this is mikel.org

This blog needs some serious attention!

2011-04-27T21:27:09Z

Oof – this blog has been in serious hibernation. Interestingly enough, helping my friend Melora get her blog going has motivated me to revisit this place as well. More to come…

New new thing…

2010-02-25T18:39:36Z

In the span of a couple of tweets and not more than 3 hours, Sylvain and CFD went from conception to birth of Pssstopedia, a wiki devoted to archiving and memorializing the history of Internet culture in Quebec. I’ve already contributed!

I still love MetaFilter

2010-02-18T12:30:25Z

Without fail, the moment I wonder why I wade through countless MetaFilter posts (as I have been happily doing for ages), some wonderful person comes along and compiles a post like this: TV, When It Rocked and Rolled. Dear MetaFilter – you’re still one of the greatest things ever on the web.

Coming soon: Glitch!

2010-02-18T12:33:08Z

Some news today grabbed my attention via Powazek: Stewart Butterfield and his fantastic crew are getting ready to release Glitch. There’s a lot more information in an article about the new endeavour: Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up.

This is really exciting news for me. I was a devotee of GNE, the pre-Flickr project from Stewart’s (and Caterina Fake’s) former company, Ludicorp, and this promises to once again take gaming down a wickedly fun road. While I don’t assume Glitch will be simply an expansion on that, having read about it and seen the intro video they’ve posted, I can already see enough of the amazingly quirky touches in this new project. I’ve never been into MMO games; but I’m very confident (read: terrified) that this one will be a very satisfying time-sink (!).

And I have to add: it makes me happy to know that this great dev team (arguably one of the greatest ever assembled, both by my subjective judgement and by any objective measure you could come up with) is back at it again.

10 Years

2010-01-06T19:53:22Z

Whoa. This month this is mikel.org turns ten (though the archives only go back to Feb 2000). I haven’t been very active on this blog in about a year, but it’s still alive and I am definitely coming back to it in the near future. Now that my company is entering a new, more mature/less startup phase, I’ll have more time for blogging.

Ten years is a long time for anything on the web to have existed, and in the blog world, it’s almost an eternity. There were already lots of blogs in existence when I started here – and those pioneers really inspired me (as well as proto-bloggers like Justin Hall) to start a blog in the first place. But it was nevertheless the very early days of the blogosphere when I got this going, and I remember those early days of blogging very fondly.

Back then, blogging was a lot closer to what Twitter is today, which is probably the most striking difference in the form between now and the early days. Remember there were no (or very few) inline commenting systems in the early blogosphere – so to comment on another blog, you had to write your own post on your own site and link back to the original post hoping that its author would notice. So – essentially the @username and RT functions in Twitter were then the state of the art in blogs as well.

Almost coincident with the tenth anniversary of mikel.org was the news (via Metafilter, where I’ve been a member for almost a decade as well) that another early blogger, Brad Graham, has died. I remember The Bradlands very very well, and although Brad and I never met (& I never have gone to SXSW, where many of the early bloggers first met), his passing brings a profound sense of loss. It’s the loss of a friend to many – but even to those of us who didn’t know him but were active in that era, he was a key member of the early community of bloggers, when it was possible to still discuss a “community of bloggers”.

Seb’s Open Research

2009-02-05T05:17:18Z

Hey look at this: Seb’s Open Research is back on the air! Or should I say, on the wire? If (by chance) you still read here (and I haven’t exactly been the most prolific blogger in the last while either) and are NOT aware of Sebastien and his blog, I strongly recommend that you click as quickly as you can and check it out. Seb is one of those guys who keeps a relatively low profile compared to the “stars” – but who has a huge and entirely deserved (in my experience) reputation among the long-standing and most perceptive thinkers in the strange space described by terms as “social” and “web” and such.

Found while moving!

2009-02-04T04:00:29Z

Tonight when moving the last of my stuff I came across my old copy of Millennium Cabaret (and yes it’s amazing to me that the site is still up). It’s a CD that (now) doubles as an important cultural record of a scene that thrived in Montreal throughout the 90s – and stretched backwards to the early 80s, as I recall the history.

The CD is full of performance poetry – a recorded anthology put together by Ian Ferrier including a who’s who of what was once a really thriving community here. Check out the website for some clips – but the CD itself is a wonderful document. I won’t name everyone (again, check the site) but if you can find a copy (or convince Ian that it’s time to put the whole thing online), you’ll find early work by Heather O’Neill, now-Toronto-expats Buffy Bonanza, Julie Crysler, and David Jager. It also features the ever-wonderful Cat Kidd (on temporary – I hope – leave from Montreal), the dean of the Montreal scene, Fortner Anderson, and many, many more.

Great news for Identi.ca

2009-01-15T15:59:09Z

GigaOM has a piece today (confirmed by Evan Prodromou, the company‘s founder) that Control Yourself, Inc., the company behind Identi.ca and the Laconica microblogging platform, has taken funding from Montreal Startup. Congratulations to Evan and his team!

Google & the Newspaper Crisis

2009-01-09T16:17:07Z

This morning Wired’s Epicenter blog is running an interesting piece: Five Things Google Could Do For Newspapers. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there, but my fear is that all of the suggestions are merely handwaving unless papers deal with the real problem – they don’t actually print enough real news. Newspapers made bets in the 90s and into the 00s that served (essentially) to divest themselves of the business of publishing the news, in many cases preferring wire services for the majority of news content. What (many) newspapers have become are reprinters of wire copy padded by a myriad of opinion, editorial, and marginally ethical fluff “journalism”.

What Google should do is to set up a fund to help struggling newspapers re-staff their news divisions and a deeply discounted consulting wing to help owners – who have made the bad decisions that got us where we are today – understand that their only real commercial value springs from factual reporting.

YULBlog.org relaunch tonight!

2009-01-25T22:33:23Z

If you’re a blogger from Montreal, it would be a great idea to come to YULBlog tonight. Patrick and Eric Demay have done a great job developing a new (beautiful) YULBlog website that will give members much more direct control over both their personal profile and their blogs. The site is being launched tonight at First Wednesday at La Quincaillerie and you’ll (likely) be able to sign up for a profile and add your blog or blogs while having a beer or two with the YULBlog crew.

Analog Dollars for Digital Pennies?

2008-11-23T02:41:45Z

Mitch Joel wrote an interesting post today to which I want to respond, but my response was longer than a blog comment so I’ve written it here.

Mitch notes six interesting questions that media companies should ponder, and then follows up with this: “why don’t traditional media companies create a new physical area (how about an office space away from everyone else) and set-up those interested in the above challenges and questions. Let them spend a few months tinkering and experimenting.”

I suspect that it’s going to take a lot more than sitting people in a room to work out the new model. That’s not because it’s so difficult, but rather because a) a lot of that work has already been done – by the NY Times, notably; and b) some of those dollars are just gone.

The problem for most media companies – particularly paper-based media companies – is that they no longer have a platform to build upon. Readers (and advertising dollars) are leaving, and have been leaving for years – and companies are hamstrung. They think it’s “the internet” that’s done it to them, but they’re wrong – it’s their reaction to new media over the course of 10 or more years that has put them where they are today.

Sure, some of the dollars are simply gone. Consider newspapers. A Big Guy at a major Canadian broadsheet mentioned to me several years ago that the classified ad business – which accounted for over a third of overall revenue at such papers – was dead, due to Craigslist. Newspaper people have known that a major revenue source was drying (or had dried) up for years now, and they did almost nothing about it.

That’s the past now. Those dollars have fled, and there’s likely nothing to do about that. It’s still significant, though, because right off the bat the pot is that much smaller.

As far as the rest of it goes, I actually don’t think it’s that difficult. The traditional media outlets have to understand their unique value proposition, the same as any company selling a product or service. For any content business on paper, that value is in the editorial quality, and when those properties are good, they do things that no one else – and particularly not blogs – can do as well as they can.

For me, that’s in-depth, factual reporting. NOT opinion, op-ed, or columnists – in a blog world, no one gives a damn about some former reporter’s opinions on anything (except maybe politics, where a reporter’s history of access to political players gives a clear value add).

The nice thing about news and investigative reporting is that it serves as a platform – by opening up the archives making sure everything is searchable and directly linkable (with human-readable links), a company starts creating value that it can leverage. Gravitas has value. Being the organ of record has a real value.

That value can be packaged online by editors who take that work and develop collections, but also by leveraging the blogs discussing those stories. Make it simple for bloggers to refer to stories – and have their opinions linked FROM the source of the reporting (automatically via trackback or through other means). The Montreal Gazette and La Presse should be THE definitive source for information on any subject in Montreal over the past 50 years. Until they take steps to become that source, that reference, I don’t think there’s much that they can do to stem the tide.

For me, print media have over-invested in opinion, columnists, and light non-reporting journalism, and that they did so as a direct reaction to the expanding media market that the Internet represents. What they didn’t understand is that the value of opinion journalism goes down, not up, when opinion writing proliferates (as it has with the rise of blogging). They made a bet starting over a decade ago – and it was exactly the opposite of the bet they should have made.

(Note that this assumes that Canadian newspapers are having the same problems as they are in the US – the last I read, Canadian dailies are holding their own, and the Canadian magazine market seems as healthy as ever).

Test from my iPhone

2008-11-15T00:13:02Z

I can blog from anywhere! Starting to get faster with the keyboard too…

Barack!

2008-11-06T02:17:47Z

In my absence from blogging, I pretty much missed the 2008 US election campaign except for a couple of posts in January (and a couple on the Exvisu blog: [1], [2]). That’s not to say that I haven’t been following the campaign very closely, however.

Of the hundred interesting stories and analyses of Obama’s stunning victory last night, though, there’s one in particular that seems to have been underplayed: the role that Howard Dean has played in the Democratic resurgence.

Obama is a unique leader, but so was (and is) Howard Dean, and well beyond their formal political relationship (Dean is the chairman of the DNC), there is clearly a sympatico between the two and their basic approach to politics and their vision of how not just to win elections, but to address a much wider public than many Democrats have attempted to address.

Ping!

2008-10-31T13:34:45Z

Hmmm. It has been far too long since I’ve blogged here – time to get back to it. More soon….

Must Read

2008-06-18T21:19:31Z

Whether it’s real or not (and I have no reason to doubt it), Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter to Yahoo is a must-read.

Canadian culture.ca being shuttered

2008-04-30T15:36:00Z

News from Michael Geist today that Culture.ca, the (well, one of several from the same department) Canadian culture portal, has closed effective April 1, 2008. I know a couple of people who are directly affected by this news, though I’m not sure what the impact will be or what impact the site has had.

What’s going on

2008-04-25T13:36:47Z

I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.

At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.

It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.

Freelancing as a career

2008-04-21T14:58:01Z

My friend Craig Silverman has written a post with some great advice for freelance journalists trying to develop their career in difficult economic times: Freelancing the future. He came to this in response to a post by Adrian Monck, who has been making the case recently that journalism is not at fault for the decline in newspapers.

Monck is almost certainly right, and Craig’s advice is really good advice – not just for freelance journalists but for any independent consultant-type person trying to get things going. But it’s the business side of the news media business that has and continues to screw everything up, IMO. When the net came along, they said, “look, blogs are great, everyone wants more opinion and context” and went ahead and gutted their news reporting function in favour of more opinion, more columnists, more of what the blogosphere was doing very well from it’s inception.

The problem is – that was the exact opposite of the bet they should have made. Opinions are like noses – everyone has one – and no one gives a damn if it’s some “journalist” (whose publisher likely sold him/her out long ago) who has written the opinion piece. On any conceivable subject, I can go out into the blogs and find at least one if not a dozen writers with more experience, more context, and more knowledge about a subject than any journalist has.

What we need – and by “we” I mean society at large – is honest, exhaustive, factual reporting. Newspapers should have (and should be) increasing their reporting budgets and decreasing their spend on columnists and opinions. I do want more opinion and context – but the last place I want to go to get it is a newspaper.

Tungle Launches in beta

2008-04-16T13:35:44Z

Montreal’s Tungle has lauched into a public beta and has received good coverage from Montreal Tech Watch (as you’d expect – Heri does such a good job of covering the local scene) and TechCrunch, among others.

Saunders on Canadian data rates

2008-03-31T17:42:42Z

Alec Saunders has written a long post comparing the rates for data plans and carrier revenues internationally called Talking Turkey on Canadian Data. Alec brings out the numbers behind the point that I’ve been making based on instinct for some time now – the problem with exorbitant data rates isn’t just that people WANT more data or somehow deserve it – which is how it’s usually portrayed. The problem with high data rates is actually that the carriers are leaving huge revenues on the table over (it seems) some kind of “we DESERVE to be able to meter every byte” principle. Canadian carriers are not acting in the best interests of consumers or their shareholders by being so intransigent on this issue.