Month: January 2009

(Note: This was originally published on the Globe and Mail website)

Although it is still very much in “beta” mode (and possibly even alpha), I’d like to talk about a new project the Globe has just launched along with the Dominion Institute — a project aimed at capturing some of your thoughts and ideas about a range of public policy issues. It’s called the Public Policy Wiki, and you can find it at http://policywiki.theglobeandmail.com. I mentioned it briefly on Twitter the other day, and we’ve already gotten some great input from a number of contributors.

The idea behind the wiki is simple. Public policy in Canada often develops behind closed doors, with limited (if any) input from average citizens or even knowledgable outsiders. We’d like to throw open those doors to some extent, and the wiki seemed like an interesting way of doing that. It is still very much an experiment, but we think it’s a worthwhile one. Interestingly enough, I found out just yesterday that Barack Obama is doing something similar at Change.gov called the Citizen’s Briefing Book.

Here’s how it works: We’ve chosen one important policy issue to start this experiment — the federal budget (which the Finance Minister is expected to introduce on January 27). We have background analysis and perspectives from a range of policy experts, two proposals on which you can vote or comment (one from TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond and one from Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford) and a forum where you can have your say.

Then there’s the wiki itself. We’ve prepared some “briefing notes” of the kind that federal ministers would have submitted to them in the lead-up to a budget. Each one addresses a specific policy recommendation — a tax cut, an auto-industry stimulus package, a Green Fund, a GST rebate, and so on. You can vote on each note, or you can use the wiki tools to actually edit these notes, and you can also create your own and have others contribute to it, as two contributors have already done.

Once you have had your say on the various proposals, we will pick the most popular briefing notes and submit them to the Prime Minister and other senior officials in Ottawa. For more on the details on what a wiki is and how you can can use it to contribute to the project, see the FAQ page at the site. I’d like to thank you in advance for contributing, and I’d also like to thank everyone who was involved in getting this experiment off the ground — including the team at the Globe and also Marc Chalifoux, the executive director of the Dominion Institute, for all of his help.

Why did we decide to do a wiki? For all their strengths, newspapers historically haven’t been all that good at the “two-way” information exchange, or what has become known as the “conversation.” Feedback or input from the general populace has typically been restricted to letters to the editor, “man on the street” surveys, and periodic focus groups.

The one-way nature of the newspaper business isn’t just a result of arrogance or lack of interest — it’s also a function of technology and time, and the limitations thereof. Finding people to interview on different topics isn’t an exact science, and even the most diligent journalist often misses people who might have worthwhile opinions. And public policy bodies such as the Dominion Institute face similar limitations when it comes to getting public input.

That’s why social-media or “Web 2.0” tools such as blogs, commenting systems, Twitter, Facebook and wikis are so fascinating. They dramatically lower the barriers to entry when it comes to getting input from knowledgeable (and, in some cases, not so knowledgeable) readers or interested people of all kinds. Even a single person on Twitter or Facebook can touch hundreds or even thousands of others, some of whom may have valuable viewpoints on something that a journalist is writing about (I’m @mathewi on Twitter, if you want to connect with me there).

We’re hoping the wiki will do that — and if it succeeds, we plan to use similar tools to solicit your ideas and input on a whole range of public policy and social issues, in a project we are calling the “Two Million Minds” experiment. I’d love to hear what you think, so feel free to email me at [email protected] or send me your thoughts via Twitter or my Facebook page.

Although it is still very much in “beta” mode (and possibly even alpha), I’d like to talk about a new project that the newspaper I work for — the Globe and Mail in Toronto — has just launched along with the Dominion Institute, a project aimed at capturing some of your thoughts and ideas about a range of public policy issues. It’s called the Public Policy Wiki, and you can find it at http://policywiki.theglobeandmail.com. I mentioned it briefly on Twitter the other day, and we’ve already gotten some great input from a number of contributors.

Continue reading “An experiment: The Public Policy Wiki”

The mesh 2009 team — that’s me, Rob “Hohoto” Hyndman, Stuart “Tripharbour” Macdonald, Mike “FreshBooks” McDerment and Mark “I’m a consultant now” Evans — have been working hard trying to nail down some kick-ass keynotes for the next mesh conference (April 7 and 8 at MaRS in Toronto), and we have a couple we can announce now: Jason McCabe Calacanis will be doing the business keynote, and Jessica Jackley Flannery is our society keynote. We’re pretty excited about both of them, and hope to have our media and marketing keynotes lined up soon.

Continue reading “Mesh09: Calacanis and Kiva to keynote”

David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, muses in a recent column about how it would be great if the newspaper industry could somehow come up with an “iTunes for news.” After all, record labels were on a long slide into oblivion just like newspapers, right? And then Steve Jobs came along with iTunes and saved everyone’s bacon, and now the record industry is just as profitable and healthy as it used to be, right? Wait — you mean the music business isn’t as profitable and healthy as it used to be? Hmmm. Maybe there’s a flaw in Dave’s analogy somewhere.

Continue reading “An iTunes for news? Dumb, dumb, dumb”

Over the years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve continually made the argument (as plenty of other people have as well) that comments are an integral part of a fully-functioning blog. As part of my new job as communities editor at the Globe and Mail — which I wrote about here — I’ve been encouraging writers at the newspaper to not just read the comments but also respond to them. Why? A couple of reasons. One is that it helps to improve the tone of the comments, since it helps to make it obvious that a) someone is reading them and b) someone actually cares what is being said.

Continue reading “Fred Wilson and the power of comments”

There’s been plenty written about the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale, and that owner Hearst Corp. says if it doesn’t sell in 60 days the paper will become Web-only, or will be shut down completely. Some have argued that as the perennial second paper in a relatively small market, the PI has been doomed for some time now (it hasn’t turned a profit in almost a decade, apparently) and that the news about the Post-Intelligencer may actually be part of a strategic move by the Hearst family to acquire the newspaper’s main competitor in town, the Seattle Times.

I don’t have any strong opinions on any of that really, although I agree with Alan Mutter that being the second newspaper in a fairly small metropolitan market doesn’t look like a great value proposition at the moment (if it ever was). What really struck me was the story that the Post-Intelligencer wrote on its own demise — and in particular a photo that ran with the story, which I’ve included here (click through if you’re reading this through a feed reader). There’s not much remarkable about it, at first glance, but for some reason I kept coming back to it and thinking about it as I was reading.

Continue reading “Some thoughts on the Web and print”

You tell I’m a gadget geek at heart, because I know I have no real use for this device, and yet I still want one: the iTable can apparently give you a Microsoft Surface-style, CNN Magic Wall-ish multi-touch television experience for as little as $2,400. As CrunchGear describes it, that will give you an overlay for a 32-inch LCD TV. For a little more — as much as $10,000 for the ultra-sophisticated version — you get a giant table-style TV with touch sensors built in and a computer that runs Windows XP.

More than a decade ago now, I remember seeing an IBM research labs demo in which they had a desk that was a touch surface (although single-touch only), where you could drag your documents around and pop up windows with photos in them or even videos. I thought it was a fantastic idea then, and I still do now. And having used the iPhone, the multi-touch interface just makes such a huge difference when working with photos or things like maps. Google Earth on a giant multi-touch table would be incredible.

Mike Arrington has a post up at TechCrunch about a Twitter client called Tweetvisor, which he says is “a contender for best alternate Twitter interface” (next the to the Web interface, presumably). I had a look, but like my friend Mark Evans — who wrote a post on his Twitterrati blog — I was underwhelmed by Tweetvisor’s interface. It might be handy to be able to manage multiple Twitter accounts, I suppose (although who needs to do that? people with multiple personalities? marketing people, I assume), but I couldn’t see much else that was all that compelling.

Continue reading “Tweetdeck rules — that is all”

Apple’s announcements at Macworld may have lacked some of the flair and sizzle that CEO Steve Jobs usually brought to his keynote, but there was one announcement that, arguably, will wind up changing the playing field considerably. That announcement is the news of DRM-free sales from all of the major music labels through iTunes, and the addition of variable pricing. As rumored during the run up to Macworld, the world’s largest online music store will soon start selling songs for 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 each. The only question now, as Peter Kafka notes in a post at MediaMemo, is whether anyone will care or not — and whether it will help to fix any of the music industry’s systemic problems.

(read the rest of this post at GigaOm)

There have been — and will no doubt continue to be — plenty of blog posts, magazine articles and even (irony of ironies) the occasional newspaper story written about the death of the newspaper. It’s become almost a cottage industry, poring over the imminent failure of giants such as the New York Times, the Tribune Co. empire and even the Wall Street Journal. Some pieces (mostly by journalists) bemoan the changes the media industry is going through, like one I wrote about recently, in which a columnist wrote about how bloggers were killing the industry. Others (thankfully) are a little more optimistic about the evolution of online media.

Continue reading “Newspapers: Evolution or catastrophe?”

For some time now, there has been speculation that Steve Jobs was sicker than either he or Apple wanted to admit. At first, the company said that he simply had “a bug,” and then when the company announced that he would not be doing his usual keynote speech at Macworld — a speech so associated with him that it has come to be known as a “Stevenote” — the company denied it had anything to do with his health. Now, we know that this was untrue. Steve himself has confirmed that he is unwell as a result of a “hormone imbalance,” and that he is working on getting better (although as Wired notes, the letter is somewhat opaque when it comes to the specifics of this problem).

Continue reading “Apple still has a credibility problem”

Like many others, I was saddened to hear about the closure of JPG, the “crowd-sourced” photography mag that started in 2004 and became a real Web 2.0 success story. I confess that I never actually saw a physical issue of the magazine, but I thought the concept had a lot of merit: a collection of the best photos submitted by a community of passionate photographers, voted on by the community and then printed and published. Printing and distributing a high-quality magazine costs a lot of money, however, and it seems JPG couldn’t quite find the business model that would make that part of the organization work.

Continue reading “JPG magazine: Great idea, bad business?”

Everyone knows that the Web speeds up the metabolic rate of many businesses (not to mention lowering the barriers to entry for competitors, of course) but the story of Twply.com has to be a new record: going from hot startup to scapegoat to selling the business in less than 24 hours. It’s as though someone recorded a business developing and then played it back using time-lapse photography, like they do in nature documentaries, when they show plants growing, blooming and then dying in a matter of seconds.

Continue reading “Twply: Instant business — just add Twitter”