John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Customary treatment: Prepping for the holidays

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

The Christmas season kicked into gear this week at our house: the Santa parade downtown on Sunday, and on Tuesday, a multiple number of things: the opening of the advent calendar, a hectic but tasty Festive Special at Swiss Chalet (a true marker, for our family) and the first chapter of Kevin Major’s The House of Wooden Santas, an advent calendar in its own right, albeit in hardcover. 

Many of the social cues in our house are made by our nine-year-old son, who already has a list of things needed for a complete Christmas. I’m not sure if the weather will co-operate with one of them, but his snowman-in-a-box kit stands by at the ready. 

Christmas customs and traditions 
From a site called Why Christmas? comes this collection of explanations of many of the things – from pointsettias to pudding – that we find around us at this time of the year. Curious young minds (and, yep, the older ones) will learn plenty of things here. There’s more to be found, too: check out the navigation bar on top to see how Christmas is celebrated in dozens of countries, as well as some fun and games, such as a drag-and-drop way to virtually decorate a tree. 

   

Christmas in France 
The above link will tell you about Christmas in plenty of countries (including, to my surprise, China), while this one focuses at length on French customs and traditions, including a history of the Christmas tree that’s pretty detailed. 

Woodland’s Advent Calendar
The Woodland junior school in Kent, England, has earned a reputation worldwide for offering an annual online advent calendar that is as engaging as it is fun. Each day, a new fact about Christmas around the world will be unveiled, so bookmark it for repeat visits. 

 

My musical advent calendar
I like online advent calendars so much, I started my own. Each day through the season, I’ll be writing about some of my favourite Christmas albums and songs. Check it out through the season, and send me your suggestions!

Cookie sheet advent calendar
You can make your own advent calendar, of course, with simple materials. I saw one online made with matchboxes and fabrics that looked surprisingly fancy. This one is appealing for families with busy kitchens: decorate (and sacrifice) a cookie sheet, and use metallic objects for the fun. You’ve missed a few days, but you can still have a blast with the kids.

Brainfroth advent calendar
Lots of websites are adapting the advent calendar theme this year, as always; I’m going to be following this science-minded blog’s revelation of information (starting with an explanation of caffeine) through the month.

HGTV decorating ideas
Got a bag of red candies, some glue and a Styrofoam wreath? (Don’t worry: I have none of those things, either.) The decorating maniacs at the specialty channel HGTV have that and many other ideas for sprucing up the house, with step-by-step galleries to guide the way.

Elsewhere this week 

Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody
A good sign that the Muppets still have a huge following? Their hilarious take on Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody attracted eight million views on YouTube in its first week, largely through word of mouth. Gonzo & co. make the song family friendly, too, by having Animal handle (well, skip over by way of mangling) the more contentious lyrics, about Mama, a trigger and such. In other words, something even the youngest can enjoy, including Beaker’s high notes, and Sam the Eagle handling the line (“No, no, no, no, no!”) that in almost seems to have been written just for him.

Big Ben on Twitter
How do you know when it’s, say, 3 p.m. in London? This Twitter feed tells you, like so: “Bong. Bong. Bong.” Genius. (I’ve spared you the all-caps treatment it uses, but the most famous, and one of the loudest, clocks in the world is entitled to get your attention.)

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Twitter right here. 

A grand day for a walk

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

The evenings are dark now, but that hasn’t stopped our family from trying to get out when we can for a healthy walk. The first site on this week’s web tour is all about the St. John’s-area network that has transformed how many of us spend our leisure time. 

Grand Concourse
The Grand Concourse is an ambitious project launched by philanthropist Paul Johnson and his family’s foundation, and now includes a network of trails and guided walks that crisscross the city and into neighbouring municipalities. Many of the trails are old and well-established, but have been upgraded to terrific shape because of the Grand Concourse’s work.
 
The website underwent a recent overhaul, and has plenty to offer, including suggestions on walks of varying skill levels and lengths, with complementing maps and photos. Among other things, it makes good use of mashups with Google Maps, so you can get a good idea of where a given route will take you.
 
While it’s nice to see a more robust web presence, I’d suggest a few things. For instance, it would be terrific to be able print simple, clean sheets on each hike. As well, the organization could develop a greater sense of community by inviting participants to get involved, and using user-generated tools for photo-sharing, hike descriptions, etc. After all, the Grand Concourse, which holds not just one local gem but many, is all about public participation.
 

Elsewhere this week

Scribd
Scribd is fast becoming a popular application all over the web, probably because it’s easy for users. It produces Flash-powered embeddable documents, which means that rather than linking to a PDF, you can put it right in your blog or website, and the reader can see scroll or tab through the whole thing. The document can be as a big as a book or as small as a brochure; that’s up to you. Better yet, it can be shared, which can help let your content move around the web, if you’re cool with that. It’s a handy way to bring something like a PowerPoint presentation to the individual level, as well. Heavy users range from major publishers, like technology gurus like O’Reilly Media, to small businesses. 

Photoshop Disasters
Photoshop Disasters made the news this fall when one of its routine posts – they all involve errors and distortions that somehow made their way to print – royally ticked off fashion company Ralph Lauren. The blog had merely pointed out that a particular model has sci-fi-style proportions, winding up with an impossibly skinny waist. When other sites, including the wonderful Boing Boing, raised hackles, Ralph Lauren went to its corner and had a boo-hoo. Fortunately, Photoshop Disasters is still plugging away, pointing out the sublime and ridiculous.

Swampland
Time magazine may never be able to shake its image as being stuffier than a starched shirt, but that hasn’t stopped it from running a political blog with plenty of bounce. Swampland is a collaborative project by the magazine’s writers, with frequently updated posts on each day’s political news, with an unsurprisingly hefty emphasis on Washington. (It’s not called Swampland for nothing.) I subscribe to the daily email alert, for reminders to check out new content.

Snapbird
Because Twitter’s in-house search system only allows seven days of access, along comes Snapbird, which lets you comb through many weeks of tweets – as long as they were made by friends or those you’ve marked as favourites. A handy tool for locating something you read weeks or months ago.

Little Wheel
Imagine a robot world where the machines have been sleeping, for lack of a better, word, for 10,000 years. A lightning strike reanimates one of them, and in this charming little game, your job is to get everything back on the go, one step at a time. If you’re confounded, you can take a little cheat and click on Walkthrough … but I bet you’ll love figuring out as much as you can on your own.
 

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Facebook right here. John is on Twitter right here.

Apparently, I'm rich and/or famous (on Twitter)

I've been making use of Twitter's new list-making application, which allows for easy grouping for followers; you can do this on things like TweetDeck and HootSuite, although the benefit here is that it's interactive, so you can see other people's lists ... and see when you show up on the lists that people create.

I've started showing up on a few lists, with different groupings - Newfoundlanders, for instance; journalists; even politics. I got a kick, though, that my old friend Tim Peckham (who had a bit of a thing going at MUN in the early 80s with his hilarious comic strip Captain Leisure) put me among his "rich friends." As well, Adam Riggio, whom I met at a journalism workshop years ago, put me among "the famous."

There you have it... apparently! 

Taking the twit out of Twitter

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

In late September, Tyler Brûlé, the Canadian-raised, London-living journalist, wrote a column taking a crack against Twitter, the social-media site.

Brûlé is the former wunderkind who launched the ultra-trendy design magazine Wallpaper* in his 20s, and now, barely 40, is running another publication, Monocle, a high-end, internationally oriented (and quite good) magazine that launched as newsstands around the world have been losing one familiar title after another. 

Kudos to Brûlé, then, for showing some bravado to stick up for magazines. But I could only laugh when I read what Brûlé wrote on Twitter for his weekly column in London’s Financial Times. On a business trip to Japan, he was delighted to find his contacts there, in the most technologically adroit country on the planet, did not know what Twitter was.

Brûlé revealed he loathes Twitter, and said he expected to become as quickly irrelevant as Second Life. I agree that much of what some people write on their Twitter feeds is inane, but the application is already powerful to warrant serious attention, especially in Brûlé’s line of work. 

Here’s the irony: I first heard about the column via my own Twitter feed. A contact had a link to the online version of the FT column. Through the next hour or two, at least three or four of the other people in my network highlighted the same column, or retweeted someone else’s message. A check on a Twitter search a week later showed screen after screen of various Twitter users pointing to the column or discussing it … often by trashing it.

I have no idea how much traffic the Financial Times picked up from all that Twitter-fed attention on the purported futility of Twitter. I bet someone noticed, though.

Which leads me to some advice for people who expertly dismiss something they don’t understand. Yes, Twitter will have no role in many people’s lives. But you assume at your peril if your own industry, business or organization need not take a serious look at how social media already works.

Elsewhere this week

Gary’s Social Media Count
In part to illustrate the above, here’s a handy tool that shows just how massively different the online landscape is now, and how it’s changing, with split-second updates on the volume of chatting, posting and, yes, spending online.

CitySounds
Some bands really soak up and showcase the cities that spawned him; many cities have strong musical identities of their own. CitySounds is a music-streaming service that is carving a niche by grouping its offerings (independently produced and artist-posted music) by geography. So, if you’re into what’s happening in, say, New York or Sao Paolo or Stockholm or, yes, Calgary, there’s a tab for you to explore. (There’s no tab, yet, for St. John’s.) Much of what played for me fell into ambient and techno-lite themes, regardless of the city. 

Super Obama World
Mario, Obama. Obama, Mario. The old-school Nintendo game gets a presidential makeover as a wee li’l Barack collects points and such. Use your arrow keys and space bar in this streamlined game.

Listal
Enjoy making lists of your favourite movies, songs and such? Listal is the place for you; you can post just those types of things, as starting points, or go into very specific subcategories, like many of the users. A healthy place for a pop-culture fanatic to hang out for a while.

10 things we don't understand about humans
Why do humans blush? And why do teenagers take so long to, well, turn into adults? New Scientist collects a set of questions for which there are theories, but not necessarily answers.

History of punctuation
The question mark and exclamation point didn’t just appear in our sentences; this very short illustrated history offers the lowdown on those dots and marks. 

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Facebook right here. John is on Twitter right here.

Advances in Twitter spam (porn edition)

While I'm as excited as anyone else to be of interest to internet entrepreneurs and SEO experts and self-made millionaires, I can pretty quickly spot a Twitter spam account when it shows up in my followers list. (Apart from the get-rich-quick types, the spammers more often go for the gonads than the wallet.)

I noticed a new development this morning in how porn spammers are trying to get our attention on Twitter. Have a look at this screenshot.

 

At the bottom is a genuine reply from my friend Andree, who was responding to a note that went to Twitter from a blog posting yesterday. 

After that, though, came a bunch of copycats using the same reply message. (There were even more than the screenshot shows.) I only clicked on one of the accounts to figure out what was on the go. (I think it would be fair to say the owner is in the adult entertainment industry.)

What to do? I already spend enough time blocking fake accounts trying to follow me (it's worth it, as Twitter will suspend or cancel an account if enough blocks are filed), but I'm not keen on spending the time to block bots that merely copy legit messages, all in an attempt to get you to click through to a porn site. After all, it'd be no trouble for the owner to whip up new fake accounts. I'm more curious to see what Twitter will do to curb an obvious abuse of the system.

The tweetness of King George

On Historical Tweets for today.

A T-shirt for those who happen to know Stephen Fry (on Twitter, anyway)

I laughed when I saw this Twitter-themed shirt. And while I'm delighted that the actor-comedian-writer-TV host is a Twitter celebrity, I'll admit that I'm not among those that Mr. Fry follows. Oh well. As seen here.

A T-shirt for those who tweet

Should not every phenomenon have its own T-shirt?

Indeed, Twitter has a bunch of merch available through Threadless.

Twitter, trends and the hump of irrelevance

Too funny. A graphic explanation of how trends often work, on Twitter and otherwise.

From Meg Pickard's Flickr stream.

The rampaging success of the Fail Whale

The Fail Whale - the cheery image Twitter uses to appease users when things aren't working (which is not that uncommon) - didn't just come from the ether. It was designed, by Australian Yiying Lu. The Sydney Morning Herald has more.