Archive for the 'Social Commentary' Category

Out Of Office

Published on April 23, 2009 in Social Commentary and Work. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The below was cross-posted to the Peer1 Internal Staff site, as part of my participation in the Peer1 Employee Exchange Program.

Hey Peer1,
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Christoph Blecker, and I’m a Network Analyst working in the Vancouver NOC. I was chosen to be the first participant in the new Peer1 Employee Exchange program, and am spending this whole week in the ServerBeach San Antonio office. I’ll be spending the majority of the time with the SB Support Team, headed up by Mark Melin.

It’s been a fun week so far. By sheer coincidence, I’m not the only person starting in SAT support this week. Jim Park, formerly of Los Angeles DCO roots, picked up and moved down to Texas last weekend. This is his first week working as a Support Specialist on the San Antonio support team. We are both learning the ropes of this office together.

So far I’ve spent time shadowing a few different members of the support team:
- Brenda C. in doing Support Level 1
- Jayson A. doing Support Level 2
- Stephanie D. doing Billing
- Allison H. doing Winback/Cancellations

I’ve also put tons of names and faces together, as well as collected a much deeper insight into the scope of issues that crop up at The Beach. Holy Plesk issues, Batman!

I’ve also been able to sample local cuisine. Breakfast Tacos? Beef and Cheese Enchiladas? Yummm! Much better than Taco Bell (the extent of my previous Mexican experience)! So far so good! I’m getting comfortable down here now, which isn’t that where the fun begins?

The other big thing I’ve noticed is the heat. I’m a Canadian. I’m most comfortable in that 17-20C (62-68F) range. It’s been up to 101F (38C) at the peak this week. I’m not down with that. At all. Thankfully the beach is kept at a nice, cool temperature. Safe to say, I’ve been huddling inside.

More to come!

Tweeting the day away

Published on March 8, 2009 in Social Commentary and Web Culture. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I’ve noticed a recent explosion in the media talk about Twitter. There are about a million explainations of what Twitter does, but put very simply, it’s a service that centres around the concept of “micro-blogging”. Micro-blogging is where a person posts short, frequent messages out to the web. These can be anything from an aggregation on information (pictures, cool links, news, etc) to status messages, to just random thoughts going through a person’s mind.

What really makes this concept different from other communication methods, is it allows celebrities, public figures, even companies, to connect directly with their users. With a regular website or blog, in many cases posts and information is distributed one direction (from the person or company, to us, the audience). We can’t really respond, and start up the conversation. Additionally, in many cases, the audience feels further disconnected, as many if not most celebrities and public figures, have their public website and blog content screened by PR. In some cases, it may not even be written by the figure at all.

However, with 140 character messages, that the celebrity or public figure can send from their phone or computer.. it’s coming directly from them. And it’s interesting to see what these people are thinking or doing. For example, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, Comedian Rainn Wilson, US President Barack Obama, and Actress Felicia Day are just a few of the public figures I keep track of on Twitter.

In the political scene, Twitter is creating a bit of a stirr. Politicians in both the US and Canada can connect directly to the public to get their message out. No news media, PR reps, or anything in between. Down south, Tweet Congress is a website dedicated to locating your local congress men and women on Twitter. Many of them talk about bills they’re working on, or events they are attending. In Canada, Mayor Robertson, NDP Leader Jack Layton, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper use Twitter to let people know their personal thoughts on recent policies and events.

This can be both a good and a bad thing for these politicians. During the recent address by President Obama to a joint session of the US Congress, Congressman Michael Burgess (R-TX) made a comment about the seating arrangements. Some people criticized him for being rude and sending these messages during the speech, but the one thing you can say is that it brings you closer to the people who are representing you in government. In the case of celebrities and other public figures, you quickly find out that these are normal people, who have random thoughts that they want to share with the world too.

It’s also interesting to watch trending on Twitter and see what people around the world are actively talking about, in real time. Sites like Summize (which was bought by Twitter itself a while back), and Twitscoop all you to search and see visual trends about what people are talking about. A regular person with a quick hand, a cell phone, and Twitter, was able to snap a picture of the February 25, 2009 crash of a Turkish Airlines plane at the Amsterdam airport. This picture was all over the internet, before CNN and other major news networks were able to break the story. Even this morning, I just learned that there was an unfortunate shooting in Maryville, IL at a church.

Twitter is even changing the ways that companies interact with their customers. Companies like Dell Computers, Zappos Shoes, Virgin America Airlines, and Comcast use Twitter to not only monitor what people are saying and thinking about their company and products, but use Twitter to interact directly with those clients and improve their customer service experience. We do this too at Peer1 and ServerBeach.

Twitter is just one service out there. The interactivity of social networks (everything from Twitter, to Facebook, MySpace, and the myriad of others) is allowing the faster, more direct, and wider dispersal of information than we have ever seen before. The concept isn’t revolutionary, per-ce.. but it’s changing once again how we get and give that information.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. And of course, you can follow me on Twitter here. ;)

Vote: Take Ownership of your Future

Published on October 14, 2008 in Social Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Everyone has their own thoughts on politics and the current state of affairs in Canada. There are a lot of differing view points, and a lot of important issues.

It doesn’t matter what you decide is important to you.. no matter if it’s the environment, the economy, heathcare, or even simply net neutrality.. This is your one chance, as a citizen, to have your voice heard on the national scale.

If you are Canadian, and over 18, get off your ass and vote. Seriously. Now.

5 Friends Uncensored

The above is a video put together for the US election, but the message is the same. However in Canada, you can register at the polls, as long as you have proper ID.

For more information, ask me, or head over to Elections Canada at: http://www.elections.ca/

News Bias

Published on August 2, 2008 in Social Commentary. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

I am truly disgusted by the sheer stupidity of some people out there, who call themselves journalists. Now, I’ve grown used to and kind of expect this from American news agencies. The fodder that is used on programs like “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or “The Colbert Report” is bad enough, and I’m sure they only show a small part of the absurdity available down there.

However, I’m been noticing it more and more on Canadian news networks too. There has always been stupidity, but they seem to purposefully be putting spin on stories to try and instill a certain point of view. Take for example the following story: “Teen cyclist killed when police chase enters Mohawk reserve“.

Now when you read that story, you get certain facts out of it:

  • Police were conducting a high-speed chase, of an obviously dangerous suspect
  • The suspect turned into a native reserve and shortly after doing so, struck a child cyclist

Now while this is very tragic, I find it outrageous that a supposedly impartial news organization chooses to focus in on not the facts of the story, but spend over half the article on the commentary from residents on the fact that police followed the suspect onto the reserve.

The opinions and commentary they got weren’t from professionals or leaders within the native community.. just regular residents. The comments are completely off base, for the following reasons:

  • The police were following an obviously dangerous criminal to conduct a high-speed chase in the first place
  • If the suspect was the least bit smart, he wouldn’t have slowed down anyways if the police had broken off pursuit — he couldn’t be sure what they were doing next or if they had an alternate plan. This would not have prevented this tragedy from occurring.
  • If a precedent was set that police couldn’t pursue a suspect onto a native reserve, guess where every criminal would go to get away. I’m very sure this isn’t what native people want.

Okay, so given that the opinion is pretty wackjob, we come to the major point.. why would CBC put the focus of the story on the fact that the natives are unhappy about police venturing on to the reserve? It put a very biased skew on news, which is supposed to be just the facts. There is no indication if more facts were release and just not reported, or if police haven’t released more information, but there are tons of other facts to the news story that people would find more useful then crap-pinions: suspect information like type of car, speeds that were reached, why police were chasing him in the first place.. or victim information like the school the boy was attending, if he was wearing a helmet or other safety equipment, his interests or activities he was involved in, when/where the services are being held. Now if more FACTS about the story aren’t available, then give us the opinion of someone who is able to formulate a rational thought from a situation like this, such as a native leader or representative from the native peacekeeping force. This is much better than some random person who lives nearby and is just thrilled to have a microphone stuck in their face and will spew anything that they think will get them on TV/radio/print.

Skewing the story to make it sound anti-police, focusing on how long the officers were on the reserve, and related crap is just wrong. It doesn’t matter if it was don’t to just make the story seem a little bit more outrageous, and get people talking, or if it was to support the view of an biased reporter, it questions the integrity of our national news agency to be able to effectively report on the facts and to let Canadians, who are generally intelligent creatures, make up their minds for themselves.

Dare to Dream

Published on July 31, 2008 in Web Culture. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

For a couple of years, I was a volunteer for the LiveJournal Support department. I was there long enough to rise to the level of a Support Administrator. I was initially drawn to it for a number of reasons. While much of it was boredom, I chose LiveJournal Support in particular because of the open-source nature of the project, the high ‘webmoral’ standards of the people in the driver’s seat like Brad Fitzpatrick, and the great community feeling of the people who did it. It was users helping users.

Over the couple years that I was involved with the project, lots of things ended up changing. Danga (LiveJournal’s parent company) got bought up by SixApart in January of 2005. 6A was a much larger company, and initially we were all quite happy that more development time and money might be provided to the project. However, this was not the case, and LiveJournal was sold once again to Russian-based SUP (pronounced “soup”).

Now don’t get me wrong — the time with SixApart wasn’t really all that bad. A lot of improvements were made to the service. However there were also some controversial changes (e.g. introduction of site ads). I can’t go into any detail (due to the NDA’s I have with Danga/SixApart), but there were things happening in the background that were out of control of the people who managed LiveJournal day-to-day (e.g. changing company circumstances, directives from upper management, etc..). In any case, the site continued to change under the direction of SUP, most recently with the removal of the Basic/Free account level (leaving only the paid or ad-supported account levels), and now proposed restoration.

Now I didn’t leave because of these reasons. I left because I no longer had interest in devoting time to the project. Now this is partially due to changes in my own life, but I think that deep down part of me was feeling a bit alienated. I lost my passion for what I was doing and had no motivation as a volunteer to keep helping.

The ideals of the original site are all but gone.

The site has the same name, but deep down at it’s core, it’s not the same site. It’s like waking up and realizing that your spouse of some years is a completely different person. Okay, well not quite as dramatic, and less worry about STDs, but you get the picture. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking a swipe at SixApart or SUP — there are some very smart people who have and/or still do work for them. I’ve never operated that large a company and am not qualified in the slightest to comment on their operations, beyond being a user who wonders if his journal, as he knows it, is going to be there tomorrow.

Now this is where an intrepid group of people comes in. A group of people — some former staff, some previous volunteers, all just regular LJ users — dared to really dream of where a site LiveJournal could be if it was completely driven by the community and had less overhead of a corporation. And so, Dreamwidth was born.

Now this is no small undertaking from both a technical and social standpoint. This group not only has to work on getting their new fork of the open source LiveJournal-codebase up to modern spec, but they are also looking to start a hosted community around this software, with more open and transparent community-based management. They are however making great leaps and strides.

It really gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside that a community can grow so passionate about what really is their online “home” that they can pull something like this off. And I have every bit of faith that they will. Good on you, Dreamwidth team.

And we’ll see.. maybe I might try and see how far my PHP knowledge translates over to Perl…