There’s a longer Discovery Channel piece on the site that explores the design and features of the bike a bit more. I like that it breaks the ‘lean forward over the bars’ paradigm of biking.

The key question, though, is this: is it less nerdy than a Segway?

We’re working with ThoughtFarmer again, with another peculiar idea: IntranetSecrets.com. It is, as you may have guessed, a play on the super-popular PostSecret (very slightly unsafe for prudish workplaces) project. It’s a blog of secrets–some created by us, some user-submitted–about corporate intranets. Here’s an example:

Not roll-around-on-the-floor funny, but hopefully chuckle-to-yourself amusing. Please check it out. If you’ve got a secret about your hated corporate intranet, feel free to submit it via Twitter or this anonymous submission form.

I’d like to get something new, but I face a vexing luggage selection problem best articulated in a table:

I know that the easy answer is “just man up and keep using the backpack”. But surely there are options I’m overlooking, aren’t there? And, no, I’m not going to buy any of that hard plastic luggage that everyone in Ireland seemed to own.

What are my other luggage options?

Each show occurs in a walled-off corner of the space, though a couple actually happened in shipping containers outside. The performances ran 10 to 20 minutes in length. For some shows you simply queued up, but plenty of others had hoops you needed to jump through to gain admission. You might have to get a token from a previous attendee, or secure a ‘VIP invitation’ from a bouncer with a clipboard. The Electric Company performed for one audience member at a time, and they ran a lottery to choose the lucky winner. I didn’t see it, but the company’s GM assured me they’d post video of the show on their website after HIVE 3 closes.

UPDATE: Here’s the Electric Company’s show.

My friend called the evening “the Fringe on acid”, and that’s a pretty apt description. I saw six shows over two-and-a-half hours, and they varied in quality and tone the same way any six Fringe shows might.

My favourite was probably Boca Del Lupo’s “The Interview”, which used clever projections and a treadmill to tell the story of an embedded reporter in Afghanistan. I assume it was fiction, as it featured a plot point very similar to the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire (retold in this nice folk song). I also liked Pi Theatre’s “House/Home”, which was kind of a burlesque pop-up book of a playlet (that’s their show in the photo below). November Theatre’s “Ana” was a carefully-crafted little nugget which seemed just right for the evening’s constraints of time and space.

Others were less successful. Nearly all the shows suffered from a lack of reach. Many companies were experimenting with form–more on this in a minute–but few aspired to genuinely take on a meaningful theme or move the audience. Maybe the evening’s format discourages weightier topics?

On the whole, I applaud this approach. It’s probably the first time in my life when I’ve attended a theatre show and been (just barely, admittedly) on the old side of the audience. Most of the audience still had their own hair, and it wasn’t grey. In a world where the big theatres regularly target senior citizens, that fact alone is pretty exciting.

It’s also a great opportunity to take the temperature of what theatre artists are thinking about these days. One trend I observed was how so many of the shows were concerned with or were mediated through technology. The aforementioned “Ana” includes a long (if familiar to me) riff on analog vs. digital. “House/Home” was performed using microphones and all the audience members wore headphones (this was also intended to manage the noise bleeding between shows). Theatre Replacement’s “S.P.A.M.” had some clever schtick involving the audience’s cell phones, though they could have constructed a more intriguing story or framework for the interactions.

I had a chat with one of the organizers about how HIVE amortizes risk for the performers. The audience member pays one price ($25 for adults, $20 for students and seniors) to get in, so the pressure is off any one particular company to sell tickets. They can take chances and experiment, and don’t have to be utterly concerned with the bottom line.

Likewise, the twelve companies can pool marketing resources. The capacity for each night is only 200, and HIVE 3 runs for eight nights through March 20. Surely the combined email lists, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of the 12 companies are more than enough to scare up 1600 attendees.

You’re not going to be moved to tears by anything you see at HIVE 3, but if you’re up for a concentrated shot of theatrical creativity, check it out.

For me, it’s a real-world task list arranged into three columns: queue, current tasks and completed tasks. An important aspect of Kanban is that the system be highly visible, usually on a wall. Here’s our very simple setup in our home office:

You can see more photos of kanban setups here.

The visibility enables other team members to see what you’re working on. The physicality of the system feels important, in that you’re actually moving the sticky notes as you complete and queue up tasks. A friend compared it to the tile system that air traffic controllers use. In the terms of original concept, each of the sticky notes is a ‘kanban’.

At Capulet and at a client site, we’ve found it to be a simple but effective way to manage tasks, a real improvement over plain text lists or Remember the Milk. I’ve sold a few other people on Kanban, and they seem to dig it too. It’s like I’m in the Getting Things Done For Dummies cult.

If you have diffiiculty keeping track of your and your coworkers tasks, I’d recommend giving Kanban a try.

They now operate with a staff of twenty, apparently garnering nearly the same number of monthly readers as they did when they had a print edition. The video is pretty self-promotional, but it’s an interesting view into a newish model of professional journalism:

Is it me, or does the staff at the Seattle P-I look a lot younger than the average newsroom?

The lead person on the journalism side has the surprisingly fresh title of ‘Executive Producer’. That feels more contemporary than, say, ‘Editor in Chief’. I also noticed that she referred to the Seattle P-I as a ‘company’, which isn’t what I’d expect to hear from newspaper professionals.

UPDATE: Oddly, it looks like the video has been removed. I’ll try to track it down.

“Cosi Fan Tutte” translates to “Women Are Like That”. It’s got a Shakespearean plot of disguises, jilted lovers and some climatic marriages, and it’s about as sexist as it sounds. It’s a mid-career opera buffa by ol’ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I wish I could comment on the technical or artistic abilities of the performers, but I’m not really qualified. The acting style of opera always seems broad, but I gather that that’s a convention of the medium. Another convention is how the singers constantly repeat lines of dialogue. It’s very odd, for a man more accustomed to musicals.

Matthew has always been a playful director, and this production showcased his talents. The libretto was in English, and set in contemporary Canada. It replaced the traditional “men fake going off to war” plot with “men fake going to pro-hockey tryouts in Regina”. The set was dominated a gigantic–maybe 25″–cell phone on one side of the stage, which hilariously featured text messages between the sopranos and their suitors. I thought some jokes were left on table regarding the giant phone–couldn’t somebody have updated their Facebook status, search Google Maps or even sung an aria through their phone camera?

I’m obviously neither an opera lover nor an aficionado. As operas go, this one was comical and enjoyable and, contrary to stereotype, I could understand at least three-quarters of what people were singing. “Cosi Fan Tutte” closed last Saturday, but be on the look out for future projects from Burnaby Lyric Opera.

It’s actually an opera-heavy month, as this Saturday I’m going to “Nixon in China”. I don’t plan to become a regular opera-goer, but I understand this to be a modern masterpiece, so I thought I’d better take my medicine.

I wonder if there will be any impact on other parts of our lives? Will there be a small blip in the number of babies born nine months from now?

Small, related marketing lesson: I originally found this graphic on a couple of blogs. I genuinely tried to find its original source on EPCOR’s website, but couldn’t. Google was no help either. When you’ve got a clever idea that gets some legs like this, make sure that people can discover and link to its original context easily.

The latest candidate is the Microsoft Courier, a tablet computer with a bookish form factor. Here’s some video from Engadget:

I really like the way that demo video plays. The narrator is very natural, and I like that it’s focused on a case study as opposed to the “rejoice, for this thing is awesome” tone so common to Apple’s videos.

I’m not sure I want one, but I’m excited by these mainstream players like Apple and Microsoft thinking creatively about interface design and how we should interact with computers.

Pretty great, eh? Truly a climactic moment.

The first was the flush controls over the urinal. As you can see, there are two buttons:

If you click to view the big version, you’ll see that one button simply has a horizontal line on it.

Without going into visceral detail, such a setup makes sense for toilets. Liquid waste requires less flushing action than solid waste. It’s a smart innovation that saves a ton of water–I wish every toilet in North America already had two such buttons.

But urinals? What’s wrong with only using the ‘less water’ button? What’s the ‘more button’ for? Kidney stones?

I moved over to wash my hands, and discovered the shallowest sink in the world:

The photo doesn’t do it justice. As my friend indicates, you can barely get your hands under the faucet. And much of the water inevitably slops over the edge of the sink. And Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you ever want to shave at work.

These sinks just seem obstinately absurd. As if the designer said, “I reject that perfection that thousands of years of sink evolution has brought us. Shallow is the new deep!”

Here are four that I’ve recently encountered:

• Who’s doing what in the blogosphere? There are no sources cited for this one, so I’m pretty skeptical, but it’s nice-looking.
• What are people buying online? Uh, where’s the porn?
• Google facts and figures
• Facebook facts

Huh. All of those were about the web. For designers and site publishers alike, there’s a deep vein here for link bait around industry-specific infographics.

UPDATE: Hang on, here’s another one, about video games.

UPDATE #2: And here’s one about World of Warcraft. The way this is going, the next one should be about the bathing habits of undead mages.

I’ve watched more hockey than anything else, much of it with friends and family. In doing so, I’ve discussed the same two topics a number of times:

• Is it appropriate to run up the score, as the Canadian women’s hockey team did in a 18-0 thumping of the Slovakian team in their opener?
• Given the constant dominance of Canada and the USA, should women’s hockey be in the Olympics?

As it happens, I’ve summarized both arguments in the comments on this post by Rebecca. I thought I’d reproduce them here, with some minor tweaks.

Running Up the Score

This is a common complaint leveled at international tournaments of all sorts–it’s not unique to hockey (I’m reminded of a certain 31-0 victory by Australia over American Samoa in World Cup qualifying). The optics aren’t good.

Here’s why teams do it: the number of goals you score (your ‘goals for’ number) is usually the tie-breaking statistics when you have the same number of points as another team. This is obviously hugely important if that tiebreaker determines, say, who advances to the next round. It may have lesser importance, too. For example, it can determine who gets home field (or ice) advantage.

Also, from a sports psychology perspective, if a team ‘goes easy’ on a lesser team, they risk carrying that behaviour into the subsequent games against tougher opponents. As coaches say, “you have to play your own game, not your opponents”. As such, ‘taking your foot off the gas’ can be risky.

The Future of Women’s Hockey in the Olympics

Last Friday, IOC President Jack Rogge (who feels a little fascist, doesn’t he?) remarked on the lopsided results in women’s hockey:

Hours before the gold medal final between the United States and Canada, dominant powers in a tournament where they routed outmatched rivals, Rogge said the Olympics can bear the lopsidedness for only so long.

“There is a discrepancy. Everyone agrees with that,” Rogge said. “This may be the investment period for women’s ice hockey. I would personally give them more time to grow but there must be a period of improvement. “We cannot continue without improvement.”

Accusations of sexism were leveled at Rogge, more because of his comments on the Canadian women’s celebration (which almost certainly were sexist) than the sports future in the Olympics. Shelley Fralic’s poorly-argued–she ignores the question of parity altogether–piece is a good example of the response Rogge’s remarks received.

To separate gender politics from sport, imagine the following scenario. Let’s pretend that snowball fights are an Olympic event:

For four Olympic Games in a row, you know with near certainty that the US and Canada Snowball Fighting teams will meet in the final. They’ve met in three of four gold-medal games. They have almost never lost to any other team in the tournament (Canada has once and the USA twice, I think), and they’ve outplayed all other opponents by a considerable margin. The final is exciting, but every snowball fight up to that point is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It’s a sure bet that at the Snowball Fighting finals in 2014, it’ll be USA and Canada again.

The mistake the IOC made was permitting women’s hockey to join when they did. I assume that they expected other nations to catch up to the USA and Canadian women, but that simply hasn’t happened over the last 14 years. It’s not all that surprising, considering that the much more popular men’s game only has, at best, eight or ten competitive teams.

If they decided to remove women’s hockey, the decision wouldn’t be without precedent. Softball was recently removed from the Summer Olympics because of America’s dominance of the sport through four consecutive Games.

The common counter-argument I’ve heard is “what better way to motivate other countries than with the promise of an Olympic medal?” This seems pretty specious, as it could be applied to any sport–no matter how niche or regionally lopsided–as a reason for inclusion in the Olympics.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Canada/USA games. And the increase in talent among those two teams in the past 14 years has been remarkable.

I don’t know what the right decision is for the future of the sport, but if you’re a fan of parity and unpredictability, you’re not a fan of having women’s hockey in the Olympics.

Here’s a kind of response to Schell’s lecture, specifically discussing this idea of external rewards.

Everybody’s talking about Chatroulette at the moment. There’s a good piece from New York magazine–I like their description of what you might find when you join the site:

A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York…I sing the body electronic.

I don’t have a lot to say about Chatroulette at the moment, beyond these three thoughts:

1. Once again, we have the pornography industry to thank for foreshadowing a mainstream phenomenon.
2. It’s simultaneously voyeuristic and exhibitionist. You’re the watched and the watcher. That, to me, is its secret sauce.
3. In terms of lonely cries into the ether, Chatroulette puts blogs to shame. We just keep inventing better metaphors for the disconnected existential existence that is modern life.

I find nothing about Chatroulette appealing. I’m obvious not opposed to superficial wastes of time, but the process just seems kind of joyless to me. Am I wrong?

It’s pretty touching, in a corporate coffee commercial kind of way. In a minute, the ad explores those two pillars of Canadian culture: the immigrant experience and Tim Horton’s.

Tim Horton’s is, of course, a much-loved Canadian brand. It’s also an incredibly mainstream brand–there’s nothing edgy about the Timmy. So this ad isn’t meant to provocatively appeal to the coasts–it’s a commercial for every Canadian watching the Olympics. And I think it’s probably appealing. We are, of course, nearly all immigrants to this land.

My American friends explained that this commercial would never, ever air in the United States. They said that there’s simply too much ill will and anger around immigration. It would mean corporate suicide for a big company to run this piece in the States.

I can’t say that I was surprised by their observation, but it’s a little sad. It’s also a reminder of how, in certain respects, we’re so different from our neighbours–spelled with the ‘u’–to the south.

UPDATE: John sent along this Globe and Mail story which explains that:

• The people in the ad are, in fact, actors.
• The ad isn’t based on one particular story.

This should come as a shock to no one.

One of the ongoing challenges of the conference is managing demand. In the past, we’ve always sold out very quickly, which disappoints a lot of people. This year we’ve taken two steps to try to ameliorate that phenomenon:

• We’ve increased the capacity to 500 attendees.
• We’re selling the tickets in two sections. Most of them will be sold in the early bird tickets, but we’re holding some back to sell later on, so that people who discover the conference for the first time have a shot at attending.

This weekend I received an email from a local arts organization that began:

We appreciate your work as an active citizen journalist and would like to invite you…

“Hang on,” I thought, “I’m not a citizen journalist”. I am often a curator, sometimes an editorialist and occasionally a critic. I rarely ‘cover’ something, inasmuch as I attend an event and report on it, but I don’t really self-identify that way. That arts group isn’t alone, though–I’ve heard plenty of others equate “blogger” with “citizen journalist”.

For me, it’s about intent. I don’t think “I’d really like to go report on that concert”. My thought process is pretty unexamined, but it’s more like “I like Cat Power, and I like writing about the arts, so I’ll write about my experience of attending her concert. Others might be interested in what I write.”

The Most Documented Games Yet

That email got me thinking about citizen journalism. Thanks to the Olympics, it’s an idea that’s much in the public eye these days. From groups like True North Media House and Vancouver Access 2010 to dozens of individual bloggers, Twitter users and rich media makers, these are surely the most documented Games yet.

There’s no shortage of reportage. We’re going to events and writing about them. We’re photographing the Games and the streets and everything in-between. We’re having fun.

We’re covering stories. But how often are we uncovering them?

Where is the local, investigative citizen journalism? To put it another way, who’s doing the citizen reporting that isn’t fun?

Who’s pounding the pavement, making calls, sifting through government reports, sitting in town hall meetings and doing all of the difficult, time-consuming work that professional journalists have been doing? Because I sure ain’t.

I asked on Twitter, and received a couple suggestions. Sean Holman’s work at The Public Eye is one example, as are Linda Soloman’s Megan Stewart’s stories on toxic chemicals for the Vancouver Observer. Notably, both Sean and Linda are professional journalists.

Can you think of other examples? Has any citizen journalist broken a story around the Olympics?

Five Percent Off the Top

I’m not trying to discredit or criticize citizen journalism. I just worry that most of it is, by its nature, lightweight and short term. Few of us have the time, resources, expertise, connections and (most importantly, I think) motivation to do the in-depth work of your average investigative journalist. On top of those discouragements, the web doesn’t particularly reward the long-form article or feature-length documentary. It’s a bite-sized medium.

If we assume that the writing is on the wall for much of the mainstream media, where does that leave us? I liked how Clay Shirky put it in a 2009 talk at Harvard:

Which leaves us with a giant hole, and a very threatening one. And in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

Will citizen journalists step in to fill this void? I hope so, but you’d be hard-pressed to get me to sit through even one town-hall meeting. I’m happy to volunteer my time for good causes, but monitoring city hall isn’t a priority.

I know I’m describing a problem without offering many solutions. Here are a couple of ideas:

• There are examples of an emerging kind of citizen statistician, who uses access to open governmental data to uncover political or corporate malfeasance.
• Another solution is to divide the work of one journalist among 15 citizen journalists, and have each of them attend four town hall meetings a year. Collaborative tools make this approach possible if challenging.

The more I think about it, the investigative citizen journalists of the 21st century are the activists of the 20th. They care enough about a particular topic to dig into it with enough effort and fervor to uncover new truths.

What do you think? Where will we find the investigative journalists of the future?

UPDATE: Thomas Friedman also wrote with clarity about climate change in the New York Times this week.

In any case, Graeme McRanor has produced this latest example, on the Winter Olympics. Rated PG for frequent cursing: