In a novel he wrote in 1863, entitled “Paris In The Twentieth Century,” science-fiction pioneer Jules Verne described a city with a network of electric lights, gas-powered automobiles, wind power, machines that transmit text and photos across long distances, high-speed trains that run on magnetic levitation, and computerized weapon systems. The central character of the story is Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates in 1960 with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued (he eventually dies after a famine and nuclear winter-style disaster wipes out most of France). Verne’s publisher refused to publish the book because he thought it was too dystopian and would ruin the author’s career, and the writer locked it in a safe, where it was forgotten until one of Verne’s great-grandsons found it. It was eventually published in 1994.
Usually I start these things by talking about the weather — except for last year, of course, when the big news was the wedding of our daughter Caitlin and her husband Wade. This year there is some news, but possibly not quite as big, or at least big in a different way: Becky and I have moved out of our house in Toronto and into a new home near Buckhorn (which seems like such a quintessentially Canadian name, but is also very popular in other parts of the world). It’s just northeast of Peterborough, which in turn is northeast of Toronto. This home has an interesting feature, which is that it’s attached to another home, one belonging to our old friends Marc and Kris (old meaning we’ve known them a long time, not old as in aged).
If you’ve seen any of these letters, you’ve probably seen a mention of the Farm, where we usually go for New Year’s and other visits during the year, sometimes with a large group of friends from our university days. So the Farm is where we are living now — this is a recent picture of it. It’s actually two distinct houses put together, with a large atrium in between, and the basements are connected. We live on the right-hand side. Kris’s mother used to live there until earlier in 2019, when she moved into a retirement home — and since we were planning to move out of our four-bedroom house in Toronto now the kids are gone, we decided to take over the house.
This was not an easy process, as anyone who has moved out of a house they have lived in for decades with multiple kids can attest — it involved countless trips to dumps and the Salvation Army and other similar places, plus a five-ton dumpster living in our driveway for weeks, and endless journeys up and down stairs with boxes. At this point, we are more or less moved in, but still have no idea where some things are, and the garage will barely fit a car because there are so many boxes of “treasured belongings,” otherwise known as stuff we haven’t figured out what to do with yet (we have a shipping container as well). But it is lovely living out in the country on a large chunk of land with woods and hiking trails, and it is two hours closer to the family cottage, which is also a plus.
The girls are also doing well — Caitlin is busy being a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at McMaster in Hamilton, and Zoe and Meaghan are living together in Kingston, where Zoe is about to graduate from Queen’s with an honours degree in psychology and Meaghan is working at Best Buy.
In what seems to have become a pattern for Toronto at Christmas, I am writing this surrounded by green grass and not a trace of snow, and temperatures are in the 5 degree Celsius range (any Americans reading this will have to do the translation into Fahrenheit themselves — I think it’s multiply by 2.1341 and then add the square root of 11). It’s quite nice not to have to shovel, and to only have to put on a light jacket when going out, but it also feels a little odd, and somewhat disturbing. I mean, I love the personal effects of global climate change, but I can’t really enjoy them fully because I’m worried about all the ways it could go wrong for the planet and life as we know it.
In any case, on to the letter! As usual, I will focus on the great events of this year and skim over (or ignore completely) the not-so-great ones, like multiple car accidents (everyone is fine! Our insurance didn’t even go up!). If everything works properly, the links below should open in a new window — and if you want to go and look at the photos afterwards, you can find them in a Flickr slideshow. You can also find larger versions of all of them, along with a whole bunch more pictures that I haven’t included here, at the Ingram Family Photo Library (unless my server is down, in which case I apologize). If you have any questions about the letter or just about the Ingram family in general, my email is [email protected] — unless of course you have a criticism to make about this letter, in which case please feel free to use the email [email protected].
As some of you may remember from last year’s letter, this year started off very differently compared to every other year. Usually we get together at Marc & Kris’s farm near Buckhorn for New Year’s, but this time we were all in a ballroom at the Stone Mill Inn in St. Catherines, toasting the marriage of our eldest, Caitlin, to a wonderful young man named Wade Hemrica. It was a great wedding, with beautiful bridesmaids and great food and a lot of good friends and family gathered, and of course there were hilarious and touching speeches from the bride and groom’s parents, which Becky and I managed to get through without too much trouble. Caitlin also convinced me to record myself singing and playing “Blackbird” by Paul McCartney, and then played that as the music for our father-daughter dance, which was pretty special. I may have had something in my eye at one point, but made it to the end without too much blubbering.
It’s hard to believe that two people as youthful as Becky and I could have a daughter as beautiful and accomplished as Caitlin, but there you have it. And despite the fact that I don’t drink, I had nine-and-a-half shots of tequila with various family members and still managed to remain vertical for most of the evening! All in all it was a terrific party, and a great way to ring in the New Year. I told Caitlin and Wade it was so much fun that we should do it every year, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.
I would like to start off by apologizing to all the devoted readers of the annual Ingram Family Christmas Letter (you know who you are) who may have noticed that they didn’t get one this year. That’s because I — as the sole editor and publisher of said letter — decided to hold the presses for some breaking news: Namely, the New Year’s Eve wedding of our oldest daughter, Caitlin Lee. If you have any complaints about this decision, please forward them to this address: [email protected].
Describing Caitlin’s wedding as breaking news might be a bit of an exaggeration — after all, we knew that it was coming ever since they got engaged last November. We were all overjoyed at this news, because her fiance turned husband Wade is a terrific guy, a fellow nurse who fits Caitlin to a T and is also a great co-parent to my favourite grandson, a Border Collie named Kip who joined their family in 2017. The three of them took some amazing engagement photos in the fall. Caitlin and Wade met after a mutual friend introduced them, and we all knew they were fated to be together when Caitlin started a quote from Lord of the Rings about potatoes, and Wade completed it with “boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew.”
The couple planned the entire wedding themselves (with some valuable and much-appreciated advice from their parents, of course) and it went off without a hitch. It was held at a historic paper mill turned boutique hotel in St. Catherines, Ontario called the Stone Mill Inn that has a big sweeping staircase where they took most of their pictures. Also, through a weird coincidence, Caitlin’s dress came from the Rebecca Ingram line of wedding designs, because that’s the designer’s daughter’s name.
The year started with beaver tails and maple taffy and general merriment at Winterlude in Ottawa, and then we headed off to resort in the Dominican, on the south side of the Samana peninsula, across from Punta Cana. There were tiki umbrellas and breakfast by the beach, which most of the time we had all to ourselves. Some days we even got some chairs on the beach, although most days they were “reserved” by people who got up at 7 am and put their towels on them with clips, which you definitely were not supposed to do but everybody did :-(. The resort had some great pools. and some leaning palm trees and some great specialty restaurants (which cost extra of course). And we did a fun horse ride on a trail through the forest to a waterfall.
We also went on a whale-watching tour, and while we only saw flashes of whales we got to sit up on top just a few of us, which was nice because people were apparently being violently ill down below 🙂 And we did a zip line through the jungle, which Becky did with her usual panache. We also took a bus tour out to a beach with some tree forts that you could rent apparently. No sooner were we back in Toronto but it was time to head off to Perugia in Italy for the journalism festival that we’ve been going to for a couple of years now. Never get tired of the view from the Brufani Palace hotel in the old city, and the amazing venues for the conference, some of which are buildings that date back to the 11th century (the Sala dei Priori was built before Gutenberg invented the printing press). We also joined a few friends on a cab ride to Assisi, where we toured the basilica again and hiked the amazingly tilted hills of that old town.
We started the year with our usual trek up to The Farm near Peterborough, which had turned into a winter wonderland, so we scraped the pond and did some skating. We had the usual feast of gourmet creations, including an awesome turkey dinner with Zoe’s friend Jade and Kris and Marc’s niece Becca and Stephanie and our friends Barb and Lori, and my famous yin-yang caviar pie, which I stole from Marc and Kris. Back in Toronto, Meaghan premiered her cool new hairdo and Zoe performed in her school’s presentation of the play Legally Blonde, playing the sarcastic lesbian character 🙂
I got a cool email from my friend Rob Hyndman in which his dad Bob — who flew with my father in German — shared photos from a famous incident in which my dad tried to help steer a fighter jet and it wound up skidding off the runway and into a field (something about the front steering wheel control being different than he was used to). We went to Orangeville for one of Zoe’s hockey games and the hockey dads had an impromptu cookout in the parking lot, with condiments on a foldout ironing board.
Soon it was Winterlude time, with skating on the canal and poutine and beaver tails, and it turned into a bit of a whiteout at one point. Ottawa even has these cool new enclosures where you can put your skates on without freezing to death, which is nice. Unfortunately, 2015 saw some bad news as well — I and the rest of the writers at Gigaom were told in March that the company had essentially run out of money, and the funders didn’t want to put any more in, so it was closing immediately. It was a pretty big shcok — I had been talking to Om Malik, my friend and the founder, about a job offer from the Wall Street Journal and he never mentioned the possibility that Gigaom might shut down. After much deliberation, I decided to turn down the job with the Wall Street Journal (they wanted me to move to San Francisco) and accepted a job with Fortune magazine. Onward!
Putting all of that behind me, we put winter behind us as well and headed south, where we did a swamp tour of the Everglades, complete with alligators (which our guide called over and fed by hand) and some of the group got to put their feet in the sand near Miami Beach — I had to wait with the car so we didn’t get towed 🙂 We spent the night in a tiny apartment where we somehow crammed all seven of us into bunkbeds, and then it was off on a cruise with lots of pools and hot tubs and our own little balcony.
As so many of our years have, we started 2014 with a New Year’s celebration at our friends Marc and Kris’s place — known as The Farm — near Buckhorn just north of Peterborough, where we scraped the pond clear and did some skating and also went for some snowshoe hikes through the woods on the property. After that we met up with Becky’s brother Dave in Port Hope for a hockey tournament, where his team was playing Zoe’s team — it was a lot of fun, except for the fact that Zoe’s team got completely annihilated 🙂 Becky and I also took some time off for a little relaxation at the Scandinave spa in Collingwood, near Blue Mountain, which offers massages and has a sauna and steam room and a half a dozen or so pools of varying temperatures. It was fantastic.
We also visited Ottawa for our annual Winterlude trip, where we pretend to skate on the canal in order to justify the eating of several pounds of poutine and beaver tails and maybe some maple taffy, which they make by pouring the syrup into cold snow and then wrapping it around a stick. I made a quick trip to Boston for a conference, where I paid a ceremonial visit to Boston Common and of course to Hahvahd yahd. It’s not quite the same, but I had a great time at a conference at the University of Toronto as well, which has some cool old buildings too. And soon it was time for our annual trip away from the snow to Florida, where we visited Becky’s mom and her new husband at their place in Port St. Lucie on the Atlantic ocean side of Florida.
We made the obligatory trip to our favourite beach, the white beach at Siesta Key and watched some sunsets from the south jetty in Venice, and took the kids to Busch Gardens to see the alligators and ride some coasters and eat too much junk food. We also went to Pop’s Sunset Grill down by the intercoastal waterway near Nokomis, where you can eat at a fire table. And of course we had Zoe’s birthday, as we usually do when we’re in Florida, and went bowling. After we got back, I went to New York for a conference that we put on at Pier 50 (which I found out is where the Titanic was supposed to dock if it had finished its voyage). I visited some of my favourite places, including Central Park and the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park and the New York Public Library near Bryant Park, where I like to work in the periodicals room.
As if to make up for the last few years, winter decided to arrive early and with a vengeance in Toronto this year, dumping a couple of feet of the white stuff in early December and bringing with it some frosty temperatures of minus 15 or so Celsius. But we managed to stick it out, and Becky and I even went running during that cold spell, because we are Canadian and that’s what we do. Our annual visit to Florida can’t come soon enough!
As usual, this Christmas letter/webpage is a selection of highlights from our year, along with one fact that I made up (you’ll have to guess which one). If you want the “too long, didn’t read” version, we are all fine and healthy and the girls are doing great, and I travelled a lot this year but it was mostly fun. If you like the letter or the pictures, drop me an email and let me know. As always, the photos are available as a Flickr slideshow if you’d rather have a look at them that way. Here’s to a great 2014 for you and yours!
The new year began with some ice-skating and general snow-related merry-making at The Farm with our friends Marc and Kris and the usual assortment of dogs, friends, extended family members, snowshoes and eating that makes up our New Year celebrations. We also had a visit with Becky’s brother Dave and his wife Jenn and their family in Kingston — including a walk through their ravine with its marshmallow-looking snow — and I managed to sneak in a trip to San Francisco, which is always nice in the dead of winter. In February we continued our winter-related activities with our usual trip to Winterlude in Ottawa with its maple taffy, poutine (a delicacy that not all of my American friends seem to have been won over by for some reason) and beaver tails.
This year I got some great shots of the legendary Hog’s Back Falls in Ottawa, which was a symphony of ice. In March, we headed off to Florida with Dave and Jenn and Caitlin came with us again to keep Zoe company and to surprise her grandmother (Meaghan had to stay at university and study unfortunately). We got our share of beaches and lying around on the lanai, and made a pilgrimage out to Rum Bay, the legendary rib spot on an island south of Venice. Zoe had her 15th birthday while we were there and Becky and I got in some golf before we had to make the long trek back home to winter.
After we got back from Florida we got to see Dave and Jenn’s brand new grandchild Brooklynn, who was teeny tiny and everyone got to hold her at least once. In April I went to New York to put on a conference for Gigaom about the future of media, in a great old building right across from Radio City Music Hall, and I was pretty proud of the program we put together — with speakers like Tumblr founder David Karp (Meaghan and Zoe were quite impressed by that, as Tumblr fans) and Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian. Even though I’ve been to New York a few times by now, I still get chills walking along Broadway and seeing Times Square and doing all that touristy stuff.
At the end of April, Becky and I got to go on the trip of a lifetime (so far anyway) when we spent almost a week in Italy. I got invited to speak at the International Festival of Journalism, so we turned it into a kind mini-vacation: three days in Perugia, which is an ancient Etruscan city two hours north of Rome that has some amazing ruins and great food (the region is known for its black truffles). We stayed in a majestic old 5-star hotel called the Brufani Palace and had a romantic dinner at an Argentinian restaurant, sitting out on a little balcony overlooking the old city, and the swimming pool in our hotel had a glass panel at the bottom where we could see the ruins of the ancient fort beneath us as we swam.
Then we took the train down to Rome, where we stayed in a great 5-star hotel that Becky found, with a beautiful rooftop patio overlooking the city, and it was just a 10-minute walk from the Spanish Steps and the Trevi fountain. We only had a day and a half, but we tried to see as much of the city as we could, and managed to get to the Coliseum and St. Peters Square at the Vatican and the Roman forum and the Pantheon and a ton of other famous ruins that we couldn’t name. And we had some even more fantastic meals, like cacio e pepe at a quaint little neighborhood trattoria near the Vatican and an amazing pizza right near the Trevi fountain. It was definitely a magical trip — and they’ve invited me to come and speak at the festival again next spring.
May brought the wedding of my cousin Jessica, which was held in the picturesque sea-side town of Ogunquit in Maine, where we all stayed in a cute little cabin right near the dunes — with our own little fireplace — and ate lobster and seafood until we couldn’t stand it any more. Caitlin was a bridesmaid and managed to look lovely even though the weather was unseasonably cold, and Meaghan and Zoe and Becky looked fantastic as always (I was there too, as this photo proves). I got to spend a little time in New York in the spring as well, which is always amazing. Then in June we had a work retreat in Santa Cruz in California, which was a great trip — despite the fact that we had to spend hours watching PowerPoint presentations while looking at the amazing beach by our hotel. But we got lots of time to explore the beach and boardwalk with its 90-year-old wooden rollercoaster, and the local pier with its customary inhabitants: dozens of noisy sea lions. And back in San Francisco, I dropped in at Twitter and got a brief tour of its famous rooftop deck.
Finally it was summer time, and we moved north to the cottage and opened up our summer office on the deck overlooking the lake, and I tried to spend as much time as humanly possible out in the kayak with the loons and the sunsets. Becky and I went on quite a few “kayak dates,” paddling down under the bridge into the bay or just sitting watching the sun go down on another beautiful evening. Zoe also got in a fair bit of kayaking — and so did Meaghan, who lived at the cottage all summer and worked as a chambermaid at the local resort for the second summer in a row. We spent a great weekend at Go Home with Marc and Kris in July, and went on a long canoe and kayak trip that unfortunately ended with me diving into the rapids with my phone in my pocket (awkward). It was time to upgrade anyway!
Then we spent a week with the rest of the Stone clan in a great cottage on Gull Lake in Muskoka with a huge dock, which really came in handy because it was about 35 degrees Celsius the whole time we were there — and just to make things extra interesting, there was a sort of mini-tornado that dropped a bunch of trees (including one right in front of where Dave and I were driving — luckily we had stopped) and threw my kayak across the bay and onto some rocks. So it’s been pre-disastered. And Dave and I spent the day chain-sawing trees and clearing the road, which was fun. We also spent a few days at Sand Banks provincial park with Becky’s family, where we had the choice campsite right next to the beach, and I went on a marathon two-hour paddle in the kayak out to the tip of the point and saw an abandoned lighthouse but didn’t take any pictures because I was afraid to take my phone with me (for obvious reasons).
In September, I got to visit London for the first time for a conference, and had a great few days roaming around looking at a variety of British things, from Buckingham Palace to the Tower of London (which is actually more of a fort) and stayed at a funky boutique hotel right near the Tower Bridge, which looks awesome at night. I saw some of the theatre district and St. Martin in the Fields (not actually in a field) and the most British-sounding pub I have ever come across. I also took the tube (subway) to see a football (soccer) match (game) and had a pastie (pastry thing), which was fun. We spent Thanksgiving at the cottage with my mum, and it was such a beautiful weekend that I got in a ton of kayaking and we saw some amazing morning fog and I even went for a swim.
And then in December, I got to visit Paris to speak at another journalism event, and stayed at a quaint little hotel in the Latin Quarter (built in 1206) and had coffee at a fantastic little cafe called Cafe de Flore on Boulevard St. Germain where poets and philosophers like Sartre used to hang out in the 1920s, and went for a great long walk across the so-called “love bridge” where everyone puts locks to show their love, and then through the gardens leading to the Champs-Elysees, and all the way up to the Arc de Triomphe and then back down to the river, where I got a good look at the Eiffel Tower at sunset.
Becky and I weren’t the only ones visiting Europe this year: Caitlin used some of her massive nurse’s salary to go on several trips, including one to Italy and the Greek islands in June, with a short stop in London to see some school friends — she got some great photos of Santorini and other hot spots, went on an ATV ride through the countryside and even rode a donkey. Meaghan spent her third year at University of Ottawa doing gender studies and really enjoying it, and Zoe is having a great year in Grade 10 — at one point she had a 100-percent average in math, which is not too shabby at all.
While we were all gallivanting around the globe and whatnot, my mum continued having some health issues unfortunately, which started with a stroke late in 2012, followed by open-heart surgery, then a fall that broke her shoulder while she was recovering from the surgery, and then another small stroke in the spring that put her in a rehabilitation hospital for awhile. But she has managed to soldier on, and after a summer at the cottage we spent the fall helping her move to a new residence in Toronto.
And that’s about all the news from the Ingram family in Toronto, at least as far as I can remember. Here’s hoping your year was a good one, that your family and friends are all well, and that you have (or had) plenty of time with them over the holidays. If you want more photos of us, you can find them here or at Mathew’s Flickr page. For e-mail purposes, Mathew is here and Becky is here, and you can reach Caitlin, Meaghan and Zoe too, although they rarely use email. Mathew and Becky are both on Facebook (here and here). And if you’re on Twitter, you can follow Mathew here. We at Ingram and Co. wish you all the best of the season, and best wishes for 2014!
Looks like we are going to have a modestly white Christmas in Toronto this year, unlike other Christmases over the last little while — although I know things are very different in other parts of the nation, since Becky drove through a blizzard from Ottawa to get here, after helping spring my mom out of the hoosegow (otherwise known as the hospital, where she had open-heart surgery). As always, putting together the photos for this card has reminded me of how lucky we are, and not just because of the warm weather — we are lucky to have had a great year filled with friends and family and all sorts of travels here and there, and all three of our girls are growing into such fine young women it is a pleasure to watch. We hope that all of you have had a great year as well, and look forward to seeing some or all of you soon (the photos are also available in a Flickr slideshow, which is here).
Our year started, as it has for the past several years, with a nice fresh snowfall at The Farm — the rural retreat and four-season playground disguised as the home of our friends Marc and Kris, where we snowshoed and hiked and snapped photos of tree branches so weighed down with snow they could barely hold themselves off the ground. Then it was off for some more winter-wonderland style shots at Dave and Jenn’s place in the countryside near Kingston, where the ravine behind their house looked like the set of the first Narnia movie. All it needed was Tilda Swinton as the White Witch. And we did the usual Winterlude thing in Ottawa, which meant some great canal-skating and beaver tails and maple taffy.
I spent some time in New York in the spring as well, at a social-media conference at Columbia University, which was a first. I got to wander around the wonderful campus, and I also got the cab driver to stop on my way to the airport so I could snap a shot of the classic Dakota hotel near Central Park, where John Lennon lived (and died). I also spent a few days in San Francisco, which was lovely and sunny — and I got some shots of the Bay bridge and the arrow sculpture on the Embarcadero near the ferry terminal. In March, we headed off to Florida with Dave and Jenn and a couple of their kids and sister-in-law Barb — and Caitlin even came with us to keep Zoe company (Meaghan had to stay at university and study). We spent time beach-walking and heron-spotting, and we even got out to a baseball game in Port St. Lucie. Back over on the Gulf side, we did a canopy walk and saw an alligator or two (we obeyed the sign and did not molest them). We also went bowling for Zoe’s 14th birthday, and Becky and I caught an amazing sunset while visiting her aunt and uncle on Siesta Key.
Later that month I was back in New York for a conference, and got to wander along the wonderful High Line park, as well as checking out the World Trade Center memorial for the first time. By coincidence, Caitlin happened to be in New York with some girlfriends from university at the same time, so we had a nice dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant just off Times Square and then we took a ride up to the top of the Empire State building and she stayed over in my room at the Waldorf Astoria. I also got to do one of my favorite things, which is to run through Central Park in the spring.
We also spent a day at Canada’s Wonderland, where we rode rollercoasters like the Leviathan (tallest rollercoaster in the world) until I had to lie down. Pretty soon, it was May 24th and we were off to Golden Lake, where we cleaned up the beach and had some amazing sunsets — and then for Meaghan’s 19th birthday in June, we went to her favorite tepanyaki restaurant and everyone got to try cooking behind the giant hot plate and doing the acrobatics that the chef does, which Caitlin and Meaghan and Becky and Zoe really enjoyed.
At the Farm, we put on a Great Gatsby-style garden party, which involved everyone either finding the appropriate costume in their grandparents’ closet or buying something at the local thrift shop. It was a great success, with champagne and finger sandwiches and croquet on the lawn. I squeezed in another trip to San Francisco for a conference, and then it was time for Zoe’s graduation from Grade 8, which went swimmingly and she looked lovely in her coral (salmon? watermelon?) dress.
In July, it was time to head to Golden Lake and open up the summer office of Ingram Inc., where we spent the better part of the next two months working from the deck and taking breaks now and then to swim and kayak and canoe and float around in tubes. Meaghan spent the whole summer there as well, after getting a job as a chambermaid at a local resort, and Zoe helped out at the summer camp down the road. We spent a little time at Go Home Lake near Muskoka helping Marc and Kris rebuild their dock (and I tried a different kind of outdoor office) and then it was back to Golden Lake. We also spent a weekend at Sand Banks provincial park in Picton with Dave and Jenn as well, which meant even more beaches and sunsets.
As an early 50th birthday present, Becky bought me a beautiful 14-foot touring kayak, which quickly became my new best friend — I spent hours paddling around in it, down the river and into various bays, tracking loons and watching sunsets (I even did a conference call in it once). It got so the loons would start hooting and hollering as soon as they saw me coming. We also spent a great weekend with Gord and Carina at their cottage on Georgian Bay, which involved boat trips and picnicking on rocky outcroppings.
Back in Toronto after the end of the summer, Becky and I got to play a day’s worth of golf for my birthday, and it was like having the course to ourselves — no one around and beautiful weather (and not a bad game either). We also went out for a special anniversary dinner because it was our 25th this year, so we had a great meal at the Auberge du Pommier, a lovely little restaurant that gave us a special dessert in honour of the event — as it turned out, the restaurant turned 25 this year as well.
After that, it was back to San Francisco for another conference, where I rented a lovely one-bedroom apartment in the Bernal Heights neighbourhood west of the Mission — a rental I found using Airbnb, which is a fantastic service that allows ordinary folks to rent out rooms, or even their entire house. I got to run up Bernal Heights to the park at the top of the hill (which was not easy, let me tell you) and while having breakfast in a local cafe I saw the space shuttle fly over on its last voyage.
Since GigaOM bought another company based in New York in the spring, we decided to have an off-site team-building weekend with the staff from the New York office, so we rented a beautiful house in the Hamptons on Long Island, where a bunch of us ran a 5K as part of the Hampton’s Marathon and spent the weekend hanging out and doing team-building things. I also spent some time in New York proper, where I rented another Airbnb apartment in the Flatiron district and got to visit my favourite burger spot: Shake Shack in Madison Square Park.
Pretty soon it was Thanksgiving, which we spent at the cottage in Golden Lake, where the colours were spectacular and I got to spend some more time kayaking around the lake and looking at the trees, and watching a couple of incredible sunsets. After that, it was off to Amsterdam, where GigaOM had a conference, and I got to spend a week wandering around the city looking at all the fantastic buildings (many of which seem to be leaning at a fairly dramatic angle) and strolling by canals and museums and other great Amsterdam-type things. And no, I didn’t do those other Amsterdam-type things 🙂
I also did a whirlwind one-day and one-night tour of Halifax, where I spoke to a group of journalism students, then I had a night’s sleep in Toronto before I had to head to San Francisco again (I know everyone is pretty sympathetic at this point). While Becky spent some time in Ottawa looking after my mom, who was in the hospital for awhile getting some tests done, Zoe and I did some fun Toronto things like spending a day down at the Distillery District, looking at the old buildings and getting some coffee and wandering through shops looking at things we couldn’t afford.
The fall also brought more hockey for Zoe, who has become quite the excellent defenceman/person, and in December we got to spend a great weekend at another farm — this one owned by a friend who is involved in the Mesh conference, a beautiful old homestead with a great old barn and a cozy fireplace. December also brought some surgery for my mom, who had to have a faulty aorta repaired and so spent a couple of weeks in hospital in Ottawa, and Becky and I stayed to help her through it (and I got some shots of the old buildings on the experimental farm near the hospital).
The surgery went really well, and my mom is getting stronger every day, and Meaghan is having a great time at the University of Ottawa (where she switched from linguistics to gender studies), and Zoe is getting some fantastic marks in her first year of high school, and Caitlin is working miracles every day on the pediatric intensive care ward at McMaster Hospital. So apart from some serious jet lag and some health scares here and there, we are as good as we could possibly be as 2012 draws to a close. Hope you and yours are well too, and here’s to a great 2013!
As I write this, I find myself torn between loving the warm weather that has made December in Toronto feel more like October — with green grass and warm breezes instead of howling winds and snowdrifts — and feeling anxious because it just doesn’t really seem like Christmas. Global climate change is a harsh mistress. Our year started with a strange omen, included a lot of travel to distant lands (if San Francisco and Greece qualify), saw offspring graduate from various educational institutions, and brough a summer of unparalleled beauty, a couple of mini-vacations at fancy resorts and a hectic fall filled with conferences in two different countries and three separate provinces.
The links below should open in a new window — and if you want to just read the text first, and then look at the pictures separately, they are all in a Flickr slideshow which you can browse at your leisure.
The year began with the usual New Year’s tradition of great food interspersed with a variety of outdoor activities at our friends’ farm near Buckhorn, northeast of Toronto. The activities included snowshoeing around the property, and the great food included my trademark (okay, Marc’s trademark) caviar pie. Then it was back to reality, and the usual kind of outdoor activies that winter brings — such as shovelling the driveway during a massive blizzard. And then came the strange omen: I looked out the window at the back of our house, and there was a shape in the snow on the roof of our shed — a red fox, curled up for a nap in the drift there, nose tucked under its black tail. I thought it was pretty special and took a photo, but he (or she) turned up again the next day, and the next, and the next. We had seen the fox in the neighborhood before, but having it sleep on our shed was a surprise.
New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s erudite skewering of various cultural phenomena, something he has become famous (or possibly infamous) for, tends to produce a strong reaction in those who are close to the topics he takes on, and his recent analysis of Twitter and its potential uses as a tool for social activism is no exception. In the several weeks since he wrote the original piece, over half a dozen essays and blog posts from a variety of sources have come out arguing that he is wrong, and today The Atlantic magazine joined the fray with a guest essay by none other than Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
Gladwell’s article was entitled “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” and started with an evocative image: a group of black college students holding a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, to protest racism — an event that triggered subsequent rallies and demonstrations throughout the southern U.S. All of this, Gladwell says, “happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.” The author then goes on to puncture the conventional wisdom that Twitter had anything much to do with revolutions in Moldova or Iran, and says that there is something wrong with “the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”
The New Yorker writer’s point is clear: real activism involves sit-ins and getting shot at by corrupt governments, not sitting at a keyboard posting things on Twitter or text messaging. And it’s hard to disagree with this — no one would argue that posting a comment to Twitter while sipping a latte at Starbucks is activism, simply because you happen to use the #iran hashtag. But is Gladwell making a fair comparison? I don’t think so. As other critics such as Anil Dash have also argued, setting up a contrast between Twitter and anti-racism demonstrations in the 1960s is effectively a straw-man argument, which allows the author to slam the social network for not doing things that no one has ever really claimed it was trying to do.
One of Gladwell’s central points is that Twitter and other social media tools emphasize and are powered by what sociologists call “weak ties” between individuals (a term coined by Mark Granovetter) — that is, the kind of ties that you have to your co-workers, or friends from high school, or people who belong to the same clubs as you. Gladwell says that real activism only occurs as a result of strong ties, the kind that people have to their churches, their families, and to strong leaders, and that real revolutions require a hierarchy that is antithetical to social media like Twitter. In his Atlantic essay, Biz Stone says: “Gladwell is wrong. Big change can come in small packages too.”
By that, the Twitter founder means that even weak ties can help pull people together around causes in ways that matter. He uses several examples, including the case of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident who is in prison for writing about human rights, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Has Twitter led to his release? No. But as Stone argues, it has given Chinese citizens a way of talking about him, something that they would otherwise not have — as described in a blog post by Hu Yong, a professor of Internet studies at Peking University, who said Twitter was “the only place where people can talk freely” about Liu and his ideas, and that it has become “a powerful tool for Chinese citizens.”
In her response to Gladwell’s piece, author Maria Popova describes several cases in which Facebook helped spark “real” social activism, including public protests in Colombia in 2008 that saw close to 5 million people participate in protests against the country’s armed forces, and a campaign in Bulgaria in 2009 that resulted in the largest public protests since the fall of communism, and led to the resignation of several Parliament members. As others have noted in their critcisms, Gladwell seems to see activism as an either-or propostion — either you use social media, in which case it’s ineffective and useless, or you gather in the streets and do real activism. But wouldn’t some of those demonstrators in 1960 have loved to have better ways of getting their message out to as many people as possible? That’s what social media provides.
While I was reading Gladwell’s piece, in my head I replaced any mention of Twitter or Facebook with the words “the telephone” — and then it became a diatribe about how people talking on the telephone has never amounted to anything in terms of social activism. That is probably just as true as his criticisms of Twitter. But would any modern social effort or campaign or demonstration be effective without someone making phone calls? Twitter and Facebook are just tools, and they can be used for social good in the same way any other tool can. And those “weak ties” can eventually grow into strong ones. As Stone notes at the end of his essay: “Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one — suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal.” And that is a positive thing for social change, not a negative one.
Facebook has been caught in another privacy-related dust-up, after the Wall Street Journal reported that a number of the social network’s most popular apps and games have been sending “personal information” to third parties, including companies that compile data on users for sale to advertisers and marketers. In the context of Facebook’s ongoing issues with privacy, it seems like a fairly major problem, and the tone of the WSJ piece suggests that it is a major breach of privacy by the social network — but is it really?
The information that the Journal is referring to in its report is the user ID that each member of Facebook gets when they join. According to the newspaper, all of the top 10 apps on the social network — including FarmVille and other popular games — were transmitting user IDs of Facebook members to advertising networks and other third parties, and in some cases those apps were sending the ID numbers of a user’s friends as well (the ad networks and other companies who received this information told the Journal that they did not collect or make use of these numbers, or any user profile info related to them).
So ad networks and other companies may have been getting your user ID. Should you care? As Facebook has pointed out in statements to the media and in a blog post on its developer blog, the user ID does not contain any private information, and even if someone plugged that ID into Facebook, all they would get is whatever public information you include in your Facebook profile (you can use the social network’s privacy settings to control what information — if any — gets sent by the apps that you use). In most cases, that’s your name and possibly your date of birth and where you live, as well as a list of your friends.
It’s easy enough to find the ID of a Facebook user, because Facebook provides it to developers through its open graph protocol — just go to http://graph.facebook.com/user-id and replace “user-id” with someone’s Facebook user name. There are also a number of tools that will show you exactly what information the social network is sharing about you, including one that gives you an overall “privacy score”. Even before the latest Journal report, Facebook had already taken steps to reduce the likelihood that a user’s ID number would be passed on via their browser (although it still faces a lawsuit as a result of this issue).
The reality is that passing on user ID numbers and even public profile information isn’t really a “privacy breach,” because the only data that advertisers or anyone else can get through this process is information that users have chosen to make public already. As some Facebook defenders such as new-media guru Jeff Jarvis have noted, many companies — including media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal — sell information about their subscribers to a variety of third parties, who in turn sell it to marketing firms and advertising agencies. Is it fair to hold Facebook accountable for the behavior of third parties when we don’t hold others accountable in the same way? Some would argue it is not.
After all of the negative attention Facebook has gotten over the past year from advocacy groups and governments because of changes to its privacy settings, it’s not surprising that the company — and its critics — would be sensitive to any suggestion that personal information was being misused. But maybe we should save our outrage for cases that involve real breaches of privacy, rather than seeing potential scandals in every dark corner.
A study released today has drawn a lot of attention in media circles for suggesting that stories on “serious topics” such as the Gulf oil spill and the mortgage crisis draw more revenue for online media outlets than stories about celebrities like Lindsay Lohan. “Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks,” says a piece in the New York Times, while the Columbia Journalism Review writes that “Celebs Are Loud, But Hard News Pays.” But is that really what the study by Perfect Market shows? While the message is undoubtedly a welcome one for media companies who would rather focus on serious content than celebrity-chasing, the reality is probably a little more complicated than the study suggests.
The study comes from what Perfect Market calls the Vault Index, a new ranking of the most valuable news topics that the company came up with as a way of publicizing its services, which involve helping media sites and other content publishers aggregate and monetize their content (the company is a spin off from Bill Gross’s Idealab). According to a description of the study, Perfect Market looked at over 15 million news articles from 21 U.S. news sites — including The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chicago Tribune — from June to September of this year, and ranked the most valuable topics on a scale from 1 to 5. It arrived at a definition of value by looking at the RPM or “revenue per thousand” for pages about those topics, based on how much each paper was charging for advertising on those pages.
So, for example, articles on mortgage rates had an average RPM of $93, and immigration reform an average of $26, while pages about Lindsay Lohan’s court appearance averaged RPMs of $2.50, according to Perfect Market. Articles on social security pulled in average revenue of $129 per thousand, the study said. In a blog post, the company’s chief revenue officer said that even when the larger amounts of traffic to stories about celebrities like Lindsay Lohan were factored into the equation, serious news stories about things like immigration still brought in more revenue for the newspapers it studied. “Publishers end up chasing trends to increase raw page views, but that is not necessarily the best revenue strategy,” Tim Ruder said. “And it’s a disservice to their readers who want credible and important news.”
While it’s nice to hear that writing about serious news issues is more valuable than writing about celebrity court cases, the reality isn’t quite as one-sided as the study makes it appear. All the RPM data really shows is that advertisers are more interested in having their ads appear on pages that are about social security and immigration reform than on pages about Lindsay Lohan. This isn’t surprising: not only are readers of articles about social security more likely to have incomes that appeal to advertisers, but advertisers almost always want to be on pages that are about “serious” topics.
That said, however, they mostly want to be on pages that are about serious topics at websites that are racking up millions of pageviews and unique visitors — and one of the ways to boost those numbers is to write about Lindsay Lohan, a topic that almost everyone clicks on, even if they don’t want to admit it. Advertisers aren’t likely to stick around and pay those hefty RPM averages for pages on websites that aren’t getting any traffic. And if you try to run a site that is just about social security or immigration reform, that is pretty much where you will be.
The line between what we call a “book” and something that is just a really long chunk of published text — what you might call the “not-quite-a-book” category — continues to blur in the electronic publishing world. In one of the latest examples, Borders has joined forces with a service called Bookbrewer to provide a simple service that allows bloggers or anyone else with an idea to publish what is effectively an e-book, and get it distributed through all the major e-book platforms. In a similar move, Amazon recently launched its Kindle Singles program, which is also designed for publishing less-than-book-length writing online.
The Bookbrewer service allows writers to upload their content — which can be any length — set their own suggested price (within the boundaries set by the various e-book retailers like Amazon, Apple and Borders itself) and then publish an e-book in the open ePub format that can be downloaded for the iPad, the Kindle, the Kobo or any other e-reader. The service has two tiers: one costs $89.99 and gives authors an ISBN, the universal book-tracking number used in the publishing industry, and the $199.99 advanced package also gives the author a master ePub file they can share or upload wherever they wish.
Amazon says that its Kindle Singles, which launched earlier this week, is designed for pieces that are between 10,000 and 30,000 words — or between 30 and 90 printed pages (about twice the length of an article in The New Yorker or several chapters of a book). The company said that it is looking for submissions from outside the traditional publishing industry, including “serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers.” It’s not clear what the Singles will cost, or how much of that revenue will make its way to the author.
When the iPad was first rumored to be launching soon, I wrote about how the tablet and others like it, including the Kindle, could become a platform for authors of all kinds to find a larger market for their works — not just authors of traditional books (many of whom love the e-book revolution for a variety of reasons), but bloggers and other thinkers with interesting ideas, academics with interesting research papers, anyone with something they might feel deserves a larger audience (although obviously not all of them will). In some ways, it’s like the early days of the Gutenberg revolution, when authors published short manuscripts and “chapbooks” and everything in between.
The advent of tablets and e-bookstores dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for these kinds of writers, who would previously have had to find an agent and a publisher willing to take them on — and would have had to pay them a handsome share of any revenue as well. Now, through services like Bookbrewer and Kindle Singles, they can reach what is potentially a much larger audience, and maybe even make some money as well. Amazon and other e-book publishers pay authors as much as 70 percent of the revenue their books make. And the e-book market as a whole continues to grow rapidly — the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers show that sales climbed 172 percent in August.
As Om has pointed out before, the book as we know it is undergoing a fundamental transformation, just as so many other forms of content are. People still read traditional printed books and many will likely continue to do so in the future — but even more interesting is how the definition of what a “book” is becomes so fluid online. So is the book dead? Yes. Long live the book.
You probably have a favorite game you like to play on Facebook — which may or may not involve killing virtual mafia kingpins, or tending to your virtual crops on a farm — but what happens when you leave your computer or your browser and start using your mobile device? A startup called Uken Games is trying to solve that problem by creating games that synchronize your player profile and other game-related data across platforms, so that when you shift from PC to phone, you can pick up right where you left off.
I sat down with founder and CEO Chris Ye recently for a short interview about the company. He and partner Mark Lampert started Uken in February of 2009, after seeing the rise of social games on Facebook and elsewhere, such as Mafia Wars and Mob Wars. In March, the company launched its first game, called Superhero Alliance — which can be played on Facebook as well as the iPhone and the Android platform — and it has since launched several other games, including Villains and Forces of War, all of which can be played on multiple platforms.
Uken got some seed funding from Toronto-based Extreme Venture Partners, and raised a second round of $250,000 earlier this year. The company has just four full-time employees and several co-op students, but its games are among the top most-downloaded free games in the iTunes store, says Ye, with 400,000 installs on the iPhone, about 30,000 on Android devices and 300,000 monthly active users on Facebook. Uken’s revenue model is based on selling virtual goods such as weapons and other special items that can be used in its games, an approach similar to that employed by massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft.
Making its games cross-platform is accomplished by using HTML5 and Ajax, says Ye. “We’ve been able to solve a lot of the problems associated with synchronous play across platforms, and we think that’s a pretty important step.” Because it uses those technologies for its games, the company was also able to port one of its titles to the iPad in less than a day, the Uken founder says, and expects to release the iPad version within the next month. While social-gaming giant Zynga is obviously a competitor, Ye says, “it can only put out so many games,” and the upside of Zynga’s presence in the market is that people have become used to playing social games and paying for virtual goods.”
