptions directions, times, links to purchase tickets, etc.). It would likly prove just as useful for single-venue events like Sasquatch, or Pemberton – live-to-the-second updates of who’s on which stage, maps to bathrooms/vendors, etc.

Give it another couple of iterations, and tying in these apps to things like twitter for real-time interaction will be easy, seamless and make it possible to interact with the larger digital realm. I’d love to see a couple more links on that Jazz Fest details page: This event on Twitter/Facebook/Flickr/YouTube/(whatever) that opens up a search results, in the app that displays relevant results, and perhaps gives an interface to contribute to it as well.

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