All posts by Robert Ouimet

Media

CBC Integrates Radio/TV and Online Management

According to InsidetheCBC.com

In a note to staff today, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch announced that the CBC Board of Directors has approved “the formal integration of CBC Radio and CBC Television, which is effective immediately. The integrated services, including CBC.ca, will be led by Richard Stursberg, Executive Vice-President, English Services.” Jennifer McGuire becomes the new Executive Director of CBC Radio

The full story is on CBC.Ca.

This fully explains the resignation of Radio Vice President Jane Chalmers earlier this month.

If you’ve ever seen a CBC management flow chart you’d agree this all makes perfect sense. The re-org means that the main media lines all roll up under one head. From the CBC.Ca story…

McGuire, CBC-TV programming head Kirstine Layfield and CBC News publisher John Cruickshank will all now report to Stursberg.

Expect a lot of dire predictions from the radio folks in particular.

In reality this is good news and should help make the decision making process less moribund.

Media

Coast Mountain Bus Company Gives The Finger to Commuters and Greenhouse Gas

6 Comments

20071121_bus.jpg

Coast Mountain’s plan to go on a holiday schedule during Christmas week this year shows how out of touch they are with the lives of their customers.

There will be fewer buses travelling around the Lower Mainland during the entire week of Christmas, as Coast Mountain Bus Company tries something new this holiday season.

The usual Christmas Day schedule will remain the same but on Monday, December 24, plus the Thursday and Friday following Boxing Day (December 27th and 28th), buses will be running on a Saturday schedule. Full story at News 1130.

I guess all the Coast Mountain execs will be taking that week off, unlike 95% of the rest of the world who will be working.

By putting the entire week on holiday bus schedules, Coast Mountain is assuring riders there will be long lines and long waits for public transit. We should be encouraged to use transit to do our post-Christmas sale shopping, but the people who run our public transit clearly have decided we should all get in our cars and jam up city streets even more.

Bus drivers have reason to be concerned that they’ll face the wrath of frustrated consumers. Instead, you should be voicing your concern to the people who run Coast Mountain.

You can find them here:

Customer Relations representatives are available to speak with you from 8:00am to 4:00pm, Monday to Friday at 604-953-3040. You may also reach us by custrel@translink.bc.ca or by fax at 604-953-3663. Head office: 1600 – 4720 Kingsway Burnaby, British Columbia
Canada V5H 4N2 Telephone: (604) 453-4500

Media

Flickr Hits 2 Billion Photos Before Its 4th Birthday

Holy Moly indeed.

In the Flickr blog today they mention that they hit their 2-billionth upload. To get a sense of the sheer volume, just check the ‘explore’ function.

If you select “most recent uploads” Flickr tells you how many photos were uploaded in the last minute. I’m usually seeing numbers between 2,500 – 3,500. That means that in one hour, at the low end, there are 150,000 uploads. Over a day, even at the low end, that’s 3,600,000 photos uploaded.

At that rate, it would take over 555 days to hit 2-billion. Flickr’s been around longer than that of course, the URL was first registered 4 years ago this month. But obviously they had no-where near this kind of uptake in the early days, and these days, I’m sure they have days that go way over that low number I’m using.

It’s staggering to think about this kind of volume. And Flickr is just one of many photo-upload sites. Add in the social networking sites that also allow photo uploads, and you really have to be impressed with sheer volume of images being uploaded, stored, tagged and displayed.

We used to keep our photos in a shoe box in a closet somewhere – the more annoying members of my family held regular ‘slide nights’ when they’d show off their snaps from their latest trip to Minot. Essentially, our family photos quietly gathered dust somewhere.

Now, they’re on display for the world to see, and in some cases downloaded, not only by friends of family, but by total strangers. Sure there are a lot of budding photographer types who use Flickr as a giant sounding board for their work, but mostly, it’s just regular photos taken by regular folks. Some of them even on a trip to Minot.

Encourage that kind of behavious, and the next thing you know you’ve got 2-billion pictures on your hard drive.

flickr-happy-2.jpg

Media

Internet surpasses TV for Young Europeans

A new study shows Europe has hit some major internet related milestones. The study was conducted by European Interactive Advertising Association. Highlights include:

  • 169 million people now online across 10 European markets
  • Internet use stretches ahead of TV amongst youth audience
  • Uplift in online driven by rising use amongst silver surfers and digital women
  • Internet users on average spending nearly 12 hours per week online and nearly a third (29%) spending upwards of 16 hours online
  • Internet users access the internet 5.5 days per week
  • Social networking sites now visited by 42% of internet users
  • 8 out of 10 Europeans connect to the internet via a broadband connection

full story here

Media

Horror – Social Networks Are The New Crack

At least according to an Australian researcher named Julian Cole…

“For many moderate to heavy users, checking their MySpace or Facebook account has become an automatic and compulsive behaviour, with some participants reporting they log on up to twenty times a day,” Mr Cole said.

He found that many openly admitted to their addiction and, in an ironic twist, contribute to online confession groups. Full story at Sydney Morning Herald

This got me wondering about young Julian’s research methods. He’s a recent university grad…

Mr Cole’s findings were based on an in-depth survey of 20 participants, chosen from a larger survey of 300 people.

Coincidentally, Julian Cole’s Facebook account shows 373 friends.

Feel free to poke him for me, won’t you ?

20071108_julian.jpg

Media

Day – I'm Ready For My Surprise Close-up

Oh sure. Totally out of the blue and unplanned.

How fortunate there were so many reporters available to chronicle this amazing act of spontaneity.

Vancouver police investigating another stabbing in the city’s Downtown Eastside had a surprise visitor Thursday morning: Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

The minister’s unexpected appearance on a street corner in Vancouver’s grittiest neighbourhood surprised police and reporters who were already at the crime scene.

After emerging without notice from his official car, Day spent a couple of minutes being briefed by Sgt. Anne Drennan, the former VPD media liaison turned beat cop, before talking to reporters while his two handlers looked on.

full story at CBC.ca

If you believe this was a total surprise, drop me a line, I’ve got a bridge for sale.

Can you say hook-line-sinker?

Media

Horror – Social Networking = Productivity Drain

1 Comment

The nerve of them.

Apparently, some employers thinks spending time on social networks like MySpace and Facebook are, well, not exactly essential to the job at hand…

Barracuda [a network security firm], based in Campbell, Calif., blocks its 350 employees from accessing social networks. “Our experience has been that they are a little bit of a productivity drain,” Mr. Drako said.

Barracuda said that in general, 53 percent of companies now restrict employee Web surfing. One in five companies that filter Web surfing also actively monitor employee online activities, which should make you think twice before you SuperPoke a friend on Facebook from your cubicle.    Full story in the NYT

I worked at a large media conglomerate where,  decades before I arrived, employees had somehow convinced management that reading the newspaper was an integral part of their jobs.  It wasn’t unusual to pass cubicle after cubicle and see people deeply absorbed in reading the paper doing research.

Its not surprising, therefore, that there was a near panic stampede a few days ago when a number of social network sites were blocked (for a short while) at this very same former workplace of mine.

But web browsing during office hours on non-work-related sites is nothing new.  This graph represents web traffic over the course of a day…

hourly.gif

This happens to be my web server log, but a variation of this graph shows up on 90% of web sites.  Sure there’s evening traffic, but the highest traffic is during regular working hours.  And it’s been like this for as long as I’ve been looking at web traffic graphs (and that’s a long time now).

So, blame Facebook and MySpace all you want.  But remember, if there’s a will, there’s a way to while away the work day.

Media

Canadian Sports Celebrities Are Cheap

What’s it cost to have, say, Ron MacLean from Hockey Night in Canada fame at your event. Apparently this much:

Note: We can only provide personal appearance booking information within the performance fee range listed below. We cannot facilitate access to Celebrities for any other reason.

Performance fee range: $10000 – 25000

That info from GetSportsLegends.com

I guess that’s a way of keeping triflers away – you know – it’s a bit like that “you have to be this tall to go on the ride” things at the PNE.

It strikes me though that this is really not a lot of money for a national broadcast legend. I mean, most Canadians know, dare I say, adore this face:


Ron MacLean

But Mr. Maclean is an exception when it comes to Canadian sports celebrities.You can get Howie Meeker, Dick Irvin or Jacques Demers for somewhere between $1,000 – 5,000 each. (I’ll wager a Horton donut you could get all three for 5k if you put your mind to it).Geez, I know Vancouver reno contractors who make more than that for just showing up on time.

Non-Canadians Chi Chi Rodriquez and Arnold Palmer are listed as $50,000 or more. Meanwhile, you can get Olympic Gold Medalist curler Joan McCusker for, you guessed it, between $1,000 – 5,000.

American Hall of Fame Pitcher Dennis Eckersley – $10,000 to 25,000.

Canadian CFL Hall of Famer George Reed – $1,000 – 5,000.

And it gets worse.

Consider this. There’s a Don Cherry impersonator – not even the real Don Cherry, who gets between $1,000-5,000 per appearance. Same goes for a ventriloquist and another guy who’s billed as a golf comedian. These guys deserve as much as Howie Meeker ? A hockey icon. A man who coined the phrase “roll it back” and “stop it right there” ?

I don’t even like pro sports and I know this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The only saving grace, and it’s a slim one, is that I’m assuming these rates are in Canadian dollars, because GetSportsLegends is in Regina.

Whew. But still. We’re proud to be hosers, but our sports celebrities shouldn’t be getting hosed.

Please. Stop it Right There.

Someone roll it back and add some zeros for these guys, will ya ?

Media

Flock – More Chrome than a 56 Caddy

That crazy new browser, Flock, has rolled into version 1.0

I really like the way it integrates with Flickr and Facebook and the like. If you can afford the screen real-estate, it’s really quite lovely.

I really like the way it makes use of the address bar with mini tabs and the people sidebar has already become my new must-have. It’s smart to have the browser highlight features that are on a web page, drawing attention to them (like RSS, media files etc) and then providing a way of dealing with them for you. Flock could be one of the best things to happen to RSS since, well, RSS.

My preference is usually for way LESS in a browser – clean and simple – but I find now that I’ve usually got quite a few tabs open at all times and Flock seems to be addressing that by building in a number of things that I would normally have sitting in a tab. So, despite my misgivings, I’m really liking it.

And, what’s not to like about a built-in blog editor.

Click the images for larger screen grabs.

20071105_flock1.jpg 20071105_flock3.jpg

Early beta versions had runs badly on my MacBook, but version 1.0 is smooth and fast on Leopard.

I keep thinking that this is a browser I should hate – so much stuff jammed in – but its nicely engineered and sweetly designed.

Media

Record Industry and Radio Face Off

Is there anyone the record industry isn’t pissing off ?

The membership of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters adopted a resolution opposing the music labels’ copyright payment demand at their Annual General Meeting in Ottawa. The resolution, which was adopted unanimously, exposes the recording industry’s intention to use the Copyright Act to have the private radio industry make up its losses due to file sharing.

Full story in Broadcaster Magazine

It’s hard to stir up sympathy for either side in this one.

Meanwhile…

At the same convention, the CAB in Ottawa, members of ACTRA turned out to protest lack of Canadian programming by CAB members…

Last year, Canada’s English-language broadcasters spent almost $500 million in Hollywood and a grand total of $40 million on Canadian dramas. For every dollar they spend on drama in Canada, they spent 12 dollars in Hollywood. Full story in Broadcaster

Media

Writers on Strike But Still Funny

American film and TV writers have gone on strike – but there’s always a joke in there somewhere…

Union members have been told that picketing is compulsory, and to hand over unfinished work to the union to ensure that that there is no furtive writing.

The strike poses a dilemma for writers who are also producers or creators of their shows.

“I have to figure out how to strike and picket myself,” said Spike Feresten, a former writer/producer on the “Seinfeld” show who now has his own weekly talk show on Fox. “How do you egg yourself? How does that work?”

Full story at Canada.com

Media

Hubert Lacroix is new CBC President

1 Comment

Montreal lawyer and broadcaster Hubert Lacroix has been named president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Radio-Canada.

Heritage Minister Josée Verner said Monday that Mr. Lacroix, chosen one of the top lawyers in Canada for 2008, has the experience and skills to lead the public broadcaster. Full story at the Globe and Mail.

InsideTheCBC has pretty much the same copy.

Over at the Zarlink.com site, where he’s a director, you get some sense of his background (and a nice corporation pic):

Mr. Lacroix has more than 25 years’ experience in the fields of mergers and acquisitions of public companies, and corporate finance.

According to FindLaw.com his area of expertise is “Business Organizations” so he should have a hey-day at CBC.

Good luck to Mr. Hurbert.